On Moderation.

 

In the midst of the current economic slump it's worth keeping in mind that we've been here before. This recession is not all that different from that of the 1930s, which began with the stock market crash of 1929. The recovery was slow and painful because necessary steps such as financial regulation and government stimuli weren't taken earlier. This time around we bailed out the banks and had a go at stimulus by way of quantitative easing under Brown. Although, we're currently embarking upon a tough austerity, - that has taken us back into a recession from a very brief incursion into a recovery - it's worth noting that we did not enact serious measures to confront the depression head-on in the 30s either. David Lloyd George took the view that we would do better to emulate the model presented by the American government. It wouldn't be until after the war that the Keynesian model of a mixed economy would prevail in Britain and Europe. Today it remains a viable and modest alternative to the international austerity.

In the midst of the recession brought on by the collapse of global financial system in 1929 the Republican President Hoover resorted to the politics of austerity. The Democrats ran Franklin D Roosevelt. The incoming administration was welcomed by a veterans' march on Washington, President Roosevelt arranged to greet the protestors with his aides and coffee. Despite appearances and this gesture Roosevelt shared the same goals as the austerity junkies he had defeated, namely to safeguard American capitalism and prevent further violent outbursts in the street. The best way to do this, in the eyes of FDR, was to reform the system to constrain the destructive tendencies of the market and to address the grievances of people marching on Washington for a decent life. This was nothing radical, it was effectively a means of 'buying-off' socialism in a world where the Soviet Union posed the only standing alternative to a decaying capitalism. Early on Roosevelt sought to craft greater coordination over the economy, to this end he put together planning sessions between government, trade unions and private companies.

 

 

Later a trade union leader would sit down with Roosevelt to discuss the conditions endured by black people and white working-class. The President listened intently and then told the trade unionist "I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it." The point Roosevelt made is that the President can't simply enact whatever policy they like. Rather the conditions have to be so that the Congress has to acknowledge a problem and then change can be implemented. In the same way that the Russian Revolution scared the British government into give up the vote to working-class men, and to women a dozen years later. It was the acknowledgement of a hard-nosed realist. He understood that to achieve reform the country had to be shaken up. That might explain why Prohibition was the first act to be thrown out under FDR. But at a deeper level the conditions in the US demanded certain reformist measures be implemented. So in 1934 Roosevelt put together the Wagner act to secure workers' rights, to make way for higher wages and improved working conditions. It's no coincidence that there were huge marches and strikes in 1934.

 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there was a harsh police repression of strikers supposedly for fear of Communist subversion. Yet Roosevelt took a markedly different approach when the Flint sit-down came around in 1936. That was a strike where hundreds of workers occupied a General Motors factory for 44 days. As the police and hired thugs tried to violently break up the strike Roosevelt supported Governor Murphy and had the National Guard sent in to protect the workers. It was this battle that led to much improved living standards in Flint and ultimately the creation of a now non-existent middle-class. This is a famous instance of the liberal credentials of FDR. However, it wasn't the President who defeated the bosses at a Firestone rubber plant in Akron earlier that year in which the management caved to a sit-down strike in a matter of days. The same can be said of a following strike at Goodyear. These successes were not handed down from above, the pressure came from below and the major achievements were won in this way.

 

Typically the Democratic administration adjusted its policies to subdue the labour movement in areas where it was most active. Repression wasn't the best tactic to be undertaken in a situation of dire economic stagnancy. So it was logical for the US government to concede ground to particularly strong strikes. The strikers in Flint were privileged by comparison to other workers across the country. A fine demonsrtation of this came later, when the US government established the minimum wage, along with the forty-hour week, and a ban on child labour. The minimum wage was set at twenty-five cents an hour and excluded a great number of the workforce. Even still, it was enough to cool the tensions between workers and bosses. Similarly the housing programmes only provided abodes for a small percentage of the population. But the gesture of federally subsidising housing projects, playgrounds and the construction of clean apartments was not insignificant to the beneficiaries.

Then came the establishment of social security and unemployment insurance, state-funds were matched for mothers and dependent children. The reform excluded farmers, domestic workers and old people, it also offered no health insurance. Comparatively the social security system offered much more security to Big Business in terms of pacifying a portion of the workforce. Though it should be noted that the wealthiest Americans barely get anything out of social security, the benefits are insignificant to them and so they don't see why they should support it. It would be more valuable if it were privatised and handed over to the rapacious forces of financial capital. The social security system also undermines the individualist tenets of American ideology, in that the system potentially fosters a social consciousness that might seek justice and solidarity. Like the NHS in Britain the establishment of social security in the US has been extremely difficult for the wealthy to erode and destroy. Thus, it remains one of the few pillars of the New Deal left standing.

 

 

During the Second World War the Roosevelt administration centralised the economy and created millions of new jobs at higher wages, in doing so, the militancy of the labour movement was undermined significantly. The New Deal had only managed to cut unemployment from 13 million to 9 million, while the war economy had almost achieved full employment. At the same time, the country was overtaken by a patriotic fervour that instilled national unity over the apparent sectarianism of classes. The combination of the New Deal reforms and the war effort effectively saved American capitalism. There is an important lesson for social democrats to take from this. The liberals of Rooseveltian ilk acknowledge that the dream of a mixed economy complete with a far-reaching welfare state cannot be achieved without tremendous struggle. Furthermore, this is not a struggle fought by liberals, to the contrary, it is the radicals who fight against capitalism who provide the impetus for the system to be reformed.

 

In his vision of the post-war world Roosevelt articulated four essential kinds of freedom to underpin the new world order: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship, freedom from want and fear. The principles FDR articulated would influence the foundation of the United Nations after the war had ended. Later, Roosevelt would propose a second Bill of Rights to the US Constitution, it was a set of economic rights which would guarantee not only universal health-care and education, but a liveable income, a job and a home. Roosevelt argued these measures would guarantee security, well-being and prosperity for all, as well as lasting peace abroad. President Roosevelt was dead before the war was over and the Bill of Rights would not be implemented. The Marshall Plan would later help to rescuscitate European capitalism, which ultimately eventuated in a social democratic mode of economy, that would safeguard many of the economic rights Roosevelt wanted to implement. It was these post-war achievements that have been eroded in recent times.

 

See also:

Howard Zinn on the New Deal - http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnselhel15.html

The Untold History of the US -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-veAiYgAY

Founding a State.

The news of an outbreak of violence in Gaza with the Israeli Defence Forces was not much of a surprise for anyone. It mobilised some to protest outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, while others joined the counter-demonstration further down the road, the vast majority of people probably languished in passive ignorance to the history of the crisis. The wars waged to establish and expand the state of Israel surprise no one with a modicum of knowledge of the history of the nation-state. Like childbirth the memory of the founding of a state is repressed precisely because it’s so traumatic. The majority of states in the world were either founded in violence or have been perpetuated through violence in some way. So it should surprise no one that the state of Israel was founded out of a theft - what Palestinians call the Nabka - in which 700,000 people were expelled from their land and their villages were destroyed to make way for a new country. And we can safely say, in retrospect of six decades, that expansionism is inherent to the state-founding project.

Expulsion from the land was the only way that the state could be established. It was necessary given that at the time Mandate Palestine consisted of a population that was 95% Muslim and Christian Arab. Today the millions of descendants of those Palestinians who were first displaced in 1948 are scattered around the world. The largest concentration outside of Israel and the occupied territories is in Jordan, where Israeli nationalists argue the Palestinians really belong. Part of the problem is the ambiguity of where Israel’s borders actually end. If the international borders are disregarded (which they are inside Israel) then the eastern frontier of the country reach across the Jordan River and that would mean Jordan can be absorbed as well. This is the irony of the nationalist line that the Palestinians should go live in Jordan. Originally the border was meant to be at the Alawi River in the middle of Lebanon. Until the borders are clarified and set at the internationally recognised limit, which is at 78% of what was once Mandate Palestine, then there won’t be peace.

The UN vote to bestow non-member observer status on Palestine demonstrates that the Palestinians are hungry for a peaceful settlement. Incidentally, Palestine now shares the same status of statehood as the Holy See. This is contrary to the picture that the Israeli Right put forward of murderous rabbles of Arabs too bloodthirsty to settle for anything less than the demise of the Jewish state. Yet it is the Israeli government that won't budge on the question of settlements and 60% of the West Bank already consists of Jewish settlements. That's a major obstacle to a two-state settlement if Palestine is meant to be constituted by 100% of the West Bank. Then there's the wall of annexation that has been extended around arable land and resources in the West Bank. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. It gets even more absurd, in the US media the wall is called a 'fence' and it's longer than the Berlin Wall.

This is somewhat appropriate as the US was itself born out of a revolt on America's East Coast only for the colonies to expand westward into Indian territory. It isn't often discussed that there may have been as many as 18 million, possibly even 25 million, people living in North America when European settlers first arrived. The fact that the US would consist of a narrow slither of land if it weren't for genocide, war and slavery was long suppressed by historians. This denial of these origins was nothing exceptional. In the same way that the trauma of childbirth is suppressed in all of our minds, the horrors of nation-building are quickly wiped from the national memory. What follows then is the creation of a national mythology, the shibboleths of American exceptionalism were crafted by English colonists quite early on. Ronald Reagan liked to describe America as "a shining city upon a hill"; well it was Puritan colonist John Winthrop who coined that phrase in 1630 and along with it the notion that America is a nation with a divine purpose.

The new world was a venture first pursued to escape the horrors of European nationalism and in a way Israel was a similar project. Yet it would seem as though the nation-state, a European invention itself, has brought with it all the destructive tendencies of the old world with it. This isn’t just the violence inherent to the project, it’s racism as well. Not just towards Arabs, who are victims of discrimination on all fronts. In May race riots broke out in Tel Aviv a Likudnik at the Knesset commented that black immigrants are a ‘cancer’ on the Jewish state. Keep in mind the black immigrants are Sudanese refugees fleeing the slaughter in their own country. Racism is never too far from nationalism, wherever it hangs its hat. The violence of founding states pukes it up almost automatically. Now Bibi Netanyahu has made it clear he is running with Avi Lieberman – a man who believes in segregation and loyalty oaths – at the upcoming elections. We can take all of this as a sign that Israel has yet to really finish its ‘founding’, and that means this could go on for much longer.

This article was published at the Heythrop Lion on December 11th 2012.

Apartheid, Analogy and Disanalogy.

 

"Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians." - Nelson Mandela
 

The analogy between Israel and South Africa is often drawn when it comes to the question of the occupied territories and the Palestinians. There are good reasons for making this analogy, as well as serious differences between the cases that would mean the analogy is dubious. The problem of a Palestinian state is innate to Israel in the same way that racial equality is a problem innate to South Africa. The creation of nation-states out of the processes of European colonialism comes with the brutality of expansionism and war. South Africa was a principle aggressor in Southern Africa in its role as a counter-revolutionary force it slaughtered over a million people in neighbouring states in the 1980s. By comparison, Israel has been at war almost constantly for most of its existence and it serves the US as a "cop on the beat" in the Middle East. This is well demonstrated by the worrying tensions between Israel and Iran. I don't think I will be able to settle this matter in just one article, so I'm only going to go over a few points about the comparison.

The network of roadblocks and checkpoints which regulate the daily lives of Palestinians has been compared to the Apartheid rule of South Africa. Though it is worthy of condemnation even if we dismiss the comparison as a disanalogy. After all it's a system which has left pregnant women to give birth in the street only for their newborn babies to die in the heat, all in the name of Israel's national security. There is even a segregated highway system, roads on which only Jews are allowed to travel. This highway system was established on the pretext of counter-terrorism.  Actually this has nothing to do with counter-terrorism. Instead it is a part of the maintenance of the occupation of the West Bank, where the Israeli government supports (directly and indirectly) the settlements which hold 60% of the land. To this end the Israeli government are busily constructed a wall of annexation in and around the West Bank to snatch the major concentrations of resources and water from the Palestinians. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. But the West Bank wall is longer than the Berlin Wall.

It's clear that the Israeli government is not too comfortable with the prospect of a Palestinian state. The continued encroachment into and domination of Palestinian territory has the potential to reduce the possibility of a free Palestine to a Bantustan at best. This isn't an accident of history. As Noam Chomsky would remind us Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after the 1967 conquests was that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories "You shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads". This is not the last of the ugly words spewed over Palestinian territory. Almost 30 years later the Director of Communications and Policy Planning David Bar-Illan who said in 1996 that "the Palestinians can have a state if they want, or they can call it fried chicken". And that's when the Israeli establishment talks peace. The establishment is aware of the situation on the ground, the need for a two-state settlement. It's just that there is no reason for the Israeli government to seek out peace.

It would seem that the Israeli elite are for a peaceful solution, whereas the more economically deprived and zealous Israeli citizens - particularly Mizrahi Jews and refuseniks - are much more hawkish. The ruling-class have been busily eroding the civic institutions and welfare state of Israel in recent decades. The neoliberalisation that the Israeli economy has undergone is another point of fair comparison with South Africa. Israel was once a quasi-socialist state with a significantly slim gap between the rich and the poor. Today it is one of the most unequal countries in the world. This is what comes with expanding a state by force and creating a country out of thin air. The apparent abnormality of Israel by world's standards today is exactly what makes it normal in historical standards. The very same process of aggressive expansionism was carried out in North America to a much more genocidal degree. And the founding of the American Republic provoked a desperate resistance from the likes of Geronimo.

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq." - Benjamin Netanyahu

There are good reasons to suspect that the Israeli ruling class is well aware of the consequences of their actions. In an interview with Gideon Levi Prime Minister Ehud Barak said "If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage." By the way, everyone should know that Nelson Mandela was officially listed as a 'terrorist' in the US until about 2009. This isn't to say that by analogy Hamas are the Palestinian version of the ANC. Sadly the picture is much more complicated than that. The concept of 'terrorism' really designates the use of violence to achieve goals of a political, religious or ideological nature. That would certainly include all of modern warfare. So it could be that the notion of 'terror' lacks any weight in terms of moral condemnation. When the US shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, it's an accident and not an act of terror. So it might be better to talk about specific forms of violence. For instance, in his years as 'terrorist' leader Nelson Mandela argued against car-bombing as a tactic. This wasn't a rejection of violence, rather it was about scale.

Christopher Hitchens observed the similarity of the theological justifications of Apartheid in the dogma of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Church adhered to a variety of Calvinism that enshrined a strict separation of white and black in holy design. Its presupposition was racial inequality, for the white man shares the bodily form of Christ. The ravings at the pulpit spewed forth its own blood myth of a Boer Exodus and in what Hitchens describes as an "Afrikaner permutation of Zionism" awarded the whites exclusive rights in a promised land. It should be no surprise that the National Party had an appalling record for anti-Semitism and took the side of Hitlerism in the Second World War. The end result was a pariah state where the rights of non-whites were nonexistent, in fact the people were confined to open prisons with boundaries defined by pigmentation. The state exercised its monopoly on violence to maintain this system for as long as it could. But the justifications were not simply theological.

Apartheid justified itself further as a separation which protected African culture from being drowned in white civilisation. Earlier in the 20th Century Jan Smuts formulated a holistic philosophy to justify British colonialism. This holism took the world to be composed of wholes, each together constitute a grand system while each can sustain and stabilise themselves. The stability of the system was guaranteed by the arrangement of wholes, provided each whole remained in the right place the system could be maintained. Every whole is made up of small wholes which are evolving and will inevitably come together to form larger wholes until finally becoming part of a single unified whole. This was the beginning of what would become Apartheid. South Africa further justified its brutal methods of repression in its claim to be an outpost of freedom fighting against Communism. Although Israel does not have the same kind of racial mythology as South Africa, its government often claims that the country is an outpost against radical Islamism.

No wonder then Israel and South Africa entered into a pariah's pact in 1975 to trade in weapons of mass-destruction. The end of Apartheid might actually signal how the occupation might end and Palestine might actually be established as an independent state. It was almost inevitable that the Apartheid system would undermine the future possibility of survival of the state. So the Afrikaner business elite began meeting with the ANC in neighbouring countries in the late 1980s. By then a campaign of sanctions and boycotting had done its damage on South Africa's economy and body politic. Around this time the Priests had a 'revelation' regarding racial equality. The fate of the regime was settled before the National Party goons even knew it. South Africa had been significantly isolated in the international community by that point. It was when the US started to withdraw its support for Apartheid that the Botha government started to cave. But this came after decades of struggle in spite of extreme violence and rejectionism.

America's affinity with Israel.

 

The leading supporter of Israel in the world has long been the United States. This is somewhat appropriate as the US was born out of a revolt on America's East Coast only for the colonies to expand westward into Indian territory. It isn't often discussed that there may have been as many as 18 million, possibly even 25 million, people living in North America when European settlers first arrived. The fact that the US would consist of a narrow slither of land if it weren't for genocide, war and slavery was long suppressed by historians. This denial of these origins was nothing exceptional. In the same way that the trauma of childbirth is suppressed in all of our minds, the horrors of nation-building are quickly wiped from the national memory. What follows then is the creation of a national mythology, the shibboleths of American exceptionalism were crafted by English colonists quite early on. Ronald Reagan liked to describe America as "a shining city upon a hill", well it was John Winthrop who coined that phrase in 1630 and not surprisingly it was a Bible reference.

 

So the notion of America as a nation chosen by God to spread its ideals actually predates the Revolution. Winthrop viewed America as ordained by God and received the charter of Massachusetts Bay from King Charles I. The charter stated that the principle purpose of the plantation was to save the indigenes from a pagan fate - in other words, it was a mission civilisatrice. The humane mission of spreading Christianity amounted to a systematic programme of extirpation and extermination. John Locke viewed America as the land where the world began and defended the theft of Indian land.  The heinous nature of the policies undertaken against the indigenous population was understood well by the Founding Fathers. Even the brilliant Thomas Jefferson made the case for the Native Americans to be forced into starvation if they didn't accept an existence as free-holding farmers. Jefferson went as far as to plan to drive the tribes into Canada, only to invade Canada and ensure that the job was finished. And so, civilisation came to America.

 

This was nothing out of the norm. To the indigenous population George Washington was known as the Town-Destroyer and for good reason. By the late 1770s Washington had set out to, in his own words, extirpate the indigenes from the country in a bid to expand westward to the Mississippi. As a punishment for resisting the Iroquois tribe was forced to cede their territory to compensate the butchers. Later John Quincy Adams would lament the "hapless race of Native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty". Expansionism soon acquired the designs of self-defence. The Jackson administration would conquer Florida in order to maintain the security of the American Republic. There were repeated attempts to annex Canada, where the British held-off the Americans. Instead the US took on the Spanish empire with much more success, succeeding in stealing away half of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Guam. This allowed the US government to buy the Philippines from the Spanish.

 

This was the period of so-called American imperialism. Yet if we look closely we find that the constant expansionist aggression that the US had demonstrated since day-one, we would find that the US has been engaged in colonial violence for much longer. In much the same way that Israel seems to go to war every 3 or 4 years these days. One minute it's Lebanon, then it's Gaza, Iran next perhaps! It's bound to be the case with a highly militarised economy and an irrationally right-wing establishment. It can't be ignored anymore, with Likudniks calling black immigrants a "cancer" on the Jewish state, - and talk of Hiroshima as the model for Israeli policy on Gaza - there's a problem that has to be acknowledged. Sadly it seems unlikely that Israel has any reason to even consider a position that would change the bloody stalemate that the region has to live with. The US isn't going to withhold its veto at the UN any time soon, that's for sure. Meanwhile the next election is due in January and Bibi Netanyahu is running with Avi Lieberman, the worst of worse scenarios.

It's just a fence!

 

The news of an outbreak of violence in Gaza with the Israeli Defence Forces was not much of a surprise for anyone. It mobilised some to protest outside the Israeli embassy in London, while others joined the counter-demonstration further down the road, the vast majority of people probably languished in passive ignorance to the history of the crisis. The wars waged to establish and expand the state of Israel surprise no one with a modicum of knowledge of the history of the nation-state. Like childbirth the founding of a state is repressed precisely because it's so traumatic. The majority of states in the world were either founded in violence and have been perpetuated through violence in way or another. So it should surprise no one that the state of Israel was founded out of a theft - what Palestinians call the Nabka - in which 700,000 people were expelled from their land and their villages were destroyed to make way for a new country. And we can safely say, in retrospect of six decades, that expansionism is inherent to the state-founding project.

 

Expulsion from the land was the only way that the state could be established. It was necessary given that at the time Mandate Palestine consisted of a population that was 95% Muslim and Christian Arab. Today the millions of descendents of those Palestinians who were first displaced in 1948 are scattered around the world. The largest concentration outside of Israel and the occupied territories is in Jordan, where Israeli nationalists argue the Palestinians really belong. Part of the problem is the ambiguity of where Israel’s borders actually end. If the international borders are disregarded (which they are inside Israel) then the eastern frontier of the country reach across the Jordan River and that would mean Jordan can be absorbed as well. This is the irony of the nationalist line that the Palestinians should go live in Jordan. Originally the border was meant to be at the Alawi River in the middle of Lebanon. Until the borders are clarified and set at the internationally recognised limit, which is at 78% of what was once Mandate Palestine, then there won’t be peace.

 
 

The UN vote to bestow non-member observer status on Palestine demonstrates that the Palestinians are hungry for a peaceful settlement. Incidentally, Palestine now shares the same status of statehood as the Holy See. This is contrary to the picture that the Israeli Right put forward of murderous rabbles of Arabs too bloodthirsty to settle for anything less than the demise of the Jewish state. Yet it is the Israeli government that won't budge on the question of settlements and 60% of the West Bank already consists of Jewish settlements. That's a major obstacle to a two-state settlement if Palestine is meant to be constituted by 100% of the West Bank. Then there's the wall of annexation that has been extended around arable land and resources in the West Bank. This wall is called a 'defensive barrier' in Israel, which is what the Berlin Wall was called in East Germany. It gets even more absurd, in the US media the wall is called a 'fence' and it's longer than the Berlin Wall. I guess you must be a Nazi if you don't see an enormous concrete wall as a white picket fence.

A Land with a People.

Click on Image

In a discussion over the events in Gaza recently I had the following exchange with a friend of mine about the fundamentals of the conflict. Note that the questioner is coming from a Christian perspective on the conflict, while I'm coming from an atheistic perspective. The primary issue is raised is the claim to the land and the specifics of the Zionist project.

Q: I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up MY land..."Does this land belong to Israel or Palestine? Well actually, according to bible scripture, God calls it His land, but the prophetic word from Joel, written 850BC is that it will in fact be divided.

 
"I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms." (Ezekiel 37:22)

 
Joshua (great name Joshua, means 'God is salvation' or 'God rescues') rightly calls this a 'miserable situation', it has a long history, Ezekiel was written sometime around 590BC, about 650 years before Israel and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the people scattered to 'the four corners of the earth'. We may ask the question was Israel returned there in 1948, fully in 1967 simply to fulfill prophecy, was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy or is there some authenticity to the prophecy. Will Jerusalem be divided? Certainly according to bible scripture it is not intended to be and if it is, will those responsible incur God's judgement?

A: Well, I don't think Jerusalem should be divided, that's merely the beginning of another problem. I take the position that is enshrined in international law: Jerusalem should be an international city, it's just too precious to belong to any state or religion. This is the same framework that would settle the conflict in a roughly 80:20 split of what used to be Palestine into Israel and Palestine. I won't comment on the scripture as I'm not a theologian, nor am I a religious man (in spite of my cool name! lol) and I think it's fair to say that the Bible is open to a lot of debate and theorisation - just look at the use of the recurring use of Gog and Magog by fundamentalists, from Reagan to Bush II, to explain foreign policy decisions.

We know from Israeli archaeology that there is considerable evidence that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for a very long time, this can be determined simply by the lack of pig bones in ancient communities. So there is a legitimate Jewish claim to live there. That's the case even if you don't buy the Bible, which most Israeli archaeologists don't by the way. There is also evidence that suggests the Palestinians are the descendents of the Jews who were living there thousands of years ago. Probably they were converted through conquest. This is all interesting, and somewhat ironic, but it doesn't provide any answer to the crisis in itself. The question of what the Zionist mission ought to be in its finer details is left completely open still. That could be part of the reason why there is opposition to peace from inside Israel, it remains unclear where the expansion should end - if 80% is too little how about 90% and so on? There are those who dream of a Greater Israel, and that will mean a perpetual war with the Arabs.

Example, should Israel be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? That's an important distinction which has never been fully clarified in Zionist circles. This matters because it relates to what kind of law there should be in Israel, as well as the demographic composition - if it's a state for Jews then it doesn't have to be a majority Jewish state for instance. By comparison, Pakistan was founded as a state for Muslims modeled on India but in the 1980s the dictatorship began to change this to the notion of Pakistan as an Islamic state (and even began to compare itself to Israel funnily enough). It impacts the internal politics of the nation-state, Pakistan has been dominated by authoritarian governments sometimes more irreligious at times. I think that Israel could've been founded in a better way than it has been, though in its foundation it was just like every other nation-state (e.g. born out of violence/theft). But we can't turn back time. The strongest claim of the Jews is perhaps based on their need for a safe haven. Again, that doesn't really deal with the details of what Israel should look like.

The important point to stress is that Israel (however defined) can exist with an independent and free Palestine as it's neighbour. To paraphrase Abba Eban, a free Palestine would pose the same threat to the existence of Israel as Luxembourg currently poses to Russia.

Epigones of Beria.

The late Alexander Cockburn noted that he was often "savaged as little better than an epigone of Beria" for settling on the figure of five or six million deaths in Stalin's Russia. It shouldn't have to be said that looking for an accurate picture of a monstrous series of crimes is not an act of exoneration. But in this society it would seem that the higher you go the better. Only the maximal estimates of Stalin's victims guarantee credibility. Expect nothing less from the enemies of the people!

Since the passing of Eric Hobsbawm in early October the BBC has made available the widely misquoted interview of Hobsbawm by Michael Ignatieff. It's around 11 minutes in that Ignatieff raises the matter of Stalin's liquidation of huge swathes of kulaks and dooming of millions of peasants in the 30s. The question asked is "If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time?" Hobsbawm responds first by stating that it is an unanswerable academic question. In a retrospective answer, not a historical answer, Hobsbawm said "Probably not". He went on to explain his reasoning, that in a period of universalised mass-murder and mass-suffering the chance of a future at all would be worth supporting. The sacrifices in Russia were unnecessarily great and excessive by any measure and, in his eyes, only marginally worthwhile. The Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution, but if it had been Hobsbawm says he isn't sure if the sacrifices would have been worthwhile.

In the next breathe Eric Hobsbawm asks "Do people now say we shouldn't have had WW2 because more people died in WW2 than in Stalin's terror?" At this point interviewer Ignatieff attempts a summary "So what that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified." It was not posed as a question and Hobsbawn responds in the affirmative, to indicate that this is the view that could be taken. Yet the old man had made it clear, moments before, that he isn't sure if the terror would have been worth it with the advent of communism. He goes on to qualify his emphatic 'Yes' by explaining that this is what people thought about the World Wars. Even though in the end many would say that the First World War was an unnecessary bloodbath, the Second World War was worth fighting. Yet this is not how the Right likes to portray this conversation, as I quote in my last article on this:

According to Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Ignatieff in 1994 "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Apparently Hobsbawm's only response was "Yes."

We have good reason to suspect the right-wing historian Conquest - a former British intelligence officer and virulent cold warrior - is out to push the worst line possible about the Marxist Left and not just the Soviet Union. It's a sure thing that Conquest wouldn't rebuke in phony moral outrage at someone who sees the slaughter of the Second World War as necessary to bring down the Third Reich. As Hobsbawm emphasises, it was not about the construction of a utopia - it was a case of "a world rather than no world" - at that time for the Communists who saw the world as crumbling at that time. Really it's because Conquest disagrees fundamentally with the ultimate aim, whereas the defeat of National Socialism merely means a return to liberal democratic capitalism. The notion of a "radiant tomorrow" was rhetoric in Hobsbawm's thinking, it was more about a better, more perfect and new world. It was a more upbeat view of the future tempered with the stark realism of the dire situation in the world.

At around 24 minutes in Eric Hobsbawm goes over his view of the estimates of deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He insists that the people involved in the Communist International, in the 1930s, had no substantial knowledge of what was going on under Stalin with regard to human suffering. Hobsbawm makes the same statement about what the anti-Communist intellectuals claim to know about the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm goes on to add that the estimates - ranging from 3 to 14 million in the gulags alone - are speculative and indefensible because of the range of the figures alone. The blunt tool Ignatieff quickly inquired if the old man of British Communism was saying Stalin's crimes have been "exaggerated" and, without hesitation, the old man responded "No... I'm merely saying that nobody knows!" Hobsbawm concludes that the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin was indefensible and inhuman. And yet the man is still lambasted by the Right as a lifelong apologist for Joseph Stalin's abattoir socialism.

Neocons and Stalinists.

A serious priority of the apologists for empire is to vilify the opposition which may emerge into the public space from time to time to challenge established power in its aggressive designs. There is a variation of the cases, just as there are liars who have understood what Goebbels knew all too well - specifically, that a big lie will be swallowed more easily than a small one. This is what we find when Alan Dershowitz had the effrontery to accuse Norman Finkelstein's deceased mother of being a kapo - a Nazi collaborator - while she was at Auschwitz. That happens to be a particularly sordid and extreme case, Dershowitz is a good lawyer for guilty candidates. Another instance would be when Andrew Sullivan accused Noam Chomsky of being a supporter of the Soviet Union on the Bill Maher show. This level of slander is nothing new. Chomsky has been accused of everything from supporting radical Muslims killing Americans to supporting nationalist Serbs killing Muslims. I'm writing of this because I recently came across this (unsurprisingly) in the work of Douglas Murray:

"Eleven days into the American forces' action in Afghanistan, on October 18, 2001, Chomsky excelled even himself in a broadcast speech: 'The New War Against terror.' In it he spoke of what American forces were doing in Afghanistan declaring "Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide." He alleged that there was a concerted American attempt to starve and kill between three and four million Afghan people."

Actually the Professor opened the talk on the so-called 'War on Terrorism' with a look at what The New York Times had pointed out about the war of Afghanistan. He covers this in the first 10 minutes, or so, of the aforementioned talk and you can see it all on YouTube. Chomsky picked the estimates of the number of Afghans who were at danger of falling into starvation out of The New York Times, the basis of which came from the United Nations. He emphasises that the millions in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation were dependent on international aid, and that this issue predates the events of 9/11. Chomsky quotes The New York Times in noting that the US demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys to Afghanistan. This would cut-off the flow of food to the civilian population. He notes that there was no reaction in the US to this demand. Incidentally, this is similar to what the US and Britain imposed on Cambodia in the aftermath of the crimes of Pol Pot and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation. Something that Chomsky was vilified over once again.

Another round of quoting followed as Chomsky notes the threat of military strikes forced out the aid workers, which crippled the assistance programmes. He quotes an evacuated aid worker who says "The country was on a lifeline and we just cut the line." The UN food programme were able to resume food shipments to Afghanistan after a few weeks, this was suspended during bombing. It was the arithmetic of the UN that calculated around 7.5 million Afghans would be left in acute need for 'even a loaf of bread' given the conditions. Chomsky observes that this tells us that Western civilisation is anticipating the slaughter of three to four million. Nevertheless, Murray goes on to dismiss Chomsky's claims as 'lunatic' while he refers us to hacks David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh who ascribe to Chomsky the motive of depicting Americans as "moral monsters" planning on killing millions of Afghans. These self-described "democratic revolutionaries" prefer to conflate anticipation with intention. There is no such thing as subtlety in their worldview.

The real point that Chomsky made was that the conditions of policy-decisions were conducive in potentia to a massive famine in Afghanistan. It was the UN that called on the US to stop the bombing to avert the famine. At this point in the talk Chomsky says "It looks like what's happening is some kind of silent genocide" before adding that this indicates that the US is implementing policies under the assumption that they might kill several million people. The Professor is keen to emphasise that, at this point, we don't know what will happen. That point is not referred to at all in Murray's book. What we do find in the book, strangely, is that Murray can quote Chomsky's reaction when he was faced with the accusation of predicting a "silent genocide". What's strange is that the author is too thick to realise that he's allowed Chomsky to explain what he means quite clearly. Yet Murray ascribes an 'opaque' quality to Chomsky's words in this instance, perhaps his words are only opaque coming after a barrage of lies from right-wing degenerates:

"That is an interesting fabrication, which gives a good deal of insight into the prevailing moral and intellectual culture. First, the facts: I predicted nothing... All of this is precisely accurate and entirely appropriate. The warnings remain accurate as well, a truism that should be unnecessary to explain. Unfortunately, it is apparently necessary to add a moral truism: actions are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated consequences."

The moral case against the war can't easily be dismissed by hacks. So it has to be reduced to a point that can easily be dismissed by a body-count in Afghanistan that conveniently leaves assumptions about the war untouched. The wretched Stephen Sakur challenged Chomsky on this point a couple of years ago. In response Chomsky aptly pointed out that the fact the "silent genocide" didn't happen because the conditions under which the policies were implemented remain the same. Whether or not the millions lived or died is separate to Chomsky's point, he was talking about the reasonable expectations of the impact of policy at the time. As Chomsky observed, the Stalinist hacks of the Soviet Union could defend Khrushchev's decision to put nuclear weapons in Cuba on the grounds that the move did not lead to a nuclear war and the end of days. To do so takes the decision in separation from its consequences, while conveniently falling back on what actually came after. In this way highly questionable assumptions are guarded from any critical reflection.

Ignoble Liars.

Douglas Murray is just the youngest public ideologist of the 'War on Terrorism' and his work is worth reading at least to know thy enemy. Noting the charge of 'noble lies' leveled by critics of the Iraq war, and its pretext, Douglas Murray writes "The notion of the 'noble lie' certainly arises in Plato, and it is true that Strauss and many neoconservatives admire Plato. But what Plato described (in his Republic) was that, on occasion, leaders have to conceal truths from the masses in order to lead them most wisely. He certainly did not (as one commentator put it with wild hyperbole) claim that 'it is practically a duty to lie to the masses.'" Going on to stress that "Plato described how in matters of grave importance, occasions arise in which a leader will know best, and in which the less well-informed masses, if given the opportunity to decide on a specific matter, might decide wrongly." This goes against his earlier position in the book where he slams the conclusion that Leo Strauss was a "champion of the 'noble lie'" as misinformed.

Even after this Murray maintains that the charge is unfounded, offensive, glib, ignorant and nonsensical. Furthermore it is hurled about by people who have "misrepresented their Plato and not read their Strauss". He describes the outrage regarding 'noble lies' as a "faked outrage". This really comes out of his loyalty to a particular agenda manifested in the policy designs of the Bush administration. In his view the UK and US governments didn't lie because they merely revealed what they knew about Saddam's Iraq - or rather, what they thought they knew - to their people. The twerp goes further to say "they discussed intelligence that was incorrect, information certain amount of raw intelligence that may turn out to have been comprehensively mistaken." He even claims that the governments were too eager to pander to public opinion (except that which was anti-war) as he derides critics as 'conspiracy theorists' once again - it would seem, it is one of his favourite swearwords second only to 'moral equivalence' in his arsenal of vilification and obfuscation.

So the fault of the Anglo-American establishment was not in but in telling the people too much, revealing information that should not have been revealed. Apparently there is not the remotest possibility that any of this could constitute deception. Murray is keen to guard against anyone who might attribute immoral behaviour to George W Bush and Dick Cheney, while looking to maintain a high bar for American aggression against Iraq. Yet the administration officially dumped the talk of WMD as soon as the invasion found there were no such weapons. The supposed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were dropped as the invasion quickly turned Iraq into a centre of terrorist activity. The doctrine of 2004 was that it's enough for a country to have the capacity to build weapons and the intent to use them. So that's virtually any country in the world. It's this kind of thing that the neoconservatives are looking to defend by damning critics as 'relativists', yet another swearword deployed against critics of imperial adventurism.

I wonder if Murray refined these abilities in whatever public school mummy and daddy sent him to when they realised they didn't love him. It's clear Murray is aware that the Platonist framework gives convenient reasoning to the wider agenda to which he is a loyal servant. In Plato's Republic the 'noble lie' is supposed to engender devotion to the city-state among the citizenry, it is meant to be employed when philosophy fails. So if we accept that the established authority has to propagate a particular view of the world in order to maintain social harmony we can still question the neoconservative mission. Really it's that Murray believes in the cause to the extent that he can be totally cynical. To get to the bottom of this we have to question the fundamentals: the position that the United States can and ought to invade countries to make democracies out of them. It's the insistence that the interests of the US (which are pervasive in all of its interventions) are synonymous with the interests of the countries it invades and occupies that we rightly take fault with.

Brand Obama - Four More Years.

As far as I can see there are a hand full of important reasons for Obama's victory that we should keep in mind. We should never kid ourselves that the US is a shining beacon of democracy atop a hill. In this election the American ruling-class had largely no reason to initiate a seat change. This was reflected by the pressure on the Republican Party to churn out a saleable extremist candidate, only to dress up 'moderate' Mitt as 'reactionnaire' Romney - it was a cop-out from the start. I think we'll probably find from analysis of the campaign funding that Obama had a lot more institutional capital behind, while irrational types like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers poured cash into Romney's doomed campaign. This may indicate that the composition of capital may be even more important than the actual concentration of wealth. Romney was chosen given his record for stable continuity and adaptability, if he lost it wasn't a big deal - the real opportunity for the GOP is 2016 and I suspect that is well understood in the belly of the Republican beast.

There is some evidence to suggest that voter-turnout was actually lower than in 2008, with a difference of maybe 10 million votes give or take. I suspect that the majority of voters were mobilised on the basis of cultural fears of either candidate, while the liberal vote went automatically for the Democrats and the rest stayed home. This is the standard culture war theory of American politics. It's possible that the Tea Party voters were even put-off by Romney, difficult to say at this point. It was a matter of continuity, of maintaining the status quo. Here we find the slim majority of votes converged with an enormous exercise of financial power on the part of the bourgeoisie to bloat Obama's campaign chest, thereby enabling him to reach as many voters as possible. The lesser evilism of Michael Moore and Bill Maher triumphed as there was no perceived left-wing alternative to Obama. But it was more about the defeat of the Right, it was a negative victory and not positive in other words. Putting aside cultural issues, there is the materialist issue of immigration.

Much has been made of the changing ethnic makeup of America, specifically the burgeoning Latino-American population. It's even been predicted that the US will not be a majority white country in a matter of decades. It's worth noting that the impact this could have on the Republican Party, given that it's share of the Hispanic vote collapsed from 44% for Bush in 2004 to 27% in 2012. It was partly due to Romney's own inconsistency, his warming to the most reactionary positions on abortion and homosexuality could not reconcile the Catholic vote given his endorsement of racist policies on Mexican immigration. These votes eventually went to the Obama campaign. Bush had managed to appeal to a broad Catholic base with socially conservative positions on gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research. Notably Bush maintained a moderate position on immigration and even produced an absurd campaign ad in which he claimed to be proud of his 'Latino heritage'. So we've seen that this contradiction might only be resolved by burning a policy plank or two.

 

It remains to be seen whether or not the GOP will moderate it's positions in order to appeal to a much wider base. It's plausible that the Republicans will get crazier and crazier as their voters get whiter. But it is also possible that they will have to concede ground in order to gain greater influence. After all that is the major priority of the Party's primary constituent, namely the American bourgeoisie. This is an instance of the capitalist system undermining it's own interests ultimately. It was the US that has enforced an appalling economic programme on Mexico and Latin America, that has led to Hispanics migrating north just to earn a mediocre living. The militarisation of the border offers only a way to temporarily mobilise a shrinking white voter-base, but the question of Latin-American voter-base still looms large. It's out of the realm of the possible for the Republicans to seek to improve the economic conditions in Mexico in order to limit immigration. The same goes for the prospect of a unionisation of Mexican immigrants.

 

In either case these measures would improve the living standards of Latin-Americans, yet it's also the case that the rising number of Latinos may be inevitable. To put it briefly, America will be skin deep for many years to come. I digress, I've already noted that it was the logic of the lesser evil that was behind a great deal of left-wing support for Obama, but there's another angle here. The late Alexander Cockburn argued in 2010 that Obama may actually be more susceptible to left-wing pressure than Clinton, so the problem is that there's not much of a Left left in America to push the Democrats around. There may be some hope in the charged discourse we now live with thanks to Occupy Wall Street. For a long time it looked as though the era of a lively culture of organised and disciplined politics is dead in the US. We should not kid ourselves that with Occupy Wall Street this era will be reborn. We might hope that the discourse has been impregnated with a certain potential. Though there needs to be something more than a lively grass-roots base to win this thing.