The Call of the Caliphate in Britain: Why British Jihadists Fight in Syria.

The rise of IS in Syria and Iraq and the evident barbarity it revels in, from social media depictions of  enemies being machine gunned into open death pits, the beheading American journalists and threatening to exterminate or convert Christians and killing Yazidis, has caused some to be 'bewildered'.

Yvonne Ridley certainly claims to be 'baffled'. When asked about ISIS, Respect Party member and Islamist propaganda hack opined, as if knowing her exact stance was going to be a matter of pressing public importance in Britain,

'There are many reasons why I've not spoken out against ISIS. For a start, I'm not sure who it is, where it came from or how it is funded. I've not seen such a militarily- and strategically-savvy fighting force emerge in the Middle East before, other than the highly disciplined and much feared Hezbollah. I, like many others, want to know a little bit more about ISIS before making public comments'

So Ridley wasted hundreds of words 'taking her stance' and switching the topic to Israel half way through when IS has nothing to do with Israel. For someone who, like George Galloway, is a champion of Hizbollah it's odd that she so clearly wants President Assad removed when Hizbollah is a staunch ally of Assad.

The laughable thing about Ridley is that Galloway, the Respect MP for Bradford West, is actually a strong backer of Assad against the Sunni jihadists ranged against him, mostly because of the idea that the US created ISIS by supporting Sunni militant fighters against the Alawite Shia dynasty Assad belongs to.

Ridley cannot resist a conspiracy theory though. One of the most popular is that ISIS is part of a devious plot by the US and Israel to 'destabilise' Iraq ( as if it was not unstable enough without the US intervening once more in Iraq ), part of a CIA/ Mossad scheme to divide and rule Iraq against Iran.

Ridley has an alternatibe plot scenario 'The former head of the British Army says that the West should sit down and negotiate with Assad to get rid of ISIS, but what if ISIS was created by Assad and his ally Iran, which has members of the elite Republican Guard in parts of Syria?'

'As crazy as it sounds, that would explain why Nouri Al-Maliki's Iraqi army fell away so easily in the face of ISIS leaving behind a massive arsenal of weapons for the militia to use. It is virtually inconceivable for a trained fighting force to leave all of its kit behind before doing a runner, just as it's virtually inconceivable that a crack fighting force like ISIS could emerge from a rag tag bunch of ill-disciplined rebel fighters buoyed-up by disaffected youngsters from Europe and beyond'.

It sounds insane because it is insane and has no basis in reality. However, if the task is to try to rationalise away the depth and extent to which the Islamic State is a direct reflection of a strand of Islamist thinking and practice, then it is clear that Ridley would want to pretend ISIS has no basis in the world view she holds.

Mona Siddiqui, a professor of Islamic studies and public understanding at the University of Glasgow, writes on British jihadists in Syria that 'we in the west feel bewildered by their ferocity and brutality' and then goes on to write, a very uneasy way, the following,

'In the UK, the fear that Isis have attracted hundreds of British men to fight in the region has reignited the question of integration and radicalisation among younger British Muslims. But perhaps what is more chilling this time is the way many of these men, who have gone over to fight, have unflinchingly assumed the role of thug and tyrant given the first opportunity....Their narrative may well be wrapped up in the familiar language of jihad and "fighting in the cause of Allah", but it amounts to little more than destruction of anything and anyone who doesn't agree with them'.

This is obfuscation again. The barbarism of British jihadists comes from the ideology and is reinforced by the barbarism of war. This experience leads them towards enacting a  greater depravity that was within them as a consequence of the ideology that firstly allowed them to rationalise the impulse towards killing and death.

The fact 'John the Jihadist' beheaded the American journalist is hardly surprising: it is meant to be shocking but it's not if the purpose of the murder is understood, that there is a 'method to the madness' and that it lies within the need to use a maximum of terror to instill submission or awe in the enemy.

The demonstration of ISIS savagery is meant to show that this is a form of revenge for the war that the US and the West started against the Muslim World, to make plain that these sorts of killings are an inevitable consequence of Western foreign policy just as much as Lee Rigby's murder in London was.

So Siddiqui has ignored the deep emotional appeal of ISIS's ideology to obfuscate the role of Islamist discourse within Britain, a form of 'political religion' that indeed does pit a "purified" and purifying version of Islam against both the West and its legacy through secular leaders and the West's allies in the region.

The irony is that IS has gained ground because of its finance came from private donors in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as part of a quest to defeat the Shia Alawite Syrian leader Assad. Now they make money from illegal oil sales and robbing banks. It's a combination of gangsterism and deranged ideology.

But the West and anything associated with it in the Middle East are thus Infidels ( e.g the Christians being subjected or slaughtered ) and or else Hypocrites and both are targets for the foot soldiers of IS. This appeals to young British Islamists who regard the West as the root cause of all global problems.

To a certain extent, this idea is propagated by non-Islamist organisations that eschew the complexity of world politics and reduce complicated problems down to the idea the West is the Big Evil , the demonic 'system' that needs to be fought against until its power is destroyed.

The so called 'anti-war' movement in the form of the Stop the War Coalition is actually a front for revolutionary activists who would regard IS as wholly a product and reaction to Western Imperialism: whether Al Qaida operatives or IS foot soldiers all are denied an agency of their own.

It is this denial of moral responsibility that enables radicalised militant Islamists to regard themselves romantically as dark avenging angels, committed to kill not because they have bloodlust but because the sheer iniquity of the Western dominated world order evil made them do it.

There's a need to face facts. IS reflects a 'retrograde discourse' within Islam as regards the Caliphate, an idea that acts as a sort of ideological utopia for alienated Sunni Muslims and that in Syria and Iraq has gained ground because of the weakness of state authority in the northern parts of both lands.

ISIS has realised a Caliphate that has transcended the boundaries created by the France and Britain back in 1916. The reason semi-educated Islamists without ego security went to Syria to fight is because it offers a strength of purpose and certainty, freedom from the meaningless freedom of the West.

In the large cities and conurbations of Western Europe, there is no formative experience and no experience of membership beyond consumerism and the identification with consumer branded goods. With a mediocre education system, Islamists gain knowledge and membership from radical groups.

'Islam is the solution' is a regular placard slogan: the Caliphate is a standard part of Islamist discourse. The appeal of this is similar to those of the secular utopias of communism in the 1960s, whether Castro's Cuba or some Trotskyist alternative to the disappointing reality of 'actually existing socialism'.

The new Caliphate has the appeal of the communist utopia promised by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The paradise was postponed only by the hideous plots to destabilise it by the Western imperialists. So too the Caliphate was abolished after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Arab lands partitioned.

The Caliphate is posited as a mythological entity that would unite all Sunni Muslims once more and its rise is seen as the death knell for secularism, Godlessness and the Western imperialism that brought it all about. Fighting in Syria or within the belly of the beast are apiece with the same jihad.

The nihilism of those supposedly educated at British universities and going to fight in Syria has not seen them transform from naive idealists into brutalised psychopaths by the war alone. It was inherent within the ideology that posits the Caliphate as a realisable Utopia here on earth and that demands blood must be shed.

Syrian Crisis: On the Usless British 'Stop the War Coalition'.

Thursday's vote by MPs to bar the way to British involvement in a war against Syria is a vindication of the mass anti-war movement in this country over the last decade. Parliamentarians of all parties claimed that they had "learned the lessons of Iraq". Better late than never, of course.

The problem with the Stop the War Coalition is that it is led by the dregs of the hard left who have rigid ideological motives for opposing any war other than those which are against 'imperialism'. The very term 'anti-war' is deeply Orwellian as nobody wants to to be 'pro-war'.

Official dissimulation and spin from governments is as inimical to a democracy as the depressing fact the StWC leadership is less interested in war because it means 'more death' but because it is a great propaganda opportunity to harness in support of its underlying hard left agenda.

Andrew Murray remains a supporter of one of the world's most lethal totalitarian regimes in history the USSR which throughout its brutal and democidal existence brought militarism, the one party state, labour camps, political repression to an apogee and an unwanted empire to Eastern Europe after 1945.

If that had no bearing on the leadership of the StWC or the desire to channel 'outrage' at wars branded as 'liberal intervention' by those for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars towards 'anti-imperialist' agitation, then the propaganda of the StWC could just be seen as mere populist annoyance at 'warmongering'.

But the fact is that those pursuing wars of 'humanitarian intervention' are not pantomime style villains 'concealing' their 'imperialism' with pleasant sounding words. All Murray has done as a leader in the StWC is demonstrate the spin doctors obsession with framing and fixing the debate.

Take this,

'The "special relationship" and "liberal interventionism" have alike been exposed as preoccupations of the establishment – indeed, only a section of it now – with no democratic mandate underpinning them. The possibility is now open for Britain playing a different role in the world, breaking with the policies and preoccupations of imperialism'.

The US is an imperial power but Britain is not. Moreover, many nations participated in the 'liberal intervention' in Afghanistan for reasons that have never been completely understood. No war is ever only about one thing but much evidence points to most wars since 1990 being resource wars.

Murray hypocritically condemns wars as being only a product of establishment preoccupations and 'imperialism'. But it seems clear most of the liberal interventions were partly about bringing democracy to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. These were wars advocated according to enlightened self interest.

No foreign policy ever has an exact 'democratic mandate' as if all people should be given a direct vote on whether war should happen or not. It is also difficult to understand why that is so important to Murray in any case given the StWC leaders have a history of supporting dictatorships.

Yet foreign policies based on 'democracy promotion' are intended to promote democracy and open access to the resources that enable the vast majority of consumers in the West to enjoy their high octane lifestyles. In order to criticise foreign policy one first has to understand what is really at stake.

The myth that military interventions are only 'all about oil' and corporate profit is a comforting one because in means the political elites-or Them-are wholly responsible and those who are not members of an elite would not benefit from stable or falling oil prices and gas.

Many people probably really value the economy more than morality. Where do you think the gas is going to come from ? As North Sea gas depletes, Qatar has become a main supplier to Western economies of LNG. Qatar backs the anti-Assad insurgents as do Saudi Arabia so the West supports them.

If they at least knew the facts, they might change their mind. But that the geopolitics of energy resources and pipeline routes are a major factor in the calculations of the main regional and global players in the Middle East is just not mentionable in front of the children.

The StWC also has no interest in an intelligent consideration of what military interventions are about. It had no clear 'position' on Syria and did not even care much until it seemed possible that Britain might join the US in intervening. As such the StWC had zero influence in the Parliamentary vote on Syria.

That is why Murray is attempting to take the credit for 'stopping the war'. As usual, self important StWC leaders are trying to justify their usefulness as any careerist politician, spin doctor or hack journalist does. There is no chance of averting future conflicts unless people understand how the world actually works.

That means going beyond rant filled embittered diatribes about 'warmongering' and 'hypocrisy' because in some sense unless a person is prepared to live without a car, not fly Easy Jet, never buy out of season fruit or advocate nuclear power then the possibility of conflicts over access to oil and gas resources is set to stay.

As Tolstoy wrote “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” The constant finger jabbing accusations about the 'hypocrisy' on the political elites' as opposed to 'ordinary people' is a common populist one made by those outside the established political system

Anyone can oppose wars whose origins are, in fact, not all identical or reducible to 'our imperialism'. The StWC was set up to 'stop' the 2001 Afghanistan War and, in fact, any war, But the proposed missile strikes, whatever one thinks of them would not amount to a war in themselves.

Murray does not understand the nature of the Syrian Crisis. That becomes quite obvious when

'This is the case in Syria, too, where the crying need is not for more bombing by anybody, but for a concerted drive for a Syrian-based political solution. The starting points have to include the west abandoning its cynical policy of basically prolonging a civil war which it wants neither side to win.'

This is not the situation.

The entire foreign policy of Washington on Syria has been and is about taking sides in the civil war and supporting its allies in Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia who are backing the militias fighting against Assad. The only reason it does not want Assad 'to go' is that Washington fears chaos and Al Qaida.

The intention behind the threat of missile strikes is to convince Assad that he will never win the civil war and to compel him to negotiate from the position of weakness at any forthcoming Geneva Conference. That would ensure, so the idea goes, that more pro-Western members of the SNC take power.

The reason is that the Western powers, primarily the US, France and Britain are strong allies and 'strategic partners' of Qatar and Saudi Arabia who support anti-Assad insurgents absurdly referred to as 'the rebels' against 'the regime'. Qatar supplies a large proportion of LNG to the West.

Iran, of which there is no mention here, is the regional enemy of Saudi Arabia and supports Assad and Hizbollah in the civil war. Washington does not want Iran to extend its influence through Iraq and Syria towards the Mediterranean, not least by building a gas pipeline from the South Pars gas field in the Gulf.

Ultimately, the geopolitical wrangle is crucially about the oil and gas supplies and regional influence. Qatar wants to build a gas pipeline between the same gas field that it shares with Iran. The US does not want Iraq moving towards Tehran through the proposed construction of its pipeline.

It is not possible to have a credible organisation that opposes the drive towards military intervention unless its leading figures understand the nature of these geopolitical struggles. If Britain cannot produce better and more sensible opponents to the drift towards a future of resource wars they will go ahead regardless.

It is lamentable that Murray is the deputy leader of a 'Stop the War' movement with a 'stance' on Syria does not even mention the alleged chemical weapons attack which, if it were proven to have been used by Assad, is the justification being used by Washington for why it should intervene militarily.

The suspicion that Cameron was leading Britain into 'Another Iraq' by preempting the findings of the UN inspectors does not, thereby, mean that the situation is directly the same as Murray is trying to pretend. The spin was similar but the actual situation is hardly 'the same'.

'It is now clear, as indeed it was in 2003, that most people have no wish to embroil Britain militarily in the Middle East, that they want the government to abide by international law and the authority of the UN, and that standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the US come what may has no purchase on their views or feelings.'

Obviously, 'most people' did not want Britain to invade Iraq or to by dragged in to a potential region wide conflict. Nor did they seem to want even the idea of a 'limited' and 'proportionate' response using cruise missiles. But, most of all, neither they nor many MPs thought the evidence was there.

However, the Labour amendment was about, among other considerations and conditions, about waiting for the findings of the UN inspectors. 'Most people' were not convinced of Cameron's case for war and the same id true of Labour, except Miliband did not actually rule out military intervention if CWs were used.

The fact is Murray would have opposed any military strike irrespective of the specific issue of chemical weapons but he does not want to draw attention to that. Even so, unless a person is a complete pacifist ( and nobody who supports the ex-USSR or dictatorship is ) then his stance on CWs is needed.

The reason for this is that no organisation can be a 'Stop the War' coalition' unless it understands what the case for the war they actually want to stop is. Murray nowhere engages in whether the case for intervention is valid or invalid, justified or unjustified. Other leading figures he works with, though, do have views on CWs.

The StWC also has George Galloway MP as a prominent member of a group absurdly termed a 'broad coalition' by Murray. On Iran's Press, TV George Galloway claims 'his theory' is that Israel gave Al Qaida the chemical weapons so that they would use them and bring in the West to destroy Syria.

"If there has been use of chemical weapons, it was al-Qaida. Who gave al-Qaida chemical weapons?...Here's my theory. Israel gave them the chemical weapons..If there has been any use of nerve gas, it is the rebels that used it."

Now this sort of conspiracy theory mongering may well advance Galloway's media career as a left wing shock jock but it discredits sensible opposition to wars that need to be based on evidence and making a strong case against wars on the rationales being given for them.

This includes countering official 'public diplomacy' with another form of misleading propaganda that relies upon distortion, a vision of the US as representing some cosmic power of Evil that can manipulate events to its exclusive and malign will, where protests to 'Stop an Iraq' War have 'stopped' it in Syria.

I have dealt already with this distortion of fact with regards what Washington's foreign policy is and it certainly is not about deliberately and intentionally prolonging a civil war that it has not a great deal of control over. To pretend the US does have control over it is, ironically, to accept the idea the US is omniscient.

This is the basis for the line about 'the West' which is said to be 'basically prolonging' the Syrian Civil War because it 'cynically' wants neither side to win. As this is factually untrue, the cynicism is Murray's because he is simply not interested in the Syrian Civil War for any other reason than to blame the West for it happening.

The reason for this crude propaganda line is that Murray just must 'prove' that the Syrian Civil War is not about sectarian enmities between Shia and Sunni Muslims or ethnic tensions that are present in Syria itself because that might upset the supporters in the Muslim Association of Britain.

So in order to formulate the Correct Public Doctrine, Murray spins the line that the civil war can only be solved politically if 'the West' stops trying to 'prolong' as if that were, in fact, 'Western' policy' without mentioning the fact that it is Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Iran who are backing the rival sides directly.

Using casual phrases such as the West 'basically prolonging' the civil war is a propaganda assumption designed to pathetically keep up the 'Islamophobic West' line ( despite a number of Syrians wanting Western intervention ) and to give the false hope that if protest can stop intervention it stops the problem.

Yet the entire way a very serious matter of war has been hijacked by the same well organised dreary fanatics in the StWC is one obvious reason why there is no intelligent alternative to the ever greater move towards military engagement in volatile oil rich lands or those strategically adjacent to them over the past decade.

Why George Galloway is a Demogogue.

There is a tendency due to his publicity stunts and hyperbole to regard George Galloway, Repect MP for Bradford as a "character" and some sort of "working class hero " or voicebox for the oppressed Muslims of Britain ( never , of course,  those Muslims in less fortunate lands murdering one another in scores for reasons entirely unrelated to any actions of "the West" )

Now, as opposed to taking Galloway not-so-seriously, and as a mere joke, his various "positions" need to be explained for the entire notion of what he term the "Bradford Spring" of 2012 is important in it's feeble attempt to yoke together the disaffected in "the Muslim World" with Britain. This makes it no less farcical, of course, but his erstwhile followers tend to take themselves seriouslywhen they listen to and amplify  Galloway's propaganda riffs uncritically.

Galloway's  Respect, the very name being designed to appeal to the right on streetwise nature of disaffected British ' yoofs', shows that the entire political platform he stands on is a sort of shitty rehash of certain themes of 1960s anti-Vietnam counter-cultural rebellion. This is shown by the contrived nature of Galloway's politcal-cum-autobiographical book "I'm Not the Only One", a line taken from John Lennon's dire and dreary dirge "Imagine".

Bizarrely, for someone lauding a pacifist peace song one moment, he tends to extol violence. As when he commented on Sky News that the Israeli IDF were getting a "bloody good hiding" from Hizbollah during the conflict of 2006. Whatever the conflict's causes there, such language of lip smacking  aggression is both vulgar and unbecoming of honourable people. But it appeals to the brutal instincts of certain working class Muslims in gritty de-industrialised nothern mill towns and students.

Galloway is not much more than a rapacious political entrepreneur who saw a gap in the market for ideals vacated by the bland nonentities in Parliament as politicians became reduced to PR middlemen acting between Britain's dysfunctional casino economy, the "markets" and the people. By posing as being an extra-parlimentary activists yet within Parliament he can pose as an outsider to the new "politician-as-celebrity" trend so common in Britain today.

Unfortunately for his mesmerised fans, they seemed to have been largely unaware that Galloway is simply fiddling them as well no less. Only he has  carved out a career as a left-wing show jock demagogue that's hardly relevant to either being an MP nor a serious democratic reformer. But that's not important. In boring Britain, student SWP activists and deracinated Muslims are itching for outrage, the latter usually due to the low level of their education ( as is obvious too with their BNP rivals ).

After all, as already mentioned, politics itself has been downgraded to part of Britain's pathetic "entertainment economy" where MPs are little better, very often, than celebrities. Galloway has nothing radical to offer other than as selling political "passion" and "conviction", rolled around with the Scots accent to give an image of Red Clydeside radicalism. That radicalism used to be transfered to anti-imperial nationalists as the IRA ( as with the slimy newt loving ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone ).

George Galloway is a colossal demagogue. His position is essentially a crude populist version of old hard left Bolshevist propaganda tropes about "imperialism" wrapped up in Islamist draping and boomed out to those whose background and stunted semi-educated worldview absorb it as it appeals to their emotional resentments. In that way he has much in common with a number of journalists who harbour a colossal vanity to be lauded by "yoof" such as journalists John Pilger.

With the decline of universities and the expansion of mediocre institutions under the disastrous government of Tony Blair, mediocre students, often members od Islamic radical associations, simply do not engage in public life or discussion but amongst one another where anti-Western hatred is standard and the propaganda culled from the relevant cult gurus and passed around uncritically. Such individuals, simply by the fact they oppose bad foreign policies does not axiomatically make them right.

On the contrary it leads to those organisations controlled only a coterie of cretinous would be jihadists from places like Bradford and Birmingham whose fantasies of hate and outrage tie in with those of immature student activists simarly lacking in knowledge and ego security.As well as a dire education system that swelled the numbers of dimwits into the "polyversities who would have been better off sweating out their energies in grubby fast food chicken outlets.

The evident absurdity of Galloway's grandstanding on international politics to gain domestic Muslim votes is shown in the failure to take any sort of coherent position on Syria. The double standards of Britain's shoddy realpolitik in the Middle East is evident. But pointing out obvious double standards is not enough.

Not least, as George Galloway's double standards are often as flagrantly as bad , if not worse, than those he criticises and he has no position of moral superiority upon which to harangue the nation. True, he doesn't make decisions in foreign policy that can cause the sort of catastrophe Blair unleashed in Iraq. Yet propaganda, if it becomes commonplaces, can become very important. And blanket anti-Westernism is what Galloway has been instrumental in spreading

The facts are :not only that he has shown a demonstrated sympathy to the Soviet Union, a lethal ideological empire that crushed out the lives of millions, but his approach to the Middle East is a sham. For Galloway has been favourable to President Assad and his regime. Yet it is Allawite and against the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood has been anti-imperialist elsewhere and looked on sympathetically by the Muslim Association of Britain and elements of the Muslim Council of Britain. And these have provided key allies in Respect.

Now, the Respect Party has essentially aligned in solidarity with Hizbollah's struggle against Israel. Unfortunately for the Party Line, it gets complicated as Hizbollah is an ally of Iran which is supported by Assad's Syria. After the Arab Spring, the Muslim brotherhood is now powerful in Egypt and for the rebels. So anti-Western hatred can fuel any number of jihadists from jetting off to Syria to fight as "warriors".

So it's clear that though the entire Galloway Line is pure tripe, it is central in becoming a popular part of an uncritical and blind hatred of 'the West'. For the Leader of the "Bradford Spring" , one who laps up "Allah Akhbar " from his deranged mob like followers, is an erstwhile great admirer of Colonel Nasser of Egypt, a secular Arab nationalist whose position on Islamists was to have their leaders executed in the 1960s. Including Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual forebear of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaida.

If British foreign policy is going to be criticised ( as it must for the follies, errors and bungling idiocy of it as regards Afghanistan, the "War on Terror" and Iraq ) it should come, at least, from organised groups of intelligent critics as opposed to a coterie of self-aggrandising cranks, pinheads, fanatic and zealots who want to profit from credulity and stupidity. The inability of public intellectuals and politicians to demolish with precise logic these inchaote positions of hatred is a form of ignorance.

Some Thoughts on Occupy London

'Occupy London has an incredible headquarters at St Paul's, but our movement is bigger than any one site. We know it's away from central London that the impact of the recession is being felt hardest. Moving forward, we intend to prove ourselves with acts of community outreach like our "public repossession" "bank of ideas" in Hackney, to create a truly "big" society. Local groups that have lost their funding are already reconvening in our corridors as we help them in carrying out their vital work.

All over the world, the public is waking up to the fact that the crises of unregulated finance, broken democracy and corrupt institutions will not be solved by those who caused them. Occupy London invites those who feel similarly to take the movement into their own communities: it's time to Occupy Everywhere'.

Occupy London is Fifty Days Old, Naomi Colvin and Bryn Philips in The Guardian, December 4 2011

Occupy London will achieve nothing as it is largely based on the myth of counter culture. It appears as though radical Brighton has just pitched up on the doorstep of St Paul's cathedral to move centre stage so as to seek attention for loony theories that would be ignored if there was no economic crisis.

I went there just over a week ago. The Occupy London squatters are predominantly cranks and depend on the "image" as opposed to the word and debating serious alternatives and constructive proposals. The slogans-"The Revolution will Not be Branded" will be next years corporate coffee mug motto.

Face facts: unless there is a united alternative based on drafting manifestos and conducting vigorous open discussion on this, as have radical reformers throughout English history, such media "events" as Occupy London are merely transient outgrowths of a consumer society of spectacles.

The silliest slogan is the one regarding the 99% versus the elite 1%, a tawdry piece of marketed populism that neatly evades the fact that a vast number of Britons bought into New Labour's debt fuelled consumer boom. No consumer was forced to take out the loans to spend greedily.

The complaints about the expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars likewise never take into consideration they are resource wars. The vast majority of consumers do not want war but they want to drive their cars and maintain the energy intensive lifestyles that make these wars inevitable.

The need in 2012 is to eschew the infantile idea that the world is in chaos because of "Them" as opposed to "Us" only as the economy has tanked out now. Few, apart from those who make a career from protest or are on the fringes of society with nothing to lose anyway, were that interested in this populist guff before the crisis of 2008.

Unless there is this willingness to confront unpleasant realities and be honest about the over dependence of Britain upon easy credit and cheap oil, the acceptance that this is not merely the consequence of rapacious politicians and elites, then there is little prospect of sane and civilised responses to crisis.

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

Obviously, the Wars are paid from our taxes and paid for with lives. Yet they are being fought to preserve lower, falling or at least stable oil prices no less than propping up dictatorships is where it's in Britain's interests. Oil is one thing the market cannot regulate.

In fact, arguments need to be made with regards energy alternatives to oil and first it needs to be understood that resource wars are about not just corporate profits but the addiction to oil in a consumer economy. This should be foremost on any political agenda for constructive reform.

But that would mean having to eschew the moronic feel good rhetoric of the 99% versus the 1% in a toytown revolutionary scenario that bears all the hallmarks of the infantile consumer society that has begotten the Occupy London "movement". As with the elites, pop stars and PR people, it's all about us.

The fact that laptop anarchists wear a V for vendetta comic book Guido Fawkes masks proves this and suggests a blurring between fact and fiction that the best advertisers in the world and the arch PR manipulators could not contrive. Counter culture is consumer culture and consumerism could lead to what J G Ballard called "elective psychopathology".

As regards the Occupy London have to understand it's really all about them, "feel good protest" and "identity". What John Osborne with regards protests in the 1960s called "we-ing" about. They are symptoms of the diseased society of which they affect to be the cure.

Reflections on New Emerging Psychopatholgies.

Some of recent protests such as that against G20 in 2008 and the recent Student Demonstrations had violent elements that made them akin to the bored characters in J G Ballard's recent novels such as Millennium People who want to trash and subvert the over-mediated consumer landscape and find meaning in a meaningless word.

The decline of the left. socialism, conservatism and, increasingly, of political liberalism means that we have left as an ideology is consumerism. History has reached a dead end of banality and narcissistic consumption where values are redundant. Only a form of Lifestyle Anarchism seemed to underpin the students demos, the myth of counterculture.

As J G Ballard wrote,

"People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be....All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs."

The sheer meaninglessness of a society based on the hallucinatory substitute for reality that the vast masses of consumers were prepared to buy into defined the New Labour period of PM's Blair and Brown until the great economic crash of 2008.

Now that the illusions have crashed with the finance system and housing boom, the result is going to be a rejection in certain quarters of the boredom that comes from reducing nearly every aspect of everyday life to nothing more than a series of money transactions.

Ballard believed that this would increasingly be more likely 'only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip."

On the fringes of a deracinated society there are those who harbour a deep frustration that the cloistered 'Metropolitan elites', all on first name terms in the "Westminster Village" just play at politics to give the illusion of brand distinction

That along with greater numbers of semi-educated people who cannot get the status from the jobs they believe their degrees entitle them too are likely in future to reject 'the system' and turn to ideologies that offer a total explanation for the way the world is.

In recent years, universities were becoming recruitment grounds for jihadist-salafi organisations and there is the potential for massive and gratuitous acts of psychopathological violence, just anything that will force the masses to question the 'inauthentic' nature of their existence.

At the G20 demonstrations some of the banners read 'Consumers Suck' : if they fail to respond, it is quite possible that extreme radicals might take to selecting less obviously 'political' targets such as shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, airports and theme parks.

The victims of terror were aiding global capitalism by consuming: their deaths will be a small price to pay if it helps to destroy the fake consumer confidence that keeps the system going and directly causes Third World immiseration and global warming.

Ballard's Millennium People starts off with a bomb explosion at Heathrow that turns out to be the work of a demented paediatrician, Dr Richard Gould who later tell the main character David Markham that the sheer meaninglessness of such an outrage was mostly designed to force people to ask 'why' and create meaning again.

The novel, though, tended to just laugh at the middle class protesters 'the Kropotkins with Pink Gin' and that the "the middle-classes are the new proletariat", and that's the main weakness of the book. Ballard did not know the radicals: just the Guardian reading middle classes.

Millennium People could have included the deracinated Islamists and Class War nihilists, as well as the anti-road protesters and the increasingly psychopathological journalist hacks such as Seumas Milne who rationalise in metaphysical terms every terror threat or terrorist action to push a revolutionary agenda of the hard left and Islamists.

The growth of Islamism in the West and the connections with the New Great Game and energy geopolitics still awaits its novelist.

Nevertheless, a lot of the street carnival protesters are those, as in Ballard's Chelsea Marina who desire to escape the "self-imposed burdens" of civic responsibility and consumer culture by having choreographed street protests and violence as a way of

By only focusing on the trashing of the Royal Bank of Scotland, people are missing the point about the degree to which much of the 'global justice movement' has been hijacked by fanatics craving destruction and to rationalise their resentment as being the "losers" in their own society.

The good anger of wanting to right wrongs and injustice always seems to be eclipsed by the organisational dominance of those motivated by hatred dressed up in humanitarian concern: a look at the G20 Meltdown groups shows the usual 'hard left' sects such as the SWP with a craving for revolutionary destruction more than having any real constructive alternative.

Just as the 1968 insurrections fomented a climate of opinion in which the Angry Brigades and the Baader Meinhof were created, so too will the growing radicalism given impetus by the crash of 2008 potentially lead to the spawning of radical psychopathological terror groups: only

Unlike the 1970s, a decade of terrorism, however, there are in the second decade of the twenty-first century the added ethnic and sectarian tensions bred by wars in 'the Muslim World' and the growth of Islamism. Apocalyptic politics based on an interpretation of Islam is spreading into the cities of Europe.

As Ballard claimed,

"There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that make up our national consciousness. I've tried to nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called psychopathology."

That hunger for apocalyptic violence is a recurrent feature of history and the more people's lives are confined to a mind numbing routine of frenetic work and regulated consumer fun, the more people will turn to violence and nastiness, where whole sections of society feel cut of, separated and full of hatred towards a decadent society

Not least when the cosmetic 'niceness' of Britain as portrayed as a fair and decent society is believed to conceal the global iniquities and inequalities that make meaningless consumer decadence possible and that are screened from perception by the mainstream media that fails to question Western projects to invade Afghanistan or Iraq.

New Designer Nihilism and Creedal Politics.

It is often thought that the viewpoints of deracinated and firebrand radicals on the far left who rant on anti-imperialist platforms do not really matter. Clearly, extra-parliamentary organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party are not that important.

Yet should not be forgotten, however, that George Galloway's Respect Party did win a seat in East London in the elections of 2005 as a coalition between SWP Trotskists and Islamists, one that broke up in 2007.

Recently, I was watching speeches being made at the meeting of a new group termed 'The Equality Movement’, a group including Jody MacIntyre, the disabled activist who was dragged out of his wheelchair by the police during the student demonstrations in December 2010.

An interesting series of speakers from the militant Marxist-Leninist Left as well as Islamists turned up , all united by their shared loathing of the USA and Israel and the Little Satanic minion that is Britain, to talk on the subject of "What is Imperialism ?".

Introduced by a rapper called "Logic", the 5 principles of the Equality Movement were drawn up in big block capital letters,

1. WE BELIEVE IN THE EQUALITY OF ALL PEOPLE; IRRESPECTIVE OF RACE, RELIGION, GENDER OR PHYSICAL ABILITY.

2. WE BELIEVE IN AN EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL PEOPLE, REGARDLESS OF FINANCIAL WEALTH OR FAMILY BACKGROUND.

3. WE OPPOSE THE IDEOLOGY OF CAPITALISM, WHICH STEALS FROM THE POOR AND GIVES TO THE RICH, THEREBY NEGATING ANY POSSIBILITY OF EQUALITY IN OUR SOCIETY.

4. WE OPPOSE THE IDEOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM IN ALL CONTEXTS*, AND SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF OPPRESSED PEOPLES TO STRUGGLE AGAINST IT.

5. WE BELIEVE THAT THE CURRENT BRITISH GOVERNMENT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE PEOPLE, AND THAT THE ACHIEVEMENT OF SUCH A GOVERNMENT IS IMPOSSIBLE UNDER THE CURRENT, UNDEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SYSTEM IN THIS COUNTRY.

* INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE ISRAELI COLONISATION OF PALESTINE, AND THE BRITISH AND UNITED STATES LED OCCUPATIONS OF AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

The aim seems to be to intensify discontent through a propaganda that stimulates outrage, over diverse issues from the conflict between Palestine and Israel to student anger over tuition fees and 'inequality, all rolled into one anti-capitalist and anti-imperial cause.

Yet curiously the anti-imperialists are not always that anti-imperialist if the power bloc of their fantasies is held to be ranged against the USA.

Take the first speaker Seumas Milne. Milne remains in many respects an ardent admirer of the USSR which up until 1991 was the largest and last European Empire. Like Ken Livingstone, he now sees China's superpower as a positive check on US power in a multipolar world.



Another speaker was Tariq Ali, a Trotskyist who supports anti-imperialist Islamists but has forgotten his hero Trotsky's contempt for Islamist movements after Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when opined that "the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at the first puff".

Sharing a platform with them was Dr. Hanan Chehata is a leading contributor to MEMO of which Dr Daud Abdullah is also a leading contributor, the man who claimed in the Istanbul Declaration of 2009 that any perceived collaboration with Zionists should be resisted with violence.

"The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing a substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity"

The wording is important as it points towards Islamism of the kind that Hamas represents as part of a global movement that can take out those it defines as "standing" with the "Zionist entity" through violence.

That clearly goes further than with Israel as a nation state: it is a jihad that can transcend boundaries, one that ties in with the attempts by other British based militant Islamists to create global politico-religious movements against Western nations from within.

For those who resent and detest the West in its entirety, and not specific foreign and domestic policies, the Israel-Palestine conflict is but one that can exploited to ratchet up hatred and help to create an Islamic hyper identity.

The Istanbul Declaration was signed by those considered "respectable" tribunes of Islamism in Britain including Mohammed Sawalha, an organiser of Islam Expo, the huge annual gathering of Muslims in east London.

It was signed also by Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannoushi of the Tunisian an-Nahdhah party whose daughter Soumaya Ghannoushi writes for The Guardian and claims mendaciously that the party is liberal and democratic.

Essentially, such activists want to use propaganda to create resistance to "imperialism" from within Britain by using the veiled threat of violence to persuade the British government that it needs to listen to such "community leaders" or else face violence from those resisting imperialism both at home and abroad.

That is welcomed by those radicals who think Islamism is usefully anti-imperialist to regenerate their hard left political agenda. As Lizzie Cocker stated,

“Unprecedented numbers of largely Arab and Muslim youth flooded into the streets...and were met by brutal suppression by the state. The government tried to portray these people as thugs and louts, just as they had criminalised the people of Gaza. Just as Israel’s leaders thought they could bomb the people of Gaza into submission, the British government believed they could bully and intimidate an increasingly angry Muslim youth into submission, at a time when our imperialist wars are escalating and spreading into other countries.”

Clearly Cocker is trying to maintain that British police policing demonstrations are paralleled by the IDF in order to ramp up hatred in a way that could breed violence and terrorism. For if the British state is considered equally as repressive towards Muslims as Israel, then perhaps the only way to redress that is violence, even terrorism.

Which, as in Palestine, would mean suicide bombing. It would never be justified, of course, but merely a response to intolerable oppression caused by the British state. This is playing politics in a way that could prove lethal on the streets of Britain as well as rationalising such violence with pseudo-moral zeal.

The concept of a seamless ideology of rapacious imperialism from Gaza to London being imposed is potentially inflammatory and psychopathological. Yoking together student demos with Hamas as "resistance" is both silly and sinister. But, even if silly, it needs to be challenged instead of written off merely as cranky left wing sectarian politics.

For increasingly, as university entrance has grown exponentially, without there being an improvement in quality, then there will be increasing number of semi educated people who hold to these paranoid and shrill and intolerant world views.

Partly this is to give excitement to mundane lives in a stultifyingly boring consumer society in the manner satirised by J G Ballard in his novels. But it also reveals what Ballard called new emerging psychopathologies whereby global struggles are sought to give purpose and identity in a Britain increasingly bereft of it.

Indeed, the issue of Israel and Palestine is not connected to the student demonstrations unless the aim of Leninist vanguard elites is to build up a revolutionary momentum by exploiting ethnic and religious tensions within "the Muslim Community" and others deemed to be "alienated".

The irony is that certain Islamist movements do not much care for atheist Leninists or SWP hacktivists and others on the fringe left wanting to hijack just any sign of discontent to "build the party" or diminish Western power.

Which is what Islamist movements want and to that extent the secular atheist revolutionaries such as Milne and Ali et al act as "useful idiots" in performing that role as Islamists in practice detest them in the Middle East but need prominent names such as Milne, a big figure at the Guardian, to push the anti-imperialist line for them.

Though Islamists despise Marxism, whilst appropriating certain concepts and propaganda tropes from Third World anti-colonial movements that claimed to be based on Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, they have something in common: the hunger for apocalyptic politics, messianism and hatred for "so-called" Western civilisation.

With the end of the Cold War , those such as Milne had to cast around for another power bloc capable of thwarting the USA, seen as negative embodiment of the Wild West in all its decadent extremity, no matter whether these power's own stance on freedom and human rights has been even worse than the USA ( as was the Soviet Union's )

Milne and those such as George Galloway have found these in Islamist movements which, because against Israel and the USA, are then considered to be united in some global way when they reflect very different regional power struggles.

Ironically, anti-imperialist war activists often accept the neoconservative world view that Islamist movements in the Middle East and secular revolutionary organisations are fighting one common cause.

As with Michael Gove in Celsius 7/7 who absurdly characterised Islamist movements within Britain and the Middle East as "one seamless totalitarian threat", radicals see it as one seamless global justice movement with various tendencies and soft peddle the ideological connections between terrorism and Islamism.

Both positions are absurd and merely serve power political agendas. George Galloway sees Islamist movements as a heroic internationalist cause in so far as they serve Iranian national interests in the Middle East.

Galloway, of course, works for Iran's Press TV . Hence Iranian regional imperialism is not considered in accordance with the Orwellian principle of doublethink. For Iran effectively has an interest in keeping the Israel-Palestine conflict going, one reason Hizbollah has acted as a proxy force in Iranian realpolitik in the Middle East.

Nor is China's Imperialism which, despite Milne wafting it aside in his Equality Movement speech as tedious anf hypothetical at this moment, is real enough in Africa for those living there, in places such as Zimbabwe, where China is backing the dictator in order to get access to natural resources.

The difference between the USA and China is that China does not operate according to double standards. It merely offers technology and economic aid to kleptocrats and dictators without the hypocritical concern for human rights.

This is a fact the anti-war or anti-imperialist ideologues never consider: the pathological struggle over access to the resources that fuel economic growth and wealth is not only pursued by the USA but by a number of powers.

The Iraq War was about Western democracy as well as oil in so far as democratic nations must please their citizens and that can be best done through high octane consumerism that people expect as a right.

Imperialism in the case of Iraq was not about profit beyond that which can be made from exchange: the explanation Milne gives for the drive behind imperialism in the Middle East. In fact, it was about geopolitical advantage, control of oil against the growing influence of China, and fears about diminishing global reserves of oil.

The mantra about Iraq being a war for profiting oil corporations is convenient for those living in the West who want to blame governments for securing the oil supplies that underpin their lifestyles.

Yet the question is how many consumers would willingly give up their current level of car use, EasyJet flights and supermarket choices in order to preserve oil and gas and thereby contribute towards the lessening of conflicts over it.

Presumably some of those consumers would have included those who bussed their way down to the anti-war protests in London in March 2003.

That would also include those students protesting against tuition fees, which was also a protest in reality against the increased meaninglessness of education. To pay in full for an education that will not lead to job security or status and, at best, work in a corporation.

The Iraq War for oil was at bottom a resource war to maintain Western living standards for the majority of the people. It was not some rapacious imperialist war disconnected from the citizens of the West simply to benefit an evil elite.

Militant Islamists know that which is why they seek to exploit this contradiction and seldom condemn terrorism without attaching conditions to it, For as horrible as it is, it might be the last tactic left to accelerate tensions within Europe sufficient for radical change to come.

The Idiocy of British Trotskyists.

It is slightly weird that there are still some Trotskyists in Britain who still hero worship Leon Trotsky after the reams of evidence that have come from archives in Moscow in recent years that have confirmed that Trotsky was a brave bad man, though with certain qualities, such as charisma and the ability to write rather well.

More than any other leading Bolshevik, Trotskyists have been fulminating at Service's supposed "hatchet job" on Service's excellent Trotsky: A Biography. In turn each of these ideologues will be dealt with for their cheap invective, cherry picking of quotes and blatant distortion of what Service has written about this mass murdering ideologue.

To begin with here are some hack propagandists I intend to precision skewer for their utter bitterness and outraged self-righteousness and misplaced faith in this supposed revolutionary hero. Most of which seems to pun rather childishly on the name "Service" as merely assert faith in Trotsky rather than deal with the facts.

Peter Taafe, A Dis-Service to Trotsky The Socialist Party/Socialist Alternative.org
Paul Hampton, A Hatchet Job on Trotsky ( Worker's Liberty )
David North, In the Service of Historical Falsification ( WSWS )
David North, Historians in the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s Biography of Trotsky
Hillel Ticktin, In Defence of Leon Trotsky.

Peter Taafe


This rather tedious and unintelligent man does nothing to engage with the substance of Service's biography other than express common places that re-iterate the mythology of Trotsky as well as moaning about how long the book is, as if that was somehow in itself an argument against it.

"This book is very thick - running to 600 pages - but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service's tome".

The only thing which is very thick is Taafe who seems to think that anything Service writes should be treated with scepticism simply because he conducted a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institute which is considered parts of the US Establishment and hence necessarily invalidates anything he has to say.

To this fool, debating Trotsky at the Hoover Institute means he must be a tool of "the ruling classes" to smear Trotsky and thereby deny hope to those yearning working masses for whom Trotsky was a beacon of working class militant struggle. Yet as Service points out, Trotsky regarded the proletariat as a means to his ideological ends of destroying the system.

Taafe whines pitifully that,

"This is a mild example of the epithets Service flings at Trotsky. He presented "serious inaccuracies" in his writings, he was an "intellectual bully"; he was "vain and self-centred". Two lines after making this charge Service says that Trotsky "disliked boasting"!"

Well , that quite possibly because it was true of Trotsky. A person who feels no reason to boast can feel so arrogant that he feels no compunction to engage with tedious politicking. Like Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Trotsky used to sit out boring committee meetings in silence.

Trotsky would usually doodle on bits of scrap paper, yawn, read newspapers ostensibly in front of dull speakers. Had the slow witted Taafe been alive then at committee meetings then , Trotsky would have treated him no doubt as an elephantine bore. The fact is Trotsky was not a pleasant man and very condescending to those of lower intellect than he.

Service is revealing his self centred arrogance and to do so by quoting primary historical sources is not "boasting". It just means Taafe lacks the intellectual capacity to engage with Service who has obviously riled him into making highly embarrassing You Tube videos that reveal his own lack of capacity for critical thought.

"He is accused of base motives in allegedly "abandoning his first wife" and his two daughters, who Service nevertheless concedes urged him to escape from Siberia in order to link up with Lenin and the RSDLP leaders who were producing Iskra (The Spark), the revolutionary paper of the time. On virtually every page there is at least one distortion, and often more, of Trotsky's ideas, his personal life, etc."

If Trotsky is accused of such behaviour, as fully documented by Service, then it is no use ignoring what Service says with regards Trotsky being a charming egotist who was always willing to put ideological imperatives before basic care and concern for his first wife, with women seen as subordinate to his world historical mission.

Unwilling or more likely incapable of challenging Service, Taafe reacts with scorn and sarcasm typical of those motivated by idolatry for the man and not concerned with all those people he betrayed in his rather unpleasant way, whether they were personal relations of the Kronstadt Sailors,

"There is not one relevant new fact which adds to our picture of Trotsky in this book... apart from learning that Trotsky's children acquired a "Viennese accent", surprise, surprise, when they were living in that city".

So they did and how does that detract from Service's biography? Answer: it does not. If Taafe is so fundamentally unwilling to react intelligently, it is hardly surprising Service has refused to debate with him any more than one would bother with a cranky religious fundamentalist standing on Hyde Park Corner.

Taafe deliberately distorts and cherry picks his way through Service's biography to find things he finds offensive and objectionable. For example,

" Incredibly, we learn, for instance, that prior to 1914, Trotsky was not a "Marxist theoretician"! Unfortunately for Service's "self-serving" account, there is the small, 'unfortunate' detail of Trotsky as the chairman of the Petrograd soviet during the 1905 revolution !"

In fact Service mentions the period "before 1914" prior to 1905, when Trotsky had converted to Marxism, when he was more a narodnik or more in tune with the Social Revolutionaries in the 1890s before he became involved with the leading Marxist grandees like Martov and Plekhanov.

Taafe's comment shows he has not even bothered to read the book at all but has just scented someone who calls Trotsky somewhat of an opportunist and so projects that sin back on to Service in some desperate struggle to prove Service is "lying". Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists are known for believing that opposition to their worldview is proof they are right.

This is proved by Taafe quoting Trotsky to prove Trotsky was right and Service must be wrong.

"Service goes on to argue that Trotsky was "not original"; this theory was really the intellectual property of Alexander Helfand, better known as Parvus, who collaborated with Trotsky. Unfortunately for Service, we have the admission by Trotsky himself that Parvus contributed the "lion's share" of this theory. But Parvus stopped short of drawing the bold revolutionary conclusion advanced by Trotsky".

Again this is tedious. An admission by Trotsky is just an admission by Trotsky who would have every reason to think he was an especially original theorist which he was not: Trotsky picked up those ideas he believed would be of Service in furthering his status and image as a unifier and unique leader of the revolutionary masses.

Which is why Taafe rationalises Trotsky's own justification for the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 without providing historical evidence to the contrary to the established fact that Trotsky ordered the repression of the sailors and that they were the same sailors.

And even if they had not, having disposed of the democracy of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, there was by then no means of redress against forced grain rquisitioning, repression of a free press, lack of pay and conditions. Taafe pathetically repeats again Trotsky's self serving justification as a matter of faith and truth by authority.

"Trotsky, for instance, is accused of "omitting" in My Life any mention of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Trotsky himself explained when he replied to the "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the 1930s that this was for the simple reason that this was not considered to be a major event until resurrected by latter-day critics such as anarchists and, unfortunately, by Victor Serge in the 1930s".

Why it was unfortunate for Serge to keep reminding Trotsky of it has nothing to do with his being an "anarchist", as Serge has become a Bolshevik by 1918 and had subsequently developed an independent mind of the sort Taafe lacks entirely as he parrots out the ideological line as Pure True Gospel.

"Trotsky was accused of "suppressing" the Kronstadt sailors", the "same ones" who participated in the October revolution. In a forensic analysis, he showed that this was not the case - he played no direct role in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt but accepted full "moral responsibility" for the actions that were taken".

Trotsky did not take full "moral responsibility" for crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny. He lied about it consistently or used casuistry and sophistry to conceal his crime.

"The Kronstadt 'rebels' demanded "soviets without the Bolsheviks", which was applauded by the counter-revolutionaries in Russian and worldwide.Service just repeats falsehoods - without any evidence whatsoever - to try and convince us that the sailors of 1921 were the same as the heroic insurrectionists of the October revolution, which they were not. The vast majority of Petrograd workers supported the action taken against them".

Which "counter revolutionaries" supported the Kronstadt rebels is not supported by evidence. The method of argumentation is using what Orwell knew in Politics and the English Language as a term used meaninglessly to mean that those who did not support the Bolsheviks were all part of a seamless and sinister imperialist plot.

Moreover, the pathetic reference to putting the Kronstadt rebels in scare quotes is a feeble line of argument designed to presuppose in advance, without evidence, that they were in league with the Imperialists, a claim later made by Stalin who claimed they were receiving money from Washington.

A claim which precisely was facilitated by the kind of paranoid conspiracy theory Taafe wheels out in defence of this act of brutality for which Trotsky was responsible

"Using independent sources Trotsky showed that the leaders of the revolt, for their own selfish ends - during the civil war - demanded special privileges. They even threatened to take over the Red Fleet which, with the thawing of the ice between Russia and Finland, would have opened the gates to an imperialist attack at the very heart of the Russian state. Reluctantly, therefore, the Russian workers' government, after the mutineers refused to negotiate and withdraw, quelled the revolt".

Again Taafe provides no evidence Petrograd workers supported its crushing.

The evidence is copious that most Petrograd workers were fed up with the Bolsheviks repression by 1920 as many were rebelling, going on strike and demanding an end to the appalling way they were being treated under the Bolshevik regime. Maybe they were the 'wrong kind of workers'.

After all Taafe conflates the Bolshevik elite with "the workers government" , so naturally those who dissented were not real workers but enemies of the people.

If this dull ideologue had anything that could pass for analytical skill, he would be able to cut a swathe through the murderous verbal fictions used by the Bolsheviks and unclog the drivel clogging his own brain from thinking constructively and objectively.

If they had not been 'real workers' valued by the workers, there would have been no need for regular Red Army conscripts to be shadowed by blocking detachments ordering those who retreated to be shot. And even if these sailors were not "the same" but mere peasants as Trotsky claimed, it was hardly ethical to demand they be "shot like partridges"

Paul Hampton

"Robert Service has long advocated the "continuity thesis" - the claim made by cold-war historians and by Stalinist apologists that Lenin (and Trotsky) led to Stalin"

This is the most stupid conflation, as if Stalinists and those who regard Communism in the Soviet Union as a catastrophe are two peas from the same pod. Hampton blethers on that Service,

"...is explicit about this in the book, but with an added twist. He makes Trotsky an even greater villain than Stalin or Lenin. Trotsky "lived for a dream that many people found a nightmare", claims Service".

This is, of course, absolutely true as all Utopian zealots assume that some abstract Historical entity, in Trotsky or Stalin's case the proletariat, represent a mathematical X in History which is unified in one singular movement towards a single vision of Paradise on Earth.

In that sense Service is entirely correct that such visions can only but polarise opinion as no one person, be it a commissar such as Trotsky nor the eventual dictator Stalin, can have a monopoly of what this illusory vision at the End of History would look like.

All societies contain millions of people with their own individual dreams, hopes and aspirations and any God Society allows for a pluralism in which people are best left alone to their own devices subject to some amount of necessary state power and government.

Hampton warbles on that Service is just wrong to maintain that,

"[Trotsky’s] ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin shared more than they disagreed about".

This is true as all of them from the outset of the Revolution sought policies of mass collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation in which the peasantry were going to be forced to work on collective farms whether they liked it or not,

"If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased... The point is that whoever governed the USSR effectively stood in need of deeply authoritarian methods to conserve communist power"

This is true as after 1918 there was going to be no open democracy after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. No free press, apart from continuous polemics from Trotsky, and no liberty for individual thought outside The Party. That's what totalitarianism means.

Hence those workers and peasants who did not understand this would be in need of large doses of re-education.

It did not matter that most of them voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries, When they did Trotsky was a key figure in dissolving it and saying they had been consigned to the "dustbin of History". So true, as Service puts it,

"[Trotsky’s] lust for dictatorship and terror was barely disguised in the civil war. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers"

Hampton, rather like Taafe, is trying to rally the faithful in defence of Trotsky as he distorts, misinterprets what he writes and muddles up the whole point of history which in the hands of professionals depends crucially on chronology

"For Service, Trotsky’s role in the flowering of working-class democracy in 1917 scarcely figures. He omits important matters such as the democratic votes in Duma elections and in the Petrograd Soviet itself in the autumn, when the most democratic bodies in Russian history voted overwhelmingly for Bolshevik representatives and for Bolshevik resolutions calling on the Soviets to take power from the highly undemocratic, warmongering, pro-landlord and anti-working class Provisional Government".

But that came before the workers stated chafing at what Trotsky was later in 1921 to offer-"militarised labour armies" and the obsession against the Workers Opposition. even in the Bolshevik Party, that Trade Unions were no longer necessary as the Bolshevik regime was a 'workers state'. All this is comprehensively documented by Service.

Hampton then states,

"Service can barely bring himself to recount the threat present by the right-wing general Kornilov, who attempted a proto-fascist coup in August 1917. He suggests that if only the Bolsheviks had left alone, Russia would have evolved smoothly towards a bourgeois democratic republic".

The use of the word "hardly bring" is a venomous pathetic little snipe that suggests Service is "concealing" key facts and id, naturally wholly unlike the witless and banal Hampton, a mere propagandist. It was the leader of the Provisional Government Kerensky who called on the SRs and Bolsheviks to defend it against Kornilov's action.

Skipping merrily across the repressive measures and introduction of the Red Terror, Hampton then spews out this nugget of utter wisdom,

Rather than explain the terrible circumstances of the civil war, and register that Trotsky’s intervention was critical in winning it against 21 armies from 14 countries, Service focuses on Trotsky's decision to have the Bolshevik Panteleev shot after the battle of Kazan in August-September 1918.A scandal previously suppressed? Not at all. There was a Politburo enquiry in April 1919. It found that Panteleev was shot as a deserter.

If by 'desertion' Hampton means this previously erstwhile Bolshevik decided to take a steamboat up the Volga to avoid the civil war between the SR's and the Bolsheviks, then that is a curious way of putting it.

And ,of course, a Politburo enquiry in a non-democratic regime was really going to go against what Trotsky had decided when he had those on board summarily executed. With no separation of powers, no independent judiciary. A Politburo was hardly going to be objective.

But it only suffices to crawl cravenly back to the sacred texts to find a rationalisation for Trotsky's cruelty. Ignoring what Service maintains all along about how selective Trotsky was in his memoirs, as all politicians are, with the exception of the secular saint Trotsky, Hampton opines,

'The incident was recounted by Trotsky in his autobiography My Life in 1930 and discussed by Isaac Deutscher in his biography published in 1954. As Trotsky put it: "I appointed a field-tribunal which passed death-sentences on the commander, the commissary, and several privates – to a gangrenous wound a red-hot iron was applied. I explained the situation to the regiment without hiding or softening anything."

That's nice of him. If that is what "socialism" is, then it would difficult to see how Fascism could be much different, only that it was only after Trotsky's suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 Fascism did come to power and self consciously emulated Bolshevik theory and practice.

As for the rest of Hampton's feeble rationalisation, there is no point going on with it when he states,

Deutscher, who saw Stalinism as (unfortunately) the only way for progress in Russia at the time, presented Trotsky's call for the "militarisation of labour" in 1920 as a prescient foreshadowing of what Stalin did in the 1930s.

Only a somewhat pitiful crank clinging on to a dogmatic pseudo-religious form of faith could think Isaac Deutscher was somehow a heretic for writing about Trotsky in this way whilst writing a generally favourable three volume Prophet series of books on the man and his Revolution.

If this is not clear from this quote I cannot think what possibly could be,

Trotsky used the term "militarisation" in the interests of honest dealing within the workers' state, and not because he rejoiced in repression. "Of course, it is only an analogy, but one that is very rich in content."

Marxism 2010: Callinicos Again

The past year or so has taken from us some of the most outstanding Marxist intellectuals of the 1968 generation .....In the supposedly ideology-free world of the Con-Lib coalition, it would be tempting to conclude that these individual disappearances are representative of a much broader decline of Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition.

Opines Alex Callinicos in the Guardian yesterday. Not one of these ideologues has made a scintilla of difference to public policy in Britain nor did they offer an alternative to neoliberal capitalism for a number of reasons.

Firstly, those like Chris Harman were Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists who continued to harp on about the Bolshevik Revolution as if it were a moment of great proletarian self emancipation and liberty. Yet Harman supported the crushing of the Kronstadt Revolt of 1921 by replicating Trotsky's self serving lies that the sailors of 1921 were not the same as those in 1917.

Few are now going to accept the romanticised mythology of the Bolshevik seizure of power without know knowing that this first successful attempt to create a workers paradise by abandoning liberal democracy-a free press, political pluralism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary-was a catastrophe that inevitably led to Stalin's totalitarian state.

Secondly, Marxism festivals off Gower Street in London held by the SWP should be termed Marxism-Leninism 2010 and not hitch the name to Marxism or even Marx if everybody wonders around these seminars and workshops bandying bits of Lenin about as if it were Pure Gospel. The SWP acts and produces devotees more like religious sectaries than free thinkers.

Marx one retorted that if a certain person he did not like was a Marxist then he was not one. It is true, Marx is a classical thinker and philosopher of capitalism who remains unmatched in some regards for his penetrating insights. But it is highly unlikely would have approved of the Bolshevik Revolution. He would have turned in his grave in Highgate to see what was done in his name in Russia.

If there is going to be an alternative to neoliberal capitalism it will have to be a debate about the pragmatic uses of the state intervention and not in the kind of apocalyptic nihilism espoused by supposed inheritors of Marx's political economy. Nor an argument for the total control of the state by ideologues forcing mankind to be happy by mass murdering all enemies of Utopia.

This is the problem with Marxism Festivals. Young people or ageing adolescents stuck in the fantasy world of ideological rationalisations for a lack of ego security in a complicated world or else a hard core devotion to overthrowing the state are simply not serious. It is dubious whether they are actually Marxists as Callinicos asserts.

When I attended Marxism 97 I did so as I wanted to hear the historian Chrisopher Hill speak. It has drawn some interesting names but most of it was broken down into post-1968 "identity politics" seminars. This cancels out the classical Marxism which was very much ro0ted in the now largely disappeared working class or "proletariat".

Callinicos is an ideologue yearning like Lenin for the catastrophe that will allow his fringe sect the SWP to emerge into the spotlight again but it will simply not happen.

SWP supporters are seen a attention seeking fanatics latching on to any dispute to display their plaards and punch their clenched fists. It's a 'pyschodelirium' as Raymond Aron said of the street theatre of the 1968 rebellions.

It would never be voted for. As he espouses a Party Line that deifies Lenin, the British electorate would have none of it. Leninist version of Marx places the idea that economics determines politics with the idea that politics could determine the economy.

This was under command economies a travesty of what Callinicos himself writes here,

Marx described his own intellectual project as the critique of political economy: Marxism therefore lives or dies by its ability to make sense of the dynamics of capitalism and to offer a way out of it.

The Financial Crash of 2008 and proceeding Economic Slump or Depression many parts of the West are facing now will not lead to a Revolution, though new thinking about the role where the state can do things best is on the agenda.

But there will be no reversion to Communism of the command type nor a fetish for violent overthrow of the capitalist system if that's what the potty prof means by 'Marxism offering a way out of the dynamics of capitalism'.

Yet Marxism Festivals seem to be jamborees of trendy New Leninists who seem to provide youth with ways of interpreting the world. With Harman and others gone, Callinicos advertises the festival by citing Zizek as a star attraction. Certainly, he's eccentric and offers some interesting insights.

Yet John Gray did a devastating and witty demolition job of Zizek in the Independent ( Friday, 20 November 2009 ) when reviewing First as Tragedy, Then as Farce when he wrote,

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century’s biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas…
A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Having said that Zizek does have some nuggets of wisdom tucked away amidst often what is elevated psychobabble.

He was particularly interesting in looking at what had gone wrong with the former dissidents of Central Europe like Vaclav Havel in the LRB, though that's probably motivated by the vanity to be seen as a 'real' European dissident more than Havel and Michnik who are now "useful idiots" as Judt put it.

As Gray put it witheringly,

Zizek ( writes ) "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."
In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved.
In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police and gulags. This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realised the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people."

Zizek seems to be one of these characters that could step out of a J G Ballard novel, that in the face of a boring a nihilistic neoliberal consumer economy just anything that smacks of real change and revolution is a really a bit bit sexy and exciting.

If only, of course, the history of terror, misery and privation of Leninism are increasingly not also known as well amongst desperate youth looking for "solutions" to a grave civilisational crisis in the West. Young people  live in a world besieged by admass dreck and wasteful consumerism and the myth of an infinite growth Utopia.

Gray continues,

'Thus Zizek steps forth as a pop star of the radical New invigorated New Left, Zizek identifies any social force that actually wants communism. For all his insistent tough-mindedness - "If you can get power, grab it", he declared in an interview the other day - he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.
The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time. The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives - and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.
A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism.
When Zizek and others like him defend communism - "the communist hypothesis", as they call it - they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past. Hence the appeal of Zizek's works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond.

To understand the failures of neoliberal finance capitalism, one would be better off with the maverick conservative John Gray's False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Tony Judt's defence of liberal social democracy in Ill Fares the Land or Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson's The Gods that Failed: How the Financial; Elite Have Gambled Our Futures Away.