Why Orwell is Relevant

With news that outgoing BBC Director General Mark Thompson turned down the idea of having a statue of George Orwell outside its new HQ, it has been occasion for some journalists such as Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Guardian to remind us of 'Why Orwell is Relevant Today'.

In my opinion Orwell matters due to the clarity of his thought and his belief that political language and unquestioned conformity could corrupt thought. As such he is bound to matter in 2012 when the techniques of organised political lying are routine and commonplace and known as "spin".

The problem is that many have taken Orwell out of context and tried to claim his mantle by posing as fearless enemies of totalitarianism. Nick Cohen fails miserably in that pose as did Christopher Hitchens in the run up to the Iraq War in 2003.

By crudely lumping all their opponents who opposed the Iraq War as some new fangled version of the old apologists for Stalin in the 1930s ( this time it was Saddam Hussein ) they were fighting polemical wars against obsolete enemies. Saddam's totalitarian state was simply not bent on an expansionist agenda

It was fairly obvious that the so called "anti-war" left comprised of those such as Galloway who fawned on Castro's Cuba and Respect was a sinister Islamo-Bolshevik party that rationalised terrorism and authoritarian regimes if they happened to be against the USA.

But the point was that the "anti-war" groups were hardly as important as the level of mendacious lying and spin that was used as a pretext to invade Iraq and the use of the 9/11 terror attacks to launch wars as part of a geopolitical plan to control global energy supplies.

Orwell was brilliant on the perversions, lies and distortions used by the power hungry no less that the cowardice and hypocrisy of those who did not posses the "power of facing". In 2012 that would include those who bleat "No War for Oil" whilst demanding higher living standards.

In The Road to Wigan Pier ( 1937 ), Orwell wrote a passage that could apply to all those self styled "anti-imperialist" sorts of sloganeering poseurs who fail to grasp that it is precisely continued over dependence upon access to oil that underpins their consumer comforts.

    For in the last resort, the only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation — an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.

Likewise, every time you turn on the ignition in your car you acquiesce in a future of resource wars such as Iraq. And every time you buy cheap goods made in sweatshops in the developing world you acquiesce in that. To that extent it is worth asking whether we really oppose our leaders as much as we pretend.

It is a useful exercise to pin down several reason why Orwell matters in 2012 so that the discussion of his intellectual legacy does not become a sort of sensational exercise in why we have a 1984 style totalitarian state in Britain at the moment as some bizarrely claim ( we do not ).

1984 was a predictive political essay in many ways and a satire on the trend towards the power hungry everywhere. As such it has relevance now only as a whole to North Korea as a fully developed totalitarian state. As a whole from his essays and fiction I would say in 2012 they are:

1) The Power of Facing' unpleasant facts against Wish Thinking

This would apply to all those who completely deny that wars are about resources or who assume wars can only ever be about resources organised by an elite to enrich themselves and in which "we" are not in any sense part of or benefit from. In extreme form, this leads to conspiracy theories of the sort offered by David Icke.

2) The Concept of Transferred Nationalism.

That because wars such as Iraq are crucially concerned with control of oil that any Great Power that opposes the USA are to be lauded. In that relation one need only think of the jargon of ex-CPGB ideologue Martin Jacques in presenting the rise of Chinese global power as a "systemic alternative" .

3) The Perversions of Doublethink.

That those who lambast the double standards of the USA by default then tend to fall into the mental trap of tending to support without reserve, or else rationalise without further thought, any organisation or power blocs which do not make an express proclamation of demanding any moral standard in global politics at all are somehow better.

A recent example is John Pilger who wrote in relation to the intervention to support those wanting to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi and elsewhere in Africa,

    ..the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China....Africa is China's success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa's greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China's most important sources of fuel.

It would be hard to think how Chinese intervention in Africa on a policy of propping up dictatorships with weapons in order to gain access to natural resources and benefiting from slave labour in certain African states such as Zaire means that this is somehow a "success" story.

The consequence of such blind fury is that any moral criticism of the USA is cancelled out by the fact that it is only the hypocrisy of the USA prating about exporting democracy and freedom whilst really pursuing its interests in securing oil supplies that grates. In which case it would be better pursuing realpolitik in the Chinese "no strings attached" manner

Yet any criticism of the appointed cult guru is seen as bad thinking because fans of Pilger's investigative journalism-much of which is truly valuable-means that any person criticising Pilger can only be doing so through the worst possible motives.

The cheap propaganda trope that one is bound to criticise one's own government first because it is something one can actually do something about, ignores the fact that global diplomacy does not take place in some kind of universe where only the USA dictates and plots events to order.

4) Freedom of Thought against "Political Correctness" and Truth by Authority.

This is connected closely to wish thinking. As certain people have a craving for security, they tend to accept only those ideas which make them feel either superior, self righteous or omniscient. So all global disasters occur because "our" governments are the root cause as opposed to one among many.

Orwell though that it was his duty to stand out as a conscientious individual against any unquestioned orthodoxy. Today that would mean that just because one is critical of British government's foreign policy, that should not mean one has to agree with all those who espouse "anti-war" credos.

Such a position is always met by intolerant hostile derision by those who believe that all anti-war positions are correct but some are more correct than others. In other words, that to criticise the British government for Iraq but to criticise Respect and Galloway is to be 'objectively' pro-war.

Telling People What They Don't Want to Hear on Libya.

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes".-

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier.

George Orwell wrote that back in 1937 in order to jolt people, not least on the left, out of their complacent assumptions. If this were to be brought up to date, it could be said that you collude with the oppression of Arabs living under dictatorships every time a car owner drives to the filling station.

Obviously, it's far more complex than that. But it has the virtue of drawing attention to the fact that both defenders and opponents of Imperialism back then and some form of "Neo-imperialism" in 2011 have utterly failing to grasp what has been at stake with regards diminishing supplies of oil and increasing global demand.

None of this has percolated into the world view of commentators such as Sir Simon Jenkins who writes in The Guardian today,

Welcome to 21st-century war, liberal style. You do not fix an objective and use main force to get it. You nuance words, bomb a little, half assassinate, scare, twist, spin and make it up as you go along. Nato's Libyan campaign is proving a field day for the new interventionism.

Simon Jenkins made some good observations on the contradictions of the Western powers in using propaganda about 'humanitarian intervention'. The No Fly Zone was originally posited as a means of protecting the rebels in Benghazi and their supporters from a bloodbath. In reality, it was about "regime change".

Stalling Gaddafi's advance on Benghazi appears to have prevented its fall. Whether there would have been a genocidal massacre, as interventionists maintain, is not known. There would surely have been bloody retribution against ringleaders, which is what dictators do to those who cross them.

True, but what Jenkins fails to mention is the key role of oil in the conflict, one consistently mentioned by leftist critics of "Western Imperialism" as if it were merely the gambit of the elites and corporations to profit from war. It's all about the mere idiocy of "Them".

The upshot of such rationalisations from the conservative non-interventionist right and the anti-imperialist militant left is that political elites are to blame for Iraq, Afghanistan and the potential for the Libyan intervention to become another quagmire.

Conservatives such as Jenkins are against this as it is simply "nothing to do with us". Despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for all the lies, duplicity and spin was not about WMD, Saddam's dictatorship or the Kurds but about grabbing one of the the world's largest supplies of oil.

Those like Milne, Pilger and Galloway and those in the Stop the War Coalition leadership such as Hudson and Murray then think that because Western intervention in Iraq and, indeed Libya, is "all about the oil" a decisive populist trump card has been played that proves the Western elites are sinister.

Yet the more disturbing and chilling fact is that interventions such as that now occurring in Libya no less than the previous rapprochement with Gaddafi after 2004 reflects the geostrategic desperation caused by nations such as Britain being overdependent upon oil.

Oil is essential to maintain the consumer economy that the vast masses of the British people have accepted as a given right. That the entire prosperity of post war Europe and North America was based on abundant supplies of cheap and readily available oil has become a fact of modern existence.

In which case, one issue that has not been addressed is the one that looks at all these wars as the necessary consequence nations such as Britain pay for a system of high octane consumerism in which higher prices for petrol can lead to the kind of strikes carried out by the road hauliers in 2000.

The trope that recent wars were "all about oil" is as obvious as it is vacuous. If those protesting on March 26th against expenditure on wars such as Libya instead of on public libraries etc could grasp the situation , they would realise that increased militarism and war is the price to be paid by failing to find alternatives to oil.

When George Osborne's "Ford Focus" budget promised to put "fuel into the tank of the British economy" by reducing the cost of petrol, few bothered to link it with events in Libya or Iraq, and this populist gesture was to avoid the populist outrage that greeted high petrol prices in 2000 under Blair's government.

The twists, follies and perversions inherent in Britain's foreign policy are determined by the government wanting to keep the petroleum fuelled Great Car Economy going, no less than offering the growth Utopia inherent in the ghastly future envisioned by progressives.

The fact that nations such as China and India have joined in the global race for controlling oil and gas only makes the necessity of intervention more likely wherever there is the chance to get it ( this is a statement of what "is" rather than what "ought" to be ).

Face facts: Libya produces 41.5% of all African reserves of petrol and 46.5% of its natural gas. The petrol is of the light and sweet variety prized by refiners in the US, China and Europe. From the British perspective, the colossal oil concessions in the Ghadamis Oil block and the Gulf of Sirte are key interests.

The reason is not merely to make profits for BP but, as Michael T Klare has argued in Blood and Oil, that high octane consumerism, the very way that life has been moulded to the use of the car and determined by supermarkets and all year available produce makes Western lifestyles dependent upon oil.

The statistics on Libyan oil production are from the 2006 data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2007, as featured in Michael T Klare's Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet ( 2008 )

Christopher Hitchens is not Great.

Columnist Henry Porter has pondered upon the nature of courage and bravery in The Observer today. There are numerous people he could have used as exemplars here, often people not in the public eye and who are not vain and self promoting. Instead he chooses to write about,

My chum Christopher Hitchens is an interesting case. He has always cheerfully put himself in the way of physical danger – posing by unexploded bombs in the Middle East and nearly being lynched while lecturing a mob of fundamentalists in Lebanon – but Christopher's mettle is now seen with his reaction to terminal cancer.

He has led his life bravely, causing no end of offence to opponents, as well as dismay to those who made the mistake of assuming he was an ally and whom he then drubbed with fratricidal glee.

I cannot think of anyone who has stirred things up quite as much as Christopher, nor in the process provided so much amusement with his writing, but the important thing is that his fearlessness stimulated people to think for themselves.

It's possible to be a brave and bad man or to be foolhardy and that applies quite obviously to Christopher Hitchens. Now that he is dying, he could be brave enough to admit he was wrong to support the Iraq War and to come very close to rationalising torture in a 2005 edition of Slate magazine.

Hitchens claimed that as the USA could not be bound to the Geneva Conventions in its global "war on terror",

The forces of al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations are not signatory to the conventions and naturally express contempt for them. They have no battle order or uniform and are represented by no authority with which terms can be negotiated.

They are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law.

Bear in mind that Hitchens was writing here of what could be called "terrorist suspects". That torture could be used to interrogate them in order to to prevent worse atrocities. That was clear when Hitchens went on to write,

Several detainees released from Guantanamo have reappeared in the Taliban ranks, once again burning and killing and sabotaging. The man whose story of rough interrogation has just been published in Time had planned to board a United Airlines flight and crash it into a skyscraper. I want to know who his friends and contacts were, and so do you, hypocrite lecteur.

As Iraq descended into predictable carnage it was more important to Hitchens to continue offering fallback positions. Iraq was not about WMD. It was an oil grab that was dressed up with a variety of pretexts from weapons Saddam did not have and part of a global war on terror and "Islamofascism".

Those who supported this war such as Michael Ignatieff have now admitted they got it wrong. Hitchens has now offered ex post fact rationalisations for the war, that the Bush administration dithered, that the subsequent sectarian war was proof of the surging threat of theocratic fascism everywhere.

On an edition of Breakfast with David Frost, Hitchens came on sheepishly wearing a Kurdish flag in his lapel instead of the US one he sported before. So the war was worth it despite hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, regional destabilisation, and the US collaborating with Shite death squads because the Kurds are deemed free.

There is nothing brave about failing to admit that the decision to back Bush's war was misinformed. Yet Hitchens never based his support on an assessment of the actual facts. He simply fitted the facts to the liberationist creed in the manner described by Orwell in Inside the Whale.

That is to say, that Hitchens wanted to hitch himself to a great cause in order to have something to fight for, the convince himself he was in the vanguard of historical progress once more and to win polemical battles with anti-war activists who were secretly craving the victory of just any anti-US power.

This obviously had an element of truth with regards many such as the unprincipled demagogue Galloway. Hitchens quip that RESPECT was an anagram of SPECTRE, a sinister group in James Bond who supported any destructive elements in order to profit was funny.

Even so, to suppose that just because most anti-war leaders in Britain were moronic ideologues and hack propagandists like Andrew Murray of the CPGB or Islamist fanatics, does not mean that they were essentially part of some seamless global movement to destroy the west.

True, Galloway works as a proxy for the Iranian regime in Press TV but the invasion of Iraq was hardly going to be an opening blow in defeating Galloway, and sinister double talking British Islamists. A reckless and illegal war would only bolster the credibility of those who detest Western civilisation.

By failing to look at the facts in the Iraq War and what was really at stake, Hitchens destroyed his credibility and ended up then seeing in religion a phenomena that poisoned everything and was responsible for preventing the success of the Iraq War and the Israel-Palestine conflict-indeed all conflicts.

Religion is not the cause of war. That merely offers a form of theological justification from an atheist perspective. Politicised versions of certain religious traditions only ups the ante in what are really struggles over land and resources and conflicts with ethnic dimensions.

Irrespective of Hitchens recent self promoting debate with Blair on religion, both men shared a faith based politics in regard to Iraq, seeing only what they wanted to and being obsessed with glory and a battle of civilisation over barbarism. Not an oil grab an the opening salvo in an epoch of resource wars.

Hitchens will be remembered as a footnote in cultural history and in the same way Sidney Webb is primarily remembered for having supported Stalin so too will Hitchens be remembered for backing Bush in Iraq and being typical of a kind of radical liberal who supported credal wars without scepticism.

Hitchens' polemic God is Not Great will be remembered, if at all, as strong in rhetoric and a weak rehash of atheist arguments used to prop up the facile notion that "religion" is "the cause" of conflict when it will be obvious that the pathological struggle over diminishing oil and gas is the driving force.

George Orwell was a brave man. Hitchens can offer no comparison here despite being lauded by Hitchens in Orwell's Victory. There will be no book in future years after Hitchen's death entitled Hitchen's Victory. Hitchens attempted to emulate Orwell in some ways but failed miserably.
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The reason is obvious: the conflict between Islamists and the West does not replicate anything very similar to that between the Soviet Union and the West that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s and dominated international politics during the Cold War.

By seeing the conflict in messianic terms by transposing the categories inherited from the Cold War on to the emergence after 1989-1990 of the Islamist Threat, Hitchen's willed the belief that by taking on remnant Arab dictatorships, even secular ones, that "Islamofascism" could be defeated.

By not bothering to look at the particular hisory of Iraq or the documented facts showing that Iraq was to be invaded as part of a strategy of controlling oil and using that as part of a gamble for regional and global hegemony, Hitchens showed a lack of courage in facing up to facts.

....................................................................................................................................................................

One hostile response to this dissection of Hitchen's pose was offered by one blogger thus,

Unfortunately, there are now many people.... who seem to have absorbed uncritically a one-dimensional "economic determinist" narrative of a complex geo-political conflict—and to a degree, I suspect, that would make even the vulgar Marxists of the SWP blush.

However, it would still be wrong for Mr Hitchens to cave in to such morally vacuous, populist formulations and admit that he was wrong about the Iraq war if he doesn't think he was. It my view, if he did destroy his "reputation" with such people in the cause of Kurdish freedom, it was a bargain trade.

The commenter is wrong. I have continually stressed precisely the opposite case to anything resembling "economic determinism". That Iraq was essentially an oil grab does not mean there were not other geopolitical factors at work-using oil as a lever against the Chinese, creating a democratic domino effect etc.

The point about the invasion of Iraq is that it need not have happened and was predictably going to lead to the fragmentation of the state into ethnic and sectarian warfare. The aim of the war was to control oil and not for corporations to make a profit as anti-war SWP types go on about.

The simple fact is that the west is overdependent upon oil in dangerous areas. Anyway this blogger obviously exhibits the usual shoddy line of reasoning of those who think that any mention of the oil as a documented fact in driving the Iraq War is some kind of sinister Marxist-Leninist.

And that this must mean Hitchens was "right" to support the war on the basis of the inherently sinister mindset of those who opposed the war. Again that only reinforces the case I made which is that this is not a logical position to take as it failed to look at what was at stake.

Nor is the one which rationalises the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab Iraqis on the basis that the war has liberated the Kurds in northern Iraq. That could be one benefit, but the question would remain whether the number of Kurds being killed on the eve of the war outnumbered those killed elsewhere since.

Yet to reduce the "moral" case for war to such an ethnically based arithmetic of death would be in line with the way the US has been willing to go against all principles in effectively collaborating with death squads and ethnic cleansing to impose authority and control.

To come back to the issue of Hitchens, it is not very brave to fail to admit that the invasion was a huge mistake and to refuse to see what was at stake was oil. And, moreover, that the West is overdependent upon it and built into the fabric of a supermarket shopping Great Car Economy.

That's something RESPECT anti-war types seldom bring up as they are populists who want to tell people what they want to hear no less than Hitchens and "pro-liberation leftists" actually do. The notion that Iraq was not about corporations enriching themselves but strategic desperation is simply too frightening.

The Treason of the Intellectuals on the Iraq War.

The total ignorance of the circumstances driving the USA and UK to War in Iraq back in 2003 was at least partly a result of intellectuals utterly failing to come to terms with what was at stake and mechanically writing off, as did Tony Blair himself, the oil grab motive as a "conspiracy theory".

Certainly John Gray was correct to assert that support for it from "progressive" intellectuals was posited on the belief that it was a Utopian opportunity to create a new world order where conflicts of interest could be overcome by toppling a vile and cruel dictator and initiating a "domino effect" in the Middle East.

By getting rid of Saddam and allowing the oil to flow again without sanctions, Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction and become a new model secular democracy. Thus it would destabilise remnant Arab nationalist dictatorships on its borders such as Syria as people there, as in Lebanon, would demand some kind of version of Europe's Velvet Revolution" in 1989.

The big idiocy behind thinking that a military invasion would bring that about meant projecting fantasies that were purely Euro-Atlanticist on to an Iraq that had never been a unitary nation state in the first place but an oil protectorate carved out of the Ottoman Empire by Britain in the aftermath of the First World War.

The fact that Blair had decided long before at Crawford Ranch with George Bush in 2002 that Iraq should be invaded can only be understood against the background not merely of dodgy dossiers, political lies about Saddam's threat to the West in the 45 minute scare warning that he could launch missiles against it.

It has to be understood that by 2001 North Sea Oil has peaked and was inexorably declining and Blair had faced a revolt by haulage companies who went on strike because of the increasingly high price of oil as David Strahan asserts correctly in his superb The Last Oil Shock.

Historians will no doubt start to debate the origins of the Iraq War within time. At the moment documentation will be sealed up in the Foreign Office and the exact reasons Blair supported Bush will remain concealed, with the Chilcot Enquiry being a mere Establishment cover up.

However, it's depressing that even Norman Davies, the great historian of Poland in his East and West , though opposing the war, claimed it was merely part of neoconservative ideology and omitted to mention anything about oil or the number of Polish intellectuals who supported it like Adam Michnik.

Yet mere outrage that Iraq was "all about the oil" tends to have Marxoid overtones that liberals shy away from as it upsets the vision of Europe, including the UK in particular, as settled and basically functioning and decent liberal democracies. No less than Poland which even supported the invasion without a vote in the Sejm .

The outrage of the supposed "anti-war" left did nothing to look at the structural factors leading to the war, looming shortages of oil, Peak Oil, Chinese inroads into other oil producing areas in Central Asia and Africa and the threat that poses to the notion that the Middle East should remain in the Western "sphere of influence".

The reason many protesters against Iraq, as well as others who opposed it, saw it as "ideological" or a simplistic Moral Evil is because few have the courage to accept that Iraq might have been a necessary invasion if it is accepted that the West's energy intensive lifestyles and what Thatcher called The Great Car Economy is not challenged.

Erstwhile fans of 'The Iron Lady, ' such as Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski of the PO, believe that Poland must follow the rugged individualism of that vision. For Poland's New Model Democracy now exhibits many of the features of this over reliance on the car and which is evident as cities like even Krakow become gridlocked by smelly and snarling SUV's.

The oil imperative was wholly ignored by by many liberals who continue to espouse a bland belief in Progress and tended to define themselves as "leftists" or the "decent left". Precedents were hunted around for. For those like Christopher Hitchens, his "leftist" post-Trotskyism indicated a proclivity to smashing "Islamo-Fascism".

The notion that the cultural radicals of 1968 had actually created and supported an antinomian politics in which an infinite growth Utopia was taken for granted and would "liberate Iraq" from the dark spell of theocratic tyranny , even though Saddam's dictatorship was secular, was quite simply never something other intellectuals have looked at.

Few "leftist" intellectuals were prepared to face up to what amounts to a crisis in civilisation as opposed to asserting a "Clash of Civilisations" where growing global demand for oil and diminishing supplies was a major factor in the drive towards the Iraq War. Timothy Garton Ash has not mentioned oil once in any commentary on the "mistake" of the Iraq War.

That few liberal intellectuals will face up to what the intelligent liberal thinker Sir Isaah Berlin called "agonistic dilemmas" is a total betrayal of the better critical aspects of the better sections of the older secular left intelligensia such as George Orwell in Britain and Albert Camus in France.

Instead the Iraq War was literally sold by feeble journalists like Nick Cohen, whom Lord Bragg pitifully called a successor to Tom Paine for his What's Left ?, a pathetic attempt to have an "Orwell moment" as Orwell did when fighting, yes actually fighting, in the Spanish Civil War against Fascism and when he declared in Why I Write,

'The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it'.

But the Spanish Civil War was not remotely comparable to the Iraq War, unless one thinks that by defining oneself against those on the remnant totalitarian left who controlled the "anti-war" movement that one is fighting for the freedom of Iraqis instead of an armchair polemics where empirical facts are omitted.

The fact is that the invasion of Iraq, never a nation state anyway in the European sense, descended into Civil War after the invasion as was predicted clearly by John Gray. If comparisons with the Spanish Civil War are apt, it might be in seeing the napalming of Fallujah in 2005 as akin to the Fascist attack from the air on Guernica in 1936.

Such support as was given to the Iraq War by people who really should have known better like the ex-dissident and Czech President Vaclav Havel was not a sign of innate badness but folly. It was a sign that ageing 68ers were hitching themselves to the sole remaining hyperpower in the USA on the lines that many in the 1930s supported the USSR.

The naive belief, and it was a belief merely, that the USA as the world's last great hope could free Iraq with very minimal bloodshed and that secular democracy as opposed to an Islamist one would arise in the wake of a War of Liberation that would be in linear continuity with "the West's" victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War.

If that was not bad enough, the anti-war protests were choreographed and led by those who have situated themselves carefully into iconic anti-war organisations such as CND, those like Kate Hudson who was a member of the Communist Party or those who extolled the USSR such as Andrew Murray and the repellant Seumas Milne, an important editor in The Guardian.

The importance of the anti-war movement being led by people no less fanatical than the neoconservatives was not that they constituted some vast "enemy within" in aligning with Islamists such as Soumaya Ghannoushi or the psychopathological Dr Tamimi Azzam or Anas Al-Tikriti.

It was that a serious politics of dissent outside Parliament was ruined by the presence of people who really are motivated by the urge to see Western Civilisation destroyed for purely nihilistic reasons as opposed to reforming the political system so that decisions could not be over concentrated in the Prime Ministerial executive represented by Tony Blair.

However, to cite such nonentities and cranks as a reason why the West was threatened from within and without by some "seamless totalitarian threat", as Michael Gove asserted in his intellectually feeble tract Celsius 7/7, was utter drivel. A responsible anti-Iraq War movement would have quelled the force of such loony assertions.

It was merely comical that the Respect Party, an incoherent bunch of ex-Trotskyists and Islamists, would bring any good any more than they could, as the Socioalist Workers Part mantra goes, "Build the Party" and present Islamists in Britain as some proto-proletarian spearhead of global insurrection against Imperialism and Capitalism from Gaza to Hackney.

Whilst nobody could take these cargo cult cranks seriously, with George Galloway the leader of Respect quickly absorbed into what J G Ballard called "the entertainment economy" by appearing on the cretinous reality telly show Big Brother, they simply blocked the need for a coherent movement for for political and constitutional change.

As Orwell made clear in novels such as Coming Up for Air, the ideologues of Respect were similar to the gangster gramophones he parodied in 1984 where George Bowling, who is trying to make some sense of the world around him, comments on one bald little lecturer spouting slogans.

The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn't particularly keen to hear what he was saying--get the same stuff in the News Chronicle every morning--but his voice
came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.

'Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . .
Rubber truncheons. . . . Concentration camps. . . . Iniquitous
persecution of the Jews. . . . Back to the Dark Ages. . . .
European civilization. . . . Act before it is too late. . . .
Indignation of all decent peoples. . . . Alliance of the
democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .
Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .'

You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It's a queer thing, I thought, to be known as 'Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist'. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what'll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course.

But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all--feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.

Such a view must have been that of those who opposed the Iraq War without wanting to embrace an Islamo-Bolshevik cause in the process but just knew that Blair was slightly deranged and that the Iraq War was being based on systemic lies and falsehoods. One reason the march in March 2003 failed to keep up momentum or translate into real politics.

Ian McEwan was quite correct to state at the time of the anti-Iraq War March that most of the protesters most likely knew nothing of Iraq or what was at stake: as a literary man he knew his Milan Kundera and the fact that these protests were festooned with what the Czech novelist called, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the 'Kitsch of the Grand March'.

Much of the protest was pathetic, an attempt by bored consumers who did not make the connection between their consumerism and energy intensive lifestyles and that Blair was invading Iraq to protect that. Knowing that, instead of dumb placards reading Make T Not War, might have stimulated them into thinking about energy alternatives to oil.

The Iraq Protest march 0f 2003 was atrociously kitsch: it was a fun day out and gave the feeling at least of being part of "the oceanic effect", some higher cause that would alleviate boredom and give errant children and infantile consumers something more important to their banal lives. There was no coherent politics involved at all.

The simple fact remains that the Iraq War happened because few challenged the basis of their consumerist existences. Neither the self styled "decent left" who supported the war nor the old "hard left" opponents like Galloway added up to much with their tedious polemics. It reflected the total sense of impotence such people had in the face of events beyond their control.

The only public intellectual to challenge this malaise has been the liberal social democratic historian Tony Judt who wrote in his coruscating Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, this,

'In our political as well as individual lives we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gambit of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole'.

Most contemporary intellectuals live in a sterile ivory tower or in "think tanks" disengaged from the real reality of the world around them and incapable, as Orwell said, od "seeing what is in front of their noses'. "Think tanks" merely encourage "group think", the fitting of the facts to the prescriptions of already agreed on creeds.

The dissenting free thinker is becoming rapidly a thing from the past. One problem is the existence of the Internet which encourages "think tankers" to try and psychoanalyse their polemical opponents, the work out their "mindset", as if by so doing those opposing their correct view of the world can be chopped to pieces by cherry picking quotes.

Worse than that are "framing devices" wherby political terminology contains within it implicit assumptions that bury within them an implicit meaning without actually saying what is quite clearly insinuated by the writer or journalist. To be "anti-war" implies not to be "pro-war" and that is clearly a Good Thing as anyone for a war is necessarily evil-except against Hitler.

But in order to frame a cause as Goodthink, all it has been necessary to do when "taking a stance" on Iraq is to use terms which seem implicitly politically correct: "the decent left", "the pro-liberation left" ( i.e those for invading Afghanistan and Iraq ) or else we have terms bandied about like "leftists"

What on earth "leftist" means shows the vacuity of our political culture. It implies a tendency towards the left which might not completely be "left wing" but is generally as good as being thought of as "progressive", as few want to be thought of as "regressive" or even "reactionary", no matter what the person writing is actually saying.

The depressing thing is that those who supported Iraq often claimed Orwell's mantle or, at least, insinuated that they were fearless speaker saying that "liberty if it means anything is telling people what they don't want to hear". Using Orwell like that to justify the Iraq War, as though it was in the same vein as World War Two, is a travesty.

It seems that too many have dipped into Orwell, a man who died at the height of the Cold War, to justify a rather silly crusade against totalitarian despots without understanding that Orwell was a man of his particular time and who cannot be set up as some "authority" or "secular saint". Or such nonsense as Orwell would have supported the Iraq War.

The man died of TB in 1950. It is fruitless to conjecture what "he would have said" because he has been dead for 60 years. But what can be taken from Orwell is his method of scenting out frauds who performed intellectual exercises as "pea and thimble tricks" rather than looking at what was the reality outside polemics flying to and forth.

Near theological disputes over what "leftism" really means or the correct "leftist" or "liberal-left" attitude to the Iraq War and the way it should proceed are embodied in think tanks like Compass headed by Neal Lawson. A Compass is a hady travelling companion to those who just know which way forward is the best no matter the practical obstacles or facts.

As Judt puts it,

'Sadly contemporary intellectuals show little informed interest in the nitty gritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically defined topics where the choices seem clearer. This has left debate on the way we ought to govern ourselves to policy specialists and "think tanks", where unconventional opinions rarely finds a place and the public are excluded'

Bibliography
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents.
George Orwell, Why I Write.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air.
George Orwell, 1984.

George Orwell, Why I Write.

More on Fake Orwell Impersonators who Lack his Moral Clarity.

This last decade has arguably seen the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The term "decent left" was coined by the American social theorist Michael Walzer in 2002 to describe those who argued that Islamism constituted a greater threat than George Bush and that the "anti-imperialist" left were camouflaging a fascistic and oppressive Islamic fundamentalism.

Many of the "decents" went on to be supporters of the invasion of Iraq, justifying it as a noble attempt to rid the world of a repulsive dictator.

In the UK, the split within the left was crystallised in 2006 with the Euston Manifesto which attempted to place what it saw as pro-democratic action at the centre of leftist activity. Euston signatories such as Norman Geras have fought a continuous and often bitter battle against what they see as leftist apologists for tyranny, "Islamo-fasism" and anti-semitism disguised as anti-Zionism.

That was Keith Kahn Harris's take on the split within the left over the Afghanistan and Iraq War. something which can be seen as an epochal division within the left, a turning point in history instead of what is a largely tedious spat amongst 'leftists'

The very word 'leftist' is one that indicates a proclivity towards certain attitudes that can be defined as left as opposed to right wing and conservative but often adds up to little in the end but an argument over the direction global progress ought to take.

This is not to say there are not real issues at stake with regards the conflict within the West between the rival value systems posed between radical Islamism and the secular left with the rise of glabal Islamism as a 'revolutionary rival'.

But most of the controversy over Islam in the West has been refracted through the lens of foreign policy and claims of the West to represent universal values as against what is considered an irrevocably backward religion that has no place in 'progressive' politics.

The problem with this artificial dichotomy between the "decent left" and "anti-imperialists" is that few see what both have in common: a tendency to regard global politics according to an almost theological interpretation over the essential nature of rival empires.

The irony is that most "decent left" and anti-imperialists in Britain & the USA tend to look towards George Orwell as a prophet and inspiration, replacing the Soviet Union with the USA as the evil empire of choice or else the threat of 'theocratic fascism'.

For example both Christopher Hitchens and Pilger see Orwell as fighting against fascism and the collusion of supposed 'leftists' with it: both see Stalinism as corrupting some 'authentic' or real left wing radical politics and global projects of emancipation.

Much of this tedious debate rest less on fact but on interpreting facts in accordance with the prescriptions of their particular progressive creed. Both decents and some, though not all, "anti-imperialists" do so for a number of reasons.

Firstly, they suspend sceptical enquiry in favour of an almost theological obsession with being 'justified'. By that I mean 'being on the right side of History' and using that as proof of their righteousness. Gloating about how Hitchens was obviously wrong about Iraq proves nothing.

Mostly it consists of hack propagandists taking pro and anti war positions to gain the upper hand over one another, parly to bolster their 'credibility' as commentators but also to vent spleen in such a way that draws media attention to them. and advances their careers.

As with Hitchens and Galloway proving their critics were all craven and morally stunted grotesques or 'renegades' from the 'true cause' excites and etertains jaded Westerners who crave some kind of cause to fight for to escape the teduim of the banal consumerism of Blair's Britain.

In short, when it comes down to it, it is all about them, about what Freud termed rationalisation, a trend increased by the obvious powerlessness felt by leftists in the West following the perceived triumph, temporary or otherwise , of global capitalism

It's curious that Hitchens wrote about the tendency of anti-war activists to rationalise Islamist terrorism.

Some of them, in my view do, and Hitchens had a point about them as did Francis Wheen in his polemic How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, especially with regards Seumas Milne's article after 9/11 ( They just can't see why they are hated ).

However, using the rationalisation of terrorism by those who opposed war to prove a pro-war case that has, in practice backed up criminal and illegal actions such as the war in Iraq is stupid and failed to engage with the obvious fact it was about energy security.

It's no better than those Orwell criticised in Notes on Nationalism who refuse to look at facts first, those cocksure partisans who want to tell you the way the world process is inexorably working towards the ultimate triumph of their own worldview.

It isn't that the 'decent left or Hitchens unconditionally apologise for US or UK power unconditionally. It is that US or Uk power is judged according to whether it advances causes they think worthy. Ultimately it boils down to a rationalisation of their own powerlessness over events.

The same is true of crowing ideologues in the Stop the War Coalition who spout slogans to ramp up outrage, upgrade their own media profile and carrers folling the demise of their own favoured power unit in the Soviet Union. eg George Galloway & Andrew Murray.

Many people get pleasure from detesting hypocrisy and double standards of Western statesmen because ultimately it acts as a convenient way of avoiding the fact that their own living standards are propped up by the control over oil. Contructive alternatives are seldom advanced because it is a bit boring.

It is much better to pretend Afghanistan and Iraq are issues somewhat akin to the Spanish Civil war and to fake Orwell's moral stance without possesing his ability to grapple with inconvenient facts or to understand that not every conflict is a simplistic rerun of the 1930s and 1940s.

Much of this has to do with the parochial nature of global progressive politics that still takes it for granted that the West, for good or ill, has the ability to determine world politics. That leads 'decents' to fall in with the USA as the least worst choice for global hegemon.

In the case of Chomsky or Pilger it leads them to see any power that opposes the USA to be necessarily on the side of freedom, no matter whether such liberation movements from the NLF to Hizbollah contain a propensity towards repression and illiberalism through their faith in Rousseau's 'general will.'

None of this has been brought out by Kahn-Harris's article because it just passes on a superficial precis of the divisions between these polemicists who' lets face it, are going to be largely forgotten in the coming decades because they failed to understand the times they lived in.

Written in Krakow Poland on Monday, 19 October 2009

Fake Orwell Impersonators-Introducing Peter Bracken

The Guardian continues on it's "Comment is Free" site to offer more of the same: no real facts or deeper reporting on the real reasons for Britain's involvement in the Afghanistan War and appalling articles by so called "pro-liberation leftists". This is Orwellian language for those who rationalise resource wars by recourse to nominally left wing ideas.

The worst one so far has been written by a pompous individual who lacks even the intelligence of Christopher Hitchens, some nonentity called Peter Bracken who got rewarded with a being able to pen article for it at shortly after I was banned for Comment is Free for drawing a parallel between the disproportionate fuss over the theft of the Auschwitz sign and Saakashvili's demolition of the Red Army Monument in Kutaisi in Georgia.

Bracken writes,

I write as a supporter of the left. That might strike some interlocutors as delusional, but that's only because the authentic left renounces everything the deluded left has embraced. And in embracing an illiberal perspective on world politics it has – I believe – forfeited its right to membership of the left. The term "deluded", in other words, not only refers to a wanton disregard for the values of the left, it also suggests that those afflicted by it no longer belong where they think they belong.

The attribution of delusion is ruinously simple to sustain. That's because, at heart, this section of the left denies the mainstay of the authentic left's agenda: liberalism.

The deluded left occludes the self-evident power of this most potent expression of civilisation by applying the prefix "neo", or conflating it with capitalism, both of which attempt to sustain another obfuscation: that liberalism is but a fig leaf for imperialism. By which circuitous route we arrive at the nub of the deluded left's unprincipled bête noire: the west.

But a left that aligns itself against the west cannot be a progressive force, especially one which vents its opposition by finding cause with the grotesque illiberalism of theocratic and proto-fascist regimes.

Bracken the gives evidence of this,

The evidence is legion:

In the morally depleted rationalisations that "explained" 9/11 (the US had got its comeuppance).

In the contrast between the excoriating criticism of Israel and the understanding accorded the vicious antisemitism of Hamas.

In the apologia for the genocidal, ethnic cleansing regime of Serbia's former President Milosevic.

In the twisted logic that casts Iran's pro-democracy movement as a US-inspired neocolonial threat, and which induces it to remain silent in the face of despicable human rights abuses.

In the fanciful opinion – expressed only recently by Seumas Milne – that China, far from being an exemplar of human rights abuses on a colossal scale, is in fact an exemplary bulwark against a rapacious, capitalist hegemony.

And, above all, in the singularly depressing capacity of the deluded left to overlook every nook and cranny of fundamentalist oppression because "who are we to preach?" The bogeyman of moral relativism, hinged remorselessly to anti-westernism, is surely the fulcrum of this left's delusion.

The term delusional left has some merit in describing those "anti-war" types who are not, in fact, at all "anti-war" but on anti-Imperialist war, condemners of "bourgeois-liberal" militarism. As was Leon Trotsky before he and the Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917 and created a militaristic state based on One Party Totalitarian rule.

Such deluded left wingers include those on the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist left who still continue to dominate what they consider the mass protest against Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars which are equally supported by deluded figures on the liberal left such as Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen.

Instead of indulging in theological disputes about what are sinful "leftists" and the ones with the "correct line" few on the pro-war left ( those supporting "humanitarian intervention" ) have looked at the empirical evidence but supported US superpower rather like Stalinist fellow travellers had blind faith in the USSR.

Bracken has a point that hypocrisy and doublethink on the "anti-war left" is seldom appreciated, the fact that whilst Pilger lambasts Britain for trading with Burma, his hero Hugo Chavez blocked sanctions against the military junta there. Censorship by omission indeed. Chavez also aligns with Iran.

But the fake labels being bandied around in these internal squabble within What's Left of the Western left are part of the problem ( What's Left being Nick Cohen's punning title of an abysmas boof in 2005 ).. The fact is that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an oil grab and Western foreign policy in Afghanistan is about energy security.

Yet screaming that "it's all about the oil" and greedy corporations is, however, also a delusion. The West, including those who oppose wars, seldom offer constructive alternatives to oil over dependency. Yet their everyday lives depend on this oil imperialism. So this is the issue that needs to be addressed.

It's interesting that all those who pretend towards some "decent left" are deluded that Orwell can be cited as a model of moral clarity. But Orwell lived at a particular time of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism which only has partial relevance to the post-Cold War realities the West faces.

True, many mere "leftists" are what he called "transferred nationalists". Bored and depressed by the failure of revolutionary Marxism, they have turned desperately to 'identity' politics, of trying to transfer hope from a diminished working class in the West to Islamism as a global revolutionary challenge.

Yet Islamism is not one monolithic threat as Bracken would have people believe, as if the complexity of conflicts from Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan can be boiled down to a simplistic narrative of "us" versus the barbarians who present some new 'seamless totalitarian threat'.

That was Michael Gove's phrase in Celsius 7/7 and what is so sinister about UK foreign policy is the lack of independent thought being given to intractable dillemas. The fact is that both traditional conservative caution has gone, the coherence of the left fractured and political liberalism in retreat.

All we get from polemicists who, lets face it, have no real power over events, is asinine discussions often with very Orwellian language. Having the "anti-war" left led by repellent sympathisers of the USSR like Murray, Galloway et al is bound to put people off trying to re-invigorate real democracy in the UK.

On the other hand nothing is served by the messianism of the Trotskyist left having metastasised into the apocalyptic form of progressive Utopianism espoused by those like Miliband, Hichens, Cohen, Berman et al which supports some "pro-liberation left" using state power in places like Iraq.

It is possible to think that both are as bad as each other as remnant Trotskyists accuse those in New Labour of apostasy or "selling out" but those who continue to venerate the Utopianism of Trotsky in 2010 sold out their right to be regarded as democrats long ago .

Terms like "anti-war", "pro-liberation left", delusional left" etc etc are all framing devices used to try and create a mood of fitting the facts to the prescriptions of a creed. After all, few want to be seen as "pro-war" or "imperialist" on the left. So those like Norman Geras brand themselves "pro-liberation".

Even words like "progressive" are now mendacious as few want to be seen on the left as anti-Progress was what is at stake here are two rival interpretations of an Enlightenment secular creed that is both self absorbed and parochial. The changing and more dangerous world needs better thinking.

The only figure on the social democratic left that still retains moral clarity and integrity is Tony Judt whose brilliant Ill Fares the Land ( 2010) excoriates both the reflexive "transferred nationalists" and the liberal armchair war mongers who hitched themselves to a neoconservative war

Iraq was fought as Judt states, by those deluded that it was for their purposes. It was not .And that is the delusion Bracken ought to be concentrating his fire on, not a bunch of remnant Respect cranks and SWP fanatics with zero impact beyond being noisy and rather irrelevant. But still given space in the Guardian.

Tony Judt wrote a seminal essay On the Strange Death of Liberal America in 2006 for the LRB , later reprinted in his brilliant collection of essays Reappraisals, which is closer to the . liberal social democratic politics of Orwell. To understand Brackens "position" one need merely read it to understand him as a feebler version of Hitchens.

For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance.

They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear.

The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war.

Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.

Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.

In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy.

Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

Plus the facts pertaining to the actual continuing war in Iraq, the Great Game, and the building of the TAPI pipeline make pipe dreams of the shifting expedient falsehoods used to rationalise the war there. True, "Enlightened self interest" could be citied. But the self interest is merelt rationalised by recourse to secular Enlightenment doctrines.

But even then the main aim is to get the TAPI completed before Obama's re-election. The absurd notion that can be done whilst winning a War of Drugs which funds the Taliban to attack the areas where the pipeline will run through ensure the delusionary left is the one Bracken supports.

It is quite possible to criticise the liberal left's trend towards messianism and fake Orwell "decent left poses" simply by countering it with the empirical evidence that is routinely censored from mainstream media. Afghanistan is a geopolitical conflict, a resource war.It was not fought for "humanitarian" reasons.

The humanitarian aspects have barely been backed up with real investment as it is in any case impossible to transplant liberal secular democracy there by force of arms. Ethical realism demands a satisfactory withdrawal of troops which wil not be disastrous for people in Afghanistan and not tedious point scoring.

But to understand the war we need more access to the real facts of why it has been fought. The TAPI is a fact but the policy of oil diversification is seldom mentioned. If not why not? It's not a conspiracy theory. It is mentioned as an explicit aim by US think tanks e.g The Heritage Foundation.