It marks an extremely serious and dangerous escalation, especially as it comes in the same year that Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated in a US drone strike just after arriving in Baghdad. Benjamin Netanyahu will take especial delight at the murder of Fakhrizadeh, having publicly naming him as head of Iran’s nuclear programme during a lecture he gave alleging Iran was trying to develop a nuclear bomb in 2018. Clearly, since then, he was viewed as a priority target as part of Mossad’s war on Iranian nuclear scientists.

That this murder constitutes a violation of international law goes without saying. As does the fact that it will have been undertaken with the blessing of the Trump administration. Married to the revelation that Trump recently mooted with his military advisers the possibility of an air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, we have an outgoing president who is bent on leaving a pile of bodies in his wake as he enters his mad dog days.

Netanyahu, determined to take full advantage of these last two months of Trump’s presidency, has upped the ante in the region significantly, evidenced not only with the assassination of Moshen Fakhrizadeh, but also an uptick in Israeli air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria. This also serves the purposes of making the incoming Biden Administration’s ability to resurrect the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) much more difficult, what with Iranian hard liners itching for some kind of military response.

Any such response would play into Netanyahu’s hands, however, in that it would pull the US into the very military showdown with Iran that he’s been so desperate to precipitate. Iranian security has been penetrated twice this year, resulting in the assassination of two of its most venerated figures. The sense of humiliation will no doubt cut deep, thus making the next few days and weeks among the most tense the region has experienced. As for Trump – his refusal to concede the election, his ramping up of baseless allegations of electoral fraud, his flirtation with lurid conspiracy theories, and his continuing efforts to deny the seriousness of Covid19 in the country with the highest infection and mortality rate of any in the world, all this taken together is proof positive that we are talking about no ordinary president.

Indeed not since Andrew Jackson has an open racist and white supremacist such as Trump occupied the White House. That he still has two months to continue to create chaos at home and abroad without any political or legal restraint exposes the rotten foundations of US democracy. Further still, the fact that 70 million Americans voted for this unhinged aspiring autocrat confirms that even after he leaves office, Trumpism will remain very much alive and kicking. Trump’s has been a rogue administration par excellence. As for Israel under Netanyahu, its unremitting criminality and murderous actions are a stain on the conscience of the world.

It is often the case that the most cogent truths are also the most simply expressed. In Malcolm X those simple truths had one their most accomplished tribunes. Perhaps one of the most powerful of the many he ever articulated was his description of the circular relationship that exists between the drive for hegemony abroad and economic and racial injustice at home. To wit: “You can’t understand what is going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what is going on in the Congo.”[i]Malcolm, by the time of his assassination, was a tribune of the ‘other America’, the one consisting of the poor, working poor, the marginalised and dispossessed.

History repeats itself, Marx famously opined, the first as tragedy, then as farce. In the personage of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, tragedy and farce are both present. The tragedy was his election in 2016, which marked the nadir of this grand experiment in placing democratic lipstick on the pig of a state then empire forged in genocide, ethnic cleansing and human slavery. It was a victory for anti-intellectualism and mass ignorance, of which both prevail in large parts of this ill-starred land. They say that you can’t blame a mushroom for growing the dark, which is true, and the intellectual and cultural darkness in which millions of Americans exist is evidenced in a gun culture that connotes societal madness, along with a hatred and fear of the other that blows out of the water any vestige of social cohesion.

Within Trump we have embodied the Trail of Tears, the overseer’s whip, the Klu Klux Klan, the Pinkerton detectives sent to crush the Homestead strike, along with too many others to mention during the US Labor Wars of the late 19th and early 20th century. Within him, too, is embodied the police batons of Jim Crow, the slum landlordism of urban America, the electric chair and the gas chamber.

In other words, Donald Trump is the land of the free with its mask removed.

His daily press briefings have also left no doubt that he, like Caligula, carries all of the symptoms of a disordered mind. His assertion that disinfectant could be injected or ingested as a potential cure for Covid-19, as his advisers looked on with the po-faces of shuffling courtiers, was a moment of peak insanity and crack-pottery, even for him. We can only hope, metaphorically speaking, that the Praetorian Guards in Washington are now astir.

This having been said, we in Britain, we are obliged not to forget, have our own problems with disordered minds in our midst. With a clutch of fanatical ideologues at the helm, led by a prime minister whose practiced buffoonery and nuttiness has quite literally got more people killed in this past month than can be put down to events, we find ourselves cursed with the worst possible government upon whose lap has landed the worst possible crisis.

Learning as we just have that Boris Johnson’s brain — the other-wordly and decidedly dangerous Dominic Cummings — has been sitting in on meetings of the government’s top scientific advisory panel should be grounds for public alarm. Firstly, it confirms that the medical and scientific advice that the country has been receiving has been politicised, and thereby compromised, throughout. Secondly, Cummings is a man who eclipses every Bond villain ever created in the sinister stakes, a malign character whose approach to politics is that of a mad scientist conducting mad experiments in a laboratory of the damned.

But have no fear, because Keir is here, what with his ‘constructive opposition’, ‘forensic’ questions, and the ‘functioning opposition’ to the government he’s leading. Indeed our centrist/Blairite chorus was in full orgasmic voice in response to this trusty knight of the realm’s debut at Prime Minister’s Questions.

It didn’t exactly hurt that facing him at the despatch box was a political pygmy in the shape of Dominic Raab. It likewise didn’t hurt that the newly elected leader of the opposition enjoys the full-throated support of the entire media class all the way from Guardianista liberal to Thatcher-loving right. Call me old fashioned, but when a former Tory chancellor such as Gideon Osborne — the man who injected the country with the anti-people poison of austerity — endorses the leader of the Labour Party, it’s a party headed at warp speed for perdition.

When it comes to the comparing of Keir Starmer and Dominic Raab at what was the first PMQs both men conducted, one is reminded of the sage words of Gore Vidal:

‘One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput’.

The unvarnished truth is that after decades of free market assault on the public sector, accompanied by the demonisation and devaluation of public sector workers by a reactionary mainstream media — owned by a clutch of billionaires for whom the public realm is the sworn enemy of their fanatical attachment to the verities of the market — we find ourselves today naked and trembling in the face of a global pandemic.

Coronavirus has exposed our government as a clutch of third rate incompetents whose threadbare response to the crisis has been of a piece with slapstick comedy. The grim reality is of course no laughing matter, however — not when we have care homes transformed into veritable death camps; not when a month into this crisis NHS workers, care workers, and others on the frontline still lack sufficient personal protection equipment, ventilators and testing; and certainly not when there is a distinct lack of organisation and joined up thinking between the various government departments.

But the calamitous response to coronavirus is not just the doing of the current government. It marks the culmination of the hegemony of free market ideology and nostrums going back four decades and peaking with ten years of austerity that cut to the bone what was left of our public services, including the NHS, turning us into latter day spectators at the Coliseum of the despair and suffering of the most vulnerable among us. It did so while propagating the grotesque idea that this is the best of all possible worlds.

Philosopher and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, whose works resonate ever still, argues persuasively that ‘Human existence is characterized by the fact that man is alone and separated from the world; not being able to stand the separation, he is impelled to seek for relatedness and oneness’.

The point Fromm is making here is not that we desire relatedness with one another, but that our species being dictates that we need it — and that when denied relatedness alienation and dysfunction is the result. In societal terms, relatedness is expressed in the level of social organisation and health and strength of our public services and institutions at any given point.

Free market (neoliberal) ideas are antithetical to human relatedness. It is why that if this pandemic teaches us anything it’s that we’ve been systematically reduced to a disorganised and disconnected mass of human dust. Thus the collective appreciation we now rightfully feel for the NHS and all who work in her, and also for our carers, cleaners, transport workers, bin men, and supermarket workers, remind us of the truth that no man is an island — that we need each other, and moreover that we need the aforementioned now more than we ever needed hedge fund managers, bankers, and a billionaire class whose greed is now so obscene you’d associate it with the dying days of Rome.

It is an utter and unalloyed disgrace that our key workers currently find themselves compelled to risk their lives just by going to work in the midst of a public health crisis and emergency that was entirely foreseen. Anyone who claims otherwise is an execrable liar and propagandist. Boris Johnson went to sleep at the wheel, embracing inaction in the interests of the economy rather than prompt action in the interests of public health at the outset. The result is that the UK is well on track to being the hardest hit country in Europe from coronavirus. If austerity can be categorised as social murder, this knavish Tory government’s handling of coronavirus has been public slaughter

We are entitled to ask how many of clapping these past few weeks voted in this government of fanatical privatising anti-NHS buccaneers (Dominic Raab, anyone) last December, highlighting the regressive part which false consciousness has played in fashioning this dystopia we have the temerity to call a society. Clapping along with Tory ministers, MPs, and right wing ideologues for the NHS and carers is like clapping along with cancer for chemotherapy.

Once this crisis ends, and who knows when, there must be a political reckoning, one that ensures there is no going back. And make no mistake, such a reckoning is at this juncture beyond the remit of parliament or the ballot box. The days of just taking it and going along to get along must end and they must end now. We need a mass movement — militant, determined, united — to take to the streets and take this country back from those who have wrecked it.

End.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give the UK its Sunday name, is the epitome of an artificial state. It was and remains the product of the grafting together of divergent cultures, histories and national identities. At inception, this grafting together was undertaken not in the interests of its peoples but in the interests of national elites eager to take advantage of the commercial opportunities of a unified polity with added manpower and resources in an age of empire.

The venality, greed and corruption of the Scottish ruling and political class in the late 17th- early 18th century delivered the Scottish people into the arms of the union with England without their support, establishing thereby the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was reflected in the social unrest and riots that ensued in Scottish towns and cities both during the negotiations that brought into being the 1707 Act of Union, and upon its passage.

For the ruling elites of both Scotland and England the union of both parliaments into one had demonstrable commercial and strategic benefits. The former had been left bankrupt after Scotland’s failed attempt at establishing its own overseas colony in Darien (modern day Panama in Central America) in the late 17th century. In order to forestall national immiseration the need to gain access to England’s overseas colonies was thereafter considered essential.

Meanwhile the English were eager to prevent the possibility of Scotland being used as a staging ground for an invasion from the north by the French in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession that raged between 1701 and 1714.

Wales, the third nation that makes up the UK, had already been merged with England in 1536. Ireland on the other hand was a subjugated English (latterly British) colony, and was officially brought into the orbit of what would then be known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.

In 1922, after a prolonged national liberation struggle in Ireland, the 26 counties that make up today’s Republic of Ireland achieved dominion status before winning full independence in 1948, while the remaining six counties that make up the the rest of the island of Ireland were partitioned to become what is now Northern Ireland: hence the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of today.

This necessary historical detour out of the way, here is where things start to bear relevance to Brexit.

An unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution, one that allowed Britain to go on and establish an empire whch at its height covered a quarter of the globe, was the forging of a united working class whose unity was able to transcend national, cultural and regional differences. This working class unity mirrored the unity of the UK’s ruling elites around the various semi-feudal institutions that underpin the British state — namely the monarchy, House of Lords, and a network of private schools that have reared and churned out succeeding generations of the country’s ruling class.

British working class unity, meanwhile, was the product of the country’s heavy industries — coal mining, steel, shipbuilding, etc. — and was expressed in common economic interests and struggles against a common enemy, the bosses and owners of those industries, in the context of the trade union movement. It also began to manifest politically with the formation of the Labour Party at the start of the 20th century.

In tandem, forged over time, was a British national identity that was nourished by the countless wars the state’s ruling elite unleashed and waged over the centuries of an empire that existed not to spread civilisation and modernity to the ‘dark peoples’ of the planet, as its proponents and apologists have always claimed, but as a juggernaut of exploitation, subjugation and oppression.

In those countless colonial wars working class men were used as cannon fodder in a dynamic that has continued to the present day.

Margaret Thatcher began the destruction of this material base of working class unity across the UK in the 1980s. Her free market counter-revolution and resulting deindustrialisation of the nation’s economy turned Britain into what it is today — a service economy underpinned by financialised capital.

Today, now, in consequence, the country’s trade union movement, which once wielded considerable economic and political clout, is but a shadow of its former self , with the Labour Party struggling, under Corbyn’s leadership, to make a full return to the party’s founding principles after Blair and his execrable centrist crew in the 1990s and on into the first decade of the noughties had gutted them in favour of an embrace with the City of London and big business.

Scottish independence rally

The remnants of this Blairite crew within Labour bear much responsibility for the party’s disastrous showing in the election, having acted as an anti-Corbyn fifth column, determined in alignment with the country’s Tory ruling media, political, and security establishment to prevent Corbyn entering Downing Street at all cost

In so doing, they have only succeeded in ensuring that the break-up of the UK is now well-nigh inevitable, what with the SNP receiving a thumping mandate in Scotland and nationalism in the North of Ireland now a majority political current over unionism. In poetic irony, it was only Corbyn’s socialist program, offering economic and social transformation, massive investment in the deindustrialised Brexit regions of South Wales and the North and Midlands of England, as well as Scotland, that provided any hope of repairing the regional, national and cultural fault lines that correspond to the breakdown of the 2016 EU referendum vote.

The post-industrial North and Midlands of England, parts of the country virtually untouched by investment and left without hope after being decimated by Thatcher, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016 a veritable scream from the bowels of austerity Britain. Every one of Scotland’s 32 local authorities, meanwhile, voted to Remain.

Both did so again in the 2019 general election, with Corbyn’s message of social and economic justice failing to penetrate the fog of emotion, rooted not in class but national identity, of the Brexit-Remain divide.

The result of the election, which Corbyn fought in the teeth of an unprecedented assault by the British ruling establishment, confirms that what was once the United Kingdom is now the dis-United Kingdom, with those previously mentioned national and regional differences informing its peoples’ identities and worldview over the identity of class to an extent previously unseen.

Karl Marx reminds us that: “To call upon people to give up their illusions about their condition, is to call upon them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

The illusion that Brexit is actually relevant to the needs of those who’ve seen their lives devoured by the beast of neoliberalism and bludgeoned by austerity must soon give way to the unvarnished truth that the UK as we know it is past its sell-by date.

“A reactionary,” the great postwar Labour left icon Nye Bevan once said, “is a man walking backwards with his face to the future.” Surveying a political class presently engaged in ripping itself apart over Brexit, who could argue otherwise?

Considering that the slow motion execution of Julian Assange, who’s currently languishing in London’s Category A Belmarsh Prison, is taking place at the behest of a British legal system whose adherents boast is a pillar of Western civilisation, Benjamin’s observation is well made.
Because be in no doubt, the founder and former editor of Wikileaks, the publishing organisation which since established in 2006 has removed the cloak of democracy from the face of an empire whose high crimes and war crimes would make Genghis Khan blush, has been placed on a metaphorical cross at in the name of nothing more ennobling than vengeance and retribution.

The chilling warning that Assange could die in the prison unless he receives urgent medical treatment — a warning published in the Guardian in the form of an open letter signed by more than 60 doctors — should make every person of conscience and consciousness tremble with rage. Compounding his brutal treatment is the knowledge that he is not being forced to suffer in the name of British justice, but instead in the name of British subservience to Washington.

In this regard the British state is acting like a rogue state, evincing no respect for international law or human rights, much less basic human decency.

Don’t just take my word for it either. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Assange at Belmarsh recently, voiced strong concerns over the conditions of his detention, arguing that ‘The blatant and sustained arbitrariness shown by both the judiciary and the Government in this case suggests an alarming departure from the UK’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law. This is setting a worrying example, which is further reinforced by the Government’s recent refusal to conduct the long-awaited judicial inquiry into British involvement in the CIA torture and rendition programme.’

Added to the revelation that while confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy between 2012 and 2019, where he’d sought political asylum fearing extradition to the US, Julian Assange was secretly being spied on by a Spanish defence and private security company at the behest of US intelligence — the revelation that the husband of the judge presiding over his extradition to the US until recently, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, has financial links to the UK military establishment, ‘including institutions and individuals exposed by Wikileaks’ — and you have a case that is so sordidly corrupt that it is no hyperbole to assert, as precisely the aforementioned Nils Melzer did in an article back in June, that ‘this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy.’

Julian Assange, in his role as editor of Wikileaks, has been the canary down the coal mine of this very ‘Western democracy’, exposing the rank hypocrisy, lies, exceptionalism, and barbarity that are embedded in its foundations. For so doing he’s now being forced to endure the kind of punishment that even Kafka couldn’t conjure up.

Expanding on this literary theme, it was American novelist Thomas Wolfe who in his essay ‘God’s Lonely Man’ argued that loneliness is the universal yet unspoken fate of all in society. He wrote: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

The concept of the isolation and loneliness of the individual in society is one that has been explored continuously. In literature Albert Camus’ seminal work The Stranger, also titled The Outsider (1942), describes the alienation of the novel’s protagonist, Meursault, before, during and after he kills a man in self defence. In first person narrative, the reader is introduced to Meursault being notified of his mother’s death. He attends the wake but refuses to view the body when offered the chance. Later he attends the funeral, but does so absent of any of the conventional emotions associated with bereavement. When standing trial for killing the man in self defence, he likewise betrays no emotion, as if passively accepting his fate.

Meursault’s crime in the eyes of society isn’t so much that he killed a man, but that he demonstrated no emotion or remorse either in the aftermath or before when attending to his mother’s death. This lack of emotion bespeaks a refusal to conform, an abnormality, thus marking him out as a threat to the system and its moral verities.

Taken in context then, Julian Assange has provided the world with a glimpse of an empire in decline. More, he has provided it with a warning of the grim consequences if, like Camus’s Meursault, it remains passive in the face of the crimes and violations of human rights it commits on a daily basis in a desperate and cynical attempt to maintain its fading hegemony.
It is why at this moment, languishing in Belmarsh Category A Prison in London, the founder of Wikileaks is indeed God’s Lonely Man.

Thus, it is the duty of all who believe in truth and justice to end his loneliness and with one voice demand his release. For if Julian Assange is allowed to perish in prison not only will we be indicted in the court of history, like him we may well find ourselves indicted in the court of those who speak the language of democracy while practising the law of the jungle.

This privileged Old Etonian’s contempt for parliamentary democracy and sovereignty, the judiciary and common decency was on full parade in the Commons on a day — the 25th of September 2019 — that will live in infamy.

For on this day, Boris Johnson returned to the despatch box not as the wounded and chastened prime minister of a democracy, who’d just been found to have acted unlawfully by UK Supreme Court in the unanimous opinion of eleven judges, but instead as the ideological progeny of Oswald Mosley, intent on placing himself at the head of a gathering nativist xenophobic mob.

As he thundered and spat words of incitement, accusing his opponents of betrayal, cowardice, sabotage and surrender, it was chilling to think that the far right terrorist who murdered Jo Cox in 2016, Thomas Mair, would have been listening from his prison cell and hollering his approval. This is where we are now, and no one should dare make the mistake of believing that it can’t happen here.

As Bertolt Brecht presciently warned after WWII, “The womb from that which crawled remains fertile.”

In similar conditions of economic extremis and dislocation as those which obtained in the 1930s, Brexit has unleashed a carnival of reaction, cleaving deep social and political fissures across the UK’s regions and constituent nations. It has driven a stake through the heart of social cohesion and brought us to the most dangerous point in the country’s postwar history.

Thus, progressing beyond a political crisis into the territory of a full blown constitutional crisis, we currently find ourselves teetering on the edge of social unrest along the lines of Roundheads and Cavaliers.

With the urging of his brain, Dominic Cummings, Johnson is taking his cue from Donald Trump and his brain, Steve Bannon, in capitalising on the detestation of the mainstream that exists among a large swathe of the country. It is only this detestation of politicians and politics-as-usual that has allowed both Trump and Johnson to present themselves as anti-establishment tribunes of ‘the people’, being denied their democratic rights by the establishment.

The Gracchi assumed the same mantle at a time when the the days of the Roman Republic were beginning to set and the age of the Roman Empire was about to rise. The difference between them and their modern equivalents is one of substance and sincerity.

Because in attempting to ram through the no deal hard Brexit favoured by Trump, Johnson is not acting on behalf not of the British people in the name of democracy, but instead on behalf of US corporations in the name of disaster capitalism.

It is a project that has nothing at all to do with reasserting British sovereignty and everything to do with completing Thatcher’s right wing revolution — in other words, the decimation of the last vestiges of collectivism and social solidarity left over from the Keynesian postwar consensus, entrenching free market nostrums and the virtues of selfishness and individualism in their place.

In other words, in the Tory dystopia to come every man and woman will be on their own, reduced to economic units whose only value is their value to the machine.

People who voted to Brexit in the referendum held on 23 June 2016 did so for a variety of reasons. But the primary reason — surrounding identity — is the most dangerous of all, elevating as it does visceral and base emotions of national particularism, tribalism, us and them, involving demonisation of ‘the other’.

As for Boris Johnson, his is a public life punctuated by scandal and controversy. Thus far none have succeeded in bringing him down, and at this juncture he is an existential threat to the left and to a working class that is in danger, given the extent to which the right has been winning the battle of ideas in response to the crisis of neoliberalism and ravages of austerity, of being the living embodiment of the sage words of Simon Bolivar. To wit: “An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction.” Johnson’s hubris is unbounded, while his practiced buffoonery, born to rule sense of entitlement and Winston Churchill tribute act is no longer any laughing matter. As things stand, he is a right wing despot in the making.

]]> https://prruk.org/the-us-is-going-after-iran-with-the-gusto-of-a-rabid-dog-that-hasnt-eaten-in-days/ Wed, 15 May 2019 16:24:42 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=10663

Source: RT

Trump has embarked on a trajectory which unless averted, and soon, will propel him and the United States over a cliff into a hell of his own creation.

Source: Medium

“The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

There are times when an individual dares to stand against the prevailing tide of orthodoxy and received truth, and is visited receive with the kind of social anathematisation and obloquy consistent with public persecution at the hands of society’s self-appointed moral, cultural and political guardians.

Such an individual was Paul Robeson, a figure who still today looms imperious as the epitome of unshakeable principle, courage, fidelity and defiance of a status quo mired in hypocrisy and nourished by injustice. In his case, in the process, he succeeded in breaking free of the limitations imposed by a purely racial and national consciousness, embracing a politics rooted in the universal struggles and plight of the working man of all lands, and all races, wherever capitalism and its works midwifed into existence racism, gross inequality, brutal conditions and, in periods of crisis, fascism.

Though such a proclamation might normally come with hyperbole warning attached, where Paul Robeson’s concerned it actually verges on understatement.

Not only did his refusal to buckle during one of the most censorious and neuralgic periods in US history – the years of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch hunts – place him on a higher moral plane than most who went before and have come after, the manner in which he was willing to sacrifice a lucrative career in showbusiness and the worldwide acclaim it brought him from the rich and connected, arguably elevates the man to the status of a martyr for free speech, free association, peace and racial and economic justice.

During his appearance before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) in Washington on 12 June 1956, the following exchange took place:

CHAIRMAN: There was no [racial]prejudice against you. Why did you not sent your son to Rutgers?

ROBESON: This is something that I challenge very deeply, and very sincerely, the fact that the success of a few Negroes, including myself or Jackie Robinson can make up — and here is a study from Colombia University — for $700 a year for thousands of Negro families in the South. My father was a slave, and I have cousins who are sharecroppers and I do not see my success in terms of myself. That is the reason, my own success has not meant what it should mean. I have sacrificed literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for what I believe in.

This passage alone offers a scintillating insight into the factors responsible for shaping Robeson’s worldview, his sense of self and profound understanding of the disjuncture between the national myths that sustained the ‘idea’ of America — liberty, freedom and opportunity — and the acute racial, economic, and social injustice that constituted the ‘reality’.

Just imagine the feeling growing with the knowledge that your father, your flesh and blood from whose seed you were spawned, had been a slave; reduced to human chattel to be treated, mistreated, bought and sold at the whim of another. Imagine the wounding sense of grievance at the knowledge that such a grotesque state of affairs existed in a country that proclaims itself the home of the brave and land of the free, and which prides itself on being a castle of democracy and liberty. Just, for a moment, imagine.

Do so and you cannot fail to arrive at the beginning of understanding relating to the elemental drive for something approximating to justice not only for his own people in America, but the oppressed everywhere, one that consumed Robeson throughout his conscious life.

The old union mantra of ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ was Paul Robeson’s credo, precisely as it should be when delineating what began as a racial consciousness and was then augmented by a class and political consciousness to forge an unbreakable trinity that imbued his life with a purpose exponentially greater than self.

Here he is in 1949, laying it all out: “My father was of slave origin. He reached as honorable a position as a Negro could under these circumstances, but soon after I was born he lost his church and poverty was my beginning. Relatives from my father’s North Carolina family took me in, a motherless orphan, while my father went to new fields to begin again in a corner grocery store. I slept four in a bed, ate the nourishing greens and cornbread. I was and am forever thankful to my honest, intelligent, courageous, generous aunts, uncles and cousins, not long divorced from the cotton and tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina.

There exists wonderful footage of Paul Robeson singing to Scottish miners in 1949. He looks completely comfortable, natural and at ease in their company, as do they in his; as if in that preternatural instinct possessed by the industrial working class, they sensed that here among them was not a visiting dignitary, arriving in their midst in a spirit of paternalism, but a man who stood with them in solidarity.

In his epic novel Docherty, following the struggles of a family in the fictional mining town of Graithnock in Ayrshire, Scotland at the turn of the last century, author William McIlvanney has the novel’s eponymous hero Tam Docherty declare during a debate with his wayward middle son Angus, “In any country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae live in that country? The folk at the bottom. The rest can a’ kid themselves on. They can afford to have fancy ideas. We canny, son. We lose the one idea o’ who we are , we’re dead. We’re one another. Tae survive, we’ll respect one another. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward together, or not at all.”

Robeson was a man whose values and outlook were forged on the basis of this very sentiment. It is why wherever workers were congregated anywhere in the world, this proud black African-American was at home, whether it be in America, Australia, South Wales, Scotland or Russia. In a 1949 interview, he talked about his struggle to unite working people across the world just as the Cold War was about to forge national amnesia in America and the West when it came to the Grand Allliance between Britain, the US and the Soviet Union that had succeeded in defeating fascism just four years earlier.

Robeson: “I toured England in peace meeting for British-Soviet friendship, did a series of meetings on the issues of freedom for the peoples of Africa and the West Indies, and on the question of the right of colored seamen and colored technicians to get jobs in a land for which they had risked their lives. Ten thousand people turned out to a meeting in Liverpool on this latter issue.” Continues: “I stood at the coal pits in Scotland and saw miners contribute their earnings $1,500 to $2,000 for the benefit of African workers…My role was in no sense personal. I represented to these people Progressive America, fighting for peace and freedom, and I bring back to you their love and affection, their promise of their strength to aid us, and their gratefulness for our struggles here.”

Robeson’s unapologetic solidarity with the peoples of the Soviet Union in a time of fanatical anti-Communism in America guaranteed that the forces of hell would be unleashed against him. Yet like the proverbial Daniel in the lion’s den, not for a minute, despite the career suicide his stance earned, did he flinch or budge. Again, from 1949: “For the progressive peoples of America the memory of the hero-cities Stalingrad, Leningrad, Odessa, and Sevastopol is sacred. Sacred are the names of the defenders of Moscow. We remember them and we will never forget them.”

Paul Robeson’s affection for the Soviet Union, outlined above, was rooted in his unwavering reverence and appreciation of the indispensable role its people played in defeating fascism in Europe during WWII. To him, this world-historical struggle was of seminal importance not only to the people’s of Europe but also Africa and throughout the Southern Hemisphere, given the ideological, political and material support provided to the multiple national liberation struggles against Western colonialism by the Soviets in the pre and postwar period.

The McCarthyite era after the war, wherein after Roosevelt’s death his successor Harry S Truman signed into law the National Security Act, establishing a permanent war economy and vast intelligence apparatus -configured to meet the new demands of the Cold War against Moscow -Robeson viewed as a betrayal of the heroic struggle against fascism. The singer and actor drew a connection between McCarthyism and racial injustice that was being suffered by blacks, particularly in the Deep South, where lynchings were still routine. He drew a strong connection between both of these maladies and fascism.

Robeson: “The essence of fascism is two things. Let us take the more obvious one first: Racial superiority, the kind of racial superiority that led Hitler to wipe out 6,000,000 Jewish people, that can result any day in the lynching of Negro people in the South or other parts of America, the denial of their rights, the constant daily denial to any Negro in America, no matter how important, of his essential human dignity which no other American will accept, this daily insult to the human being.”

Within Paul Robeson raged a sense of justice and hatred of racial and class oppression. He articulated both with uncommon gravitas and sincerity, lending him a majesty which belied the public opprobrium and anathematisation he endured at the hands of men whose collective legacy amounts to a particle of sand in comparison. Internationalism was to him more than a word or even principle it was a non-negotiable condition of human progress. He went wherever exploitation reigned, more at home among workers in mining communities, whether in Russia, Scandinavia, Scotland or Wales than in the grand opulent theatres and venues at which he performed in his time.

Paul Robeson was born 9 April 1898 and died 23 January 1976. Throughout his long life he set bar of fidelity to unshakeable principle so high that very few have come close to reaching it since.The price paid in monetary terms and in terms of the demonisation he was subjected to throughout the postwar period, over his refusal to compromise on his solidarity with the officially designated enemy of a Washington political and security establishment defined not by democracy but white supremacy, was as nothing when set alongside the mammoth legacy he achieved not only as an artist and political activist, but as a man.

In his own words: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

Amen.

Source: RT

News coverage of the suffering and carnage has been so sparse in the mainstream media you would struggle to locate it using the Hubble Space Telescope.

If a special place in hell is reserved for a Saudi kleptocracy that wears its barbarism as a badge of honor rather than shame, Britain’s ignoble role in actively facilitating Riyadh’s murderous war in Yemen is surely deserving of the same.

Thinking about it the scope of the inhuman brutality that has been inflicted on the Yemeni people over the course of a conflict that began in 2015, it is near impossible to fathom the pristine hypocrisy of a British political establishment that is never done lecturing the world on matters great and small.

Britain’s most revered prime minister, Winston Churchill, once famously described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Perhaps, perhaps not, but where there is absolutely no mystery or enigma is in a British foreign policy that is testament to opportunism rather than principle, one made worse by the sanctimony in which it comes wrapped, regardless of the ocean of blood of its countless victims year after year.

London’s opportunism and Riyadh’s sectarian brutality are currently entwined in a marriage of murder in Yemen, a conflict whose dismal human toll most recently accounted for 11 more people killed, children included, and 30 wounded in yet another Saudi airstrike unleashed on Sanaa, the country’s capital.

In a UN report on the conflict, published in November 2018, the military campaign conducted by the Saudis and their allies in Yemen has accounted for 17,640 civilian casualties since it began in 2015, including 6,872 dead and 10,768 injured, excluding those who have perished from malnutrition and disease. However, in a piece for the UK’s Independent news website in October 2018, veteran and respected Middle East correspondent, Patrick Cockburn, made the astonishing claim that the official casualty figures in Yemen have been vastly understated.

“Little information about casualties in Yemen reaches the outside world because Saudi and the UAE make access difficult for foreign journalists and other impartial witnesses. By contrast to the war in Syria, the American, British and French governments have no interest in highlighting the devastation caused in Yemen – they give diplomatic cover to the Saudi intervention.”

Patrick Cockburn makes a cogent point when it comes to the assertion that Britain and its Western allies have “no interest in highlighting” the devastation that has and continues to be wrought in Yemen by the Saudis. News coverage and analyses of the suffering and carnage has been so sparse in the mainstream media you would struggle to locate it using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Riyadh is the single biggest customer of the UK arms industry, within which the country’s principal arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, has been the trade’s principal beneficiary – this to the point where the Saudi national flag should be flying over the company’s corporate headquarters in central London, alongside a bright red flag denoting the blood that is on its corporate hands.

For those who may accuse me of lapsing into hyperbole at this point, consider that with the legal sanction of the British government, the Saudis purchased a sixth of everything BAE Systems produced in 2017, and that, according to the UK pressure group, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), many of those weapons have been used by the Saudis in Yemen against civilians, thus in violation of international humanitarian law.

It’s also worth pointing out that in 2016 the European Parliament voted for an EU-wide arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, which the UK government blithely ignored; more interested in the cash bonanza to be had with the sharp uptick in arms sales to the kingdom due to the war in Yemen.

But it’s not only on the level of arms sales that Britain is up to its bowler hat in blood when it comes to Saudi war crimes. British technical expertise and military assistance have also been brought to bear in the conflict in Yemen – and far more extensively than previously thought. We know this because the role of UK defense contractors in this regard, many of them BAE Systems’ employees, others ex-UK military personnel working under direct contract to the Saudi government, was recently the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary.

Among the most damning of the evidence revealed in the documentary is that the Saudi air force would be unable to fly the British Typhoon fighter jets used to conduct airstrikes in Yemen without the technical assistance of UK personnel, working at airbases within the kingdom.

We already knew, due to an expose that appeared on the Mail Online news website in November 2017, that British military personnel had been revealed to be engaged in training Saudi troops for the war in Yemen in a mission known as Operation Crossways. Now, with the damning evidence revealed by Dispatches, there is no arguing the fact that the war in Yemen is as much a British war as it is Saudi.

I mentioned the UK pressure group, CAAT, earlier. As these words were being written, CAAT – with the backing of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Oxfam – were preparing to enter the Royal Courts of Justice in London to appeal against a 2017 High Court ruling, denying a judicial review of UK arms exports to the Saudis.

In the society to which I aspire, CAAT would be entering the court to give evidence at the trial of the CEO of BAE Systems, Mr Charles Woodburn, on a charge of accessory to war crimes. Justice in a country whose ruling class is not afflicted by a profound moral sickness would surely dictate nothing less.

Such a country is not Britain in 2019.

Source: RT

For the army of smug liberals, many of them leading columnists in newspapers such as the Guardian, that noise they hear right now is the death rattle of their collective moral conscience.

Julian Assange is being punished for removing the veil of freedom, human rights, and civil liberties from the face of an empire of hypocrisy and lies.

BREAKING NEWS 11 April 2019: Julian Assange arrested by the Metropolitan Police at the Ecuador Embassy.

Source: Medium

Brexit and Trump were predominately delivered by a white working class in battered and bruised deindustrialised regions of the UK and US.

There are times when the truth is not enough, when only the unvarnished truth will do; and the unvarnished truth when it comes to the terrorist massacre that unfolded against Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand is that unless we wake up to and confront the beast of white supremacy that is now in our midst, we are headed for perdition.

The unity and interpenetration of opposites is a key tenet of Marx’s dialectial materialism, a theoretical formula that applies with impeccable insight when arriving at a proper rendering of the worldview of the white supremacist mass murderer responsible for Christchurch. It is a worldview that stands both as the polar opposite and twin of the Salafist-jihadism espoused by al-Baghdadi and ISIS.

Because in the last analysis the divide within the humanity that allows us to penetrate the obfuscation of racial, religious and ethnic divisions is not the divide that exists between Muslim and non-Muslim, between Jew and non-Jew, Christian and non-Christian, or white and non-white. No, the divide, the only divide, which corresponds to the human condition in all its multifarious complexity is the divide that exists between a sectarian and non-sectarian worldview and consciousness.

White supremacy is both by-product and driver of Western colonialism and imperialism. When Columbus set sail across the Atlantic from Spain in the 15th century, expecting to reach India and China but instead ending up in the Americas by accident, he did so not with a heart bursting with Christian love and fellow feeling for whomsoever he and his men might encounter when they finally reached their destination. Instead they set sail with hearts filled with the rapacious intent to plunder and dominate. This is because for them Christianity was both religion and ideology interwoven, coterminous with Western so-called civilisation, based on nothing more ennobling than might is right.

From then to now the same might is right ethos has lain at the root of the West’s dominant cultural values. That Europe’s rapid economic development, starting from around the mid 17th century, was down to an accident of geography rather than any racial or cultural superiority compared to the lesser economically developed non-West, has been conveniently elided from the West’s cultural and political taxonomy, usurped by a set of cultural and historical myths deployed with the objective of wedding the masses throughout the West to the value system of their own ruling classes.

White supremacy as both a racial and ideological construct has been the result; though in normal times sans the rhetoric of white supremacy, given that white supremacy is so historically entrenched within Western culture it has long been embedded the collective unconscious of Western societies. It is why when atrocities such as the one just carried out in Christchurch explode in our midst, political leaders from left to right of the narrow spectrum that constitutes the mainstream outdo themselves in platitudes of condemnation and sympathy for the victims. That they do so having been the architects of even worse atrocities against Muslims or black and brown people in our time, unleashing devastating wars under the flag of democracy and human rights, this is the hypocrisy that has undergirded Western colonialism and imperialism since time immemorial.

With the inimitable insight for which he was known, Edward Said once pointed out that every empire “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

Multiculturalism is at once a child of empire and Western colonialism and also the revenge of its victims (not literally, of course, in the abstract). Its unintended consequence, as it has broadened out over the decades, has been to challenge prevailing national myths and identities, giving rise to a reconsideration of the history of Western civilisation and its conceits.

Thus the presence and growth of other cultures forces us to re-evaluate that which we’d been taught and conditioned to believe represents progress and human worth. In the process of doing so, as the myths that sustain the West’s dominant cultural values are gradually and steadily stripped away, we are forced to confront received truths fed to us from childhood over the West’s role in the world, its history of plunder of the lands of ‘the other’. The African proverb that “until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,” springs to mind here.

In this scenario, multiculturalism in Western societies is something we can either embrace as a means of mental and cultural emancipation from those myths and the unconsciously-held prejudices they sustain, or reject as a threat to those myths and the national identity established on the back of them — one that, perforce, is rooted in white supremacy.

The economic extremis wrought by the crisis of global capitalism starting in 2008, culminating in draconian austerity programmes that only left already vulnerable deindustrialised regions and communities battered and bruised, has tilted the scales in favour of the latter at the expense of the former in those regions, with Brexit and the election of Trump in the US the most obvious result.

The uncomfortable truth we must contend with is that both Brexit and Trump were predominately delivered by a white working class in those battered and bruised deindustrialised regions of the UK and US, but less on the basis of class and more on the basis of whiteness – or, to be more sociologically precise, ethnocentrism. It is surely no accident that the white supremacist terrorist responsible for the Christchurch massacre cited Trump in his ‘manifesto’ as “a symbol of renewed white identity,” while also stating his support for Brexit.

Hip-hop artist, writer and thinker, Akala, in his imperious book Race and Class In the Ruins of Empire, highlights among other things the following data vis-a-vis the 2016 EU referendum result:

1. Of the people who thought multiculturalism was an ill, 81 per cent voted leave
2. Of the people who thought immigration was an ill, 80 per cent voted leave
3. Of the thirty areas with the most people identifying as English not British, all voted leave

He also writes persuasively of how “the narrative of white racial victimhood is very useful in class terms for the white ruling classes. By demonising the undeserving ethnic other with whom poor whites have more materially in common, the upper classes can use a racial solidarity rooted in the history of dominating the other to mask a history and reality of exploitation. Those that instrumentalise race in this way generally could not give two shits about the ‘chavs’ in Liverpool or the ‘redknecks’ in Alabama.”

The mass murdering white supremacist and your average Brexit or Trump supporter could not be farther apart in terms of how their race consciousness manifests in actions. There were and are entirely legitimate reasons to vote for and support Brexit and Trump, given the role of the extreme centre in fashioning a world fit for bankers and corporations rather than ordinary working people. That said it is inarguable that white racial anger was the driver of both – misplaced, misdirected and shaped by the politics of ethnocentrism rather than class.

Confronting this ugly truth has never been more necessary, along with drawing the conclusion that support for multiculturalism must be embraced rather than rejected or viewed as an optional extra in the struggle for transformative change as part of the class struggle.

The alternative hardly bears thinking about.

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Corbyn and his supporters are being witch-hunted, chased from pillar to post by a feral UK mainstream media that has entered full firing squad mode.

Source: Medium

Venezuela is shaping up to be our Spanish Civil War. And like Spain in the 1930s, the struggle taking place now is of world-historical importance .

If this is to be the end of the Bolivarian Revolution, be in no doubt that it will be a bloody and chaotic affair. For it is no exaggeration to state that Venezuela is shaping up to be our Spanish Civil War. And like Spain in the 1930s, the struggle taking place in the Latin American oil rich country now is of world-historical importance — arguably even more so than those that took place or continue to unfold in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, places where rampant and unfettered US-led Western hegemony has left its blood-soaked footprint since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Though some may still retain the capacity to suspend disbelief and elicit the desired Pavlovian response to the rolling out of the Holy Trinity of democracy, human rights and freedom as justification for imperialist aggression by Washington and the usual suspects, there are those of us who refuse to be infantilised. Trump and his neocon grim reaper crew — Bolton, Abrams and Pompeo — are engaged in a campaign against the sovereign government of Venezuela of which Julius Caesar would have been happy to associate himself while rampaging through Gaul, coronating their placeman Guaido in Caracas while salivating over the prospect of getting their gnarled hands on the country’s prodigious oil reserves.

Never knowingly late to the feast, the usual clutch of Washington’s European satellites, with the honourable exception of Italy, have followed instructions in the accustomed manner, joining in the frog’s chorus of recognition of Juan Guaido as interim president and the demand for new elections in a country that sits across the other side of the world in a far off continent. This is at a time when the leader of the opposition in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, cannot get Theresa May to call an election in the midst of a Brexit crisis that has paralysed her government — a government that continues to mercilessly bludgeon millions of its own people for daring to commit poverty.

Compounding the hypocrisy of perfidious Albion when it comes to Venezuela is the act of grand larceny committed by the Bank of England in sequestering £1.2 billion of Caracas’s gold reserves. At least Dick Turpin went to the trouble of wearing a mask.

In France, meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron has done more for the colour yellow than Dulux could ever dream. Despite harbouring delusions of grandeur as a world leader of note, France’s President of the Rich is has already gone down in history as the most unpopular leader to occupy the Elysee Palace since Louis XVI was striding through the place with his head still attached to his shoulders.

Having lost in Syria, the beast of US hegemony has now turned its attention to Venezuela, whose present troubles are a consequence of capitalism and imperialism not socialism. This is not to claim that President Maduro has not made mistakes or wrong turns since his election as Hugo Chavez’s successor: first in 2013 after the latter’s death, then again in 2018. Both elections, en passant, were adjudged free and fair by international observers; and both were conducted wholly in keeping with the country’s constitution.

But with a nation’s internal development inextricably linked to the external pressures arrayed against it in a given time and space — especially those nations of the Global South whose vulnerability to the hegemonic agenda of the West is ever present—any deficiencies in Maduro’s governance must weighed against the actions of a determined domestic opposition, supported by Washington, and Venezuela’s history of under development.

Oil reserves are both a curse and a blessing for a country like Venezuela. They are a curse in that the economic bounty they provide disincentivises the drive for economic diversification. This has been the case in Venezuela for generations; long periods when the country’s oil was harnessed not in the cause of improving the condition of the masses of the poor and dispossessed, or to invest in other sectors with economic diversification in mind, but to enrich an oligarchy for whom the nation’s poor and dispossessed were invisible.

Though oil is a valuable commodity, oil prices can act as a potent weapon, especially when applied to a country that is oil dependent and in the crosshairs of hegemony. Chavez used the revenue from the country’s oil exports when oil prices were buoyant to fund the social programs which transformed the condition of the poor in the barrios. The result was social indicators that inspired millions throughout the region and beyond during his first decade in power. However, with oil accounting for 98 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings, when oil prices took a tumble in 2014, the economy was hit with uncommon severity.

Criticisms of Chavez’s own lack of serious attempt at diversification during the good times are not entirely without foundation, however in a 2016 article in The Nation, Gabriel Hetland points out that that the healthy growth in the Venezuelan economy in the first decade or so of Chavez’s tenure “was made possible by the 2003–2008 oil boom,” but that nonetheless “the non-oil sector grew faster than the oil sector during this period, and government reserves increased.”

What must be borne in mind when it comes to moves towards economic diversification by nations of the Global South is the immovable force of existing market relations. Those relations favour the rich economies of the northern hemisphere in terms of trade, investment, currency and technology. Indeed, in essence, the global economy operates with the express purpose of maintaining a status quo by which the development of the so-called First World is predicated on the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World.

Many analyses have been produced making the case that Chavez damaged Venezuela’s oil industry by extracting too much revenue from it to fund the aforementioned social programs, while not reinvesting enough in what is a capital-intensive industry. Assuming there is some validity to this, the neglect of the poor in the country prior to Chavez was the prime mover in him being elected and re-elected time and again up to his death, and thus their plight was rightly central to his leadership.

Chavez’s showdown with the management and workforce of Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, in 2003 — culminating in his government firing the management and 18,000 workers — did much to disrupt the country’s oil industry, of this there is no doubt. This kind of disruption and sabotage has been a running theme in Venezuela since Chavez came to power (the attempted coup in 2002 being the most obvious example) on the part of an opposition whose actions have consistently demonstrated a preference for ruination and US intervention to socialism in a country it believes is theirs to rule. Because abstracted in the doom-laden analyses on the whys and wherefores behind the destruction of the Venezuelan oil industry and economy, analyses of a type found at Forbes and the FT, is the vicious and unremitting ideological struggle that has underpinned politics in Venezuela during the Chavez and Maduro years.

These one-sided analyses of Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro is no surprise, of course, not when the upsurge in mass consciousness the Bolivarian Revolution produced brought with it the possibility of an escape from a capitalist past that had shackled not only Venezuela but Latin America in its entirety to Washington via the dollar, reducing the entire region to a vast neo-colony.

Where Chavez can be justly criticised is in his failure to root out corruption, and his mismanagement of the nation’s currency in opening the door to the kind of rampant corruption that remains a feature of the country’s woes to this day.

Gabriel Hetland: “The problem stems from the coexistence of three different exchange rates, and the yawning gulf between the lower of two official rates and the black market, or parallel, rate,” creating created “immense incentives for corruption among businesses and state/military officials who are provided dollars by the government at the lower official rate. These businesses and officials often trade these dollars on the black market in order to make obscene profits. Second, the diversion of dollars away from imports and into illegal black-market trading has contributed to severe scarcities as well as the marked drop in imports. Third, production by legitimate businesses (as opposed to ghost enterprises, so-called empresas de maletín) has declined because of their lack of access to dollars and needed inputs.”

Hetland also criticises Chavez’s refusal to lift capital controls at a certain point, though this is problematic given the danger, indeed likelihood, of capital flight in an economy in which the private sector, controlled by the opposition, still retains a commanding footprint.

US and international sanctions, imposed in various guises since 2015, when initially introduced by the Obama administration — along with reguar bouts of social unrest due to the actions of a restive and aggressive opposition — have had the effect of frightening off private investment and restricting access to dollars, thus producing shortages due to the inability of the government to import foods, medicines and other basic necessities.

With the aforesaid factors in mind, Chavez made a sharp turn to Moscow and Beijing before he died. Maduro deepened those ties, borrowing extensively from both in recent years to provide Venezuela with a semblance of a lifeline in the midst of prolonged economic and social crises. Though China’s relations with Maduro have been solely economic, receiving oil in return for loans and investing in the country’s copper and gold mining industries since 2012, Russia has established ever closer geopolitical and military ties. Last December’s non-stop flight to Venezuela from Russia of two strategic bombers and two other long range military aircraft served to highlight those ties.

That Washington views Russia’s growing relationship with Caracas, especially on the level of military cooperation, as a serious threat to its own influence in a region it has always considered a US fiefdom is not in doubt, with the Trump administration’s move for regime change just two months after the aforementioned international flight of Russian military aircraft to the country clear evidence.

Whatever the outcome of the crisis in Venezuela, and at time of writing civil war is a distinct and emerging possibility, the country is now, as with Syria and Ukraine before it, a key frontline in the continuing struggle between the forces of hegemony and unipolarity, led by the US, and those of anti-hegemony and multipolarity, led by Russia and China.

Taking a broader view, when the history of this period in Venezuela’s history is written it will be impossible to avoid exploring the possibility that just as a woman cannot be half pregnant, an economy cannot be half socialist and half capitalist in a time of imperialist hegemony. Authoritarianism is not a charge that can be seriously laid at the door of Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro. On the contrary, it is arguable that both men were not authoritarian enough in relation to a US-supported and funded opposition.

It is also hard to argue that the severe shift to the right that has taken place across Latin America overall, after an all too brief pink tide, has left Caracas isolated with few allies.

“There are decades when nothing happens,” it is said, “and weeks when decades happen.” The crisis in Venezuela confirms that those weeks are upon us.

For the first time in generations, the Labour Party is led by a man who offers a decisive break with the status quo.

Amidst the chaos of her Brexit negotiations Theresa May still hangs on. For how much longer, who knows? But, as John Wight explains, her best hope for survival is the establishment’s fear and trembling over the prospect of her being replaced by a government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

The escalating crises that are now a near daily occurrence within May’s government and cabinet are symptomatic of a Tory party which is irretrievably split on Brexit between no-deal fundamentalists, of whom Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is most prominent, and soft Brexit single market adherents, led by Chancellor Phillip Hammond.

It is in the context of this split, which has grown evermore deep and antagonistic over the months of deadlock and lack of progress in the government’s Brexit negotiations with Brussels, that Theresa May has been drained of personal authority to the point where the likes of Johnson and her former International Development Secretary, Priti Patel, have felt emboldened to go rogue and plough their own furrows. Add to the mix the recent resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon over sexual harassment revelations, and at this writing the mounting pressure on her Secretary of State Damien Green to resign over similar allegations of sexual impropriety, and Theresa May has been reduced to a political mannequin.

However for the British establishment the only thing worse than a mannequin in Number Ten is Jeremy Corbyn, whose popularity and personal standing as leader of the opposition and prospective prime minister since June’s general election has only increased. Indeed a seesaw effect between Corbyn’s increasing popularity and May’s increasing unpopularity is now markedly evident.

The reasons for establishment dread of what a Corbyn government portends are easy to discern. For the first time in generations, the Labour Party is led by a man who offers a decisive break with the status quo ideologically, economically, and on foreign policy. While certainly not the Marxist his detractors claim, Jeremy Corbyn is a socialist who believes in redistributing the bulk of society’s surplus to the working class, doing so in the context of increasing investment in public services, a living wage, public ownership, investing in affordable housing, and supporting an enlarged role for the unions in the workplace when it comes not only to defending wages and conditions but improving them.

Taxing the rich, business, clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance, while introducing tighter regulation in the financial and banking sector, ensures that for each of the groups affected, Corbyn looms over the horizon as a latter day Che Guevara intent on fomenting bloody revolution. It is a primal fear reflected in the concerted attempt to destroy his leadership from the moment he was elected leader of Labour in 2015 up to the aforementioned general election, when in cementing his authority with a campaign performance that ranks as one of the best of any Labour candidate for Downing Street ever, it was clear their efforts had failed.

Illustrating the dread within the UK financial and banking industry of what Corbyn represents economically was its hysterical response to Labour’s intention of introducing a financials transaction tax (Robin Hood tax) of 0.5 percent per transaction, bringing with it the prospect of raising up to an additional £5.6 billion in government revenue by 2021/22. With Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell leaving no doubt that the tax was designed to “make the financial sector pay its fair share,” especially given its role in the 2007/08 economic crash, we are talking an economic policy underpinned by an ideological commitment to meaningful wealth redistribution.

Even more danger is attributed to what Corbyn’s foreign policy would entail, how it would impact and change Britain’s various international alliances and commitments. The Labour leader’s years-long support for the cause of Palestinian self-determination is well known, as is his dim view of Britian’s arms trade with Saudi Arabia, its membership of NATO, the Atlantic Alliance with Washington, and on a personal level at least Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent.

With this in mind, one man who is in no doubt that Corbyn should be kept away from Number Ten at all cost is Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agenct MI6. Writing in The Telegraph on the eve of the general election in June, Dearlove opined, “the leader of the Labour Party is an old-fashioned international socialist who has forged links with those quite ready to use terror when they haven’t got their way: the IRA, Hizbollah, Hamas. As a result he is completely unfit to govern and Britain would be less safe with him in No 10.”

The fact that the real danger to Britain’s security in recent times has been a foreign policy responsible for the proliferation of international terrorism, the worst relations with Russia since the Cold War, and a refugee crisis of biblical proportions, is obviously lost on Mr Dearlove and the establishment he represents and undoubtedly speaks for. However the point remains: Jeremy Corbyn is the British establishment’s worst nightmare and the primary reason Theresa May has not yet been kicked to the kerb, risking in the process an early general election which Corbyn would almost certainly win at this point.

If the leader of the opposition was a Blairite and thus represented continuity rather than change, she would already be toast at the hands of her very own cabinet and party of ‘bastards’. “My crown I am,” Shakespeare wrote, “but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state despose but not my griefs; still I am king of those.”

Source: Medium

Theresa May’s determination to hang on regardless long ago crossed the line from tenacity and is now an affront to democracy.

Though no elected British minister or politician of the current crop would dare venture anything approaching an endorsement of Churchill’s dismal verdict of the ‘average voter’, lacking his candour and biting wit for one thing, it’s a fair bet that many are sympathetic to it — and never more so than now with the country at sea in a Brexit storm with the clock ticking down to March 29 with no solution in sight.

It goes without saying that democracy, any democracy, only succeeds to the degree that its supposed beneficiaries, the average voter, are informed with a sufficient grasp of the issues. Yet with responsibility for insuring that he or she is informed devolving to the political class itself, along with a Fourth Estate (mainstream media in today’s parlance) ably and honestly fulfilling its role as disseminator of facts rather than a conduit for the prejudices and political hobby horses of its very rich proprietors, we arrive at the myth of a free press across the West and within the UK in particular.

In fact if any issue embodies the corrosive impact of the current state of media ownership in the UK it is Brexit. In the run-up to the EU referendum in June 2016 a veritable tsunami of half-truths, untruth, and obfuscation peddled by a Brexit-supporting media extended itself in ascribing the cause of British society’s ills to Brussels rather than a generation and more of free market Thatcherite economic nostrums, accompanied by an assault on the welfare state, NHS, public services, and the wages and conditions of the country’s working class.

More recently, in the wake of the 2008 economic crash and the resulting imposition of austerity, the callous disregard for the welfare of the most vulnerable in society spiked to the point where it became commonplace to blame their plight on them themselves, adding insult to very severe injury.

In other words, as part of an exercise in deflecting the underlying cause of the economic crisis — in précis private greed and an unregulated financial and banking sector — the political class and reactionary press successfully made the case that its cause was a crisis of public spending and bloated welfare state, thus setting up the most vulnerable as a convenient scapegoat in the eyes of a wider public demanding answers and solutions.

In the years since this scapegoating has continued apace; only now, in service to Brexit, the guns have been turned on migrants, refugees, and by extension existing minority communities, depicted as a threat to that hoary old leitmotif of ‘British values’.

In parenthesis, just what are those values the British people are meant to hold so dear anyhow? Are the product of an empire that plumbed new depths of racism and brutality in its super-exploitation of large swathes of the developing world? Are they the product of a cultural propensity for unleashing war against poor countries, resulting in the slaughter of innocents? Or do they derive from the callous cruelty towards the poor and vulnerable at home that has long been the shameful hallmark of a sociopathic ruling class?

On the other side of the Brexit divide it is impossible to be a fulsome supporter of the EU — certainly not in its current form — underpinned as it is by institutions that stand as a dismal reflection of a tired and outmoded Washington Consensus.

In fact it is no exaggeration to state that whenever a politician of the stature of Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, pops up on your television screen your stomach automatically hits the floor. Verily, if mediocrity were an Olympic sport Mr Juncker would boast a string of gold medals; yet by dint of some grotesque bureaucratic trick, the man finds himself endowed with the power to dictate chapter and verse to sovereign governments, which unlike him are accountable to electorates.

The cracks that have appeared in the foundations of the EU recent years, of which Brexit is the most serious, reflects the neoliberal economics it champions; the very same that have wreaked havoc in the lives of millions of ordinary working people. In truth, neoliberalism is a corpse whose burial is long overdue. And whether in the context of the EU or Brexit Britain, until there is a fundamental break with this dead economic model political and social crises across Europe will continue to be the rule rather than its exception.

Despite the narrative to the contrary, Polish plumbers and Bulgarian bricklayers are not the enemy of working people in the UK. Migrant workers are not the cause of the crisis within the NHS, the housing crisis, or any of the other crises that working people in Britain are faced with. Those are a product of the most draconian austerity programs of any advanced economy. Taking a wider view, the enemy of working people of all nationalities and cultures are global corporations with their ability to sow economic dislocation and foment a race to the bottom to the detriment of workers of all lands. And with this in mind, for all its manifest drawbacks the only political entity to stand up to global corporations in recent years has been the EU

The concept of European unity is a sound and progressive one; the role of nationalism across the European continent in producing two of the most devastating world wars and conflagrations in human history leaves no doubt of it. But for there to be a truly united Europe the inclusion of Russia and the exclusion of the US is non-negotiable; for it is the lack of the former and too much of the latter that is the true source of Europe’s problems in the second decade of the 21st century.

I maintain that a Corbyn government within the EU would have a massive catalysing impact on left and progressive forces across the continent, pushing back against the traction of an awakened far right and presenting Brussels with an ideological challenge it has not yet faced. This being said, Corbyn’s stance on Brexit at this juncture is the most coherent and nuanced of all the available permutations mooted, tailored as it is to addressing the regional and national fault lines cleaved across these islands over 40 years of Thatcherism, reflected in the breakdown of the 2016 EU referendum result.

Theresa May’s determination to hang on regardless long ago crossed the line from tenacity and is now an affront to democracy. We currently have general mayhem masquerading as leadership; what we need is a general election and new leadership. The mounting casualties of austerity demand nothing less.

As they continue to pile up, Brexit increasingly takes on the character of a sideshow.

See also:
Brexit, Theresa May and the malign incompetence of the British ruling class

Source: RT

Hiring him as the president’s top national security advisor is an invitation to war, perhaps nuclear war. This must be stopped at all costs.

Source: RT

For over 30 years, Washington has engaged in a concerted and unrelenting effort to return the oil-rich country to its ‘rightful’ status as a wholly owned US subsidiary.

The Mexican-American War was a war of plunder and conquest on the part of a US ruling class for whom every country south of the Rio Grande was then, as if by divine right, deemed subservient to Washington. From then to now the US has regarded Latin America as a wholly owned subsidiary, its primary function to serve Washington’s economic interests.

Any Latin American government that dared assert its country’s right to sovereign independence of the US in the years since has found itself subjected to a campaign of subversion and attack, so blatant in gangsterism it would have made Al Capone blush.

It was US Marine General Smedley Butler who famously said after retiring in 1931: “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

This is the context in which Trump’s public recognition of Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaido, as interim president should be weighed.

Starting from the beginning, ever since Hugo Chavez dared liberate Venezuela from the iron grip of a US-controlled local oligarchy in the late 1990s, Washington has engaged in a concerted and unrelenting effort to return the oil-rich country to its ‘rightful’ status as a wholly owned subsidiary.

And what with Venezuela possessing the largest proven oil reserves in the world, for a Trump administration that evinces the characteristics of a New York mafia crime family more than a democratic government, it was always inevitable that this campaign would be ramped up rather than tamped down upon the Orange One’s arrival in the White House in 2016.

Venezuela’s current ‘legally elected’ president, Nicolas Maduro, took over the presidency after his mentor’s death from cancer in 2013, pledging to protect and continue the legacy of radical reforms Chavez inspired and introduced.

And under the aegis of the Bolivarian Constitution, the achievements of those reforms cannot be gainsaid.

The mass literacy known as Mission Robinson was the biggest and most ambitious ever undertaken, its success recognized by UNESCO in 2005 when it declared Venezuela ‘illiteracy-free’. Cuba, crucial to that success, was also involved in the establishment of health clinics, designed to provide free healthcare to the country’s poor.

Additionally, according to the UN, the quality of life of Venezuelans improved at the third highest rate in the world between 2006-11. Poverty was cut from 48.6 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent by 2011, while at the time of Chavez’s death Venezuela had the lowest rate of income inequality of any country in Latin America.

In order to achieve such outstanding outcomes, the Chavez government moved against the country’s US-backed oligarchy, seizing the assets of over 1,000 companies. It also nationalized oil fields owned by US oil giants Exxon Mobil and Conoco Phillips.

Price controls were introduced in order to ensure the affordability of basic necessities, which along with free education, healthcare and the constitutional right to a home ensured that the Bolivarian Revolution was a beacon of hope to the poor and marginalized not just in Venezuela but throughout the region and across the wider Global South.

On foreign policy, meanwhile, Chavez proved a formidable foe of US hegemony, taking every opportunity to denounce the history of Washington’s role in subverting democracy, human rights and national sovereignty throughout Latin America, educating the Venezuelan people on the history of US imperialism in the process.

He sought and forged closer ties with Cuba, China, Russia and Iran – countries that likewise opposed and challenged US domination – and embarked on numerous initiatives throughout the region to foment closer economic, political and cultural integration.

This fruits of this policy were the establishment of the Latin American trading bloc known as Mercosur, the economic, political and cultural integrationist project knows as ALBA, and the pan-Latin American television and media network, Telesur.

Prior to his death, Chavez also had ambitions to set up a regional development bank in order to end dependence on the IMF and World Bank.

The legacy laid out above is important to grasp if serious about understanding why for Washington the Venezuela shaped and inspired by Hugo Chavez could never be allowed to survive.

Since assuming office in 2013, Maduro has had to contend with a sharp drop in the price of oil, which, combined with a determined campaign conducted by a US-supported opposition, plus US sanctions, has plunged the country into a deepening economic, social and political crisis.

The result has been skyrocketing inflation and a shortage of basic goods on supermarket shelves, blamed by Maduro on an orchestrated policy by the opposition of hoarding food supplies in order to foment social unrest.

Now, with the crisis in the country reaching the point of critical mass, Trump’s coronation of Juan Guaido as interim president marks the next and most blatant attack on a Bolivarian Revolution whose only crime, since inception, has been the crime of a good example.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…