Book on Medieval Russian State of Kiev

George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press 1948).

I picked this book up when I was at College in the mid-80s. I did medieval history at ‘A’ Level and Russian at school, and although that’s long ago, I still have an interest in eastern European history, culture and politics. One of atrocities of this war among so many is the Russian assault on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. President Zelenskyy has said that he’s afraid that his country, its history and culture will be wiped out. Kyiv is one of the great historic cities of Europe. Great Russian authors such as Mikhail Bulgakov have set their novels in the city, and in music its been celebrated by the great Russian musician and composer, Mussorgsky in his ‘The Great Gates of Kiev’. But from c. 10th to the early 13th century Kyiv, or Kiev as it is known in Russian, was the centre of a great medieval Russian empire.

This book is a comprehensive history of Kievan Russia, looking not just at the reigns of its great tsars, but also the church and religion, its literature and culture, everyday life, relations with the other states and the position of national minorities. It has the following chapters, broken down thus into sections.

1. Kievan Russia’s Place in History

1. Is Russia Europe?
2. Russia’s place in the medieval world.
3. Divergent and parallel trends in Russian and European history.
4. The notion of east European history.
5. The challenge of geopolitics.
6. The significance of the Kievan period in Russian history.

II. The imperial plan and its failure, 878-972

1. The imperial plan: dreams and realities
2. First successes – Oleg
3. First setback – Igor
4. A breathing spell – Olga
5. The great adventure – Sviatoslav

III. Conversion to Christianity

1. The Russian paganism
2. Vladimir the Saint before his conversion (972-87)
3. The story of Vladimir’s conversion
4. Laying the foundations of the Russian church (990-1037)
5. The significance of conversion: An early appraisal.

IV. The Kievan Realm, 990-1139

1. Vladimir as Christian ruler (990-1015)
2. The struggle between Vladimir’s sons (1015-36)
3. The age of Iaroslav the Wise (1036-54)
4. The triumvirate (1054-93)
5. The reign of Sviatopolk II (1093-1113)
6. A social legislator: Vladimir Monomach
7. The first two monomashichi (1125-39)

V. Economic Foundations of Kievan Russia

1. Introductory remarks
2. Natural resources and population
3. Hunting, agriculture and fishing
4. Agriculture and cattle breeding
5. Metallurgy
6. Building industries
7. Textile arts, furriery, tanning, ceramics
8. Commerce
9. Money and credit
10. Capital and labor
11. National income
12. Prosperity and depression

VI. Social organisation

1. The basic social units
2. Social stratification
3. The upper classes
4. The middle classes
5. The lower classes
6. The half-free
7. The slaves
8. The church people
9. Woman
10. The steppe frontiersmen
11. National minorities
12. Concluding queries: on “economic and social feudalism” in Kievan Russia

VII. Government and Administration

1. Introductory remarks
2. The lands and the principalities
3. The three elements of government
4. The princely administration
5. Branches of administration
6. The city-state
7. The local commune
8. The manor
9. The church
10. The judiciary
11. Concluding queries: on “political feudalism” in Kievan Russia

VIII. The Russian Federation, 1139-1237

1. Introductory remarks
2. The struggle for Kiev (1139-69)
3. Keeping the balance between east Russia and west Russia
4. Defense of the frontier
5. The first appearance of the Mongols: the Battle of the Kalka (1223)
6. Time runs short (1223-37)

IX. Russian Civilisation in the Kievan Period

1. Introductory remarks
2. Language and script
3. Folklore
4. Music
5. Theater
6. Fine arts
7. Religion
8. Literature
9. Education
10. The humanities
11. Sciences and technlogy

X. The Way of Life

1. City and country life
2. Dwellings and furniture
3. Dress
4. Food
5. Health and hygiene
6. The cycle of life
7. Public calamities

XI. Russia and the Outside World in the Kievan Period

1. Preliminary remarks
2. Russia and the Slavs
3. Russia and Scandinavia
4. Russia and the west
5. Russia and Byzantium
6. Russia and the Caucasus
7. Russia and the east

It also has a map of Russia in the Kievan period as well as a list of sources, bibliography and index.

I’ve no doubt that some of the material in the book has become out of date in the nearly 80 years since it was first published. For example, the book describes the veche, a popular assembly, as a democratic institution. But others have said that it met too infrequently really to have been an instrument of popular, democratic government. Although you do wonder what history might have been like if it had been. Would we now be looking at the Ukraine as one of the major foundations of European democracy alongside the British parliament, the Swiss cantons and the Icelandic althing?

Despite its inaccuracies, I think that the book is nevertheless an excellent history of this most ancient Russian state and its people.

And I hope it is not too long before peace and justice is restored to this part of eastern Europe.

Queen Victoria on the Relative Threat Posed by the Working and Upper Classes

I really don’t think Queen Victoria can be seen as an ardent advocate of democracy. I’ve seen her opinions described as ‘Whiggish’, which would suggest that although she was in favour of reform, it was very limited. But I do like this quote, which is another one from Peter Vansittart’s Voices 1870-1914:

‘Danger lies not in the power given to the Lower Orders, who are becoming more well-informed and more intelligent, and who will deservedly work themselves up to the top by their own merits, labour and good conduct, but in the conduct of the Higher Classes and of the Aristocracy.’ (p. 12).

Looking back on the decade of Tory misrule by David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson and their cabinets of upper class, Eton-educated horrors, I’d say her maj’s case was proven.

Shaw’s Classic Defence of Socialism for Women Part Three

George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, foreword by Polly Toynbee (London: Alma Classics 2012).

Socialism and Marriage, Children, Liberty and Religion

Shaw also discusses what socialism would mean for marriage, liberty, children and the churches, and these are the most problematic sections of the book. He looks forward to marriage being a purely voluntary commitment, where people people can marry for love instead of financial advancement. This will produce biologically better children, because people will be able to choose the best partners, rather than be limited to only those from their class. At the same time incompatible partners will be able to divorce each other free of stigma.

He defines liberty in terms of personal freedom. Under socialism, people will be freer because the amount of time they will have for their personal amusement and recreation will be greater. Legislation might go down, because the laws currently needed to protect people will become unnecessary as socialism is established and society advances. Shaw also believes that greater free time would be enough to attract the top brains to management positions in the absence of the usual inducement of greater pay. Shaw realised that not everyone could run industries, and that it was necessary to hire the very best people, who would be a small minority. Giving them greater leisure time was the best way to do this, and he later criticises the Soviet government for not equalising incomes.

But this is sheer utopianism. The Bolsheviks had tried to equalise incomes, and it didn’t work, which is why they went back to higher rates of pay for managers and so on. And as we’ve seen, socialism doesn’t necessarily lead to greater free time and certainly not less legislation. The better argument is that socialism leads to greater liberty because under socialism people have better opportunities available to them for careers, sport, entertainment and personal improvement than they would if they were mere capitalist wage slaves.

Religious people will also object to his views on religion and the churches. While earlier in the book Shaw addressed the reader as a fellow Christian, his attitude in this section is one of a religious sceptic. The reader will have already been warned of this through the foreword by Toynbee. The Groaniad columnist is a high-ranking member of the both the Secular and Humanist Societies, and her columns and articles in just about every magazine or newspaper she wrote for contained sneers at religion. Shaw considers the various Christian denominations irreconcilable in their theologies, and pour scorn on orthodox Christian doctrines such as the Atonement, that Christ died for our sins. Religion should not be taught in school, because of the incompatibility of the account of the Creation in Genesis with modern science. Children should not be taught about religion at all under they are of the age of consent. If their parents do teach them, the children are to be removed from their care. This is the attitude of very aggressive secularists and atheists. Richard Dawkins had the same attitude, but eventually reversed it. It’s far too authoritarian for most people. Mike and I went to a church school, and received a very good education from teachers that did believe in evolution. Religion deals with ultimate questions of existence and morality that go far beyond science. I therefore strongly believe that parents have the right to bring their children up in their religion, as long as they are aware of the existence of other views and that those who hold them are not wicked simply for doing so. He also believed that instead of children having information pumped into them, the business should be to educate children to the basic level they need to be able to live and work in modern society, and then allow the child to choose for itself what it wants to study.

Communism and Fascism

This last section of the book includes Shaw’s observations on Russian Communism and Fascism. Shaw had visited the USSR in the early ’30s, and like the other Fabians had been duped by Stalin. He praised it as the new socialist society that was eradicating poverty and class differences. He also thought that its early history vindicated the Fabian approach of cautious nationalisation. Lenin had first nationalised everything, and then had to go back on it and restore capitalism and the capitalist managers under the New Economic Policy. But Russia was to be admired because it had done this reversal quite openly, while such changes were kept very quiet in capitalism. If there were problems in the country’s industrialisation, it was due to mass sabotage by the kulaks – the wealthy peasants – and the industrialists. He also recognised that the previous capitalist elite were disenfranchised, forced into manual labour, and their children denied education until the working class children had been served. At the same time, the Soviet leaders had been members of the upper classes themselves, and in order to present themselves as working class leaders had claimed working class parentage. These issues were, however, gradually working themselves out. The Soviet leaders no longer had need of such personal propaganda, and the former capitalists could reconcile themselves to the regime as members of the intellectual proletariat. And some of the industrialisation was being performed by criminals, but this was less arduous than the labour in our prisons.

Shaw is right about the NEP showing that nationalisation needs to be preceded by careful preparation. But he was obviously kept ignorant of the famine that was raging in the USSR through forced collectivisation and the mass murder of the kulaks. And rather than a few criminals in the gulags, the real figures were millions of forced labourers. They were innocent of any crime except Stalin’s paranoia and the need of his managers for cheap slave labour. It’s believed that about 30 millions died in Stalin’s purges, while 7 million died in the famine in the Ukraine.

Shaw’s treatment of Fascism seems to be based mostly on the career of Mussolini. He considers Fascism just a revival of the craze for absolute monarchy and military leadership, of the kind that had produced Henry VIII in England, Napoleon, and now Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, the Shah of Iran and Ataturk in Turkey. These new absolute rulers had started out as working class radicals, before find out that the changes they wanted would not come from the working class. They had therefore appealed to the respectable middle class, swept away democracy and the old municipal councils, which were really talking shops for elderly tradesmen which accomplished little. They had then embarked on a campaign against liberalism and the left, smashing those organisations and imprisoning their members. Some form of parliament had been retained in order to reassure the people. At the same time, wars were started to divert the population and stop them criticising the new generalissimo. Industry was approaching socialism by combining into trusts. However, the government would not introduce socialism or truly effective government because of middle class opposition. Fascist regimes wouldn’t last, because their leaders were, like the rest of us, only mortal. In fact Mussolini was overthrown by the other Fascists, who then surrendered to the Allies, partly because of his failing health. That, and his utter military incompetence which meant that Italy was very definitely losing the War and the Allies were steadily advancing up the peninsula. While this potted biography of the typical Fascist is true of Mussolini, it doesn’t really fit some of the others. The Shah, for example, was an Indian prince.

Anarchism and Syndicalism

Shaw is much less informed about anarchism. He really only discusses it in terms of ‘Communist Anarchism’, which he dismisses as a silly contradiction in terms. Communism meant more legislation, while anarchism clearly meant less. He should have the articles and books on Anarcho-communism by Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin believed that goods and services should be taken over by the whole community. However, rather than a complete absence of government and legislation, society would be managed instead by individual communities and federations.

He also dismisses syndicalism, in which industry would be taken over and run by the trade unions. He considers this just another form of capitalism, with the place of the managers being taken by the workers. These would still fleece the consumer, while at the same time leave the problem of the great inequality in the distribution of wealth untouched, as some industries would obviously be poorer than others. But the Guild Socialists did believe that there should be a kind of central authority to represent the interests of the consumer. And one of the reasons why nationalisation, in the view of some socialists, failed to gain the popular support needed to defend it against the privatisations of the Tories is because the workers in the nationalised industries after the War were disappointed in their hopes for a great role in their management. The Labour party merely wanted nationalisation to be a simple exchange of public for private management, with no profound changes to the management structure. In some cases the same personnel were left in place. Unions were to be given a role in management through the various planning bodies. But this was far less than many workers and trade unionists hoped. If nationalisation is to have any meaning, it must allow for a proper, expanded role of the workers themselves in the business of managing their companies and industries.

The book ends with a peroration and a discussion of the works that have influenced and interest Shaw. In the peroration Shaw exhorts the readers not to be upset by the mass poverty and misery of the time, but to deplore the waste of opportunities for health, prosperity and happiness of the time, and to look forward and work for a better, socialist future.

His ‘Instead of a Bibliography’ is a kind of potted history of books critical of capitalism and advocating socialism from David Ricardo’s formulation of capitalism in the 19th century. These also include literary figures like Ruskin, Carlyle and Dickens. He states that he has replaced Marx’s theory of surplus value with Jevons‘ treatment of rent, in order to show how capitalism deprives workers of their rightful share of the profits.

 

 

Labour Leadership Candidate Lavery Blames ‘Remain’ for Labour Defeat

Yesterday’s I (2nd January 2020) also ran this report on the candidates for the Labour leadership by Jane Merrick, ‘Labour ‘foisted Remain on working class’. This runs

One of the architects of Labour’s historic election defeat has claimed that the party’s attempt to “foist Remain” on working class communities was responsible for last month’s result.

Ian Lavery, the party’s chairman and general election campaign coordinator, denied that Jeremy Corbyn’s policies contributed to the losses.

Mr Lavery is among several Labour MPs considering running to succeed Mr Corbyn. Ahead of nominations opening next week, speculation is mounting that Jess Phillips, one of the most widely recognised MPs among the general public, is about to announce her candidacy.

Yesterday she tweeted: “2020 starts with fire in my belly and I promise that won’t change.”

I’m a Remainer, but Lavery’s right: all the northern and midland communities that voted for Boris were Leave areas. Labour’s manifesto promises for the nationalisation of rail, water and electricity, strengthening the welfare state, restoring workers’ rights and union power, were actually well-received and polled well. But they’re a threat to the upper and upper middle classes, including media barons like Murdoch, the weirdo Barclay twins and Lord Rothermere, so the Tory press is doing its absolute best to try and discredit them.

And the I unfortunately is also following this line. It has always backed the ‘Centrists’ in the Labour, for which read ‘Blairites’ and ‘Thatcherite entryists’, who stand for more privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state. But they pretend – mostly – to be more ‘moderate’ than the Tories. The I’s also been promoting female candidates for the party leadership, and loudly denouncing opposition to them as ‘misogyny’. It’s noticeable in all this that the women, who’ve thrown their hats into the ring are all Blairites, and so the election of someone like Phillips would just be a liberal disguise for the right-wing policies underneath. Just like Hillary Clinton over the Pond is right-wing and militaristic, and therefore very establishment. But she was claiming that, as a woman, she was somehow an outsider, and the people, including women, who back Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for the presidency instead were just misogynists.

At the moment the I’s backing Lisa Nandy, who appears to be another wretched Blairite.

Lavery, however, is working class, and so a far better spokesman for those areas and people that have suffered from the neoliberalism the Tories and their pet press have pushed on us.

 

Jarvis Cocker Launches Charity Song with Explicit Title about Tory Victory

Remember Jarvis Cocker? He was the lead singer of the Britpop band Pulp, who gave us the song Common People commenting on the persisting class division in Blair’s Britain. He also caused mass outrage and hilarity when he dived onto the stage during Michael Jackson’s performance at one of the annual music awards, ran around the stage being pursued by the bouncers and then mooned the world live on TV. He then issued an apology stating that he did not mean any disrespect to the late Jacko.

Now, as Mike reports on his blog, Cocker has released a charity single intended to create an atmosphere of ‘inclusivity, representation, love, acceptance and kindness’. All the sentiments you want at Christmas. Just as ‘Common People’ was a bitter comment on the upper classes’ attitude to us, the lower orders, so this song’s a bitter protest against the Tory election victory. It’s titled ‘C*nts Are Still Running the World’. It attacks the idea that we love in a meritocracy when such people are rewarded with their position at the top of society, how they view working people as obsolete and are outsourcing their jobs abroad, the way they claim to tolerate us, while making sure we don’t live anywhere near them, and laissez-faire economics. A Facebook group has been launched to try to get it to number one.

To see the video for it, and links to the Facebook group and the site for the single’s purchase, go to Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/20/buy-the-latest-christmas-charity-song-with-a-naughty-title-and-a-serious-message-extreme-language/

I realise that many people will object to the obscenity Cocker uses to describe the ruling orders, and I know women, who feel that it’s misogynistic, and sympathise. But Cocker isn’t the first person to use it to describe the ruling elite. Way back in 2011 the conspiracy magazine Lobster published an article by William Clarke, ‘The C*ntocracy’, which used it to describe the British class system of government and its members. This began

Why not call the present political system a ‘c*ntocracy’? This is not, as it might seem, just a reaction to the advent of someone as painfully fraudulent as Nick Clegg. We need a new name for not just what the political class do to us because of greed and stupidity; we need a term that advances the idea of social organisation as something innate in people. It should combine a description of the reality of our place in such a society with an accurate discription of the nature of the society. Cuntocracy describes the reality.

By calling our society a c*ntocracy we return power to the ordinary people; we give the people a voice, a simple way for them to talk back to those who pose as leaders but take
us nowhere. And we offer a meaningful contribution to David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’.

The article can be read here: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster62/lob62-cuntocracy.pdf#search=%22cuntocracy%22. Be warned, the offensive term is printed in full.

Jarvis Cocker shows that he’s still rocking, and fighting against the Tories!

John Quiggin on the Failure of Thatcher’s New Classical Economics

Very many Libertarians describe themselves as ‘classical liberals’, meaning they support the theories of the classical economists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This rejects state intervention and the welfare state in favour of free markets and privatization. This theory was the basis of Thatcher’s economic policy before the Falklands War, as well as those of other countries like Australia and New Zealand. In all of these countries where it was adopted it was a massive failure, like trickle-down economics and austerity.

Quiggin describes how Thatcher’s New Classical Economic policy was a failure, but she was saved from electoral defeat, partly by the Falkland War on page 113. He writes

The only requirement for the New Classical prescription to work was the credibility of the government’s commitment. Thatcher had credible commitment in bucketloads: indeed, even more than an ideological commitment to free-market ideas, credible commitment was the defining feature of her approach to politics. Aphorisms like “the lady’s not for turning” and “there is no alternative” (which produced the acronymic nickname TINA) were characteristics of Thatcher’s “conviction” politics. The slogan “No U-turns” could be regarded as independent of the particular direction in which she was driving. In a real sense, Thatcher’s ultimate political commitment was to commitment itself.

So, if New Classical economics was ever going to work it should have done so in Thatcher’s Britain. In fact, however, unemployment rose sharply, reaching 3 million and remained high for years, just as both Keynesians and monetarists expected. New Classical economics, having failed its first big policy test, dropped out of sight, reviving only in opposition to the stimulus proposals of the Obama administration.

However, Thatcher did not pay a political price for this policy failure, either at the time of (the Falklands war diverted attention from the economy) or, so far in retrospective assessments. The only alternative to the “short sharp Shock” was a long, grinding process of reducing inflation rates slowly through years of restrictive fiscal and monetary policy. While it can be argued that the resulting social and economic costs would have been significantly lower, political perceptions were very different. The mass unemployment of Thatcher’s early years was either blamed directly on her predecessors or seen as the necessary price of reversing chronic decline.

New Classical Economics was a colossal failure. In fact Thatcherism, whether implemented by the Tories or New Labour, has been a failure, though New Labour was better at managing the economy than the Tories. The only reason it has not been abandoned is because of the charisma surrounding Thatcher herself and the fact that it gives even more wealth and power to the upper classes and the business elite while keeping working people poor and unable to resist the exploitative demands of their employers. And its given a spurious credibility to ordinary people through its promotion by the media.

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tory Self-Delusions

I found this little gem in the ‘Pseud’s Corner’ column of an old copy of Private Eye. Amid the usual, very pseudish remarks from football pundits and cookery writers comparing that last goal by Arsenal to Julius Caesar crossing the Tiber, or literary types extolling the virtues of their last excursion around the globe, where they took part in the ancient tribal ceremonies of primal peoples, was a truly astounding quote from the Young Master. This is, of course, the current darling of the Tory party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who declared.

“I am a man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei!”

This was in response to Andrew Neil questioning him about the influence of public schools on British political life.

Rees-Mogg probably does see himself as ‘man of the people’. He’s in a party, which considers itself the natural party of government. Decades ago, the Tory ideologue, Trevor Oakeshott, tried to justify the overpowering influence of the middle classes by saying they were the modern equivalent of the barons who stood up to King John, in providing a bulwark against the power of the state. True in some case, but very wrong when the middle classes are in power, and the state functions as their servant.

Rees-Mogg has never, ever, remotely been a man of the people. He’s an aristo toff, who has made his money from investment banking. He holds deeply reactionary views on abortion and homosexuality, which are very much out of touch with those of the genuinely liberal middle and lower classes. And he has always represented the aristocracy and the rich against the poor, the sick, and the disabled. He began his political career in Scotland trying to folks of a declining fishing community that what this country really needed was to keep an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. In parliament, he has continued to promote the interests of the rich by demanding greater subsidies and tax cuts for them. For the poor, he has done nothing except demand greater tax increases on them, to subsidise the already very wealthy to whom he wants to give these tax cuts, and voted to cut welfare services and state funding for vital services. No doubt he genuinely believes all that Thatcherite bilge about making life as tough as possible for the poor in order to encourage them to work harder and do well for themselves.

Personally, he comes across as quiet-spoken, gentlemanly and polite. But he is not a man of the people. He hates them with a passion, but clearly thinks of himself as their champion and saviour against the dreaded welfare state.

Let’s prove him wrong and throw him out of parliament!

Will Killary and the Generals Get Their War with Russia?

The news yesterday that a number of EU countries had followed Britain’s lead and expelled Russian diplomats is alarming. This is ratcheting up the tension with Russia to Cold War levels. Despite the lack of definitive evidence that the Russians were behind the poisoning of the Skripals, May and nearly the rest of the countries in the EU have decided that Putin is responsible. And I’m afraid that the tensions they’re fomenting will ultimately lead to war.

Killary began all this nonsense about Russia interfering in western elections as a way of diverting blame from herself for his massive failure to convince Americans to vote her. She’s a horrible candidate – a massively privileged, neoliberal corporatist, who has absolutely no sympathy for the working class, and whose policies on drugs with her husband actively damaged the Black community. She took working class votes for granted and didn’t even bother to campaign in many traditional Democrat states. Instead, she did what Blair did over here and went chasing the upper and upper-middle classes. As a result, she alienated many voters, who would otherwise have voted Democrat. She did get a million or so votes more than Trump, but lost through the machinations of the Electoral College, a very undemocratic institution that was originally set up to allow slave-holding states to count their slaves as less than human so they would have voting equality with free states. She could have blamed the electoral and demanded its abolition. Many others have. But she didn’t. Obviously, she’s quite happy with that very undemocratic part of the American electoral system.

Unable to accept her responsibility for losing the election, and a strong supporter of the status quo, she turned to blaming Russia. In doing so, she joined a number of far right organisations, including eugenicist groups founded by former Nazis, who believed that the poor and Blacks are biologically unfit and so should be denied state welfare. And even before she lost the election, she showed a very strong hostility to Russia.

From reading articles in Counterpunch, it appears that the current policy in the White House and the Pentagon is for ‘full spectrum dominance’. That means that America should be the world’s only superpower, with an unchallenged military dominance of the rest of the world. What America, and its elite leader, including Hillary Clinton, fear is the rise of the multipolar world. They cannot tolerate the emergence of political and economic rivals, such as Russia, or China, or India, for that matter. Hence the massive increase in military spending. Under Obama’s administration, Hillary’s foreign policy towards Russia and China was militantly hostile and she seemed keen to ramp hostility to both these nations to dangerous levels.

And on this side of the Pond, various NATO generals also forecast war with Russia. One of them, a deputy-head of NATO, actually had a book published a couple of years ago entitled 2017: War with Russia, in which he predicted last year that Russia would invade Latvia, and this would spark a war between Russia and NATO. He predicted it would all happen last May. Fortunately, the month came and went and Russia didn’t. But NATO troops were massing on Russia’s borders, which would serve as a provocation to the Russians. Russia is encircled by NATO bases, and has sent military advisers to the Fascist regime in Ukraine.

As I’ve blogged many times before, much of this renewed American hostility to Russia has nothing to do with concerns about democracy and human rights. It’s purely economic. The American multinationals that poured millions into backing Yeltsin at the end of the Cold War did so in the expectation that the ensuing massive privatisation of Russian state assets would allow them to dominate the Russian economy. But Putin has stopped that. Thus the massive corporate anger against Putin’s Russia. Putin is a thug, who has his critics and opponents beaten and killed, but that’s not the reason the American political elite and their counterparts over here hate him.

I’m very much afraid that this latest round of expulsions will end by creating more tension, in a cycle that will end in a war with Russia, perhaps using a manufactured incident as a pretext for invading them. The pressure the government placed on Porton Down to state that the chemical used to poison the Skripals was definitely Russian is very, very similar to the pressure Blair and his cronies put on MI6 to ‘sex up’ the dodgy dossier and claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could launch within 45 minutes. He didn’t. The British and American publics were lied to, and despite massive opposition the west invaded Iraq. And the result has been nearly two decades of chaos and carnage.

And I’m afraid the same process is going on here to create another war for the benefit of the American military-industrial complex and big corporations desperate to get their hands on Russian resources and industries.

It needs to be stopped. Now. Before war really does break out, a war that could see millions die, and our beautiful planet turned into an irradiated cinder.

John Wycliffe’s Pacifist Theology

I’m sick of writing about the Christian right in this country and America – their hatred of the poor, their Zionism and their insanely dangerous millennialism, in which they look forward to the last, apocalyptic war between good and evil, personified as a conflict between the Christian West and Israel on the side of good, and Communism and Islam as the armies of Satan. Here’s a bit of more inspiring theology, at least for those on the Left, from one of the seminal influences on the Reformation.

John Wycliffe has been described as ‘the Morning Star of the Reformation’. He was a late 14th-century English vicar from Yorkshire, who proposed radical reforms to combat what he saw as the corruption of the Church in his day. He was against pluralities, in which clergy held many benefices, often in widely separated parts of the country, noting that this did nothing for the Christian cure of souls. It was set up, however, partly as a way of giving the lower clergy a reasonable income because of the poverty of parts of the church at that time. He argued that the Bible should be the only source of Christian truth, and that salvation was by faith alone, not works. He demanded an end to clerical celibacy, which he said acted ‘to the great prejudice of women’ and promoted homosexuality amongst the clergy. So, not a fan of gay priests then. He also went further in his criticism of the moral right of rulers to govern us when they themselves were guilty of sin. No-one had this right, and those rulers sinning had to step down or be removed. This has been widely criticised since, as it would have made government just about impossible. But it is a severe corrective to the moral double standards of the upper classes, who saw themselves as having an absolute right to rule, often committing heinous sins and crimes themselves, while claiming their right as Christian rulers to punish and uphold moral standards to those lower down the social ladder. This attitude continued into the 17th century, when the monarchists of the British Civil War defended the monarchy on the grounds that the king, as God’s representative on Earth, was above the law, but had the duty to expound it, and so could not be tried for its breach.

He also translated the Bible into English, radical act forbidden by law in England, though perfectly acceptable elsewhere on the continent, such as France. He was not a member of the Lollards, the early radical Protestant movement that grew up around his doctrines, though he was a powerful influence on them. It was the Lollards who produced the song attacking contemporary serfdom, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ In the 16th century, this was taken up and inspired the German peasants in their revolt against feudal overlordship: ‘Als Adam grub und Evan spann, wer war dann der Edelmann?’ Which is an exact translation.

I got the latest Oxbow books Bargain Catalogue through the post a few weeks ago. Among the books on medieval history and culture were two of Wycliffe’s. One was on the inspiration of scripture, the other was on his pacifist theology.

The book is John Wycliffe on War and Peace by Rory Cox. The blurb for the book in the Bargain Catalogue runs:

From the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo to the fifth century, Christian justifications of war had revolved around three key criteria: just cause, proper authority and correct intention. Using Wyclif’s extensive Latin corpus, the author shows how he dismantled these three pillars of medieval “just war” doctrine, demonstrating that he created a coherent doctrine of pacifism and non-resistance which was at that time unparalleled.

200 pages, Boydell and Brewer Ltd, 2014, 97080861933259, Hardback, was £50, bargain price £12.95.

I’m not a pacifist myself, as I believe that sometimes true evil can only be combated through violence. But I’m sick of the co-option of morality to justify the terrible greed and inhuman violence of colonialism and imperialism, especially in the latest attacks on the Middle East.

I realise that many of the readers of this blog have very different attitudes to my own on religion. I’m not trying to insult anyone else’s religious views here, particularly not Roman Catholics or the atheists, who read this blog. I am simply mentioning it as many Christians of radically different denominations and confessions have over the centuries come to pacifism in disgust at the horrors of war as organised violence. I fully recognise and endorse the contemporary Roman Catholic peace movement, which I’ve blogged about before.

I’ve posted it up the news of this book, as I thought it would interest and inspire the Christian readers of this blog, who share my opinions on war. And would also act as corrective to the militant bilge coming out of the American and British religious right and their aggressive, omnicidal militarism.

Black Parisians Protest against Islamist Slave Auctions in Libya

This is another great piece of reporting from RT. It’s horrendous, and shows the depths of sheer barbarism that the country has been reduced since we and the American helped the Islamists overthrow Colonel Gaddafi.

Gaddafi was no angel. He was a tyrant who ruled by fear and used the Islamists himself to assassinate his enemies in Africa and the Middle East. But he did much to improve his country. His official ideology was a mixture, so I gather, of Arab socialism and Islam. Libya was a modern, secular state, where women enjoyed western style rights under the law. Like the old boy at one point had an all-female bodyguard. Education and healthcare was free. Previously, the oil companies had run the place as they liked. When he took power, they had to pay a fair price for the oil, and fund public works projects, like building roads. He was a monster, but not half as monstrous as those, who have replaced him.

Slavery is recognised and regulated in the Qu’ran, as it is also in the Bible and in many other religions. Mohammed, however, praised the emancipation of slaves as a meritorious act, and the Qu’ran instructs Muslims to treat their slaves gently. The Prophet was also anti-racist, and the Qu’ran also tells Muslims that they are not to distinguish between Black and White. The Muslim states, like the Ottoman Empire, enslaved both Blacks and Whites. After the Ottomans put down a nationalist rebellion in Crete in the 1820s, it was estimated that about 20,000 White, Greek slaves filled their slave markets, and furnished the Georgian painters of the era with pictures of murderous, tyrannical Turks dragging heroic-looking men, and young, virginal, naked women off into captivity. In Egypt there were two guilds for slavers, one for those, who dealt in Blacks and another for those selling enslaved Whites.

In fact, Europeans had also enslaved Whites through the Middle Ages, The word ‘slave’ is derived from ‘Slav’, as so many of the enslaved people finding their way to western slave markets came from the Slavonic countries to the East. This was stopped by the rise of the Mongol Empire and the expansion of Ottoman Turkey in the 15th centuries, and so western Europeans turned instead to importing and exploiting enslaved Africans. Hence the connection of slavery in the Western mind with negritude and African heritage.

After the British ended slavery in their empire in 1839, they turned to trying to stamp it out elsewhere in the world, including Africa and the Ottoman Empire. They were helped in Egypt by the reforming pasha, Khedive Ismail, who was sincerely opposed to it. However, it was blocked by vested mercantile interests, particularly in the Sudan, where it formed an important fabric of the economy of the upper classes. The British attempts to exterminate slavery there, with General Gordon acting in charge of the Egyptian forces, was one of the causes of the Mahdi’s revolt. Throughout the 19th century there were complaints by British ambassadors and diplomatic staff about slaves continuing to be imported into Libya from further south in Africa. These imports were disguised as ‘personal servants’, which the law permitted slave-owners to take with them on their travels. The British also tried to avoid a direct confrontation with the religious authorities as far as possible, by granting certificates of liberation to those enslaved people, who came to them to ask for their freedom.

What finally discredited slavery in Egypt was a prosecution brought by a Circassian slave woman, Shanigal, against her master for raping her. The Circassians are a people from the Caucasus mountains, and converted to Islam after they were conquered by the Turks in the 17th century. Shanigal went to the British authorities to obtained justice, and got it. In doing so, she showed up the massive injustice and hypocrisy towards slavery in the upper and middle classes, with the result that she dealt a major blow against it.

While studying Islam at College, I did read in one of the books on the Islamic Revolution that some of the Muslim fundamentalists then wanted to bring it all back, but they were successfully blocked – thank heaven! – by the rest of the revolutionaries.

However, there is still a widespread racial prejudice against Blacks in the Islamic world. Flicking through a Teach Yourself book on the Arabic of the Levant, way back when I was at school, I found a bit that described how common term for Blacks in the Syrian Arabic dialect literally translates as ‘the slaves’. And in Sudan, the indigenous Black population are still treated very much as slaves by the Arabs. One of the civil rights leaders for the Beja people died back in the 1990s. In the obituary for him in the Independent it mentioned how his Arab teachers really didn’t want him to go to school, because there was no point educating slaves. I mentioned this in a long letter to a Black organisation, that really only wanted to discuss White racism. They really didn’t like it, and politely told me to take my correspondence elsewhere. The problem is that slavery and racism are found all over the world, and in the globalised societies of the 20th century they need to be tackled together.

Most of the crowd in the video looks to be Black. My guess is that many of them, if not the majority, are probably asylum seekers, who came to Europe and France through Libya, and so this has an acute personal meaning for them.
Along with signs with the slogans ‘Ons dit non a l’esclavage’ – ‘We say ‘No’ to slavery’, there are other signs directly attacking Bush, Clinton and Blair as war criminals.

Yes, they are. No argument from me. Bush and Blair started the illegal wars in the Middle East, but it was Obama and Killary, who authorised the bombing of Libya. With Killary smirking and giggling like an excited schoolgirl over Gaddafi’s death. ‘We got him!’, she rejoiced.

Yeah, you got him. But you destroyed a modern, secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa.

The secular state and its infrastructure have been destroyed. The Islamists massacred and butchered whole towns, and particularly those occupied mostly by Blacks. Women are being deprived of their hard-won, modern, western style rights, despite the fact that in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world there are Islamic feminist groups. When I was studying Islam at College, we were told that one year they had a seminar given to them by a Black, Muslim feminist talking about the status of ‘protected peoples’ – that is, those monotheist peoples that Muslims are forbidden to convert by force.

So despite the best efforts of Muslim and Arab reformers, the country has been plunged back to medieval barbarism.

And Killary Clinton is the direct cause of this. And she has the sheer, unmitigated gall to claim that she’s some kind of ‘everywoman’ feminist.

She isn’t, and has never been. She’s a rich, entitled corporate boss, who’s in the pocket of Wall Street and a hundred other corporations, no doubt. She’s as corrupt and bloodthirsty as the male hawks and corporate whores, who surround her.

At home, she stands for corruption, inequality and lack of single-payer healthcare, all to drive up profits for her friends in big business. And abroad, well, she stands for American corporate interests there too. The Americans weren’t interested in freeing the Libyan people from a dictator. They wanted Gaddafi out because he defied American imperial power. And he also threated the petrodollar. He was planning to abandon that, and have it replaced with the gold dinar, which would be used through the Middle East and Africa. If that happened, America wouldn’t be able to remonetise its debts, and the economy would collapse. Or collapse even further.

So Killary sent the planes in to destroy a country, and murder its leader. then she giggled about it.

And the result is this return to savagery and barbarism.