Okay, I keep hearing rumours that the gender-critical, ‘femalist’ women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen has turned her organisation, Standing For Women, into a political party, and is preparing to stand against Keir Starmer. She has said before that she doesn’t expect she’ll win, but simply wants to take the opportunity during the leadership and election debates to ask Stalin a few awkward questions that he’ll have to answer. No doubt these will be ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘Do women have cervixes?’, both questions that have had Starmer running away as fast as he could when asked them. The trans issue is an uncomfortable one for Stalin, especially as he’s zigzagged all over that issue – first stating he would back a gender recognition act, then saying it wasn’t an issue he’d pursue, before going back to saying he’d back it again. But there are other, equally important questions the scumbag should be asked, and no evasions or refusals tolerated. Like:
How can we trust anything that comes out of your mouth when every pledge you’ve made has been broken?
How can we trust you with our traditional freedoms when your leadership of the Labour party has been authoritarian in the extreme?
How can potential allies and supporters in parliament and local government trust you, when you’ve been treacherous in your treatment of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour grassroots socialists?
How can we trust you with the NHS after your hero Blair pushed privatisation up a notch or two and you’re bringing in a CEO from a private healthcare company? Blair also modelled his reforms on the American private healthcare company Kaiserpermanente. He thought they were more efficient than the NHS. They weren’t.
Why should the poor, the sick, the disabled and unemployed trust anything you say, after Blair brought in the work capability tests and under Ed Milliband the party showed very tepid opposition to the sanctions regime? Why should genuinely starving people on food banks, and those fearing that they’ll end up on them, trust you and your cronies, after Rachel Reeves said that in power Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories?
Foreign policy: Blair launched at least one illegal war in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq. That was nothing to do with democracy, but simply a grab for oil and the country’s state industries. It has reduced a middle eastern country with a reasonably secular government into a hell-hole riven by sectarian violence, one that became another theatre of war when ISIS raised the vile, barbaric heads. Brave, genuinely patriotic men and women were sent to risk life and limb on false pretences so that even rightists like Paz49 is wondering why Bush and Blair aren’t sharing a cell with Putin and the monsters of the former Yugoslavia looking at war crimes charges. Blair’s bombing of Libya in support of the rebels has also done much the same to that country, leaving part of it under the control of Islamist slavers. That’s S-L-A-V-E-R-S, in case your grubby mind can’t grasp how monstrous this situation is. How can we trust you not to start another fake, illegal, bloody war and waste more of our best people and destroy more countries?
Also: the Palestinians really are suffering terrible, racist persecution by the Israeli state. It has been repeatedly condemned by the international community. How are you going to stop this and not make libellous accusations of anti-Semitism against those campaigning against it instead?
Anti-Semitism: How can we trust you to take a genuinely objective, nonpartisan view of anti-Jewish hatred, when your definition of who is a true Jew is whether or not they support Israel? How can ordinary, grassroots Jewish members of the party trust you, when about 4/5 of those you’ve smeared as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews themselves, as well as gentile supporters and activists against anti-Semitism?
Racism: Ditto. There’s been a rise in Islamophobia in the party, as well as notorious incidents of bigotry and bullying against Black and Asian members and officers. Yet again, all we’ve heard from you is lies: lies that you’re implementing the Forde report, when all the evidence says you’re doing nothing of the kind and are actively blocking people from putting it into practice. Why should people of colour trust you with this issue?
Transgender issues: I’m gender critical, but this is fundamentally about trust. Starmer’s attitude to trans people has changed with the political winds. How can trans people and their allies trust what you say? Are you going to throw them under the bus as well?
Channel Migrants: You seem opposed to their mistreatment and the various harsh policies of Cruella and the Tories, but how long’s that going to last? Your behaviour suggests that you have no policies except what the Tories do, and no real ideological criticism of them. How can we trust you to bring about a fair, human solution to this problem, one that doesn’t involve treating asylum seekers as criminals? Italy’s Far Right Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni has made speeches declaring that to stop the flood of migrants, we should be tackling poverty and exploitation in Africa. She has also demanded that the international community do something to shore up the banks in Tunisia, as the banking crisis there is likely to set off a fresh wave of desperate migrants. She’s an authoritarian, who has impounded migrant vessels. Her party, God help us! – is descended from Mussolini’s Fascists. But she seems to have a far better grasp of solving the problem at its source in Africa’s poverty than you do! And no, I am not recommending anyone vote for the Far Right.
Northern Ireland: At the moment Nationalists and Loyalists are on knife edge. Tensions are rising and there are real fears that the hard men are going to come back and destroy everything decent people have worked for. My local MP, Karin Smyth, respect you because of the work you’re supposed to have put in on the Good Friday Agreement. But so did a lot of other people, including Mo Mowlam, Jerry Adams and Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve come across very dark hints that you were involved in some of the nastier, terroristic tactics carried out by parts of the secret state, and in your actions as Attorney General or head of public prosecutions or whatever, you showed no compunction on cracking down on civil liberties in order to protect the establishment. How, therefore, can we trust you to help solve this problem and protect the North of Ireland’s ordinary people?
Economy: The majority of the people of this grand country want the utilities renationalised. Thanks to privatisation, people can’t afford their energy bills, sewages is being pumped into our rivers and seas by the private water companies and nearly every month or so – I exaggerate, but it feels like that sometimes – a railway company has to be taken back into public management. But all I’ve seen from you is more support for the failing, undead shambling corpse of Thatcherism, a corrupt corporatism you learned from you mentor, Blair, which rewards shoddy service and political donations with government contracts and bloated profits. How can ordinary people trust you with our utilities?
The cost of living: Inflation is rising all the time, and hard-working ordinary people really are wondering how they make ends meet. You’ve suggested some policies like using a windfall tax from the energy companies to put extra investment in some services. But I’ve seen absolute no evidence that you want to do everything necessary to tackle this crisis. That means going all the way to the root. But instead you quail and cower before the press and political establishment, falling over yourself to reassure Murdoch and the rest of the blackguards that you’re a safe pair of hands, won’t upset Thatcher’s raddled, shop-worn legacy. You’re not a tribune of the people, but an establishment puppet, dancing whenever the donors pull your strings.
And we could go on and on, with issues like schools. The academies are another flagship project of Blair, one that he took over from Maggie Thatcher. Except she and Normal Fowler had enough wits about them to know it was failing and were winding the city academies up. Since then, academy chain after academy chain has had to be taken back into public management because they were failing. But I’ve seen no sign from you that you have the backbone to realise this is another failed Thatcherite policy that should be brought to a close. Or indeed, do anything about education except what might look good on the pages of the Scum and Heil.
In short, why should anyone, anyone at all, trust you within a foot of power?
Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.
Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.
I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.
The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.
And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.
There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.
There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.
Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.
There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.
And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.
I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.
But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.
I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.
It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.
This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.
And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.
‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.
The Mirror has published a very incisive piece about an advert calling for the renationalisation of the railways, in which Europeans laughs at us for allowing their state owned railways to buy up ours. The article by Mike Boyd, ‘Europe mercilessly mocks UK government for allowing British rail to fund their rail systems’ begins
‘The British rail system has been mocked by Europeans appearing in an advert pushing for the network to be made public.
In the viral video produced by the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) – whose members are striking across the UK today – the franchised structure of the UK’s rail network is mercilessly ridiculed.
In the clip representatives of “the people” of France, Netherlands and Germany “thank the British people” allowing their “publicly owned rail networks” to “buy up your rail network”.
In one brutal moment the cast explain: “So when you buy a ticket on Thameslink, Gatwick Express, Grand Central, Chiltern Railways, Merseyside Rail, Scotrail, Greater Anglia, London Midland, DLR, Northern Rail, London Overground, Cross Country, Southern and South Eastern, the profits go to making our railways cheaper.”
They add: “In 2012 we got £3million just from Greater Anglia. Not only that, the British taxpayers pay our franchises massive subsidies, without which we could never make a profit.
“So even if you never catch a train, you’re still sending us money. But before you say, ‘ah, we’ve left the EU’, that doesn’t make a difference.
“In fact, the Tory government want to privatise even more, which means we can take over even more.
“So to the British people we want to say, thank you.”‘
The advert, the article says, was first made in 2017, and has resurfaced as the rail workers launch industrial action.
This is precisely correct, and there was criticism a few years ago of the Dutch railway company’s management of one of the rail franchises a few years ago, though the company responded with a statement that they were actually investing millions into it. But this problem isn’t just confined to the railway networks – it’s also in the electricity and water companies. I’ve got a feeling that the local water company for Bristol is owned by the Indonesians, and at least one of the electricity companies owned by the French. This is all a product of Thatcher’s privatisation. These companies have no interest in giving the privatised utilities the investment they need, only in using the profits to give dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their chief executives. There are state owned electricity companies in the US, and I understand that those that aren’t owned by the state are protected by law from foreign companies owning a controlling stake in them. The same is true of the press, which is why Dirty Rupe Murdoch abandoned Australia to become an American citizen.
The railways, electricity and water need to be renationalised now. However much the Heil, Torygraph, Financial Times and GB News may scream against it.
Bravo to the RMT’s Mike Lynch, who’s been humiliating various journos on the right-wing news programmes by ably answering some of their stupid and very leading questions. Momentum put up a three minute video the other day of him being interviewed by Kaye Burleigh on Sky News. She asked him what he was doing picketing. He casually turned part way round to indicate the picket line behind her, telling her that they were there and would try to persuade workers not to cross it. But what if they tried? asked Burleigh. Then we’d try to persuade them not to, replied Lynch. At which point she got a bit huffy. The miners’ strike was mentioned, with Lynch wondering if she was old enough to remember it. She said huffily that she was, and she knew what picketing was. She was clearly desperate to get him to say something incriminating, like violence might happen, but Lynch would not be baited. And he’s been causing panic with his calm, reasoned answered right across the news programmes. I went to a left-Labour Zoom meeting on Wednesday. It was a conversation between the mighty Richard Burgon and Jess Barnard, the awesome head of Young Labour. During their conversation they said that public support for the train workers – not just the drivers, but also the signalmen and the people who work to maintain it all – had gone up. Several Labour MPs have even defied Starmer to express their support and solidarity with the union and its strike.
This has clearly put the wind not just up Starmer, but up the Blairites as a whole. And as Corporal Jones used to say in Dad’s Army, ‘they do not like it up ’em. They do not!’ For some reason I’ve had a short, 1 1/2 minute video from New Labour appear on my mobile this afternoon of Tony Blair telling anyone who’ll listen why we shouldn’t support public sector strikes.
Rubbish! As Burgon and Barnard said, Labour was founded by the unions to defend union rights. And that also means public sector unions. I see absolutely no reason why anyone, who wishes to remain true to the party and its great traditions, should listen to either Starmer or Blair. When Blair took over the Labour party, he threatened to cut its ties with the unions if he didn’t get his way on reducing their voting powers in the party. This would effectively have torn the heart out of the party as a genuinely working class organisation. The subtitle for this wretched video described Blair as Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007. So he was, during which time the number of people voting Labour actually went down along with the party’s membership. The number of people voting for Blair was actually less than those voting for Jez Corbyn. Blair only won because the Tories were even worse.
Why did the Labour vote and membership decline? That’s not a difficult question! It might have something to do with Blair carrying on Thatcher’s programme of privatisation, including that of the NHS, the further destruction of the welfare state and lying about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction which he could launch within forty minutes to take us into an illegal war. A war which wrecked a country and destabilised the entire Middle East, leaving it vulnerable to the horrible predations of ISIS. Hussein was a monster, but by the time he invaded he was not a threat to the other countries and something of a joke in the Arab world. He was certainly no threat to Britain. We sent our brave lads and lasses into Iraq not to defend Blighty, not to give the Iraqis democracy, but simply so that the oil companies and multinationals could steal Iraq’s oil and its state industries.
Blair’s a war criminal who should have been put on trial at the Hague alongside other monsters like Slobodan Milosevic. But somehow New Labour, now looking very shabby and shop-soiled, expect us to hang on his words like an elder statesman, like some latter day Pericles or Solon, but from Islington rather than Athens.
Bilge! Blair should shut up and keep silent. He had his time and it was over 15 years ago. As for Starmer, he’s a disgrace. They’re probably arguing that supporting public sector strikes will make the party unpopular. But I think they’re really scared that the RMT strike is proving all too popular, and that other unions are joining in to demand better wages for their workers.
And hooray for them, and yay for Mike Lynch!
Here’s the video Momentum put up of Lynch very capably rebutting Kaye Burleigh’s questions.
I got this message early this afternoon from the good peeps at Arise, the left Labour festival of ideas. It details their petitions, internet article and forthcoming protest against a possible war in Ukraine. It’s entitled ‘Speak Up For Peace – What You Can Do’, and it runs
‘Hello David
As much of the world hopes for de-escalation around the Ukrainian crisis, we are joining with the anti-war movement, Young Labour & others to oppose the UK’s Goverment’s sabre-rattling. Here are 3 things you can do:
Sign the Stop the War Coalition statement against the war-mongering Tory Government here.
Read the latest analysis from Kate Hudson (CND) here, Young Labour here and Andrew Murray (Stop the War) here on our media partner Labour Outlook.
Labour Party Conference passed policies that show a clear alternative of how we can build a world of international justice, equality & peace. But too often the Party leadership is not offering this alternative to the Tories’ reactionary foreign policy agenda. Please support the anti-war movement and join us on March 5, which will be a key point to organise for an international agenda for justice, equality. Be there!‘
Yours in solidarity, The Arise Volunteers Team.‘
Stop The War Coalition’s statement against our government’s warmongering over Ukraine reads:
‘Stop the War opposes any war over Ukraine, and believes the crisis should be settled on a basis which recognises the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and addresses Russia’s security concerns.
Our focus is on the policies of the British government which have poured oil on the fire throughout this episode. In taking this position we do not endorse the nature or conduct of either the Russian or Ukrainian regimes.
The British government has talked up the threat of war continually, to the point where the Ukraine government has asked it to stop.
Unlike the French and German governments, it has advanced no proposals for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, and has contributed only sabre-rattling.
Indeed, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has even accused those seeking a peaceful settlement of preparing “another Munich.”
Instead, the British government has sent arms to Ukraine and deployed further troops to Eastern Europe, moves which serve no purpose other than inflaming tensions and indicating disdain for Russian concerns.
It has also declared that Ukraine has a “sovereign right” to join NATO, when no such right exists to join it or any other military alliance.
Britain needs to change its policy, and start working for peace, not confrontation.
Stop the War believes that Russia and Ukraine should reach a diplomatic settlement of the tensions between them, on the basis of the Minsk-2 agreement already signed by both states.
It believes NATO should call a halt to its eastward expansion and commit to a new security deal for Europe which meets the needs of all states and peoples.
We refute the idea that NATO is a defensive alliance, and believe its record in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Libya over the last generation, not to mention the US-British attack on Iraq, clearly proves otherwise.
We support all efforts to reach new arms control agreements in Europe and to move towards nuclear disarmament across the continent.’
I’ve added my name to the statement because I am extremely worried about the way our government seems to want to take us to war there, and the Coalition are fundamentally correct in everything they say. NATO made an agreement with Gorbachev after the fall of communism that the former Warsaw pact countries would not join NATO and would remain neutral, with their security guaranteed by both parties. And then as soon as it could, NATO expanded in eastern Europe right up to Russia’s borders, thus stoking Russian fears of encirclement.
The invasion of Afghanistan had less to do with overturning a repressive Islamist despotism and creating a free and democratic state for its people, and far more to do with geopolitics and securing a vital oil pipeline. The overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy by rebels aided by western bombing has resulted in a divided country, one half of which is run by Islamists, who’ve dragged it back into the middle ages. Gaddafy was a dictator, but he believed in Africa as a continent and the equality of all its peoples, Black and White. But the Islamists don’t, and have reopened slave markets selling migrants from further south, who have struggled to reach Libya in their efforts to cross to Europe.
As for the Iraq invasion, that has been an object lesson in how right the British scientist, broadcaster and Fabian Socialist Jacob Bronowski was when he said ‘War is theft by other means’. Again, the war wasn’t about overthrowing a tyrant for the benefit of the Iraqi people. It was done so the American and Saudi oil cartels could steall their oil and western multinationals could still their state industries. I caught a bit of a talk about the invasion and its consequences in a recent Zoom meeting organised by the Labour left by an Iraqi gent. It’s heart-breaking and disgusting what has been done to the country. The American occupation government divided the state industries up into three categories – those that were to be privatised, though that were to be mothballed, and those that were to be simply closed down, thus helping to wreck the country’s domestic economy. And the Iraqi health service has been decimated. According to the gentleman, if you have a relative or friend in hospital now, there are no drugs to treat them. You have to run around outside trying to find someone who will sell them to you. But this was a country under Hussein that had a good healthcare system where treatment was free.
I think there are forces in the military and the Tory party that have been hoping for a confrontation with Russia for over half a decade. I think they were looking forward to a war between NATO and Russia in Lithuania in 2017. That year’s come and gone, and the theatre of war has moved south.
And I really do wonder what we are doing supporting the Ukrainian government when it has strong links with real Nazis. Novara Media put up a video this week discussing the story and photograph on the front page of the times. This was about a 78 year old women, who was undergoing training with some kind of paramilitary outfit in order to defend her homeland. Well, this would all be good if the paramilitaries involved were an ordinary patriotic defence group. But they weren’t. They were the Azov Battalion, a bunch of Nazis who have form for dressing up in the uniform of World War II SS auxiliaries and celebrating Nazi collaborators as national heroes. And it hardly needs to be added that they are definitely anti-Semites.
I don’t want to see a war in Ukraine. I don’t want to see it plundered and robbed, or destabilised for the benefit of big business, like Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. And I am terrified that any confrontation will very swiftly become nuclear.
And so I fully support the demands for peace made by the Coalition, Arise and its multitude of supporters. Including Jeremy Corbyn, the greatest Prime Minister this country has had stolen from it.
I’ve put up several pieces today commenting on far-right Labour MP Neil Coyle and his anti-Semitic tweet about members of Jewish Voice for Labour being ‘Communists’ with their ‘own parties to ruin’. I commented on how this is very close to Nazi rantings about ‘Jewish Marxism’ and power in the SPD and government generally. But it wasn’t just the German Nazis who held these vile beliefs. There were also in British Fascism from the very start. During the War radical right anti-Semitic groups accused Jewish Anglo-German businessmen, such as Alfred Mond, of secretly aiding Germany. The coalition government was reviled as the ‘Jewalition’, while the post-War Conservative Die-Hards were anti-Semitic, anti-Socialist and believed that there was a secret Jewish plot to bring down the Empire. This sounds highly relevant to me, despite the distance of time and space. The Blairites are also anti-Socialist, and Blair’s wars were another form of western imperialism, disguised as freeing countries from tyrants and giving them democracy. In fact it was about removing checks to Western dominance and, in the case of Iraq, looting the country of its oil and state industries. British anti-Semites like Rotha Orne Linton and Nesta Websta were bonkers conspiracy theorists, who believed that Jews and Freemasons were responsible for every revolution and every calamity that had befallen humanity from the French to the Bolshevik Revolutions. One of these ladies also claimed that Nudism was also part of this vast Jewish plot! These people really weren’t well. I can hear Frankie Howerd, the great comedian, who would almost certainly have been killed or put in a concentration camp because of his homosexuality, saying, ‘Oh don’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted!’
I found this piece in Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987) describing British Fascist denunciations of what they saw as the corruption of the British parliament dominated by Jewish interests:
‘Other members did not mince their words with regard to the British government. William Joyce attacked the ‘Slobbering, bastardised mendacious triumvirate’ of Churchill, Eden and Cooper and argued that conscription would bring into the army thousands of young fascists whose training should not be wasted. Elwin Wright, who up until 1937 had been secretary of a respectable Anglo-German Fellowship, advocated the shooting of Jews, called Neville Chamberlain a liar and a traitor and stated that Parliament was a ‘blackmailing corrupt body of bastards.’ For Commander Cole, the Palace of Westminster was full of dirty, corrupt swine and the House of Commons was a ‘house of bastardised Jews’. Cole’s extreme anti-Semitism had developed as a result of his exposure to the Protocols when he had been involved with allied help to the White Russians in the Civil War in the 1920s.’ (p.82).
One of the various Fascist magazines circulating in the early 1920s was The Hidden Hand, published by The Britons. This had originally been called Judentum Ueber Alles when it appeared in 1920, but changed its name in the September of that year. Judentum Ueber Alles – ‘Jewry Over Everything’, an obvious play on the German national anthem, Deutschland Ueber Alles. Perhaps that’s how we should refer to any announcement by Starmer or the Blairites of another purge of innocent, decent Jews, on the spurious pretext that they are somehow anti-Semitic, because they criticise Israel, or ‘communists’ because they’re socialists?
And there was another nasty, anti-Semitic publication, The Jews’ Who’s Who. Presumably this was a list of Jewish figures in parliament, industry, culture and the arts, and the gentiles who supported them. This reminds me of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and related groups, who apparently put together a map of the people they accused of anti-Semitism – who were naturally supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, including Jews – and where they lived. This resulted in one entirely blameless Jewish woman having her car firebombed.
We have gone very far through the looking glass here, folks, where anti-Semitism is dressed up as its opposite and racists use its accusation to smear genuine decent, anti-racists, especially if they’re Jewish.
If this carries on, will the next time Starmer speaks he’ll be met by a uniformed mob chanting ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Starmer!’ Because if he isn’t, he should.
This video comes from WION, which I think is an Indian news network. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has released a mock video on his website of Donald Trump being assassinated by a drone while playing golf. The video was produced as part of a competition to mark the American drone assassination of General Soleimani, and the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi has pledged to avenge his death. The Americans have responded with a statement that Iran will face dire reprisals for any attack on an American national.
This comes a few days after Iran issued a demand for Trump to be prosecuted and killed, while over the Christmas period the regime’s armed forces simulated an attack on an Israeli nuclear installation.
Readers of my blog will know what I think of Iran’s government: I despise them as ruthless, theocratic dictators. But I can’t condemn them for producing the video or calling for Trump’s prosecution. Trump was responsible for the killing of Soleimani by drone, and while I don’t think Soleimani was in any way an angel, the Americans don’t really have a counterargument if other countries use the same methods against them. As Kant said, ‘When you legislate for one, you legislate for all’. Which is why we have international law.
As for the simulated attack on an Israeli nuclear plant, again it’s immensely hypocritical for America or the Israelis to condemn it. Israeli has nuclear weapons, which is against international law but no-one seems to condemn them for it. They have launched attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, though I think they’ve so far been with viruses rather than drones. Even so one of these attacks left a number of Iranian nuclear scientists dead. Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest have been trying to tell the world that Iran’s trying to develop nuclear weapons and we should all be very worried. The Iranians have said that, on the contrary, they’re developing it for their power industry. This is actually quite likely. Iran’s economy depends on its oil exports, and if they want to increase that then one way to do it is cut down on domestic oil consumption. Nuclear power would be a way of doing so, with the oil saved sold for export.
But I also wouldn’t blame the Iranians for developing nuclear weapons either. They’re on the list of the seven countries, whose regimes the Neo-Cons want overthrown. The same people behind the Iraq invasion and their theft of its oil and state industries are no doubt also keen to do the same to Iran. The reason America had Mossadeq, the last democratically elected prime minister of Iran overthrown in a CIA sponsored coup, was because he had nationalised the Iranian oil industry. Previously it had been owned and controlled by foreigners, principally Britain. And there is a very good reason why Iran would want to acquire nuclear capability simply for domestic safety. Bush and Blair both claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but only invaded when Saddam Hussein assured them he didn’t have nuclear weapons. This teaches any country at the receiving end of western imperialism that the only way they can protect themselves is through acquiring nuclear weapons. The Iraq invasion has encouraged nuclear proliferation, not discouraged it, and has made the world less safe.
I don’t want Trump killed in a drone strike, nor do I want him executed, although I do accept that there is a case for prosecuting him for the drone strike that killed Soleimani. Not that I don’t think that Soleimani wasn’t a butcher himself. I also don’t believe that Iran has the capability to launch any kind of drone attack against anyone in America. If they had, they wouldn’t bother putting up fake videos about it.
My guess is that Trump is perfectly safe from Iranian drone strikes. I don’t want one to happen, but I don’t blame the Iranians for dreaming about it either.
You can say one thing for Tony Blair and his inclusion on this New Year’s Honours list, it’s united the British people in a way that’s rarely been done. Right across the political spectrum, from Corbynist left to Tory right, people despise him as a warmonger. The petition on Change.org to have him stripped of his knighthood has reached 650,000 signatures. Which I think means that it has to be debated in parliament. Unfortunately, as the mad right-wing internet broadcaster Alex Belfield has said in one his videos, there’s little chance of the politicos taking notice of it or doing what nearly three-quarters of a million people want.
Mike has pointed out that the people want him denied the honour because he took the country into an illegal war with the Iraq. The charitable interpretation of this is that Blair believed the fake information that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But rather than wait for a UN resolution authorising military action, Blair put pressure on his advisers to state that he could launch an invasion,, and then went ahead and acted according to the advice he’d decided he should be given. Nearly a million people have died as a result of the war that followed.
Less charitable individuals might follow instead the information in Greg Palast’s book, Armed Madhouse, which showed that the real reason behind the invasion was economic. The Neo-Cons wanted Hussein out the way because he occasionally sent aid and support to the Palestinians. The American and Saudi oil industry wanted to loot Iraq’s state oil industry and oil reserves, which are the largest outside Saudi Arabia. Western multinationals also wanted to get their mitts on the country’s state enterprises. And the Neo-Cons also had a plan to turn Iraq into the kind of free trade state with precious few tariff barriers against imports they wanted for America. The result was that Iraq’s oil is now in the hands of foreign countries, a situation authorised by the new constitution written for the country. Many Iraqi businesses went bust as a result of the lowering of tariff barriers, as the world dumped their surplus goods on the country at cheap prices. The country’s own businesses couldn’t compete and went out of business. The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 60 per cent.
The country had been relatively secular with a welfare state and, I believe, free healthcare for its citizens. This has vanished. Women were also safe on the streets and could follow a career outside the home. That vanished too. One of his Hillary Clinton’s female officials tried telling a crowd that things were actually better for Iraqi women during a diplomatic tour of Turkey. She was very definitely told the contrary by a group of annoyed Iraqi ladies. And domestically the country collapsed into bloody chaos. In Baghdad, peace walls had to be erected between Sunni and Shia Muslim areas. Sectarian death squads roamed the country looking for the wrong kind of Muslims to kill, with the cooperation of the American military authorities. The mercenary companies also employed as peacekeepers were also out of control. They ran drugs and prostitution rings, and their soldiers shot ordinary Iraqis for sport. One American diplomat to Iraq was so shocked that he came back to the Land of the Free to the tell the media all about it, including the Nazi regalia sported by some US squaddies.
Over 2 million severely normal Brits marched against the Iraq invasion. One of the priests at my local church was one of them. They were ignored. Just as Blair’s successor, Keef Stalin, is also keen that the government or Her Maj not rescind Blair’s knighthood. Apparently he gave some kind of speech listing all the good things that Blair had done, like winning three elections. Blair’s administration was responsible for some good policies. He would have liked to have privatised the health service, but under him it was still properly funded and he had some success in tackling poverty. But he was also responsible for the Work Capability Tests that have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled people wrongly judged fit to to work, and thrown off the state support they desperately need. All too many have died of starvation and neglect as a result.
And that still doesn’t remove the fact that Blair launched an illegal war and on that account is viewed as a war criminal by many. I bought a book a while ago, written by a lawyer, which made that very case. It went through the relevant international legislation and showed through repeated examples how Blair and Bush had violated it. There were even attempts by Canadian and Greek human rights activists to have the two arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity. This failed as it was successfully blocked by politicians and other officials.
The war also further destabilised the Middle East, setting up the conditions for the expansion of Iranian power into the Iraq, while at the same time radicalising parts of the country so they were taken over by Daesh. Who then went on to smash the monuments and sacred buildings of Christians, Shia and other religions they didn’t tolerate, and destroy priceless antiquities going back to ancient Babylon. This, along with the civil war in Syria, has also fuelled the refugee crisis. I’ve no doubt many of the channel migrants, or ‘dinghy divers’ as they’ve been dubbed by anti-immigrant right-wingers like Belfield, are people fleeing the chaos in Iraq. I am definitely no fan of Barbara Barnaby, the head of the British branch of Black Lives Matter. But she made a good point at a Corbynite Labour meeting last year when she said that Britain should admit these refugees because of our responsibility for the wars that forced them to leave their homes.
I’ve also heard the other side of the argument, that Blair should have got the knighthood after leaving office, as was customary for all prime ministers. He wasn’t. This has also caused a further problem, in that apparently they have to be granted to prime ministers in order. This has meant that Cameron hasn’t got one either and Tweezer hasn’t been made a dame or given some equivalent honour. The insult, on this view, is that it already has taken so long to grant Blair his honour.
Well, I still don’t think he deserves one. Just as I don’t think Cameron and Tweezer deserve honours either. Cameron held the vote on Brexit thinking it would fail and he’d defeat the Eurosceptics in the Tories. It didn’t. It narrowly won. However, it divided Britain. England largely supported it, while the Welsh, Scots and northern Irish rejected it. It’s breaking up the union and has particularly betrayed the people of Ulster. Both Loyalists and Nationalists wanted the border with Eire to remain open. The loyalists, as you might expect, also didn’t want a tariff barrier separating the Six Counties and the rest of the UK. An open border with Eire was one of the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the war in Northern Ireland. With Britain leaving the EU and the imposition of a hard border, instability and sectarian violence have returned. Speaking on the BBC comedy show, Room 101, Jeremy Paxman nominated Cameron to be sent into the room containing all the most horrible stuff in the world. Cameron was, declared the former bane of politicians on Newsnight, the worst prime minister we’d had since Lord North. He was the PM who lost us the American colonies.
My guess is that Blair will still get his knighthood. But millions of severely normal Brits will still hate him as a warmonger, the man who lied to us to get the illegal war he wanted, and sent Britain’s courageous young servicemen and -women to fight and die in decades of pointless war. I think Blair will still get the honour, but millions will still remember him as war criminal, and further resent the honours system that has rewarded him.
Bush and Blair were subjects of satire and ridicule when they started the war. Someone on the Net cut footage of various speeches and press gatherings by the duo to show them singing Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’. Which has the fitting lines ‘Let’s start a war. I want to start a nuclear war’. Let’s hope Blair and the world’s other politicians never do.
A few days ago Mike was pointing out that, in contrast to Starmer and his current attitude towards Afghanistan, there was one Labour politico who was consistently right. This was Jeremy Corbyn. Back in 2001 when Blair and Bush were considering invading, Jeremy Corbyn was elected to the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition. He said there was considerable disquiet and opposition to the deployment of troops in Afghanistan and the bombing of Iraq. An invasion would cost thousands of lives and not solve anything.
Totally correct.
In 2010 he spoke against the war, saying
“The issue of Afghanistan goes on. The deaths continue, the soldiers continue to die, the war is clearly unwinnable,” Corbyn said.
“The expense in moral terms, financial terms and loss of life of Afghan people gets worse and worse.”
He spoke again against the war in Afghanistan in 2017 when he was leader of the Labour party.
The war in Afghanistan has failed. After 16 years of bloodshed and destruction, the Taliban are undefeated and terrorism is no less of a threat at home. In fact it has spread.
“The British Government should make clear to Donald Trump that his strategy of more bombing and a new troop surge will continue this failure, not obediently applaud his latest policy U-turn.”
In July 2021, last month, when Johnson announced that he was pulling British troops out of Afghanistan, Corbyn dared to question why we had ever invaded the country in the first place.
“This has to be a day of reflection. We have spent billions of pounds in the war in Afghanistan, 450 British troops have lost their lives, thousands of Americans and other troops have lost their lives, many, many thousands of Afghan people have lost their lives and many more have been forced to be refugees in exile all around the region as well as in western Europe.
“While Britain is withdrawing, surely we need to recognise that when we make hasty foreign policy decisions to go to war, the consequences go on for a very long time. In this case, it is now the 20th anniversary of such a decision.”
Now Mr Corbyn has said
“We must learn the lessons of a two-decade war which cost nearly a quarter of a million lives and failed to achieve security for the Afghan people or prevent the spread of terrorism.
“The War on Terror and its architects’ reckless use of force to deal with complex political issues has had profound, uncountable, and unacceptable human costs – whether to British and allied servicement and women or to the civilian populations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.
“Invasions and occupations are not only wrong and violate the right to sovereignty, they also do not deliver viable and sustainable political settlements. We cannot allow ourselves to be led down such a disastrous road again.”
He recognises that some critics see a refusal to take action as a sign of weakness, and pre-empts them with the statement
“Too often rejecting military intervention is conflated with taking no action at all. As well as resettling refugees, I will be making the case in Parliament this week for the UK to play its part in a robust diplomatic effort that engages regional powers to ensure stability.
“This will need to cover humanitarian support, a response to rising extreme poverty, respect for human and civil rights especially those of women and girls, and real self-determination for Afghanistan.”
Mike contrasts this with Starmer, who says that his thoughts are with the Afghans but is only concerned with rescuing British support staff, not giving sanctuary to Afghan refugees.
The British and American peoples have been lied to about Afghanistan and Iraq. They were told the invasions and occupations were all about liberating these nations from vicious tyrants. They were told that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were responsible for 9/11. Well, the Taliban did provide a safe haven for bin Laden, but I heard that they protested that they had no idea what the thug was doing and actually offered to give him up. And Hussein had nothing to do with the attack.
Both invasions were really all about oil and demonstrating American military superiority. Bush and the Neo-Cons were waiting for an opportunity to invade Afghanistan so they could build an oil pipeline after talks with the Taliban about its construction had broken down. Iraq was invaded because Aramco, the joint American-Saudi oil company wanted the country’s oil industry and oil reserves. American multinationals like Haliburton, to whom Bush and various members of his wretched cabinet had close ties, also coveted Iraq’s state industries. The Neo-Cons also had fantasies of turning the country into a low tariff, free trade state, the establishment of which wrecked domestic Iraqi industries, creating a surge of bankruptcies and an unemployment rate of 60 per cent.
And the succeeding regimes have had serious flaws. Hamid Karzai’s regime in Afghanistan was massively corrupt, with officials buying their positions and government contracts and connections, and using them to extort bribes and money from Mr and Mrs Ordinary Afghan. Under Karzai, the production of opium actually increased. Iraq descended into sectarian violence and civil war, while the mercenary companies brought in as peacekeepers ran amok, setting up prostitution and drug rings. They also shot ordinary Iraqis for fun.
Mike has pointed out in the above article that while Corbyn has been spot on, Boris’ predictions are so off target that he could have taken them from a box of Christmas crackers. Actually, I’d say that probably reflects the value of some of the decision makers. You can wonder if our intelligence agencies actually have any understanding of the Middle East. The CIA didn’t see the Islamic Revolution coming, for example. When it did become clear that the Shah’s regime would be toppled, they predicted that the Ayatollah Khomeini would lead a peaceful movement like Gandhi.
If only.
As for Iraq, one of the Neo-Cons critics is a female Pentagon Colonel, Kathryn W. She’s a woman of the right, a traditional Conservative who believes America has no right to interfere in the affairs of others. She is particularly scathing about the massive ignorance of Bush and his advisors of the practical realities of the Middle East. Not only that, but they were hostile to and dismissed American military staff, like General Zilli, the head of the Pentagon’s Middle East sector, who actually did. Because officers like Zilli told the Smirking Chimp what he didn’t want to hear: that it wouldn’t work, and the occupations would last a long time.
Two million people marched against the Iraq invasion. That’s two million people who knew far better than the grinning warmonger Tony Blair. Bush and Blair were not only wrong, but wilfully ignorant and greedy. And Johnson is so stupid he’s a walking insult to the intelligence.
Only one person has been consistently right about Afghanistan and Iraq – the man the media has vilified and smeared as a Communist, Trotskyite and Anti-Semite: Jeremy Corbyn.
A few weeks ago the Labour left staged an event on Zoom in which a series of Labour MPs and activists, including the head of the Stop the War Coalition, explained why socialists needed to be anti-war. They stated that after going quiet following the debacles of the Iraq invasion, Libya and elsewhere, the Neocons were being rehabilitated. There was therefore a real danger that the ideology behind those wars was returning, and Britain and America would embark on further imperialist, colonialist wars. And now, according to this fortnight’s Private Eye, for 16th – 29th April, 2021, Boris Johnson has appointed Robin Simcox, a Neocon, as head of the government’s Commission on Countering Extremism. Simcox is a member of the extreme right-wing Henry Jackson Society, firmly backing the wars in the Middle East. He also supported the rendition of terrorists to countries, where they would be tortured, as well as drone strikes and detention without trial. And when he was in another right-wing American think tank, the Heritage Foundation, he objected to White supremacist organisations also being included in the American government’s efforts to counter violent extremism.
The Eye’s article about his appointment, ‘Brave Neo World’, on page 14, runs
Robin Simcox, appointed as the new head of the government’s Commission on Countering Extremism (CCE), has neoconservative view that will themselves seem pretty extreme to many observers. He replaces Sara Khan, the first head of the CCE, which Theresa May set up in 2017 as “a statutory body to help fight hatred and extremism”.
Simcox was researcher at the neoconservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), before leaving for the US to become “Margaret Thatcher fellow” at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He was also a regular contributor to Tory website ConservativeHome, writing there in 2011 that David Cameron was wrong to criticise neoconservatives “what has been happening in the Middle East is proving the neocons right” (ie that invasions could build democracies.
In a 2013 study for the HJS, Simcox argued: “Rendition, drones, detention without trial, preventative arrests and deportations are the realities of the ongoing struggle against today’s form of terrorism; they are not going to disappear, because they have proved extremely effective.” Rendition meant the US and UK handing terror suspects over to nations such as Libya or Egypt so they could be tortured for information. He complained that politicians “failed to adequately explain to the public” why these methods were needed and were “failing to explain that the complexities of dealing with modern-day terrorism meant that not all roads lead to a court of law”.
Simcox spent many years looking at Islamist terrorism, but at the Heritage Foundation he argued that making “white supremacy” the subject of a “countering violent extremism policy” was mostly driven by “political correctness” and could be “overreach”, regardless of the terrorist acts by white racists in the UK, US and elsewhere.
Simcox has been appointed interim lead commissioner of the CCE, possibly because bring him in as a temp means his recruitment wasn’t subject to the same competition and inspection as a permanent appointment.
Johnson has therefore appointed as head of the commission an extreme right-winger, who supports unprovoked attacks on countries like Iraq and Libya. The argument that these invasions were intended to liberate these nations from their dictators was a lie. It was purely for western geopolitical purposes, and particularly to remove obstacles to western political hegemony and dominance of the oil industry in the region. In the case of Iraq, what followed was the wholesale looting of the country. Its oil industry was acquired by American-Saudi oil interests, American and western multinationals stole its privatised state industries. The country’s economy was wrecked by the lowering of protectionist trade tariffs and unemployment shot up to 60 per cent. The country was riven with sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia, American mercenaries ran drugs and prostitution rings and shot ordinary Iraqis for kicks. The relatively secular, welfare states in Iraq and Libya, which gave their citizens free education and healthcare vanished. As did a relatively liberal social environment, in which women were to be regarded as equals and were free to pursue careers outside the home. And western intervention in the Middle East created an environment leading to the further, massive growth in Islamist extremism in al-Qaeda and then Daesh. And this has led to the return of slavery. This was Islamist sex-slavery under Daesh in the parts of Iraq under their jackboot, while Black Africans are being enslaved and sold by Islamists in slave markets that have reappeared in Libya.
Domestically, Simcox’s appointment is also ominous. He clearly doesn’t believe in human rights and the protection of the law. Just as he doesn’t believe in tackling White supremacist extremism, even though at one point there were more outrages committed by White racists than Islamists.
His appointment is part of continuing trend towards real Fascism, identified by Mike over at Vox Political, of which the Tories proposed curtailment of the freedom to demonstrate and protest in public is a major part. At the same time, it also appears to bear out the Labour left’s statement that the warmongers responsible for atrocities like Iraq and Libya are coming back. And I fear very much that they will start more wars.
The people warning against this and organising to defend real freedom of speech is the Labour left, whatever the Tories might say about ill-thought out legislation designed to outlaw ‘hate speech’. We need to support left politicos like Richard Burgon, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Diana Abbott and Apsana Begum. The last three ladies, along with former head of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, held another Zoom event as part of the Arise festival of left Labour ideas, Our right to resist – the Tory attacks on our civil liberties & human rights, in March. We need to support the Stop the War Coalition, because I’m afraid the Tories and the Blairite right in the Labour party will start more wars.
Blair lied, people died. And Johnson lies as easily and as often as other people breathe. If not stopped, the Neocons will start more wars and more innocents will be massacred for the profit of big business.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 