ISIS and the Ideologies of Military Intervention and Non-Intervention.

The ideology of non-interventionists in Iraq against ISIS has become increasingly marginal because the so-called 'anti-war left' in Britain was always as simplistic in its approach to the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars as was the equally ideological 'pro-liberation' left championing selfless wars of  'humanitarian intervention'.

The Stop the War Coalition is a failure. It was probably more influential in the period between 2001 to 2003 in shaping the reaction of Tony Blair and those demanding a break from the old realpolitik as regards Iraq and overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein to put right previous wrongs caused by Britain.

The fact that Saddam Hussein had been backed by the US and Britain in the 1970s and 1980s as bulwark against a potentially more menacing Iran, with pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, was flashed as proof that the US was now posing as offering the military solution to a problem it caused.

The Stop the War Coalition leadership consisted of the disgruntled dregs of the British Communist Party and Trotskyist sects that did not grasp that governments in a democracy are not always the same sorts of politicians always doing the same thing because they do not have much time for representative democracy.

As a consequence, the Second Gulf War tended to get support of intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens who encapsulated the position of those for a war to liberate both Afghanistan and the Taliban when he argued Britain had a moral duty to do so precisely because of its previous failed foreign policies.

With ISIS now staging carefully choreographed executions of American and US hostages, the need to be seen to be doing something in Britain is conjuring up the memory of the way Bush and Blair used the 9/11 attacks back in 2001 to become a pretext for military intervention to be either backed or opposed.

As usual, there are those who point to the disaster of the last Iraq war and occupation as a reason both why ISIS was able to surge into Iraq and why it is not right to intervene militarily again and so the can phrase 'the liberation of Iraq has to be the work of the Iraqis themselves' is thrown out mechanically.

For those such as Richard Seymour, the concern is that this may well be putting people off the anti-war cause and so he has to concede that ISIS is evil in the sense of it being annoying and difficult to fit into a convenient formula that opposes any military intervention to prevent its exterminatory policies and beheadings

'Isis goes to your head and gets under your skin; it leaves you feeling infested. Back in the days when one didn’t know much about the jihadis carrying out beheadings, it was possible to think that they were just – as David Cameron has denounced them – “monsters”, savages, beasts. Or, if one were on the anti-war left, one could simply point out that there was, after all, a war on. A brutal occupation produces a brutal insurgency: case closed'.

The problem then, is not that ISIS is murdering people since Seymour believes that all wars are murder which are based on humanitarian intervention, as made clear in his The Liberal Defence of Murder. ISIS is, therefore, only a small time murderer compared to the US and Britain which are 'state terrorists'.

As a consequence, Seymour routinely downplays ISIS atrocities or rejects them as being the 'real reason' for intervention by the US and, potentially, by Britain in the near future. It was the Kurdish peshmerga which rolled back ISIS and not US airstrikes, though curiously the peshmerga leaders claimed they have helped.

None of that means Britain should involve itself with prsuing a strategy based on the belief that bombing ISIS positions is going to provide a teachological short cut to 'degrading and ultimately defeating' it. Then again, neither Obama nor Cameron have actually claimed that it would so Seymour's argument is a strawman one.

Clearly, Seymour is largely ignorant of the realities of the Middle East and his main aim is to manufacture the politically correct 'line' to be taken on the way the battle against IS is 'framed' for ideological purposes, albeit in more sophisticated way than the 'vulgar' propagandists of the StWC.

In Britain, the Stop the War Coalition and 'anti-war' groups are laregely dominated not by pacifists or by those who are against war on principle but by those who wish to seize upon discontent and unease at Britain's involvement in wars to propagate hatred and resentment against the British state.

Unfortunately, Seymour's interpretation is not much more nuanced than Lindsey German's "stance" that military intervention would only be a reaction to an insurgency wholly the product and 'caused' directly by British foreign policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Evidently, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a disastrous decision that helped create the quasi-failed state Iraq is outside Baghdad and the fortified oil producing zones guarded by the peshmerga in Kurdistan and Shi'ites in the south around Basra. Only the discredited and loathed Tony Blair clings to his 'belief' it was 'right'.

So, given that this is no longer hardly 'subversive' knowledge but generally a generally recognised fact, radical 'anti-imperialists' such as Seymour needs to 'stand out' by developing a 'new stance' which is more 'nuanced' but ends up being based purely on ideology fitting the facts to suit it.

For a start, Seymour claims 'Isis would be nowhere if it weren’t for the generalised rejection by Sunni Iraqis of the sectarian political authority in Baghdad.' This is wholly nonsensical because ISIS would, in fact, still be somewhere if they had not surged into Iraq: they would, obviously, be in Syria.

Islamic State has its base in Syria and was created by jihadist groups that splintered off and broke away from the control of the Free Syria Army and joined a group that had its origins as ISI during the Sunni insurgency against the Shi'ites in Iraq, a rivalry that long predates the invasion of Iraq.

The collapse of a functioning government in northern Syria and the support given to the most Sunni jihadists by Saudi Arabia and Qatar as part of their proxy war against Iran, which backs Assad, is an important reason why jihadi-Islamists gained ground in Syria and why Hizbollah joined in the war.

This clash is embarrassing for revolutionary leftists in Britain who regarded Hamas and Hizbollah as guerrilla resistance united against Israel and US imperialism, so clearly the line has to be that the US encouraged a 'viscious sectarianism' that would not have otherwise existed.

'..whereas the jihadi ultras of the “war on terror” era were an unpopular, marginalised minority within the Iraqi resistance, always fought and opposed by the mainstream of the Sunni Arab insurgency, Isis succeeds because of the support it enjoys within much of the population it seeks to rule.'

ISIS 'succeeds' because Sunni Arab militias and their tribal leaders took the decision to join forces with ISIS. Any such popularity as they get is tied in to the fact ISIS uses revenues from organised crime and sales of oil to provide jobs, to sponsor children's festivals and even medical clinics'

Iran's backing for the Maliki government only further alienated the Sunni Arab tribes and ex-Baathists, which comprised what Seymour extols as the 'Iraqi resistance' against Baghdad. It is these forces which have aligned with IS in 2014 as a means to increase their strength against the government.

Britain would like to believe it has decisive leverage over Qatar as the US believes it has in Saudi Arabia in trying to pressure both to clamp down on the funding given to fanatical jihadists. But it is not the case, partly as it was not tried back in 2012 or for most of 2013 until ISIS turned against the FSA.

Britain's foreign policy is not made by 'Westminster spear-carriers for American empire' but by those with a shared interest in preventing the collapse of Iraq and any threat to the global oil price caused by ISIS attacks. Over the longer term, Iraq is set to a major oil producer needed to keep oil prices stable.

Britain is one of many global powers with a developed economy that has an interest in that along with OPEC nations and East Asian countries such as Japan and China, even though the 'international core coalition' to defeat ISIS is, in the military sense, primarily a US western-led alliance.

ISIS has a base in Syria and Iraq but it is, like Al Qaida, becoming a franchise operation that is set to spread across the lands claimed as part of the caliphate because in such regions jihadi-Islamists are leading the disenfranchised poor in a war to seize oil or menace oil transit zones.

Throughout all these lands climate change, drought, crop failure , overpopulation, the strain on water supplies and resource struggles are combining in a lethal brew to spawn vicious pyschopathological jihadi-movements that have nothing to lose in trying to deal crippling blows to the world economy.

The 21st century is going to see the response through drone warfare to eliminate and precision zap savage groups in these regions and to protect strategic resources and pipeline routes by creating fortified protection zones out of which the drones would patrol so as keep the threat of sabotage at bay.

Tony Blair Continues to Instruct and Reform the World for the Better.

'In a letter to Nursultan Nazarbeyev, Blair told the autocratic ruler that the December 2011 deaths, "tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made". Blair advised Nazarbeyev that when dealing with the western media, he should tackle the events in Zhanaozen, when police opened fire on protesters, including oil workers demanding higher wages, "head-on".

In the letter, obtained by the Sunday Telegraph he also suggested passages to be inserted into a speech the president was giving at the University of Cambridge aimed at counteracting any bad publicity. One read: "By all means make your points and I assure you we're listening. But give us credit for the huge change of a positive nature we have brought about".

The former Labour leader's consultancy, Tony Blair Associates, set up in the capital, Astana, in October 2011, signing a multi- million pound deal to advise Kazakhstan's leadership on good governance, just months after Nazarbeyev was controversially re-elected with 96% of the vote and weeks before the massacre' .Tony Blair advises Kazakh president on publicity after killing of protesters, The Guardian August 26 2014

Blair means well. Platforms for stability must be built first, even by dictatorship if necessary. That's realism. In Iraq, it was realism to invade and depose the dictator because he posed a threat. Other dictators do not pose threats. They promise reforms and Blair wants to facilitate them and mutually beneficial partnerships.

To be frank, people in Britain need to realise it's time to move on from the Iraq war. There is a vital need to engage in global reform processes that create wealth that raise the people up, not to destroy wealth and create horrendous uprisings from the bottom. There is a need to focus on the bigger picture.

The idea Blair is advising strong leaderships across the world for financial gain is absurd. Those who strive to succeed, those who were chosen by the people for the people are, so to speak, the chosen ones who accrue to themselves wealth through the grace of God.

The TonyBlairFaithFoundation has noble goals of stressing what true faiths, like Tony Blair's, have in common with one another. From Gaza to Glasgow, from Accrington to Afghanistan we are more together than ever before and, frankly, its perverted religion that thwarts noble causes such as democratic reform in Iraq.

Take Kazakhstan. It could be said that doing nothing is an option. It would be. But not engaging with Nursultan Nazarbeyev is a choice too that could result in people misunderstanding the real benefits of reforms that yield wealth in a widening cricle, not just for a few but for many other dynamic individuals too.

Blair is a gifted communicator who understands what it is like to be a reformer beset with carping critics who focus on the style rather than the substance. Blair's natural gift of empathy allows him to get strong leaders to think about how events in Zhanaozen could affect his image before the people.

Now where it is possible to get the strong leader to understands and identify in part with the audience, it is possible too to get the leadership and the state apparatus to start to empathise with those in the firing line and start to identify with them. So there would be far fewer tragedies in future.

Blair grasps that a blend of empathy and psychopathy could enable dictators across the globe understand that you've just got to focus on the sort of bad PR image you are going to give if the people are going to view on television those unpleasant signs of instability.

From Islamist protests in Cairo to the striking oil workers of Zhanaozen, the images those associated with being machine gunned down dead in the streets are going to be found to be offensive. Those associated with being crushed under tanks, for example, could well find these images somewhat oppressive.

What Blair could bring to regions where instability is a real media management problem is that he could advise strong leaders on how to make the people understand its difficult to take bold decisions and carry the people along with the reform process, as some, no doubt, shall fall by the wayside....

Designer Revolutionary Frauds: From Marxist Utopianism to Neoconservatism in Foreign Policy

A brilliant piece from John Laughland in The Spectator in 2005 goes a long way to explain the messianic policies of "regime change" pursued by even supposedly "Conservative" government's in Britain and liberals in the USA and the "socialist" government of Hollande in France. The sentences in bold are mine.

....the way in which the West has itself adopted many of the old nostrums of communism, and especially the twin doctrines of revolution and internationalism. 

Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon. Fifteen years ago it still carried — at least for conservatives — the negative connotations of ‘Bolshevik’, ‘sexual’ and ‘French’. Not any more.

The myth of revolution now wields such a strong hold over our collective consciousness that, with the compulsiveness of children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept at face value fairy tales about revolutions in a faraway country of which we know nothing. Being tabula rasa for us, these countries are the perfect backdrop on which to project our own fantasies: these tales invariably follow the same formulaic sequence, in which a dishonest or authoritarian or brutal regime is overthrown by ‘people power’, and everyone lives happily ever after. 

Recent years have seen a spate of such ‘revolutions’. The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic on 5 October 2000 in Belgrade; the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, in the ‘rose revolution’ of November 2003; the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine last Christmas; the violent overthrow of the president of Kyrgyzstan in March; the uprising in the Uzbek city of Andijan in May — all these are presented as spontaneous outbursts of righteous popular indignation.

Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song. But before the fall of communism, ‘revolution’ and ‘people power’ were considered just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime’s appeal to its own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have become more naive, and have started to take these same two-dimensional archetypes seriously.

It often happens that, after the event, reports reveal that things were not as spontaneous as was believed at the time. In the case of Ukraine, for instance, it is now a matter of public record that the Americans poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko, and that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans’ side, playing a key role in stagemanaging the whole charade.

To be sure, the fact that secret services may be involved does not mean that the people on the streets themselves do not believe in the rightness of their cause, or that the events are the result of manipulation alone. But the simplistic terms in which these ‘revolutions’ are presented by our media, and believed by us at the time, are so strong that they reveal more about our own inner fantasies and desires, and about the true nature of our own political culture, than they do about the countries themselves.

In particular, they reveal that the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. If Chairman Mao once said that ‘Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: “It is right to rebel”’, that sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy. One of the key catchphrases of George Bush’s presidency has been the eminently Trotskyite concept of world revolution: on 6 November 2003 the American President specifically said, ‘The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.’ In his second inaugural speech, on 20 January, Bush announced nothing less than a programme of political emancipation for the whole planet — he said that America was pursuing ‘the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world’.

George Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his closest advisers, especially the neoconservatives, come from what can only be described as a post-Trostkyite background. The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin’s alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938. Within two years, Irving Kristol — the man who was later to be the founding father of the neoconservative movement which so dominates the Bush administration — joined it. Kristol’s own influence has been immense and his son, William, is now one of America’s most influential neocons. But Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983 he wrote that he was still proud of it.

The same goes for numerous leading lights in the neoconservative movement. In 1996 Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the leading ideologues of the war on terror, coined the phrase ‘global democratic revolution’ — in the subtitle of a book in which he attacked Bill Clinton for being a ‘counter-revolutionary’. The book’s title, Freedom Betrayed, is an obvious allusion to Trostky’s own 1937 account of his break with Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed. Another leading neocon, David Horowitz, himself a former communist, published The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits in 2000: the book was given a warm write-up by Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief of staff, as ‘a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield from an experienced warrior’ even though Horowitz quotes Lenin approvingly in it: ‘You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can only do it by following Lenin’s injunction: “In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.”’

 In the same vein Eric Hobsbawm, the veteran Marxist historian, wrote at the end of June that ‘At least one passionate ex-Marxist supporter of Bush has told me, only half in jest: “After all, this is the only chance of supporting world revolution that looks like coming my way.”’

If such comparisons seem outlandish, it is precisely because we in the West have failed to grasp the true nature of Marxism-Leninism. We think of communism as being all about state ownership of the means of production and central planning: in fact, Karl Marx advocated neither. Instead, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the ‘soul of Marxism’ lies in something called dialectical materialism. Derived from Hegel and ultimately Heraclitus, this doctrine holds that the world is in a constant state of flux, that nothing is absolutely true or false, and that everything is connected to everything else. Permanent revolution is consequently the natural state of reality, and hence of politics. Because flux is the natural state, Marx, Engels and Lenin all reasoned that all fixed forms of political association, i.e., the state, were oppressive, and that men would not be free until the state itself had ‘withered away’. 

How was this withering away of the state to occur? For Marx and Engels the answer was clear: world capitalism would do the trick. The two authors of The Communist Manifesto eulogised the unstoppable revolutionary force of world capitalism — what we now call ‘globalisation’. They were convinced that capitalism was an unstoppable revolutionary force; that it would overthrow all the existing structures of nation, state and family; and that it would usher in a politically and economically united world. ‘The bourgeoisie,’ they enthused, ‘cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned.’

For Marx and Engels, indeed, the key to the revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie lay precisely in its international and cosmopolitan nature. ‘To the great chagrin of Reactionists,’ they wrote, ‘the bourgeoisie has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. In place of the old local and national self-seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.’

Globalisation, in other words. Engels argued explicitly that the atomisation and deracination caused by international capitalism was the necessary precursor to worldwide emancipation. ‘The disintegration of mankind into a mass of isolated, mutually repelling atoms,’ he wrote, ‘means the destruction of all corporate, national and indeed of any particular interests and is the last necessary step towards the free and spontaneous association of men.’

It is well known that Marxists believe political arrangements to be a mere ‘superstructure’ determined by the underlying economic reality. ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord,’ Marx wrote, ‘the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.’ After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the division between East and West was overcome, Western ideologues of globalisation used this same Marxist argument to claim that things like the internet and the fax machine meant that the sovereign state belonged in the dustbin of history. They then used this alleged withering away of the state to argue in favour of a one-world political regime, in which statehood would have to give way to the superior claims of universal human rights. Tony Blair justified Nato’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 by saying that the right to bomb a country for alleged human rights abuses derived from globalisation. ‘People are recognising that if there is a serious problem with the Brazilian economy, it develops into a serious problem for the British economy,’ he said. ‘It is similar with security problems.’ 

The neocons hated Bill Clinton for his pragmatic refusal to follow Tony Blair’s logic through to its conclusion — for instance, when he withdrew from chaotic Somalia rather than carry the burden of nation-building. George Bush has done the opposite. He seldom allows reason of state, or any other practical consideration, to befog his own ideological clarity. In his second inauguration speech, Bush pronounced the word ‘freedom’ 28 times, the word ‘free’ seven times and the word ‘liberty’ 15 times: he sounded as if he was singing the Internationale.

Bush makes a highly moralistic appeal to universal values, which he says America embodies and which he insists ‘are right and true for all people everywhere’. ‘Freedom,’ he has said, ‘is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person — in every civilisation.’ Laced as it is with religious (often esoteric and even apocalyptic) vocabulary — the American President frequently says that freedom is God’s plan for mankind — Bush’s messianic political discourse recalls the Marxist movement which swept through Latin America in the 1970s, conjugating God and politics, and which was known as ‘liberation theology’.

It is this promise to emancipate the whole of mankind which so endears George Bush to a phalanx of former Marxist ideologues like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill and David Aaronovitch. People who in their youth idolised the worker ‘who has no country’ have little difficulty identifying with today’s cosmopolitan ideology of globalisation, or with George Bush’s internationalism. Hitchens has defended his own surprising work with the neoconservatives by saying, ‘I feel much more like I used to in the 1960s, working with revolutionaries’, and he understands that George Bush’s policy of regime change is by definition going to be supported by revolutionaries. As he pointed out, with his customary clarity, in a recent debate on the Today programme with his brother, Peter, ‘It is right, I think, that conservatives oppose regime change: that is what conservatives do.’

Support for the programme of world revolution also explains the support given by ten Eastern European heads of government, nearly all of them former communist apparatchiks who, almost alone in the world, lined up obediently to sign an open letter of support for the impending Iraq war in February 2003

. ‘Dissidents’ in Eastern Europe — broadly speaking, the people who are now in power — were not anti-communists at all, but instead ‘critical’ Marxists who worked within the communist system to reform it, not destroy it. Bush’s announced fight ‘against tyranny’ is of obvious appeal to those who used to rally around the old communist cry of ‘anti-fascism’, which in turn was largely a slogan expressing leftist hostility to the nation and the state, both of which are now deeply unpopular concepts in the West.

Indeed, it is a striking indication of the dominance of left-wing modes of thought in the West that the supreme political insult in the new world order is ‘authoritarian’. Authority is, by definition, a conservative notion — and that is why it is universally reviled in the West today. Without exception, every single political leader whom the West has removed, or tried to remove, in the last decade and a half has been labelled ‘authoritarian’ or ‘nationalist’, as if these right-wing vices were the only political sin. This malediction is bandied about even when the leaders so attacked are in fact old lefties like Slobodan Milosevic, Alexander Lukashenko or Saddam Hussein.

In short, any state which pursues a policy of national independence will soon find itself in the West’s cross-hairs. The Clintonite doctrine that there are such things as ‘rogue states’, which has been effortlessly adopted by George W. Bush, means precisely this. There is an international and a domestic aspect to this hostility to the state: internationally, George Bush’s ‘forward strategy of freedom’ — predicated as it is on the assumption that states have a right to enjoy their national sovereignty only under certain conditions — entails support for the anti-sovereignist dictates of punitive supranational law. In internal politics, the anti-state Marxist-Hegelian doctrine of ‘civil society’ has become a central plank of Western thinking, at least for states it wishes to control.

 In Eastern Europe, for instance, supposed ‘non-governmental organisations’ are invariably presented as being more authentic and objective representatives of popular opinion than the established, public, law-based structures of the state. This applies even when the so-called NGOs are in fact front organisations funded by Western governments, as is often the case. Indeed, the mere activity of ‘opposition’; is, by itself, often elevated to a sort of political sainthood, as if the exercise of authority and power were intrinsically sinful. In one egregious case, in Georgia, the task of counting the votes in the January 2004 presidential election was given to just such a private NGO, with the established state authorities simply sidelined. 

Like Marxists, indeed, and like many of his European friends, George Bush appears to believe both that freedom is an ineluctable ‘force of history’ and also that it requires constant struggle to achieve it. He argues, like Hegel, Marx’s precursor, that humanity is one, and that a free state like the USA is not really free if other states live under tyranny. In his mind, old-fashioned American Puritan millenarianism marries easily with the missionary mentality of world revolutionists. ‘The survival of liberty in our land,’ he said in January, ‘increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.’ A true conservative, by contrast, would say that there is much evil in the outside world — and that the duty of a statesman is to hold it at bay. 

George Orwell is rightly credited with predicting a great deal, yet it is an indication of how far leftwards the West has travelled that his key prediction is often overlooked. Orwell saw that the Cold War would end on the basis of a convergence between communism and capitalism — the very predicament in which we now find ourselves. At the end of Animal Farm the farmer, who symbolises the capitalist West, returns to the farm and plays cards with the pigs, who symbolise communism. The shivering creatures outside ‘looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’.

The Taxpayer's Alliance and the Tea Party Movement

As a land with forthrightly "Atlanticist" orientation, it was bound to be the case that the latest idiot populist movement from the USA was going to come to Britain. The Guardian reported, on Thursday 9 September 201o that,

British anti-tax campaigners are taking advice from leaders of the rightwing Tea Party movement in the US in a bid to import the mass-protest techniques that have seen a million activists march on Washington DC to call for lower taxes and smaller government.

The Taxpayers' Alliance, an influential campaign group that calls for tax cuts and low government spending, is being advised by Freedom Works, a powerful Washington organisation credited with helping to destabilise the Obama administration through its mobilisation of 800,000 grassroots activists.

Libertarian US Tea Party organisations attended a conference in London today to share tactics with British and European taxpayer lobby groups, and described their activities as "an insurgent campaign" against their government's tax and spending policies.

The move reflects an increasing desire within rightwing circles to establish a British version of the Tea Party "uprising", and a growing belief that expected union action against the coalition government's programme of cuts could be harnessed to mobilise vocal counter-demonstrations.

This pseudo-populist initiative is essentially a media creation and a perfect example of what the future might hold as regards staged revolutions choreographed by huge corporate interests who can dominate the media agenda and co-opt politicians who then can pretend they are "reacting" to the "will of the people".

There is nothing unusual about the Tea Party proselytising for "Freedom" in the UK as Freedom Works, the organisation behind the Tea Party, has been endorsed by those wonderful exponents of American Freedom and intellectual fire power everywhere, the Bush Family.

"Folks, you've got to get to know this organization ... They have been doing a great job all over the country educating people."

-President George W. Bush

To be endorsed by this dimwit should be the kiss of death as far as the notion of educating the folks is concerned, though Bush II was not entirely as cretinous as he tried to portray himself, even if Sarah Palin seems to represent a new departure here.

In Britain, there is no reason why the Taxpayers Alliance will not be supported by those like Richard Littlejohn and given coverage by Sky News just as Bush and his regime was backed by Fox News, both of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch, a key donor to the Tea Party, though he has publicly lied about not supporting it.

A key figure is Steve Forbes, the businessman and "libertarian thinker" who was a signatory to the Project for the New American Century and very much an Establishment figure, having worked for Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. He is on the Board of Directors at Freedom Works.

As Freedom Works states,

In addition to FreedomWorks Foundation, Mr. Forbes serves on the boards of The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He is on the Board of Overseers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and on the Board of Visitors for the School of Public Policy of Pepperdine University. He served on the Board of Trustees of Princeton University for ten years.

Such a figure as Forbes means that the Tea Party and Taxpayers Alliance are not simply as comical as those in Britain would assume: these are media men practised in the dark arts of spin, dissimulation and media manipulation. They wield power and influence and intend to spread it cynically.

A close pal of Forbes is David "Axis of Evil" Frum who wrote for Forbes Magazine. Forbes has media outlets in "New Europe" such as Latvia and Poland where flat tax rates have been introduced or posited for the future in Poland's case.

The presence of the Tea Party in China might have something to do with the fact Forbes set up with Fosun Media, one of China’s largest private conglomerates. monthly publication in February 2003. He has set up media in Romania and Turkey as well to advance his interests.

"You guys are everywhere."
- Florida Governor Jeb Bush

Freedom Works supports a number of policies that coincide with Cameron's New-ConDem regime in Britain, including offering more "choice" in schools ( i.e the involvement of business and the private corporations ) of the sort proposed by the neoconservative chump Michael Gove ( writer for Murdoch's Times ).

This is the very Michael Gove who argued recently that,

I believe in value for money. It is maybe a concept that was alien to the last government and it may not be a concept that the BBC would like to see applied to public expenditure, but I believe that it is important that the taxpayer gets protection for the money that it spent on his or her behalf.

Naturally, whilst the Tea Party and Taxpayers Alliance are against taxes, this libertarian agenda is curiously absent when it comes to supporting militarism and the military industrial complex as well as supporting "state intervention" in Iraq.

Hardly surprising, as the Tea Party is bankrolled by Murdoch, supported by Forbes and Koch Industries, those heavily involved in the oil industry

Jane Mayer ran an article in The New Yorker which according to one source in the NYT,

... found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

These guys are everywhere. And soon in one form or another they will be over here, constantly meddling in the affairs of the UK, promoting the interests of those like Murdoch and a crude version of neoliberalism of "libertarian" anarcho-capitalism of a very authoritarian and nasty kind.

The Taxpayer's Alliance is, in reality, the alliance of the super rich and an extension of the US nationalism, the best democracy money can buy and very little to do with the principle of "no taxation without representation". If little people feel they are not already represented, then the cynical idea is that taxation should only go on "defence".

Yet, as foreign policy under the Bush II regime proved, in practice this means the collossal expenditure on military hardware and war, some 21% of the USA's total amount.

Needless to say, there are no indication that cuts are supported here or in carbon emissions, not least as in the UK the TPA is supported by big oil and "climate sceptic" Nigel Lawson.