Just now I got the latest email newsletter from the Stop the War Coalition, notifying its readers of the organisation’s forthcoming events. One will be an evening with veteran civil rights campaigner, author and broadcaster Tariq Ali about the consequences of forty years of war in Afghanistan, including NATO’s occupation of the country. They are also organising a conference for trades unionists next year and encouraging members of the unions to affiliate their unions and their local branches to them. And, of course, they also appeal for people to join them. The email runs
‘NATO’s Legacy in Afghanistan
Afghanistan has been abandoned by the international community following the events of 2021 when the 20-year NATO occupation of Afghanistan came to an end.
It seems the only thing the West now has to offer Afghanistan is extrajudicial killings. After the appalling Panorama revelations of a ‘campaign of terror’ by British special forces during the occupation comes the assassination of Ayman al Zawahiri. Quite simply, such attacks are war crimes and do nothing to “make us safer” as Joe Biden stated this week.
With the Taliban back in power and stronger than it was in 2001, NATO’s occupation has been an outright failure. From the lies of installing democracy to improving quality of life to liberating women, the War on Terror did nothing but cause death and destruction.
The country is home to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, as 90% of the population live below the poverty line. The country’s economy is at a standstill as sanctions cripple the nation.
One year on from the end of the occupation, join us for an evening with Tariq Ali – writer, film-maker and author of The Forty Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold – as he takes a look at the current state of the country and the myths surrounding the Western occupation.
The World at War: A Trade Union Issue Stop the War Trade Union Conference 2023
We have called our first ever trade union conference because we believe that it is always working people who are the first victims of war and that the record sums being spent on arms and the military should be redirected to public services, to the NHS, social care and our crumbling schools. We believe that the slogan ‘cut warfare not welfare’ should be taken up by the whole of the trade union movement.
We have called our first ever trade union conference because we believe that it is always working people who are the first victims of war and that the record sums being spent on arms and the military should be redirected to public services, to the NHS, social care and our crumbling schools. We believe that the slogan ‘cut warfare not welfare’ should be taken up by the whole of the trade union movement.
head of the conference, we’re asking all trade unionists who support Stop the War to affiliate to us. By affiliating your branch or region you can ensure that our movement will continue to campaign against the British government’s war policies. We receive no grants from governments or financial backing from commercial backers.
It is only because of individuals and organisations like yours that we are able to continue to build the anti-war movement so that future generations may live in a more peaceful world.
This week our Vice President and founder member Jeremy Corbyn has once again come under fire for standing up for peace. He said in relation to the war in Ukraine that…
“Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution, it’s only going to prolong and exaggerate this war…This war is disastrous for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia, and for the safety and security of the whole world, and therefore there has to be much more effort put into peace.”
He’s right. And we must further his call for peace and negotiation.
One small way to help us intensify our campaign against the warmongers is by becoming a member.
We do understand that these are difficult times and we are only asking you to support us if you can. Membership costs as little as £2. We hope you will consider joining.
Ali’s interesting. Apparently the Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’, written during the wave of sixties radicalism, is all about him. I read in one of the papers that apparently when he was a little boy, he had an aunt knit him a jumper with Stalin’s head on. This was presumably before people knew what a monster Stalin was, when his sycophants were falling over themselves to declare him the grreat saviour of the international working class and progressive humanity. He had his own Black interest programme on satellite or cable television, or at least he did. And a few decades ago he published an anthology of classic texts from the golden age of Islam to show to young Muslims how enlightened and tolerant Islam had been, as against the intolerance and bigotry of the Islamists. He’s very careful about history. On one of his shows, he pointed out that during the period of racist lynchings in America, more Italians were murdered in Louisiana than Blacks. This surprised me, because I thought it was only Blacks who were being murdered by these mobs. But I’ve no doubt that it’s true.
Afghanistan is, like Iraq, a country where the real reason for the invasion has nothing to do with combatting terrorism or installing democracy. It was about oil. The American oil industry and Republican administration was negotiating for an oil pipeline with the Taliban. When the Taliban stalled, the policymakers took the decision to hold back until there was some kind of crisis which they could use. This would provide a pretext to invade the country and build the pipeline anyway, without the Taliban’s consent. This came with 9/11 and the al-Qaeda attack.
I got this statement yesterday from the Stop the War Coalition. It condemns the Russian invasion and calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops. But it also argues that NATO is an aggressive imperialistic organisation that itself has caused wars. It rejects economic sanctions against Russia as a form of warfare, and points out that the government expects to have increased funding for the armed forces while at the same time increasing repayments on student loans and cutting expenditure on the NHS. The statement reads as follows
‘The Russian invasion of Ukraine overnight is a massive escalation in the conflict there. Stop the War is calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops and for an immediate ceasefire. Our statement is here and our resolution for union branches/CLPs here.
The danger of war involving nuclear weapons is more real than previously and must be opposed. The real losers will be the ordinary people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of Europe.
We should, however, take no lessons in peacemaking from our own government and its allies. They have brought us decades of escalating wars, each of which has been a failure. They have encouraged a growing arms race internationally. And they have set on a path of Nato expansion which has brought the military alliance to the borders of Russia, in contravention of agreements made at the end of the Cold War.
Nato is not a defensive alliance but an aggressive one, centrally involved in wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Yugoslavia, and engaged in more and more ‘out of area operations’ including in the Indo-Pacific.
Our government wants to hide its domestic problems behind its belligerent statements, and we can be certain that this will continue, at the same time that it will provide unlimited money for war but increase student loan repayments and cut the NHS.
There is a surge or argument in favour of greater sanctions, including from those who purport to be anti war. But sanctions are not an alternative to war – they are economic warfare and therefore a prelude to war. We have seen this in Iraq where all they did was bring war closer, at the same time as bringing real suffering to the people of Iraq.
As an anti-war and peace movement, our first priority is to stop war. This conflict has not developed in the last few weeks alone, but reflects a society where war is being turned to increasingly to solve other problems. However, we are also aware that this is a different situation from previous wars where our government has been directly involved in military action, and we need to do as much as we can to explain and discuss the issues with those around us.
We are asking our members, supporters, groups and affiliates to do the following:
Make sure our statement and resolution are disseminated as widely as possible.
Do everything to publicise and support our international meeting on Saturday 26th February and our in person rally on Wednesday 2nd March in Conway Hall, London.
Hold urgent meetings in all localities – in person where possible – calling for withdrawal of Russian troops, ceasefire now and against Nato expansion.
Attend the demos and actions in support of the NHS with placards linking cuts in public spending with money for war- you can download and print our new placard design from our website.
Prepare for a day of action (tba) where we hold protests and vigils against the war.
Please contact the office for materials and more information, and for speakers.
Due to the high volume of traffic we are currently experiencing, we apologise for any difficulties you may encounter whilst trying to access our website today; please keep refreshing or try again later.
Best wishes,
Lindsey German
Convenor’
I also noticed that the Depress was ranting about Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott against because they had both condemned NATO, and one of the other Tory rags had reported that Starmer was under pressure to discipline 14 other Labour MPs who’d done likewise.
Which means that Corbyn, Abbott and the other 14 are the only people talking sense in all this.
Okay, my last piece was against anti-White racism and how the media really doesn’t like covering race-hate crimes against Whites. Which means that supposed comedienne Sophie Druker is able to get away with a stupid joke about Blacks wanting to kill Whites on a show last year hosted by Frankie Boyle, and has even won the Comedy Award because of it.
But now I have to cover the opposite racism against Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities. Mike’s put up a piece warning that our wonderful, loathsome foreign secretary, Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel, wishes to pass legislation making any official causing death to a migrant immune from prosecution. According to the Groan, this specifically means anyone pushing the migrant boats crossing the channel back out to sea. Mike’s called this abomination what it is: Nazism. It’s the defence used by the monsters who carried out the Holocaust and other atrocities committed by Hitler’s Third Reich: ‘We wuz only following orders!’
Mind you, what really, really seems to get right up the nose of right-wingers like Patel is when you call them ‘Communists’. Well, despite the obvious difference that Stalin had everything nationalised and the Tories would like to privatise everything they can, you can make the same comparison. Stalin killed 30 million Soviet citizens during his purges. This included the deportation of whole nations, such as the Chechens, and Russian minorities like the Cossacks to Siberia. He was a vicious anti-Semite and would have liked to have deported the Jews there as well. He set up a Jewish autonomous oblast (district) out there, but only a small number of Jews actually went. I remember watching a documentary on the deportation of the Cossacks in the 1990s. This was filmed by members of Leningrad University’s anthropology department, and simply consisted in a large part of the students and researchers sitting down and talking to the old folks who’d survived. It was understated but harrowing. People described cannibalism during the famine, boys running away from Hannibal Lecter’s all too real predecessors. School children dying of starvation en masse. One woman tearfully describes how she was gang-raped by prison camp guards. It was horrific stuff, told in simple conversation over glasses of tea in Soviet peasant homes.
Stalin also used the purges to industrialise the former Soviet Union. Business managers sent the KGB lists of the types of workers, manual and intellectual, they wanted to the KGB, who obliged by rounding them up on false charges of anti-Soviet activity. They were then sent to the gulags, around which whole prison cities grew up with populations of hundreds of thousands.
But no-one responsible for the mass arrests have been charged for their crimes against humanity.
Yes, Khrushchev in his secret speech attached and dismantled Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, and Lavrenti Beria, the rapist in charge of the KGB responsible for enacting the purges, was arrested by the Soviet army and shot. But other, lesser officials got away with the mass murder of millions. Their membership of the Communist party gave them a ‘get out of jail’ free card.
Just as it seems, membership of the DWP and the Tory party do the same in 21st century Britain.
Samuel Miller, one of the excellent folks on Twitter Mike quotes in his article, has said that the Tories have already made DWP officials responsible for the deaths of benefit claims immune to similar prosecution for years.
And Mike has also published a long article about the ways Priti Patel intends to pass legislation breaking international laws on refugees. He has also pointed out that such laws don’t just affect non-white immigrants. They affect traditional White Brits. Because, as the late, great Tony Benn observed, what the Tories do to native Whites, they start by doing to immigrants. Food banks first appeared under Tony Blair, when he made illegal immigrants illegible for benefit. Then the Tories decided it could also be used to support -just barely-all the indigenous Brits, by which I also include Blacks and Asians, who’ve been here for generations, who got thrown off benefits due to their genocidal sanction system.
The moral of all this: Don’t get pulled in to supporting to this by all the rhetoric against ‘dinghy divers’ and so on by people like Alex Belfield. ‘Cause after PolPotPatel (copyright ‘Cleckylad’) she and the other walking moral imbeciles will come for you.
Because they have the same contempt and hatred for the White poor, as they have for Black and Asian immigrants.
Really brilliant post yesterday by Zelo Street, demolishing the Tory lies that David Duke, the head of the KKK in Louisiana and Britain’s own Fascist abomination, Nick Griffin, support Jeremy Corbyn. The claim was made a year or so ago by the Times and the Scum in order to add some spurious credibility to the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour leader and his supporters.
This began with Henry Zeffman in the Thunderer writing
“A white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan praised the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership as a sign that people were recognising ‘Zionist power’ and ‘Jewish establishment power’. David Duke, who led a branch of the KKK based in Louisiana in the 1970s, told listeners to his radio show in 2015: ‘It’s a really good kind of evolutionary thing, isn’t it, when people are beginning to recognise Zionist power and ultimately the Jewish establishment power in Britain and in the western world.”.
The problem with this was that two years after the claim Zeffman had uncovered, Duke had seriously revised his opinion of Corbyn, calling him ‘Marxist filth’.
And the BNP’s former fuehrer has crawled out from whichever stone he’s been hiding under ever since his stormtroops gave him the heave-ho to make it clear that he does not, after all, support Jeremy Corbyn either. After reading headlines claiming that Corbyn’s speech to the CBI raised the issue of anti-Semitism once again, Griffin tweeted
“Have read that headline several times. Can easily be read that someone at the Mail still has the occasional ‘hurrah for the Blackshirts’ moment!”
Zelo Street remarks that the Heil’s history is so notorious that even Griffin knows about it. Which I suppose he would, actually being one of the Fascists the Heil supported back then. But in an answer to the question who he would personally support in the election, Griffin responded
None of them. Though I did give the Zio-media a stick to beat Corbyn by saying I’d vote for him on foreign policy grounds. But unless he comes out to oppose the UK sanctions on Syria that are killing thousands of children & adding to the refugee flood, I won’t be doing so”.
It should come as no surprise that neither Duke nor Griffin support Corbyn. And in Griffin’s case, he makes it clear that he only said he did in order to cause trouble for the Labour leader.
Despite Conservative claims on both sides of the Atlantic that the Nazis were socialists, because they said they were, Hitler’s crew were far from it. Both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists were strongly in favour of private industry. When in power, they both embarked on massive privatisation programmes. The Nazis celebrate the entrepreneur of part of the biologically superior elite, who had a natural right to rule. And before the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler told a meeting of leading German businessmen that he had no intention of nationalising anything and private enterprise needed a strong ruler to protect it. Under Mussolini, the Italian Fascists declared that private industry was the best economic system and the very foundation of the country and state.
David Duke is a member of the Republican Party, or he was. Who are very keen on protecting and extending private enterprise against the state – not just in industry, but in healthcare and education, and also against the environment. So are other members of the Klan. A few years ago Duke frightened the Republicans by threatening to reveal the identities of other Republican politicians, who wore white sheets at their klonvocations. Of course Duke was going to find out eventually what Corbyn really stood for, and denounce him as a Commie. Just like the Tory press has been trying to smear him and his followers as Communists, Trotskyites, Stalinists or whatever.
And Duke obviously didn’t know about Corbyn’s Jewish supporters.
Contrary to what the press and media want you to believe, Corbyn ain’t an anti-Semite and has Jewish supporters. People like Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas, the Jewish Socialist Group, and London’s Haredi community. Because he’s actually stood up for Jews and Jewish issues. Mike and the other left-wing bloggers have put up lists of the numerous occasions Corbyn intervened on the community’s behalf. He has the support of Shraga Stern and London’s Haredi community because he stopped their historic burial ground from being redeveloped. And rather than wanting the mass carnage of Israelis, he simply wants an end to the Israeli state’s system of apartheid and oppression of the Palestinians. But that enrages Israel and its apologists, who unable to refute the allegations against them with fact, simply turn to smearing their opponents – including and especially self-respecting Jews – as anti-Semites.
Duke’s comment about Corbyn looks like his ideas about the Labour leader came from the biased reporting of the lamestream media. I dare say Duke would have gone berserk if he’d realised then that Corbyn is pro-Jewish and anti-racist, with Jewish supporters, along with those from Britain’s other ethnic communities.
However, if Duke and Griffin aren’t supporting Corbyn, other members of the far right are supporting the Tories. Like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alias Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL, formerly of PEGIDA, former special adviser on Islam to UKIP. And for some reason the Tories are keeping very quiet about his support, while definitely not repudiating.
They can’t really, not when so much Tory strategy is based on stirring up hatred against ethnic minorities and immigration, particularly Islam. Mates Jacobs uncovered a whole mass of islamophobia, racism and anti-Semitism in the social media groups for supporters of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees Mogg. Some of whose members even believed in the same ‘great replacement’ nonsense – the conspiracy theory that the Jews are deliberately introducing and encouraging non-White immigration in order to destroy and replace White Europeans – that Duke and the Klan believe in.
Corbyn doesn’t have the support of David Duke or Nick Griffin. But the Tories have the support of Tommy Robinson, and some of their members certainly have extreme right-wing views. Which is why Boris isn’t going to have an inquiry into Tory islamophobia until after the election.
He’s probably hoping that by that time he’ll be safely in No. 10 and people will have forgotten about the whole scandal. Don’t let him.
I don’t quite know what’s going on in Venezuela at the moment, but from the little I have seen on the alternative news channels it seems that the lamestream news are very definitely not telling us the truth. According to some of their reports, the ongoing campaign to topple Premier Maduro is just another case of the US engaging in regime change against a Latin American nation that refuses to accept its place in the American Empire.
In this clip, posted on YouTube by Philosoraptor on the 9th February 2019, Chris Williamson, the now-suspended MP for Derby, replies to Jon Snow about the crisis in the South American country. Snow argues that the chronic shortages and civil unrest are all the fault of Maduro’s regime. The sanctions imposed by America are quite correct, and so are the calls for Maduro to resign and hand over government by America, Britain and other nations.
Williamson begins by describing the British government’s recognition of Juan Guaido, Maduro’s rival, as a democratic outrage. He has never been elected head of the Venezuelan national assembly and he did not stand against Maduro in last year’s election. He also flatly contradicts another contributor to the programme, who claimed that the elections had been rigged. Williamson states that he has spoken to observers from 86 countries, who have said that it isn’t true. It’s supposedly impossible to rig the elections as each voter must bring ID and each vote is twinned with their fingerprint.
Snow then moves on to ask him how it is that one of the richest countries in Latin America is now bankrupt. Whose fault is that? Williamson replies that Venezuela has very real problems, but goes back to talking about the conduct of the elections. Snow talks over him, asking him ‘Whose fault it is?’ Williamson says he’ll come back to that, and states that Jimmy Carter called the Venezuelan elections the safest anywhere in the world. As for the fault for the country’s wretched state, Williamson explains that Maduro was dealt a very bad hand. He came into office when the price of oil had collapsed, the country was then hit with street violence by right-wing forces supported by the US. This was exacerbated by Barack Obama signing an executive order declaring that Venezuela posed an extraordinary threat to the US. And Donald Trump has ratched up the sanctions even further. A UN special Raporteur has said that the sanctions are illegal and could constitute a crime against humanity. Williamson goes to say that the UK ought to be pressing the US to withdraw the sanctions, but he is once again talked over by Snow.
Snow goes on to say that Venezuela is a country on its knees when it should be towering high, brought down by maladministration and protests, and asks him what his solution would be.
Williamson states that his solution would be that rather than behaving as Trump’s poodle, the UK should be calling on him to withdraw the sanctions and try to bring the factions around the table and reach an amicable solution. Maduro himself has called for talks to stop the violence and bring an end to its economic difficulties.
Snow then interrupts him, telling him that he’s talking as if it’s just Britain on its own. But Britain is joined by many other countries – Sweden, France, and others like Italy.
Williamson responds by pointing out the nations that are also supporting Venezuela, like Mexico. He corrects Snow on Italy, and Snow changes this and says ‘Spain’. Williamson goes on to mention Bolivia, Russia, China, Italy as supporting Maduro. It is ironic that Spain opposes Maduro, as when the Catalans declared their independence and had their referendum, the Spanish state sent in the troops and security service, meted out extreme violence on the Catalan people and put their leaders in jail. This hasn’t happened to Guaydo in Venezuela.
Snow then challenges him on the human rights record of China and Russia, two of the countries supporting Madura, to which Williamson responds by pointing once again to Mexico, Bolivia and Italy. Snow goes on to state that Williamson and Corbyn ‘are in a very nasty corner now’. He says once again that Venezuela’s terrible state is due to the people who ran it and the people who support it, and asks him if it isn’t time he changed sides. Williamson says that he won’t get behind Donald Trump, but is once again shouted over by Snow, who asks him if he’s getting behind Maduro’s gross human rights abuses. Williamson responds by saying that no-one is going to support human rights abuses, and they should be called out wherever they occur. But he goes on to tackle the media’s bias, saying they’ve been a bit ‘one-eyed’ in its reportage. He’s seen footage of government supporters beaten to death, set on fire and decapitated. This needs to be called out as well, but it is tacitly supported by the US, which is financing this kind of abuse.
Snow talks over him again, telling him that he will also see the three million refugees that Channel 4 has covered pouring into Columbia, and asks him what he has to say about them. Williamson replies by saying that people in Venezuela are understandably worried about their safety and are leaving the country. But in the past millions of people have travelled in the opposite direction from Columbia into Venezuela. Venezuelan society is divided. The poor working class and the Black community predominately support the Maduro government. The middle class and elites predominately do not. We need an end to the economic sabotage, an end to the sanctions from the United States, and we need the UK to use its good office to bring about a peaceful solution to stop it from escalating out of control. The United States actions in Latin America are appalling. They wanted to make the economy scream in Chile, and that’s what they’re doing in Venezuela. At which point Snow ends the conversation, telling him he’s had a good go to make his case.
It’s very clear from this interview where Snow’s personal sympathies lie and what his views are. But Williamson has a point. I’ve seen reports from sources like The Jimmy Dore Show, which state that some of the footage used of protests from the lamestream media is fake. An anti-Maduro demonstration, which supposedly was filmed in Venezuela, was actually staged in Columbia. As for America’s opposition to Maduro, some of this seems to come from the country’s defiance of US global economic policy. I think the country refused to get behind some of America’s demands for changes in global oil output. I also remember that they sided with Russia, Iran and several other countries in deciding to change from the Dollar to another currency as the medium of payment for oil. The petrodollar is the method by which America refinances its debts, and the moment that collapses a fair chunk of the American economy is destroyed. Hence some of the bitter opposition to Maduro and Obama’s declaration that Venezuela is a grave threat to American national security.
Quite apart from the fact that America’s long history of intervention in Latin America is appalling, with liberal and socialist regimes overthrown and brutal Fascist dictators installed in their place, all to protect American economic and corporate interests.
This interview also illustrates why the Blairites and the Israel lobby were so desperate to have Williamson suspended for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. There’s an interesting piece by one of the journos in the alternative news media, that argues that the elite in this country hate Corbyn because he is the closest this country has to an anti-imperial candidate. His sympathies are for the poorer countries, abused and exploited by the Developed World. And so they’re determined to prevent him getting into power by any means necessary.
Williamson has been one of his staunchest supporters, and by standing up for the countries bullied and invaded by the US-led West, he too has become a target.
This is a very short video – just over two minutes long – by male feminist and anti-Fascist vlogger Kevin Logan. The target of his very well-aimed rebuttal is a tweet from Turning Point UK. You know, the daft British subsidiary of the American Conservative organisation, Turning Point, which was launched over here by Charlie Kirk and Candace Owen. Kirk’s the propagandist, who got terribly upset when Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks asked him how much he made. To which Kirk responded by shouting that he ‘LIVED LIKE A CAPITALIST EVERY SINGLE DAY’ and challenged Uygur to a fight before people calmed him down. A piece of this bit of fine verbal parrying is shown in Logan’s video. And Owen is the Black female Conservative, who at the launch of the Turning Point UK said that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, but a globalist, and seemed to say that everything he did would have been alright, if he’d just stuck to his own country. For which she was rightly attacked by everyone.
Logan here responds to a sneering tweet from these fine examples of the Conservative intelligentsia, ‘If socialism is so great, then why do people fight tooth and nail to flee socialist countries for free market capitalist countries?’
What’s Logan’s comeback?
‘Well, if free market capitalism is so great, then why do free market capitalist countries have to insist on embargoing, sanctioning, funding coups, invading, and overthrowing socialist nations all the time. I mean, if socialism is so f**king terrible, then surely it’ll fall over on its own. There’s no need for all this f**kery. It’s almost like you’re full of s**t, guys.’ He also points out that by their own pseudo-libertarian definition, free market capitalism hasn’t actually happened either. And the constant messing around with socialist nations means they’re hack bastards.
Quite. And he’s right. The late critic of the American Empire, William Blum, devotes two chapters to the left-wing, socialist regimes which America has attempted to overthrow in his book Democracy: America’s Deadliest Export, and it’s a long, long list. And Logan is probably very well aware of it as he’s a graduate of 20th century history and politics, so he knows his stuff.
This rebuttal counts for 1.12 minutes of the video. These is footage of him in bed having his face hit by his cat’s tail. Because it’s cute and funny.
The Friday before last, former president George H.W. Bush, the father of former president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, finally fell off his perch at the age of 94. Like Monty Python’s parrot, he had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. He was an ex-president, and well and truly. He was buried with due state honours last Wednesday.
And the press and media fell over themselves to praise him to the rafters. If you believed them, you would have thought that America had lost a statesman of the stature of the ancient Athenian politico, Pericles. Or that he combined in himself the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, Maddison and the rest of the Founding Fathers.
He wasn’t. He was the successor to Ronald Reagan and a former head of the CIA, and had been involved with shady dealings, dirty, proxy wars and invasions in Latin America and Iraq, that had cost thousands their lives, while thousands others were tortured by the dictators he supported. And domestically he was responsible for racist electioneering and a highly discriminatory drugs policy that has resulted in the massive disproportionate incarceration of Black American men.
Mehdi Hasan on George Bush Senior
He was a disgusting creature, and Mehdi Hasan wrote a piece in the Intercept describing just how disgusting and reprehensible he was. In the piece below, he also appeared on Democracy Now! to talk to host Amy Goodman about Bush senior and his legacy of corruption, murder and terror.
Bush was elected president in 1990. He was a former director of the CIA, and served from 1981-89 as Reagan’s vice-president. Despite calling for a kinder, gentler politics when he was vice-president, Bush refused to tackle climate change, saying that the American way of life was not up for negotiation, defended future supreme court justice Clarence Thomas even after he was accused of sexual harassment. He was responsible for launching the first Gulf War in Iraq in 1991. During the War, the US air force deliberately bombed an air raid shelter in Baghdad killing 408 civilians. The relatives of some of those killed tried to sue Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, for war crimes. The attack on Iraq continued after the end of the war with a devastating sanctions regime imposed by Bush, and then his son’s invasion in 2003.
The Invasion of Panama
In 1990 Bush sent troops into Panama to arrest the country’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Noriega had previously been a close ally, and had been on the CIA’s payroll. 24,000 troops were sent into the country to topple Noriega against Panama’s own military, which was smaller than the New York police department. 3,000 Panamanians died in the attack. In November 2018, the inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations for what they considered to be an illegal invasion.
Pardoning the Iran-Contra Conspirators
As one of his last acts in office, Bush also gave pardons to six officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. This was a secret operation in which Reagan sold arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, despite Congress banning the administration from funding them. Bush was never called to account for his part in it, claiming he was ‘out of the loop’, despite the testimony of others and a mass of documents suggesting otherwise.
The Collapse of Communism and Neoliberalism
Bush’s period in office coincided with the collapse of Communism. In the period afterwards, which Bush termed the New World Order, he was instrumental in spreading neoliberalism and the establishment of the NAFTO WTO treaties for international trade.
Hasan not only wrote for the Intercept, he also hosted their Deconstructed podcast, as well as a show, Up Front, on Al-Jazeera English.
The Media’s Praise of Bush
Goodman and Hasan state that there is a natural reluctance against speaking ill of the dead. But they aren’t going to speak ill of Bush, just critically examine his career and legacy. Hasan states that as a Brit living in Washington he’s amazed at the media hagiography of Bush. He recognizes that Bush had many creditable achievements, like standing up to the NRA and AIPAC, but condemns the way the media ignored the rest of Bush’s legacy, especially when it involves the deaths of thousands of people as absurd, a dereliction of duty. He states that Bush is being described as the ‘anti-Trump’, but he did many things that were similar to the Orange Buffoon. Such as the pardoning of Caspar Weinberger on the eve of his trial, which the independent special counsel at the time said was misconduct and that it covered up the crime. And everyone’s upset when Trump says he might pardon Paul Manafort. Bush should be held to the same account. It doesn’t matter that he was nicer than Trump, and less aggressive than his son, he still has a lot to answer for.
The Iran-Contra Scandal
Goodman gets Hasan to explain about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan sold arms to Iran, then an enemy state, to fund a proxy war against a ‘Communist’ state in South America despite a congressional ban. He states that it was a huge scandal. Reagan left office without being punished for it, there was a Special Council charged with looking into it, led by Lawrence Walsh, a deputy attorney general under Eisenhower. When he looked into it, he was met with resistance by Reagan’s successor, Bush. And now we’re being told how honest he was. But at the time Bush refused to hand over his diary, cooperate with the Special Counsel, give interviews, and pardoned the six top neocons responsible. The Special Counsel’s report is online, it can be read, and it says that Bush did not cooperate, and that this was the first time the president pardoned someone in a trial in which he himself would have to testify. He states that Bush and Trump were more similar in their obstruction of justice than some of the media would have us believe.
Iraq Invasion
They then move on to the Iraq invasion, and play the speech in which Bush states that he has begun bombing to remove Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential. It was done now, because ‘the world could wait no longer’. Because of Bush’s attack on Iraq, his death was marked by flags at half-mast in Kuwait as well as Washington. Hasan states that Hussein invaded Kuwait illegally, and it was a brutal occupation. But Hasan also says that Bush told the country that it came without any warning or provocation. But this came after the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Hussein that American had no opinion on any border dispute with Kuwait. This was interpreted, and many historians believe, that this was a green light to Hussein to invade.
Bush also told the world that America needed to go into Iraq to protect Saudi Arabia, as there were Iraqi troops massing on the border of that nation. This was another lie. One reporter bought satellite photographs of the border and found there were no troops there. It was lie, just as his son lied when he invaded twelve years later. As for the bombing of the Amariyya air raid shelter, which was condemned by Human Rights Watch, this was a crime because the Americans had been told it contained civilians. Bush also bombed the civilian infrastructure, like power stations, food processing plants, flour mills. This was done deliberately. Bush’s administration told the Washington Post that it was done so that after the war they would have leverage over the Iraqi government, which would have to go begging for international assistance. And this was succeeded by punitive sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. It all began on Bush’s watch.
Racism, Willie Horton and Bush’s Election Campaign
They then discuss his 1988 election campaign, and his advert attacking his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was attacked for having given a weekend pass from prison to Willie Horton, a Black con serving time for murder, who then went and kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping the woman. This was contrasted with Bush, who wanted the death penalty for first degree murder. The advert was created by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, who later apologized for it on his deathbed. This advert is still studied in journalism classes, and until Trump’s ad featuring the migrant caravan appeared it was considered the most racist advert in modern American political history. Atwater said that they were going to talk about Horton so much, people would think he was Dukakis’ running mate. Bush approved of this, and talked about Horton at press conferences. And unlike Atwater, he never apologized. Roger Stone, whom Hasan describes as one of the most vile political operatives of our time, an advisor to Donald Trump and Nixon, actually walked up to Atwater and told him he would regret it, as it was clearly a racist ad. When even Roger Stone says that it’s a bad idea, you know you’ve gone too far. But the press has been saying how decent Bush was. Hasan states he has only two words for that: Willie Horton.
In fact, weekend passes for prison inmates was a policy in many states, including California, where Ronald Reagan had signed one. Hasan calls the policy what it was: an attempt to stoke up racial fears and division by telling the public that Dukakis was about to unleash a horde of Black murderers, who would kill and rape them. And ironically the people who were praising Bush after his death were the same people attacking Trump a week earlier for the migrant caravan fearmongering. It reminded everyone of the Willie Horton campaign, but for some reason people didn’t make the connection between the two.
Racism and the War on Drugs
Hasan also makes the point that just as Bush senior had no problem creating a racist advert so he had no problem creating a racist drug war. They then move on to discussing Bush’s election advert, in which he waved a bag of crack cocaine he claimed had been bought in a park just a few metres from the White House. But the Washington Post later found out that it had all been staged. A drug dealer had been caught selling crack in Lafayette Square, but he had been lured there by undercover Federal agents, who told him to sell it there. The drug dealer even had to be told the address of the White House, so he could find it. It was a nasty, cynical stunt, which let to an increase in spending of $1 1/2 billion on more jails, and prosecutors to combat the drugs problem. And this led to the mass incarceration of young Black men, and thousands of innocent lives lost at home and abroad in the drug wars. And today Republican senators like Chris Christie will state that this is a failed and racist drug war.
This was the first in a series of programmes honouring the dead – which meant those killed by Bush, not Bush himself. The next programme in the series was on what Bush did in Panama.
Dark Rock and Bush: The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Vision Thing’
I’ve a suspicion that the track ‘Vision Thing’ by the Sisters of Mercy is at least partly about George Bush senior. The Sisters are a dark rock band. Many of front man Andrew Eldritch’s lyrics are highly political, bitterly attacking American imperialism. Dominion/Mother Russia was about acid rain, the fall of Communism, and American imperialism and its idiocy. Eldritch also wanted one of their pop videos to feature two American servicemen in a cage being taunted by Arabs, but this was naturally rejected about the bombing of American servicemen in Lebanon. Another song in the same album, ‘Dr Jeep’, is about the Vietnam War.
‘Vision Thing’ seems to take its title from one of Bush’s lines, where he said, if I remember correctly, ‘I don’t have the vision thing.’ The song talks about ‘another black hole in the killing zone’, and ‘one million points of light’. It also has lines about ‘the prettiest s**t in Panama’ and ‘Take back what I paid/ to another M*****f****r in a motorcade’. These are vicious, bitter, angry lyrics. And if they are about Bush senior, then it’s no wonder.
Yesterday Tweezer took it upon herself to enter the stage at the Tory party dancing, coming in shaking her booty to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. I think this was supposed to maker her appear upbeat and confident, showing how little she was worried about Brexit, challenges from BoJo and other rivals and Jeremy Corbyn’s revitalized Labour party. And presumably her, or her advisers, thought the choice of the Abba song would stress how regal she was.
The opposite has been the case. With a few notable exceptions, the prevalent mood across the country seems to have been a mixture of mirth and acute, vicarious embarrassment. The left-wing, disabled issues vlogger, Gordon Dimmack, put up a video yesterday about it, describing her as ‘dad-dancing’. Which is quite accurate. She did come across very much as that middle-aged relative, very often someone’s father, who proceeds to embarrass their offspring by dancing at family parties. Mike has put up a very good piece about Tweezer’s cringe-inducing display over at his blog, where he quotes the good folks on Twitter on this weird spectacle.
They’re all worth reading, but my favourites are the Tweet from Wandering Aeonghus, who said “Abba have condemned the use of their music by extreme right wing political groups. Do keep up!” and James Melville, who suggested new, more appropriates for the Abba song to fit with the Tory conference. They were
“You are the Brexit queen
Two left feet, dance like Mr Bean
Brexit queen
Feel the heat from the EU team, oh yeah
Plead with France, you don’t stand a chance
Having the worst time of your life
Ooh, see no deal, watch us scream
Digging the Brexit queen”.
Wirral In It Together, on the other hand, made a serious point about Tweezer and her racism and victimization of the poor and disabled:
“Theresa May dancing?! Are there graves of poor, homeless, abused, disabled, black, Asian, Hispanic people under the #CPC18 stage?”
Some people in the media, amazingly, appear to have been impressed. The I has glowing headlines today about her performance. And Laura Kuenssberg tweeted “That was one of best speech entrances ever from the person the public might least expect it from”.
This got angry replies pointing out how poor her assessment of it was and how out of touch Kuenssberg herself was from Michael Stewart and Fiona Nouri. While Matt Thomas tweeted that “Presumably Fred West could’ve come out doing Gangnam Style and Laura would’ve put a positive twist on it.”
LBC’s James O’Brien spoke for so many in this video showing his reaction to it all on YouTube.
‘Oh no! This is awful!’ he cries, before he facepalms.
You can hear the spirit of the late comedy legend, Frankie Howerd, saying ‘Titter ye not! Ooooooh noooo! It’s rude to mock the afflicted’.
But there’s a serious aspect to May’s weird cavortings. She’s dancing ’cause she’s trying to stay in power, and she’s proud that her party has reduced the working people of this country to abject poverty. Proud that they’re deporting people of colour, who have every right to be here. Proud that they’re privatizing the NHS and introducing charges for services that should be free. Proud that sanctions and the work capability tests means that the unemployed and disabled are dying of starvation. Proud that there are nearly a quarter of a million people using food banks. And the poverty for ordinary people will get worse, thanks to their partisan and utterly inept handling of Brexit.
The last word should really go to Mrs Gee, who said
“Young people – take a long hard look. Then register to vote and #voteLabour like your fucking lives depend on it. Because actually they do.”
Mike concludes his article with this
Every word of that is true. The lives of the young – their quality, everything that makes a life worth living – are in danger every moment the Conservatives are in power because the Conservatives want to take everything that makes life worth living away from working people.
And yes, that will probably extend to the right to reproduce, at some point in the future. Which is odd, because if there’s one thing Mrs May’s performance showed, it’s that it is the Tories who really shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
Gordon Dimmack is a left-wing vlogger with a particular interest in disability issues. In the video below, of about six and a half minutes in length, he discusses Tweezer’s decision yesterday not to give an interview to Channel 4’s Jon Snow at the Tory conference.
He shows the piece Snow himself broadcast about it, pointing out that this was the first time since the broadcaster was founded in the 1982 that it had been refused an interview with the-then leader of the ruling party. He’s been therefore for 35 years interviewing Thatcher, then Blair, Brown, Cameron and even Tweezer herself. Except this week, when they turned him and the broadcaster down. No reason was given.
Dimmack wonders whether the reason could possibly be connected to an interview Tweezer gave four weeks ago to Channel 4’s Michael Crick. This was when she was at Robben Island in South Africa going to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela. And Crick gave her a grilling comparable to that handed out by Paxo on Newsnight. He asked her a question she really didn’t want to answer: what did she do to free Nelson Mandela?
As you can see from that segment of Dimmack’s video, she really didn’t want to answer that question. She tries to get round it by waffling about the support given to Mandela and South Africa during the transformation to democracy. What it doesn’t wash with Crick. He asks her if she got herself arrested protesting South Africa or boycotted South Africa. Tweezer admits that she ‘didn’t chain herself to railings’ before trying to resume with her waffle about Britain supporting Mandela, his vision of the country, etc. Crick is skeptical about this, and with good reason. Thatcher considered Mandela a terrorist. And he asks Tweezer about all this supposed aid Britain gave South Africa under Thatcher. Tweezer continues with her nonsense about giving help where it was needed.
Crick doesn’t pick up on it, but that raises all kinds of questions. Thatcher tried to justify her refusal to boycott South Africa on the grounds that it would hit Black South Africans the worst. But the ANC, Mandela and the other Black organisations wanted Britain to impose sanctions anyway. So what was Tweezer saying: that by not imposing sanctions, they were giving to Black South Africa, even when that was not what they wanted, when they saw their real goal as ending apartheid? Crick doesn’t ask, and Tweezer didn’t say, but the question’s still there.
Crick’s interview was admired, rightly, by the press and critics. But the Tories haven’t given Channel 4 another interview with Tweezer.
But one broadcaster they have allowed to interview her was the Beeb. And Dimmack pointed out that the last interview the Corporation did with her was very softball, with what looks like the Macclesfield Goebbels, Nick Robinson, lobbing very easy questions at the Prime Minister.
Dimmack wonders if Tweezer’s new reticence towards Channel 4 has got something to do with the above, claiming that he honestly doesn’t know. Well, unless Tweezer ‘fesses up, no-one knows. But he’s built a good case.
As for Jon Snow, he remarks that access is the cornerstone of democracy, it helps journalists hold the government to account. He’s right, but this is clearly a government that doesn’t want to be held to account. But then, that was clear by its attempts to weaken even further the Freedom of Information Act, the way Tweezer and her predecessors have refused FOIA requests into the deaths they have caused with their wretched ‘work capability tests’. And the Tory press have been absolutely complicit in supporting this out of control, murderous party.
Meanwhile, across the North Sea, Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, has managed to make himself extremely unpopular to the point where some left-wing German MPs are calling on Angela Merkel to throw him out of the country. Grenell had already upset the Germans by telling them that as Trump was going to impose sanctions on Iran, they should wind up their business connections with the country. He has now further enraged them by giving an interview to the extreme right-wing news agency, Breitbart, in which he said that he wanted to empower right-wing movements across Europe, as he thought there was a Conservative resurgence going on.
In this video from RT, Peter Oliver reports on the reactions to Grenell and his remarks in Germany. Martin Schulze of the SPD, the German equivalent of the Labour party, caustically remarked that ambassadors are representatives of states, not political parties. He then accused Grenell as acting less like a diplomat and more like ‘a Far Right colonial officer’, and demanded his expulsion. Andrej Hunko, of the Left Party, also explains why Grenell’s comments are illegal under international law, quoting the regulations chapter and verse which specifically exclude diplomatic staff from engaging in party political activism.
The video also includes comments from the German public. These range from ‘I’m not really bothered about it, but he should be more diplomatic’ to one gent, who is really outraged about it, and goes on at length about how disgraceful it is.
Fuelling this outrage at Grenell’s stupid and undiplomatic comments are concerns about the rise of the AfD, the far-right, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic party that has just entered the Bundestag for the first time. They are deeply unpleasant, and contain real Nazis and Holocaust-deniers, who have denounced the Holocaust monuments in Germany. One of their leaders even said in a speech that he’d build an underground railway to Auschwitz, which seems a very clear statement to me that he fully supported the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The last thing Germany or any other country needs is for Trump to encourage the AfD and parties like it.
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