Tag: danielmargrain.com

Gods & monsters

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By Daniel Margrain

Brideoffrankenstein.jpg

During the dark pre-enlightenment days before science, the earth was widely perceived as a stable force at the centre of the universe overseen by a God who envisaged humanity as having a fixed set of roles within it. To step outside this framework of ‘stability and order’ was to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that shaped society. By challenging the existence of God (and hence the nature of society) through science, Galileo and others paid the ultimate price with their lives.

For man to disobey God by tasting the fruit of the forbidden tree was deemed to have brought evil into the world. Thus theology and the clergy explained the existence of wrongdoing as a primordial human condition that had to be controlled by a deity for whom the wrongdoers were required to seek salvation. This salvation took root in a system of ideas that underpinned the philosophical writings of Aristotle who conceived a world in which everything had a purpose.

The purpose of individual beings, and the places they naturally occupy, all dovetailed together, according to Aristotle, to form the pattern of the universe in order to give everything its place in the world. Religion and Aristotlian philosophy are therefore mutually reinforcing concepts that helped maintain uneven relations of power, centred on order.

Although the enlightenment and the emergence of science was a great leap forward from the idea that the power of Kings was historically fixed predicated on a grand purpose and design ordained by God, it nevertheless remained tied to the concept of progress as being that of the development of the human mind and of human nature as unchanging. So just as the church regarded stability and order as a primordial human condition, the classical economists that arose out of the enlightenment treated private property also as a fixed primordial human condition.

The religious and political establishment continue to blind the masses with this propaganda today. Hierarchical structures are as rigid in class stratified modern Britain (where social mobility is actually in reverse) as they have ever been. The masses of ordinary people have been conditioned to know their place within an ‘unchanging’ society even though the great changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution prove that power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees.

The supplanting of the aristocracy of land with money in this way led to the reduction of the great estates to commodities in which almost everyone and everything became “objectified”. The worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. The labour of the worker, according to Karl Marx, thus becomes a separate, external being:

“Man’s labour exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power, the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.”

In the year of Marx’s birth in 1818, a young English author called Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published, in London, the first edition of the Gothic and Romantic science fiction novel, Frankenstein – the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. It’s the externalizing and uncontrollable force that provides the catalyst for change that Shelley describes in her masterpiece which draws parallels with the daily lot of workers. It’s these workers who continually produce what they cannot keep until eventually, as was the case with the Luddites, they rebel against the machines that churn out the fruits of their alienated labour by smashing them to pieces.

In dialectical terms, change in nature is reality. But as Marx understood, the dialectic also applies to the social world in which alienation is considered to be a material and social process. Since humans are an integral part of nature, they can not be excluded from the forces that govern it. The forces that determine changes in nature also, therefore, apply to the social world. At some point quantitative change results in fundamental qualitative change. An acorn, in becoming an oak, for example, will have ceased to be an acorn. Yet implicit within the acorn is the potential to become an oak. The economic system of capitalism, in potentially becoming something else, will similarly, cease to be.

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn is indicative of the kind of transformation from quantitative to qualitative change outlined. This explains why the establishment are doing their utmost to prevent it. Just as Dr Frankenstein couldn’t control the monster he created and the machines couldn’t ultimately control the impulses of workers in the factories wrought by the impacts of industrial capitalism, so it is the case that the establishment won’t be able to control the forces which Corbynism has unleashed.

What has typified the history of colonial and imperialist oppression thus far, has been the ability of the oppressors to suppress opposition to their rule using monsters as part of their strategy of divide and conquer based on the concept of “my enemies enemy is my friend”. However, what the oppressors rarely appear to factor in to their strategies, is the potential for both the monsters and ordinary people alike, to break free from their chains. The brainwashing techniques of the corporate media, as well as the Machiavellian politicians who sing to the tune of their paymasters, is not sustainable. Corbyn is leading a movement that potentially will be at the forefront of tearing the entire edifice down.

Not only are monsters able to break free from the oppressors who create and nurture them, but paradoxically they also create the conditions in which a greater number of other monsters emerge. This was, for example, the case in Afghanistan during the 1980s following president Carter’s 1979 authorization of a $500 million covert action programme in support of tribal groups known as the mujahedin.

The kinds of monsters which successive US governments help nurture have managed to either strain at the leash (as in the case of Israel), or completely break free from their masters grip (as was the case with the mujahedin in Afghanistan). In terms of the former, as a result of the law of unintended consequence, the US-dependent monster often bites the financial hand that feeds it. This is rooted in uncontrollable and unpredictable geopolitical forces.

However, there are other monsters which their creators manage to exert a tight control of. An example, is the extent to which the the US government have managed to maintain leverage over the terrorist fighters that continue to emerge from what was formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). Since 1946, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen as well as torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists who, according to SOA Watch, have “ripped the continent apart.” Two-thirds of the El Salvador army who committed some of the worst atrocities in its civil war had been trained at the SOA.

Moreover, the school has been complicit in numerous other dirty wars – particularly throughout the 1980s – fought on behalf of the US as well as training various other dictators from all over central and south America. More recently, the school was almost certainly responsible for training the killers who were a component part of the brutal regime that overthrew the Honduran government headed by Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. Media Lens pointed out in early March this year, that those responsible for the coup d’etat – which was supported by successive U.S administrations – assassinated the leading grass-roots Honduran environmental activist, Berta Caceres.

These kinds of Faustian pacts with the devil have, largely by way of ‘blow back’, contributed significantly to the exponential spread of terrorism worldwide, as well as the destabilization of entire countries and even regions. This is evidenced by the emergence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq following the 2003 illegal US-led invasion, the chaos that is unfolding in Honduras and the spread of ISIS in Libya and beyond. The latter were spawned in the Wests favoured regional client, Saudi Arabia – the authoritarian religious extremist state that has been bombarding Yemen for the last 19 months using, as journalist Iona Craig has documented, weaponry sold to them by the UK-US governments’.

Given that the FBI defines terrorism as “violent acts …intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government”, it’s difficult to rationalize how violations of international law in this way, under the guise of illegal war, is not illustrative of anything other than the kinds of terrorism the Western powers accuse their official enemies of committing.

Famously, Peter Ustinov eloquently articulated the conflation of war with terrorism. “War”, he said, “is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless.” In other words, the wars initiated by the powerful represent the substantial terror. Under such circumstances, the greater monsters are closer to home than many of us would perhaps care to admit. If God does exist, maybe he will be at the gates of Heaven to pass judgement on our rulers.

In the meantime, ordinary people are trying to establish the number to the combination lock to the chain that binds them to the Gods and monsters created by imperial power. Jeremy Corbyn has the number to the combination in the jacket pocket of his unkempt suit.

A second referendum?: The Tories continue to fiddle while Britain stumbles into the abyss

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By Daniel Margrain

Last Wednesday afternoon I took the Eurostar from a grey and dismal London to a sunny Paris. I decided that I would try to ignore the news while I was away. However, by Friday, temptation got the better of me. While sitting at a restaurant table in the small picturesque Parisian commuter-belt town town of St Germaine en Laye enjoying my lunch, I asked the waiter if he knew what the result of the EU referendum was. He expressed his shock at the decision of the British public to renounce their membership of the 28 member club. “That’s it”, he said, “the European project is dead”. I asked him whether he thought that this was a good thing or a bad thing? “It’s a bad day for Europe”, he exclaimed. “I’m not sure the project can continue to be run effectively with Britain gone but your heart was never really in it anyway”, he continued.

He claimed that Britain had already negotiated for itself numerous concessions and any more would have effectively made the Federalist vision for Europe he was in favour of, a redundant concept. The British position he said was selfish in as much as the government appeared reluctant to use its economic muscle as leverage in order to help improve the living standards of the working classes within poorer nations of the EU which, according to him, was the ethos at the heart of the project. In other words, for the poorer nations to gain something, and for the European project to work, as he saw it, it was necessary for richer nations like Britain, to concede some financial ground at the expense of the poorer nations.

He blamed David Cameron for triggering “an unnecessary referendum based upon unfair criticism of the EU and many years of misinformation about how it actually works”, which in turn was perpetuated by some of the most right-wing media in the whole of Europe. He also claimed that vast swaths of working class people were further disorientated by some political commentators and politician’s on the left of the spectrum who he said, “ought to have known better” than, for example, to effectively blame immigrant workers for allegedly undercutting British workers. All of this, he claimed, had eventually – from a Brexit perspective – “bore fruit”.

It was difficult for me to disagree with any of this. The news that the British people had decided to leave the EU appeared to have been as much of a shock to him as it was to me. The statistics show that the demographic of those who voted to leave were mainly the elderly age group and those who voted to remain were from the younger age group. However, the elderly will not be around for long compared to the young. It therefore, follows, the former will experience the consequence of a decision that they made to a far lesser degree than the latter who didn’t.

It does seem strange that an ageing population who were allowed to vote but statistically are less able to make an informed decision with regards to issues that have long-term ramifications, are considered to be a better judge for what is best for the country than people who are, say, 16 or 17 years old but are prevented from voting on something that will effect them to a far greater degree and for far longer. For this and other reasons, it makes sense why younger people might be furious with older people. The latter, for example, have overseen the ruination of the environment that includes the spreading of poisons throughout the atmosphere, sea and soil. They have also overseen climate change, the ruination of entire economies and been at the forefront of the shift in wealth from the many to the few, which will mean that the generation to come will not only be poorer than the preceding one, but will die sooner.

In short, the older generation have run the world for their own selfish short-term gain. The younger generation are suffering, and will continue to suffer, the consequences wrought by a post-war generation that were virtually guaranteed socioeconomic protections that will be denied to their young counterparts. This includes the concept of a job for life, free higher education and gold-plated, index-linked pensions that the elderly have taken for granted. Relatively speaking, the post war-generation have never had it so good, although one will be hard pressed to draw such a conclusion from the mainstream media. And to top it all, by disproportionately voting to leave, the older generation have now given a future to the young that they specifically do not want – problems that will be further compounded by the imminent growth in automation and increasing global competition.

What is also bizarre is that countries and regions like London, Scotland and Gibralter wanted to stay in the EU within a context in which some of the most deprived parts of England and Wales were intent on leaving. In Boston, in North East England, for example, 75.6 per cent voted to leave the EU. Paradoxically, given that Brexit means that no more EU funds will be forthcoming to these deprived regions, it’s the poorest who will be most adversely affected as a result of this decision to leave. Consequently, it would appear that the poorest have been persuaded to make the decision to leave for the worse reasons, predicated largely on lies. These lies included the amount of money they were told the government spends on the EU and what amount, by contrast, it spends domestically.

The leave campaign also understated the positives of continued membership in terms of the amount of funds Britain receives from the EU as well as insisting that by leaving the British people would have the prospect of being surrounded by fewer foreigners. On all these points, and more, the public were lied to by the leave campaign. In terms of the second of these issues, for example, UKIPs Nigel Farage has already back-tracked in relation to his assertion that the £350 million a week that he wrongly claimed was spent on the EU would, instead, be spent on the NHS. The more likely scenario is the correct £161 million net figure will be used to pay for more tax cuts for the rich. Apparently leave have deleted their promises from their website. This is a useful aide-memoire.

Almost a week has passed since the referendum result was announced and the Conservative government under PM David Cameron is in disarray. With the PM still not having made any definitive legal commitment to leave, the political consequences for the remaining 27 members is far from certain. With Britain’s new status outside the EU yet to be legally formalized, its legal sequestration remains uncertain. For all those who thought that the Brexit vote would have meant a hasty political decision to leave based on a legal determination, might need to think again. As I said in my previous post, in legal terms, the referendum is advisory not mandatory. What happens next is a matter of politics, not law – a determination that’s dependent upon whether the government decides to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

Even though I supported the remain camp, I respect the democratic decision the British people made when they voted to leave. Any decision to either seriously delay invoking Article 50, or any attempt at backtracking on the referendum result would, in my view, be totally unacceptable. Nevertheless, delaying the democratic decision of the majority is what the government appears to be intent on doing. Seemingly, this will involve the implementation of a possible second referendum. The government intends to respond to calls for it within the next few days. This will likely take the form of a debate in parliament following the signing of a government petition by four million people to that affect.

In many other democracies throughout the world, four million signatures would guarantee a vote on the issue. But in Britain, a similar amount of signatures only guarantees that the government will consider talking about the possibility of a vote. The governments petition committee is currently considering the protest following a meeting they held yesterday (June 28). The petition entitled EU Referendum Rules Triggering A Second EU Referendum, reads:

“We the undersigned call upon HM government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60 per cent based on a turnout less than 75 per cent, there should be another referendum.”

Will the government give in to the demands set by the petition and thereby allow a second referendum to take place?

The wider issue seems to be that unless the government can find a way of presenting simple solutions to a complex set of problems, people on the whole will not understand them. However, the problem is there are no simple solutions to such complex problems. Ultimately, David Cameron will go down in history as the man who set in motion the chaos and uncertainty that will almost certainly ensue in the coming days, weeks, months and possibly years.

Because Cameron attempted to assert his authority over the Tory party, he assumed that by offering the people a referendum and winning it, would cement this authority and garner the UKIP vote as a consequence. But by losing, he has bolstered the xenophobic fringe within the UKIP and Tory parties, unleashed the potential for a rise in racist attacks and hastened the rush for Scotland to break from the UK. But perhaps most significantly of all, is that a final decision to leave, will prompt the 60 per cent of companies outside the EU who have their EU HQs in the UK and who trade with the EU, to re-locate elsewhere. If you headed a company that was based outside the EU but was big enough to have a EU HQs and you selected to be in a country that is now potentially going to be outside the EU, what would you do?

It’s a no brainer. You would have to up-sticks and move to the EU. Having an EU HQs in a country that is no longer in the EU, makes about as much sense as having a US HQs in London. So in the event of Britain definitively leaving the EU both politically and legally, tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. This is a bare minimum of the chaos that is likely to occur set against a backdrop of increasing resentment, suspicion, xenophobia and racism. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride ahead.

A victory for Brexit is unlikely to change anything in the near future

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By Daniel Margrain

 

For all those who thought that a Brexit vote in Thursday’s (June 23) highly anticipated and drawn -out referendum campaign will result in closure, might need to think again. In legal terms, the referendum is advisory rather than mandatory. What happens next is a matter of politics, not law – a determination that’s dependent upon whether the government decides to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

To put it another way, the government doesn’t necessarily have to pay attention to what the British public says. What will happen on Thursday is that we, the British electorate, will effectively be advising and giving our opinion which doesn’t make the decision to leave, if that is indeed the outcome, necessarily legal. If we vote in a way that Osborne and Cameron disagree with, the government will almost certainly reconsider the result, particularly if the outcome is close.

Say, hypothetically, the turnout is 50 per cent and 51 per cent of that 50 per cent voted to leave, it would mean that 25.5 per cent of the electorate would have made the decision to leave which would adversely impact on the remaining 74.5 per cent. In other words, if something similar to this hypothetical situation did arise it would not, the government could argue, be indicative of a mandate to leave. Given how close the result is predicted to be, the vote tomorrow is unlikely to be the end of the matter, but merely the beginning of a long and drawn out process that will likely continue until the electorate arrives at a decision that Cameron and Osborne regard as acceptable.

As the Financial Times puts it:

What happens next in the event of a vote to leave…. will come down to what is politically expedient and practicable. The UK government could seek to ignore such a vote; to explain it away and characterise it in terms that it has no credibility or binding effect (low turnout may be such an excuse). Or they could say it is now a matter for parliament, and then endeavour to win the parliamentary vote. Or ministers could try to re-negotiate another deal and put that to another referendum. There is, after all, a tradition of EU member states repeating referendums on EU-related matters until voters eventually vote the “right” way.

What matters in law is when and whether the government invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. This is the significant “red button”. Once the Article 50 process is commenced then Brexit does become a matter of law, and quite an urgent one. It would appear this process is (and is intended to be) irreversible and irrevocable once it starts. But invoking Article 50 is a legally distinct step from the referendum result — it is not an obligation.

There are three points of interest here in respect of any withdrawal from the EU by the UK.

First, it is a matter for a member state’s “own constitutional requirements” as to how it decides to withdraw. The manner is not prescribed: so it can be a referendum, or a parliamentary vote, or some other means. In the UK, it would seem that some form of parliamentary approval would be required — perhaps a motion or resolution rather than a statute. The position, however, is not clear and the UK government has so far been coy about being specific.

Second, the crucial act is the notification by the member state under Article 50(2). That is the event which commences the formal process, which is then intended to be effected by negotiation and agreement. There is no (express) provision for a member state to withdraw from the process or revoke the notification. Once the notification is given, the member state and the EU are stuck with it.

And third, there is a hard deadline of two years. This is what gives real force to Article 50. The alternative would be the prospect of a never ending story of rounds of discussions and negotiations. Once notification is given, then the member state is out in two years, unless this period is extended by unanimous agreement. It is possible that such unanimity may be forthcoming – but this would be outside of the power of the member state. Once the button is pushed, the countdown cannot just be switched off by a member state saying it has changed its mind, or by claiming that the Article 50 notification was just a negotiation tactic all along. That will not wash.

This said, what is created by international agreement can be undone by international agreement. Practical politicians in Brussels may come up with some muddling fudge which holds off the two year deadline. Or there could be some new treaty amendment. These conveniences cannot, however, be counted on. The assumption must be that once the Article 50 notification is given, the UK will be out of the EU in two years or less.

What happens between a Leave vote and any Article 50 notification will be driven by politics. The conventional wisdom is that, of course, a vote for Brexit would have to be respected. (This is the same conventional wisdom which told us that, of course, Jeremy Corbyn would not be elected Labour leader and that, of course, Donald Trump would not be the Republican nominee.) To not do so would be “unthinkable” and “political suicide” and so on.

And if there is a parliamentary vote before any Article 50 notification then there is the potential irony of those seeking to defend parliamentary sovereignty demanding that an extra-parliamentary referendum be treated as binding. But it must be right that the final decision is made by parliament, regardless of what the supposed defenders of parliamentary sovereignty say.

What is certain is that if there is an Article 50 notification then there will be immense legal work to be done. Over 40 years of law-making — tens of thousands of legal instruments — will have to be unpicked and either placed on some fresh basis or discarded with thought as to the consequences. The UK government has depended since 1972 — indeed it has over-depended — on it being easy to implement law derived from the EU. The task of repeal and replacement will take years to complete, if it is ever completed. Even if the key legislation — especially the European Communities Act 1972 — is repealed there will have to be holding and saving legislation for at least a political generation.

A vote for Brexit will not be determinative of whether the UK will leave the EU. That potential outcome comes down to the political decisions which then follow before the Article 50 notification. The policy of the government (if not of all of its ministers) is to remain in the EU. The UK government may thereby seek to put off the Article 50 notification, regardless of political pressure and conventional wisdom.

There may already be plans in place to slow things down and to put off any substantive decision until after summer. In turn, those supporting Brexit cannot simply celebrate a vote for leave as a job done — for them the real political work begins in getting the government to make the Article 50 notification as soon as possible with no further preconditions.

On the day after a vote for Brexit, the UK will still be a member state of the EU. All the legislation which gives effect to EU law will still be in place. Nothing as a matter of law changes in any way just because of a vote to Leave. What will make all the legal difference is not a decision to leave by UK voters in a non-binding advisory vote, but the decision of the prime minister on making any Article 50 notification.

And what the prime minister will do politically after a referendum vote for Brexit is, at the moment, as unknown as the result of the referendum itself.

Why it’s inappropriate to charge the killer of Jo Cox under terrorism legislation

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By Daniel Margrain

A message from the vigil for Jo Cox in Leeds

A message from the vigil for Jo Cox in Leeds (Pic: Andrew Brammer)

 

It is my contention that it is wrong that Thomas Mair, who allegedly killed MP Jo Cox, be charged under terrorism legislation on the basis that such a determination is bound up with all kinds of ideological connotations. The argument of many of those commentators on the political left of the spectrum who take the contrary position and believe that it is appropriate to describe the violent actions committed against the Labour MP, as well as other far right-wing inspired attacks such as the Orlando massacre, as acts of terrorism, seem to have arrived at that conclusion based solely on the question of media’s lack of consistency when describing other similarly planned attacks – albeit motivated by the other end of the political or ideological spectrum.

While on the surface, the ‘lack of consistency’ observation is arguably an accurate one – as evidenced, for example, by the media’s hypocritical response to the case of Ryan McGee who built a nail bomb to attack Muslims – I will attempt to show, however, that it is not a necessarily commendable position to take. Over the last 15 years, the killing of individuals or groups in Western societies have to a greater extent involved a political subtext as a result of the media’s response to them, particularly within a context in which Western-instigated wars waged against Muslim countries have resulted in their ruination and destabilization.

Given that there is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, it follows that the political-inspired violence of individuals or groups, either in support of wars of aggression enacted by the state against its official adversaries, or in what is often perceived to be in opposition to them, illustrates the limitations of this narrow conceptual framework. Specifically, this can be seen, firstly, in terms of the difficulties involved in ascertaining what constitutes a terrorist act and, secondly, relates to the question as to who determines the conceptual framework by which those who are accused of terrorism are legally bound?

The widely used definition of terrorism which pertains to “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes”, does not preclude the violence undertaken by states to similarly achieve political ends. Based on this understanding, it’s clear that all politically-motivated violence – whether undertaken by individuals, groups of state actors that include illegally constituted wars – amount to acts of ‘terrorism.’ Ostensibly, therefore, politician’s like Tony Blair and G.W. Bush who illegally led the rush to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, are as equally culpable of committing terrorist acts as somebody like Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh.

However, whilst on the surface such a determination sounds positive and is seen to serve a need for those who desire justice to be achieved, this consensus level playing field approach is paradoxically one that the state is keen to resist. Moreover, given the absence of any universally- defined legal framework for terrorism, the term is subjective. As Bruce Hoffman has noted:

“Terrorism is a pejorative term. It is a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally applied to one’s enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore. Hence the decision to call someone or label some organization ‘terrorist’ becomes almost unavoidably subjective, depending largely on whether one sympathizes with or opposes the person/group/cause concerned. If one identifies with the victim of the violence, for example, then the act is terrorism. If, however, one identifies with the perpetrator, the violent act is regarded in a more sympathetic, if not positive (or, at the worst, an ambivalent) light; and it is not terrorism.”

As Hoffman also notes, for this and for political reasons, many news sources avoid using this term, opting instead for less accusatory words like “bombers” and “militants”.

It’s my argument that from an activists point of view, it’s important that the media make a distinction between illegal wars undertaken by state actors and the non-state politically-inspired violence of individuals and groups irrespective of whether the latter emanate from the left or right of the political spectrum. By charging some individuals or groups with terrorism offences predicated on politically-inspired violent actions but not others, potentially lends itself to accusations of double-standards and propaganda by the state. Those who doubt the veracity regarding the intention of the state to selectively invoke terrorism legislation need to look no further than the case of Pavlo Lapshyn – who murdered a Muslim and bombed mosques. This case represents the tip of a very large ice berg. As Craig Murray put it:

“Mair, McGee and Lapshyn would all, beyond any possible shadow of a doubt, have been charged with terrorism if they were Muslims. The decision is made by the Crown Prosecution Service, which has also recently decided that Tony Blair, Jack Straw, John Scarlett, Mark Allen et all will not stand trial for extraordinary rendition and complicity in torture, despite overwhelming evidence presented by the Metropolitan Police, including my own. There is a dark cloud of Islamophobia hanging over the Crown Prosecution Service. Given the totality of these decisions, there has to be.”

UK terrorism legislation which built up following the events on 9/11 and 7/7, is clearly intended as an ideological weapon whose purpose is to perpetuate this propaganda offensive in a highly selective and discriminatory way. This explains why the media resisted all attempts to describe the likes of the alleged far-right fascist killer of Jo Cox and the ultra-Zionist who hospitalized MP George Galloway as terrorists, but nevertheless regularly use the terrorist epithet to describe Islamist-inspired violence. The reality of the situation is that all charges of terrorism are legally unnecessary.

Instead, the appropriate course of action for the state to take is to invoke perfectly adequate murder and conspiracy to murder charges. Rather than running with the notion that Mair was a murderer who was almost certainly inspired by far-right politics, the line of the right-wing Daily Mail preferred the suggestion that the killer of Jo Cox allegedly targeted the MP due to a history of mental health problems. The implication is that these alleged mental health issues – in isolation – led to the attack on the Labour MP as though being mentally ill somehow makes one immune, as opposed to being sensitive, to the world which is the reality. The reality is that the mentally ill have no more propensity to violence than anybody else. As one commentator put it:

“The mentally ill are not other. They live in this world. They see the same media. And when the media tries to whip people into a frenzy, it is no surprise that some are whipped into a literal frenzy.”

The truth is that the right-wing media are using the issue of mental illness as a scapegoat for the crimes committed by a far-right politically-motivated murderer. As somebody who is currently diagnosed with anxiety and depression, the notion that some of the media are attempting to attribute the cause of the murder of Jo Cox to similar symptoms, is deeply offensive. This is not an attempt to absolve the murderer of any mental illness he may be suffering with, but merely to highlight that on its own it would have been highly unlikely to have been the cause.

It’s about time the media became unequivocal in emphasizing that, for the most part, wars are illegal state-sanctioned forms of collective violence, on the one hand, while on the other hand, they need to attribute lone killings – whatever their ideological motivations – as murders. In turn, the state needs to stop charging these murderers under terrorist legislation.

 

English football hooliganism: the UK political establishment’s trade-off

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By Daniel Margrain

A teargas grenade explodes near an England fan ahead of England's EURO 2016 match in Marseille, France
Violence erupts on the streets of Marseille CREDIT: REUTERS

Almost 18 years ago to the day, the English national football team beat Tunisia 2-0 in the opening game of their World Cup campaign in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille in the south of France. For many, the victory was overshadowed by the violence off the pitch that preceded it. For the last three days running, football hooliganism in Marseille involving England fans has once again dominated the media headlines. Reuters journalist Mitch Phillips described the influx of the first wave of 70,000 England fans on the French port city:

“….the fans wasted no time establishing a foothold in Vieux Port to start three days of drinking and singing ahead of Saturday’s Euro 2016 match against Russia. Noisy and boisterous, bare-chested and full of lager and bravado, they draped the flags around the Queen Victoria “British pub” and roared out their songs of defiance in the time-honored manner of “England Away”, just as they had in the same port-side bars 18 years ago.”

Shortly after the fans had gathered in large numbers in the bars and pubs of the city on Thursday (June 9), scenes of drunken mayhem followed that involved pitched battles, the throwing of bottles and chairs and the chanting of racist abuse. This was preceded by crude displays of jingoism that included the singing of the words “f**k off Europe, we’re all voting out” and “sit down if you hate the French”. The incitement of this kind of hatred in a foreign country is bound up with the notion that these kinds of thugs perceive themselves as superior to their hosts. This in turn forms part of a wider imperialist narrative of entitlement, ownership and control. As one sports writer put it:

“The members of this anti-social faction do not visit a foreign city: they occupy it. They erase the local culture and try to turn the place they are in into a satellite of their own English town or city.”

This view neatly encapsulates why the kind of hooliganism experienced in Marseille cannot be divorced from a wider historical context. Since the mid 20th century, Britain in general – but particularly England – has existed in a post-empire historical setting. The question is, why does hooliganism and loutish behaviour appear to be more of an English trait compared to other nationalities? It seems to me that England, more than many other European societies, finds it difficult to cast off its imperial legacy. When groups of English men gather together in a foreign country there seems to be a reluctance among a large swath of them to relinquish the notion of the concept of empire.

This mentality appears to be underscored by an entrenched nationalism as evidenced by the repeated singing of the national anthem during games, an emphasis on the notion that ‘Britannia rules the waves’ and that football hooligans carry the mantle of this imperial and colonial legacy, ostensibly on behalf of their ruling class overseers. There seems, in other words, to be something deeply embedded within the mindset of English football fans when they gather collectively that transcends the simplistic argument that their hooliganism is an expression of nothing more than drunken and pathologically-driven related violence and thuggery.

This transcendence, I would argue, corresponds to the kind of historical, social and cultural setting described that enables it. Secondly, sport doesn’t exist in a political vacuum. One can see this, for example, in the chants at both club and international level and the England-Germany rivalry which constantly mobilizes ideas about the Second World War. The third broader point is that national sports are a forum and reservoir for jingoistic sentiment in general. What happens is that banal forms of nationalism and jingoistic group-think mentality – expressed through violence and an adherence to political-inspired chanting – is cynically co-opted and reinforced by national states and governments for wider sinister political objectives.

Take the current political climate as an example. The right-wing Brexit elements within the EU debate often echo the xenophobic anti-German and anti-European sentiments of many of those who chanted the anti-French rhetoric outlined above. Football hooliganism is not just an illustration of a few ‘bad eggs’ as is so often depicted in the media, but represents a far wider problem. The reality, in other words, is that football tends to be a vehicle for deep-seated expressions and outpourings of nationalistic narcissism and patriotism.

This is dangerous in another way in as much as these linkages provide a ready pool which governments can then use in order to justify even more sinister foreign policy purposes such as foreign invasions and occupations. The question is though, are the majority of football hooligans aware of the historical and anthropological background described, or is it simply that English men these days don’t generally go to war or fight as part of an organized army but have a lot of testosterone-based pent up aggression that needs to be expelled?

I would contend that it’s not necessary for individuals to be conscious of the notion of post-empire and the loss of colonial possessions – what dissident French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed jouissance – in order for them to experience excess indicative of societal breakdown achieved as part of a shared group. There are certain settings or locations in which the establishment deem it unacceptable to reach jouissance – mainly within the political sphere. This sphere has increasingly become limited because of the potential threat it poses to the existing class structure that this implies. Instead, jouissance is channeled as a displacement activity at football matches, pubs, nightclubs and bars.

Paradoxically, it’s precisely these kinds of violent outpourings or expulsions of visceral energy that enables civilized society to function. If the collective outward violent expression of mainly young men were to be severely suppressed, football hooligans and others would almost certainly turn their energy inwards which would be even more dangerous as far as its impact on civilized society is concerned. This is because any suppression of ‘orgasmic’ violence would be more radically destabilizing in terms of the potential for the derailment of the functioning of wider society. In other words, any major repression of the ability of hooligans to vent their anger might instead be turned against their bosses and, perhaps more widely, the owners of the means of production itself.

This is, of course, not in any way an attempt to justify the kinds of hooliganism witnessed in Marseille, but to recognize that in a wider symbolic and societal setting, such violence is arguably necessary. Englishmen abroad with their smart phones and apps, set against a context of Cultural Marxism, is an unholy, potent and potentially perilous mix for the establishment to negotiate. Nevertheless, it’s a trade-off that the said establishment is willing, albeit reluctantly, to endure in order that the current political status-quo be maintained.

Muhammad Ali: Brilliant but flawed icon

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By Daniel Margrain

Muhammad Ali captivated the imagination of millions (this writer included) during his peak from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. His iconic status transcended his work inside the boxing ring. His larger than life personality, good looks and quickness of thought outside the ring was matched by the speed, deftness and grace inside it. It was precisely the combination of his magnificent athleticism as a champion allied with his ability to articulate what was happening in society that made him the icon and legend that he was and will almost certainly continue to be in the decades to come. In simple terms, Ali’s legendary status as a sportsman and his civil rights activism were deeply intertwined.

Despite many of today’s leading sportsmen and women and stars of the entertainment industry having the requisite platform with which to confront the injustices that surround them, they invariably lack the integrity to do so. This was not true of Ali. Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky on the 17th January 1942, the most famous sporting icon on the planet used the media in a brilliantly imaginative way to stand up to what he believed in and he did so in the knowledge that the personal price to be paid would be the threat of imprisonment and a massive loss of income. For Ali, following the easy path wasn’t an option.

It’s perhaps easy to underestimate the extent to which Ali helped lay the foundations for what many people today almost certainly take for granted in terms of the relative social harmony that exists within our contemporary multicultural societies. But it has to be remembered the context in which black people lived their lives when Clay came to prominence after he became world heavyweight champion in 1964. Objectively, the lives of black people in Clay’s U.S homeland hadn’t changed much for the better at the time of the boxers first major triumph in the ring.

Despite the fact that the massive expansion of U.S capitalism which followed WW2 created thousands of new jobs and thereby put strains on the racist job reservation policies that existed in many industries, considerable resistance to fundamental change remained well into the 1950s. As Kevin Ovenden points out, up until this point, the political establishment in the North of the U.S were grouped around the Republican party who remained largely indifferent to the racism and urban poverty in the South. Nor did they care that in the South everything was run by the same establishment who had fought the Civil War to preserve slavery.

The South was run as a one party state by the Democrats – the party supported by the section of the American ruling class who fought longest and hardest to keep blacks under a state of virtual apartheid. Change, when it did come, was inspired by the struggles of southern blacks themselves which theoretically began to make inroads following the 1954 American Supreme Court adjudication of the Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education case which proffered that racially segregated schooling was unconstitutional. The case which had been brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was, however, tokenistic and hence it did not result in widespread desegregation.

This was the context which led a member of the NAACP, Rosa Parks in 1955, to refuse to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Following Parks’ arrest, activists began to organize and the Montgomery bus boycott was born. The ensuing victory a year later inspired civil rights activists everywhere and propelled the Baptist minister, Martin Luther King to nationwide prominence. Consequently, what began as a question of attaining legal rights spread to the economic and political sphere. This was the point at which Clay began to make his mark, politically.

Eight years after the successful Montgomery bus boycott, Clay at 22 years of age returned to his homeland as a world heavyweight champion after beating Sonny Liston in what was widely regarded as an upset. Despite his new found fame and status, Clay was still subjected to the humiliating institutional discrimination that blighted the lives of black people in the US. He was refused service at a ‘whites only’ restaurant and was set upon by a gang of racists. He had trouble finding a hotel to stay when he traveled to fight.

Already he displayed the outspoken bravado for which he was famous. Interviewed in the ring immediately after the fight, he said, “I don’t have a mark on my face, and I upset Sonny Liston, and I just turned twenty-two years old. I must be the greatest.” The following morning he confirmed the rumours of his involvement with the Nation of Islam or the ‘Black Muslims’ as they were also known, founded by a Middle Eastern immigrant, Wallace D Fard in 1930. It was during this period that he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.

Ali’s involvement with the militant black separatist movement, the Nation of Islam, which was growing in influence and challenging the hegemony of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, coincided with the rise to prominence of Malcolm X, the Nation’s most charismatic figure and talented spokesperson who would go on to mentor him. Two years after experiencing racism first hand that followed his defeat of Liston, Ali further antagonized the white establishment by refusing to be conscripted into the U.S military citing his religious beliefs and opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War.  Ali’s response was clear and emphatic:

“No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave-masters of the darker people the world over.”

The price Ali paid was a heavy one. He was convicted by an all white jury of evading the draft and sentenced to five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Though he never actually served time in jail the threat remained until his conviction was eventually overturned in June 1971. Meanwhile he was stripped of his titles and governing bodies across the world including the British Boxing Board of Control revoked his licence to box. Ali’s principled stance as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war made him an icon for the larger counterculture generation.

Writer Mike Marqusee highlights the fact that four days after he was ordered to report for duty in April 1967 a huge 125,000 strong anti-war rally was held in Central Park. His defiant declaration was that he had nothing against the Vietnamese:

“They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? …How can I shoot them poor people, Just take me to jail.”

Such an outspoken stance gave other dissenters and the wider anti-war and anti racist movements a huge boost. Other sporting and cultural figures were to follow his lead including the athletes who gave the famous Black Power Salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. However, despite his many outstanding achievements in and out of the ring, it was clear that by the early 1970s Malcolm X’s mentoring had seriously disorientated Ali. It was his proclamations of racist pseudo-science – the formal ideas of which were codified as part of the belief system of the Nation of Islam – which was to result in some of Ali’s more bizarre and eccentric rhetorical flourishes. This culminated in his famous interview with Michael Parkinson in 1971.

Three years later, Ali was back in the ring after having been stripped of his world title seven years previously. One of my earliest childhood sporting memories was the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle‘ bout when he reclaimed his world title from George Foreman. Back then very few black people appeared on TV and when they did it was invariably as villains, who were swiftly dispatched or buffoons to be ridiculed.

Ali finally retired after humiliating defeats against his former sparring partner Larry Holmes and a journeyman Trevor Berbick in 1980 and 81. It’s a pity as far as this writer is concerned that he made the undignified decision to carry on fighting well beyond his peak. This was probably due to a combination of his own vanity and his attempt to recoup some of the money from those whose greed had exploited him throughout his career, stripping him of much of his wealth. By this time he was already suffering the early onset of the Parkinson’s Syndrome that was to afflict him so dramatically in later life.

Despite his lack of clarity of political thought, Ali along with Malcolm X, gained a reputation for what other leading black figures did not dare voice. Ultimately, it was the denunciation of the system that won them support. As far back as late 1964 Malcolm X appeared to reject the obscurantist philosophy that underpinned the Nation of Islam and began to speak openly and favourably about socialism saying white anti-racists tended to be socialists. He was also aware that the source of racism was located at the heart of capitalism. As writer George Breitman, quoting Malcolm X, put it:

“The system in this country cannot produce freedom for the Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system, period. It’s impossible for this system, as it stands, to produce freedom right now for the black man in this country.”

Whether Muhammed Ali had moved towards this view during the end of his life is not clear. Nevertheless, regardless of Ali’s perceived political weaknesses, these flaws are outweighed by the fact that he remains one of the most historically outstanding cultural figures in the struggle against racism, war and imperialism of modern times.

 

Antisemitism: the myths & the maths

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By Daniel Margrain

A great deal has been written about how the Blairite fringe within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) are attempting to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership with a view to his eventual toppling using the specter of antisemitism as a weapon with which to achieve it. Arguably the most comprehensive analyses of the McCarthy-style witch-hunts undertaken so far (which ironically have involved Tony Greenstein, who has been at the forefront of moves to combat genuine cases of antisemitism on the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement), has been undertaken by the journalist Asa Winstanley. In an excellent piece published by the Electronic Intifada (April 28, 2016), Winstanley outlines the links between right-wing, anti-Corbyn Labour and the pro- Israel lobby within the party. He meticulously shows how this lobby manufactured an ‘antisemitism crisis’, pinpointing the individuals involved, the tactics and dirty tricks used and the connections to powerful individuals whose ties lead to pro-Israel groups both in London and Israel.

Among those the journalist points to are two individuals who instigated the antisemitism row, David Klemperer who opposed Corbyn’s run for the labour leadership (but has since been kicked out of the party), and former Israel lobby intern, Alex Chalmers. Perhaps significantly, Winstanley points to a more influential figure behind the false claims of antisemitism. That figure is former chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), Jeremy Newmark, now the chairperson of the Labour party-affiliated, Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The JLM is also affiliated to the Israeli Labor Party and the World Zionist Organization. According to the UN, the latter pumps millions into building in the occupied West Bank through its settlement division.

The media uncritically bought Newark’s assertion that antisemitism is rife within Corbyn’s Labour party. But as Winstanley contends, no mainstream journalists “have disclosed Newmark’s long-standing role in the Israel lobby, or his record of lying about anti-Semitism.” Winstanley also shows how media outlets such as the Telegraph, Huffington Post and the Jewish Chronicle have been complicit in the systematic attempt to disorientate Labour party members and supporters by either printing misinformation or reproducing unsubstantiated accusations and smears against individuals all of which have contributed to a false media narrative.

The implication appears to be that antisemitism is not only more prevalent within the Labour party compared with other political parties but is also more prevalent compared to other forms of racism in UK society more widely. Neither claims stand up to scrutiny. There’s no evidence to suggest that such views are any more prevalent in a party which historically has been at the forefront of anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns. On the contrary, racism and fascism is more likely to be symptomatic of far-right politics then left-wing politics. Take Zionism as an example. Far-right political parties court the Zionist vote because Zionism is a far-right and racist ideology. More widely, a 2015 survey by Pew found that seven percent of the UK public held ‘unfavourable’ views of Jews. By contrast, about a fifth held negative views of Muslims and almost two-fifths viewed Roma people unfavourably.

Interestingly. I recently came across the following blog piece, originally posted last August by Mira Bar-Hillel. Although, Bar-Hillel’s use of the term “Jewish Lobby”  is, I would contend, inappropriate, the piece is nevertheless an extremely lucid, revealing and well-written account of the extent to which the Zionist pro-Israel lobby have managed to inculcate their propaganda within the wider UK political and media discourse, the consequences of which appear to be adversely impacting on the democratic process. Mira Bar-Hillel’s sound and well articulated arguments fit in well with the current ‘antisemitism’ debacle discussed above. This is Mira Bar-Hillel’s post in full:

It has become universally acknowledged that #antisemitism in this country is rising massively to alarming record-breaking levels. Most commentators accept this as a simple fact and some respond by demanding curbs on free speech, including senior MPs and even Ministers.

The myth that British Jews are living in fear of life and limb suits some people, to whom I will refer as the “Jewish Lobby”. I will do this because it is true, and because I have been called an #antisemite so often and so publicly (and that’s just by Danny, Lord Finkelstein of Pinner) that that must be true as well.

But the rise in #antisemitism is a myth and one which needs to be busted. And if it takes a Jewish #antisemite to do it, then so be it, with help from the Metropolitan Police.

When I asked the Met for figures and breakdowns of so-called “hate crime”, they were happy to oblige, adding that nobody asked them for these figures until I did. The results will strike fear into those obsessed with scaring British Jews, but actually show there is little to worry about.

In 2014 the police recorded 358 anti-Semitic offences. This is 177 fewer than claimed by the Community Safety Trust, but then the CST is a well-funded Jewish Lobby which would not exist without #antisemitism, real or made-up. The Met’s figures, by the way, also recorded 1,481 reports of homophobic attacks and 611 of Islamophobic ones (generally accepted to be massively under-reported).

The Met’s breakdown of anti-Semitic crime in London in 2014 – which included the aftermath of the Gaza massacres and the media coverage they got – was as follows: FOUR cases of assault with injury (only ONE GBH); seven cases of Common Assault; 36 cases of Criminal Damage to a Motor Vehicle and 38 of “Harrassment”, which could mean anything. The rest were online

Compare that if you will to 180,000, which is the total for offences in these categories recorded by the Met in 2014. So attacks against Jews made up only one in 500 of the total, while they make up around one in 86 of the population of Metropolitan London. We should all be so lucky.

So why are prominent, educated and articulate Jews behaving as though their future here is suddenly at serious risk? Why does Maureen Lipmann regularly pack her bags, citing #antisemitism in between appearances in the media and radio discussions on the subject – only to unpack again?

And why is Danny Cohen, 40, recently appointed Director of BBC Television at £320,000 a year (poor didums), telling a Jerusalem conference that he “questions the long-term future for Jews in the UK”, adding  “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as in the last 12 months” – which was when he was promoted to his powerful new job?

Possibly because they have chosen to believe the CST’s “statistics” rather than the police. The well-funded CST regards posters saying “Free Palestine” as #antisemitic events. Last August: Graffiti was daubed on a pavement reading ‘Jews kill Palestinian babies’. You may recall that in August the UK media was full of images and reports of Palestinian children and babies being killed by Israel in Gaza (the eventual total being 550).

The graffiti may have an unpleasant reminder, but it was factually correct. And it was certainly not a crime, more a report of a crime. So next time you see the CST figures, have the salt cellar at the ready.

Jews make up 0.5% of the population of this country but run a very effective lobby, which is their right. It is also the right of the other 99.5% to be aware of this fact and what it means in democratic terms. And before you descend upon me from a great height and add “Jew Hater” to #antisemite, I would like to put a few things on the record.

My father left Berlin in 1933 in the face of the real and imminently dangerous #antisemitism of Kristalnacht. My mother followed him in 1936 from Cracow, which fell to the Nazis in 1940. I was born in Palestine – yes, PALESTINE – in 1946, after my father, who volunteered to join the British Army to fight the Germans came home to Jerusalem. Most of their families (and mine) perished in Hitler’s camps and one of my uncles was saved by Oscar Schindler.

I grew up and was educated in Jerusalem, served in the IDF in the mid-60s and lived through the Six Day War. I was then a news reporter on Israel Radio until 1972. I then became aware that the Israeli government – decades before Netanyahu – had no interest in negotiating away occupied territory for peace.

Long before the atrocities of the occupation turned Israelis into what the late Professor Isaiah Liebovich called “JudeoNazis” (long before the baby burning) and their country became, according to Desmond Tutu and countless others, an Apartheid State, I could feel the rot setting in and wanted none of it.

So, in the words of Bob Dylan, “Call me any name you like, I will never deny it –

“But farewell, Angelina, the sky is erupting, I must go where it’s quiet”.

Racist tropes & the Zionist attempt to make ethics illegal

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By Daniel Margrain

There is something deeply unsettling about the manner in which powerful and influential Zionists and Zionist political entities in Britain and Israel appear to be intent on subverting the democratic process in order to reinforce their mutual interests. This is sustained when tropes are adhered to which perpetuate existing racist myths such as those that invoke ‘loyalty oaths’. Whenever, for example, an atrocity is committed on British soil by those who self-identify as Muslims, the wider Muslim community are effectively urged to pledge an allegiance to the country of their birth or, alternatively, they are encouraged to collectively condemn the actions of terrorists. Often it’s both of those things.

Any attempts to resist apology projection is deemed by the establishment to be akin to a form of treachery in which tacit support for an official enemy is implied. Crude loyalty binaries are invoked. Opposition to this stereotypical attitude often evokes the specter of the ‘enemy within’ trope among significant sections of the corporate-controlled media and political establishments. The Muslim community is thus tarnished with the ‘terrorist sympathizers’ brush. Arguably, the most famous example of the establishment pressurizing dissidents to conform to this collective condemnation of the official enemy narrative was in relation to George W Bush’s evoking of the binary “you are either with us or with the terrorists” proclamation that followed the events on 9-11. It is therefore unfortunate that some prominent Zionists appear to be intent on perpetuating and reinforcing the ‘divided loyalties trope’ which has the effect of playing into the hands of racists and antisemites.

Matthew Gould and Jake Wallis Simons are two relatively recent examples of what appears to be British-born Jewish Zionists conforming to stereotypical tropes that involve the prioritizing of a foreign power, namely Israel, above the interests of the British state. The former was the first Jewish-Zionist to have been appointed as Britain’s ambassador to Israel. Gould, who along with Minister of Defence, Liam Fox and his businessman friend, Adam Werritty, through undisclosed meetings, seemed intent on ensuring that Britain would be drawn into a war with Iran, ostensibly on Israel’s behalf. Gould’s openly Zionist leanings implied a serious conflict of interest issue.

The latter example, the Daily Mail’s Jake Wallis Simons, who has been at the forefront of a sustained and coordinated media witch-hunt as part of a coup attempt against pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn while simultaneously labeling anybody who supports Corbyn’s position as an “antisemite” said that he would support Israel if Britain and the Jewish state were hypothetically to go to war. Needless to say that if a British-Muslim had proffered support for any one of Britain’s official enemies, the security forces would have almost certainly detained him/her under terrorism legislation and the corporate media would have plastered the story over its front pages.

The same double standards apply to the media’s reaction to their coverage of the governments crackdown on those who support boycotts against Israel which the government looks set to make illegal. In light of the current political crackdown on almost all criticism of the Zionist state, one wonders when the government will consider the banning of anti-Zionism critiques. The governments claim appears to be that boycotts, which favour the Palestinians, are a form of “antisemitism” It’s clear that anti-democratic crackdowns of this nature violate the right to make an ethical stand against any perceived injustice and will thereby set a dangerous precedent.

According to.pro-Israeli propagandist and former representative of the Zionist Federation, Jonathan Sacerdoti- whose current job title is ‘Director of Communications for the Campaign Against Antisemitism’ – Jews regard boycotts against Israel to not only be intimidating but are also perceived to be an illustration of “antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel which are driving Jews in fear of their lives from Britain to Israel.” With such highly exaggerated nonsense clearly predicated on an overriding and deep-seated sense of victim hood,  Sacerdoti appears to be confusing Britain’s multicultural, secular and pluralistic liberal democracy with the inherently racist, Zionist entity headed by a PM who also sees himself as the leader of the whole of the Jewish world. 

Clearly, it hadn’t occurred to Netanyahu that Jewish British people are British, just like Black, Asian or other British people. They are not Israeli. With the exception of Zionists like Jake Wallis Simons who would sooner see Israel triumph against the land of his birth, Netanyahu can make no legitimate claim to lead or control the Jewish diaspora. To suggest otherwise is to replicate the false racist and sectarian-based argument that Zionists and Jews are synonymous, and therefore to attack Israel is “antisemitism”. Netanyahu outwardly expressed this racism when he attempted to shift the blame for the Holocaust from Hitler on to the Grand Mufti. This makes sense given that Muslims are the joint enemy of both the European far-right and their Zionist allies.

The impression the Zionist propagandists want to give is that British cities are rife with antisemitism in which boycotts of Israel are regarded as emblematic. This rationalization serves a political purpose. Currently the non-Jewish population of Israel stands at about a quarter of the total and the proportion is growing. The Zionists need to halt the demographic shift and the way to do that is to invent, provoke or exaggerate, in the UK and elsewhere, instances of the new “antisemitism.” Zionism is threatened from within and so needs a new influx of ethnic Jews in order for the ethnically-based Jewish state to survive in its current form. Ideologically there is no principal difference between Zionism and Nazism in that regard. Indeed, antisemitism is the flesh and blood that Zionism and all related industries and institutions connected to it feed off in order for them to justify their existence. As Gilad Atzmon has argued:

“The Zionist project, from its onset, formed a symbiotic relationship between Zionist Jews and the Jew haters who wanted the Jews out of Europe. Zionism promised a national home for the Jews and at the same time offered to ‘take the Jews away.’… Zionism as well as the State of Israel are sustained by Jew hatred. If ‘antisemitism’ disappears, Israel and Zionism become obsolete concepts. Understanding this, Israel and Zionism have consistently contributed to the rise of antisemitism. When there is no antisemitism to point at, Jewish institutions simply invent it, as they are presently doing in the Labour party.”

But even if we were to accept the high levels of antisemitic incidences outlined by Sacerdoti (which I don’t), the implied racism inherent in the notion that there is a correlation between Zionism and Judaism, is offensive to the silent majority of Jews who want nothing to do with the apartheid, racist state. The implied notion that intimidation and boycotts are synonymous is not sustainable either. In any case the argument is a red-herring since there are existing laws against intimidation and violence. Sacerdoti seems unaware that for boycotts to have any impact there has to be a form of collective action which he is conflating with the potential negative affects they have on particular groups of people.

The position of Sacerdoti, who claims to speak on behalf of all Jews, is essentially twofold. First, that democratic expression should be constrained if it upsets people, and secondly, it should be curtailed if it leads some people to act illegally on the basis of those values. If these two principles were to be applied, there wouldn’t be much of British democracy left. The government is losing the moral high ground by seeking to quash boycotts and prevent legitimate political activism more generally. In so doing, it is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Ultimately, it has to be a legitimate course of action in a democracy like Britain for a group of people to be able to pass a resolution condemning a country because they are opposed to its political values.

Clearly, what is behind the governments decision to ban boycotts is to clamp down on local democracy and to shut down any debate that’s critical of the human rights record, not only of Israel, but its other regional allies too. It seems to me to be remarkable the extent to which double standards are applied in relation to the media’s response to those who are opposed to the governments crackdown on boycotts against Israel in the occupied territories on the one hand, and in terms of their response to Zionist state terrorism on the other. Muslims are repeatedly pressured by the elites to apologize for acts of terror committed in their name by Islamist Jihadists and more often than not, they willingly oblige. However, this rule of thumb doesn’t seem to apply to Jews following the massacres of Palestinians by Zionists.

In the current climate of Zionist witch-hunts and McCarthy-like smears, any justifiable criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or opposition to boycotts is to risk being labelled an “antisemite”. Hadley Freeman’s complaint that she was put under special pressure to criticise Zionist violence following the successful campaign to boycott the Tricycle Theatre resulting in the cancellation of a Jewish Film Festival in Kilburn, London (despite having written an article on the subject), underlies her total disregard for the plight of the Palestinians as a consequence of this violence. This is far from unique among Zionists. Neither the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland nor the Mail’s Melanie Philips, for example, have ever acknowledged the terrible crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Instead, their preferred tactic is to take aim at Israel’s critics by accusing them of singling Israel out.   

 

Britain’s high-debt, low-productivity economy spells long-term disaster

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By Daniel Margrain

The collapse of the Berlin Wall which was the trigger that brought the totalitarian dictatorships of the former Soviet Union and those of its satellite states to their knees, came to symbolize for many the triumph of capitalist free market democracy over tyranny and oppression. An adviser to the US State Department, Francis Fukuyama, received international acclaim in 1989 when he reiterated this message by declaring, no less, that the collapse of communism was ‘the end of history‘. Great social conflicts and great ideological struggles were said to have been a thing of the past. Numerous newspaper editors and television presenters agreed.

A little over a decade after Fukuyama made his famous declaration, Islamist terrorists attacked the Twin Towers in New York. The attack was, in part, the result of Wahhabism’s ideological opposition to Western imperialist hegemony. Numerous imperial wars have been launched against Muslim countries since. Thus, Fukuyama’s thesis was trounced on a single day back in September 11, 2001. Anthony Giddens, the former director of the London School of Economics and court sociologist to Britain’s then New Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, repeated a similar message to that outlined by Fukuyama in his 1998 book, The Third Way.

Giddens  said, “We live in a world where there are no alternatives to capitalism.” He was accepting and repeating a widespread but unsustainable assumption. The earliest merchant-form of capitalism began to emerge in the 17th century and industrial forms of capitalist production developed from the late 18th century. The organizing of the whole production of a country by capitalist means is barely three centuries old. It only began to become a dominant feature in terms of the universal dependence on markets some 60 or 70 years ago. Yet modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. In other words, what Giddens argued is that a capitalist economic system which represents a tiny fraction of our species’ life-span is set to last for the remainder of it.

Leaving aside the possibility of global catastrophe resulting from climate change or nuclear war, the notion that capitalism will continue to exist indefinitely into the future, is highly improbable. As the saying goes, ‘forever is a long time in history’. In just under two decades following the publication of The Third Way, capitalism has transformed into a finance-based neoliberal variant predicated on a form of systemic corruption underpinned by booms that zap productivity. The reason why financial booms impact on productivity in this way is in part the result of too much capital being mis-allocated to low productivity sectors which crowds out real economic growth.

Company buybacks illustrate this practice. Take Viacom as an example. The company issued debts of £10 billion and then bought back the shares which had subsequently reduced in value by 55 per cent. Similarly, Amazon issued £5 billion of debt prior to announcing they would also engage in this highly unethical practice. Issuing debt in order to buy-back stock implies an inability to grow companies organically. Rather, increasingly, the approach seems to be to boost the stock price artificially by a process of financial engineering. The problem is that levels of industrial production, the latest figures of which indicate a 0.3 per cent fall from the previous month, are not sufficient to support these kinds of debts.

Another illustration of the mis-allocation of capital to a low productivity sector, is in the realm of housing. Essentially, the UK economy is based on speculative-based property booms that are sustained through zero interest rates. This means that banks have access to almost unlimited credit which enables them to finance enterprises risk-free, underwritten by the tax-payer. The Conservative government under PM David Cameron is not investing in the productive parts of the economy but in financial ‘bubbles’ of which housing plays a significant part.

UK Chancellor, Gideon Osborne’s ‘help to buy scheme’ in which the UK tax-payer provides 40 per cent of the deposit for first-time house buyers, is clearly a policy aimed at the potential Tory voter in London. Many of the properties purchased will be used for the rental market as speculative investments thus boosting the housing bubble. Meanwhile, people who are part of the productive economy and make London tick, are steadily being priced-out and socially cleansed from the city. This is contributing to the decline in UK industrial output which has seen its biggest fall since August 2013. More importantly, this has impacted negatively on the UK’s trade deficit figures which are one of the highest, as a percentage of GDP, of any country within the OECD.

To emphasize this point, the UK’s trade gap with the European Union increased to a record high of £8.6 billion. The government’s suppose aim of re-balancing the economy by allegedly supporting its productive parts, is contradicted by its creation of risk-free speculative property bubbles of the kind described. The concept of free-market capitalism is supposed to be predicated on incentives, not state sanctioned socialism for the wealthy as the means to prop-up unsustainable economic bubbles. Yet the corporate controlled media, with their lurid headlines, continuously promote the latter.

The government’s subsidizing of house purchases is unhealthy for the medium to long-term economic well-being of the country as a whole. The subsidized property speculation bubble outlined is part of a centrally-planned Tory policy, no different in principle, to the socialist planned economies of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states that ‘the end of history’ allegedly supplanted. Low productive sectors within the UK have a knock-on effect in terms of the broader economy which is destined to decline as a result. This is because more needs to be produced for the pound sterling in order to counteract the affects of subsidized speculation which adds no value to the economy.

This principle also applies under conditions in which global investors pour money into government bonds which currently result in negative yields to the tune of some $6 trillion and growing. The infusion of greater amounts of subsidized money into the London economy runs counter to the government’s stated argument that they intend to diversify the wider economy by spreading investment throughout the UK as a whole. As a consequence of the Tory policy of socialism for property speculators, house prices in London are the most over-valued of any major city in the world.

Nevertheless, as long as potential property buyers and those already on the ladder in London have a perception that their homes are worth more than is actually the case, they will more likely be inclined to vote for the kinds of politicians who will perpetuate the bubble by continuing to offer some first-time buyers an injection of a huge cash-free gift as part of their deposit. If this was indeed the Tory plan prior to the London Mayoral election in order to assist the Tory candidate, Zac Goldsmith, then the strategy failed miserably. Whether Labour’s newly elected Mayor, Sadiq Khan, will attempt to scupper any moves by Jeremy Corbyn to put a break on the Tory’s high debt-low productivity economy policy, in order to further his broader opportunistic political ambitions, remains to be seen.

Normal service resumed as the Zionist political class push the UK towards the 19th century

· 11 Comments ·

By Daniel Margrain

The optimism that surrounded the election of a genuine and principled democratic socialist in Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour opposition following the cynical attempts of right-wing Zionist elements within the PLP to drive a wedge between traditionalists and Blairites using the specter of antisemitism as their ideological weapon, has since receded. Corbyn’s unfortunate capitulation to the pro-Israel lobby represented by the Zionist Labour Friends of Israel that resulted in his ‘comrade’ Ken Livingston being hung out to dry, looks set to reverse the gains the party had hitherto made. The results of the forthcoming local elections will indicate the extent of the damage the calculated attacks on Corbyn’s leadership has done to the party’s fortunes.

The recent appointment of the ultra-Zionist Mark Regev to the role of Israeli ambassador to the UK, has arguably played a part in the instigation of the timely coup ahead of the said elections with the openly anti-Corbyn figure John Mann, operating as the Zionists principal henchman. The pro-Israel lobby, who have a significant financial stake in the Labour party and whose influence spreads throughout the British political establishment more generally, clearly see Pro-Palestinian Corbyn as an anathema to their wider interests viz a viz Israel. Certainly the Hasbara propaganda web site, UK Media Watch, regard the witch-hunt against Corbyn, as well as the attempts by his detractors to disorientate the membership, as ‘a job well done’.

Free from the undue influence of the mass pro-Corbyn Labour membership, the right-wing Blairite rump envisage themselves returning to a ‘business as usual’ cross-party consensus, pro-establishment and imperialist politics whose natural alignment is geared towards the unconditional support of Israel. More broadly, with Corbyn gone, the political establishment will effectively have an unchallenged hand to return to their plundering of state coffers while reinstating their disciplining of the workforce by removing all forms of in-work financial support to them. The gradual real terms reduction of out-of-work benefits by stealth, as well as the undermining of human rights for those who refuse to work in return for their ‘benefits’, means that the Tories will effectively be in a position to force, unhindered, ordinary people to work for anyone, under any conditions, for any amount of money, no matter how small.

These kinds of attacks on the weakest in society are not new. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, for instance, was one of the earliest measures aimed at instilling labour discipline in the new working class. The core principle of the Poor Law, the principle of less eligibility, was aimed at disciplining the working class by ensuring that the alternative to working – the Workhouse, or Poor House – was so awful that workers would accept any jobs and any conditions. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who developed the concept of “less eligibility”, according to which poor relief should always be set at below the level of income of the worst paid, argued that:

“Only the cheapest fare should be served in the house: an ample fare might be served only if it did not ‘render the condition of the burdensome poor more desirable than that of the self-maintaining poor.”

Fundamentally nothing has changed between the Poor Law ideology of the 19th century and the political establishments demonization of the poor today. It does not take great political insight to see that the modern equivalent of less eligibility in Britain – and the current ‘stimulus to industry’ – is provided by measures such as the Work Capability Assessment test introduced in April 2013 for those who fail to meet every appointment, and a cap on benefits which means that those on benefits can never receive more than the national average wage, regardless of circumstances. The Tory argument made in support of this, is that British tax payers – in contrast to those on the Europe mainland – subsidize poverty pay through working tax credits and its therefore necessary to remove this subsidy in order to fall in line with Britain’s European partners. But this is a bogus line of reasoning since the UKs comparative European competitors are far more productive than they are in Britain and they earn more. Former Labour MP for Oldham, Michael Meacher, made the point that:

“Britain already has the highest proportion of low-paid workers — ie about a fifth earning less than two-thirds of median earnings, which is the OECD definition of low pay — of any advanced industrial nation, including Japan, Australia and Germany, except the US.”

Although on the surface, the Conservative governments stated intention to phase-in a £9 an hour living (minimum) wage by 2020 sounds progressive, the real intention is to hoodwink the public into thinking this announcement counteracts the affect on the poor resulting from the abolition of working tax credits and the limiting of household welfare payments. Of course, the intended £9 an hour increase in four years time that will likely form one of the main Tory pledges prior to the next election, will be worth a lot less than £9 in real terms. I predict this pledge will be quietly dropped after the election. It’s far more likely that ‘market forces’ will end up determining wages that are likely to have reached a minimum of at least £9 by 2020 anyway, meaning that the supposed introduction of a ‘legal’ minimum is a moot point.

The announcement, therefore, appears to be a move intended to shift the emphasis away from the necessity of the state as provider of welfare to that of ‘private wealth facilitator’. It’s evident to me that this shift is part and parcel of a Tory strategy to abolish the welfare state altogether by stealth, thus counter-intuitively bringing forth the potential for a deeper capitalist crisis and civil disorder sooner than perhaps many people anticipate. Meanwhile, the absence of a significant increase in the minimum wage to ameliorate the impacts of further cuts, will likely result in widespread homelessness and hardship for the poorest in society of a kind not experienced in mainland Britain since the Victorian era.

It would appear that the Tories are intent to make life so intolerable for the poor so as to push them towards something akin to a real revolutionary transformation of neoliberal capitalism. Although the vast majority of ordinary people – particularly the young – have not yet been reduced to the levels of extreme poverty witnessed in many of the countries of the developing world, the trajectory is nevertheless heading in that direction. Given that the Labour opposition to Tory welfare cuts prior to the last General Election were non- existent, Osborne’s decision to introduce the £9 living wage sounded by many to be a comparatively revolutionary concept – which said a lot about the depressing nature of the Labour Party under Ed Miliband’s leadership as well as the British political scene in general at that time.

A week is a long time in politics and the eight months since Corbyn’s shaking-up of the consensus now seems like a lifetime ago. Personally, I will be surprised if he will be able to ride out the current contrived ‘antisemitic’ storm intact in spite of his justifiable claims to the contrary predicated on an intention to fulfill the mandate entrusted to him by the people. Within the current Zionist political landscape dominated by the power of money, democratic mandates sadly mean very little. I am clear in my own mind that the establishment attacks on Corbyn and Livingston amount to a form of revenge, not only for their opposition to ruling class political violence on those least likely to be able to defend themselves, but also for their strident opposition to Zionist imperialist wars and the colonial settler Israeli state for which all the factors described above are deeply implicit.

What upsets the political and media establishment the most, is the fact that both Corbyn and Livingston have been vindicated on these core issues while, by contrast, many of their critics have been exposed for their duplicitous lies and deceits. It seems likely that the concerted attempts by the pro-Israel lobby under the tutelage of John Mann and his fellow Zionist cohorts to purge Corbyn and Livingston from the Labour party will continue until the coup attempt has been achieved.

The claims of widespread antisemitism within the party are an obvious smokescreen as a basis in which to discredit all legitimate support for the Palestinians by influential or prominent figures both inside and outside the party. The deliberate misrepresentation of the views of Craig Murray by the Daily Mail’s Jake Wallis Simons – one of the many Zionists at the forefront of the anti-Corbyn campaign – is an example of the latter. Unfortunately, I have very little hope in the ability of the wider UK population, come this Thursday’s local elections, to see through the pro-Zionist corporate media headlines and lies. I hope I’m proven wrong.

 

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