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.

While no one familiar with the life of George Jackson would normally dare contradict the kind of wisdom acquired through extreme adversity and hard struggle, the historic victory of Sinn Fein in the 2020 Irish general election suggests that patience can in politics be more courageous than impatience in pursuit of a people’s and nation’s liberation.

The torturous and tragic history of Ireland is inextricably linked to the crimes of British colonialism and empire. It’s partition in 1921 into the 26-country free state in the south and the six counties of the north, which remained under British rule as Northern Ireland, gave rise to the very ‘carnival of reaction’ that had been prophesied by James Connolly years before partition was established.

The London-controlled province, with its inbuilt Protestant and unionist majority, instantly became a by-word for religious sectarianism and institutional apartheid, wherein the Catholic and nationalist minority were viewed as the enemy within and treated as such.

This iniquitous state of affairs gave rise to Irish Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s. Inspired by the Black Civil Rights Movement in the US, it met with the same hostility and violence, its members and supporters attacked and bludgeoned by sectarian thugs both in and out of police uniform whenever and wherever they appeared on the streets of the north to demand equality and civil rights for the province’s Catholic citizens. The resulting strife saw British troops being deployed to Northern Ireland for the first time.

Initially there to keep the peace between both communities, the British Army soon became just another tool of anti-Catholic sectarian oppression in the hands of Northern Ireland unionist administration. The end result was the Ballymurphy Massacre of 1971 in Belfast and Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972. Both events involved troops of the British Parachute Regiment gunning down unarmed civilians.

Into the picture now came the Provisional IRA and 30 years of conflict known as The Troubles.

The high-water mark of an armed struggle which saw atrocities committed by all sides was for Irish Republicanism the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, in which ten Irish Republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, starved themselves to death in protest at having their political status removed by the British.

The death of Sands and his comrades had an enormous international impact, but even more important than that was how Sands’ decision to contest a by-election in Fermanagh and County Tyrone while on hunger strike, which he won, along with the election of fellow hunger striker, Kieran Doherty to the Dail (Irish Parliament) set in train the direction of mainstream Irish republicanism away from the bullet towards the ballot.

Along with former Derry IRA commander Martin McGuinness, now retired President of Sinn Fein Gerry Adams worked to end the IRA’s armed struggle and channel the struggle through the conduit of electoral politics from that point on.

They succeeded in doing so in the face of harsh criticism from within Irish republicanism — from men and women who believed that armed struggle for Irish unity and freedom was sacrosanct and electoral politics a betrayal, in that by definition it recognised British colonial rule in the north and a truncated republic in the south.

Adams’ decision to pivot his own political focus as leader of Sinn Fein to the south in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday, rather than take up a leading role for the party at Stormont within Northern Ireland’s new power-sharing devolved administration, was informed by the view that the road to a united Ireland runs through Dublin.

The 2008 global financial collapse and ensuing global recession, plunging neoliberalism into a crisis only deepened by draconian austerity programmes imposed across the West with the aim of ensuring that the bulk of the resulting economic pain was felt by the working class rather than business class, has succeeded not in saving the status quo but instead renting it asunder.

In the context of the UK a rising tide of support for Scottish independence and Brexit are the fruits, while in Ireland Sinn Fein, a party which for many years was known as the political wing of the Provisional IRA, has just caused a political earthquake.

It allows even the most sceptical to believe that though there remain political obstacles to overcome, a united Ireland has now taken on the character of an idea whose time has come.

End.

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/up-to-its-bowler-hat-in-blood-britains-role-in-the-suffering-of-yemen-is-squalid-beyond-belief/ Mon, 15 Apr 2019 15:10:46 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=10424

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.

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.

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: Medium

All you need do to grasp the magnitude of social carnage that now exists in the UK is walk outside your front door and look around you.

The day before a revolution erupts the consensus is that it could never happen here. The day after it erupts the consensus is that it was always going to happen here. Such a dichotomy marks the difference between complacency and inevitability, which in the context of a social revolution is but a hairsbreadth in dimension.

In his classic account of the French Revolution of 1789–93, Jean Jaures opines that one of its causes was the fact “French royalty didn’t have the ability to understand events or to be open to renewal…It was too old and too tied to ancient powers to accommodate itself to the new times.”

Reading Jaures’ words, this year’s ritual Queen’s Christmas message hovers into admonitory view.

There she was, Queen Elizabeth, as old as time itself, perched inside her gilded palace surrounded by the opulent evidence of an out of touch institution, one that despite standing as a symbol of class privilege manages in normal times to remain inoffensively peripheral due to its enduring presence in our lives.

But the time we are living through now is far from normal. How could it be when the social carnage wrought after eight years of a brutal and one-sided class war, officially known as austerity, has reached the point where there is no longer any hiding place for a ruling class whose utter disregard for the millions of lives destroyed in the process may well, proceeding along its current trajectory, prove its undoing?

If it be so, in decades to come historians will look back and identify the sight of Queen Elizabeth delivering her 2018 Christmas message, perched on a chair in front of an obscene gold piano in a room laden with riches, to be of similar historic moment as Marie Antoinette’s infamous “let them eat cake” dismissal of the suffering of the French masses prior to those masses taking matters into their own hands.

In Britain we have been conditioned to believe that revolutions are either a thing of the past, a mere footnote in history, or only ever take place in far away places we associate with instability and chaos (en passant, that this instability and chaos is created in large part by our own foreign policy is another matter that need not detain us here).

Yet as we move into 2019, the contradictions of a society in which so many have been pushed into poverty and destitution in service to the ideology of wealth and privilege, have become more acute than at any time since the Second World War.

Married to a Brexit crisis that has induced a state of paralysis within government, and with a liberal commentariat in complete and utter meltdown as the ground shifts beneath its feet — effecting its escape from reality with the intoxicating wine of ‘Russians under the bed hysteria’ — and Britain is fast becoming ripe for revolution.

That the Tories have pushed the austerity envelope too far is now indisputable, with the recent findings of the UN’s rapporteur into extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, confirming it.

Alston writes:

14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. The widely respected Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7% rise in child poverty between 2015 and 2022, and various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%. For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.

Crucially, despite this grim picture and the indictment of the status quo it represents, Professor Alston emphasises how the

Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise waysto ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract, at least the worst features of the Government’sbenefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan. Some tweaks to basic policy have reluctantly been made, but there has been a determined resistance to change in response to the many problems which so many people at all levels have brought to my attention.

In truth though, you do not need the findings of a UN report to grasp the magnitude of social carnage that now exists in the UK. All you need do is walk outside your front door and look around you. Rough sleeping in towns and cities across Britain is now so ubiquitous Charles Dickens would balk.

Add to this foodbanks that are struggling to cope with the increased demand caused by the rolling out of the government’s latest benefits wheeze, Universal Credit; an epidemic of violent crime combined with cuts to the police that has left nobody safe from its consequences; draconian cuts to fire services; prisons in chaos; the NHS crumbling; a rail system that is antiquated, unreliable and increasingly unsafe — all of this while the country’s political class is fixated on Brexit with no resolution in sight — and it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Injecting a sinister element to this deepening crisis are the embryonic shoots of a potential anti-Corbyn government coup. Established by the charity The Institute for Statecraft, and funded by the FCO to the tune of £2 million, the Integrity Initiative has been exposed as a conspiracy not only to drip feed anti-Russia disinformation into the public domain via social media accounts, and with the willing collusion of various high profile mainstream journalists, it has also been engaged in a campaign to undermine and attack the credibility of the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn.

More worryingly is the participation of British military intelligence in this conspiracy, drawing parallels with the contours of the plot that was uncovered to topple Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the mid-1970s by a similar cabal of deep state actors; alleging, as they do Corbyn now, sympathy with the British establishment’s designated external enemy, Russia.

In such a crisis-ridden setting, whoever advised the Queen to deliver her Christmas message this year in a room dripping in gold, this person is either a revolutionary in disguise, intent on lighting the spark, or else the loyal servant of a monarchy whose detachment from lived reality of millions is so complete as to make the Bourbons appear like social reformers by comparison.

If, as they say, revolutions are not made by the poor but by the rich — with the poor merely finishing what the rich begin — austerity Britain at the end of 2018, moving into 2019, has never been more ripe.

That sound you hear from way in the distance is the sound of a storm gathering.

12 January 2018 National Demonstration | Britain is Broken – General Election Now
Assemble: 12 noon outside the BBC, Portland Place, London

No matter which way you voted in the original referendum, if you care about ending austerity, if you care about homelessness, if you want to see rail and other privatised utilities taken back into public ownership, then a general election is the only way that this can be done. More details…

Source: RT

The murky relationship between British intelligence and establishment journalists reaches far back in time and continues in the present.

Because if a clutch of right-wing reactionary billionaires owning the bulk of a nation’s major newspaper titles and media constitutes a free press, the word ‘free’ has been stripped and shorn of all meaning.

Yet, while the aforementioned – let’s be kind here – ‘anomaly’ has long been understood by anyone of adult years with the ability to put their underpants on the right way round in the morning, the extent to which the British establishment press and media has been penetrated by intelligence services and acts as a conduit for their agenda is less well known.

That it is less well known remains one of life’s great mysteries nonetheless. Scratch your average British journalist and you have yourself a frustrated spook; someone who would be on their toes at the sound of a car door slamming shut in the street, while harbouring fantasies of coming across Vladimir Putin in a dark alley one night and scoring one for the Empire.

Take Con Coughlin, for example, Defence Editor at The Daily Telegraph (more colloquially and accurately known as The Daily Torygraph). Coughlin is a product of a private school production line that has unleashed more knaves on the world than spittle on a dentist’s chair. While his outing as an MI6 asset may have been a long time coming, now that it has, it marks yet another nail in the coffin of a media class whose relationship to truth and objectivity belongs in the box marked non-existent.

Though I hold no candle for Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, it remains a truism that even a blind chicken gets a piece of corn sometimes; and on this basis Jones has rendered us a service in outing Coughlin in a recent series of devastating tweets. Also providing an invaluable service in helping join the dots of the story is The Canary, independent left-wing news and views web journal that currently boasts a larger readership than a growing section of the mainstream media.

As it turns out, Mr Coughlin’s links to MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence agency) go back some time. As Jones writes: “A 2000 article reveals Coughlin was fed material by MI6 for years, which he then turned into Telegraph news articles.”

The Guardian article Jones is referring to was published at a time when the centre-left newspaper was a worthy source of information and analysis, home to the likes of Seumas Milne, one of Britain’s finest-ever columnists currently plying his trade as chief press adviser to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. It just goes to show that whoever said evolution only moves in one direction had never taken the time to follow the trajectory of The Guardian in recent years.

But that’s another story.

We are informed in the aforesaid 2000 Guardian article that “There is – or has been until recently – a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or ‘I/Ops’.”

Further on: “A colourful example of the way these techniques expanded to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 70s, when the readers of the News of the World were treated to a front-page splash, “Russian sub in IRA plot sensation”, complete with aerial photograph of the conning tower of a Soviet sub awash off the coast of Donegal.”

This story was of course entirely bogus, as was one published in the Sunday Telegraph, sister paper of the aforementioned Daily Telegraph, over two decades later, written by – you guessed it – Con Coughlin.

From the article: “he [Coughlin] regaled [the newspaper’s]readers with the dramatic story of the son of Libya’s Colonel Gadafy (sic) and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story [implicating Saif Gaddafi]was… falsely attributed to a ‘British banking official.’ In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years.”

Coughlin, by the way, is also revealed, according to Jones, to have been an eager shill for the Saudis.

In the wake of the disappearance of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, whom according to Turkish authorities was brutally murdered and dismembered by a group of Saudis, who, equipped with a bone saw, flew in to the country from the Kingdom to carry out the deed especially, Coughlin went to work shrouding matters in a fog of benign uncertainty. Consider: “It could well be, therefore, that the unfortunate Mr Khashoggi has become the victim of the region’s dangerous and conflicting currents.” Ahem… indeed.

Coughlin also saw fit to describe current Saudi tyrant – sorry Crown Prince – Muhammad Bin Salman (affectionately known as MbS) as a “human dynamo,” after he was afforded the privilege of a sit down interview.

At the risk of focusing too much on Mr Coughlin and his work, however, we are obliged to make the point that he is merely one among many British establishment journalists who have eagerly embraced the role of conduit of the nation’s intelligence services over the years.

In his classic work on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne writes: “The incestuous relationship between the intelligence services and sections of the [British] media is, of course, nothing new. The connection is notoriously close in the case of foreign correspondents… Sandy Gall, the ITN reporter and newsreader, boasted of his work for MI6 in Afghanistan during the 1980s.”

Milne, in the same passage, goes on to reveal how “After US Senate hearings in 1975 revealed the extent of CIA recruitment of both American and British journalists, ‘sources’ let it be known that half the foreign staff of a British daily [newspaper]were on the MI6 payroll.”

So there you have it, the murky relationship between British intelligence and the country’s establishment journalists is one that reaches far back in time and continues in the present, as redoubtable and reliable as Big Ben itself.

In fact considering where we are, the indefensible positions taken by prominent newspaper journalists and columnists at not only The Telegraph but also The Times and, yes, The Guardian over Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela et al. – in other words, the way that almost to a man and woman they have fallen into line behind their own government when it comes to who the officially designated enemies of the moment should be – the question we need to ask ourselves is not how many of them might be in the pay of MI6 and MI5, but how many of them might not?

Source: RT

The Gilets Jaunes’ revolt  is not indigenous to one country. It is the struggle of millions across Europe who have had enough of being held in contempt by elites.

I am writing these words in a hotel room in central Paris in the aftermath of a day of rage, unleashed by the self-styled gilets jaunes (yellow vests) mass movement of latter-day ‘enrages’ (angry ones) of French revolutionary repute. And it was indeed a day that bore the hallmarks of a revolution underway. Even now, just after 8pm, the unrest continues, with the sound of wailing police sirens and helicopters hovering overhead the unceasing mood music to my thoughts.

This chaos is taking place not in Syria, Venezuela or Ukraine but in Paris, the city most synonymous with the affluence, culture and liberalism of a European continent that increasingly finds itself beset by social unrest and political disruption.

The French capital is now, for all intents, the frontline in a growing struggle against neoliberalism and its bastard child, austerity, across a European Union whose foundations are crumbling. They are crumbling not due to the devilish machinations of Vladimir Putin (as an increasingly unhinged and out of touch Western liberal commentariat maintains), but instead as the result of a neoliberal status quo that provides far too few with unending comfort and material prosperity at the expense of far too many, for whom dire misery and mounting pain are its grim fruits.

Not only is this mass grassroots movement of Yellow Vest protesters a problem for Macron, but it is also increasingly a problem for an EU political and economic establishment that is yet to wake up to the fact that the world has changed, and changed utterly.

Throughout human history hubris has been the undoing of the rich and powerful, along with the empires forged in their name; and hubris is currently well on the way to being the undoing of an EU whose proponents have embraced the unity not of its peoples but of its banks, corporations, and elites.

Emmanuel Macron is a poster boy for ruling class hubris in our time, a leader widely referred to in France as the ‘president of the rich’. His unalloyed contempt for the plight of ordinary people across the country has only woken them up – and from what I have seen, they will not be going back to sleep anytime soon.

From the perspective of Macron and his government the inchoate character of this Yellow Vest movement, which is mounting the most serious challenge to neoliberalism in Europe yet seen, has to be the most worrying aspect of the current crisis. Thus far it is a movement that lacks a concrete programme and recognizable leadership, with neither Macron nor the French authorities, it is obvious, clear about what it is they are dealing with.

All they know at this point is that whatever it is, its momentum elicits no evidence of slowing down – buoyed by a level of public support that governments which genuflect at the altar of austerity can only dream of.

This being said, the lack of a concrete political programme and coherent ideology, though a strength now, may prove the movement’s undoing down the line.  Because it’s quite simple really: if you don’t have your own programme, sooner or later you will inevitably become part of someone else’s. Of this, the fate of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011 leaves no doubt.

The few protesters I talked to were adamant that this is a non-political movement (or perhaps that should be non-politics as usual), with no room for right or left – no support for either Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon. They are, they said, opposed to the system and political parties in their entirety. They demand Macron’s resignation, a new constitution, and popular referenda in order to return power to the people.

As to the EU, one young man I talked to called David voiced support for a reformed model of European unity – one that places people first. Macron’s EU is finished, he averred. It is not democratic it is autocratic, delivering not justice but injustice; distributing economic pain rather than prosperity to those whose only crime is to be young and old and ordinary in a world governed in the interests of the rich and the connected.

I also talked to Rafiq, a young guy of Moroccan descent. He proclaimed that Macron’s arrogance and indifference to the problems of the people had gone too far. When the people have no hope, he said, they have no choice but to rise up.

But surely, I put it to him, rioting and violence is not the way to go about making change in a democracy. What democracy, he retorted. In France democracy is for the rich. In Macron’s eyes, nobody else matters.

They descended on central Paris, refusing to be cowed or deterred by the heavy police presence, or the warnings issued in the days leading up by the authorities of a heavy crackdown should any trouble break out. Along Boulevard Haussmann they marched towards the Champs Elysees. They were singing, waving flags, shouting anti-Macron slogans and epithets, propelled on by a sense of unity and confidence in their own strength and purpose.

They had come from all over the country, reminding the city’s affluent residents, its bourgeoisie, that Paris is not France and France is not Paris.

But where were they, these rich and affluent shoppers and denizens of Macron’s Paris? Where were the usual fleet of luxury vehicles, the army of tourists and shoppers that normally colonized this part of the city?

On Saturday, rich Paris was in retreat; the Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques, the lavish department stores, upscale restaurants and wine bars boarded up to make way for the arrival of the kind of European army Macron did not have in mind when he issued a call for one.

The struggle being waged by the Yellow Vests here in Paris and across France is not indigenous to one country. It is the struggle of millions across a continent who have had enough of being held in contempt by elites who couldn’t give a damn about them or their families. It is a struggle common to the masses in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy – in Ireland and across the UK. It is the struggle of men and women of no property, pitting those who have nothing against those who have everything.

If Macron had expected the Yellow Vests to return to the obscurity from whence they came, after caving into their initial demand of canceling the proposed fuel tax hike, he miscalculated. As Paris burns, so does his legacy – the legacy of a leader who has come to symbolize the end of the road for neoliberal Europe.

Source: RT

Source: Medium

The UN report is a charge sheet of crimes against humanity: the prosecution and conviction of those responsible is long overdue.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization.

Britain in 2018 is a country in which the class system is more openly flaunted than any other of the ‘industrialised’ world. It is also a country where barbarism, dressed up as government policy, reins. The mere fact that a UN official — in the person of Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights — should deem it necessary to visit the 5th largest economy in the world, a country that in 2017 boasted a GDP of 2.622 trillion USD, by itself constitutes the most searing indictment.

What Professor Alston found in the course of his tour of the country over two weeks, outlined in a excoriating 24-page report, removes any lingering doubt that since coming to power in 2010 successive Tory governments have prosecuted a relentless, systematic, wilful and devastating economic assault against the poorest and most vulnerable section of British society, tantamount to the unleashing of a class war.

Alston writes:

In the past two weeks I have talked with people who depend on food banks and charities for their next meal, who are sleeping on friends’ couches because they are homeless and don’t have a safe place for their children to sleep, who have sold sex for money or shelter, children who are growing up in poverty unsure of their future, young people who feel gangs are the only way out of destitution, and people with disabilities who are being told they need to go back to work or lose support, against their doctor’s orders.

Taken on their own terms the statistics are damning enough. Fourteen million people — that is 14 million — currently living in poverty. This translates to a fifth of the population with four million of them more than 50% below the poverty line. Meanwhile between 1 and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.

Even so, no matter how damning, statistics fail to penetrate and expose the actual lived experience of the lives they embrace, people forced each and every day to surmount the mountain of economic, material, psychological and soul-scorching pain that describes poverty and destitution. That they do so while surrounded by the ceaseless churning out of propaganda promoting the dominant cultural values of society’s affluent middle class, this adds another layer of psychological humiliation to proceedings.

Returning to Professor Alston’s report:

The government has made no secret of its determination to change the value system to focus more on individual responsibility, to place major limits on government support, and to pursue a single-minded, and some have claimed simple-minded, focus on getting people into employment at all costs. This mentality has informed many of the reforms that has brought the most misery and wrought the most harm to the fabric of British society. British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society.

Set out above is the warped, sociopathic ideology that underpins conservatism. It is an ideology by which concepts such as solidarity, welfare, solidarity and compassion are anathema, deemed the enemy of human progress as fashioned under deregulated free market capitalism.

But what Professor Alston’s report exposes, and indeed what anyone who cares to notice will already have known, is that the free market is far from being free. On the contrary the toll it exacts is measured in unalterable despair, immiseration, poverty, truncated lives and, in all too many instances, premature death for those bludgeoned by its merciless lack of compassion for the weak in a society configured to serve the needs and interests of the strong.

Perhaps, though, we would rather not be woken up to the brutal reality of Tory Britain that surrounds us, preferring instead to exist in a bubble of denial when it comes to being reduced to passive spectators of the mass experiment in human despair that has and continues to be inflicted on so many by so few. If so, I respectfully suggest that things have reached the point where denial is no longer an option.

When Karl Marx opined at the beginning of his Communist Manifesto that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” he took a scalpel to the benign mask behind which the snarling, feral beast of clss power resides. But just as you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, neither do you have to be a Communist to know what injustice looks like. All you need do for that is take yourself into any Jobcentre in any town or city on any given day to see it being played out in real time. There you will see the human impact of the criminalisation of the poor rather than poverty which the authors and champions of austerity have rolled out.

The staggering thing about it is how so easily and so willingly those who work in Jobcentres and at the DWP are able to dole out this level of economic terrorism. Where are those with the moral courage and principle to stand up at their desk and proclaim “No I won’t?!” It’s as if they are part of a vast Milgram Experiment, affirming the horrifying extent to which ordinary people are capable of committing monstrous acts of cruelty in obeisance to authority.

Hovering into admonitory relief at this juncture arrive the thoughts of Erich Fromm, who writes, “Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not because they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human bond to their subjects. While less vile than pure sadists, the bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in them there is not even a conflict between conscience and duty; their conscience is doing their duty; human beings as objects of empathy and compassion do not exist for them.”

Professor Alston also takes time in his report to outline a few of the reasons why proponents of the country’s departure from the EU should pause for thought:

There are many concerns linked to Brexit. Given the vast number of policies, programs and spending priorities that will need to be addressed over the next few years, and the major changes that will inevitably accompany them, it is the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society who will be least able to cope and will take the biggest hit. The IMF has suggested that a no-deal Brexit could cost the UK economy somewhere between 5% and 8% of GDP, representing a loss of thousands of pounds per household.

Furthermore:

In my meetings with the government, it was clear to me that the impact of Brexit on people in poverty is an afterthought, to be dealt with through manipulations of fiscal policy after the event, if at all.

It bears repeating that the financial collapse and ensuing global recession of 2008 was the product of private greed on the part of those for whom the taxpayer was used as glorified ATM machine in response, bailing them out to the point where the resulting pain has been almost exclusively borne by the poor and working class. The reality is that the recession was used as a pretext to effect the transference of wealth from the poorest in society to the richest, sold as the need to ‘tighten our belts’ and clear up the mess left behind by the previous Labour government.

In the conclusion of his Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Professor Mark Blyth writes, “Austerity doesn’t work. Period…The costs of this epistemic arrogance and ideological insistence [in support of austerity]have been, and continue to be, horrendous. If European economic policy makers, like medical doctors, had to swear to ‘do no harm,’ they would all be banned from ‘practicing’ economics.”

The key word in this aforementioned passage is ‘ideological’. Austerity is not and never has been driven by economics. It is an ideological weapon deployed in the interests of the rich against the poor in conditions of economic extremis. It is an attempt to breath life into the corpse of neoliberalism, the most extreme variant of free market capitalism whose burial is long overdue. But instead of burying neoliberalism we have a Tory establishment that has opted to bury the most vulnerable with wave after wave of assaults on their ability to survive.

Professor Philip Ralston’s report, commissioned by the United Nations, amounts to a charge sheet of crimes against humanity. The main conclusion to be taken from it is that the prosecution and conviction of those responsible is long overdue.

John Wight writes and rants on politics, geopolitics, culture and more in between. He posts articles here. You can support his work here. Follow on Twitter @JohnWight1

Source: Medium

As we’re invited again to embrace Britain’s role in the world as a force for good, the people of Yemen are being systematically slaughtered and starved with active UK involvement.

The ritual of tribute to fallen soldiers is a tradition that stretches back to antiquity. From then to the present the exaltation of those who have died fighting in a tribe, city state or nation’s wars has been crucial in uniting said community around a common narrative of shared purpose and values.

In Britain we have the annual commemoration of Remembrance Day, observed each year on the closest Sunday to 11 November, the anniversary of Armistice Day bringing the First World War to an end in 1918 after four bloody years of slaughter in the mud swamped trenches of the Western Front.

Young and old, rich and poor, the message embraced on Remembrance Day is that regardless of our differences we are joined by a common nationality, heritage and history, and that those who died fighting in the nation’s wars did so in the interests of all of us and as such are worthy of unyielding esteem, admiration, gratitude and honour.

This is even more relevant when we consider Britain’s participation in the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — wars in which countless thousands of civilians were killed and maimed, and for whom there is no monument or ritual of remembrance. And this is not forgetting the myriad other colonial wars the country has waged in the history of an empire that in truth should be a source of shame rather than celebration.

Moreover in 2018, invited again as we are to embrace Britain’s role in the world as a force for good on Remembrance Day, the people of Yemen are being systematically slaughtered, starved and made vulnerable to disease in a war unleashed upon them by the murderous medieval tyranny of Saudi Arabia with the active involvement of British miltiary expertise and resources.

Meanwhile at home as the usual array of politicians, members of the royal family and various other dignitaries step forward to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph, consider that 13,000 former soldiers are currently homeless, cast aside like so much flotsam; their lives reduced to a daily struggle with mental health issues resulting from their active service, compounded by the living hell of Tory austerity. Their grim plight forces us to confront a withering reality — namely that of a political establishment which consistently demonstrates little desire to offer those who serve in the nation’s ignoble military adventures more than an existence of poverty, alienation and despair afterwards.

Given, too, that the apotheosis of militarism this annual ritual engenders acts as a de facto recruiting sergeant, encouraging succeeding generations of young working class men, starved of opportunity and prospects at home, to join up and likewise be sacrificed on the altar of national prestige and degeneracy, the entire enterprise constitutes a cycle of unyielding false consciousness.

It behoves us also to resist the attempt to elide Britain’s eminently dishonourable role in the world, a source of unrelenting suffering, chaos and carnage throughout a Global South forced to pay the price in blood for the litany of grand statues and monuments to the nation’s countless wars and military heroes. When it comes to the one war in Britain’s post-WW1 history that was morally justified in being waged, the Second World War against fascism, inconvenient historical truths abound. Among the more salient of those is that were it not for the savage peace terms imposed on Germany in the wake of the First World War, enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s rise on the back of the consequent deep felt sense of grievance and national humiliation unleashed in Germany would have been far less likely to have taken place — if at all.

The subsequent years of appeasement on the part of the nation’s ruling class, driven in part by the latent sympathy for the Nazis that existed among a significant section of its number, must also be weighed on the scales of hypocrisy in this regard. For were it not for this craven appeasement the fascist dictator would likely have been stopped at a far earlier stage in his ambitions.

Remembrance Day reminds us that we are a nation and a society suffering from an addiction to war. Breaking this addiction requires that we first undergo a sea change in our attitude to war and how we view those who’ve died in them. The liberal bandying around of words such as ‘sacrifice’ and ‘heroism’ at this time of year, usually by well fed, privileged politicians and commentators, reveals an atrocious lack of understanding of the terror the young men hurled into places such as Afghanistan and Iraq to kill and be killed experience.

No amount of training could ever prepare them for the horrors of war, the sight of their mates being blown apart beside them, of women and children slaughtered; and no amount of bugles and parades could ever compensate those who return maimed and/or psychologically damaged, whereupon they are left to the mercy of charity.

If Remembrance Day imparts a message worthy of our collective intelligence it is that war should be made a crime, with those who instigate it punished as criminals. In the last analysis it does not determine who is right only who is left.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Source: Medium

“Are you a communist?”
“No I am an anti-fascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

The rise of this dismal trio came amid similar conditions of economic dislocation that Western economies are experiencing now, in our time, in what appears a chilling parallel. And too, as then so now the economic reins of society, despite this dislocation, have remained in the hands of neoliberal ideologues whose ideas gave us the worst global recession since the 1930s, and whose solution to its far reaching impact has been the imposition of austerity, sowing even more economic pain and concomitant misery in process.

Cometh the time cometh the man, they say, and in times of the anger, fear, confusion and hopelessness wrought by that which is blind — the forces of global capitalism, managed by a discredited political class — conditions are ripe for the rise of a demagogue to make the cause of everything that is wrong with the world visible and corporeal to those suffering its consequences.

While in the 1930s Jewish communities across Europe filled the role of enemy within for an emerging far right, depicted as adherents of an alien culture and religion, demonised as an existential threat to white European civilisation, today it is Muslims

The racialisation of rape and other sexual offences is nothing new, of course. In fact it is as old as colonialism itself, part of the ideological apparatus that supports the racial hierarchy upon which the domination of the ‘other’ rests. The dread-fear of black men in the Deep South during the slavery era and thereafter belongs in the same white supremacist box, responsible for the lynching of black males for even daring to make eye contact with a white woman in times gone by.

Sexual grooming, rape and paedophilia are vile crimes which are by no means exclusive to one race, religion or culture. The so-called Huddersfield gang, locus of Tommy Robinson’s contempt charge, consisted of twenty individuals convicted of the systematic abuse and rape of fifteen vulnerable young girls between the ages of 11 and 17. Sixteen of those convicted have been sentenced to a total of 220 years in prison, where it is hoped they will now rot.

Robinson’s attempt to intercede in the trial while it was live and ongoing endangered those convictions and sentences, a fact his supporters obviously consider of little import in relation to his self-anointed role as protector of the white race from the Muslim hordes threatening it with extinction.

Yet here we arrive at the rub. For if truly sincere about protecting vulnerable young women, including teenagers, from sexual abuse and exploitation, Robinson and his crew would surely be patrolling Heathrow Airport in order to stem the tide of white men departing on flights to Thailand each and every week to satiate their lust for young Asian girls living under conditions of desperate poverty and forced as a consequence to sell themselves. A significant number of those white men are no doubt sympathetic to the far right snake oil Robinson is peddling, and indeed some no doubt stand within the ranks of his supporters.

Presumably these Thailand sex junkets are okay though, what with the girls on the receiving end being non-white and foreign and the men exploiting and abusing them white, British and proud. It reveals that under the grotesque racial, religious and cultural hierarchy adhered to by the far right, some women and girls are deemed worthy of protection, while others are deemed worthy of use and abuse.

But lest we find ourselves dancing on the head of that particular pin and far right Trojan’s Horse over long, we are obliged to take an admonitory step back to survey the issue in its meta-dimension. And doing so, who could seriously argue that without the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn and his programme of structural reform to the nation’s economy, priorities and foreign policy, the propulsion of Tommy Robinson and the far right into the embrace of the mainstream would not have been anywhere as pronounced?

To put it another way, the politics of mass distraction is the lifeboat upon which an establishment in crisis sails when threatened by a viable alternative to the wealth, privileges and power that are the real menace to society.

Oswald Mosley’s rise in the 1930s was made possible, returning to the role of the establishment press and media, with the connivance of a ruling class that had reason to be fearful of the traction of socialist and communist ideas among a working class whose immiseration had reached the point of social explosion. Thus the Daily Mail’s overt support for the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was entirely logical from the point of view of the class whose interests it has always represented and upheld, tailoring its editorial line and style to the cause of pitting working people against one another on the basis of race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality and so on.

In fact not only the Mail — the Daily Mirror also enjoyed a flirtation with Mosley and his BUF in the early 1930s, hailing the Blackshirts as an organisation that “will respect those principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics.” The fact that both tabloids were at the time owned and part-owned by Lord Rothermere, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, was no accident of course, reminding us of the danger to a democracy of allowing newspaper and media ownership to be concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats.

In our time Tommy Robinson was recently made the subject of a BBC Newsnight feature package, and previous to that was featured in an interview with popular US news anchor and talk show host, Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, allowed to present himself as a prisoner of conscience in relation to the six months he spent in jail for contempt.

Indeed the US dimension has been crucial in the grooming of Robinson as leader of the disaffected English masses of late. Steve Bannon, self-styled guru of a resurgent far right on the other side of the Atlantic and the man credited as the strategic force behind Trump’s election in 2016, described Tommy Robinson as the “backbone of this country” while on the visit in the UK in July. The former leader of the EDL has also received public support from Donald Trump Jr and his case was raised with Britain’s ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darroch, by Trump’s ambassador for international religious freedom at the behest of the far right US website Breitbart.

Robinson’s traction, taking a wider view, correlates with a spike in growth of the far right across the West – to the point where we discern the establishment of a far right international in embryo, initiated by the aforementioned Steve Bannon. Whether his profile grows to the point of feeling emboldened to put himself forward for election at some point, perhaps as a UKIP candidate given the noises being made when it comes to the possibility of him being accepted into the ranks ofthe anti-migrant party, this remains to be seen.

Not in doubt is the fact that as in Britain in the 1930s, Tommy Robinson and the far right will not be defeated in the courts but in the street, confronted by a reconstituted anti-fascist movement — one which as the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 proved is the true guardian of democracy and justice when the chips are down.

Source: Medium

The race for the White House in 2016 was a race between two representatives of a psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair.

“Mickey and Mallory Knox are without a doubt the most twisted depraved pair of shitfucks it has ever been my displeasure to lay my god damn eyes on. I tell you these two motherfuckers are a walking reminder of just how fucked up this system really is.”

From Oliver Stone’s controversial 1995 black comedy, Natural Born Killers, the above unforgettable lines, when rewritten with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s names substituted for those of Mickey and Mallory Knox, serve the most salutary purpose of disabusing us of the myths of US liberal exceptionalism, while at the same time bringing us face to face with its grim reality.

It’s a grim reality that has never been more important to confront at a time when Barack Obama has decided to make a return to mainstream politics in the run-up to the US midterm elections in early November. This he does as the liberal saviour America has been desperate to see appear on the horizon of the dystopia fashioned by the current impostor in the White House, ‘the orange one’, bearing his trusty shield of hope in one hand and steady lance of decency in the other.

The only problem with this particular movie is that the distortion of reality at its heart is so outlandish it makes the suspension of disbelief impossible.

Obama’s record, in truth and in fact, is such that it elevates his successor to the level of moral giant by comparison. Yes, this may well change. In Trump, after all, we have us a man and president for whom caprice is a virtue. But nonetheless, at the time of this writing, there is no escaping the fact that of the two it is Obama whose worldview presents the greatest danger to a world left battered and bruised by too many years of US exceptionalism and the litany of crimes committed in its name.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m overstating things? Well, for those who continues to harbour hope in a man who peddles hope like a drug dealer peddles crack, I implore you to survey the kind of evidence that should rightly be presented at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It comes in the form of journalist Neil Clark’s heartrending piece on the devastation visited on Libya in 2011 by the West — this under the rubric of yet another NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ — which only succeeded in turning the North African country from a functioning state able to boast, per the United Nations Development Program, the highest human development index of any African state, into a living hell.

Obama and his then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton (Mallory to his Mickey) were prime movers in unleashing this catastrophic military intervention, one that was tantamount to NATO flying sorties for al-Qaeda. And who will ever forget the sight of Clinton, upon learning of Gaddafi’s brutal slaughter at the hands of a baying mob of sectarian butchers we’d been told were the heroic harbingers of Libya’s democratic future, clapping her hands in undisguised glee while proclaiming, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Held up by their supporters as representative of everything that’s good about America — freedom, liberty, opportunity, and all that jazz — Clinton and Obama are in truth exemplars of the ocean of bodies that has been left behind in the swirl of their tireless paens to the ‘promise of America’ in the name not of democracy and freedom but exceptionalism and hegemony.

Clinton’s record, staying with her for a moment, is a veritable monument to mendacity. She and her husband come as a package of liberal opportunism who’ve made a virtue of speaking left and acting right. The fruits of this malady are mass incarceration, the entrenchment of Wall Street as the golden temple of the US economy, and perpetual regime change wars and military intervention overseas. Their Clinton Foundation is the acme of moral turpitude, where corruption comes dressed in the top hat and tails of liberal cant. On this, Christopher Hitchens was never more right than when he opined, “She [Hillary Clinton] and her husband haven’t met a foreign political donor they don’t like and haven’t taken from.”

And yet it’s Trump who we are being told is the nutcase, the half lunatic and crackpot against whom members of his staff are working to ‘protect America and the world’ day and night. Such a rendering only makes sense when you ask yourself who in their right mind could possibly conceive of making peace with North Korea and Russia when you can have war?

When it comes to the state of the nation at home, anyone who believes America is a classless society need only spend half an hour walking around Hollywood, acknowledged epicentre of the American Dream, to realise how wrong they are. For not only will they be assured that there is no society more defined by class than US society, they will be left in little doubt that every minute of a every day a fierce class war is raging with up to now only one side taking all the punches and doing all the bleeding.

Not only in Hollywood but all across America the abandonment of the poor, downtrodden and sick to their fate has and continues to be so brutal that its human consequences given new meaning to the words ‘wretched of the earth’. And this wretched constituency of millions — lacking healthcare, decent housing, jobs, and hope — hardly saw their fortunes improve under Obama, despite the soaring rhetoric about hope and change, etc.

Try Cornel West for size: “The reign of Obama did not produce the nightmare of Donald Trump — but it did contribute to it. And those Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility.”

And there’s more: “Obama’s lack of courage to confront Wall Street criminals and his lapse of character in ordering drone strikes unintentionally led to rightwing populist revolts at home and ugly Islamic fascist rebellions in the Middle East. And as deporter-in-chief — nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported under his watch — Obama policies prefigure Trump’s barbaric plans.”

The real hope when it comes to the ills of America, those it dispenses at home and those overseas, lies not with Trump’s overt white supremacy nor with Obama and Clinton’s liberal exceptionalism. The real hope lies in the resistance to both that runs like an unbroken thread through the country’s history. Indeed, the names of its most courageous proponents shine like glittering stars in a coal black firmament: Sitting Bull, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, the San Patricios, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, MLK, Malcolm X, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, anti-Vietnam War movement, Cesar Chavez, the list goes on.

Each of the aformentioned were sustained by moral outrage at the injustice they experienced and witnessed being inflicted on their own and other peoples in the name of progress and might is right. Many, of course, experience this sense of moral outrage. The difference lies between those who learn to make their peace with it and those who refuse to make their peace with it — who instead choose to grapple with this monster in what they know before they start will be a losing fight.

This is the human condition at its most inspiring, the willingness to fight even while knowing you are destined to lose. But, then, such a reductive and one dimensional interpretation of victory has no place when we understand history as a river that flows without end, rather than a monument separating it into neat and tidy chapters, as in a book. Fighting is winning and winning is fighting in a struggle that will continue so long as injustice and oppression obtains.

The race for the White House in 2016 was a race between two representatives of a psychopathic ruling class for the keys to a kingdom of despair. But lest this ruling elite allows itself to to remain too complacent in its privilege and ostentation, let the words of legendary Native American Chief Crazy Horse, spoken days before he died while resisting imprisonment, resound as a portent of the reckoning to come:

“The Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world; a world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations; a world longing for light again.”

Amen.