London:
SEOUL — One by one they came, taking seats next to a United Nations flag and stating their names for the record. Some kept calm. Some wept. One, as he spoke, used his left hand to clamp his trembling right hand to the table.They told stories about North Korea’s brutal network of criminal detention and political prison camps, and their evidence was physical: burns on their backs, scars on their heads, bodies ravaged by torture for acts that amount to crimes only in the North. They described forced abortions, public executions, constant hunger and ghoulish mind games played by prison guards, whose permission was needed even to catch and eat the camps’ many rats and mice.
Pussy Riot: A Documentary, Review.
BBC Four’s Storyville documentary about Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk group, and founders of a new feminist movement, was extraordinary.
AS Wikipedia describes them, “they stage unauthorized provocative guerrilla performances in unusual public locations, which are edited into music videos and posted on the Internet. Their lyrical themes include feminism, LGBT rights, opposition to the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom they regard as a dictator,[2] and links between the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin.”
“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it” ran the Bertolt Brecht quote at the programme start.” notes the Telegraph reviewer.
They also cited Guy Debord.
The great merit of the documentary was that it showed the strength of their movement, their personal courage, and their ideas without forgetting some of the doubts people may have about their actions.
The film makers pointed out that the very Cathedral where they staged their most famous protest (Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Russian: Храм Христа Спасителя, Khram Khrista Spasitelya) was demonilished on 5 December 1931, by order of Stalin’s minister Kaganovich, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was dynamited and reduced to rubble.
It was rebuilt long after the Soviet era, in the 1990s.
That the believers come in different kinds, and that they have rights too.
At a time when Christians are under physical attack in many lands, we should not forget this.
Human rights have no exceptions, none.
Free Pussy Riot!
Norman Geras – a Beloved Comrade, Passes.
Norman Geras 25 August 1943, – 18 October 2013.
I just would like to add a tribute to Norman.
Geras’ writings were an inspiration to the left .
The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (1976) and Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend will remain as landmarks of socialist thought.
Like many comrades I had the privilege of meeting Norman – in particular as a member of the Socialist Society.
We had a correspondence about ethical theory.
I am sure that many other comrades who knew him well will add their memories.
One of the most cherished memories for me is at the Ralph Miliband memorial meeting at the LSE.
He explained his ethical stance, which later took him into directions which not many of us on the Marxist left shared,
A superb thinker and a great human being.
Andy Newman Invited to North Korean ‘Skiing Resort’.
Kim Jong-un has joined the growing movement to defend Comrade Andy Newman.
“Full attack. March Forward. Let’s Absolutely Finish Building Masik Pass Ski Resort Within This Year By Launching A Full Aggressive War and Full Battle.”
As part of the celebrations for the opening of this historic step forward for the Korean working class Comrade Any Newman has been invited to an, all expenses-paid, fortnight at the latest example of the victory of the Juche philosophy.
Colonel Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby (Retired) writes,
“Comrade Newman has shown sterling work over the years.
Shoot the mad dogs“.
In a surprise move the son of “Che” Guevara has emerged from the Wiltshire jungle where he has been waging a thirty year long guerilla war, to give his backing to the campaign.
“¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre Andy!”
Says he.
“Stalin was Diamond Geezer” says Labour Candidate Andy Newman.
Diamond Geezer say Labour Candidate Andy Newman.
“Stalin was great says Red Ed’s man.”
So sayeth the Sun.
The Daily Mail helpfully adds,
Red Andy, the Labour hopeful who says Stalin improved living standards and the Berlin Wall was ‘a great success’ (but Ed says the party HASN’T lurched to the Left).
At first glance, Andy Newman would appear to be a good fit with the affluent Wiltshire seat, held by Liberal Democrat Duncan Hames.
Educated at a private school (Editor’s note I didn’t know that – another reason to hate Newman) and Oxford University (same as previous) Mr Newman’s CV bears the hallmarks of a modern Labour politician.
However, a delve into some of his recent writings suggests the union official is determined to keep the Red Flag flying over the West Country.
He has called the Berlin Wall ‘a great success’ and praised the ‘significant improvement in working class living standards’ during Stalin’s Great Terror.
He described the attacks on Pearl Harbour as the ‘opening salvo in a war between two rival imperialisms’ – equating America with wartime Japan under Emperor Hirohito – and branded the Dalai Lama a ‘figurehead for slavery’.
In the run-up to his selection last month, the telecoms engineer set out some of his uncompromising beliefs in articles in ultra-left-wing publications.
Paying tribute to Stalin’s character, whose brutal dictatorship led to the deaths of millions of citizens, he wrote earlier this year: ‘We should recognise how Stalin was the creature of his times; and not alone in culpability.
‘What is more, the character of Stalin, who almost through a feat of sheer will industrialised and militarised the USSR to defend itself against the Nazi threat, was also the character that ruthlessly regarded people as expendable. It did give Stalin the attributes needed to be a great war leader’.
And in 2009, Mr Newman, who is the local branch secretary of the GMB union, used a piece in Socialist Unity to put a positive gloss on the tyrant’s rule
Describing him in apparently respectful terms as ‘the Stalin’, he wrote: ‘Free market capitalism had seen worldwide depression in the 1930s and had led to fascism and war.
‘Meanwhile the USSR’s economy had achieved staggering success in the same period, including a significant improvement in working class living standards, despite the Stalin’s terror’.
In the same article, he wrote warmly of the Berlin Wall: ‘If we set to one side the issue of personal liberty, the [Berlin] wall was a great success.’
Our hearts are bleeding at the right-wing press witch hunt.
Why I Hate the British Press.
Many people might not recall the right-wing columnist, David Aaronovitch, but here he is in full fettle,
They were the most sexy left group on campus – smoking dope, dropping acid, bonking and partying.
WHEN I was first at college, the most romantic and sexy left group on campus was Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group. They smoked dope, they dropped acid, they bonked, they argued, they partied. When they got militant the blokes all put on denim jackets, tartan scarves and black gloves, and occupied things. And the IMG women were cool, too, divided between free-loving Alexandra Kollontais and Earth Mothers.
Echoes of this past were ringing in my ears when I read the accounts this week of the attempts by Liz Davies, the ousted Labour candidate for Leeds, to get elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party this autumn. She is part of a slate – the “centre-left” slate, no less – which is canvassing for the votes of ordinary Labour Party members, even as I write. She’s had a very good press for, after all, what is she doing, other than trying to debate, in a party that now stifles debate? Poor Liz.
And Poor Liz campaigns more in sorrow than in anger. This is part of her election statement: “During the general election campaign, tens of thousands of Party members worked long hours… because they believed a Labour government would build a fairer, more compassionate and more collective society,” she says. But what happened? “Tragically, the New Labour Government has implemented or proposed measures which will have exactly the opposite effect.” So what can we do, Liz? “This year’s NEC elections are a critical and historic opportunity for party members to express their disappointment with the Government and their alarm over its apparent future direction.”
Liz’s slate is a heterodox one, bringing together various groups. But Liz’s bit of it, Labour Left Briefing, may be slightly less amazed by the failure of Tony Blair to be their kind of guy than is the ordinary disappointed activist in the Clapham smoke-filled room. Because, in fact, they never thought that the PM would usher in “a fairer, more compassionate, more collective society”.
More here. At the time Labour Briefing’s ‘Inner circle’ (about 12 people) had two former members of the IMG. Leonora Lloyd and me. Oh and by the way we won 2 out of the six seats on the Labour Party National Executive.
Hannah Arendt. A Review.
Hannah Arendt. A Review.
Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s “greatest political philosophers.” The response of the Editor of the New Yorker to a colleague who queries sending her to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 signposts the difficulties underlying Margarethe von Trotta’s film. How can thought be put on the screen?
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), that assembled the resulting magazine pieces, is the hinge of the film. She famously doubted the right of Israel to judge one of the central actors in the Endlösung. Arendt made an appeal for a different, International, Tribunal to judge crimes against Humanity. But there was more than this. The political thinker evoked her understanding of the history of the Shoah and asserted that, “recognised Jewish leaders” had, “almost without exception, cooperated with the Nazis”. An uproar followed the articles.
Hannah Arendt is, like Trotta’s Rosa Luxembourg (1996), an intimist film. Hannah, played by Barbara Sukowa – who also Rosa – teaches in University, and lives with the former Sparticist and anti-Stalinist Henreich Blücher. Close friends, including Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer), who will come to her defence, surround them. Politics passes the threshold of their New York flat into heated discussions at get-togethers, not through active political engagement.
Windows into other worlds open during the trial itself, and the ferocious reaction from Arendt’s colleagues to her opinions on the “role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people.” Saying that she “blamed the victims” left loose a flood of charges against her. When the Eichmann controversy is at its height Hannah receives threatening letters, and a note from a “nice old gentlemen” on another floor in her apartment block, calling her a “Nazihure” (Nazi whore). Dramatically perhaps the most telling moment is when an old friend breaks with her, dismissing Arendt as arrogant and typically “intellectual”.
Hannah’s attachment to Heidegger – from a youthful affair, her enduring acquaintance, to her dismissal of his “silly” pro-Nazi proclamations – is introduced through flashbacks. This might remind the audience of the controversies that followed Victor Farais’ Heidegger et le Nazisme (1987) and Hugo Otto’s Martin Heidegger. A Political Life. (1994). In the film Arendt’s enemies are keen to remind people of this association with the Rekor-Führer who spoke of Hitler as the “German reality, present and future, and its law”.
Intense movements, sharp exchanges, and coherent arguments, mean that Hannah Arendt is a dramatic success. The cast displays depth and warmth. But the film leaves many yawning political and philosophical gaps. That is, we have to read what she said, not only hear parts of her work. Cinema can only go so far.
From the Film to the Politics.
Eichmann in Jerusalem remains the object of passionate dispute. Perhaps too many people have heard of the “banality of evil”. But behind it lies Arendt’s complicated, and structurally unfinished work on the “moral collapse the Nazis caused in respectable European society”, and the “elementary structure” of totalitarianism. Her writings touch upon the 19th century birth of Imperialism, Militarism (influenced by, amongst other, the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg), and Mass Society, as well as Nazism and Stalinism.
Arendt’s views on Eichmann’s role in the Nazi bureaucratic extermination machine might be considered in terms not just of these “criminal organisations”. That,is, he was not merely guilty because his bastardised ‘Kantian’ defence, that he was acting according to a ‘universal’ moral law, failed to accept Kant’s rule that we should treat other people as ends in themselves, not means. It was not only this flaw, psychological or not, that was the problem. As Mary McCarthy said, “calling someone a monster does not made more guilty; it makes him so by classing him with beasts and devils”. The problem is deeper. One response may be to say that many political ideologies can permit killing, but German National Socialism made material a language in which mass murder was a must.
On the surface that is on the arguments of Eichmann Arendt is open to a number of serious charges. In her defence Arendt stepped back a little, (1964), “until 1939 and even until 1941, whatever Jewish functionaries did or did not do is understandable and excusable. Only later does it become highly problematical.” This looks very weak. Michael Ezra has shown that she was simply wrong to sweep together the ‘Jewish authorities’ into one bloc. (The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics). Citing Jacob Robinson he says,
Arendt had attempted to substantiate her claim that Jews would have been better off without leadership by asserting that in Belgium there was no Jewish Council and ‘it is not surprising that not a single Jew was ever deported.’ Robinson showed that in Belgium there was a Jewish Council and Jews were deported. Moreover, in Russia, Jews not governed by a Jewish Council were slaughtered even faster than in Poland where there were Jewish Councils. In France, Yugoslavia, Greece and other countries where there were no Jewish Councils, the Nazis still managed to carry out the ‘Final Solution’ effectively. Arendt had claimed, in her letter to Scholem, that Jewish Council members could ask to be relieved of their duties ‘and nothing happened to them.’ The reality, according to a non-Jewish witness of the Cracow ghetto, was that ‘To resign [from the Jewish Council] was equivalent to signing one’s own death sentence.
Arendt was critical of the procedures of the Israeli Court, the absence of a real space for defence, of the Israel Court, the absence of a space for real defence. She doubted the right of the Jewish People to indite Eichmann. The whole political spectrum of Zionist thought would quickly recall her doubts about the constitutional basis for their Country (she had been a qualified believer in a federation with a new state for the Arab population). Her call for an International Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity has a greater echo today – when there is a United Nations War Crimes Court. In this she followed her enduring friend, Karl Jaspers, who stated that a verdict on Eichmann could be “handed down only by a court of justice representing all mankind”. Whether this answered Arendt’s own belief that full human rights had to come attached to states is not clear, and not all states belong to this Court.
In her later books on political theory (On Revolution 1965, the posthumous Life of the Mind 1978, amongst others), Hannah Arendt defended the idea of the freedom of the political realm. This she contrasted with the politics of interest dominated by “labour” by the “social question” by (even) “compassion”. – a world for Marx dominated by necessity, or for humdrum liberalism, by deal-making. The twentieth century saw mobs turn into totalitarian political parties, run by conspirators who held truth in contempt, and tried to rub out all these differences.
We can, she believed, escape this fate. Within its proper boundaries politics may be marked by, “joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, this acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new.” (1)
Arendt asserted this liberty of the ancients to write about the trial of Eichmann.
She discovered, though never recognised, that the company of her peers was not always joyful, that not everybody was prepared to act together with her, and that sustaining her personal identity isolated her from whatever crooked – but living – form politics took in her time.
(1) Page 574 The Portable Hannah Arendt Edited by Peter Baeher. Penguin 2003
This review relies heavily on Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World 2nd Edition. 2004.
German Greens in “Serious Negotiations” for Coalition with Merkel.
Grüne auf Kamikaze-Kurs?
Greens on kamikaze course? Thursday Neues Deutschland.
»Wir werden erst einmal ausloten, ob es CDU und CSU ernst meinen mit einer anderen Umweltpolitik«
We will explore first if the CDU and CSU are serious about environmental policy,”
The new leader of the German Greens, Anton Hofreiter, stated, that a coalition is possible, “eine schwarz-grüne Koalition möglich” (ist).
The Greens plan to bring together ecological and economic concerns.
Their main demand is that Federal Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU), a strong opponent of letting more refugees into Germany, is removed from being in charge refugee policy.
Opposition to such a coalition comes from the Young Greens (Grünen Jugend) and figures such as Bärbel Höhn, who has described the very idea as a “Kamikazi” plan.
These talks are not so surprising.
As Global Post pointed out a few days ago,
The Greens and the conservatives have, however, worked together on the state level in Hamburg. More progressive CDU supporters in northern and western Germany may find themselves closer to the Greens than they are to the CSU on social issues, and share many of the Greens’ concerns over the environment.
The Greens, together with the Social Democrats, have voted with Merkel to back key measures to keep the euro zone together during its crisis — even as some on the right of her own party have rebelled.
But, while apparently the negotiations will take place on a “serious” basis (and the German Radio station,Deutschlandfunk, has discussed them at length) a coalition with the Social Democrats is much more probable.
That is the judgement of the Wall Street Journal as well.
German businesses, for one, wouldn’t be disappointed if talks between the conservatives and the Greens collapsed. Considering the challenges in regard to European and energy issues, and labour market, employer lobby group BDA Wednesday advocated an alliance between Ms. Merkel’s conservative parties and the Social Democrats.
In this case the left party, Die Linke, will be the largest Parliamentary opposition force.
It is with interest that we note that the Green-leaning Taz today is already giving lessons to Die Linke on how to become a responsible party.
They offer some instructions to Gregor Gysi (“der klügste Kopf der Partei” the brightest mind in the party) on how do this.
The White Flag of Reformism or Red Flag of Revolution ? Peoples Assembly to People’s War ?
Democracy and Class Struggle says : Yes there is a need for the mass line on austerity, but it also must combat reformism and revisionism.
The re-elect Labour on a Socialist Platform Parliamentary cretins have long abandoned the Red Flag of Revolution for the White Flag of Reformism and have almost destroyed our movement.
Prepare for November 5th 2013 Day of Direct Action for a Bonfire of all Con- Dem Government Vanities.
From Peoples Assembly to People’s War is our call the days of Reformism and Revisionism are over.
“Build an Anti-Capitalist Alternative.”
PS: this does not appear to be a conscious spoof.
Hat-tip to the Father of the Faris.
SWP: Callinicos and Kimber, “They’re all out of step but us”.
Building Unite the Resistance to Expose the Left Misleaders.
The SWP has responded….
The politics of the SWP crisis.
Charlie Kimber and Alex Callinicos.
The article begins, “For almost a year the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has been seized by deep division. It has not stopped us acting as a revolutionary organisation. We have had successes and recruited hundreds of new members. The trade union conferences saw some of the biggest party fringe meetings ever and near-record sales of Socialist Worker.”
I continue for the many (very many) who have stopped at this point and skip to the next paragraph.
“But none of that is to underestimate the shock we have suffered or the damage inflicted, as hundreds of members resigned from the SWP.”
For those interested in a serious in-depth discussion on the “specific issues that sparked this process” read (while you can) the just published Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber and the investigation of rape. (Hat-Tip AC).
The present piece will concentrate on what lies behind what the Author of the article summarises as,
The strategy behind Callinicos and Kimber’s piece is to blame everyone but themselves for the crisis in the SWP: Michael Rosen, Lindsey German, John Rees, George Galloway, John McDonell, Jeremy Corbyn and many others get criticised by name for their failures of revolutionary nerve.
Very true.
Amongst the gems we have this, ” Respect was too small and too narrow. The International Socialist Network is at fault. They note the “disgraceful attacks that Seymour and his ilk were making on the rest of the party.” Their former comrades German and Rees, “Counterfire has become little more than decorative coverage for the efforts by Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, to rebuild the Labour left.”
The SWP’s present analysis will no doubt please Len McClusky, and Counterfire, leading forces in the People’s Assembly,
a rank and file to the left of the union leaders does still exist, although not as an organised movement. It was reflected in the 36 percent of the vote won by Jerry Hicks in the Unite general secretary election against Len McCluskey, one of the most left wing leaders. It was seen in the votes at the trade union conferences this year where a substantial minority of a third or more wanted to go much further than the union leaders proposed. It made itself felt in the warm reception at the local and national People’s Assemblies for criticism of the trade union and Labour leaders’ lack of action.
Conclusion,
This is the primary layer that Unite the Resistance seeks to pull together and organise into more solid networks of solidarity and political understanding.
In other words the SWP, through its front organisation, Unite the Resistance, intends to use the People’s Assembly’s meetings as pools from which to build their own organisation.
Expect “criticisms” (we are only too familiar with how they are delivered) of “trade unions” and Labour” leaders at every People’s Assembly event.
But then, naturally, “Ultra-left sectarians never have any problem about denouncing trade union bureaucrats such as McCluskey. But, by counterposing abstract programmes to living movements, they ensure there is no interaction between them and activists influenced by reformism but open to the arguments of revolutionaries.”
Is the SWP’s way?
Not so!
A successful party must seek to chart a clear way forward, and to develop alternatives to capitalist explanations of the world, but crucially it must also raise the level of confidence and struggle by the working class. Ultimately a revolutionary party is about providing the leadership that can enable the working class to conquer state power-in its own country and internationally.
We will be interested to see what “living movement” can be resurrected from the SWP, ready to “conquer state power”.
And how their front organisation’s actions will raise anybody’s ”confidence” apart from their own.
Front de Gauche on the Brink of a Split?
Split in the Front de Gauche?
The National Front won the first round of the ‘cantonal’ by- election at Brignoles in the Var. Its candidate, Lawrence Lopez, got 40.4% of the vote to the UMP candidate , Catherine Delzers, who came second with 20.8% of votes.
The two left candidates, Communist Party, (PCF) (14.6% of the vote) and the Greens EELV (8.9%) were eliminated in the first round of voting in this district won by the left in 2012. A right-wing dissident candidate, Jean-Paul Dispard, having obtained 9.1% of the vote, far right meets a total of more than 49% of votes in the first round marked by a low turnout (67%).
According to Le Monde the Communist Party blames the Green Party for this result.
But this result has stirred up an already serious division on the left, inside the Front de gauche (FdG), in which the PCF is the largest party.
L’Humanité notes today that the PCF the Parti Socialiste (PS) have called for a “Front républicain” to block the election of the far-right FN by voting for the UDF in the second round. The Socialists had in fact called for a PCF vote in the first round, and not their government partners the EELV.
But this morning on France Inter Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading figure in the Front de gauche, and leader (inside the alliance) of the small Parti de Gauche (PG) said that the Parti Socialiste was to blame for the far-right vote.
The Socialist President, François Hollande was the cause of the far-right surge,
“le principal pourvoyeur des voix du FN est à l’Elysée”. Il a refusé de choisir entre le parti de Marine Le Pen et l’UMP au second tour de la cantonale du Var.
“the main source of the FN vote is at the Elysee.” He refused to choose between the party of Marine Le Pen and the UMP in the second round of the cantonal du Var.
He went on to claim that the reasons for the rise of the extreme-right lay in,
“The deep divisions on the left which have created despair and resignation. We elected a President of the Republic on a social democratic basis, and what does he do? He dismantles the social achievements of the country,” he said citing the pension reforms.
“People are living out the opposite of what they expected. Why are they constantly cuddling up to the bosses?”
On the call for the Republican Front, he said that both the UDF and the Front National throve on the same calls to hate. There was nothing to choose between “the devil and the deep blue sea” (la peste ou le choléra, literally plague and cholera).
Mélenchon stated that the Front de gauche was not just interested in elections, but in “mobilisation”. This was the way out of despair, and the ground of hope for the future.
Pressed to explain what these views meant for next year’s local elections he weighed in with support for “autonomous” FdG lists, rather than agreements with the Socialists.
It is well known that the PCF councillors only survives in many municipalities because of electoral pacts with the Parti Socialiste.
They are not likely to throw away this at Mélenchon’s command.
Earlier on France-Inter this problems this is causing inside the Front de gauche were discussed.
Disagreements between Mélenchon and the PCF came to the fore at the end of the summer, with the Communists’ leader, Pierre Laurent, complaining about the language used by the Jean-Luc against his own views.
Mélenchon has only partially patched his relations with the Communists up.
He has no doubt noted that some opinion polls (such as one in June) that le Front de Gauche could get 15 % in next year’s European election, the same as the Parti Socialiste. But before this the municipal elections take place in March.
For those interested in the detail of what these local elections mean can be seen here.
The Parti de Gauche has 12,000 members.
It has one European Deputy, 17 regional councillors, 11 general councillors, 1 metropolitan councillor, 2 Paris councillors and leads 7 communes of more than 3,500 inhabitants.
The Parti Communiste Français claims 138, 000.
It has 13 MPs and 19 senators, 10 000 councillors (at various levels) in 800 councils, 89 mayors of towns with more than 9, 000 inhabitants.
It does not take much to realise why the PCF takes local elections very seriously.
They may be prepared to split on this.
There is not much sign of any mass “mobilisation” in France to pull them away from this position.
Behind this are other issues.
At his best Mélenchon is an inspiring speaker.
His anti-racist speeches last year, during the Presidential election campaign, in favour of “Métissage” (mixing) and secularism, stand in stark contrast to the failure to confront these issues on the British left.
At his worst the leader of the Parti de gauche sounds like a believer in a messianic mission for the French Left, with 19th century revolutionary ‘patriotic’ overtones.
It was unfortunate that on France-Inter today Mélenchon referred to his Socialist Party opponents “barking” (aboyer).
This is how he often comes across: a satirical show has him breaking into barks every second sentence.
And that is without his widely reported habit of calling those that cross him, “connards” – whose meaning can be easily guessed.
Many on the European left admire the Front de gauche – we are amongst them.
We hope this can be sorted out.
One piece of advice.
If Mélenchon continues to rail against ‘les anglo-saxons’ can we suggest that he stops using some products of linguistic “métissage” – nord, sud, est and ouest,
They are 12th century additions to the French language from the English: North, South, East and West.
**********
Parti de Gauche on the Brignoles result here, with the view that the Socialists are largely to blame for the far-right’s success. They also affirm that this shows the need for “le FDG a plus que jamais la responsabilité d’offrir une nouvelle voie, claire et autonome ” – to stand out on their own (without agreements with the PS).
Tunisia: Islamists Agree to Leave Office Before the End of the Month.
Protest at assassination of Tunisian leftist leader Mohammed Brahmi .
Latest news: Tunisia deal to bring end to Islamist rule.
“Tunisia’s political rivals have agreed on a timetable for the Islamist-led ruling coalition to quit and be replaced by a government of independents.
The Islamist Ennahda party and opposition groups in the country signed a roadmap aimed at creating a new government within three weeks.”
More in Al Jazeera.
The Islamist Ennahda party, which heads the Tunisian government vowed on Saturday afternoon to step down before the end of October to resolve a deep political crisis. This comes two years after their victory in elections following the January 2011 revolution. Libération.
Tunisia Live continues,
The roadmap plan drafted by a group of civil society organizations calls for government and political leaders to meet for direct negotiations, and mandates that the current government resign three weeks from the first session of talks in favor of group of technocratic leaders to be chosen during the dialogue.
Leaders of Ennahdha, the largest party in the ruling coalition, and Ettakatol, one of its governing partners, both signed the agreement at a ceremony today in Tunis. Most opposition parties, including Nidaa Tounes and members of the Popular Front coalition, also signed on. *
The same web site noted on Friday,
The Popular Front opposition coalition confirmed that it will take part in the direct talks between government and opposition parties, scheduled to begin Saturday morning.
“We are going to participate,” Popular Front leader Mohamed Jmour told Tunisia Live Friday. “But all parties have to respect the roadmap. Otherwise, we will leave the dialogue.
Tunisia has been in a political deadlock since the July 25 assassination of Popular Front member Mohamed Brahmi.
The roadmap plan guiding the dialogue was proposed by the UGTT labor union, the UTICA employers’ union, and two other civil society organizations.
This plan calls for direct meetings between political leaders and calls for a new government to replace the current government within three weeks of the first session of talks.
According to the UGTT, the opening session will kick off on Saturday at 9:30 am at the Palais de Congrés in Tunis.
Al Jazeera says,
Mistrust
“I want to thank you for joining this dialogue because you are opening the door of hope for Tunisians,” said Houcine Abassi, whose UGTT trade union confederation was the lead mediator behind the roadmap, at Saturday’s ceremony.
Delegates at the Palais des Congres said the launch of the hard-won dialogue with a symbolic ceremony had earlier been jeopardised by a last-minute dispute.
The UGTT said Ennahda had initially refused to formally sign the text that underlines the timetable of the national dialogue.
The two sides are still divided over issues including the date of elections, the role of a special assembly finishing a draft of a new constitution and composition of an electoral body to oversee the vote.
Libération also notes,
As a sign of prevailing animosity in Tunisia opposition figures this week again accused Ennahda of being involved in the assassination of MP Mohamed Brahmi in July and the killing in February of another opponent, Chokri Belaïd. These crimes, for which nobody has yet to claim responsibility, have been laid at the door of the Salafist movement.
The country remains locked in institutional paralysis, linked to the emergence of armed Salafist groups. This has increased economic difficulties. Investors have become more and more cautious, while inflation and the depreciation of the Tunisian dinar have eroded ordinary people’s purchasing power.
Smear on Ralph Miliband: le Monde’s Account.
Le Monde Now Comments on Mail’s Hate Campaign.
The ‘ man who hated Great Britain”. With this provocative headline, the Daily Mail , a British right-wing tabloid. triggered a huge controversy that has kept growing. It stands as an illustration of the showdown between the British press and the country’s political class……
The article targeted Ralph Miliband, the father of Ed the current Labour leader. He was a Belgian Jewish refugee who arrived in Britain in 1940. Ralph MIliband was a famous Marxist academic. He was portrayed with unusual violence, described as a dangerous communist who hated the elite and British institutions. The Mail forget to mention that that as soon as he reached the age of 16 Ralph Miliband served in the British armed forces in order to fight the Nazis.
This was a political attack, implicitly aimed at his son, Ed Miliband. Faced with filial outrage the Daily Mail has not backed down. When they published Ed’s response, the tabloid published an editorial just next to it, entitled “Why we do not apologise”.
Adapted from today’s Le Monde.
The paper goes on to say how this affair “illustrates the power of the Daily Mail”.
It describes the paper’s content as a “world where crimes rage unchecked, immigration is out of control, and Islam is invading the national scene. It is clearly on the Right. It either glorifies or vilifies political figures…”
For Le Monde this is strong stuff.
Protest: For Everyone the Daily Mail Hates.
TRY THE TEST: HOW MUCH ARE YOU HATED BY THE DAILY MAIL? HERE.
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Be prepared: the right are preparing all-out war
by Owen Jones
The Daily Mail’s stomach-churning attack on Ed Miliband’s father – and him by association – is a warning. The British right are preparing one of the most poisonous, vicious all-out wars against the left in post-war Britain. If this is how far into the gutter this wretched “newspaper” is already willing to plunge, what’s it going to be like six months before the election?
The logic of the campaign is three-fold.
Firstly, the right believe that Ed Miliband has veered off script, abandoning the free market fundamentalist consensus established by Thatcherism in favour of what – by historical standards – is pretty mild social democracy.
Secondly, the right-wing media barons who set the terms of what is deemed politically palatable in Britain have never forgiven Ed Miliband for his endorsement of Leveson, which they believe is an unacceptable threat to their power.
Thirdly, they think Labour under Ed Miliband could actually win the 2015 election.
There’s a mixture of reasons why: the fact every time the Tories have won an election since 1955 has been on a lower share of the vote than the time before; the fact the Tories have a glass ceiling of possible support given their disappearance as a political force in Scotland, much of northern England and Wales; that the Tories haven’t won since 1992, and only won 36% in 2010 despite economic collapse and a Labour PM less popular than tuberculosis; the fact Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, even though she woefully lagged behind Labour’s James Callaghan as the electorate’s preferred PM; that the electoral boundaries that favour Labour; that those who voted Lib Dem because they thought Labour were too right wing, and are now firmly back in Ed Miliband’s party’s fold; the fact that, even though Ukip’s current polling will subside, even a significantly smaller poll result for Farage’s party in 2015 will inflict serious damage on the Tories; and the fact that Miliband’s social-democratic populism could prove, well, pretty popular a time of ever-falling living standards.
The right fear that, if Labour were to win in 2015, it would inflict a possibly fatal blow to the free market fundamentalist political consensus. It will show it is possible to win on a different sort of programme, including one that at least hints at challenging an arrogant elite all too accustomed to wealth and power being generously shovelled in their direction by successive governments.
Therefore, a Labour victory is not acceptable to the guardians of the free market fundamentalist order.
Some will shrug off the Daily Mail attack as, well, the sort of thing you expect from this almost farcically detestable rag. The brazen hypocrisy of a paper once owned by a supporter of the Nazis and the Blackshirts has been well covered. But, in my view, this is serious. It is a warning shot.
I don’t care if the Daily Mail got someone called Geoffrey Levy to write it. As others have pointed out, this whole episode reeks of anti-Semitism – of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew with contempt for his country, and so on.
George Osborne’s speech this week lumped Ed Miliband in with Marxism. A red-baiting, McCarthyite-style campaign beckons, nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Jeremy Hunt today effectively endorsed the Daily Mail attack, stating that “Ralph Miliband was no friend of the free market and I have never heard Ed Miliband said he supports it.”
We already know that the Tories are employing Lynton Crosby to replicate the sort of vicious campaign he has pioneered elsewhere. Their strategy is to redirect people’s anger away from those at the top, to people’s neighbours – unemployed people, public sector workers, immigrants, and so on. Rather than be angry at the fact you’re being mugged, be angry that your less deserving neighbour isn’t being mugged enough, is the general gist. This is how they hope to win the election, combined with a possible one-off pre-election tax cut.
We’ve already had public money being spent on vans with ‘Go home’ written on them, sent to ethnically mixed communities; now we have the Daily Mail slandering Ed Miliband’s Jewish immigrant father.
There are many on the left who have misgivings about Labour and Ed Miliband. As someone who wants Labour to be more radical, I more than empathise. But let’s be clear. We’re on the verge of an all-out, frothing-at-the-mouth war against even the mildest challenge to free market fundamentalism. It will be as dirty, vicious and personal as it gets.
That’s why anybody who wants to build a different sort of country – not a Britain treated as the plaything by wealthy barons who can’t even be bothered to pay tax – needs to stand against this poison. That doesn’t mean descending to their vile, reprehensible level. We really are better than them, and in part we must hope they will discredit themselves in the eyes of people who have decency and humanity.
But it does mean fighting back. The build-up to the 2015 election really is going to be horrible. None of us can have any illusions about that now. Let’s all do everything we can to take on this bile and to drive it back. I’m afraid I don’t think it is hyperbole, or a lazy resort to a well-worn cliché, to suggest that the future of this country is at stake.
From here.
Ralph Miliband: What did “Evil” Miliband really believe? Obituary Review (1994).
What did ‘Evil’ Miliband really believe in?
Keeping Socialism in Sight.
Labour Briefing. October 1994.
Andrew Coates reviews Socialism for a Sceptical Age by Ralph Miliband (Polity Press, £11.95) and Socialist Register 1994 Between Globalism and Nationalism, Edited by Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (Merlin Press, £12.95).
We need to take a long look at the prospects for socialism, To follow fashion is to think that the best a Labour government could bring would be a reformed constitution and industrial modernisation, Ralph Miliband’s death on May 21st deprives the left of one of the most trenchant critics of this ‘new revisionism’ which denies that there is a realistic alternative to capitalism, Tough-minded and deeply-informed, he never lost sight of the potential for more radical change.
Miliband’s reputation was made through his studies of the Labour Party (Parliamentary Socialism, 1961 and 1973) and the state (The State and Capitalist Society 1969). The former attacked Labour leaders’ ‘”dogmatic” attachment to the parliamentary tradition; the latter explored the limitation of reforming parties of the left.
In the 1980s Miliband was faced with a wholly new problem. Former Communists and radical socialists leap-frogged over Labour to endorse what David Marquand called a ‘new progressive coalition” of the centre-left which repudiated even the modest objectives of class-based reform. In Divided Societies (1989) Miliband had to put the arguments for the very existence of class struggle. He admitted, however, that there was a fundamental “crisis of the agencies” of socialism, from unions to parties. From the convulsions in the East and the dramatic weakening of Mediterranean socialism, to the triumph of Blair, there is ample evidence that he was right.
As its title suggests, Socialism for a Sceptical Age takes on board this crisis. But it also addresses the far deeper difficulties of capitalism. This (it seems almost too obvious to state – were it not that is constantly ignored) is based on wage-labour - a “morally abhorrent” type of exploitation and subordination.
In a series of sketches Miliband outlines the case against today’s social system. Neo-liberal economics have blighted individual lives and entire continents. Despite this, some if the left believe that private enterprise is a source of liberty. This is false. Capitalism and democracy is not friends. As Miliband points out, popular rights are “largely the result of stubborn pressure” from “labour and left movement, against the dominant forces of property and privilege.” Weaken them and freedom suffers.
The limited parliamentary control over nationalised industries was, in retrospect, at least a start towards making economic management responsible to an electorate. Unapologetic about collective control, Miliband insists that socialisation of the means of production must replace private ownership,. Against the prevailing winds, he asserts: “Public enterprise makes possible a democratisation of economic activity beyond anything that capitalism can achieve.”
Miliband was often a robust opponent of those believe that the Labour Party has socialist potential. He was scornful about the lack of Marxist influence within it. It seemed, a few years ago, that he wanted to help form a new party to Labour’s left. While Socialism for a Sceptical Age describes the failings of Labour’s modernisers, it also recognises that new social movements, and small red-green parties, are neither stable nor coherent enough to replace social democracy. Nor are these bodies any more sympathetic to Marxism. We have to have substantial parties, with a collective and strong leadership that can govern a country. He concludes: “There is little doubt that social democratic parties will for the foreseeable future remain the main political force on the left, or at least a factor of major importance”. The immediate task lies in “strengthening left reformism” through grass-roots work, by recreating a Marxist current, and by building coalitions with the oppressed.
Some claim that the globalisation of the economy makes even moderate socialism impossible. The latest Socialist Register tackles this issue. Leo Panitch analyses the nation state in the world system and its role in turning hyper-liberal policies into facts of life for its citizens. Far from agreeing that governments must accept treaties (from Maastricht to GATT) dictating permanent free-market strategies, Pantich points to the potential for alternative development. A crucial factor is sheer political will.
Other important articles by Manfred Bienefeld and Arthur MacEwan take up the same theme. They should be required reading for anyone who wants an answer to the globalisers’ claim that reform is bounded by the rules of international finance.
In a short excursion around the history of the year-book, Miliband himself discusses its most important interventions in left debates, including those on Conservatism, post-modernism, Stalinism and the ‘new revisionism’. As a guide to the central concerns of the British left the Register had been and remains invaluable, and Miliband played a major role in creating and sustaining it.
He sometimes argued that labret could never play a positive role in socialist politics. But his best contributions focused people’s minds on the real problems faced by socialists. By laying-down long-term principles for the creation of an egalitarian, democratic and co-operative society, Miliband left us with great resources. Every socialist can profit from his lucid and inspiring writings.
Ralph Miliband: A Great Democratic Socialist Slandered by the Mail.
Hated Britain So Much He Joined the Belgian section of the Royal Navy.
“The man who hated Britain: Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father.”
The headline over GEOFFREY LEVY‘s Mail article will have outraged many people, on the left and elsewhere.
Ed’s father, Ralph Miliband, was known, and warmly remembered by thousands (if not more) on the left.
He was a founder member of the New Left, a democrat, fiercely opposed to Stalinism, and the author of books that influenced people people across the labour movement.
His more topical articles in the yearly Socialist Register contributed enormously to international and British political debate – and still bear reading (I have cited some only a couple of months ago).
The Mail, barely skates the surface of this.
Thought apart from his ‘hate’ for Britain, Ralph apparently “made plain his disdain for the Establishment, which was, to his mind, nothing less than the old boy network.”
Levy continues,
Miliband, father of Ed and David Miliband, died in 1994, aged 70, soon after the publication of his last book, Socialism For A Sceptical Age. In it, the venerated Marxist philosopher and academic continued to espouse his lifelong ‘socialist’ cause.
One voice, however, vehemently informed him that he was still pursuing a lost cause. It was that of his elder son David. He did not mince his words.
Having read the manuscript before publication, David wrote to his father asking, ‘whether you are restating a case that has been traduced in theory or practice, or whether you are advancing a new case.
I was sent the same manuscript (before publication) and reviewed it in Labour Briefing.
Like many I had met Miliband as a member of the Socialist Society Steering Committee – in many ways the continuation of the original New Left.
The print-out text was sent to Briefing so as our obituary of Ralph Miliband could incorporate the insights of his last book.
In the pages of the Briefing I praised Socialism for a Sceptical Age for his hopeful, democratic insights, which came at a time when the free-market hard right (as today) was wreaking havoc in our country and across the world.
Ed, rightly, is outraged at the attack on his father.
He says in his reply,
My father’s strongly Left-wing views are well known, as is the fact that I have pursued a different path and I have a different vision. He was a man with a great sense of humour, so the idea of me being part of some ‘sinister’ Marxist plot would have amused him and disappointed him in equal measure and for the same reason — he would have known it was ludicrously untrue.
But whatever else is said about my Dad’s political views, Britain was a source of hope and comfort for him, not hatred. Having been born in Belgium he didn’t start from a belief in the inferiority of other countries, but he loved Britain for the security it offered his family and the gentle decency of our nation.
Amongst the controversy now flaring up it is important to bear in mind some points.
- Ralph Miliband was a democratic socialist. In Marxism and Politics (1977) he argued for political pluralism and representative elected institutions. He was strongly opposed to ‘Leninist’ vanguard politics and dictatorship of any kind. The Socialist register backed dissidents struggling for democracy in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc and Asia. He was consistently anti-Stalinist.
- MIliband was sceptical about the Labour Party. That is, he considered that socialism (at the time still officially a central part of Labour’s Constitution) was less important to the party than its loyalty to the British Constitution. That was his famous conclusion to Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour (1961). In practice he backed socialists who were members of the Labour Party. His final book left the question as to whether a British left might revive in Labour open.
- Coming from the original 1950s New Left – itself a break with the traditional left – Miliband was open to new movements, such as feminism, and ecology. But he remained committed to ‘class politics’. That is, he considered that the central inequalities of capitalist society were bound up with minority economic rule – the bourgeoisie. Socialists had to tackle the economic sources of this rule in order to fight a much wider range of injustices and oppressions.
Ralph Miliband was a good man, a good socialist, and a good comrade.
And, as Ed shows, he was a good father.
The Mail, we note now says this,
“An evil legacy and why we won’t apologise.”
“But what is blindingly clear from everything he wrote throughout his life is that he had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished.”
The constitutional monarchy, the bicameral legislature, property rights, common law . . . even ‘respectability’ and ‘good taste’ — all were anathema to this lifelong, unreconstructed Marxist who craved a workers’ revolution.”
This is the Mail’s own democratic record (Hat-tip Paul F),
A brilliant response to the Mail’s lies, Ralph Miliband: democrat and anti-fascist is given by Poumista.
Hate on the Dole: George Osborne to Make Unemployed “pick up littter.”
‘Community Service’ Osborne’s Solution to Mass Unemployment.
The Daily Mail exults, “Benefits will be stripped from the long-term jobless unless they work full time picking up litter, removing graffiti or preparing meals for the elderly.”
“George Osborne will today announce details of the US-style ‘work for the dole’ programme, starting within six months and affecting 200,000 welfare claimants.”
The Independent reports the crucail details.
200,000 people a year who have claimed jobseeker’s allowance for three years will lose benefits unless they take up one of three options after two years on the Work Programme:
- Thirty hours a week for six months of community work such as making meals for the elderly, cleaning up litter and graffiti or charity work, plus 10 hours of “job search activity”.
- Daily attendance at a jobcentre to search for work instead of a brief interview once a fortnight.
- A mandatory intensive regime for claimants with underlying problems such as mental health, drug addiction or illiteracy.
Although the benefit sanctions will be controversial, the Tories regard the “work for dole” scheme as an example of “tough love” and insist their aim is to help the jobless back into work.
We note,
Statistics released by the DWP today show that the performance of the Work Programme – which was already achieving less than doing nothing at all – is steadily getting worse.
By June 2013 a lower percentage of people who had been on the scheme for one full year had found a job which lasted at least 6 months – known as a sustained job outcome – than in the previous two months. In April 2013 14% of claimants who had been on the scheme for one year had found sustained jobs, by June this had dropped to 13%.*
Boycott Workfare rightly compares the plans to the punishments given out to those who have broken the law.
Unemployed people and campaigners have condemned George Osborne’s announcement that long-term unemployed people will be forced to work unpaid or face losing their social security as a criminalisation of unemployed people.
The maximum community sentence that a judge can hand out is for 300 hours, but claimants on six-month workfare schemes are already being forced to work without pay for 780 hours. The four-week Mandatory Work Activity scheme is already the equivalent of a medium level community service order that a person might receive if they were found guilty of drink driving or assault.
When a similar scheme was introduced in the US, thousands of jobs in the Parks Department were lost in New York alone – to be replaced with forced unpaid workers. Similar case studies have emerged in the UK, where workfare placements are already taking place in hospitals, council offices, charities and businesses.
What is the record of previous workfare schemes?
A pilot has already been tried.
Boycott Workfare commented on the results,
The preliminary results are from the trailblazer pilot, which tested CAP along with Ongoing Case Management (OCM) – “a more intensive a more intensive offer of flexible and personalised adviser-based support, as well as a set of mandatory activities, delivered by Jobcentre Plus through increased adviser interventions for six months”. These two schemes were tested with a control group continuing on standard job centre plus, and participants randomly assigned to the schemes.
Fifteen to 18 per cent in each programme strand had entered paid employment, become self-employed or were waiting to start work at the time of the survey, six to seven months after starting on the trailblazer. These job outcomes did not vary significantly between programme strands, nor did the types of jobs entered, take-home pay and hours worked.
For participants on OCM, those who reported receiving more personalised support to their individual needs were significantly more likely to be in work at the end of the programme. However, for CAP participants, neither attending a placement nor receiving jobsearch support were significantly associated with a job outcome around the end of the programme.
The majority of participants reported being in receipt of JSA at the time of the survey. DWP statistics published alongside this report found statistically significantly lower levels of benefit receipt for both CAP and OCM participants compared to the control group about six months after starting the programme.
The degrading sight of the Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing, with glee, that the out-of-work will have to clean the streets, wash the walls of scribblings, and cook for the old, awaits us today.
His Minister of Work and Pensions, Ian Duncan Smith, is said to be devout Catholic.
Not doubt that played something in the decision to make life hell on earth for the unemployed.
Important Update.
Johnny Void points out how the hard right Policy Exchange has manufactured statistical support for Workfare.
“The general public’s opinions on workfare have been grossly distorted by the nature of the questions asked in this survey.”
* The TUC said (26 September 2013),
Work Programme is still failing to help vulnerable people, says TUC
Commenting on figures published today (Thursday) by the Department for Work and Pensions on the government’s Work Programme, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said:
‘Despite the official spin, the Work Programme is still failing to deliver for many jobseekers.
‘Just one person in 25 is able to find a proper job after a year on the scheme, and disabled people have seen virtually no benefit since its introduction. Although there has been an increase in placements for those on those on the dole these improvements are starting to tail off.
‘The government is obsessed with punishing those out of work, rather than helping them find jobs. The best way to get to grips with our unemployment crisis would be to offer a jobs guarantee for anyone out of work for at least a year.’
The Legacy of the ‘Fellow Travellers’ and the Present-day Left.
Few Western Fellow-Travellers Today?
David Caute’s The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment, (1973) is one of those books you have to read and re-read.
It’s the history of those individuals who were not willing to become Communists but were attracted by the socialist systems of the Soviet Union, the Popular Democracies, and Communist China.
Caute distinguished those who became members of the European (German, French and British) and US Communist parties from those who more than ‘attracted’ but actively supported the Soviet Union (and later China and the Eastern bloc).
The term Fellow Traveller originates from Russian,попутчик, poputchik (literally: “one who travels the same path”)
It was used after the Russian Revolution for intellectuals who went along with the Bolshevik ‘Soviet’ power, but did not join the Party. It became internationally known (it’s generally accepted) when Trotsky used it,
Between bourgeois art, which is wasting away either in repetitions or in silences, and the new art which is as yet unborn, there is being created a transitional art which is more or less organically connected with the Revolution, but which is not at the same time the art of the Revolution. Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nicolai Tikhonov, the “Serapion Fraternity”, Yesenin and his group of Imagists and, to some extent, Kliuev – all of them were impossible without the Revolution, either as a group, or separately. … They are not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist “fellow-travellers”, in the sense in which this word was used by the old Socialists. … As regards a “fellow-traveller”, the question always comes up – how far will he go? This question cannot be answered in advance, not even approximately. The solution of it depends not so much on the personal qualities of this or that “fellow-traveller”, but mainly on the objective trend of things during the coming decade. 1924 Literature and Revolution.
Caute lists some European calques, Mitläufer, compagnon de route compañero de viaje (or ruta), as well as the English.
The history of those who admired the Soviet Union during the Stalinist period is deeply saddening.
The book stands on its own, but two aspects of Caute’s analysis struck me to the quick.
They are relevant to anybody trying to explain how callously some on the Left reacted to the Kenyan shopping centre bombings.
The first is that the fellow travellers – even during the Moscow Trails – remained committed to Western ‘bourgeois’ democratic forms – in their own countries. They were indeed often specialists in the defence of civil liberties. D. N. Pritt, the most outrageous apologist for the Moscow Trials, was a British barrister and a member of the Labour Party (expelled during the Second World War). Amongst many cases, he successfully stopped the deportation of Ho Cho Minh from France in 1931.
To continue, “In 1934 he successfully defended the veteran socialist Tom Mann, on trial for sedition with Harry Pollitt in 1934, and the same year won damages against the police for the organizers of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Pritt also worked for the recently formed National Council for Civil Liberties. In August 1936 he attended the first Moscow show trial. His account, published as The Zinoviev Trial, gave support to the attempt by Joseph Stalin to purge his political opponents. Margaret Cole pointed out that Pritt had “fallen in love” with Soviet socialism.” Spartacus.
Fellow Travellers like Pritt thought that bourgeois democracy was not suitable for the Soviet Union. They accused critics of the regime of not understanding what today is called The Other.
Secondly, the Fellow Travellers, thought that people were determined by their environment. They could be ‘made’ better once that was changed. So better that the Soviet Union had created a ‘New Man’ and ‘New Woman’. Caute says this is their Enlightenment legacy – though perhaps the less rose tinted attitude towards human nature of Lumières like Denis Diderot not bear out that claim.
To look at the reaction of some of the European left to the Kenyan bombings is to see that some of these attitudes remain.
There are those (that is the SWP) who claim that the Somalian Islamists at least established ‘order’ and even ‘law’.
As the SWP put it,
“After the invasion by Kenyan and Ethiopian troops in 2011 it said that it supported the ideas of Al Qaida. Even Rob Wise of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank comments that it was “a relatively moderate Islamist organisation”, which was driven towards Al Qaida by invasion.
He added that since 2008 al Shabaab has “increasingly embraced transnational terrorism and attempted to portray itself as part of the Al Qaida-led global war on the West.”
The killers, then are the product of ‘imperialism’. This environment has made them. Only changing these conditions can stop their terrorism.
Above all we have to be wary of ‘Islamopbia’.
We should not ‘impose’ Western standards on Muslims.
Thus in the recent SWP Socialist Review Talat Ahmed argues,
Faced with Islamophobia the response of some Muslims has been to go on the defensive – a form of “quietism” or retreat whereby people withdraw from society in the hope of avoiding its worst excesses. This level of disengagement can lead to identify with overt Islamic “symbolism” – adopting a certain type of dress code, not eating pork, abstaining from alcohol, having traditional marriages and observing certain religious ceremonies.
Though understandable, this approach lends itself to a certain form of “lifestyleism”. This dovetails with an electoral politics that seeks to represent distinct “Muslim interests” within existing institutions. The main weakness with this approach is that it can safely incorporate genuine concerns and grievances of all Muslims in a strategy of reform, rather than challenging the roots of Islamophobia.
Those who criticise these ‘lifestyles’ and ‘traditions’ should no doubt be very wary of attacking the Other, and, indeed risk ‘Islamophobia’.
There is absolutely no idea of the need for a democratic left-wing political struggle against Islamism.
At least we can be thankful there are few mass murdering Islamist regimes around for large numbers of Western Fellow travellers to marvel at.
The dictatorships that there are, from Sudan on wards, don’t seem to have attracted more than fellow Islamists.
Even the worst elements of the SWP and British left would not go so far as to praise them directly.
Dexter Fletcher: the Unknown Story.
Dexter Fletcher’s ‘Hood’.
Dexter Fletcher is in the news.
Jamie Oliver threw a star-studded gala screening for his friend Dexter Fletcher’s latest movie (Sunshine On Leith), as the actor-turned-director revealed that the TV chef was the inspiration behind his decision to make a musical film.
More in the Evening Standard and Wikipedia.
The startling but true history behind Dexter Fletcher can now be told.
As a lad Dexter grew up in Tewkesbury Terrace, North London (N11).
With his brothers, Graham and Steve, he was part of the Bounds Green ‘Bounders’.
This gang, with echoes of the Peaky Blinders and the Chicago Mob, also drew on the support of the sinister leader of Tendance Coatesy, and other desperate figures.
Though much younger than the rest of the crew “Dex” was the most feared.
Bottles of pop from Burridges, and tins of light ale from the The Ranelagh would mysteriously disappear.
On the ‘front line’ on The Green the Bounders ruled.
Dexter’s early career is lightly fictionalised in his first film, Bugsy Malone.
His often cited “genuine Cockney accent”, which Coatesy, as his neighbour (2 doors down) also boasts of, is a relic of this hard life growing up in the Bounds Green ‘hood’.
We are willing to sell more details to the press for any reasonable offer.
Note, “Bounds Green features in the ‘crap towns‘ list compiled by the bi-annual book-shaped magazine The Idler.”
SWP Reaches New Moral Bankruptcy, “The horror in Kenya is a direct product of Western intervention. “
Al-Shabab: No Will of their Own, Says SWP.
“The shocking attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya’s capital Nairobi was not just mindless terrorism.”
The SWP goes on to explain in the latest Socialist Worker why the centre was targeted.
“Westgate was chosen for this operation because, as Kenyan socialist Zahid Rajan put it, “It is the venue of choice for wealthy people across the racial divide”. To most better-off Kenyans the malls like Westgate were seen as a haven from the embittered, violent country.”
Apparently Al-Shabab are no so bad.
After the chaos in the early 200s, they restored some kind of government in Somilia
Central authority collapsed in Somalia with the fall of US-backed dictator Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991. Al Shabaab was part of the Islamic Courts movement that restored some kind of government in 2006.
But…
“This was overthrown by a US-backed invasion and the group has since moved to more extreme forms of Islamism. “
As opposed no doubt to their ‘moderate’ form of Sharia before.
“After the invasion by Kenyan and Ethiopian troops in 2011 it said that it supported the ideas of Al Qaida. Even Rob Wise of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank comments that it was “a relatively moderate Islamist organisation”, which was driven towards Al Qaida by invasion.
He added that since 2008 al Shabaab has “increasingly embraced transnational terrorism and attempted to portray itself as part of the Al Qaida-led global war on the West.”
Conclusion?
“The horror in Kenya is a direct product of Western intervention.”
Al-Shabab themselves say (Al Jazeera),
The place we attacked is Westgate shopping mall. It is a place where tourists from across the world come to shop, where diplomats gather. It is a place where Kenya’s decision-makers go to relax and enjoy themselves. Westgate is a place where there are Jewish and American shops. So we have to attack them.
And as for the ‘anti-Western’ claims they underline their wish during the attack to kill only non-Muslims (the majority of Kenyan for a start).
We released all Muslims when we took control of the mall. Witnesses have backed us on this.
Now the SWP may think that Al-Shabab are forces swept into history by Western ‘imperialism’.
They deny them free will – who to kill or not to kill.
Few others will sympathise with this self-indulgent moral bankruptcy.
Least of those suffering from the Al-Shabab attack on a Kenyan Border post today.
French Greens Begin to Crack.
After Die Grünen, the EELV (Europe, Ecologie, Les Verts)…
Noël Mamère, former Presidential Candidate of the French Greens, les Verts (2002, 5,25% of the vote), has just resigned from the party.
I decided to leave the EELV because I do not recognize the party that I represented for the presidential elections in 2002. Our party does not create anything: it is a prisoner of its tactical calculations and its cliques. We have become a trade union for our councillors and MPs. I feel that we stuck in denial about the the role we can play in society. That will not stop me from leading a municipal election list at Begles, I do not need the party label. For me the page has turned. I am quitting without regrets, without any particular emotion. This is the result of observation and analysis. Le Monde.
This follows the decision of Pascal Durand, their National Secretary, elected as part of the fusion between Europe Ecologie (led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and the Green Party, not to stand again for this post.
Mamère holds a grudge against the leadership of the French Greens,
The real bosses are the so-called “firm” that is, Cécile Duflot and friends. Although Cécile Duflot is a good minister, she did not let go of the control of the Greens. But the Greens were not created to be dependent on the wishes of one particular party grouping. This is the opposite of what environmentalists defend.
Cohn-Bendit says he shares Mamère’s feelings,
I share this feeling of being utterly fed-up with the clannish, terrifying couples who rule EELV. “Christmas Mamère (…) represents all the contradictions of political ecology. he is a reformist mayor which, through small steps, is trying to change , to reform, to make avandces for his town of Begles. At the same time, ipolitical ecology is completely commited to being a parliamentarian, and a spokesperson for radical humanist ecology.
Cohn-Bendit referred to the case of Pascal Durand.
Others have noted that Mamère has quite a history of making similar gestures. His less than principled participation in the manoeuvres that led to the annulment of the Presidential candidature of left-wing Green, Alain Lipietz is not forgotten, here at any rate.
Underling this is are a number of problems facing the French Greens.
They have a very high ratio of elected representatives to their membership.
In 2012 EELV claimed 14 869 full members and 17 371 supporters (‘co-operants’), (the figure has gone down since, many of the latter joined only for the Presidential election campaign).
It has 18 deputies in the National Assembly alone, and hundreds and hundreds of local councillors at all levels.
Some claim that the ratio of real members to those holding some kind of office is as high as one to four, and that most ‘activists’ hold some kind of elected position.
Critics alleges that as a result the driving force of the party has become the interests of these politicians, which is, unsurprisingly for many, their careers (Mamère not excepted)
That is before we look at the policies of the present Socialist-led Government and President Hollande.
But it should be noted that Mamère is not a critic of Hollande’s aggressive stance on Syria: like Cohn-Bendit he, as the New York Times states, backs a Western intervention to the hilt.
German Elections: Die Linke Beat Die Grünen .
8,6% to Greens’ 8,4%
Angela Merkel’s re-election is not the only news out of Germany (Hat-tip Dagmar).
The results showed that the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won only 4.8%, which correspondents say is a disaster for the junior coalition partner, leaving it with no national representation in parliament for the first time in Germany’s post-war history.
Party chairman Philipp Roesler called it “the bitterest, saddest hour of the Free Democratic Party”.
The FDP was beaten by the Green Party (8.4%) and the former communist Left Party (8.6%). It almost finished behind the new Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD), which advocates withdrawal from the euro currency and took 4.7%, just short of the parliamentary threshold.
There was at one point speculation that Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister CSU might even win enough seats for an absolute majority – the first in half a century. BBC
Comment: so the Greens have been outrun by the Left Party. It is good news that Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) “Alternative for Germany” – the country’s UKIP – did not get in.
Final percentage of the vote
- CDU bloc: 41.5%
- SPD: 26%
- FDP: 4.8%
- Left Party: 8.6%
- Green: 8.4%
- AfD: 4.7%
Der Spiegel comments on the result,
Is the scene now set for another grand coalition? The leadership of the SPD are putting the brakes on speculation over a potential pairing with Merkel. Following its weak performance, the party wants to avoid internal disputes over what would be an unpopular alliance.
Sigmar Gabriel is usually very adept at beating around the bush, but after Sunday’s election result he decided to take a more direct tack. “We would have expected a little bit more,” the leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) said.
No, it was not a good outcome for the Social Democrats, and they know it. The party made a bit of a recovery compared to 2009, but talk of a resurgence is out of the question. The conservatives, consisting of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have rode off even further into the distance. To the chancellor and her party colleagues, the SPD looks tiny, a party left far behind.The Social Democrats are facing some testing weeks. Angela Merkel has fallen just short of an absolute majority; she needs a partner to govern. The Greens, after their own debacle, are likely to have enough to worry about without testing a potential coalition option that is already internally highly controversial, so the chancellor will likely court the SPD. After four years, the Social Democrats could once again be in government.
But few in the party have much enthusiasm for a new alliance with Merkel. The gap between the conservatives and their closest competitior is sizeable. A CDU/SPD coalition would not be on a level playing field — that at least is what the Social Democrats suspect. In the end, so the fears go, everything would pan out as it did in 2009. Or even worse. Back then, SPD politicians felt Merkel got the credit for anything positive that happened within the government, even if it was the Social Democrats’ own work.
After Kenya, 60 Killed in Pakistan Church.
After, “The attack by Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked rebel group, al-Shabab, at an upscale mall in Nairobi has killed at least 59 people and wounded 175 others, Kenya’s interior cabinet secretary said.
Multiple barrages of gunfire erupted on Sunday morning from inside the building where there is a hostage stand-off with the attackers nearly 24 hours after they stormed the Westgate shopping centre using grenades and assault rifles.”
The Guardian adds,
During a lull in the firing the attackers called out in Swahili, a language widely spoken in Kenya and the rest of east Africa, for Muslims to identify themselves and leave.
Covering the Christian name on his ID with his thumb he approached one of the attackers, whom he described as Somali, and showed them the plastic card. “They told me to go. Then an Indian man came forward and they said, ‘What is the name of Muhammad’s mother?’ When he couldn’t answer they just shot him.”
Now, there is this,
A suicide bomb attack on a church in the Pakistani city of Peshawar has killed at least 60 people, police said.
The attack occurred as parishioners left the building after attending Sunday mass, police said.
“After the service ended, people started to come out and the suicide bomber rushed towards them,” said Najeeb Bogvi, a senior police officer in Peshawar.A hospital spokesperson said that at least 120 people had been wounded in the attack.
These two atrocities have a one, very clear, link.
German Elections: Die Linke.
“Die Linke’s pro-capitalist, social democratic outlook has been obvious for quite some time.” writes Ben Lewis in the Weekly Worker.
A more sympathetic article by Peter Thomson in the Guardian on September the 5th stated, that die Linke should not be written fog. It is the “ only party represented in the Bundestag that does not go along with the general austerity consensus on social and economic policy.”
The French Communist paper, L’Humanité notes that the programme of Die Linke resulted from a June conference that endorsed these main points,
Gathered under the slogan “100% social,” the 500 delegates focused on the abolition of Hartz system that millions of precarious workers. The program includes the introduction of a minimum wage to 10 euros per hour. It also calls for the end of the retirement age of sixty-seven. In the debate on the crisis in the euro area, Die Linke has spoken for the continuation of the single currency.The party claims a reform of the content of the monetary union “overcomes the serious imbalances” that have emerged in Europe. And noted that “austerity is the main threat to the maintenance of the euro,” which transformed is essential to building a European solidarity.
They also oppose Western armed intervention in Syria.
The same paper reports that these social demands have made their presence felt during the electoral campaign.
On Saturday the 14th there was a day of action, called by civil society groups, trade unions, and backed by Die Linke, calling for “”Um fair Teilen” (a fair share) demanded a just redistribution of wealth.
Neues Duetschland (aligned to Die Linke) confirms this.
Above all the demand for a minimum wage at a “living” level is popualr,
Eine Mehrheit der Bundesbürger, die einen gesetzlichen Mindestlohn befürworten, sprechen sich für eine Höhe von 10 Euro pro Stunde aus. Das ist das Ergebnis einer Infratest-Umfrage für den SWR. 41 Prozent unterstützen hingegen eine Höhe von 8,50 Euro. Insgesamt liegt die Zahl der Menschen in Deutschland, die eine generelle allgemeingültige Gehaltsuntergrenze befürworten sehr hoch: 85 Prozent der Bundesbürger wollen die Einführung eines gesetzlichen Mindestlohns.
Die Zahlen bestätigen eine Forderung der Linkspartei, welche sich in ihrem Wahlprogramm … ….
A majority of German citizens advocate a statutory minimum wage. They are in favour of a basic level of 10 euros per hour. This is the result of an opinion survey for SWR. 41%, however, support a lower rate of 8,50 €. The total number of people in Germany who advocate a minimum is very high: 85% of Germans want the introduction of a statutory minimum wage.
Figures confirm that this – a plank of the the Left Party’s election manifesto.
If the demand for a minimum wage of 10 Euros an Hour is not very radical it clearly has some echo in the population.
Whether this is translatable into votes is another question.
Der Speigel gives the latest opinion polls,
A 58 percent majority of Germans say they would like to see Merkel remain in the Chancellery, with just 32 percent preferring her centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) challenger Peer Steinbrück. But while support for her party remains at a steady 40 percent, the FDP is down to 5.5 percent, barely clearing the 5 percent hurdle required for representation in parliament, but giving the coalition combined support of 45.5 percent.
According to the “political barometer” poll commissioned by public broadcaster ZDF, the SPD, the Greens and the far-left Left Party are polling at 44.5 percent after support for the SPD rose to 27 percent and for the Left Party to 8.5 percent.
The environmentalist Green Party’s popularity, meanwhile, dropped to 9 percent after a turbulent week that saw the party weakened by fresh evidence of its past pro-pedophile sympathies.
Reports indicate that the Greens and Die Linke are about equal, at around 9-10% of intentions to vote (Wikipedia below). This is a drop of about 1 to 2 % from the previous, 2009, election.
| Institute | Date | CDU/CSU | SPD | GREEN | FDP | LINKE | PIRATES | AfD | Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trend Research[6] | 18 September 2013 | 38% | 27% | 10% | 5% | 9% | - | 4.5% | 9.5% |
| INSA/YouGov[5] | 19 September 2013 | 38% | 28% | 8% | 6% | 9% | 2% | 5% | 4% |
Les Renards Pâles. Yannick Haenel. Situationism Reborn?
Les Renards Pâles. Yannick Haenel. 2013. Situationism Reborn?
“The memory of Guy Debord and the Situationist International went through me like the flash of a flaming comet: they were the last, in France, to give life to the word ‘revolution’, and to live that out as true freedom.” (Page 26)
Jean Deichel, the narrator of Les Renards Pâles (the Pale Foxes), is 43 years old and unemployed. Rent unpaid, living in a kind of stupor, he leaves his flat and goes to live in his car, a Renault 11 Break, in one of the last streets in Paris where parking is not metered.
Turning the radio on Jean finds that a new French President has been elected – he had chosen not to cast his ballot. As he listens he keeps hearing the word “work”. Work? It destroys people’s lives. After having slogged his guts out in the Parisian suburbs, he has decided that he simply does not want a job. Jean imagines what would happen if everybody refused to be docile, to obey the “republican duty” to labour, a general strike against work…
A very different story to the man who loses his post and pretends to go out to the office every day follows. Jean roams Paris, guided by his ‘I Ching’, En attendant Godot, found in the glove compartment. He is unconcerned with current events, sensitive only to the changing “clouds and overgrown weeds that cover the last empty spaces of Paris.”
Something of a psychogeographer and a cousin of Walter Benjamin’s Flâneurs Jean does not linger in the modern Arcades, les Halles, or the luxury elsewhere but remains outside, often in the 19th and 20th Arrondissements. He sees the phantoms of the Commune rise, thinks, at Tourelles, of an Internment Camp for ‘undesirables’, refugees and resistance fighters, in 1941. Jean is aware of the hidden civil war that continues in France right till today. It was if the “blood of revolutionaries had never ceased flowing in France.” (Page 95)
A Belleville encounter with an acquaintance, and his circle of rebellious “artists” (the inverted commas are Haenal’s) rises into an intoxicating debate about confronting the “nouvel élu” (the President). Jean announces that he had voted for Max Stirner, the author of the Ego and His Own, (1844). Is this an affirmation of his “uniqueness”? One, Bison, is a veteran of the Genoa 2011 protests. He does not stop talking about the G8, that it crystallised the world split into the resistance and the repression. Corned about his own politics, Jean admits, to the disdain of his questioner, that he voted for nobody. He finishes by thinking that the phantoms of the state take a life of their own, “politics eats the body of those who have the weakness to believe in it.” (Page 43)
Two of this group leave to join the Tarnac Group (L’inssurection qui vient). Yet Jean’s own itinerary leads to perhaps a more radical end.
The Dogans and Les Renards Pâles
Fascinated by a wall slogan, La Société n’existe pas, Jean ponders the idea that there is no place for him, or us, in a society that talks of “re-educating” the unemployed through compulsory labour. He meets Malian migrants, working as dustmen, “picking up France’s shit to feed Mali.” A mysterious woman, nicknamed ‘La Reine de Pologne’ who visits the swimming pool he uses to keep clean, takes him to a Griot (Malian Sorcerer) who explains the story of the Renards Pâle, a creature of their cosmology, “cet animal anarchiste qui s’étatait rebellé contre la Création” (page 109) The cruelty of this anarchist animal, inspiring divination, could come to Paris and in an insurrection that could overturn our world.
The novel unfolds into that tumultuous uprising: “un spectre hante la France, c’est L’Afrique”. Treated as slaves, massacred under colonial rule – as “brutes” in the Heart of Darkness – Africa has come to France as the ‘sans papiers’ (‘illegals’). The deaths of two Malians, Issa and Kouré, set the wheels of rebellion in motion. An “Insurrection of masks”, abolishing the very of countries, and…at the conclusion, masks and identity papers. “Cette nuit à travers les flames qui la consacraient, la place de la Concorde reprenait son ancien nom: elle était à nouveau la place de la Révolution.” (Page 173) The old name, Revolution, is restored, and, in a world where nobody has identity papers any more, the conclusion left just beyond the tips of our tongues. That may well be a world without borders, and free from the “republican duty” to toil in misery.
André Breton spoke of. “convulsive” beauty. He would have been stunned by Les Renards Pâles. The novel’s pages are studded with agitated movement (a frequent word is ‘tituber’), and glimpses of the majestic beyond. The past weighs in both through nightmarish revenants, and reappears through more kindly Furies. Heanal has made a political and artistic intervention that breaks the boundaries of what appears possible – and impossible. In this sense it is truly in the line of all that was best in Situationism. That is not all. The prose and delivery of Les Renards Pâles stands muster with the best contemporary world literature.
Le Monde critic Jean Birnbaum is amongst many who have fallen for Haenel’s “hypnotic charm” and “sublime voice” (le Monde des Livres. 23rd August 2013) This book is important: it must be read.
* The Tarnac group’s ideas are clearly referenced by Haenel, ““S’organiser par-delà et contre le travail, deserter collectivement le régime de la mobilisation, manifester l’existence d’une vitalité et d’une discipline dans la démobilisation même est un crime qu’une civilization aux abois n’est pas près de nous pardoner; c’est en effet la seule façon de lui survivre”
L’insurrection qui vient. 2007.
Account in English here.
Ipswich Protest Against Probation Service Privatisation.
Thursday Lower Brook Street Ipswich. (Photo JB)
Members of the National Association of Probation Officers are joined by trade unionists and supporters of the Suffolk People’s Assembly.
Probation workers across the eastern region have taken to the streets today in protest at the government’s decision to privatise the service.
Across the country members of union Unison, along with colleagues from the GMB and National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO), held their joint protest to coincide with advertisements being placed by the Ministry of Justice in OJEU – the Official Journal of the European Union – inviting private sector bids.
Norfolk and Suffolk Probation Trust workers outside the offices in Palace Plain, Norwich said privatisation would axe services designed to keep communities safe, as well as introduce potentially dangerous cost cutting measures in the relentless pursuit of profit.
They also warned that among the list of likely bidders were Serco and G4S, both currently under investigation for alleged fraud in the running of previous MoJ contracts. EDP 24
Thousands of probation workers will join nationwide protests today to claim that public safety will be jeopardised by the Government’s plans to transfer the community supervision of most former offenders to private companies.
Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, is to signal his determination to push ahead with the £800m privatisation of the bulk of the National Probation Service, which traces its roots back to 1907. He will publish advertisements today inviting bids to take over around three-quarters of the service’s current workload.
Under the moves, the 35 existing regional probation trusts will be replaced by 21 government companies which will tender out the work of supervising more than 200,000 offenders each year considered to present low or medium risk. Those regarded as high risk will continue to be monitored by a slimmed-down national probation service.
Ministers insist their plans are essential to drive up standards in probation and to reduce reoffending levels. Six out of 10 people who leave prison are reconvicted within two years.
Potential bidders include such firms as G4S and Serco, which are both being investigated over alleged fraud in Ministry of Justice contracts. The sums paid to the successful companies or voluntary-sector organisations will be linked to their success in reducing offending rates.
Bidding has begun for probation service contracts worth £450m across England and Wales, the Ministry of Justice has announced.
Payment-by-results contracts are to be split between private companies and charities in 20 English regions and one Welsh region, officials said.
They will supervise 225,000 low and medium-risk offenders each year.
Senior probation officers have condemned the plans as “a disgrace and total failure”.
The competition will continue through 2014, with contracts awarded by 2015.
Under a system of 21 contracts, the voluntary groups, charities and private companies will only be paid in full if a certain proportion of offenders do not commit further crimes.
Suffolk People’s Assembly Against Austerity. A Report.
The Suffolk People’s Assembly held a very successful meeting on Tuesday night.
Around 150 people crammed into the Co-op Education Centre in Fore Street to hear speakers on “It’s Time to Fight Back’.
People came from Lowestoft, Bury St Edmunds, Saxmundham, and Hadleigh as well as Ipswich and its surroundings.
As the trade union UNITE noted, “The assembly intends to act as a focal point for a general campaign against the tide of austerity that is hitting the 728,000 people living in this predominately rural county. “
The meeting was organised by trade unionists, and a range of campaigners from across the county. Many had been active in the Suffolk Coalition for Public Services which had held large demonstrations against the cuts in the region.
The Suffolk People’s Assembly (originally the Ipswich People’s Assembly, formed in April) after the June People’s Assembly Conference in London , attended by 4,000 people.
There were banners from Ipswich and District Trades Council, UNITE, the NUT, the GMB and Disabled People Against Cuts.
Graham White, Suffolk county secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) led off the meeting. he talked of the privatisation of education and the attacks by the Education Minister, Michael Gove, on teachers Graham called for support for the coming joint NUT/NASUWT strike action.
Teresa McKay, Secretary of Ipswich Trades Council, talked of the way austerity and poverty hit us, particularly women. She backed the Living Wage campaign, and a one-day national protest general strike to oppose government policies.
David Ellesemere, Leader of Ipswich Council Labour Group, began by dissecting the disaster created by the Liberal-Conservative Coalition’s economic policies. He cited, Winston Churchill to back the argument that low wages ended up by making everybody worse off.
David made the Living Wage,calculated as the salary needed for a decent standard of living without tax credits, * the centrepiece of his speech.
He observed that the state was now subsidising bad employers by refusing to introduce this standard. He said that Ipswich Borough Council had brought the Living Wage, and banned zero hour contracts for their employees. A Suffolk Living Wage Campaign would bring pressure on those companies which refused “A fair day’s pay for a fair day;s work”.
Ipswich Borough Council was proud to announce that it had begun building Council Houses, for the first time in many years.
The Council had, so far, resisted cuts – though the Coalition was now set to introduce centrally imposed reductions in Ipswich spending.
David’s speech, which took a clear anti-austerity stand, was well received.
Dianne Holland, Assistant General Secretary of UNITE, spoke of the broader effects of austerity. We needed an alternative that could grip people’s imaginations and inspire opposition, Unity, People sticking together, was what we need.
Owen Jones, the keynote speaker, made just such an inspiring speech.
He talked of the politics of hope, opposed to the Government’s efforts to create fear and envy, setting the working poor against the unemployed, the healthy against the disabled, and the stigmatising of migrant workers.
Owen slammed the disability ’testing’ firm, ATOS, one of many of the government’s welfare ‘reforms’, the bedroom tax, and the fact that people now had to be fed by Food Banks.
Many people react to the decline in living standards and policies designed to foment division, with frustration and anger.
Hope, he said, was as essential to life.
In place of the Government’s politics of hatred Owen offered plans for public housing, for decent wages not tax credits, and for welfare. It was a scandal that rents were so high that the Housing Benefits were going into landlords’ pockets, without helping solve the housing crisis. In their place rent controls and a massive programme of public sector housing were needed instead. Banks, bailed out during the financial disasters of the last few years, should be brought under public control and used to promote investment. tax avoidance should be stemmed.
The movement, he observed, had a knack for division, into rival Judean Fronts.
But now we were working together towards common goals.
Owen’s speech ended with a standing ovation from the audience.
There was ample time for debate.
There was concern that over the weekend a ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’ live music charity event at The Steamboat Tavern on the Waterfront had cancelled by organisers after threats from the English Defence League. Around 11 members of the EDL had turned up. **
Members of the audience raised issues such the cuts in education locally, Labour Party Policy, the NHS’s use of agency workers. Concerns about the Labour Party’s policies in these areas, and over squatting, were raised. Women from the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) called for people to support their campaign against the service’s sell-off.
One speaker, indicating how the politics of division could be fought, said that the local UNITE had recently recruited a substantial number of Eastern European Haulage drivers.
Sandy Martin Leader of the Labour Group on Suffolk County Council noted that unlike Ipswich Borough, the Tory-run County employed people on zero-hour contracts. Its privatised services, such as Home-care service exploited workers still further.
After the Assembly people remarked on how heartening they had found the meeting.
Serious follow ups are planned.
The Suffolk Living Wage Campaign will be organised in the coming weeks.
People will be out on the September the 29th NHS demo outside the Tory Conference in Manchester, and the November the 5th Day of Action.
Tuesday was a springboard for a much wider campaign against austerity in Suffolk.
Suffolk People’s Assembly meeting at the Coop Education Centre Ipswich, on September 17th 2003 resolves to:-
* Oppose the Austerity policies being carried out by the Coalition government and develop political and economic alternatives to them. Read the rest of this entry »
Socialist Unity: Worst Political Blog, We Wonder why…..
Thus Spake the Strop.
Phil has published the eagerly awaited list of “Worst Political Blogs 2013“.
Socialist Unity comes tops,
Andy Newman comments,
Over the past several years I have detected a slight hint that this blog, and me personally, are not universally popular, and obviously this has caused me many sleepless nights, and I often burst spontaneously into tears. However, I soldier on, and despite the risk of further damage to my delicate and sensitive ego, it is worth perhaps considering the state of blogging, as revealed by this poll.
Newman is to be saluted as the brave little soldier he is.
He then says (accurately),
The phenomenon of “blogging” has moved on, and probably declined, compared to a few years ago. It has to an extent been overtaken by Twitter and Facebook, and it is rarer for new blogs to be able to break through into the public consciousness. There is certainly less of a sense of a blogging “community”, that used to be evidenced through “memes” and “carnivals” by blogs with shared affinities.
This means that “blogging” has in a sense transformed into a form of hybrid online publishing, whereas it used to be more of a peer to peer exchange. Blogging has ceased to be a “social scene”, and the heroic era has settled down into a much more staid and even formulaic collection of fairly well defined websites, who produce few surprises. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a different thing.
This is not only true but the debate on the veil on this Blog has been carried out in more detail on Facebook.
For reference (Hat-Tip Rosie), most of the arguments, for or against, are covered here.
Yes but… the Niqab debate
In its own entry into these complex issues Socialist Unity has helpfully reminded us of its mettle.
A certain ‘John’ – no doubt related to John Wight the roaring apologist for the Iranian regime – comments on this post,
“Fascism in our midst courtesy of the Sun”
This is on the Sun’s hostile views on the face-veil.
A certain ‘John’ comments,
there are some on the ‘left’ who will approve of the Sun’s campaign. They need to be spurned and unveiled as the racists they truly are.
Who approves of the ‘Sun’s views’ is left unsaid.
But we can guess that this inaccurate claim is aimed somewhere.
Is it Jean-Luc Mélenchon?
Or somebody closer to home?
Whatabout the women?
These are John Wight’s views on women’s rights in Iran,
Following the Revolution the status of women changed. The main social group to inherit political power– the traditional middle class – valued most highly the traditional role of women in a segregated society. Accordingly, laws were enacted to restrict the role of women in public life; these laws affected primarily women of the secularized middle and upper classes. The attire of women became a major issue. Although it was not mandated that women who had never worn a chador would have to wear this garment, it was required that whenever women appeared in public they had to have their hair and skin covered, except for the face and hands. The law has been controversial among secularised women, although for the majority of women, who had worn the chador even before the Revolution, the law had only a negligible impact.
No democracy is without its imperfections. Under the Islamic Republic, Iranians, no matter where they happen to live throughout the world, have the right to vote in elections. Women are debarred from standing for office, which is certainly regressive in itself. However, this differs from democratic elections in the West only in the sense that debarment here is based on economic status rather than gender. In effect this ensures that only the wealthy within western societies have any meaningful chance of holding high office.
Furthermore, while women in the US and Britain can stand for election, even sit at the heads of their respective governments, the reality is that both of the aforementioned nations have been responsible for depriving women throughout the Middle East and beyond of a far more fundamental right – namely the right not to be slaughtered or see their families slaughtered in the cause of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.
Face Veil Controversy: An “Obscene Outfit” to Jean Luc Mélenchon but not to Socialist Worker.
“Obscene Outfit” says Mélenchon.
YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN writes in the Independent,
Birmingham Metropolitan College was similarly cowed and had to reverse a directive forbidding students from covering their faces. One hooded lady crowdsourced a protest against the college. Some overexcited student union members, Muslim objectors and online petitioners have forced a U-turn. Shabana Mahmood, MP for Ladywood, Birmingham, welcomed the capitulation. Happy days. Muslim women can now to go to courts and college in shrouds.
That all-covering gown, that headscarf, that face mask – all affirm and reinforce the belief that women are a hazard to men and society. These are unacceptable, iniquitous values, enforced violently by Taliban, Saudi and Iranian oppressors. They have no place in our country.
In this passionate and well argued piece Alibhai Brown continues,
None of our sacred texts command us to cover our faces. Some branches of Islam do not even require head coverings. These are manmade injunctions followed by unquestioning women. We are directed always to accept the rules of the countries we live in and their institutions, as long as they are reasonable. For security, justice, travel, education and health identification is vital. Why should these women be exempt? We Muslims are already unfairly thought of as the enemy within. Niqabs make us appear more alien, more dangerous and suspicious. If it is a provocation for Ku Klux Klan to cover up so they can’t be recognised, it is for Muslims too.
This is a struggle between the light of the faith and dark forces here and also in Islamic countries. The clothes symbolize an attempted takeover of the religion just when believers are looking for liberty, autonomy, democracy and gender equality. Malala Yousafzai doesn’t hide her determined face. Nor do our female Muslim MPs and peers or civil rights lawyers.
So why do we get this gang announcing in Socialist Worker, the following,
Students celebrate beating Birmingham college niqab ban
The successful campaign in Birmingham should serve as a warning to college bosses everywhere – students will not allow their Muslim friends to be scapegoated.
‘Islamophobia’ Watch has joined the fray.
Bob Pitt is, amongst his usual forth, particularly exercised over a Tory MP’s Twitter comments,
Pitt and the SWP would have heart attacks if they were on the French left.
This is what Jean Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the Front de gauche, and their presidential candidate, said on the Face veil (during the 2010 debate on French laws in 2010).
Full veil: Mélenchon “for a general ban”
29/04/2010
The chairman of the Left Party (PG), Jean-Luc Mélenchon has called for a total ban of the full veil in the Figaro.
According to him, the restriction prohibiting the wearing of the full veil in public services alone is “an incredible cowardice.”
He added that the law “must be of universal application.”
In more detail Jean Luc Mélenchon set out his position (2010) on his Blog.
Why is he wearing the full veil degrading for women? Firstly, because it is obscene. It reduces the wearer to the status of sexual potential prey. As it is not proposed to blind men, it is designed to hide the object of desire from natural desires of all those watching. It’s worth noting how it is insulting to men who are deemed as being that are predatory and obsessed. In any case, the fully veiled woman bears a humiliating statement of that she has the status of property of another. is attached to the veiled woman.
A human being can not be the property of another. This is contrary to the human rights principle, that all are born free and equal in rights.
Mélenchon wanted a law that would not just ban the full face veil in public places but for legislation to guarantee ” it would give “ l’obligation de mixité des lieux publics et services publics.” – the obligation to have women and men together in all public places and services. That is, to refuse all demands for single sex treatment.
Mélenchon has done far more defending French Muslims and “métsisage’ (cultural mixing) than the likes of the British Islamophiles.d.
What passes for defending Muslim women’s rights for the SWP and Bob Pitt, is deeply misguided.
Some liberal-minded people may think that people can do what they like (Harry’s Place), a way of presenting the issue is profoundly misleading terms.
The face veil is there to maintain the wearer’s ‘purity’ and to treat others as ‘unclean’ because they do not have the modest dress that their interpretation of a religion demands.
This is to accept the installation of a group of people with what are close to a racist form of religious intolerance inside public institutions.
This is not about ‘choice’ but a right to demand the restriction of choice.
Let us be clear: there is no right to be oppressed.
The face veil is dramatically opposed to the progressive goal of “métsisage’ (cultural mixing).
An important place where there should be taking place, in education, has become a battle field, pitting progressives against those from the extreme-right and the Islamists, who oppose this.
The full face veil is as Yasmin Alibhai Brown says, a reflection of “unacceptable, iniquitous values, enforced violently by Taliban, Saudi and Iranian oppressors.”
Andy Newman Next Labour MP for Chippenham!
Marxists back Newman in Chippenham!
Andy Newman is the Labour Party prospective candidate for the Chippenham constituency.
Congratulations!
On the excellent Andy Newman For Chippenham blog Labour’s proud record is defended,
We should be very proud of what was achieved by the Labour government between 1997 and 2010.
The Labour government with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and Alistair Darling as Chancellor, had introduced a number of specific and targeted measures that boosted the economy.
Comrade Newman spent much of this time backing the Labour Party by supporting candidates of Respect and Socialist Unity.
He was Swindon spokesman for the Respect Party and, amongst other activities, invited George Galloway to speak at the town.
Newman ran the Socialist Unity site.
We say, phooey! and whatabout? to this past.
In a gesture of solidarity we announce our intention to campaign for Comrade Newman.
Chippenham Map for Socialist Canvassers.
Hat-Tip, Facebook.
Update: a bit tardy but worth waiting for, Andy Newman announces his candidacy on his own site.
The Wiltshire Daily Small Pig Breeder and the North Wiltshire Digital DJ, Alan Patridge Jnr, have given this extensive coverage.
The contest looks a close run with Labour scoring 6.9% in Chippenham at the last election.
Suffolk People’s Assembly Public Meeting September the 17th.
And….
• John Lister Keep NHS Public, author of Public Health and Private Profit
• David Ellesmere, Leader Ipswich Council – Labour Group
• Graham White, Suffolk County Secretary NUT
• Diana Holland, Assistant General Secretary UNITE the Union
Suffolk People’s Assembly say No to Austerity!
It’s Time to FIGHT BACK!
This meeting is designed to do just that. It will bring together people fighting against the cuts in jobs and living standards and follows on from the successful Peoples Assembly held in London in June, which attracted over 4,000 delegates, with 100 coming from all ov
At the SUFFOLK Peoples Assembly Public meeting at the Coop Hall Ipswich on September 17th, we will launch a “Living Wage Campaign“.
This will plan our public activities on November 5th, the date selected by the national Peoples Assembly for a day of action against Austerity across the country.
COME TO OUR MEETING ON SEPTEMBER 17th
Contact Suffolk People’s Assembly via Facebook.
Supported by UNITE the UNION, NUT, PCS, Ipswich Trades Council and many others…
Albert Jacquard, leading French Left Intellectual and Activist, Passes.
A Great Humanist and Progressive.
Albert Jacquard passed away yesterday
Albert Jacquard (born in Lyon on 23 December 1925) was a French geneticist and essayist. He is well known for defending ideas related to the concept of degrowth. He died on 11 September 2013.
“A specialist in genetics he was noted for his defence of the concept of sustainable degrowth. He supported a range of progressive movements including the campaigns for free software and the international language Esperanto . He was also president of the association Right to Housing (Droit au Logement).”
Died Wednesday evening
The geneticist and leftist Albert Jacquard died Wednesday evening at his home in Paris (6th arrondissement) at the age of 87 years, announced Thursday his son told AFP.
Born on the December 23, 1925 his passing was caused by a form of leukemia.
Libération gives Jacquard’s political background in more detail (adpated),
His first books, such as Eloge de la différence : la génétique et l’homme (1978) enjoyed an enduring great popular though he moved towards writing about philosophy, popular science and political anti-liberalism (in the French sense, against free-market ideology) and humanism.
Professor Jacquard loathed neo-liberalism. He was a parliamentary candidate in Paris 1986 heading the ‘ Liste Alternative’. This was backed by various movements of the alternative left (the Parti socialiste unifié, the Fédération pour une gauche alternative, Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, the Parti pour une alternative communiste) (1). In 1999 he figured on the environmentalist list list led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (in 84th position).
In the 1990s, Albert Jacquard put his energy into another cause: the poorly housed and ‘undocumented’ – sans papiers – immigrants. he participated in the rue du Dragon Occupation in 1994 and that of the ’Eglise Saint-Bernard. His face became publicly familiar as that of the Abbé Pierre, Gaillot or Emmanuelle Béart, his comrades.
Amongst many tributes Jean-Luc Mélenchon has said
Albert #Jacquard aidait à être humain. Il ne faut pas que sa lumière s’éteigne.
Albert Jacquard helped us to be human. The light he shed should not cease.
(1) I was on the Parisian ‘co-ordination’ for this campaign, as one of the representatives of the Fédération pour une gauche alternative
Chile 11th September 1973: Remembering the Coup.
Sunday the 8th of September 2013, thousands of Chilean march in Santiago for the defence of human rights (from here).
These are some interesting commentaries.
Allende’s Legacy Strong 40 Years After Chile Coup
LUIS ANDRES HENAO Associated PressAs bombs fell and rebelling troops closed in on the national palace, socialist President Salvador Allende avoided surrender by shooting himself with an assault rifle, ending Chile’s experiment in nonviolent revolution and beginning 17 years of dictatorship.
But as the nation marks Wednesday’s 40th anniversary of the coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Allende’s legacy is thriving. A socialist is poised to reclaim the presidency and a new generation, born after the return to democracy in 1990 has taken to the streets in vast numbers to demand the sort of social goals Allende promoted.
“Forty years after, he is mentioned more than ever by the young people who flood the streets asking for free, quality education,” said his daughter, Sen. Isabel Allende.
“Allende’s profile keeps on growing while Pinochet is discredited.”
Chileans have focused their anger on the costly university system installed under Pinochet, and on the vast gap between rich and poor that resulted from his free-market economic policies.
France’s exiled Chileans remember 1973 coup
France welcomed thousands of Chilean exiles in the wake of the 1973 military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. Forty years on, FRANCE 24 asked some of them to share their memories from the tragic day and its aftermath.
By Joseph BAMATGonzalo Fuenzalida remembers September 11, 1973 – the day the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet – like it was yesterday. A 17-year-old student at the time, Fuenzalida left his high school when teachers said the military coup was imminent and was only 50 metres from La Moneda presidential palace when soldiers overran the capital of Santiago. “I never ran so fast in my life,” he recalled.
Fuenzalida is among the thousands of Chileans who were forced to flee their country in the wake of Allende’s overthrow and death, and who eventually settled in France. They are commemorating the 40th anniversary of the coup this year from their adopted home with a mixture of longing and sorrow.
“On the way home I saw soldiers hit women and shove children with a violence I was unfamiliar with. I could feel the fascist fear spreading across the city,” Fuenzalida recalled. The horror eventually reached his own family: his father, an Allende supporter who lived in northern coastal town of Iquique, was arrested and summarily tried. He was executed on October 30, 1973. “That’s the date the dictatorship started for me,” Fuenzalida said. More here.
Chilean opposition leader Michelle Bachelet has called for a full investigation on the human rights abuses committed during Gen Pinochet’s rule.
She led a ceremony to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought the general to power.
She demanded an end to impunity and said Chileans had the right to find out what happened to the victims.
The opposition has boycotted an official ceremony to mark the coup.
At the ceremony, centre-right President Sebastian Pinera criticised the “violent coup that started a 17-year period of military rule”.
But he said it was “the predictable outcome” after “repeated violations of the rule of law” under the government of socialist President Salvador Allende.
La última foto de Allende, a las puertas de la Moneda / ORLANDO LAGOS
El Pais reports that both sides of the Chilean political scene, left and right, held separate ceremonies to commemorate the Coup.
Those still nostalgic for Pinochet remain in evidence on the right including in the Unión Demócrata Independiente of billionaire President Piñera.
The President was amongst those who opposed the arrest and detention of Augusto Pinochet, in London, initiated by Baltasar Garzón, arguing that it was an attack on the sovereignty and dignity of Chile.
But...
Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (Left) is leading in opinion polls as her country gears up for the November presidential election.
A survey released Thursday showed that 44 percent of the respondents want Bachelet, the candidate of the center-left New Majority coalition, to be the next president.
Her main rival, Evelyn Matthei of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union, trailed with 12 percent, according to the poll, conducted by polling firm Center for Public Studies.
French “Far Left” (Guardian) Union Protest Today.
“Austerity anger returns to eurozone streets as France’s far-left unions call a day of action, but not clear how many workers will take part.”
The Guardian newspaper, which so clearly marked out the unions involved, is running something close to a “live” feed on today’s protests in France.
In fact the demonstrations are backed by four union federations, CGT (left, formerly aligned closely to the Communists but now an independent ‘class struggle’ union), FO, (centrists, formerly aligned to traditional social democrats with a Trotskyist minority and Right-wing, Gaullist supporters) Solidaires (Close to the Noveau Parti anticapitaliste) , FSU (the main teaching union, with public sector workers, left-of-centre to left). - Le Monde.
The Front de gauche has called for support, as well a section of the (governing) Parti Socialiste.
The dispute is focused on the gradual lengthening of the contribution period to obtain a pension (increased to 43 years minimum , which will finally come into full effect in 2035.
The mobilisation has wider targets, the defence of ““Salaire, emploi, conditions de travail” – wages, jobs and working conditions.
The CGT has also brought in the wider issue of austerity,
La CGT, avec d’autres organisations syndicales en France et en Europe, considère qu’une rupture est nécessaire pour réorienter les politiques sociales et économiques, et renouer avec la croissance, la création de richesses pour une autre répartition.
The CGT, with other unions in France and Europe, considers that a clean break is needed to shift the present social and economic policies, and resume growth, and the creation of prosperity on the basis of a different distribution of wealth.
.
Map of French ‘far left’ demonstrations today.
The Appel Unitaire lists a broad range of representative left-wing individuals and groups backing the demonstrations. (1)
Nous ne pouvons accepter la paupérisation programmée des futurs retraité-es, la destruction des solidarités sociales, l’idéologie absurde du « travailler toujours plus » dans une société productiviste et inégalitaire. Cet engrenage favorise l’extrême droite et menace à terme la démocratie. Comme en Europe du Sud et dans bien d’autres pays du monde, la société doit se mettre en mouvement. Pour y contribuer nous organiserons partout des réunions, des initiatives de rue, des ateliers d’éducation populaire et nous soutiendrons les initiatives prises par le mouvement syndical. Nous voulons un système de retraites solidaire.
We cannot accept the programmed impoverishment of future pensioners, the destruction of social solidarity, and the absurd ideology of “working harder” in a consumerist and inegalitarian society. This backwards turn favours the far right and ultimately threatens democracy. As in Southern Europe and in many other countries worldwide, the social movements have to act. Our own contribution will come from organising meetings, initiatives streets, popular education workshops as widely as possible in support the initiatives of the trade union movement. We want a pension system based on social solidarity.
La mobilisation approuvée par 56% des Français says the CGT.
(1)Premiers signataires
Gérard Aschieri (président de l’institut de la FSU) – Clémentine Autain (FASE) – Ana Azaria (Femmes Egalité) – Marinette Bache (Résistance sociale) – Read the rest of this entry »
No2EU Vanity Politics Part 2: Breaking UKIP’s “Monopoly”.
Breaking “UKIP Monopoly”.
“The neoliberal Tory-boys of UKIP should not have a monopoly for opposing a corporate-dominated, anti-democratic EU whose policies they largely support.”
“The No2EU campaign will be standing in the 2014 Euro elections under the slogan ‘No2EU -Yes to Workers’ Rights’.
“Our movement created the basis for democracy in the 19th century with The Chartists and the demand for universal suffrage which is now being taken from us in the 21st century by the EU.
“The only rational course is to leave the EU and rebuild Britain with socialist policies,” he said.
No2EU TUC fringe meeting
Yes to workers’ rights!
As the myth of ‘Social Europe’ is finally exposed how can workers reclaim their rights?
Monday September 9 at lunchtime
Venue: The Hermitage Hotel, Clifton Suite, Bournemouth
Speakers: RMT general secretary Bob Crow
John Hendy QC trade union rights lawyer
Former Labour MP Dave Nellist
Communist Party chair Bill Greenshields
It is sad to see an old comrade, Geoff Martin, involved in this Vanity Politics.
Who will support this?
That is, apart from Bob Crow, the Communist Party of Britain, and Dave Nellist’s Socialist Party.
More on this sorry tale here.
Tariq Ali and Syria.
Highgate Sage Ali Speaks on Syria.
In his latest foray (LLB 28th of August) Tariq summed up the Syrian situation,
The aim of the ‘limited war’ as set out by the United States and its European vassals is simple. The Syrian regime was slowly re-establishing its control over the country against the opposition armed by the West and its tributary states in the region (Saudi Arabia and Qatar). This situation required correction. The opposition in this depressing civil war needed to be strengthened militarily and psychologically.
The present war is essentially driven by anti-Iranian forces,
Ever since the war and occupation of Iraq, the Arab world has been divided between Sunni and Shia components. Backing the targeting of Syria are two old friends: Saudi Arabia and Israel. Both want the regime in Iran destroyed. The Saudis for factional reasons, the Israelis because they’re desperate to exterminate Hizbullah. That’s the endgame they have in sight and Washington, after resisting for a bit, is playing ball again. Bombing Syria is the first step.
In lines that may well have been an attempt to rival Dean Swift he outlined the position of the United Kingdom,
It’s foolish to get too worked up about Britain. It’s a vassal state, de facto governed by a National Government that includes Parliamentary Labour. Its political parties have accepted permanently situating themselves in the ‘posterior of the White House’. Cameron was gung-ho for a war some months ago. When the US went cold on the idea, Downing Street shut up. Now they’re back in action with little Ed saying that he backs the war ‘reluctantly’, the most pathetic of positions. Conservative backbenchers are putting up a stiffer resistance. Will more Tories vote against than Labour? We shall see.
Ali described how his position evolved until September 2012 as follows (in Counterpunch),
From the very beginning, I have openly and publicly supported the popular uprising against the family-run Baathist outfit that rules Damascus.
Then,
But, as in Egypt, once the euphoria of the uprising and its success in getting rid of a hated despot evaporates, politics emerge. What is the strongest political force in Syrian politics today? Who would be the largest party in parliament when free elections take place? Probably the Muslim Brothers and in that case the experience will be educative since neo-liberalism and the US alliance are the corner-stone of the Turkish model that Morsi and other colleagues in the region seek to emulate. For half of the last century, Arab nationalists, socialists, communists and others were locked in a battle with the Muslim Brothers for hegemony in the Arab world. We may not like it (and I certainly don’t), but that battle has been won by the Brotherhood. Their future will depend on their ability to deliver social change. The Egyptian and Syrian working class have played a huge part in both uprisings. Will they tolerate neo-liberal secularism or Islamism for too long?
His conclusion?
A NATO intervention would install a semi-puppet government. As I argued in the case of Libya once NATO entered the fray: whoever wins the people will lose. It would be the same in Syria. On this I am in total accord with the statement of the Syrian Local Coordinating Committeespublished on 29 August 2011.
What will happen if the present situation continues? An ugly stalemate. The model that comes to mind is Algeria after the military, backed strongly by France and its Western allies, intervened to stop the second round of an election in which the FIS were going to win. This resulted in an attritional civil war with mass atrocities carried out by both sides while the masses retreated to an embittered passivity.
This is why I continue to insist that even at this late stage a negotiated solution is the best possible way to get rid of Assad and his henchmen. Pressure from Teheran, Moscow and Beijing might help achieve this sooner than the military posturing of Sultan Erdogan, his Saudi allies and their surrogates in Syria.
ln criticising this position. the Syrian Leftist site, Syrian Freedom for Ever, claimed that,
TARIQ ALI says we are witnessing in Syria a new form of re-colonisation by the West, like we have already seen in Iraq and in Libya.
Many of the people who first rose against the Assad regime in Syria have been sidelined, leaving the Syrian people with limited choices, neither of which they want: either a Western imposed regime, “composed of sundry Syrians who work for the western intelligence agencies”, or the Assad regime.
The only way forward, in the interests of all Syrians, says Ali, is negotiation and discussion. But it is now obvious that the West is not going to let that happen because they are backing the opposition groups who are against any negotiation.”
What remains of this at present?
With greater confidence Ali now observes,
Every single Western intervention in the Arab world and its surrounds has made the conditions worse. The raids being planned by the Pentagon and its subsidiaries in Nato are likely to follow the same pattern.
After praising Boris Yeltsin as a democratic socialist (1) , and voting Liberal Democrat in the 2005 General Election (2), Tariq Ali is famed on the left for his canny nose for the Zeitgeist.
That is, his capacity for getting things completely wrong.
The Morsi outcome could be classed in the thick file of Ali’s efforts in this direction.
Now that said many of us will find that Ali’s geopolitical analysis fairly convincing (Robert Fisk says as much).
That he was wrong about the British Parliament and Labour’s willingness to defy Washington puts him the company of thousands, to no disgrace.
Vassals, little Ed, posteriors, and pathetic as they all may be, they didn’t act in the predicted way.
They may continue to show some independence, though this is less certain.
But there is not a word in Ali’s analysis about the fate of the Syrian democrats opposed to Assad.
Or how any democratic forces can be supported.
Not a dicky bird.
That really sticks in the craw.
(1)Ali’s Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going? (1988) is also dedicated to Yeltsin, whose “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country.”
(2) “In the tightly fought battle for the Hornsey and Wood Green constituency, the Liberal Democrats have received the support of prominent writer and film maker Tariq Ali, who says he will be backing the party in the forthcoming General Election. Mr Ali, who lives in the constituency, is a long-time critic of the Government over the war in Iraq.” (Here) The Liberal Lynne Featherstone, won the constituency,
Call to Arm the Syrian Opposition: Which?
There are further calls to arm the Syrian opposition from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste,
“Nous devons obtenir la livraison de l’aide indispensable (vivres, soins, équipements, armes) aux représentants des collectifs syriens qui se battent pour la démocratie, la justice sociale et la dignité nationale dans le respect de toutes les composantes du pays. ”
We must ensure that indispensable aid – food, medicine, necessary equipment, arms – is delivered to representatives of the Syrian collectives battling for democracy, social justice and national dignity and who respect the diversity of the country.
September the 5th.
Jacques Babel (a member of the NPA responsible for international work and in particular coordinating work with and in the Arab region).
At the end of August (that is prior to the latest threat of intervention) an important on-line debate on the left on the Syrian opposition took place organised by the US Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD).
The issue of arms played an important part in this in the discussion.
Michael Karadjis has thoroughly put the case that there are strong reasons to back democratic forces on the ground,
Throwing the whole Syrian uprising into the “jihadi” camp undermines the very forces within the revolution that confront this reactionary trend on a daily basis (see for examples of popular demonstrations, slogans, declarations etc. against these currents and their actions here, here, here,here, here and elsewhere).
His position is summarised as, while ”defending the right of Syrian revolutionaries to obtain arms, he believes that the ongoing militarisation of the conflict favours both Assad and the Islamists; therefore he thinks a ceasefire would be in the best interest of the revolution, allowing a revival of the mass movement that initiated the revolt against the regime.”
Salameh Kaileh begins from the standpoint of the Syrian Revolution. He states that, “rebels should find other ways to get weapons, and must establish real army forces capable of struggle until victory.”
Others roundly attack any idea of intervention, direct, or indirect. Michael Eisenscher calls for an arms embargo.
CDP Co-Directors, Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy, conclude.
“Consistent with our strong opposition to any kind of military intervention in Syria by the U.S., or other foreign powers, we also oppose providing air cover or establishing no fly zones. We do believe, however, that the democratic opponents of the Assad dictatorship have the right to get guns where they can, while resisting all attempts by those who provide arms to acquire political and military influence in return.” We continue to defend this right, and we agree with Karadjis that merely receiving arms from foreign countries has never been the “final determinant” of a revolutionary movement’s politics. But we also recognize that since none of the governments in the region or in the West actually favour a mass popular democratic victory, they are extremely reluctant to offer the democratic opposition significant weaponry. Moreover, like Karadjis, we do not call on the United States to arm the rebels, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for the way that the U.S. government will inevitably use any offer of weapons to attempt to manipulate the struggle and buttress its ongoing reactionary role in the Middle East.
Joseph Daher (of the the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current - closely inked to the NPA) argues that there are groups in Syria that meet the description of those favouring the democratic opposition. Daher’s own Blog is here. It contains this statement, there are “two fronts in Syria right now: the jihadists on the one hand, and the regime on the other.” There are not a lot of posts on display with which to gauge the grouping’s influence.
Daher, the NPA, and many others (such as their British comrades in Socialist Resistance, Workers Power and teh International Socialist Network, appear to place their hopes in the ‘Local Coordination Committees‘.
The Committees’ site is important.
It includes, amongst many others, links to articles from International Viewpoint and the British SWP.
Their profoundly moving declaration includes this statement,
As we insist, in the present very special circumstances, on the direct right of the Syrian people to affirm its right of self-determination before the international community, we assure that all calls based on the ground of “droit d’ingérance,” “devoir d’ingérance,” “humanitarian intervention” or “responsibility to protect” should not hinder the aspiration of the Syrian people to cause peaceful change by its own forces; or lead to dealing with the Syrian people as yet another sphere of influence in the game of nations.
It concludes,
The recalcitrance of the Syrian regime to meet its international obligations in terms of respect of human rights and international humanitarian law, may require, in this particular moment, that the international action contemplated above be supported by the sending of a United Nations observers mission, to be approved by a resolution of the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. The mandate of the observers mission must emphasize prevention and assistance in building appropriate political conditions to achieve a peaceful democratic transition in Syria. The observers mission must comprise civilian components holding nationalities of countries known historically for their neutrality, and under the direct supervision of the Secretary General of the United Nations, in cooperation with the League of Arab States. The observers mission’s staff members must be in such numbers as to allow them to be present in or reach any town or village at any time, to monitor and report to the United Nations Secretary General, on any violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, as well as on progress of the political process to achieve a peaceful democratic transition pursuant to appropriate constitutive procedures as shall be solely determined by the Syrian People.
We affirm the priority of using dialogue and peaceful persuasion, including the use of non-coercive and non-violent measures. Yet we have no illusions as to the Syrian regime’ obstinate responses and its attempts to buy time. Experience has shown that the granting of time has not rendered the Syrian regime less resolute in committing yet further violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Such time costs the Syrian people more killing and destruction. Every day that passes means more people killed, and Syria finds itself even more remote from any possibility to find political solutions.
There is no mention of arms.
No doubt times have changed since this statement was made two years ago. But the NPA’s case includes an argument is that weapons should have gone to these bodies then.
We have also few means to gauge the real importance of these groups.
But the side-bar ”LCC in the news” lists their (‘a group of anti-regime activists’) declarations on unfolding events.
There are reports that the Pentagon is preparing more serious attacks than thought - here.
The situation is increasingly unclear, though Jihadists are now openly attacking Christian targets. .
Perhaps this is one reason some on the left who back the Syrian Revolution are starting to flail about.
Louis Proyect posts this,
From documentary film-maker Ben Allinson-Davies:
The Free Syrian Army are hugely different to the al-Qaeda-linked fruitloops that so many leftists, regime apologists, and unsavory, sneering internet experts (most of whom have restricted their research to listening to the incoherent, generic ramblings of Syrian expat Syrian Girl Partisan for a few minutes) would have you believe. I didn’t see a single jihadist or hardline Islamist during my travels across Idlib. If the closest I can get to finding one is a fighter from Tunisia who took his religion seriously, then it doesn’t cast the media coverage of the Syrian genocide in a good light at all. It seems like they parrot reports which parrot reports which come from shady sources with affections for the Assad regime – notorious ‘journalists’/shills like Cockburn, Fisk, and countless others.
When they’re not fighting, they’re living with their families in neat, respectable looking homes (despite shortages, family homes are still where the heart is for everyone) where children toddle around playing, and relatives and friends come and go for a meal, a glass of tea, or a chat – many spend much of their time looking after their children, using radios and the internet to coordinate and plan their next moves (again, the picture of fabulously armed, US-backed rebels really doesn’t add up at any point whatsoever), and enjoying family life.
Undercover. The True Story of Britain’s Political Police. Rob Evans and Paul Lewis. Review.
Undercover. The True Story of Britain’s Political Police. Rob Evans and Paul Lewis. Faber & Faber 2013.
Many of the reported 8,931 political campaigners on the “national data base of political extremists” took a keen interest in the publication of Undercover. Some police infiltrators had already been publicly unmasked. Mark Kennedy – “Stone” – has been fingered by Indymedia in 2010. ‘Progressive academic’ and advocate of a dialogue with Islamists, Bob Lambert, was confronted with his spy chief past at a conference to “celebrate diversity, defend multiculturalism, oppose Islamophobia and racism” in October 2011. Suddenly people on the left, and other campaigners, were reminded of the existence of intense police surveillance on our political activity.
Undercover has marked a new stage. The extracts in the Guardian, which contains fuller revelations about Kennedy and Lambert, and others’ including long-term relationships with activists, and the use of dead children’s birth certificates to procure undercover identities, did not just whet the appetite of a broader public. They raised serious issues about the involvement of what Evans and Lewis rightly call the “political police” in Britain.
One case continues to cause an uproar. On spy, Pete Black, began his work in the 1990s in anti-fascist groups, then the (what has become) Socialist Party’s Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE). He moved on to spy on community-organised fights against legal injustices affecting the black community. Black finally began to recoil when asked to “smear” those involved in the Stephan Lawrence campaign and discover anything he could to discredit the key figure of Duwayne Brooks. (Page 156)
Provocations.
Questions about their role have extended to allegations about their use as agents provocateurs. It has been claimed that Lambert helped write the anti-MacDonald leaflet by London Greenpeace (an autonomous body) – the origin of the notorious libel action. It’s also said that Lambert “encouraged and even participated in an arson campaign that caused millions of pounds of damage. Lambert has firmly denied that he planted the incendiary device at the Harrow store, of Debenehams.”(Page 43) He strongly denies this, though claims credit for putting the animal rights activists involved in prison.
Nor is this a purely domestic matter. Kennedy has been cited in the French case, the Tarnac Affair, in which he allegedly witnessed bomb making. Briefly alluded to in Undercover (Page 265) this – dismissed – claim made headlines in Le Monde. They raised questions (details here) about Kennedy’s role in the prosecution of a group of libertarian leftists.
They Steal Identities, They Break the Law, They Sleep with the Enemy. Under these words on the book cover there is a lot more detail to ponder over in this excellent book. The causal deception the spies used to maintain their ‘cover’ deceived more than their comrades and friends. “There was no specific rule against having sexual partners. It was so commonplace they, he says, it was barely remarked on.”(Page 142) The heartbreaking stories of Charlotte, and Helen Steel, abandoned by their lying long-term partners, Lambert, the mother of Charlotte’s child, and John Dimes, whom Helen was “madly in love with”, are gut-wrenching. There are plenty of others; nine of the operatives identified in the book had “meaningful relationships” with the opposite sex. (Page 322) When the time came the agents simply slunk away
History of the Political Police.
These human tragedies had their origins in government and security decisions. Undercover traces the history of the British political police. The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), founded in wake of 1968, put in place its agents throughout the left. Ideally they would be the “trusted confidant, a deputy who lingered in the background”(Page 23) It was disbanded in 2008. Another body, which with the increasing focus on civil resistance, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) – was founded in 1999, under Tony Blair, with 70 staff. What were (are) their targets? “Domestic extremists, police decided, were those who wanted to ‘prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy’, often doing so ‘outside of the normal democratic process.”(Page 202)
Initially they went for animal rights activists, including the less than appealing Animal Liberation Front, and “environmental extremists”.Then broadened their scope, “Domestic extremists now included campaigners against war, nuclear weapons, racism, genetically modified crops, globalisation, tax evasion, airport expansion and asylum laws, as well as those calling for reform of prisons and peace in the Middle East.”(Pages 203) Today we also have the National Domestic Extremism Team, all which are brought under the control and merged of the Association of Chief Police Officers.
There is little doubt that those who offer a violent threat, not just to “the demcoratic process” but the people at large – have to followed. But this is hardly the case for those of the above list.
Why these official bodies go to the lengths they do remains something of a mystery to many on the left. Why do they need infiltrators? Is it because we are all plotting something subversive – a wide term the previous paragraph suggests covers most of the activist left’s campaigning including large sections of the Labour Party – in secret?
It is true that some groups cultivate an aura of mystery. Ian Bone once wrote that if anarchists ran the train carrying Lenin to the Finland Station they would have no identity on the side except a Post Office Box Number. The Socialist Workers Party has fought a losing battle to keep its internal discussions secret.
But most of what we do is easy to follow. Blogs, Facebook and the rest, are full of details about we do. Some people – specifically the tradition the Tendance comes from – believe in being as open as possible about how we reach decisions – by democratic vote – and what we do. To the great interest, no doubt of all coppers well up on Leftist Trainspotting and the finer points of the history of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals.
Others have a way of reaching conclusions, and a distinct political culture, which may be harder for the political police to follow. That is the ‘consensus method’ of some of the groups covered in the course of Undercover; “activists used a strange-looking ritual known as ‘jazz hands’, in which they wriggled their fingers in the air to express support for speakers.” (Page 245) But if they want to do this, why not? Wiggle away, we say, far far away from, say any industrial action where we suspect consensus would never permit a strike in the first place.
In reality, the Web, as they say, shows just about everything these days. Which may or may not be a good guide. Indeed it well may not as we found with our own visit from the local rozzers after a malicious complaint by a local Islamic cult.
It will be interesting to follow the Net news on Bob Lambert if he does, as Evans and Lewis suggest, convert to Islam. (Page 331) Perhaps he will find peace – in a religion of order. Some would say that the version he is most familiar with, from his days in the Muslim Contact Unit, Political Islam, offers many possibilities for police surveillance and repression. Or, it might be that, following Kennedy, his personality is unravelling – as indeed Bob’s last television interview seemed to suggest.
Wounds Remain Unhealed.
An open wound remains. The legal action taken by 11 of the deceived women is proceeding at a snail’s pace. The latest news suggests that the women are profoundly dissatisfied with the procedure. Public knowledge of the activities of the political police has not changed things. Post-Kennedy recommendations to clean up the system have not been implemented. Further official inquiries, are, as the authors predicted early on, less than forthcoming. Operation Herne has trawled wide, but “has not yet made a single disclosure about any undercover operation.”(Pages 327 –80)
The last word should go to Steel and Morris, to Lambert – “Shame on you!”
French Communists and Front de Gauche Oppose Syrian Intervention.
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Pierre Laurent Makes Speech of His Life.
“Atlanticism is henceforth the ‘Party line” is how the leader of the Front de Gauche Jean-Luc Mélenchon describes the position of the governing French Parti Socialiste. (Le Blog de Jean-Luc Mélenchon). Convinced that he had to go along with the American position France’s president, Hollande, now finds he has “solé notre pays et profondément détruit son image d’indépendance et d’autonomie dans le monde.” isolated our country and seriously damaged our global image, of independence and autonomy.
Mélenchon makes the point that the French Socialists’ determination to not put a Syrian intervention to a vote reveals deep fault-lines in the Constitution of the 5th Republic. His diatribe against “les Anglo-Saxons” manages to ignore completely that it was the ‘anglo-saxon’ (a dated and racist term in many people’s eyes) British Parliament which set this particular hare running.
The rest of what he says is overshadowed by these constant references.
Far better was the immensely dignified and moving speech given by the leader of the French Communist Party to the (very short) debate yesterday in the French Senate (a shadow of what we saw in the UK House of Commons but a direct result of this) (see Here).
It is based on a profoundly democratic commitment to the Syrian people, strongly opposed to Assad, and opposition to armed interference in the civil war.
It says everything many of us would want to say.
Intervention de Pierre Laurent au Sénat sur la Syrie (adapted)
Faced with the tragedy into which Syria is now sinking, the martyrdom suffered by her people, France now faces a crucial choice: either preparing for war by supporting the aims of the U.S. government in Syria and the Middle East or to define its own independent and positive role. This has to be an approach without the illusions of power politics, fully aware of the dangers of military intervention. We have to work for a negotiated solution guaranteeing an end to massacres and a transition to democracy. This choice we make is of great significance for Syria, for the entire region of the Middle East, and for France. This deserves, and indeed calls for, a vote in Parliament, as, on the 27th of August, I already asked the President of the Republic.
It would take time and serious effort to translate the rest of the speech.
Those who wish to see a very approximative English version can use the automatic translation.
But the original is too good to render quickly into English.
Quelque deux Français sur trois se déclarent aujourd’hui opposés à une intervention militaire. En Europe et aux États-Unis, des constats semblables témoignent aussi d’interrogations, de réticences et d’hostilités massives à la guerre. Le choix de la guerre ne peut être le choix d’un seul homme. Devant un enjeu si crucial, dans un monde devenu si complexe, nos institutions, qui réservent au seul chef de l’État le pouvoir d’engager nos armées, témoignent de leur archaïsme. Je réitère ici notre demande solennelle : aucune décision ne doit être prise sans un vote du Parlement.
La crise syrienne est devenue une terrible guerre civile, déclenchée, il y a plus de deux ans maintenant, par la répression brutale et sauvage du régime de Bachar El Assad contre son peuple, et amplifiée depuis par l’internationalisation et l’ingérence militaire croissante des puissances régionales et internationales dans le conflit. La France n’a malheureusement pas été en reste. Le drame syrien est donc aussi une crise géopolitique internationale, dans une région, celle du Proche-Orient, où tous les conflits s’entremêlent. Dans un tel contexte, ce qui est attendu de la France c’est la capacité à proposer une perspective, une solution, un mode de règlement politique. Or, ce qui se prépare, ce que vous nous invitez à soutenir, c’est l’inverse : une intervention militaire dont les risques sont énormes et qui, on le sait, ne résoudra rien. La France ne doit pas s’y engager. Elle doit choisir une autre voie d’action. Oui, la France doit agir mais sûrement pas pour rajouter de la guerre à la guerre, du sang au sang.
Quel est le sens de l’entreprise de guerre que vous envisagez? « Punir » le régime de Bachar Al Assad ? Le « punir », dîtes-vous, pour empêcher que se renouvelle l’usage des armes chimiques. Quelle est la pertinence de ce choix, son efficacité réelle ? quelles seront ses conséquences, son utilité à faire progresser l’indispensable solution politique dont le Président de la République dit lui-même qu’elle reste la seule véritable issue ?
Est-ce que l’on peut bombarder la Syrie, des objectifs militaires, des infrastructures civiles, comme ça, pour « marquer le coup », juste « pour voir »… Comme au poker ? Sans la légalité du droit international et d’un mandat de l’ONU ? Sans évaluer les risques d’embrasement régional, notamment au Liban où dans les faits il a déjà commencé avec une succession d’attentats, de représailles et de vengeances ? Sans mesurer les conséquences pour les civils syriens, les représailles possibles du régime ? Sans prendre garde au sort de nos 2 otages dans ce pays ? Ne les oublions pas.
Le degré supplémentaire franchi dans l’horreur par l’usage massif d’armes chimiques justifie selon vous que la France entre à son tour ouvertement dans la guerre. Mais pour aller où ?
L’usage des armes chimiques est inqualifiable. C’est un crime effrayant et insoutenable. Il inscrit ceux qui l’ont commis, dans la violation manifeste des conventions qui les interdisent, à la condamnation et à la justice internationale. (…) Le devoir de la France, comme membre permanent du Conseil de sécurité, est de verser les éléments dont nous disposons à la Mission d’enquête de l’ONU pour qu’elle établisse officiellement les responsabilités. La France déclare détenir des preuves, mais rien ne la dispense des résultats de la mission de l’ONU.
Rien ne l’autorise à pouvoir prétendre « punir » seule sauf à contribuer elle-même ainsi à discréditer la légalité internationale.Face à l’amplification des crimes – « la Syrie est en chute libre, notait déjà en juin le rapport de la commission d’enquête internationale indépendante remis à l’ONU, les crimes de guerre et les crimes contre l’humanité sont une réalité quotidienne en Syrie. Personne n’est en train de gagner la guerre et personne ne la gagnera » – la France doit inlassablement travailler à trois objectifs : tout faire pour que cessent les hostilités ; ramener tous les belligérants, syriens et internationaux, autour de la table des négociations ; imposer une solution politique négociée qui garantisse une transition de la Syrie vers la justice et la démocratie exigée par son peuple.
L’ escalade guerrière que vous nous proposez tourne le dos à ces trois exigences. Elle rajoutera de la guerre à la guerre et nous éloignera de la solution politique et négociée incontournable.
Les autorités françaises mesurent-elles avec suffisamment d’attention et de prudence les expériences désastreuses, que personne ne peut oublier dans le monde, des guerres en Irak, en Afghanistan ou en Libye ? Chaque fois, on a prétendu imposer, par la force, une prétendue solution en prenant -selon la formule consacrée- « toutes les mesures nécessaires ».
Mais les gouvernements coalisés dans la guerre n’ont finalement recueilli que la poursuite de la crise, une déstabilisation profonde, voire le chaos. Le syndrome d’un modèle d’intervention libyen, dont on mesure pourtant aujourd’hui les effets désastreux, a dramatiquement marqué la diplomatie française dans la crise syrienne. Est-ce qu’avec ces guerres la démocratie a progressé ? Est-ce que la sécurité s’est renforcée ? Est-ce que les relations et les institutions internationales en sont sorties consolidées ?
Que de questions sans réponse.
Que de risques majeurs sans vision politique digne de ce nom.
Que d’échecs stratégiques sans qu’on en tire les leçons.
Encore une question. Le peuple syrien, première victime de cette crise, n’est-il pas en réalité le grand oublié de cette tragédie ? Otage, dramatiquement effacé, de la confrontation des intérêts géopolitiques de puissances, dont la Syrie est devenue une sorte de ligne de front ? En mars 2011, le peuple syrien s’est soulevé pacifiquement. Comme en Tunisie, en Égypte et ailleurs… ce fut pour les libertés, pour un État de droit, pour la justice sociale, pour la souveraineté. Ce mouvement, c’est la vérité du peuple syrien. C’est l’espoir du peuple syrien. Nous l’avons soutenu dès le départ. Ce Printemps arabe exprime la légitime volonté des peuples concernés d’affirmer leurs droits, leur dignité et d’abattre des dictatures criminelles et corrompues, comme celle de Bachar Al Assad. Cette volonté, nous l’approuvons. Nous la soutenons. En Syrie comme ailleurs.
On voit aujourd’hui combien la conquête de l’émancipation politique et sociale engagée par ces peuples est complexe et difficile.
Particulièrement en Syrie où le régime, dès les premiers jours, a choisi une répression féroce et meurtrière qui n’a fait qu’accélérer la militarisation de la crise et une terrible escalade dans la confrontation armée, avec des exactions d’une sauvagerie inouïe.Le bilan de cette crise est épouvantable : plus de 100 000 morts ; plusieurs millions de réfugiés et déplacés, des villes en dévastation et un patrimoine culturel anéanti ; une société pulvérisée par la violence des affrontements, par les divisions politiques et confessionnelles, par les atrocités de groupes salafistes, pour l’essentiel des corps étrangers à une société syrienne profondément laïque, et armés par des puissances régionales dont certaines font, paraît-il, partie de nos alliés…
Alors, oui, il faut arrêter ça !
Il faut arrêter ça pour le peuple syrien.
Il faut arrêter ça pour toutes celles et ceux qui, en 2011, avec courage, ont lancé des mobilisations pacifiques contre le régime.
Il faut arrêter ça pour faire vivre une transition démocratique.
Il faut arrêter cette escalade tragique et chercher le chemin d’une issue politique.
Une intervention militaire, dirigée par un duo isolé de puissances occidentales hors du droit, constituerait un degré supplémentaire dans l’inacceptable, aux conséquences incontrôlables.
Ce n’est pas par la guerre que l’on peut protéger les peuples et gagner une sécurité humaine.
La France doit d’urgence prendre un autre chemin, définir une vraie vision politique et prendre une forte initiative. Il y a une alternative !
Nous appelons donc les autorités françaises à proposer dès la réunion du
G20 qui se tient demain une réunion au sommet des belligérants et des principales puissances impliquées, les États-Unis et la Russie bien sûr, mais aussi la Turquie et l’Iran notamment, afin de définir les conditions d’un arrêt de l’escalade dans la confrontation militaire, et d’une transition démocratique en Syrie. Il faut reprendre l’esprit et l’ambition de la deuxième conférence de Genève qui aurait pu tracer la voie d’une telle solution il y a déjà des mois, et qu’au lieu de soutenir dès juin 2012 au lendemain de Genève I, vous avez aussitôt mis en doute. Parce que, disiez-vous à l’époque, Monsieur le ministre, l’accord alors passé ne prévoyait pas clairement la mise à l’écart de Bachar El Assad. L’occasion de stopper les massacres a été gâchée. Or, aujourd’hui, vous préconisez une intervention aux risques énormes en déclarant qu’elle ne vise pas le départ de Bachar El Assad. Où est la vision, où est la cohérence ?La France doit cesser de se fourvoyer et reprendre l’initiative politique et diplomatique. Cela est encore possible. On voit d’ailleurs le niveau élevé des réticences politiques et des rejets populaires de la guerre en France, en Grande-Bretagne, en Allemagne, en Italie, plus largement en Europe et même aux États-Unis. La coalition autour de Washington n’en est que plus maigre et pathétique. Non, il n’y a pas de consensus pour la guerre !
La France, Monsieur le Ministre, a mis jusqu’ici son énergie dans l’option militaire, nous vous demandons de l’investir dans une issue politique.
Au lieu d’imposer la guerre, il faut, avec détermination, avec vos alliés, avec la Russie, emmener les protagonistes syriens aux conditions d’un règlement politique, avec un calendrier et de vraies décisions qui puissent constituer une réelle avancée dans la voie de la transition démocratique attendue par le peuple syrien. La France se grandirait en agissant ainsi. Le G20 doit être utilisé pour une première et urgente concertation multilatérale, en particulier avec la Russie, les États-Unis et les autres puissances concernées.
La crise géopolitique syrienne sollicite donc, avec insistance, la France et le rôle qui devrait être le sien dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.
Car cette crise majeure fait surgir immédiatement d’autres questions de grande portée internationale, en particulier l’enjeu global de la sécurité internationale, celui du désarmement et de l’élimination des armes non conventionnelles ou de destruction massive. Il n’y a pas, en effet, que les armes chimiques. Il y a aussi, notamment, les armes nucléaires et la question cruciale de la prolifération.Lors de la Conférence des Ambassadeurs, il y a seulement quelques jours, le Président de la République, à propos de la crise sur le nucléaire iranien, a explicitement affirmé : « le temps presse (…) la menace grandit et le compte à rebours est d’ores et déjà enclenché ». Nous souhaitons, Monsieur le Ministre, que cette grave formulation – visant d’ailleurs le principal allié de la Syrie – ne soit pas l’annonce que la crise iranienne devrait elle aussi, le moment venu, passer par l’inacceptable et dangereuse phase d’une nouvelle opération militaire, de nouveaux bombardements. On dit, en effet, à Paris comme à Washington, pour la Syrie comme pour l’Iran, que « toutes les options sont sur la table »… Y compris, encore, la guerre ?
Jusqu’où oserez-vous aller ?
Je souhaite vraiment, Monsieur le Ministre, une réponse à cette question.
Le Traité de Non Prolifération doit être respecté par tous ses signataires. Il faut aller vers un désarmement nucléaire multilatéral et contrôlé. Et ni les États-Unis, ni la France, ni d’autres puissances ne peuvent se permettre d’envisager le règlement de toutes les crises par la force. C’est impensable ! Ne vous engagez pas dans un tel engrenage !
Construire une sécurité collective et humaine sur le plan international appelle tout autre chose que la guerre et les ambitions de domination qui vont avec. Et qui n’ont rien à voir avec l’exigence de paix… mais tout à voir avec des intérêts stratégiques et énergétiques. La France ne doit pas suivre Washington sur ce fil qui mène aux déstabilisations, aux désastres que nous connaissons déjà.Un changement sur le fond de politique internationale et de conception de la sécurité s’impose. Avec un effort indispensable pour le désarmement concernant toutes les armes de destruction massive, et la nécessité de lier cette option essentielle au règlement des conflits, notamment la crise sur le nucléaire iranien, la politique israélienne et la question de Palestine, la politique de la Turquie et la question kurde…
Il est temps aussi pour la France et pour ses partenaires européens de trouver un rôle et une dynamique positive dans la refondation des stratégies de développement et de partenariat avec l’ensemble du monde arabe.
L’urgence n’est pas de faire la guerre. Elle est de construire un avenir commun pour tous les peuples dans cette région cruciale de la Méditerranée et du Proche-Orient.
Saurons-nous, en Syrie et ailleurs, commencer à relever ce formidable défi ? Nous pensons pour notre part que la France, si elle le décide, en a la force.
Arms and the Means: the Left and Arming the Syrian Opposition.
Is this as clear as it seems?
Does part of the left back arming the Syrian opposition to the murderous Assad regime?
A few months ago the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste site carried an article making this call by Jacques Babel.
the responsibility of the international workers’ and democratic movementto demand that our governments immediately provide weapons to the Free Syrian Army, which should be obliged to defend the Syrian revolution.
Justified mistrust of any direct imperialist intervention should not lead to the abandonment of the Syrian people, but to the demand for the democratic control of supplies and aid, including a greatly increased level of humanitarian assistance.
Our responsibility is to immediately provide all possible assistance to the insurgents, from our civil society to their civil society, and to defend Syrian refugees who manage to get into ‘fortress’ Europe.
15th of June.
The NPA’s most recent statement condemns the projected Western intervention in Syria.
In fact it is titled,
Against any military intervention.
They add, Total support for the Syrian revolution.
What does this mean?
It adds,
…we reaffirm that the great Western powers, by refusing to deliver the weapons demanded for so many months by the collective structures of struggle set up by the people, also bear a heavy responsibility for the perpetuation of the murderous regime, while contributing to the development of religious obscurantist currents which constitute a second mortal enemy for the Syrian people.
On the Fourth International’s site, there is a statement from some small Arab left groups (Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt) – Revolutionary Left Current (Syria) – Union of Communists (Iraq) – Al-Mounadil-a (Morocco) – Socialist Forum (Lebanon) – League of the Workers’ Left (Tunisia) paints a sombre picture of the horrific events unfolding in Syria.
We Stand Behind the Syrian People’s Revolution – No to Foreign Intervention
Despite the enormous losses mentioned above, befalling all Syrians, and the calamity inflicted on them, no international organization or major country – or a lesser one – felt the need to provide practical solidarity or support the Syrians in their struggle for their most basic rights, human dignity, and social justice.
The only exception was some Gulf countries, more specifically Qatar and Saudi Arabia. However, their aim was to control the nature of the conflict and steer it in a sectarian direction, distorting the Syrian revolution and aiming to abort it, as a reflection of their deepest fear that the revolutionary flame will reach their shores. So they backed obscurantist takfiri groups, coming, for the most part, from the four corners of the world, to impose a grotesque vision for rule based on Islamic sharia. These groups were engaged, time and time again, in terrifying massacres against Syrian citizens who opposed their repressive measures and aggressions inside areas under their control or under attack, such as the recent example of villages in the Latakia countryside.
A large block of hostile forces, from around the world, is conspiring against the Syrian people’s revolution, which erupted in tandem with the uprisings spreading through a large section of the Arab region and the Maghreb for the past three years. The people’s uprisings aimed to put an end to a history of brutality, injustice, and exploitation and attain the rights to freedom, dignity, and social justice.
Do they back arming anybody?
This declaration ends with a call, “Break open the arms depots for the Syrian people to struggle for freedom, dignity, and social justice.
A statement by the British Socialist Resistance (British section of the Fourth International) and the International Socialist Network (29th of August) further complicates the position,
For over two years, Britain, the USA and France have stood by, refusing to deliver defensive anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons to the progressive and democratic components of the opposition, for fear that the toppling of the Assad regime may extend and deepen the revolution which started in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011.
Gilbert Achcar from the Fourth International yesterday makes this extraordinary claim (displaying what can only be called a mind-reading ability through the complexities of US policy-making),
Washington does not want the Syrian people to topple the dictatorship: it wants to force on the Syrian opposition a deal with the bulk of the regime, minus Assad. This is the so-called Yemen solution that President Barack Obama has been actively pursuing since last year, and that Secretary of State John Kerry has been trying to promote by cozing up to his Russian counterpart.
He ends with this observation
…it is the duty of all those who claim to support the right of peoples to self-determination to help the Syrian people get the means of defending themselves.
Not surprisingly this call to arm the “Syrian people” (en bloc) has created a massive rumpus and splits in Left Unity (in which Socialist Resistance and the International Socialist Network Participate).
It may well be the case that (as these two groups say) that,
We reject the notion that this rebellion has been co-opted by imperialism. This remains a popular revolution by a people struggling to free itself from oppression. It is a key component of the Arab spring which has inspired the masses of the region and beyond.
We oppose both the “humanitarian intervention” of Britain, France and the USA, and the pro-Assad intervention by Iran and Russia. Instead, we choose to be on the side of the revolutionary masses struggling for their emancipation, and extend our solidarity in particular to the democratic and progressive components of the revolution.
But how exactly are they going to sift through the complex political forces at play, from traditional Islamists, nationalists, Sunni groups, democrats, nationalists, social democrats, socialists, to jihadists, to get arms to those the Fourth International (and the NPA) considers to be the authentic ”revolutionary masses”?
Seriously….
Burston Strike Rally 2013.
The East Anglian Daily Press reports that “hundreds” attended the annual Burtson Strike Rally yesterday.
Throughout the day people heard influential speeches from Bob Crow RMT General Secretary and Richard Howitt MEP and music from the RMT Brass Band, Red Flags and Leon Rosselson.
The strike started after local teachers Annie and Tom Higdon were sacked following a dispute with the area’s school management committee after they refused to let children leave school to help with the harvest.
Children went on strike in support of their teachers and the couple started a school on the village green which was attended by 66 of their 72 former pupils.
A new school, financed by donations, was built 1917 and in The Burston Strike School continued until shortly after Tom’s death in 1939. Since its closure, the Burston Strike School has been developed into a museum.
Mike Copperwheat, trustee of the Burston Strike School, said the day had gone well.
“About 1,000 people joined in the march which was headed up by the RMT brass band which was very good.
“It’s important that we remember this event as it is a part of local history and it is a community event.
“We are looking forward to celebrating our centenary next year. We will be putting on an event at the school.”
Villagers also used the area to host a community event on Saturday night.
Campaigners meet on the first Sunday in September where they march the same route the children would have walked.
Photos (with permisison to reproduce) from Ann Nicholls
Burston Facebook Page - here.
The Tendance helped out on the joint Norfolk and Suffolk People’s Assembly Stall.
Sarah sold her famous jam.
The day was a great success.
A high-point was seeing Leon Rosselson.
He did a good song attacking Welfare ‘reform’.
This is my current favourite Rosselson,
64% of French Against Syrian Intervention, as Bernard Henri Lévy Regrets “English” Decision not to Take Part
BHL: Now the French Reject His Call for Syrian Intervention.
“The French are overwhelmingly hostile to their country’s participation in a military intervention (64%) against Bashar al-Assad.” according to the latest opinion poll by Le Parisen 30.8.13.
Bernard Henri Lévy (BHL) presented as somebody with influence on French international politics, was paraded round the British media yesterday.
BHL is in favour of an intervention in Syria.
Earlier this month he launched an appeal, with Alain Juppé, (former Chirac Prime Minister, convicted in 2004, of abuse of public funds, back in office as a Minister in 2007, and accused by the Rwandan government of complicity in the genocide in that country) and Bernard Kouchner (another Sarkozy former Foreign Minister, and humanitarian itnerventionsit) .
Lévy’s only specific proposal was for the creation of a “No Fly Zone”
First he was on Channel Four News. “French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy tells Channel 4 News that those who believe the UK has always been on “the good side of freedom” were saddened by the British decision not to attack Syria.” (Channel Four News).
Later, on Newsnight he announced, “For the first time in my life I don’t admire England tonight.”
Let us cast aside the unworthy suggestion that Lévy, with his strangulated efforts to speak English, and his intense self-regard, was paraded in an attempt to discredit supporters of humanitarian intervention in Syria.
It was, nevertheless, the case that he managed to rankle a hefty part of his audience by referring, more than once, to “England”, as if Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland did not exist.
Lévy also deftly annoyed those of us – numerous – who are suspicious of anybody who goes on, and indeed, on, about how much they love and admire our country.
As far as I am aware Lévy’s connection with Britain extends little beyond his visits to the (former) Paris ‘Pub’, Le Twickenham.
His efforts to persuade French President Sarkozy to back the no-fly zone in Libya were no doubt of great importance, not least in his own mind.
There are very long sections in the French version of the Wikipedia entry on Lévy, listing all the good things people think of him.
They undermine his credentials as a philosopher, a commentator, and as a politically engaged intellectual.
Criticisms include an inability get facts right (names of towns, in his book on Daniel Pearl) his distorted account of French anti-Semitism in L’idéologie française (roundly criticised by no less than Raymond Aron), the way he cited a fictitious philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul and the La Vie sexuelle d’Emmanuel Kant in his critique of the German philosopher…..one could continue for a long time.
In 1985, Bernard-Henri Lévy, with others, launched a petition to Ronald Reagan top keep backing the Contras in Nicaragua.
He was also known for his backing for the Afghanistan Mujahideen “Comander Massoud.” – assassinated by the Taliban.
Massoud was a complex figure, and it would be wrong to try to make an instant judgement about him.
But many suspect that hero-worship is not a good position to take about anybody involved in the wars in Afghanistan.
The French writer was prepared to take sides come what may.
Yet it is exactly this kind of simple moral choice that Lévy is presenting to us about Syria: you are for us, or against us.
This will not wash, and has not washed, with the British Parliament – or, it seems, with the French public.
With Breast Expanded. Brian Behan. A Contemporary Review.
With Breast Expanded. Brian Behan. MacGibbon 1964.
“For my own part. I had always contested the right of any party to control my actions and to force me to carry out decisions with which I did not agree. I believed then as I do now that a man must finally be true to his own conscience and follow the dictates of his own experience. The greatest of saints and humanists can founder and do terrible harm once they relinquish this right. My whole life has been a search for an organisation that would bring happiness to humanity, only to find that all organisations become an end in themselves, thriving on, and perpetuating, human misery and backwardness. As far I’m concerned, any organisation of more than one person (except one man and one woman) is suspect.” Brian Behan. With Breast Expanded. Page 42.
“Brendan and Brian did not share the same views, especially when the question of politics or nationalism arose. Brendan on his deathbed (presumably in jest) asked Cathal Goulding (Behan’s half-brother following a relationship between Stephen Behan and Goulding’s mother), then the Chief of Staff of the IRA, to ‘have that bastard Brian shot—we’ve had all sorts in our family, but never a traitor!’” Brendan Behan Wikipedia.
One of the best books ever written about the left is With Breast Expanded. It is a memoir, not a political tract. But many of the things we talk about today, about parties, about ‘democratic centralism’ and – above all – authority – come up in what was an extraordinary life.
The author, Brian Behan (1926 – 2002) was the brother of Brendan, who has an entry in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, and whose play, the Quaere Fellow remains seared in many people’s minds. Their family, raised in the Dublin slums and, then, council estates, of the 1930s and 40s, was left-wing, republican, and trade unionist. They were closely linked to the, pre- and post independence, IRA. His mother was a friend of Micheal Collins. The brothers (there was another, the songwriter, Dominic) were part of a circle of exceptionally talented working class and bohemian radicals. There was also a sister, Carmen.
Brendan was actively involved in the IRA from the age of 16. For his self-appointed attempt to blow up Liverpool Docks in 1939 Brendan served time in the Suffolk youth penal institution, Hollesley Bay. He wrote about this sentence in Borstal Boy.
Brian recalls in With Breast Expanded, “It still warms my heart to remember the long letters Brendan wrote me from Bostral when I was in Malin. (Page 202) Malin, the Artane Industrial School, was where petty thieving led Brian to spend his teens. Run by the Christian Brothers, “where the rule of the boot and the fist still predominates”, it was a physically and sexually abusive institution. Its control methods “would have put Stalin to shame.” (Page 27)
After Malin there was the Army Construction Corps, labouring, a job creation scheme (the ‘Turf camps’), Brian developed as a left-wing and trade union activist. Some accounts put him already as an anarcho-syndicalist. But With Breast Expanded he says that he was a Communist and met up with left-wing IRA men, influenced by Marxism. This “put me in violent opposition to nine-nine-point-nine per cent of my fellow men. Since a child I had known that the bosses were our enemy. And to me, my enemy’s enemy must be my friends. It never entered my head they might just be peas in a pod.”(Page 37)
Exported to to England.
Facing long-term unemployment and continuous trouble with the Irish authorities Brian left for England. “For hundreds of years prime cattle and mature men have been Ireland’s chief export to England.”(Page 95) The meat of With Breast Expanded is the account of his experiences on building sites, and as rank and file trade union activist. Hard manual labour, hard digs, and hard men, surrounded him. But Brian found the time, and the energy, to become politically active in the Communist Party of Great Britain. During a landmark strike on the Festival of Britain site, they were selling 180 Daily Workers a day and “defended every last action of Joe Stalin’s.”(Page 134)
During a campaign against the post-war ban on May Day marches Brain found himself sentenced to two months in Brixton Prison. Discharged the CP were waiting for him to take bring him to a public meeting on Korea, “At that precise moment I would sooner have shown my arse, or anything else for that matter, but a public meeting was not my idea of the best way to spend my first day of freedom.”(Page 124) held out in the open the defence of North Korea only attracted the “anger of the toilers”.
Brian’s account of the CPGB remains instructive. He felt real anger (which leaps from the page into your gut) about life in the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Embassy in London lavished food and free fags on the ‘labour movement’ guests at their regular beanos and did they same to those who visited their lands. In Moscow the city centre was like Hyde Park. But in the outskirts, “were slums, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Dublin. Worse still, I found building workers toiling away under the threat of armed guards. I was told the guards were there to prevent sabotage. But it also seemed also a magnificently handy way to discourage agitation.”(Page 128) A trip as part of delegation to China showed the same divisions, “”in one you ate old paptoa leaves, in the other you wined and dined till your guts ached.”(Ibid)
Behan, as a rank-and-file building workers’ leader, ended up elected to National Executive Committee of the Communist Party, “selected by the top, and blessed by the sheep down below, would be a better description.”(Page 131)
The Communist Party was stuck in the doldrums. The contrast, well known to everybody on the (British) left, between influence in the trade unions and irrelevance in the ballot box clearly rankled with Behan, who described the former as the result of the reward of dedicated “fanatics”. The theory that the latter dismal results – he had got around 181 votes in an election – show the “mathematical average of loonies in each area of Britain” is appealing. (Page 146) If this is true the number of the mentally challenged has a much greater variety of electoral choices today, from UKIP further onwards, and has grown in size.
Hungary and After.
Deeper issues were at stake. Behan instinctively revolted at the lack of workers’ rights in Russia, and at accusations that Communists fiddled votes in the E.T.U. Discontent came to a boil over the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He stood up for Edith Bone – a Hungarian born British Communist. The rebels released her. Nobody had heard of her for seven years. As Francis Beckett puts it, she was “tortured, half-starved, tormented by arthritis, her guts ravaged by the prison food, ragged and barefoot.” (1) An attempt to publicly condemn Bone’s imprisonment was lost – 31 to 1 on the National Executive. This was not the end of it. “..the Hungarian Revolution turned me upside down.”(Page 151) He wavered from supporting the revolution, but finally was driven to leave the Party. “It may have made little or no difference, but I would be a much happier person today it I’d fought harder for people who were resisting the guns and tanks of state capitalism.”(Page 151)
Behan did not desert the building sites, and battled – with further time in gaol – in the great South Bank strike of 1959. Left politics still loomed large in his life. Outside prison and outside the CP, he resolved to join one of the “fanatical little groups who waited to net the stranded fish. They were latter-day Communists hoping and praying for a return of a Trotskyite Russia. They rattled his old bones with all the fervour of black with-doctors. Each little sect claimed that it was the inheritor of the revealed truth.”(Page 169)
Healy and After.
To be exact he joined the group that later became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, at the time known as the Club before it became known as the Socialist Labour League. (2) With Breast Expanded describes its leader, Gerry Healy, as follows, “He as a small man, made revolutionary by his failure to make a fortune selling floor-polish door to door.” (Page 169) A dispute, which Behan puts down to his proposal to put the Party’s printing press under workers’ control and others link to his hostility to Healy’s proposal to ‘enter’ (merge into) the Labour Party, soon erupted. (3) It was not long before Behan, and his friends, were expelled.
That is as may be, but this rings true. Healy shouting at a meeting, “I want all you comrades to appreciate that M.I.5 have now developed a new device which they simply point towards a window and pick up the sound vibrations that bounces off it.” “I ask all comrade to speak with their backs to the window, and if possible direct your sound waves to the floor.” “..as one man, lecturers, trade unionists and working women turned their chairs away from the window and commenced looking to the ground. One man, a psychoanalyst in a big London hospital, was bent double, his waves smashing into the wood blocks.””(Pages 170 – 171)
Behan briefly worked with London based anarchists and syndicalists, including some of the historic Spanish exiles. He had only a brief encounter with the latter. Of the former, and thinking of the Wobblies he describes them (and himself) as “the leavings of the great movement that rolled across the American prairie organising lumberjacks, wheat men and cotton pickers. Any resemblance between us and them was purely coincidental.”(Page 183) Behan noted the self-regard of one “conceited wretch” who brought a tape recorder to keep intact his meeting speech – and his alone – for posterity. Yet these were not the anarchists in fashion in the late 50s and early 60s, as CND and the Committee of 100 rose. He was spared the high-minded, but even more narcissistic, pacifist anarchists recently brought to the screen in the recent Ginger and Rosa (2012).
It is not the intention to write a précis of With Breast Expanded, though the memoir is so good that a horde of further anecdotes and incisive words come to mind. Behan, if not always likable, is lovable. He is all the better for this final citation, about his brother Brendan – amongst many, less complementary thoughts, “When, in my ignorance, I sneered at homosexuals, he turned on me like a tiger and told me to keep my dirty ignorant thoughts to myself.”(Page 201) We could equally note that he, despite admiration for his formidable mother Kathleen, never exactly caught the importance of feminism,. His wife, Celia, appears on in a side-role. The book’s epigraph is not designed to win friends in that quarter. Brian’s further career (he died in 2002 at 75 years old) as a lecturer, writer and a playwright, was impressive. He never did find the organisation that would take decisions he never disagreed with, or indeed, any party at all. Perhaps we are all better off for that.
Thanks to JM for information on the Dublin Left.
(1) Page 134. The Enemy Within, The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party, Francis Beckett. 1995. Beckett offers an excellent account of the effect of the Hungarian Revolution on the British Communist Party.
(2) “Then, in 1958, Brian Behan obtained work as a labourer on McAlpines South Bank site. Whoever took him on very quickly learned their mistake, a very costly mistake. Behan was fired and, despite the fact that there were a number of inexperienced and unorganised workers on the site, the shop stewards committee – which was led by Hugh Cassidy and was both experienced and resolute – called a strike. The whole organisational weight of the Club was thrown behind the dispute. Special issues of The Newsletter were produced and strike bulletins and leaflets rolled off the press. For the first time since the general strike of 1926, middle class revolutionaries joined the workers on the picket line. Brian Behan’s brother Brendan (the playwright) appeared dispensing ten bob notes and not a few pints of Guinness. The police were much in evidence, arrests were made and, after one fracas, Brian Behan was arrested and given three months in Shepton Mallet prison.” Jim Higgins. 1956 and All That (1993)
(3) “Politically, Behan could offer no serious alternative to Healy’s opportunism, his call for the proclamation of a revolutionary party by a few hundred militants being foolishly ultra-leftist. But, contrary to Healyite mythology, Behan was not so sectarian that he denied the need for fraction work in the Labour Party. Nor was he incapable of making some correct criticisms of Healy’s unprincipled political manoeuvring. ‘The zig-zags of policy from “right” to “left” and back again’, Behan wrote, ‘result from the opportunist considerations of a small clique …. Those who opposed the turn to open work a year ago were denounced as reformists and capitulators to the right wing, but now the leadership are fighting to return to the old form of work in the Labour Party.”
“It was on the organisational question – the concentration of power in Healy’s hands – that Behan’s attack really hit home. Not only did Healy hold the posts of SLL general secretary, IC secretary and, in practice, League treasurer and print shop manager, Behan pointed out, but he hired and fired full-timers and purchased expensive equipment, all without prior consultation with the League’s elected bodies. Behan also opposed as grossly undemocratic Healy’s control of the organisation’s assets, the SLL’s press being jointly owned by Healy, the Banda brothers and Bob Shaw. Behan described it as ‘farcical that even if the whole conference should decide on a change of policy, four people could frustrate the will of the conference by simply splitting and walking away with the assets’. He proposed to place all the League’s property under the control of the membership.” Bob Pitt. The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy. Chapter 5.
Syria and the Left, Different Assesments.
Is this Enough?
An important interview with Joseph Daher, a member of the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current, in International Viewpoint today makes the following point,
What is your response to some on the left who assert that the Syrian opposition are proxies for Western imperialism and the oil rich Gulf states?
The problem with some of the Western left, especially the Stalinists, is that they have been analysing the Syrian revolutionary process from a geo-political perspective, ignoring completely the socio-economic and political dynamism on the ground in Syria. Many of them also consider Iran, Russia, or Syria to be anti-imperialist states struggling against the USA, which is wrong on every aspect. Our choice should not be to choose between on one side the USA and Saudi Arabia and on the other side Iran and Russia, our choice is revolutionary masses struggling for their emancipation.
The background to this is the assessment that the democratic and social revolution against Assad, through local coordinating committees, continues.
We have to understand more generally the crucial role played by the popular committees and organisations in the continuation of the revolutionary process, they are the ultimate actors that allow the popular movement to resist. This is not to undermine the role played by the armed resistance, but even they are dependent on the popular movement to continue the battle, otherwise without it we would not stand a chance.
In this respect the role of the Islamists has been challenged,
The Syrian revolutionary masses have increasingly opposed the authoritarian and reactionary policies of these groups. In the city of Raqqa, which has been liberated from the forces of the regime since March 2013, many popular demonstrations occurred against the authoritarian actions of Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS in the city. Similar demonstrations took place with masses challenging this kind of behavior in Aleppo and other cities.
It should be said as well that Jabhat al Nusra has not hesitated to strike deals with the Assad regime, for example the regime is paying more than $150 million Syrian lire [AU $2.4 million] monthly to them to guarantee oil is kept pumping through two major pipelines in Banias and Latakia. Jabhat al Nusra fighters have also been involved in other businesses.
The Syrian National Council, instead of defending the principles of the revolution and doing everything possible to develop the democratic components of the FSA, have let these groups, which are and were part of the counter-revolution since their establishment, to develop without condemning them and actually providing them with cover. These groups, just like the Syrian regime want to divide the Syrian people into sectarian and ethnic entities. The Syrian revolution wants to break the sectarian and ethnic division.
Daher states,
Different leftist forces have been involved in the Syrian revolutionary process since the revolutionary process began. We can find numerous smaller leftist groups and youth in Syria participating in the revolutionary process, in popular committees on the ground, organisation of demonstrations and of the provision of services to the population. The left has mostly been engaged in the civil work, in opposition to the armed work.
From the very beginning, despite our modest capacities, we, the Current of the Revolutionary Left has not once faltered in our engagement with the revolution, calling for democracy and socialism. We have struggled alongside the people and all democratic forces for the victory of this great popular revolution, just as we struggle for the formation of a socialist workers’ party.
The Labour Representation Committee makes this, very different, assessment of the forces opposed to Assad.
The tragedy for the Syrian people is that what began as a mass movement for democracy, as part of the wider Arab spring, has been largely hijacked by western-backed and Gulf-funded anti-secular and anti-democratic groups, some linked to Al Qaeda and extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism, as Owen Jones recently pointed out (Independent – Owen Jones). The success of such forces could lead to a wholesale sectarian bloodbath.
This analysis is based on the following,
As Sami Ramadani pointed out in the July edition of Labour Briefing: ‘During the past two years, an assortment of terrorists flooded in from Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Europe. Some are flown to Turkey to receive their arms and funds, an effort coordinated by a specially set up CIA HQ in Turkey. Saudi rulers generally back the Wahhabi Salafis and pro-Saudi secular forces associated with the Lebanese right wing, while Qatar backs the Muslim Brotherhood. However, Qatari and Saudi funds were given freely, especially during the 18 months of the fighting, to anyone who wanted to fight in Syria or defect from the regime. Qatar’s dictatorial rulers alone have spent $3 billion within two years in its efforts to topple Assad’s regime.’ (Labour Briefing – Battleground Syria).
We note, with great interest, that the Novueau Parti Anticapitaliste, (part of the Fourth International that Publishes International Viewpoint) has this to say about what should have been done to avert these developments.
Mais nous réaffirmons que les grandes puissances occidentales, en refusant de livrer les armes que réclament depuis tant de mois les structures collectives de lutte dont s’est doté ce peuple, portent aussi une lourde responsabilité dans la perpétuation du régime assassin, tout en contribuant au développement de courants obscurantistes religieux qui constituent un second ennemi mortel pour le peuple syrien.
But, we reaffirm that the principal Western Powers, by refusing the supply arms – demanded for months by the Syrian people’s collective structures of struggle – bear a heavy responsibility in sustaining the murdering regime. This has equally contributed to the development of religious obscurantist currents, who are mortal enemies of the Syrian people.
This call for arming the Syrian opposition has not unnaturally caused waves inside the NPA – see here,
All the evidence points to the Labour’s Representation Committee being right and the NPA/International Viewpoint having wildly exaggerated the strength of democratic and left forces in the Syrian opposition as it is presently fighting.
Behind this are wider differences inside the Arab left.
Nicolas Dot-Pouillard in le Monde Diplomatique noted last year that
“..unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the Syrian revolt has not had unanimous support from the Arab left. There is a split between those who sympathise with the protestors’ demands and those who fear foreign interference, both political and military”
He continued,
….unconditional supporters of the revolution do not seem to be in the majority either. Most of them are on the far left of the political spectrum, usually Trotskyist (the Socialist Forum in Lebanon, the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt) or Maoist (the Democratic Way in Morocco). They have links with sections of the opposition, such as Ghayath Naisse’s Syrian Revolutionary Left. Since spring 2011 they have taken part in occasional demonstrations in front of Syrian embassies and consulates in their own countries. There are also some independent leftwing intellectuals who support insurrection, like the Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi. They demand the fall of the regime, and rule out dialogue. Even though they champion peaceful popular protest, they believe the rebels have the right to resort to force of arms. Far left supporters of revolution distance themselves from the Syrian National Council (SNC) (5), one of the main opposition coalitions, because they believe its links with countries such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia could compromise the independence of the popular movement.
But,
..the majority of the Arab left are maintaining a prudent distance from the Syrian uprising. They condemn its militarisation, which they say only benefits radical Islamist groups and the foreign fighters flocking to Syria. They criticise the sectarianism of the conflict, pitting first Alawite then Christian minorities against a Sunni majority radicalised by repression, which they fear will lead to unending civil war. And they worry about the regional and international balance of power. With Iran and Syria set against the Gulf monarchies, and Russia and China against the US, Syria has been put on the front line of a great international war game. The left tends to favour Iran and Syria, and Russia and China, rather than those they oppose.
For all their courage one gets the impression that the leftist forces in the Syrian opposition, not to mention any armed activity, are small in number. Has the “prudence” of those who did not joint them been proved wrong? The LCC’s judgement would indicate that it has not.
Dot-Pouillard’s conclusion remains valuable,
the position that much of the Arab left takes on Syria reflects its own clash with political Islam. That is why parties that normally claim to be “revolutionary” and “progressive”, even if they are not necessarily Marxist, are, paradoxically, hoping for a negotiated solution and gradual transition in Syria, for fear of disillusionment in the future.
One could add that those forces – from Counterfire to the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) – on the European left that once saw progressive aspects in political Islam are particularly in disarray.
Their allies in the Muslim Initiative are now engaged in protesting for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – here the ally of a key player (the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood) in the anti-Assad alliance.
More openly the Muslim Association of Britain – which jointly organised with the StWC the big demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq – has this to say,
We call on all activists and workers to support the revolution in every field and arena, everywhere; and to pressurise the political establishments to take firm action against the tyrannical Assad regime.
Dr Omer El-Hamdoon – MAB President said, “Out thoughts continue to be with the Syrian people, who have faced more than two and a half years of oppression; and more recently this chemical attack.”
“It is about time the international community takes firm action to put an end to the killing and destruction that it taking place in front of our eyes.”
As a group closely aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood we await with interest an protest from the MAB against a Western armed response.
Or perhaps its ‘anti-imperialism’ was always a matter of variable geometry.
Ukranian Feminists, Femen, Accused of Arms Cache.
Raid on Femen (link to Official site).
FEMEN have accused Ukrainian police of planting weapons in their Kiev bureau.
The feminist group, known for their bare-breasted protests, have denied being in possession of items included a World War II pistol and a grenade, during a police raid.
Crude mock-ups showing Russian President Vladimir Putin in a snipers’ crosshairs were also found. The police said they were responding to an anonymous tip-off.
“Half an hour ago policemen came and told us that there had been a complaint about weapons and explosives being stored in our office. We of course did not take it seriously, but the fact that seconds later the whole special group appeared shows that everything has been planned in advance,” said FEMEN co-founder Anna Gutsol.
There are no reports of arrest, but the offices have been sealed off and many activists were rounded up for questioning.
This morning Libération reports,
After the discovery of weapons in their headquarters in Kiev, feminist activists have decided to close their local offices, saying it is no longer possible to work because of constant surveillance by the police.
Even before this incident, ” It was no longer possible to work in the office, where we were all the time listened to and monitored by the ‘special forces’. ” declared their local leader, Anna Hutsol.
The newspaper adds,
The Femen movement, founded in the Ukraine, but whose HQ is now in Paris, had for some years carried out actions across the world, denouncing sexism and discrimination against women. Their supporters appear suddenly, their breasts bared, and their bodies covered with writing, in order to attract attention. The group also denounces homophobia, the collusion between the state and the Church, authoritarian regimes, and election fraud.
Agence France Press just reported,
Kiev police spokesman Igor Mikhalko told AFP on Wednesday that the police had launched a criminal probe into illegal possession of weapons by the group, which could lead to a jail sentence of five years.
No one in the group has been charged but the investigation continues and the women could be called in for further questioning, Mikhalko said.
Hutsol told AFP that the group had already decided to move out and that the police raid had “strangely coincided” with its last day in its offices.
Police questioned activists until late Tuesday before releasing them, Hutsol said.
Femen’s female activists have become well-known in Ukraine and abroad for baring their breasts to protest at discrimination against women and other rights violations.
The group has claimed that Hutsol and other activists were beaten by special services last month in an attempt by the government to pressure them to halt their protests, which target figures including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The group will continue its activism in Ukraine, Hutsol vowed.
“We are not stopping our activities in Ukraine, we are just moving out of the office.”
“Now to plan and prepare our next protests we will gather in different places.”
The Sceptical Case for Opposing Western Intervention in Syria.
Al-Nusra Already Threatens Alawites over Chemical Attacks.
Patrick Cockburn writes (Independent),
The priority for Syrian foreign policy for the past two-and-a-half years has been to avoid foreign military intervention on behalf of the rebels. By the same token, the opposition has tried by every means to secure armed intervention by the US and its allies sufficient to win the war.
He then goes on to say,
Experts specialising in chemical weapons had hitherto expressed scepticism, even derision, at supposed proofs of chemical weapons use in the media.
But,
So it is difficult to think of any action by the Damascus government more self-destructive than the Syrian army launching a massive chemical-weapons attack on rebel-held districts in its own capital. Yet the evidence is piling up that this is exactly what happened last Wednesday and that the Syrian army fired rockets or shells containing poison gas which killed hundreds of people in the east of the city. The opposition may be capable of manufacturing evidence of government atrocities, but it is highly unlikely it could do so on such a large scale as this.
After weighing up the situation detail Cockburn concludes,
The Syrian government denies it had anything to do with the gas attack, but it has not given a credible account of what did happen. Initially, there was disbelief that it would do something so patently against its own interests, but all the evidence so far is that it has done just that.
This morning on France Inter, the well-informed geopolitics commentator Bernard Guetta expressed the view that all the Western governments were convinced that the chemical attack had taken place.
The issue now is what kind of action they will take.
In France, Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius says on Europe 1 that “toutes les options restaient “ouvertes” et que la décision concernant une “réponse proportionnée” serait prise “dans les jours qui viennent”.
All options remain open, and that a decision, regarding a proportional response, will be taken in the coming days.
In the UK the BBC reports,
Diplomatic pressure on Syria has failed and the UK is considering its response to a suspected chemical attack, Foreign Secretary William Hague says.
He told the BBC it would be possible for the UK and its allies to respond without the UN’s unanimous backing.
He said the UN Security Council, split over Syria, had not “shouldered its responsibilities”.
Today we learn that (Independent),
The White House signalled on Sunday night that the Syrian government’s decision to finally allow weapons inspectors to analyse the site of last week’s alleged chemical attack was too little too late after bluntly rebuffing an invitation issued by Damascus.
Options for a military strike drawn up by the Pentagon are already on President Barack Obama’s desk. However as he contemplated them last night – most likely a strike by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean – he was on the receiving end of strong warnings to desist from both Moscow and some leaders of his own party at home.
The administration official stressed that President Obama had not made up his mind and was awaiting a final assessment from the US intelligence services on the circumstances of the use of chemical weapons. But he made clear that the outcome of that assessment was hardly a matter of suspense. “There is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians in this incident.” Any final decision may also await a meeting of top Western and Arab defence ministers in Amman expected in the coming few days.
This is not a question of arming “Syrian democratic leftists”.
Not is a matter (as Socialist Unity believes) of defending an “axis of resistance” – Syria, and Iran – against the ‘West’ – imperialism or as they call it, the “West’s hegemonic objectives” .
We would not defend these blood drenched regimes.
It is is doubtful if the Syrian tragedy is a “proxy war” (for whom, for what?), as the Stop the War Coalition alleges.
There are profound democratic reasons to want Assad and the Baathist tyranny to go.
The reason is that intervention will not help Syria to create a democratic society based on social rights.
Western direct involvement in the Syrian civil war will not help the cause of the peoples.
There is indeed a wide range of opposition groups in Syria, many involved in the fighting (see Wikipedia for the long list).
It is said (Reuters) that they intend to create a National Army.
“Once we get the (battle)field organised, then everything will be organised,” he said. “This will be the army of the new Syria. We want to integrate its ranks and unify the sources of funding and arms,” the Syrian National Coalition member said.
Saudi Arabia has prevailed over Qatar to impose itself as the main outside force supporting the Syrian rebels, in part to counter the influence of Qatari-backed Islamist militants.
Riyadh has put forward $100 million as preliminary funding for a force planned to be 6,000 to 10,000 strong, rebels say.
Sources in the Coalition said the aim was to form a core of several thousand well-trained fighters that would also serve as the base for a bigger national army once Assad was toppled, avoiding a military vacuum and anarchy.
Yet the hard-line Islamist groups, Salafists and Jihadists (list here) within the armed opposition have not stopped growing.
They have shown utter contempt for democracy and human life.
Their hatred of minorities, from Christians, Alawites, to the Kurds, has been demonstrated through gore and horror.
The Al-Nusra Front has already threatened Alwaite villagers (not Assad) as a reprisal against alleged Chemical warfare.
Many of us would not put much faith in a Saudi backed force to replace them – or to rein them in.
The West’s action will be pouring petrol on the fire.
Oppose Western Intervention!
Front de Gauche: Spat between Communist Party and Mélenchon
Summer ‘University’ of the Front de Gauche has just seen a serious spat.
In his key-note speech on Friday night the former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon ended by attacking his own side. He accused his comrade of the Left Front, Pierre Laurent, the national secretary of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) of being a ”back stabber”. (Adapted from Libération).
Laurent’s response was immediate. On Saturday at the opening of the University of the Left Front in Grenoble, Pierre Laurent denounced the remarks as “unnecessarily hurtful” . But he did not want to “continue the controversy”. Whether this was a purely verbal escalation or not the disagreements about the article of national secretary of the PCF in the columns of Liberation (1) , which called for an end to “provocation and invectives ”overshadowed the first day of debate.
Libération notes that the attendance at this Front de Gauche event was down on last year.
Mélenchon apparently disappeared after making his speech, an absence which did not go down well.
“He is deeply disappointed by what Pierre Laurent said.” one of his supporters remarked. “But this should not last, there is no divorce in the Left Front “.
(1) Laurent notably argued for a strategy for next year’s local elections based on agreements with the (governing) Parti Socialiste. “L’objectif doit rester de faire élire des majorités de gauche en rassemblant communistes, Front de gauche, écologistes, socialistes et forces citoyennes pour empêcher droite et extrême droite de conquérir des villes.” The objective must remain to elect left majorities, bringing together Communists, the Front de gauche, socialists and citizens’ groups, to prevent the right and the extreme-right taking power in our towns and cities.
He also implicitly criticised Mélenchon’s tone in his attacks on the Socialists, and Interior Minister Manuel Vals,. Laurent agreed that the Minister had made declarations (about Islam, about law and order and immigration) that were both opposed to the ‘values’ of the left and had had a “calamitous” effect.
But “Pour convaincre, nous ne devons pas confondre la colère et la radicalité nécessaire avec la provocation et l’invective.” To convince people we should not confuse together our anger and radical determination with provocation and invective. Here.
A “reconciliation” is expected today (Sunday).
Horror of North Korean Prisons.
UN Investigation into North Korean Human Rights Abuses.
This has not received the attention it merits on the left.
North Korean prison camp survivors tell U.N. investigators of rights abuses
Reuters. Public executions and torture are daily occurrences in North Korea’s prisons, according to dramatic testimony from former inmates at a U.N. Commission of Inquiry that opened in South Korea’s capital on Tuesday.
This is the first time that the North’s human rights record has been examined by an expert panel, although the North, now ruled by a third generation of the founding Kim family, denies that it abuses human rights. It refuses to recognize the commission and has denied access to investigators.
Harrowing accounts from defectors now living in South Korea related how guards chopped off a man’s finger, forced inmates to eat frogs and a mother to kill her own baby.
“I had no idea at all … I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off,” said Shin Dong-hyuk, punished for dropping a sewing machine.
Born in a prison called Camp 14 and forced to watch the execution of his mother and brother whom he turned in for his own survival, Shin is North Korea’s best-known defector and camp survivor. He said he believed the U.N. panel was the only way to improve human rights in the isolated and impoverished state.
“Because the North Korean people cannot stand up with guns like Libya and Syria … I personally think this is the first and last hope left,” Shin said. “There is a lot for them to cover up, even though they don’t admit to anything.”
There are a 150,000-200,000 people in North Korean prison camps, according to independent estimates, and defectors say many inmates are malnourished or worked to death.
After more than a year and a half ruling North Korea, Kim Jong Un, 30, has shown few signs of changing the rigid rule of his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, state founder Kim Il Sung. Neither have there been signs of a thaw or loss of control inside the tightly controlled state.
Jee Heon-a, 34, told the Commission that from the first day of her incarceration in 1999, she discovered that salted frogs were one of the few things to eat.
“Everyone’s eyes were sunken. They all looked like animals. Frogs were hung from the buttons of their clothes, put in a plastic bag and their skins peeled off,” she said. “They ate salted frogs and so did I.”
Speaking softly, she took a deep breath when describing in detail how a mother was forced to kill her own baby.
“It was the first time I had seen a newborn baby and I felt happy. But suddenly there were footsteps and a security guard came in and told the mother to turn the baby upside down into a bowl of water,” she said.
“The mother begged the guard to spare her, but he kept beating her. So the mother, her hands shaking, put the baby face down in the water. The crying stopped and a bubble rose up as it died. A grandmother who had delivered the baby quietly took it out.”
“TOUGH NUT”
Few experts expect the commission to have an immediate impact on the rights situation, although it will serve to publicize a campaign that has little visibility globally.
“The U.N. has tried various ways to pressure North Korea over the years in the field of human rights, and this is a way to raise the pressure a bit,” said Bill Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University in Britain.
“But it’s obvious that North Korea is a tough nut to crack and the U.N.’s means are limited. There would need to be profound political changes in North Korea to make headway in the field of human rights.”
But there appeared to be little interest in the issue in Seoul. Only a few dozen people, including journalists, attended the public hearing at a city center university.
Defectors are largely shunned or ignored in South Korea and eke out an existence in menial jobs, if they have them at all, according to official data.
Kim Jong Un stepped up the nuclear weapons and rocket programs launched by his father with a third nuclear test and two rocket launches and emphasizes the military in his speeches.
This year, he threatened the United States, South Korea and Japan with nuclear attack and although the country’s bellicose moves were dismissed as empty rhetoric, Kim succeeded in driving tension on the divided Korean peninsula sharply higher.
The hope of many activists would be for the Kim dynasty to fall and for leaders in Pyongyang to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, although the U.N. commission says this is not possible for the moment.
On its website, the Commission said it was “not appropriate” to comment on any ICC jurisdiction over potential crimes against humanity as North Korea had not signed the statutes that would enable the court to prosecute.
Amina Sboui Quits Femen Over ‘Islamophobia’ and Asks about ‘Israeli’ Funding.
Amina: Worried About ‘Israeli’ Finance for Femen.
This morning on France-Inter the Tunisian Femen activist (imprisoned and still charged with outrage of public decency) explained why she had left the feminist group.
She highlighted her concerns about Femen’s ‘Islamophobia’.
Amina then stated that she was worried about the finances of the organisation.
She expressed the view that she would not accept money from “America or Israel”.
Why did you decide to quit the Femen group?
I don’t know how the movement is financed. I asked Inna several times, but I didn’t get a clear answer. I don’t want to be in a movement supported by dubious money. What if it is financed by Israel? I want to know.
And then, I don’t want my name to be associated with an Islamophobic organization. I did not appreciate the action taken by the girls shouting “Amina Akbar, Femen Akbar” in front of the Tunisian embassy in France, or when they burned the black Tawhid flag in front of a mosque in Paris. These actions offended many Muslims and many of my friends. We must respect everyone’s religion.
But these actions were taken to support you while you were in prison. Why didn’t you consider them as such?
I thank them all for their support. Especially Joséphine, Marguerite and Pauline, who were also imprisoned. They took some good actions, but it wasn’t the case for all of them. They should have asked for my lawyer’s advice before taking some of these actions. This made my case even more difficult. Because of the protests I was charged with a new crime, “criminal conspiracy,” when I was in prison.Have you informed the Femen group about you quitting the organization?
No. They are not going to like it, but that’s the way it is.So, you decided to quit the organization, but you posted another topless photo just four days ago…
Yes, a topless photo of myself bearing a painted circled A, the anarchist symbol. It’s different.
Amina then announced her possible support for an Anarchist group Feminism Attack.
She declared that the “problème c’est tout le système” , the problem is the whole system (original – bizarrely translated in the English language Huffington Post as “I don’t like the system altogether”).
We strongly suspect this is the source of Amina’s ‘concern’ about the money behind Femen.
From what is known about their funding: the key player appears to be an individual named Jed Sunden. (6) Sunden is a Brooklyn-born American Jew who founded a major Ukrainian newspaper/media company; KP Media (which owned the Kyiv Post till 2008/2009 for example) , (7) and also is an active part of the Ukrainian jewish community. (8) Sunden was the man who‘discovered’ Femen and it was he who began to give them the oxygen of publicity (and notoriety) for their topless protesting in the Kyiv Post.
The anti-Semitic site (Semitic Controversies), continues,
This Jewish money and influence behind Femen seems to also be reflected in the organization’s public activities in so far as it protest against a vast number of things in different countries, including outraging Islamic opinion by performing topless stunts in North Africa and outside mosques in Europe. (13) This is in addition to Femen’s attacks on anything even remotely conservative as being‘patriarchal’ as well as their fairly crude hatred of religion writ large (and without qualification), but primarily of Christianity and Islam which they consider (as good third wave feminists) to be ‘evil patriarchal religions’ responsible for ‘innumerable atrocities against women’ as being intrinsically deeply oppressive towards the fairer sex.
There is plenty in the same vein from Russian racist sites, and the British ‘Stormfront‘.
This is a great shame.
Amina showed great bravery in protesting at sexism in Tunisia.
She still risks two years in Prison.
Amina betrayed not FEMEN but thousands of women who acted for her freedom during “Free Amina campaign” and because of who she is free now
Former Socialist Mayor of Henin-Beaumont Condemend for Corruption: a Boost for the Front National.
RFI reports,
The former French socialist mayor Gerard Dalongeville of Henin-Beaumont in northern France has been sentenced to four years in prison on charges of embezzlement and accepting bribes.
While Dalongeville could be released after three years, the Criminal Court of Bethune has also banned him from office for five years and slapped him with a 50,000 euro fine.
The sentence stems from accusations that Dalongeville along with his first deputy in charge of finance Claude Chopin and businessman Guy Mollet submitted false invoices between 2006 and April 2009 that benefitted companies up to four million euros.
Chopin was also sentenced to three years in prison along with a 30,000 euro fine and five years of political ineligibility.
Mollet was sentenced to four years in prison as well as a 5,000 euro fine.
Henin-Beaumont is not just any Northern French town.
Hard-left’s Mélenchon battles Front National’s Le Pen in France’s depressed north
Marine Le Pen campaigns at an open-air market in Henin-Beaumont May 29, 2012; T-shirt reads, “Leave the Euro”Reuters/Pascal Rossignol
By Sarah ElzasTwo former presidential candidates have thrust a small, economically-depressed northern French town into the spotlight by deciding to face off in the race to win its parliamentary seat. The hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon has taken his campaign against far-right Marine Le Pen to the industrial desert of Hénin-Beaumont.
Legislative elections 2012. First Round.
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Marine Le Pen
FRONT NATIONAL
42,26 %22 460 voixVoix obtenues dans la 11ème circonscription du Pas-de-Calais
48,21 %5 172 voixVoix obtenues dans la commune de Hénin-Beaumont
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Philippe Kemel
PARTI SOCIALISTE
23,72 %12 609 voixVoix obtenues dans la 11ème circonscription du Pas-de-Calais
16,69 %1 790 voixVoix obtenues dans la commune de Hénin-Beaumont
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Jean-Luc Melenchon
FRONT DE GAUCHE
21,46 %11 406 voixVoix obtenues dans la 11ème circonscription du Pas-de-Calais
21,21 %2 275 voixVoix obtenues dans la commune de Hénin-Beaumont
Second Round.-
Philippe Kemel
PARTI SOCIALISTE
50,11 %26 814 voixVoix obtenues dans la 11ème circonscription du Pas-de-Calais
44,86 %4 906 voixVoix obtenues dans la commune de Hénin-Beaumont
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Marine Le Pen
FRONT NATIONAL
49,89 %26 696 voixVoix obtenues dans la 11ème circonscription du Pas-de-Calais
55,14 %6 030 voixVoix obtenues dans la commune de Hénin-Beaumont
The 2009 Municipal elections were particularly ‘hot’ (see here).
The Front National lost to a united “republican front”.
The former Mining Town – and historic bastion of socialism – faces a renewed challenge from the Front National in the 2014 local elections.
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Lothar Bisky, Die Linke, Dies.
Bisky was somebody completely respected, and warmly liked, in his party – Die Linke, and before that the PDS. He died unexpectedly on Tuesday, four days before his 72nd Birthday.
German politician Lothar Bisky has passed away. He had two spells as leader of the successor party to the East German communists and helped form the Left party.
Bisky’s death at the age of 71 was announced by the parliamentary leader of the Left party, Gregor Gysi, on Tuesday.
In a statement released later, Gysi and his two party co-chairs expressed their sorrow at the loss of one of the Left’s key figures since the fall of the East German communist regime and reunification.
In the statement. they said Germany had lost a great mover and shaker of recent times and that Europe had lost a dedicated champion of “the project of the political, social and economic unification of the continent.”
The statement also described him as a “leader and shaper of the Left party,” saying he had fought for a “strong German and European left-socialist party.” Deutsche Welle.
Der Speigel says,
Bisky was twice leader of the PDS: 1993-2000 (succeeding Gysi) and from 2003 to 2007. He took over after the merger of the PDS with the West German Election Alternative (WASG) together with Oskar Lafontaine and they managed, for three years, the leadership of the new party “Die Linke”. At the party congress in Rostock in 2010, he did not run for office. His succesors were Klaus Ernst and Gesine Lötzsch .
Bisky 2007-2010 was Chairman of the European Left – since 2009 he was a member of the European Parliament. In March 2012 Bisky resigned from the leadership of Die Linke. He cited health problems as his reason.
“Left is unthinkable without him”
For Die Linke Bisky was, in recent years, powerful integrating force. Again and again he managed to overcome the serious battles between the Eastern and Western German parts of the Party, which regularly saped the Party’s morale. He resisted making sharp comments. Bisky stood out with his pleasant manner from some other top comrades. …
There is a Wikipedia entry on Lothar Bisky which highlights some, perhaps, less admirable aspects of his past. That is, about his links with the Stasi.
Ben Gummer, Ipswich MP: Has Perter Bum Than Coatesy.
Ben says, “I have perter bum than Coatesey”.
Tendance Coatesy presents the ‘Alternative View’ by Ipswich MP Ben Gummer.
“I would like to thank my good friend Andrew Coates for giving me this space to express myself.
God (and he alone) knows it’s hard to get an airing in the Bolshevik local press.
Well there’s been a lot of controversy in Ipswich about Zionism.
Plucky leading local Conservative Kevin Kevin Algar has rightly brought the ‘Zionist domination of the media’ to our attention.
His views on the ‘Zionist’ threat are not alone!
On another side we are pleased to announce that, as part of our equal opportunities programme, that we now employ a Mz Toolidays as our charlady.
She has an excellent background, Green Party, Labour Party and the Sparticist League.
And , forgive me for mentioning this Andy, my bottom is a lot perter than yours!”
Important Update: I am offended. I am offended that Comrade Coates didn’t have the courtesy to give me a ping back like this one. If he’s going to insult me, he can at least draw the insult to my attention.
Anti-Politics: Partido X, a Spanish ‘Five Star Movement’, Looks to Set to Win Votes in 2014.
Spanish 5 Star MoVement?
Partido X, Partido del Futuro.
Es la Red Ciudadana que aplica el programa que instaura una verdadera democracia con la que la gente pueda defender sus intereses.
X Party Citizen Network, the Party of the Future.
The X is unknown. It represents whoever changes completely the idea of what a “political party” is, in order to establish a true democracy. No party will do it? Then the X represents the people, the Citizen Network that will cast them out of their seats.
It is the Citizen Network who wins because it applies the program that allows a true democracy to be established, one people can use to defend their interests.
The X Party Citizen Network enters parliament, opens its doors and returns sovereign power to the people through the implementation of its entire program: “Democracy, Full Stop”.
From this moment, every citizen has the possibility to improve and vote on laws that affect them or propose laws through Popular Legislative Initiatives and binding referendums.
The French media have caught on, as have activists across Europe.
Noting that this group comes from the Indignados movement, which mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in Spain, Le Monde has published an important article about them.
The conclusion is well worth noting,
Etant donné l’ampleur de la rupture entre représentants et représentés en Espagne », affirme Jaime Miquel, analyste électoral, « une candidature citoyenne peut espérer obtenir un million deux cent mille voix aux prochaines élections européennes et trois millions cinq cent mille voix aux prochaines élections générales ». De quoi conférer à l’Espagne, actuellement gouvernée par une majorité absolue, l’instabilité politique de la Grèce, de l’Italie ou du Portugal.
Given the size of the gap between political representatives and those they represent in Spain – notes electoral analyst Jaime Miquel, ” a citizens’ candidate can hope to get around a million, two hundred thousands votes in next year’s European elections, and three million, five hundred thousand votes in the next General Election. This give Spain, at present ruled by a majoritarian political system, the political instability of Greece, Italy and Portugal.
The organisers of Partido X also deny that the intend to follow the path of Italy’s Five Star Movement (MoVimento 5 Stelle).
They reject the rule of one individual, like the 5 Star’s Beppe Grillo.
But politically – as they seem open to “any” idea to bring government back in the hands of the people, not to say general windbaggery – it is hard not see resemblances.
