A lot of people have been suggesting that the real reason the Orange Generalissimo wants to get his grubby hands on Greenland is because of its mineral wealth. The argument that he wants it for US national security simply don’t make sense. There’s a video on YouTube of an expert on a British TV interview knocking it down one point after another. First of all, there are already 18 US bases on Greenland. The US has never asked for more, even though the Greenlanders would be perfectly willing to let them. There also aren’t Chinese and Russian ships nosing around Greenland’s waters. There are, however, plenty of Chinese and Russian ships nosing around the American waters off Alaska.
I got this piece yesterday, reproduced from the American radical magazine Jacobin, from the Democrat newsletter Daily Dose of Democracy. It clearly demonstrates that behind Trump’s belligerent demands for Greenland to be handed over to America are the US big tech companies, who have their eyes very firmly set on the precious minerals locked beneath its icecap.
‘The tech billionaires behind Trump’s Greenland push Lois Parshley, Jacobin: “President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a phone call last week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the ‘aggressive and confrontational’ conversation, Trump threatened tariffs if he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he also refused to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion military expansion in the Arctic. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasizedGreenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city. The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral resources. These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials crucial to the artificial intelligence boom. That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper. Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million in its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3 billion. Among the contributors was a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the administration’s technology policies, including consulting with Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a self-proclaimed ‘unpaid intern.’ In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis Nation, a project aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals and technology like cryptocurrency. The venture is also funded in part by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and bankrolled by libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly managed a uranium mine in Namibia. Pronomos aims to create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in developing countries where investors could write their own laws and regulations. These ‘broligarchs’” now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant supporter of Trump, throwing millions of dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing him to current Vice President J. D. Vance.”‘
This video comes from the right-wing YouTube channel Based Camp with Simone and Malcolm Collins. With their thick rimmed glasses and similar appearance, the pair might be brother and sister, husband and wife, or a pair of clones from some MAGA biological experiment. They’re rationalist Protestants, and so they make some sweeping statements attacking not just the poisonous irrationalism of witch beliefs and hysteria, but also claim that the mysticism of the Roman Catholic cult of saints and charismatic Christianity are also harmful, which I don’t necessarily agree with.
Despite this, I agree wholeheartedly with their main point: that the belief in witchcraft and the efficacy of magic is harming Africa economically and personally endangering the lives of women and children. This doesn’t come from White western racists, but published and peer reviewed ethnological research. They start with the finding that a majority of Nigerian university students believe that Africa is poor and the west rich, not because of the effects of colonialism in holding the continent back, European tariffs against manufactured goods preventing Africa from industrialising or the corruption and incompetence of its politicians. No, African remains poor compared to the West because the West has a magic that they’re not sharing. These aren’t hicks and country bumpkins who believe this, but the educated elite, who have been indoctrinated by the belief. Just as they controversially claim that western university students have been indoctrinated with the transgender ideology.
Witchcraft beliefs also act as a disincentive to entrepreneurs exploring new Products and ventures and even the display of wealth. Wealthy Africans try to hide their success in case people believe that they owe it to magic. Businessmen are also afraid to try new ventures in case they are accused of using witchcraft if it succeeds. And politicians, rather than adopt rational policies to improve their constituencies, like building roads and so on, turn to sorcerers and magicians for spells. They also use magic to win elections.
Women and children are also put in horrific personal danger by this belief. Many women have been accused of witchcraft to the point where there are now camps housing them to protect them from mob attacks. This has become so common that Ghana has passed legislation making it illegal to accuse people of witchcraft, but this has had little or no effect. Disabled children are seen in many African societies as ‘spirit children’, who present a magical danger to others, and they too are harmed and killed. This aspect is very much like the 17th century witch craze in western Europe, which may have taken the lives of 100,000 people.
~This is an issue that really needs tackling. The belief in witchcraft and magic declined amongst the elite in Europe with the progress of science and scientific scepticism, although it remained very strong amongst the poor until well into the 19th and even the early 19th century. In 1736 England passed the Witchcraft which stated that witches had no supernatural powers, but only pretended to have them in order to gain money and goods from their victims. It therefore classed witches fraudsters, and the execution of suspected witches ended, although it hung on in Scotland for several decades more. A similar change of attitude is badly needed amongst the African elites and the population as a whole today.
This is also an object lesson on why the postmodernist attitude that science is only a White western creation without universal validity, and which is harmful and colonialist when applied to non-European societies, is fundamentally wrong and pernicious. The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement earlier in this century had this postmodernist attitude. There’s a video online of a debate at a South African university where a Black student urges her White debating partners to open their minds and accept that African rainmakers can make it rain. But the belief that they can is religious and metaphysical, not science, and should not be treated as science. Science and modern medicine may have their origins in the west, but they are of universal validity. Those extra-European countries that have embraced them, like China and India, and have made enormous strides to the point where they are challenging the economic, industrial and technological power of the West.
I don’t agree with Richard Dawkins’ militant atheism and rejection of the supernatural, but Dawko is right to oppose postmodernism and pernicious beliefs, like those in witchcraft and magic in Africa.
Today marks the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States. In just over three months, we’ve watched on as a global superpower dismantled its own democracy.
The first 100 days of a government are supposed to set the tone. Trump’s second term has delivered a clear message: the rule of law now only applies to the perceived enemies of the regime.
Britain should be watching very closely. Because the same toxic political project is gaining ground here.
Here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list of what Trump has done so far:
Destroyed the administrative state: Through Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” key regulatory bodies—protecting everything from clean water to financial fairness—have been gutted.
Ideological purges: Civil servants face loyalty tests. Pro-Trump loyalists now occupy crucial roles across federal agencies.
Academic and legal crackdowns: Universities and law firms have been targeted. International students have had visas revoked simply for exercising free speech.
Defied Congress: Trump has bypassed Congressional authority over government spending, shredding the Constitution’s ‘power of the purse’.
Abused deportation powers: Hundreds have been deported without trial to an unregulated mega-prison in El Salvador—dodging US legal protections entirely.
Ignored court rulings: Even orders from the Supreme Court have been flatly ignored—an astonishing assault on the rule of law.
Jailed judges: Yes, really. Trump’s FBI arrested a sitting circuit court judge—for daring to uphold the law.
And that’s just scratching the surface. We haven’t even touched on his tariffs disaster, alignment with Putin, efforts to deport US citizens, pardoning January 6th insurrectionists, or when he threatened to invade Canada. But the resounding message is clear.
This is what authoritarianism looks like. It begins gradually, and then it comes all at once.
Here in the UK, we’re facing a similar storm.
Voters are exhausted by two-party politics. Many have lost faith in the entire system. That frustration, distrust, and political fatigue is rocket fuel for Farage and Reform UK.
Sound familiar?
That’s exactly how Trump came to power. The US failed to take its trust crisis seriously. It handed power to those who weaponised distrust. And now, the cost is staggering: a broken democracy, a silenced civil society, and a nation adrift.
The far-right in both countries are just two sides of the same coin. Andrea Jenkins, Reform UK’s mayoral candidate for Greater Lincolnshire, is reportedly campaigning on instituting a Musk-style ‘DOGE’ project at the local level.
We still have time in Britain. But not much.
Keir Starmer has acknowledged the crisis of trust. He says he wants to fix it. So far, we’ve seen little action. Public frustration is only growing.
Farage and Reform UK are rising fast. The window to act is closing. We can look across the Atlantic today and see precisely where they’d take us – towards a regime that values money and power above all else, where ordinary people have even less of a voice than they did before.
Starmer must treat this like the democratic emergency it is. Before it’s too late.
Fixing trust in politics is a monumental task. It won’t be easy. But we already know where he needs to start: introducing a fairer voting system with a National Commission for Electoral Reform, taking dark money out of politics, and tackling the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories.
All the best,
Matt
Matt Gallagher
Communications Officer
Open Britain’
There is some hope regarding Trump, however. His bullying of Canada with threats of imposing tariffs and annexing it so that it becomes America’s 51st state has resulted in a surge of patriotism there which has swept Mark Carney and the Liberals into power and seen the Conservative leader lose his seat. And according to the Occupy Democrats site, polls now show that 52% of Americans feel that he’s an untrustworthy dictator. If Trump carries on like this, perhaps he’ll succeed in putting British voters off his best buddy over here, Nigel Farage.
I dare say that there’s a lot that Jackie Walker and I would disagree on, but on this issue she has a razor-sharp intelligence and insight doubtless gained through her decades campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Israel. And I dare say that her parents, civil rights campaigners in the US, also taught her much about institutional prejudice and its enforcement by political authorities. I have a feeling that the Office of Strategic Affairs, the department of the Israeli state tasked with shutting down anti-Israel opinion abroad, considers her the No. 2 existential threat to Israel. All this fuss over a respectable middle class academic and Jewish grandmother!
This comes from the Crispin Flintoff show on YouTube, and shows Jackie and Flintoff analysing Starmer’s non-answer to a question in parliament about what kind of definition of genocide he is using while men, women and children are being killed in Gaza. Starmer replies by saying it would be wise to take the question back to October 7th, which seems to be a typical, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’ answer, as if he was replying to a lost person asking for directions but really didn’t know how you’d get to the destination from the present location himself. He then goes on to say that he is well aware of the definition of genocide, which is why he’s not going to answer that question. Somebody has commented elsewhere that the reason he doesn’t give a definition of genocide is that all of them describe exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians now.
Jackie states that this is the answer you’d expect from a mafia boss flanked by two of his heavies. Starmer is warning not just the Labour party behind him – because they all talk like that – but also the general public that such questioning will not be tolerated. She points to the various critics of Israel like Craig Murray, Tony Greenstein and most recently Natalie Strecker, who have been pulled in by the fuzz, information taken from their computers and mobiles, and then released without charge. It certainly compares to the tactics the Stasi used. Apart from disappearing and torturing dissidents, they used to send a couple of agents round regularly to their houses, just to let them know they were being watched. She also notes that while there’s a lot of discussion in the right-wing press – of which she considers the Guardian to be a part – about people jailed for offensive tweets, no-one has called attention to the arrest of the above critics of Israel.
She also states that the question about the kidnapped Israeli hostages is irrelevant, as they’ve probably been killed by the Israeli’s bombing and starvation of Gaza. I’ve also come across an even more chilling suggestion about what has probably happened to them: they were killed by the Israeli state as part of its Hannibal strategy, in which Israeli citizens are killed by their own armed forces to prevent them being taken captive. This view also comments on the contradiction in the claims of the Israeli military, that they can accurately locate Arab generals and senior officers for assassination, but can’t find the missing hostages. It does sound unlikely.
And this is going to get worse. Trump wants us to decide between America and Europe. If he puts up tariffs on our goods of 30, 40, 50 per cent, then we’re screwed. And he’ll want us to back Israel.
As per the standard Friday routine, here’s an update on what’s going on across the pond. The US election is now under two weeks out – just 11 days away.
Donald Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Hide It
With more than 30 million votes already cast either by mail or via early voting, the 2024 Presidential Election is well underway. As the two candidates make their final appeals to the American public, the race still seems to be a toss-up.
Even by Trump’s standards, his campaign has grown increasingly erratic over the past several weeks. He’s been spreading damaging conspiracies about migrants and hurricanes, teasing out bizarre last-second policy proposals (such as abolishing federal income tax entirely and replacing it with “tariffs” – a sure-fire way to crash the US economy practically overnight), and toying with silencing media outlets he doesn’t like.
He’s accused the Labour party of “election interference,” referencing the (frankly inconsequential) meetings held between Democratic and Labour party staff over recent months. A bold claim from someone who just got his tech-bro pal Elon Musk to offer up millions to Trump voters – the same tech-bro pal who’s reportedly been having regular meetings with Vladimir Putin.
The former President has always had a fascination with authoritarian strongmen, from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. This week, he’s alleged to have indicated that he wants to command “German generals” like those of Adolf Hitler.
Add that on top of what we already know. He’s indicated he’d be a “dictator” on day one. He’s talked about replacing the federal bureaucracy with partisan ideologues. He’s threatened to unleash the US military on his left-wing political opponents. He’s said that “this could be the last election we ever have”. One of his former aides has warned that he’d govern like a “fascist.”
For eight years now, Trump has shown us who he is and what he stands for. American democracy is far from perfect as it stands, but the former President is now threatening to ditch the guard rails – the constitutional checks and balances on our politics – entirely.
For all of us across the pond, what happens in eleven days is going to be massively consequential. Trump threatens to boost our own nativist authoritarians at home, and our flimsy democratic safeguards are not likely to fare any better. Even if he loses, we can expect chaos at the polls and a massive wave of election denial – surely to be amplified here in Britain by the likes of Nigel Farage.
In other US Election News:
Rumours are swirling about a highly damaging video tape of Donald Trump potentially leaked to the press that may appear this weekend – though at this point its unlikely to sway the result;
Harris held a campaign event last night with Bruce Springsteen, who labeled Trump a “tyrant”;
Given how close this race is, fears are mounting about a contested result (as occurred in 2001). Experts warn it could exacerbate the US’ political polarisation.
That’s it for this week.
All the best,
Matt Gallagher
Communications Officer
Open Britain’
Some of the best analysis of the politicking in the run-up to the presidential election I’ve seen comes from Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk. I’m not a secularist, but his videos on the sheer madness and vile policies of the American right are definitely worth watching. And they can also be hilarious. Trump’s intellectual faculties seem to be going the way of Joe Biden’s. Halfway through one speech the other day Trump’s mind wandered off and he started talking about the late golfer, Arnold Palmer. Trump likes golf, and admires Palmer as the type of ‘real man’ American needs. But then he said something about how well endowed Palmer was when you saw him come out the showers. He also claimed that Obama ‘shlonged’ Hillary, when there was a wave of outrage at this assertion, he said that it had other meanings as well. This has started people wondering if Trump is losing his mind and has a fixation on willies.
As for his comments about needing ‘German generals’, he said he wanted generals that would be loyal to him just like Hitler’s. Then someone pointed out that they tried to assassinate the flatulent corporal three times. He wouldn’t have it. Oh well, it means he won’t be expecting it when the Joint Chiefs of Staff hand him a bomb in a suitcase, just as several of the German generals did with Adolf. And no, I am definitely not recommending that anyone do this to Trump. It’s an attempt at humour.
And the conspiracy theories about the weather are so bizarre that they really do make your eyes boggle. Apparently, thanks to Trump, Republican voters have started asking whether the Democrats have storm cannons to generate the tornadoes that have caused such devastation in the Land of the Free recently. Utter madness.
As for Trump’s statement that this would be the last election there would ever be, I remember another politician thousands of miles away in Russia saying exactly the same thing. It was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the country’s Fascist Social Democratic Party. In the 90s after Communism fell and the country was holding elections for the first time sing the Revolution, the Beeb followed Zhirinovsky’s election campaign as he sailed up and down the Volga trying to get the people there to vote for him. This included his election song, which went ‘Zhirinovsky’s a proper Russian bloke, even though he doesn’t drink or smoke’ and how, when the singer finally met him, he’d embraced him and give him a fag. At one point Zhirinovsky appeared to be telling a group of bemused people from off a collective farm that they should vote for him, because if they did, they’d never have to vote again.
At the time Zhirinovsky was rightly labelled the mad dog of Russian politics and people had no illusions that he was a fascist. Now Trump is saying some of the same rubbish, but his supporters are convinced he’s defending the constitution.
Back in 2016, Nigel Farage adamantly claimed that getting Brexit done means making food cheaper. Three years later, the Brexit party desperately tried to woo voters with promises of affordable groceries. Just last June, Jacob Rees-Mogg boldly assertedthat Brexit would cut fees and “allow us to lower food prices.” Despite how often that lie has been repeated by Brexit hardliners, it’s remained just that – a lie.
Yesterday, DEFRA revealed that a new flat fee – the “common user charge” – will apply to animal and plant product imports starting on April 30th. The government, who, true to form, announced the changes at the very last minute, claimed that the proceeds will go to “world-class” border detention facilities. Where is their mandate to make consumers pay for their red-meat election fodder?
Once again, we’re hit with the harsh reality that our rights have been traded away for nothing other than a pack of lies. Students and professionals have lost their ability to roam Europe, the institutions protecting our human rights are under siege, and the “red tape” (the laws that once protected UK consumers) has been slashed. Quite a heavy price to pay for empty promises and delusions of grandeur.
Of course, the zealots of the Brexit cult already have a different spin. The Conservatives’ chums at TheExpress and GB News are giddy today, celebrating imaginary victories from their alternate reality. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The Brexit cult has spread its evangelical fervour throughout government and media. Lies debunked years ago – currently being disproven once again before our eyes – are still being repeated. It’s no accident or anomaly: broken political systems produce broken political results.
We need to build a political environment where lies like these carry consequence. Where mechanisms exist to hold politician’s feet to the fire. Where the voice of the majority triumphs over powerful extremists and cultish demagogues. It’s not impossible – we have the blueprints. We just need to start building.
I realise I’m far too late putting this up, but I thought I should nevertheless because of its description of the immense damage Brexit has done and is doing to British farming.
‘A message from Liz Webster, Chair of Save British Farming, to Open Britain supporters.
Dear David,
Save British Farming is excited to be heading to Labour Party Conference in Liverpool this weekend to discuss Brexit and food security with Labour members at a fringe event hosted by the Independent Commission on UK EU Relations and sponsored by Open Britain.
A major justification for Brexit was regaining national sovereignty. But ironically, Brexit has reduced Britain’s control over its food supply and borders. Brexit opened the UK’s borders to unchecked food imports flooding in from the EU, while new Brexit bureaucracy and red tape make it harder for British companies to export. Rather than increasing sovereignty, Brexit has constrained the UK’s authority over its own food system and ability to regulate what enters the country. The results contradict promises of regaining authority by leaving the EU.
One has to ask how a country can claim to have won back sovereignty if this nation then loses the ability to control its borders and its food supply.
The Brexit debate has focused disproportionately on blaming farmers for supporting Brexit rather than examining the implications of Brexit for the UK’s food supply, economic inflation, environment, animal welfare and public health. This is a mistake because sufficient food is essential for social stability. As many have pointed out over the years, “No country is more than three missed meals away from a revolution.”
Brexit risks significantly disrupting food availability and affordability in the UK, and that could lead to public unrest. The discussion should, therefore, shift to constructive debate about Brexit’s impact on agriculture, food security and related issues. Protecting these is vital, regardless of how farmers voted on Brexit more than seven years ago.
Since the onset of COVID-19, empty supermarket shelves have become commonplace in the UK. However, food supplies across Europe have largely rebounded from pandemic disruptions. The one exception is British goods, which are less available in EU markets post-Brexit. New non-tariff barriers erected after Brexit now obstruct British food exports to the continent. While European grocers have overcome initial pandemic shortages, Brexit-related trade friction continues to hamper UK food producers’ access to our closest neighbours. This contrasts with the full recovery seen elsewhere in Europe. Ongoing Brexit barriers explain why British grocery selection still lags while EU food stability has resumed.
Brexit’s negative impacts on British farming and food supply are materialising faster than expected. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war have magnified economic shocks, speeding up the damage. Alarmingly, the Conservative government removed food production as a priority area for the public good. They scrapped powers allowing intervention in farming to ensure food security. Control over food policy has now shifted toward profit-focused supermarkets, even though food originates on farms.
If post-Brexit declines in domestic food production continue, the UK will have to import more food to feed itself. The World Wars showed the dangers for an island nation relying heavily on imported food. Brexit risks again leaving Britain vulnerable to supply disruptions during crises. Being self-sufficient in food provides stability. The government must restore farming and fisheries as top priorities. When it comes to threats to food security, they ignore the lessons of history at our peril.
The Conservatives have long believed the markets should be king, despite historic events of the British Empire in Ireland and India proving time and time again that this leads to untold suffering.
The Labour Party has never been seen as the party of the countryside and farmers – far from it – and the Tories have tended to dominate rural areas. But all of this has now changed as farmers and rural voters have begun to realise that the Tories aren’t on their side. Any that were slow to see this surely must’ve realised this week when the President of the NFU, Minette Batters, accused Jacob Rees-Mogg of seeking to destroy British agriculture after he blurted out that he backed imports of hormone-fed Australian beef.
The Labour Party is very likely to win the next election and will inherit the mess that the Tories have created. At the heart of that mess is the security of our food supply. No government can survive repeated and prolonged food shortages, and it’s vital that the incoming Government works with the British farming industry now to ensure Britain has adequate, affordable and safe food supplies.
That is the key message I will make at our Conference event. If you are going to be there, please come along and listen to what is expected to be a lively panel discussion. We’ll be in the Environment Hub Marquee on Sunday 8th October from 10.00 am. Further details can be found here.
I found this video on YouTube the other day of ‘No Justice’ aiming some very justified criticism at the Labour candidate for the newly created seat of Stockport. ‘No Justice’ appears to be a woman of the left. Looking through her videos they seem to be very definitely from a genuinely left-wing, old Labour viewpoint. She makes the point in this video, however, that she is not a member of the Labour party, especially not now under Keef Strangler. But despite her protests that it doesn’t really matter to her how the Labour party deals with its members, she’s clearly appalled by the hypocrisy by which Starmer used accusations of supporting other parties to purge the left. Left-Labourites were purged for just liking Tweets by members of competing parties, like the Greens. But Bowyer and other members of the Labour right were allowed to remain, even when, as Bowyer did, they actually called for people to vote against Labour and for the Lib Dems in 2019 to get Corbyn out.
And Bowyer comes across as a typical, modern career politicians. He has no experience of life outside academia and politics. He was born in Stockport, and joined the Labour party. He’s been a member for forty years. He graduated from Manchester university and then took a job as a researcher for a Labour politician. He then spent much of the next forty years in London, before heading back to Stockport with the opportunity of becoming its MP. But what really annoyed ‘No Justice’ was his response on Twitter to someone who dared to say what an appalling disaster the Iraq invasion was. His angry response was that the Iraq invasion was a success, and that Brexit was a disaster. Well, I agree that Brexit is a disaster. But it is not of the same magnitude of the carnage of the Iraq invasion. Let’s go through everything that makes the Iraq invasion a bloody fiasco.
We sent our bravest young men and women to fight and die on the false pretext, fabricated by Blair, that Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass distruction’.
The war cost 200,000 Iraqis their lives and resulted in the further displacement of another 2 million. Many of the Channel migrants are Iraqis fleeing the devastation inflicted on their homeland.
The war was fought, not give the Iraqis democracy, but for the oil companies to seize their oil and the multinationals to seize their state enterprises. It was also going to be an experiment for the Neocons trying out their idea of a low tariff, free trade economy. This resulted in the world dumping their products in Iraq. Their domestic industries could not compete, there was a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment rockets.
The invasion worsened sectarian divisions. There were attacks and mass violence between Sunni and Shia that had not occurred before and peace walls had to be built to separate them in Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was Islam-based, but broadly secular. This has been largely destroyed. Women had been free to pursue careers outside the home. This is now denied them. But western politicos, like various members of Barack Obama’s foreign office, refused to accept this and got a rough reception when they spoke in Turkey to claim that the invasion had benefited Iraqi women.
The private military companies supporting the allied troops behaved like a bunch of Nazi criminals. They shot ordinary Iraqis for sport and ran drug and prostitution rings. This profoundly shocked a US ambassador, who publicly spoke about this uncontrolled lawlessness when he returned to the US.
The invasion created the conditions for the rise and further expansion of DAESH, who imposed their narrow and barbarous interpretation of Islam on the country’s luckless people. Ancient churches and mosques were vandalised and destroyed, homosexuals killed and Yezidi women kidnapped and sold as sex slaves. They also attempted to erase its pre-Islamic history by destroying ancient archaeological artifacts.
Since the invasion some kind of democratic order has appeared in Iraq, but I don’t think you can honestly call the invasion a success. Not after that chaos, and not after the victors had it written in to the country’s new constitution that they didn’t own their own oil.
Bowyer’s view that the invasion was a success is sheer, Blairite, New Labour nonsense. And it makes me wonder what other bloody and unjust wars he is also prepared to support, because his right-wing leader says he must.
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.
Here’s an interesting little snippet of news from the Inter Vlog channel on YouTube. It seems that Nigeria’s National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, NASENI, in conjunction with the country’s aviation authority, is currently in moves to produce a made-in-Nigeria helicopter. The aim is to purchase a Belgian Dynali helicopter and back-engineer it, using Nigerian engineers trained at the Dynali works in Belgium. However, they are seeking to licence the helicopter, so it won’t quite be an illegal Third World knock-off. The Dynali helicopter was chosen because it’s easy to back-engineer, and the projected, Nigerian machine will be a sports helicopter.
This is interesting as Africa is possibly the last place anyone would think of for technological innovation and development. I was taught at school that the continent, and indeed the rest of the Developing World, was prevented from industrialising through the trade treaties set up during decolonisation. Britain and the rest of the developed world wished to protect their manufacturing industries while having access to the raw materials of Africa and the rest of the Third World. They therefore set up tariff barriers against manufactured goods from these countries while establishing treaties that kept Africa and other countries primarily as exporters of agricultural goods and raw materials, like copper. This system, dubbed neocolonialism by the Norwegian economist Gunnar Myrdal, has kept Africa and the rest of the Third World poor. This seems to be changing. Looking through YouTube for this, I found another video on the development of a bus by Uganda and another video showing off the planes, helicopters and drones individual Nigerians had built. There clearly is a lot of intellectual potential in Africa waiting to be tapped. I also heard at school that Nigeria, with its vast oil reserves, could be the world’s wealthiest country if it weren’t for the massive corruption. This also makes me wonder if Nigeria is now where India was a few decades ago in its industrialisation, and, also like India, will be a rising economic force in a few decades time. If that happens, then it could have a devastating effect on a number of economies around the world as they are undercut by cheaper, African-made goods.
I’ve a particular interest in this as Bristol and the south-west were a centre of the British helicopter industry with Westland Helicopters. They fell into financial trouble in the 1980s, and Maggie sold them off to the Americans because of pressure from the American government.
Thus she destroyed another part of our manufacturing and technological sector all to keep in with Reagan.
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