Yesterday the good fellow at the Crewe-based Zelo Street blog put up a post discussing how LBC radio’s James O’Brien had attacked the Tories for their hypocrisy in criticising the Labour Party. for supposed anti-Semitism, while all the time allowing venomous racism to flourish in their own. This came after the blogger Racists4ReesMogg revealed a long series of tweets from internet groups set up to promote Boris Johnson and Rees Mogg as leaders of the Tory party.
The tweets were truly vile. The members of these groups discussed burning Qu’rans, throwing Muslims off bridges, bombing and closing down mosques, sterilising immigrants and the poor, debarring Muslism, and particularly Sajid Javid and Sadiq Khan from positions of government, ’cause their Muslims, along with ethnic cleansing of such ferocity that the ‘SS Einsatzgruppen would look like a Boy Scout’s picnic’. There were racist attacks on Diane Abbott and Sayeed Warsi, along with speculation that a civil war was coming and they should all get guns and licences. And almost inevitably there were the weird conspiracy theories about the Jews. Some of them seem to believe in all that nonsense about the ‘Kalergi’ plan, a secret Jewish conspiracy to import Africans and Muslims into Europe to destroy the White race.
As a result, Tory deputy chairman James Cleverly suspended 14 members, boasting on politics live that his party takes action, unlike Labour in its handling of the anti-Semitism crisis. But Zelo Street speculates that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that Racists4ReesMogg seems to be finding more all the time.
And then James O’Brien sharply contrasted the Tory tolerance, and even encouragement of frothing racism and islamophobia, with their sharp intolerance of supposed instances of anti-Semitism. Zelo Street quoted him as saying
“Imagine if the New Statesman published an article by Owen Jones stating baldly that there is not enough anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. What would happen? Imagine if Diane Abbott or John McDonnell came forward with comments about Jewish women being like letterboxes, or made a joke about the wigs that orthodox Jewish women wear. Made a joke that invited people to mock and condemn them”.
“Imagine if John McDonnell made a joke about … the locks that Orthodox Jewish men grow, or the Yarmulkes that many, many Jewish men choose to wear. Imagine if, for example, John McDonnell said ‘Why do all these Jews walk around with frisbees on their heads?’ Explain to me how that would be substantially any different from what Boris Johnson said about Muslim womens’ sartorial choices”.
“The ones that make them look like letterboxes. D’you see what I mean? That’s not even controversial, that comparison. Just imagine Owen Jones wrote an article on there not being enough anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and then how the hell Rod Liddle gets to write an article arguing that there’s not enough Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. And he’ll still get invited on to programmes and into studios, and Andrew Neil can still claim when he’s covering these issues that he’s impartial”.
“And Fraser Nelson can host an event at the London Palladium with Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fans are so vile that 14 of them have been suspended from the very party. Now just swap all of those phrases. Swap Islamophobia for anti-Semitism. Swap Rod Liddle for Owen Jones, swap Fraser Nelson for Jason Cowley … and swap Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson for John McDonnell or Tom Watson. And you tell me that we don’t live in a country that is utterly upside down”.
Zelo Street states that the Tories have got away with it for so long because the press has been actively complicit in promoting such venomous bigotry. Like the Scum, which started off whipping up hatred against the Irish, then it was Blacks, and now it’s ‘Scary Muslims’. This press is only now stopping to think about what they’re doing. But it’s too late for the Tories, as the lid is being taken off this ugly can of worms. The Tories have every reasons to try to misdirect people to the anti-Semitism allegations against Labour. Because when this stops, people will turn and see where the real racism is. And it will not end well for the Tories.
There always has been a section of the Tory party whose members and views have overlapped with the real, horrific Fascists of the NF and BNP. Like Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes and the Libertarians links to Latin American death squads and apartheid South Africa. But the rantings of Rees Mogg’s and Boris Johnson’s supporters reminded me in particular of the weird, paranoid conspiracist views of the Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. Almost by definition all the Nazis were paranoid conspiracy theorists, as the whole party was based on the assumption that Jews control capitalism and communism and were working to destroy the Aryan race as a whole and specifically Germany. But in the case of Rosenberg the paranoia was particularly acute. Rosenberg was bitterly anti-Christian, and his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century was suppressed by Hitler because it was an embarrassment at the time the Fuhrer was trying to gain the support of Christian Germany. Apart from Jews, Rosenberg was also paranoid about Freemasons, Communists and nearly everybody else. At one point he was convinced that there was a secret Roman Catholic plot to seize control of Germany and install the old Catholic princes. In a party of murderous paranoid nutters, he was one of the most paranoid and nuttiest. But looking at the paranoia and frothing, venomous racism of Johnson’s and Rees Mogg’s supporters, he’d have fitted in very well there.
These people are genuinely frightening. During the mid-70s there was a plot by the editors of the Times and Mirror, as well as the British intelligent agencies, to overthrow the minority Labour government. Left-wing MPs, trade unionists, activists and journos would be rounded up and interned, possibly on one of the Scottish islands. It never got off the ground, as leading members of the civil service and the staff at Sandhurst weren’t interested and told the plotters where to go.
But it shows how fragile British democracy really is. This was during the mid-70s, when the country was experiencing inflation, strikes and the energy crisis. Thanks to Thatcher, the unions have been smashed and inflation kept low, which is why there is so much poverty. But May’s botched and incompetent Brexit threatens to make the problem much, much worse. And as the case of Nazi Germany shows, in times of severe economic and political crisis, people look for scapegoats. We could see a massive expansion of bitter, murderous racism in this country too, accompanied demands for the full instruments of Fascist repression – internment, mass arrest, and death camps if people like the denizens of these sites and the threat they pose are not taken seriously.
One of the most entertaining books I’ve read on the stranger or more remarkable items of the English lexicon is simply entitled Words, by the American author Paul Dickson (London: Arrow Books 1982). It’s subtitled ‘A Connoisseur’s Collection Of Old And New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful And Outlandish’ -. And one of the most useful political terms it records, in the chapter on ‘Neologisms’, is ‘Democrapic’. The book gives its definition as ‘Garson Kanin’s word for the expression of democratic beliefs by those who cannot tolerate democracy in action.’ (p.168).
It’s particularly appropriate at this time, as we heard a lot of democrapic last week from the Independent Group. They are the breakaway politicos from Labour and the Tories, who are so passionate about democracy and parliament, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, don’t have any real policies, except opposition to Brexit – or at least, not any they want the public to know – and have registered as a private corporation so they don’t have to do what real parties do and reveal who their sponsors and donors are. Nor do they have any infrastructure to allow a mass membership that would decide party policy.
Of course, they have serious rivals in their use of democrapic by the Blairites in the Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The Blairites maintain that they’re the true heart of Labour and stand for genuine inclusion, equality and diversity, while all the time trying to purge the real moderate and left-wing members of the party. At the same time, Tony Greenstein has noted that there’s also a very nasty racist undertone in the anti-Semitism smears, in that they’re targeted primarily at anti-Zionist Jews and anti-racist Black activists. The Lib-Dems are very democrapic since they effectively dumped John Mills’ On Liberty as their founding text determining the pursuit of real democracy to support David Cameron’s secret courts, where in the interests of national security, you may not know who your accuser is, nor the evidence or charge against you, and the whole trial will be held in secret. Pretty much like Labour’s Compliance Unit examining charges of anti-Semitism. And when you come to the Tories, there’s a whole mountain of democrapic coming from a party that despises the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, Blacks, Asians and Muslims, but make a lot of noise about how they stand up for British ideals of tolerance and democracy when anyone challenges them on all this.
Democrapic is a very useful term to describe this type of political hypocrisy. Just as the old slang term ‘gentleman ranker’, for a ruined gentleman reduced to serving as a private in the army, aptly describes Iain Duncan Smith. Who was rumoured to have failed the office course at Sandhurst and Returned To Unit.
IDS is now out of office, but sadly, not out of parliament. But I predict that ‘democrapic’ will remain intensely relevant, especially as applied to the Independent Group, who are particularly democrapic.
This is an excerpt from George Galloway’s Talk Radio Show, which I found on YouTube. He begins with talking about a conversation he had with James Whale, a fellow presenter, about the dangerous situation in the Middle East, where Israel is now facing an Arab, Russian and Iranian enemy. He pours scorn, however, on the juvenile scribblers, as Galloway sees it, who claimed that the missiles shot at the Golan Heights had entered Israel. Galloway states that the Golan Heights were illegally seized by Israel from Syria, and so are not part of Israel, no matter what the hacks say.
He then goes on to talk about Theresa May’s volte face, which has meant that victims of the Grenfell Tower fire will now be allowed onto the board investigating it. After that, he moves on to talking about how the Brexit negotiations are an appalling mess, and the whole affair something which all of us will have difficulty getting out of.
But the main subject of his ire is a piece published by Paul Carter in the Torygraph the day before, which may be 10th May 2018. The Torygraph had speculated on the possibility of a military coup against Corbyn. Galloway describes the article as chilling, and states that its author, Paul Carter, has no footprint in social media. The article claims that this coup would occur if the labour leader was elected to power and proceeded to enact to enact three particular policies. These were conducting a referendum to abolish the monarchy, taking us out of NATO, and taking us out of the western foreign policy consensus. Galloway himself wishes Corbyn would do all these, but the Labour leader will certainly not do any of them. The proximate cause of the Torygraph article is that it is 50 years since Mountbatten and the editor of the Mirror met to plan a coup against the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. Galloway states that Wilson was a political giant, who dominated the sixties and much of the seventies. He was right-wing Labour, a social democrat. But he had his house burgled and his mail intercepted because it was suspected that he was a Russian secret agent. If the coup had gone ahead, the country would probably be led by Mountbatten from the Despatch Box, probably from the House of Lords, unless he resigned and fought a bye-election. Not that such constitutional niceties would bother people, who had just overthrown their democratically elected leader.
He also makes the point that there were plans to intern 4,000 other leftists, including journalists, on the Shetland Islands. Galloway himself was too young at the time, but if they did launch a coup against Corbyn, this would be the last you’d hear of him for a long time, unless he managed to get onto Radio Free Shetland. He notes one expert, who has said that it would be much harder to launch a coup now that people have mobile phones and social media. It was easier fifty years ago when it was the editors of the newspapers to overthrow the government. But Corbyn would be wise to keep his mobile phone handy. If they did launch a coup, then millions would pour onto the streets to defended their elected leader? Or would they? Galloway leaves this as a matter of discussion for later in the programme. He says that eventually the plans for the coup were abandoned, because the conspirators thought better, including the government’s scientific advisor, Solly Zuckerman. But Galloway thinks this is false, and that they simply got cold feet.
Galloway then closes the segment with a piece about how popular the woman presenting the weather reports is becoming.
This is worrying, as it looks like a combination of smear piece and speculation by the Torygraph. Corbyn hasn’t any intention of trying to abolish the monarchy, taking us out of NATO or acting against the current foreign policy consensus, so it’s a smear to suggest that he might. The absence of any social media footprint for Paul Carter suggests that this is a pseudonym. And this in turn invites speculation that it’s someone from MI5 or another branch of the security services.
This wouldn’t be the first time MI5’s been acting against the government, if this is the case. The agency was convinced Wilson really was a KGB spy, and Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, have suggested that it was behind the smears circulating then about the Labour leader.
As for the coup they’re discussing, the plotting occurred later than the article claims. Mountbatten and the editor of the Mirror were making their plans in the mid-70s. And the Times was also looking forward to Wilson being toppled, though replaced by a civilian government of trusted members of the Labour party, like Shirley Williams, as well the Tories. These plots are discussed in Francis Wheen’s book, Strange Days Indeed: Paranoia in the 1970s, and by Ken Livinstone in his book Livingstone’s Labour. The date’s out, but otherwise everything that Galloway’s said about the proposed coup is correct. One of the reasons it failed is because one of the plotters approached Sandhurst, to ask if the old colonels there would help. They said they wouldn’t, and sent him away. Hurrah for Sandhurst!
Galloway says at the beginning of his discussion of the article that no-one else was talking about it. Which suggests that this is purely speculation and wishful thinking by the Weirdo Barclay Brothers and the paper’s managing director, Murdoch McLellan, and whoever is now the editor of this wretched rag. The paper’s been running articles attacking Corbyn, claiming that he’s an anti-Semite and so on, along with the Daily Mail. But this shows more than a hint of real desperation. For all the Tory and media talk about ‘peak Corbyn’, it seems they really afraid he’ll win the election. In which case, they want the troops to overthrow him. Not because they’re afraid he’ll do all the things they claim he will, but because his very mild socialist programme will cause the end of the Thatcherite consensus. The corporate rich could no longer look forward to a privatised NHS and railways, and parts of the electricity grid would also be renationalised, would which would also upset corporate profits. Not to mention that they could no longer rely on having a cowed, cheap workforce of the desperate on poverty wages, on zero hours contracts and kept in line by the threat of benefit sanctions and starvation.
This is all too much for the Torygraph and its scribblers. So they’ve started fantasising about the possibility of a coup. Just like the British stock exchange cheered the Fascists when they revolted against the Republican government at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
The Torygraph has just about gone full Fascist with this article. And its publication is more than a bit hypocritical for the Tories. Not after they went berserk and accused Hilary Mantel of encouraging terrorism when she published her short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. But this shows just how far Corbyn has rattled the Tories, and shown how some of them, at least as for the Torygraph itself, have started hankering after a coup to stop him.
On Friday Mike put up a piece reporting that the Tory MP Bob Stewart, a former army officer, had declared that ‘torture works’. Mike’s short piece commented that this was because Stewart clearly didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and that they didn’t teach morality at Sandhurst.
He also included a Tweet by Laurie Penny, stating that the same could be said for chemical weapons, cluster bombs and genocide. But that wasn’t the issue.
Indeed not. The issue is whether they are at all moral, and whether a nation that considers itself civilised should be using them. In all of the above, the answer is clearly ‘No’.
I think Mike is, however, wrong about morality not being taught at Sandhurst. A few years ago one of the alternative BBC channels ran a series following a group of cadets at the training academy. This showed them being taught and discussing the issue of morality in war. I got the impression that this is a major part of the course, and that much more could have been shown.
That does not mean that British officers are morally unimpeachable boy scouts. Unfortunately, the army has more committed atrocities. But it has also been trying to rebut any reputation it might have acquired for cruelty and incompetence. Remember a little while ago, when the recruitment films being run on Channel 4 and the commercial channels showed British squaddies nobly helping to police the distribution of food aid? Or showing tough but caring female squaddies looking after traumatised women, who’d had their menfolk butchered before being raped themselves? That was the image the British army wanted then.
Torture doesn’t work. Members of the intelligence services have said that it doesn’t provide any usable information. Which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, as people in extreme pain will say whatever they can to make it stop.
Instead, it lowers us to the same level as the thugs who use it, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and acts to further radicalise our opponents against us. If we are known to brutalise and torture our enemies and suspects, this will be used against us by the terrorists, who will claim that this justifies their campaigns against us. If we espouse torture, then we’re handing our enemies a major propaganda weapon.
But clearly Bob Stewart doesn’t understand that. Probably because he’s a Tory, and the whole party’s platform seems to consist on inflicting pain and degradation to those they consider inferior, including the poor and helpless in British society.
Earlier this evening I reblogged a piece from Vox Political, where Mike discussed a piece in the Canary about Cameron’s plans to isolate Islamist radicals in a special prison, rather like Guantanamo Bay. Mike raised the obvious and chilling question of whether this would be a concentration camp, especially with the government’s secret courts providing the legal basis for the Nazi-style Nacht und Nebel round-up and imprisonment of radicals.
I believe Mike’s fears are entirely justified. In the mid-1970s there were sections of the establishment that openly advocated a coup against the-then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. They’re discussed by the journalist and frequent guest on the News Quiz, Francis Wheen in his book, Strange Days Indeed: Paranoia in the 1970s. They’re also discussed, along with other intrigues and campaigns by MI5 and MI6 against the Labour left in ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone’s book, Livingstone’s Labour: A Manifesto for the Nineties. He writes
As the economy disintegrated under Wilson’s mismanagement, there began to be talk of the need for a change of government or even a coalition of the great and the good drawn from the British establishment. In the summer of 1967, the CIA, the FBI, MI5, MI6, and the Australian and New Zealand security services met in secret in Melbourne, Australia. They were addressed by Golitsin about his Wilson allegations and Wright presented information which he claimed raised the question of the loyalty of Willi Brandt. This meeting was followed by a visit to MI5 by Angleton who claimed to have confirmation from another source, whom he claimed could not be named, that Wilson was indeed a Soviet agent.
Matters began to hot up when the press baron Cecil King, a long-standing MI5 agent, began to discuss the need for a coup against Wilson. He informed Peter Wright that the Mirror would publish any damaging anti-Wilson leaks that MI5 wanted aired, and at a meeting with Lord Mountbatten and the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman, King urged Mountbatten to become the leader of a government of National Salvation. Zukerman pointed out that this was treason and left the meeting which came to nothing due to Mountbatten’s reluctance to act. (P. 53).
He also states that one army intelligence officer states that the security services had also convened meetings to determine the location of a possible internment camp for radicals in the Shetland Islands. One of those involved in this process was George Young, who had been the deputy head of MI6. ‘Red’ Ken quotes this passage from Young’s Subversion and the British Riposte, published in 1984:
(A) security counter-action need cover no more than 5,000 persons, including some 40 MPs, not all of them Labour; several hundred journalists and media employees, plus their supporting academics and clerics; the full-time members and main activists of the Communist party and the Socialist Workers Party; and the directing elements of the 30 or 40 bodies affecting concern and compassion for youth, age, civil liberties, social research and minority grievances. The total internment could easily be accommodated in a lesser ‘Gaelic Archipelago’ off the West Highlands.
Livingstone goes on to state that in the end the talks of coups amounted to nothing through a variety of factors. King lost his place at Mirror newspapers because of his increasingly erratic behaviour, which got worse. In 1974 he gave a speech to a group of officers at Sandhurst, urging them to overthrow Wilson in coup. ‘They thought he was made’, says the Bane of Thatcher. (p.54)
He also states that MI5 was also behind smears that Ted Heath was gay. Apparently the Tory MP Captain Henry Kerby was used to spread the rumour that the Tory Prime Minister was gay and had had an affair with a Swedish diplomat. Says Ken ‘I suspect that for some in MI5 being a Swedish diplomat and homosexuality were virtually synonymous anyway.’
Livingstone says that this sound like something from one of Frederick Forsythe’s grotty novels, but it’s all true and deadly serious. I’m sure he’s right. And the same kind of rumour mongering started again in the 1990s about the late former Labour leader, Michael Foot. It was Golitsin again. According to the defector, Foot was a KGB spy codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’. Really. And the conduit for the smear, which cost Murdoch a liberal actions, was the Times under its editor David Leppard.
You’d like to think that MI5 and MI6 had changed since the days of Thatcher. David Cameron, however, is despite all his verbiage about ‘One Nation’ Toryism, a Far Right authoritarian. I simply don’t think you can discount the idea that he would start rounding people up as subversives, not just Muslim radicals, but anyone, anyone at all, if he could get away with it. And his decision to start setting up special jails of Islamists seems to confirm it.
Cameron’s is a government of ‘filofascisti’. It’s the terms the Italians used to describe the ’80s generation of Yuppie Fascists. Rather than appear in Blackshirts and jackboots, they all adopted sharp business suits, and posed for the cameras like the models in GQ adverts for suits. The desire to imprison, beat, and attack immigrants, trade unionists, Socialists, Communists and others remained. Just as it is with Cameron and his pack of thugs.
I’ve been going through dictionaries of slang, turning up words and turns of phrase that describe the current head of the DWP, and minister in charge of culling the unemployed, sick and disabled. One of them is ‘Gentleman Ranker’, a 19th century term which described a broken gentleman, who was forced to serve as a private soldier. One of the rumours going around about IDS is that, contrary to his claim to have been an army major, he flunked the course at Sandhurst and was R.T.U.’ed – returned to unit. IDS certainly has pretensions to gentility, and so the term suits him admirably. And looking through You All Spoken Here, a compendium of words and phrases from the southern US, I found a few more terms that could be imported over here to describe this least honourable of Honourable Gentlemen. These are:
‘Coattail politician: One who depends on the favour of a more successful political figure.’ IDS has been an abject failure on his own. His stint as leader of the Tory party was a disaster, as has been his management of the DWP. He is massively incompetent, and his big idea – the consolidation of all the various welfare benefits into a single, Universal Credit, has been marked since its inception with massive cost overruns and postponements. It seems to me that he owes his whole position in the cabinet to his vocal support for David Cameron. And it seems to me that it is only Cameron’s power that’s keeping him there.
‘Snollygoster’: The book defines this as
A tadpole; a pretentious boaster; a political shyster. The Dictionary of Americanisms quotes “a Georgia editor” as defining snollygoster as “a pretentious boaster” and a “fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy.”
Whatever “talknophical assumnacy” is, deponent knoweth not. But we know the editor quoted was Colonel H.W.J. Ham. He was great shakes as a platform speaker, circa 1890, and on the northern lecture circuit was known as “the Cracker Chaucer.”
The Colonel’s son, Walter Ham, said his father applied the snollygoster tag to “a fellow who is continually side-wiping around after a little office which he can’t get, and which ain’t got sense enough to fill even if he could get it.”
President Harry S. Truman, in his whistle-stop campaign in 1952, renewed interest in the term. This when he applied it to “a group of Republican obstructionists – men of little minds and mean aspirations – who have put party above country and have worked for votes instead of peace.” “Republican snollygosters,” he called them.
The article ends by stating that the term originated as a colloquial word in the south for a tadpole.
It also fairly accurately describes IDS. He is indeed a vain boaster. He claimed that his benefit reforms would end poverty, and likened himself to the great anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce. He has also claimed to have a degree from an Italian college or university, even though that particular institution doesn’t issue first degrees. His management of the DWP is massively incompetent, and he seems to have zero scruples whatsoever.
He and Cameron won their first campaign going round slum estates and expressing concern about poverty in Britain. The book, Red Tory, by Cameron’s political mentor, Andrew Blond, made Cameron’s Conservatism seem more left-wing than Blair’s Labour administration. Once actually in power, of course, the mask came off, and it was back to privatisation, stringent welfare cuts, and the demonization of the poor, the underprivileged, the unemployed and the disabled as usual. Cameron also declared that his ‘would be the greenest government ever’. That also went by the board very quickly. Once in office, Cameron ditched the windmill he’d put over his front door, and set about passing laws to allow fracking, build nuclear power stations and generally set about avoiding any kind of environmental regulations. And now he and Osbo have decided to cut the subsidies for renewables. And despite Osborne’s statement that all this austerity and hardship is to cut the deficit, it’s actually gone up under the Tories. So in that respect, just about the entire Tory front bench are snollygosters.
It’s time to call them what they are, and throw them out of government for good.
Earlier this evening I blogged about the Tory bloodlust applauding the killing of Mohamed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazee, the brutal Islamist thug responsible for ‘executing’ al-Qaeda’s prisoners for the sick little propaganda videos by drone. I pointed out that, while Emwazee was a murderer and war criminal, who got pretty much exactly what he deserved, this does not mean that drone strikes are an effective weapon against terrorism. I pointed out in that article that critics of the drone programme have stated that their use tends to increase support for terrorists, like the Taliban in Pakistan. Also, drones themselves are not always accurate. The machines home in on cell phone signals, for example, so that most of their victims aren’t terrorists themselves, but may simply be their relatives or those, who happen to be there at the time. Moreover, The Young Turks reported that the programme had been criticised as an instrument of extra-judicial execution of American citizens, like the al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, by the American state. Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in the Yemen. He was an American citizen, but was effectively executed without trial.
The video below is from an American show, Democracy Now. It’s of an interview with a whistleblower, Michael Haas, who revealed the callous indifference to human life amongst the drone operators. Haas states that the operators called the children killed in drone strikes, ‘fun-sized terrorists’. They rationalised the murders by comparing them to grass. ‘You have to cut the grass before it gets too tall’ was the way the saw it. And everything was done to deny their humanity in order to make the killing of children easier.
There’s also a report on this by the atheist website, Secular Talk. They report that the drone operators also used to refer to children as TITs – Terrorists In Training. Haas himself was concerned about the way the drone operators seemed determined to kill indiscriminately, regarding everyone as a target. He was an instructor in the programme, and at one point pulled one of the men he was training off the console because he was upset at the man’s bloodlust. He told him that it wasn’t a video game, and that the people killed stayed dead.
If this is account is true, it was the action of a proper, good soldier. If you watched the programme on Sandhurst, the British military academy a year or so ago, you’ll have seen how the British army is concerned about the morality of warfare and killing. It’s part of their studies, and I’ve been told that the programme accurately reflected the course’s concern for the proper conduct of what is the brutal and horrific business of killing other human beings.
Haas was, unfortunately, not praised or commended for his moral concerns. He was instead punished. After he left the army, he states that he was hooked on ‘bath salts’ and cocaine. He also stated that for every four terrorists they killed, they created ten more.
From his evidence it appears that the use of drones is both deeply immoral, and having precisely the opposite effect of what is intended.
Now the insurgents in Iraq have used children as soldiers in combat with the occupying allied troops. There’s a horrifying description of a firefight in Iraq between the Americans and a group of insurgents in the first chapter of the book, Falling Off The Edge. During the battle, couple of insurgents took refuge in a nearby house, and threw outside a seven year old boy. Lying on the ground was an unexploded RPG round, which had been fired by one of the American troopers. The boy looked like he was planning to move towards and throw the grenade. The American soldiers told him to move away, and not pick up the round. The boy reached towards the grenade, and so was shot by the troopers.
A seven year old kid, killed because he was sent to do their job by ruthless, exploitative cowards. From the description, it doesn’t seem that the American troopers in this instance had a choice. If they had not shot the lad, he would have thrown the grenade, killing them.
The drone operators are in a different position. They aren’t personally threatened by the people they kill. They aren’t physically present, and they certainly don’t have to kill children or innocents. But about 990 per cent of the people killed in drone strikes aren’t terrorists.
Secular Talk concluded their piece by demanding that the drone programme be discontinued until the American forces clean it up. I don’t share their anti-religious views, but they’re right about that. It should come to an end now, before even more innocents are killed, and more people radicalised from it.
I found a piece on the atheist news show, Secular Talk, on Youtube discussing a report by one of the mainstream news channels/ programmes claiming that rather than being the fearless ghazis for Islam they claim to be, ISIS’ warriors are so wracked with fear that their leaders have to keep ’em drugged to get them to fight. The claim comes from an interview with a fighter for Hisbollah, the militant Lebanese paramilitary organisation. The fighter claimed that in battles with them, the ISIS fighters all turned tail and ran away. When Hisbollah took one of their bases, they found stacks of boxes of amphetamines. They believed that ISIS had put their fighters on the drug in order to keep them fighting.
So much for the great warriors of the ‘Islamic State’.
Now there are good reasons to treat this report with a pinch of salt. Hizbollah are, like ISIS, a militant Islamic organisation. They too have engaged in bombings and terrorist outrages. Private Eye has published several pieces critical of their non-Muslim supporters in the West, repeating a statement from the self-declared ‘Party of God’ which ran ‘We don’t want anything from you. We just want to kill you.’ An anthropological study of Hizbollah from its origins in the 1980s pointed out that the organisation was claiming to have changed and become more moderate, though the book remained somewhat sceptical of this.
Hisbollah are, in sharp contrast to ISIS, Shi’ah. It has its basis in a Socialist Lebanese Shi’ite party that was infiltrated by religious militants. ISIS are fanatically intolerant Sunnis, who have followed al-Qaeda in murdering and brutalising the Shi’ah population of Iraq. Hizbollah has also used propaganda to promote its aims, and has every reason to try and make ISIS as its opponent look as weak as possible in order to encourage and strengthen its supporters.
On the other hand, that does mean they’re wrong.
Combat stress was known centuries before psychiatrists recognised ‘shell-shock’ amongst the traumatised soldiers of World War I. Paddy Griffiths, a senior lecturer in War Studies at Sandhurst, states that the Vikings recognised it, and called it ‘Battle Foot’ in his book, The Viking Art of War. For all the dark, violent aspect of human nature, some anthropologists believe that killing does not come easily to humans. If you saw the film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, you’ll recall the scene where the mad, New Age major at the heart of the American Army’s secret psychic weaponry programme tells Ewan MacGregor’s character that in the First World War, 80 per cent of the shots initially fired at the enemy were deliberately aimed wide. The same when it came to some of the some conscripts fighting in the Vietnam War. The Men Who Stare At Goats was based on Jon Ronson’s Channel 4 documentary series, Crazy Rulers of the World, in which he went looking for the real psychic warriors in the American army, led by General Stebblebine. And like the mad officer in the movie, Stebblebine really did walk into walls, believing that one day he would be able to pass through them through the sheer power of his mind. The stats about the deliberate inaccuracy of soldiers fighting in World War One and Vietnam are true, however, if only during the initial phases of the conflict before the army realised that they had to train soldiers to kill, rather than just point their guns. The Israeli author, Amos Oz, in an TV interview back in the 1990s, recalled his experiences fighting in the Golan Heights during the Six Day War. He stated that he found the whole situation so difficult to believe and understand, that his initial reaction was to wonder why no-one had called the cops, as the situation was so far beyond his experience.
My guess is that civilised people, regardless of their race or religious beliefs or lack thereof, find killing extremely difficult. Hence all the effort terrorist organisations like ISIS and the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and violent, genocidal states like Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, put in to demonising their enemies.
And nations have frequently resorted to trying to help their troops keep going through exhaustion and the heavy stress of fighting by using chemical enhancement. The Nazi war machine was extremely efficient, but they used an amphetamine-derivative to keep their troops fighting. The stuff has since re-emerged, to plague deprived American communities as ‘Nazi Crank’.
Another type of recreational drug blighting the lives of the underclass is ‘Black Bombers’. This is again based partly on amphetamines. A friend of mine told me it was developed by the US army to keep their pilots flying bombing missions during the Vietnam War.
And this is the Nazi and US military machines, which were well-funded, trained and professional. And if they had to use drugs to prop up their troopers, it’s not even remotely incredible that ISIS are doing the same to their volunteers.
And the mass of ISIS fighters probably aren’t very good soldiers. A little while ago I found another report from The Young Turks news show commenting on a propaganda video released by ISIS promoting their version of the US’ Navy SEALS. ISIS was showing their version on manoeuvres, loudly proclaiming that they would be swift, efficient killers who would put fear into their enemies.
The result from professional Western soldiers and military analysts was somewhat different. Okay, it was the complete opposite. According to the Turks, it raised laughter and chuckles, rather than heart-pounding terror. The Western military authorities watching it couldn’t believe how bad their fighters were. They even made basic mistakes in the way they held their guns. And these were supposed to be the organisation’s elite killers, the ‘best of the best of the best’.
So, given the caveats above, I’m quite prepared to believe Hisbollah when they say that the ISIS troops they fought ran, and were so bad as soldiers that they needed to take Speed to give them courage.
If it was almost any other army or soldiers, I’d have some sympathy. As I said, for most civilised people all over the world, killing is extremely difficult. I realise that people fight in pubs and nightclubs, or in teenage gang battles, but this usually stops short of the knife or gun or whatever. Quite often before the fight breaks out, somebody jumps in, shouting, ‘Leave it out! It’s not worth it!’ or some such. Or the rozzers arrive to break it up and start giving people rides in the party van.
In the case of ISIS, I have absolutely no sympathy at all. This is the organisation that has butchered and enslaved its way across the Middle East, whose members boasted about how brutal and bloodthirsty they were. The brigade, whose on-line propaganda encouraged some of the jihadi brides to run away from Britain to marry them, bragged that they ‘delighted in carnage’.
Well, long ago a certain Bill Shakespeare, of the Midlands, had this to say about the difference between tough, martial masculinity and loss of humanity, in one of his plays. In the Scottish Play, MacBeth is being urged on by his wife to murder his way to the top to fulfil his destiny, as prophesied by the three witches. He’s initially reluctant, saying ‘Peace, woman, peace; I do all there is to become a man. Who dares do more is none.’
It’s a wise line, which shows you why people are still performing the Bard’s plays after four hundred years. It is, tragically, a lesson in masculinity that thugs and butchers like ISIS haven’t learned, and aren’t interested in learning.
And so I have no sympathy at all. They’re monsters, drugging the mass of their troops up to disguise how weak they really are, while at the same time boasting of atrocities that even the Nazis tried to conceal in case it brought shame on them.
Owen Jones devotes a whole chapter in his book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso 2012) to the way the media has also contributed to the demonization of the working class as feckless, drunken, drug-addicted promiscuous and violent wasters. He quotes expressions of such class, and also racial prejudice towards the White working class, not only from Right-wing columnists, such as James Delingpole, Amanda Platell and Janet Daley, but also Liberal anti-racists such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. He quotes Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel on the very narrow class basis of the journalists now sneering at the underprivileged and the working class, stating
As Rachel Johnson (editor of the Lady and sister of Boris Johnson) puts it: ‘What we’re having is a media which is run by the middle classes, for the middle classes, of the middle classes, aren’t we?’ She is spot on. The journalists who have stirred up chav-hate are from a narrow, privileged background. Even papers with overwhelmingly working-class readerships join in the sport. Kevin Maguire told me of a Sun away day in which all the journalists dressed up as chavs. Chuckle at their venomous columns by all means, but be aware that you are revelling in the contempt of the privileged for the less fortunate. In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly a flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working class Britain. (p. 119).
He then goes on to describe how such hatred and contempt for ‘chavs’ has become an amusing pastime for the privileged members of the Middle Classes, including Prince William, at Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
This chav-hate has even become a fad among privileged youth. At universities like Oxford, middle-class students hold ‘chav bops’ where they dress up as this working-class caricature. Among those mocking the look was Prince William, one of the most privileged young men in the country. At a chav-theme fancy dress party to mark the end of his first term at Sandhurst, he dressed in a loose-fitting top and ‘bling jewellery’, along with the must-have ‘angled baseball cap’. But when the other cadets demanded he ‘put on a chavvy accent and stop speaking like a Royal’, he couldn’t do it. ‘William’s not actually the poshest-sounding cadet, despite his family heritage, but he struggled to pull off a working-class accent,’ one cadet told the Sun. Welcome to twenty first century Britain, where royals dress up as their working-class subjects for a laugh.
To get a more detailed sense of what the ‘chav’ phenomenon means to young people from privileged backgrounds, I had a chat with Oliver Harvey, an Old Etonian and president of the Oxford Conservative Association. ‘In the middle classes’ attitudes toward what you would have called the working-class, so-called chav culture, you’ve still got to see class as an important part of British life,’ he says. ‘Chav’ is a word Harvey often hears bandied around beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford. ‘You’d think people would be educated here, but it’s still something people find funny.’ Unlike other students, he dislikes the term because of its class meaning. ‘I think it shows a patronizing attitude and is rather offensive. It’s a word used by more fortunate people towards less fortunate people… Unfortunately it’s now a popular term that has been transplanted into people’s everyday consciousness.’
A place like Oxford is fertile ground for chav-hate. Nearly half of its students were privately educated, and there are very, very few working-class people attending the university at all. It helps unlock the truth behind the phenomenon: here are privileged people with little contact with those lower down the scale. it is easy to caricature people you do not understand. And indeed, many of these students owe their place at Oxford to the privileged circumstances that brought them a superior education. How comforting to pretend that they landed in Oxford because of their own talents, and that those at the bottom of society are there because they are thick, feckless or worse.
Michael Bakunin: aristocrat and Anarchist revolutionary. Probably wouldn’t have been a fan of David Cameron
All this seems to bear out what the great 19th century Russian Anarchist revolutionary, Michael Bakunin, had to say about the corrupting effects of social privilege:
It is the peculiarity of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the intellect and the heart of man. The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.
IDS: Just about everything about him corroborates Bakunin’s comments on privilege.
Clearly not everyone in the upper or middle classes is a mass of seething hatred and contempt for the working class, despite the efforts of the columnists of the Daily Mail and Telegraph. And very few would wish to see present society destroyed rather than reformed in the wave of apocalyptic violence Bakunin recommended. ‘Even destruction is a creative act’, as he described his attitude to the exploitative state and contemporary society. But it does describe the class attitude, and privileged hatred of the poor and disadvantaged shown by the very upper class members of the Tory front bench. After all, with Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and IDS presiding over an administration determined to destroy the welfare state, reforms that have resulted in as many as 38,000 deaths per year, it’s difficult not believe that Bakunin had a point about the corrupting influence of privilege. This needs changing, and fast. And it must be through the ballot box that such class hatred, oppression and exploitation must be removed.
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