Anniversary

Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the Feb 15th anti-war demo. It was possibly the biggest single political event (in terms of participation) in human history and it occurs to me I can hardly remember a thing about it. Not getting to the end of Gower Street before we had to find our bus (and the Mexican waves passing all the way along) is the strongest thing I can recall. The key point about the Stop the War Coalition at it's height was it had an estimated 50,000 active participants in 500 branches and/or affiliated groups. Now that was the basis of possible left realignment. These days people are largely too enervated and too sectarian to even begin thinking of a current equivalent. But left realignment is our bearing point if we want to the way out of our current predicament (our in both the narrowest and broadest sense).

Of course you realise this means war?

World War Two means different things to different people. For some Allies it an imperialist war, for others a war of liberation. In order to bind the population to the government the two wars had to be lost in each other. Nevertheless at some points the two different interpretations came to clash, the Greeks know all about this. Having liberated themselves from the fascists the British came… and rearmed the fascists.

Different post-war settlements meant various states went part way to meet working class demands and reabsorb the organised working class in the bourgeois hegemonic system in time for the cold war. World War Two became the key reference point it is today.

Of two key arguments the first was “He’s a Hitler”. If an anti-colonial leader wasn’t obviously a communist he was a fascist, and that’s why we must go to war on… sorry, intervene in this particular country. Here’s an example, John Reid on why the Iraq war was a socialist war.

The second argument, more prevalent in the past few years has been “The rules have changed”. In this example Tony Blair was announcing to the world he was going to eff up any suspicious brown people he wanted to.

This argument has become more significant under the long-term crisis of profitability. The current depression has made it all the more urgent (from the bourgeois point of view) to reorganise the economy and society, to transfer more wealth by various means from bottom to top and prop up the general rate of profit. The current strategy is called Austerity. All checks on executive power, both democratic and bureaucratic must be removed.

This is what David Cameron meant when he said Britain is at war. Ok, so he meant “an economic form of war”. Yes war, like World War Two, only this time Hitler is planning oversight.

An aside: look how far we’ve come from the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. Trade equals war. It’s a fundamental weakness in the basis of capitalism. Due to the nature of commodities trade is simultaneously mutual and a form of competition, the source of all conflict. When Cameron talks about bureaucracy what he actually means is oversight:

"Government can still be far too slow at getting stuff done…Consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback – this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth. It's not how you get things done. So I am determined to change this."

Strange as it may seem, according to Cameron this bureaucracy has its roots in democracy. 

"There are understandable reasons for that. When you have lobby groups lined up to criticise every action you take; parliamentary select committees ready to jump on every bump in the road; then the rational choice is to be cautious - even over cautious. But for the sake of our country's progress we have got to cut through this".

He's also seeking to pass the parcel in terms of blame for the economic and social catastrophe he has engineered. It's not that we've too much austerity, no, the government would dish out more, if only the bureaucrats would stop pandering to 'lobby groups' and get on with it!

This is no argument for bureaucracy, but there are good reason and then there are real reasons, and the real reason Cameron is saying this is he wants to rig society even further in favour of his party and the rich.

Tuppence for the war

It's hard to know what to say about the Israeli onslaught in Gaza that hasn't already been said. This is the fourth such assault the Israeli state has carried out on its neighbours I think in ten years. Lenin's Tomb is of course doing a bang up job. Shabogan Graffiti has some excellent posts on the barbaric propaganda coming out of the BBC. 

At a surface level it's an utter paradox why the right would hate such a consistent and successful establishment propaganda tool. We forget sometimes that the ruling class (with its competing empires) is not homogeneous. It needs a state in part to make fractions of the class, such as the network of power round News International, knuckle under for the greater bourgeois good. It needs accepted 'neutral' ideological outlets. The BBC is neutral when it comes to intra ruling class conflicts. It is though fiercely partisan when it comes to class on class conflict, state on state conflict.

Only six or so weeks ago he Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu was in the United Nations shilling for war on Iran. It seems he'll have to make do with kicking the Palestinians, again. He'll get all the help he could ask from the BBC.

This is also a test for the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptians. This is the Egyptian IS statement on the war:

“Today the Zionist enemy is preparing a ground attack on Gaza. But Egyptian gas still flows to Israel, the Rafah border crossing is still closed—and the Camp David agreement remains in force. 

“Why are Morsi, his advisers, ministers and organisation waiting? They should put in practice what they always preached before coming to power—cutting all ties with the Zionist enemy, abolishing the Camp David agreement, deploying the Egyptian army in Sinai and permanently reopening the Rafah crossing.”

A world of stupid...

Apparently:

Britain is losing its moral compass to such a degree that the armed forces can no longer rely on young recruits to behave in a way once expected by senior officers, General Lord Dannatt, a former head of the army will say on Tuesday.

He may be suggesting this because there was systematic torture of prisoners in Iraq. But that was a (well organised) one off, surely... OK, so there was internment and torture in Ireland in the 1970s... internment and torture in Kenya in the 1950s... back in the 1850s there was this weird phase of executing Hindu rebels by strapping them to cannons, but in no way does this constitute an abbreviated inventory of British army torture... Only a fool or a communist would suggest as much.

Also:

Dannatt, a committed Christian...

Is clearly not so committed that he's heard about the ten commandments, particularly the sixth, "thou shalt not kill"; fairly unambiguous, wouldn't you say? Not to mention difficult to reconcile with soldiery but ho hum...

Help for Heroes

Our Brave Boys defending us from the evil machinations of Iraqi hotel workers:

Among the humiliations forced upon the detainees, the report said, were toilets being flushed over their heads, beatings with metal bars, verbal abuse, being forced to "dance like Michael Jackson" and having lighter fuel poured over them.


One officer who visited the detention centre told the inquiry that the detainees looked as though they had been "in a car crash".


After the death of Baha Mousa, the surviving detainees were subjected to further assaults and "trophy photographs" were said to have been taken of them being beaten.

Was Iraq the new Vietnam? Who cares anymore? They were only Muslamics. Help your heroes, look the other way, forget about it, look, X Factor is back.