A gauleiter was the Nazi officer in charge of a gau, an administrative district of the Third Reich. After the Italian Fascists’ military incompetence was revealed, and the Nazis had to intervene on their behalf in countries like Greece, they started to refer to Mussolini sneeringly as the ‘gauleiter of Italy.’ For all the Duce’s pretensions to military power and seniority in the relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Hitler stopped telling him his war plans after the invasion of Belgium. This was for the simple reason that after he found out about the planned invasion, the Duce told the Belgians. When Hitler asked him why he had betrayed his plans, Musso simply responded that he wanted them to put up a better fight.
Something similar is, I feel, happening in the relationship between Trump’s USA and Bozo, our clown prime minister. Oh, the Americans have been the dominant partner in the Special Relationship ever since the attempt to retake Suez from Nasser in the ’50s collapsed because the US wouldn’t back it. But a few days ago Trump showed how much he trusted or felt he needed to rely on support from his European allies, including Bozo. He had the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, whacked out by drone without telling us or anyone else. American soldiers are, however, being rushed to Iraq. At the moment Britain and the other Europeans are urging a de-escalation of the situation, which the Iranians have, not unreasonably, described as an act of war. But you can bet that if conflict does break out – and may God help us all if it does – Trump will almost certainly demand the rest of Europe to get in line, and strong arm Britain to do so. Not that I don’t believe Bozo would be only too willing.
Critics of Bozo’s wretched Brexit deal with Trump have pointed out that it could potentially give the Americans ownership of large sections of the British economy and industry. Cheap American imports threaten British manufacturing, specifically the motor industry, and agriculture. But that’s the deal Boris wants.
It could wreck our economy, and make us economically dependent on the US. Just as Trump would demand our military support for his unilateral military adventures.
Just as Hitler eventually reduced Mussolini to puppet dictator of an Italy heavily reliant and dominated by Nazi Germany.
On Friday I put up a piece questioning whether we were also involved in running death squads in Iraq, like the Americans had under General McChrystal. Blissex, one of the many great commenters on this blog, added the following information. He writes
Things are more complicated yet simpler than that, for example an UK military commander objected:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chilcot-inquiry-black-ops-in-iraq-caused-split-between-us-and-uk-7130996.htmlhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/chilcot-inquiry-black-ops-in-iraq-caused-split-between-us-and-uk-7130996.html “Some senior British officers were unhappy at what was going on and the involvement of the UK’s SAS and the SBS. “Why are we helping to run Latin American-style death squads?” One British commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know. The SAS were, on at least two occasions, barred from carrying out such missions in the British-run south of the country.
Questions were asked about how information was being obtained from suspects in Balad. There was an unofficial inquiry into the treatment of prisoners at the base, although no evidence was found to implicate Maj Gen McChrystal. …
But the reverberations from special forces operations in Iraq continued. Six years later Maj Gen McChrystal, by now a four star general and commander of international forces in Afghanistan, had received a complaint from the UK’s director of special forces (DSF) for speaking about operations carried out with the SAS and SBS in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile an SAS lieutenant colonel, who had served with distinction under Maj Gen McChrystal in Iraq, was told to stay away from the Regiment’s headquarters in Hereford.”
“Britain’s dilemma from 1945 until today has been easy to state, impossible to resolve. How do you maintain independence and dignity when you are a junior partner, locked into defence systems, intelligence gathering and treaties with the world’s great military giant? … At other times her dependence has been embarrassing, in big ways such as the Suez fiasco; and small ways, such as the American refusal to share intelligence assessments in Iraq, even when the raw intelligence was gathered originally by British agents and passed on.”
He also stated that while Obama and Killary were behind the bombing of Libya, the real people pushing for war were Sarkozy in France and David Cameron in Britain.
«Killary was Obama’s Secretary of State when he sent the bombers in to level Libya and aid the Islamist rebels in overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi.»
Oh she and Obama were/are warmongers, but the insanity is that the libyan stupidity was strongly initiated by N Sarkozy, with D Cameron’s support, and B Obama tried to talk him out of it, even if eventually went along.
So elements of the SAS and British special forces were involved in assassinations in Iraq for the Americans, but they were not popular and important sections of the British administration were against their use. As for Cameron and Sarkozy, I wonder if hankering after British and French imperial greatness was also a factor in them demanding Gaddafi’s overthrow. The French are supposed to be recolonizing all over Africa, and it’s also possible that Sarkozy may still harbour resentment towards African and Arab independence movements because of the horrors of the Algerian independence movement. As for David Cameron, the British aristocracy and upper classes, as George Orwell pointed out, are bred for war and get a real thrill out of it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Cameron, and Boris as well, want to be seen as great war leaders, like Winston Churchill. Both Britain and France have been savagely hit by Islamist terrorism, and so I think that a desire to launch a fresh attack on the Middle East to teach Muslims a lesson was also a major factor. Gaddafi’s regime was accused of the Lockerbie bombing, although Private Eye has maintained that the real culprit was probably Syria, but we needed their support for the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein under George Bush snr. Gaddafi did sponsor terrorism, but they were used against other Arab and African leaders, and he kept them on a very short leash domestically.
As for the quotes Blissex provides about Britain trying to reclaim its imperial role by riding on America’s coat-tails after the Second World War – I completely agree. And the Special Relationship has always worked to America’s advantage, and very much against ours.
I see that the government have started running recruiting ads for the armed forces again. It was the navy a few months ago. Now it seems to be the army. The ads show a greasy, disheveled man, who clearly represents some kind of Latin American Fascist or other butcher, being hunted down and snatched by our brave boys, who then whisk him over the sea in the motorized dinghy to a waiting British warship and justice.
Oh, if that were the reality!
It ain’t, of course. Like the Americans, we seem to have spent the last seventy odd years since the end of the Second World War propping up every Fascist mass murderer we could, so long as he would protect British interests from Communism or local nationalist movements. In 1958 we and the Americans organized a coup against the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq, because he dared to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which included the equipment and complexes owned by Anglo-Persian Oil, which later became British Petroleum, now BP. Then there was Nasser and Suez, and Mrs. Thatcher’s fave South American buddy, General Pinochet. Quite apart from one of the Libertarian organisations that form part of the Tory party inviting the head of one of the South American death squads over as guest of honour at their annual dinner one year.
As for snatch squads, this ad looks inoffensive over here, but if it was shown on American TV it would actually be very sinister. One of the tactics the American military used to terrorise the Vietnamese during the war there was to use snatch squads to catch Vietnamese peasant farmers during nighttime raids. The farmers would then be killed and their bodies left as a mute message to their compatriots.
Britain’s invasion of Iraq with George Bush, in contravention of the UN legislation against pre-emptive war, and the continuing occupation of Afghanistan, have done precious little except create even more carnage and bloodshed in the Middle East. And these wars were not fought to defend America and the West against evil dictators. In the case of Iraq they were fought so that the oil industry and other western countries could loot whatever they thought was profitable in the country’s economic infrastructure. They also managed to wreck the economy by lowering trade tariffs in order to create the magical free trade utopia fantasised about by the Libertarians and Neo-Cons. Added to this was the ethnic and sectarian bloodshed unleashed by the occupation, and the use of mercenaries and Shi’a militias as death squads by the American overlords.
This makes this next video all the more urgently important. It’s not short – over fifty minutes long. It seems to be a film of the American radical journalist Chris Hedges speaking at an American university gathering about his experiences as a war reporter, and the anti-war cartoonist Dwanyne Booth, alias ‘Mr. Fish’, talking about his work. And it’s strong stuff, which doesn’t pull its punches.
Hedges has a degree in Divinity from Harvard. His father was a Presbyterian priest with radical political beliefs, who was strongly involved in the Civil and gay rights movements. Hedges trained in a seminary, but didn’t joint the clergy. After graduating, he joined the New York Times and served as a war journalist in South America in the 1980s, when Reagan was funding Fascists dictators and their death squads, like Contras in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. After that, he then covered the war in Iraq.
And he presents the unvarnished truth about war and the dehumanizing effect it has on those who are involved, whether as combatants or observers. It’s bloody and horrible, and he states that being in a firefight is terrifying beyond imagination. In fact, terror really doesn’t describe the sheer fear felt during these encounters. These are wars fought for the benefit of big business, and the images and stories about it that we are brought up on are lies.
He describes some of the battles in which he was personally involved, and the times he was captured by hostile forces, like Contras in Nicaragua and the Iraqi Republican Army in Iraq, when he really thought they were going to kill him and his companions. He states that before going into battle, everyone, with himself excepted, used to get drunk or high. Particularly the photographers, as they had to do what you really shouldn’t do in a gun battle and stand up. He states he knew many of them, who lost their lives doing their job. He also states that it is not like the movies. He praises Oliver Stone and his movie about Vietnam, Platoon, but says that the battle in that film is not like real firefights. It’s choreographed. Real battles are just chaos, in which you don’t know what’s going or who’s firing. In all the very many battles in which he was personally involved, he only once saw someone firing in his direction.
He describes how the Contras in Nicaragua called the Sandinistas and forces allied or sympathetic to them ‘periacuas’, a Latin American term meaning ‘motherf***er’. The Contras especially despised the press and media as being allied to the Sandinistas, which made his job even more dangerous. They also used to launch night raids, in which they’d murder a couple of peasant farmers. These people, would have had nothing to do with the war or the Sandinistas, but they were killed and a message left for the ‘periacuas’ on their bodies telling them that this was what was going to be done to them next.
They captured Hedges and his team, when he went looking for a group of them, who had gone underground. He found them, and they really weren’t happy. After capturing him, they radioed their headquarters to ask them whether they should kill them. Fortunately, the answer was, ‘No.’ But they were told to release them and say that if they caught them again, they would kill them and burn their jeep. As if they cared what would happen to the vehicle when they themselves were facing death!
He describes how he and another group of journalists were caught in Iraq by the Republican Army, thrown in the back of a jeep, and had guns pointed at their heads. They were then driven out of the city, and were afraid that their captors would stop somewhere in the desert and shoot them. Fortunately, this didn’t happen, and they were captured by proper, regular soldiers rather than the various militias that had sprung up, including companies formed of 14 year old Shi’a boys, who’d been given guns by Iran.
He also talks about the numbing effect war has on its participants, and the way it becomes a drug. Nothing can beat the high experienced by actually surviving a battle. And so he, like the soldiers he covered, became addicted to combat, playing a weird game with God to see if he could survive ever increasingly dangerous situations and battles.
He also talks about the immense alienation former soldiers feel, an alienation that prevents them from fitting back into society when they’ve returned from combat. He describes them as speaking a language no-one can understand, and makes the point that no-one wants to hear what they’re saying. He makes the point that when you find yourself in a war, you realise that everyone, from your government, the media and your educators, has lied to you. He discusses how old soldiers hate being told how well they’ve served their country, and how no-one wants to hear from them what war is really like. Of the troopers who took Iwo Jima, for example, several took their own lives, while a couple of others drank themselves to death. Hedges himself states proudly that he concentrated on talking to ordinary soldiers. He didn’t talk to anyone above the level of lance corporal, because he wanted to get the truth from them, rather than get caught up in the propaganda spouted by the generals and commanding officers. And he was unique in this. Most journalists wanted to see the top people, and so when he went for the job with the Times, he was told that the queue for the job began and ended with him.
As for the brutal reality of war, it is not like it is portrayed on television on the nightly news. He describes how, when he was in Iraq, in one area they visited the Iraqi army had been without water for three days. Dying of thirst, they tried to cross a minefield in the hope that Hedges and the squaddies he was with would give them some. One of the Iraqi troopers had both legs blown off by a mine. It took him six hours to bleed to death.
Hedges says that it’s quite possible now to show incidents like that using a satellite feed, so you can see in real time real soldiers suffering and dying. But no-one wants to see it, or broadcast it, because if they did, there’d never be another war.
Booth in his work is also angry and bitter about war, and the corporations and individuals standing behind it. One of his cartoons shows a little boy pointing into the camera in the classic Uncle Sam/ Lord Kitchener pose in the war recruiting posters. The legend below reads
I want YOU to give me a future not f*cked up by all your crazy bullsh*t about how moral and just the United States of America is when it invades and occupies other countries and how heroic and brave I’d be to kill for you because you’re too f*cking lazy and bigoted and unimaginative to prefer peace to hegemony and terrorism.
Another of his cartoons shows a child’s body in its grave, with corporate logos covering the shroud.
After speaking, there’s also a question and answer session with members of the audience, who include staff at the university. Some of these link the military action of the American empire to the destruction of the environment and other issues.
This is hard-hitting stuff, and it needs to be heard. We still have our politicians telling us lies about Iraq, and the other interventions in the Middle East, like Libya and Syria. And we haven’t been told the whole truth about Afghanistan – that the Taliban were utterly defeated, but the allied occupation was so terrible, and created so much chaos, that they were able to return and actually be welcomed by the people, they’d formerly oppressed.
Despite the fact that he’s a war criminal, Tony Blair’s still at large and desperate to get back into politics.
We need journos like Hedges. But the corporate media aren’t going to allow them to speak. In fact, the New York Times did its best to suppress the truth about what was going on in Iraq. And tens of journalists have died out there in highly suspicious circumstances, which suggests that the American army might have been killing those members of the media, who didn’t follow the approved line and described what they saw, rather than what the military wanted them to.
Don’t believe the corporate claptrap and the rubbish put out in the recruiting films. Support the independent media that dares to say what they won’t. And for heaven’s sake let’s get our young men and women out of the Middle East. Let’s stop wasting the precious lives of courageous people, who are being butchered simply so Haliburton and Aramco can make even bigger, more obscene profits.
Mike over Vox Political posted up a piece today reporting Michael Howard’s belligerent comments about Gibraltar. Theresa May didn’t mention Gibraltar when she gave the EU her notification that Britain would like to trigger Article 50. As Spain also has territorial claims to the Rock, the EU then inserted a clause stating that Spain would have a veto over any negotiations.
This has caused Howard to start getting his toy sword out, and start waving it around whichever parliamentary play room he now inhabits. Howard has declared that Britain will defend Gibraltar, and that the country will rally round the Tory party, just like they rallied around Mrs T. over the Falklands.
Mike over at Vox Political points out how stupid this is, and includes a selection of tweets about it from the many others, who also think that Howard has gone off the deep end. At least one of them points out that NATO countries cannot go to war on each other. Others point out that the EU was formed to stop European countries attacking each other. And there’s a piece from 2000 AD’s Calhab Justice way back in the 1990s, in which Britain nukes Spain over Gibraltar.
And Mike also points out that Gibraltar, unlike England, voted to stay within the EU.
There are number of aspects to this latest piece of Tory warmongering that need to be commented on. Firstly, the Tories have nearly always been the War Party. During the 1990s under Blair the situation was reversed, and many Tories campaigned against his evil and mendacious invasion of Iraq. Now that they’re in power, the situation has reversed again and the Tories are back to demanding more fire and blood. As usual.
Now dictatorial regimes faced with a domestic crises often start an international crisis in order to divert attention away from their weaknesses. Franco used to do it too with Gibraltar. As soon as his regime started to look insecure and unrest increased, he’d start banging on about sovereignty in order to get the Spanish people to rally round him. Mussolini and Hitler were both imperialists by conviction, rather than expediency, but they also used their imperial ambitions to divert resentment away from their regimes to the countries they fought and invaded.
Now under Theresa May, Michael Howard is using the same tactic.
Which suggests that you really can’t trust the polls. They may show that the Tories are way ahead in the polls, but the fact that Howard feels that a war is needed to rally Brits around them, and raise the spectre of Thatcher and the ‘Falklands Factor’ again, suggests otherwise. Whatever the polls say, it appears that secretly some Tories are very worried.
Good. Let’s make ’em petrified.
Howard talks about Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands, but it could very easily have gone the other way. At the time, Thatcher was cutting back the armed forces. I got the impression that we were able to defeat the Argentinians because we had the help of the Americans and Chile.
The Tories have similarly cut back the armed forces since David Cameron took power. Even before then, British troops in Afghanistan had problems acquiring needed kit, to the point where Private Eye reported that they were being nicknamed ‘the borrowers’ from their American comrades because they were forced to borrow theirs.
America also cannot be relied upon to give its support automatically to Britain. Britain lost the Suez canal when it was seized by Nasser back in the 1950s, because the Americans refused to back Eden’s proposal for military action. This effectively ended Britain as a leading superpower, and our replacement by the Americans.
Lobster’s editor, Robin Ramsay, is very critical of the EU as an instrument of economic domination across the Continent in favour of big business. He’s run several articles arguing very strongly, and with very good evidence, that Britain’s membership of the Common Market, or EEC, as it then was, was due to lobbying by right-wing business groups and the Americans. Now I don’t support Brexit, but do accept that there is much about the EU that is undemocratic and massively needs reform. I mention that the Americans pressured us into the joining the EEC to make the point that they may not support us if we withdraw.
In short, the Americans will embarrass May’s government by denying Britain their support to safeguard their own interests, just like they did Eden.
But let’s suppose that somehow, Britain did go to war with Spain. This could escalate, as both sides start trying to find allies. It’s unlikely, but this could end up with NATO divided, and several of its countries shooting and bombing each other.
In which case, congratulations, Howard and May. You’ve just destroyed 70 years of western European peace and divided a continent, causing massive bloodshed. Because you wanted to get yourselves re-elected by causing another Falklands War.
And finally there’s a lesson from the First World War. This was opposed by radical Socialists across Europe as an imperialist war. It was fought by the great powers for the benefit of big business. The ordinary Brit, Frenchman, German or Austrian was being told to sacrifice his or her life for the profit or their country’s ruling classes. Ordinary working people across Europe had more in common than national divisions, and so should not participate in a fratricidal war.
The same criticism applies exactly today to Howard’s ludicrous outburst. Neoliberalism is the economic doctrine espoused by the political elites across Europe and the rest of the globe. But it is doing nothing to benefit the poor and working people. Indeed, quite the opposite. Poverty is increasing. Now Howards wants to start a war with Spain, or threaten a war with Spain, so that his neoliberal party of exploiters can benefit by bamboozling working people into dying on their behalf.
Just like Blair did in the invasion of Iraq.
We were lied to about that war. Millions have perished and been displaced as a result. We will not be lied to again.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 