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 )
The existence of "kill teams" in Afghanistan and grisly photos revealing US troops murdering and carving up Afghan civilian's corpses have been published in, of all places, the Rolling Stone magazine. It reports,
During the first five months of last year, a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan went on a shooting spree, killing at least four unarmed civilians and mutilating several of the corpses.
The “kill team” – members of the 5th Stryker Brigade stationed near Kandahar – took scores of photos chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib.
The images – more than 150 of which have been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,” one of the soldiers told Army investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.”
Resentment against the NATO war in this benighted land can only increase. Afghan writer Malalai Joya wrote in The Guardian, ( Kill teams in Afghanistan: the truth Wednesday 30 March 2011 ).
All the PR about this war being about democracy and human rights melts into thin air with the pictures of US soldiers posing with the dead and mutilated bodies of innocent Afghan civilians.
We believe that the brutal actions of these "kill teams" reveal the aggression and racism which is part and parcel of the entire military occupation.
While these photos are new, the murder of innocents is not. Such crimes have sparked many protests in Afghanistan and have sharply raised anti-American sentiment among ordinary Afghans.
The occupying armies have tried to buy off the families of their victims, offering $2,000 for each one killed. Afghans' lives are cheap for the US and Nato, but no matter how much they offer, we don't want their blood money.
Once you know all this, and once you have seen the "kill team" photos, you will understand more clearly why Afghans have turned against this occupation. The Karzai regime is more hated than ever: it only rules through intimidation, corruption, and with the help of the occupying armies. Afghans deserve much better than this.
However, this does not mean more Afghans are supporting the reactionary so-called resistance of the Taliban. Instead we are seeing the growth, under very difficult conditions, of another resistance led by students, women and the ordinary poor people of Afghanistan. They are taking to the streets to protest against the massacre of civilians and to demand an end to the war. Demonstrations like this were recently held in Kabul, Marzar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Farah.
Naturally, the whole idea that the Afghanistan war is primarily about human rights and democracy is a rationalisation for a war that is crucially about the geopolitics of the New great Game and specifically the construction of the TAPI pipeline, a war aim seldom, if ever mentioned in the mainstream Western news.
The Afghanistan debacle is justified as an exercise in enlightened self interest and "liberal imperialism" when it is founded on the idea that should the country be stabilised sufficient to enable the TAPI pipeline to be built then it will unite the regional powers of Central Asia together to the benefit of the West.
The civilian victims are seen as a price worth paying as when the TAPI is built the economic regeneration of Afghanistan will proceed and then the victims will be forgotten. As Shantie Mariet D'Souza recently outlined the stakes in the Afghanistan War (Business StandardMarch 20, 2011 )
Even while consensus eludes the end-game in Afghanistan, and regional rivalry continues to complicate even a remote possibility of establishing peace in this conflict-ridden country, the economic windfall from an oil pipeline may yet help stabilise Afghanistan. The projected gains from the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline still retain the potential to create a win-win deal among regional stakeholders in Afghanistan.
The TAPI project, expected to start in 2012 and be commissioned by 2016, envisages constructing 1,680 km of pipeline with a total gas capacity of 90 million standard cubic meters per day (mscmd).
The proposed pipeline would stretch from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field and travel 1650 km through Turkmenistan (145 km), Afghanistan (735 km) and Pakistan (800 km), before culminating at the Indian border town of Fazilka in Punjab. It would carry 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to consumers.
It is thus not altogether surprising that the US is propounding the project as ‘magic glue’ that will bind the warring factions and their regional proxies into an inter-dependent cooperative framework. The US also hopes that the TAPI pipeline will usher in economic interdependence among competing regional powers, thus making the costs of conflict too high and benefits of cooperation lucrative.
The strategy also fits in with containing and isolating Iran which would be encircled and hemmed in by a pro-US regime in Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east.
TAPI will in all likelihood wean India away from the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline from Iran’s South Pars gas complex in the Persian Gulf, one of the largest gas fields in the world. This would not only further isolate Iran, but the resultant interdependence and benefits of cooperation would possibly act as a catalyst for peace between India and Pakistan, narrowing differences between the two nuclear armed rivals in South Asia.
The problem has been that the Taliban has kept up its attacks in key areas such as Helmland, where British casualties continue to increase, as this lies squarely across the route of the TAPI pipeline. No attempt by politicians or the media has been made to explain this basic fact.
Think tanks and leading members of the US government have continually mentioned the TAPI pipeline as a strategic prize, though. D'Souza seems to suggest that it might be possible to get
A major factor, which will impinge directly on the fate of the project, would be political instability, issues of pricing and security considerations in the region. Since the birth of independent Central Asian states, the region has been plagued by political instability as witnessed by various ‘colour revolutions’.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, the near absence of an effective police force, providing security for the pipeline, could turn this project into a lucrative protection-racket or cash cow for insurgents, local warlords or simply more dependence on private security armies and contractors, with little being done to build on Afghanistan national security institutions.
In fact, there is little chance that the TAPI pipeline will have the intended effects of regional stability. For a start the objective is contradicted by the "War on Drugs" which makes opium production profitable and thus funds the Taliban insurgency.
Even in Georgia, the creation of a pipeline transit state has led to politics becoming a corrupt and pathological struggle between clans and interest groups vying for control over the transit fees. Pipelines in danger will always ratchet up the potential for the Western powers being dragged in to protect it.
The reason NATO has "stayed the course" in Afghanistan for a decade now shows how dangerous it is for the West to remain addicted to fossil fuels lying in dangerous and far off lands and to become embroiled in futile and farcical projects to impose freedom by force.
News of rebel advances on Monday brought hope that Colonel Gaddafi might be gone by the end of the week. The morning bulletins on Tuesday brought word of pro-Gaddafi successes, suggesting that the dictator would not be out any time soon.
That's what a protracted civil war could look like, a tug of war between two armed groups where the momentum shifts back and forth. But this very pattern presents an awkward question for the alliance thumping Libya and for all those who supported this intervention: a question that becomes all the more urgent on those days when the rebel forces do well.
The problem here is that Gaddafi most likely cannot be removed without a continuation of a bloody civil war should the rebels attempt to push west towards Tripoli. The best solution to the crisis will be to accept that a Srebrenica style massacre has been avoided and to negotiate a partition, if possible.
Clearly, it is possible that the largest oil producing areas of the east would fall under rebel control. A brokered ceasefire would ensure that the terms of the UN Resolution were fulfilled in protecting the civilians of the east. To have the war escalate in an attempt to go all the way to Tripoli would only ensure the deaths of civilians towards in the west.
With regards the legal situation, Freedland writes,
Philippe Sands QC, an authority on such matters, is clear: "The resolution allows for protection of civilians from the threat of attack. If the threat of attack has ceased, there is no justification for the use of force."
The problem might be that certain influential representatives of the Western powers will use the perception of a "threat" to argue to push on to the bitter end in order to maintain "credibility" and save face after effectively having implied that Gaddafi should go whilst arguing the aim is not "regime change".
The political reality is that no one wants to see the stalemate scenario, in which Gaddafi clings on as the seething ruler of a Tripoli-plus statelet in the west, while the rebels control the east. They want him gone, no matter how much they have to stretch the language of the UN resolution to achieve that outcome.
What also needs to be considered is how much the control of Libyan oil from the west is also prized as a strategic goal. Most of the petroleum refining plants and LNG terminals are in the east, with four oil exporting harbours there compared to just one in the west at Azzawiyah near Tripoli.
To understand what's at stake in the realpolitik calculations of the powers maps of the petroleum geology of Libya and the main concessions to foreign oil corporations is a useful indicator. Most of the existing operational oil concessions, indeed largest oil field are in the east. Shell has a huge concession in the Sirt Basin.
Germany, which opposed the intervention, has major concessions in the west of Libya through Wintershall. But the USA's Exxon Mobil has a huge concession in the Ghadamis Basin. The other large company in the west is Spain's Repsol. These oil interests are a key factor omitted from Freedman's analysis.
The oil concession map also includes the two large concessions agreed between BP and the Libyan regime, one in the Gulf of Sirt which abuts the region of Benghazi is clearly a vital interest for Britain and may account for the hawkish stance of Cameron and Fox.
But BP also has a colossal concession in the Ghadamis basin. This along with Exxon Mobil's concession could account for the determination of the US and UK to arm the rebels in an attempt to get rid of Gaddafi. It's a major factor that has not been clearly related to diplomatic events as much as it should.
BP’s own map of its two oil concessions in Libya, signed with great fanfare during the last few weeks of Tony Blair’s premiership in May 2007. Look at the offshore Sirt block, in the Gulf of Sirt. It is the size of Belgium.
It is, of course, thousands of feet underwater....according to a Reuters report last week, BP said it was going to start offshore exploration drilling within weeks – before June. 3D seismic has already been done by a Norwegian company. Drilling was delayed, partly because of Libyan concerns about the Gulf Oil spill.
The question is how valuable the BP concession is to Britain now and how far the British government is going to risk escalating the war to secure control over the concession in the Ghadamis Basin, even assuming a partition of Libya would allow the colossal Sirt block to fall to a new rebel government in the east.
Obviously, the intervention in Libya is crucially concerned with oil. Unless the West learn to find alternatives, pathological conflicts such as these are set to become normal in the course of the 21st century. Even Afghanistan is now crucially about the geopolitics of the TAPI gas pipeline.
In any case, Libyan oil, whilst accounting for 2% of global oil supply, is still of great significance to all the high octane consumer economies of Europe, not least set against the background of economic recession following the crash of 2008 and Arab Uprisings In Bahrain and Yemen.
As Edward L Morse remarks inOil and Unrest( Foreign Affairs journal March 8, 2011)
The ongoing violence in Libya has had a more consequential impact on oil prices. To date, some 750,000 barrels a day of Libyan crude oil have been lost; Saudi Arabia claims to have replaced all of that supply. But Libyan and Saudi oil are not interchangeable. Libya's crude oil is known for its high quality: most of the 1.5 million barrels a day that the country produces is light and sweet, which means it is low in sulfur (hence its "sweet" smell) and is easily refined into high-demand petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Only 25 percent of global crude is of similar quality; the loss of Libyan crude represents about nine percent of that pool. Saudi oil, however, is heavy and sour, making it -- at best -- an imperfect substitute for Libyan supply.
As the rebels push westwards towards Tripoli, it is clear that Gaddafi still retains much genuine support there. An interesting essay by Mark Mazower provides some essential historical background to show why the Libyan dictator might be able to draw on popular sentiment should the bombing go on. The full version is here ( Libya remembers, we forget: these bombs are not the first The Guardian Friday 25 March 2011 )
Almost exactly one hundred years ago, the world's first aerial bombing campaign took place – in Libya. In September 1911, desperate for an empire of their own, the Italians invaded.
When the airman Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades from his Taube monoplane on to the enemy outside Tripoli, little damage was done: indeed the practice of priming and then dropping live bombs by hand was nearly as hazardous to the Italian pilots as it was to the Turkish troops below. Nevertheless, a staff officer, Major Giulio Douhet, had seen enough to formulate the arguments that would make him the century's foremost advocate of war from the skies. A decade later, Douhet argued in his classic study The Command of the Air that the sheer terror induced by mass bombing of civilian targets would shorten conflicts and save lives; outrage was thus misplaced, for total war was humane. The western way of war had been born in the north African desert.
Faced with a popular insurrection, they retaliated through the deliberate destruction of villages, wells and herds with force. Nearly 100,000 people were interned or deported, and thousands died of disease or malnutrition in labour camps. Italian planes once again bombed the country, this time dropping mustard gas in defiance of the 1925 Geneva protocol.
Memories of anti-colonial resistance helped to legitimise Libya's new British-backed king, Idris, who as head of the Sanusi order had been a figurehead for the struggle against the Italians. But such memories also helped bolster the 27-year-old Colonel Gaddafi when he accused the king of selling out to latter-day imperialism, toppled him in a coup and set up the republic that he continues to rule to this day.
The majority of Libyans may hate Gaddafi and wish him gone as quickly as possible. But they will remember what we have forgotten – that these planes are not the first, that there is a long history of overwhelming western might being deployed on north African shores, and that western power generally comes professing good intentions. If the west wishes today to underline the differences that surely exist between its intervention now and earlier ones, a precondition for persuasiveness is to familiarise ourselves with what we have forgotten, to understand why this history does matter despite everything that the Gaddafis of the world do with it, and will matter more and more the longer the regime hangs on.
The intervention of Western powers such as France and Britain with air strikes to protect the rebels against Gaddafi's regime and safeguarding the Libyan Uprising has been portrayed as another "humanitarian intervention" has been met with cynicism in many quarters.
The reasons are clear enough: the invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to a colossal catastrophe and a descent into anarchy and chaos. Afghanistan has gone on for a decade since NATO invaded in 2001. Advocates of intervention have argued that Libya will be different. Nora Bensahel, formerly of the Rand Corporation, and a think tank analyst for the Centre for a New American Security in Washington DC, sees this as a "make or break" moment for NATO,in which the presumed testing ground is a place called Libya.
The initial phase of the allied military operation to prevent mass killings of Libyan civilians by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces is rapidly ending. The overall decline in cruise missile strikes suggests that Libya's surface-to-air weapons have been suppressed and the immediate threat of a massacre in Benghazi has been alleviated for the time being.The hard truth is that Nato's European allies are the only countries that can ensure the protection of civilians, particularly those countries like the United Kingdom and France that pushed vigorously for intervention.
As it stands that is true enough. Yet there is in Libya's case no sense of the idea of whether this intervention lies within the art of the possible.
Propaganda is flying forth over the Western campaign against the Gaddafi regime and many rationalisations for and against the conflict are failing to deal with what is actually at stake. Increasingly, it is unsure if the means are at all proportionate to ends that remain unclear in official government explanations.
The intervention is clearly concerned with protecting the oil interests of the West. Even so, it is possible that if Gaddafi had entered Benghazi the civil war would have escalated into a full scale bloodbath as he had the advantage of 15,000 disciplined loyal troops compared to the straggling insurgents.
Having lost control over Libya, Gaddafi could no longer be ensured to ensure stability in Libya. Once his forces had advanced into the key oil refining cities and ports of the east such as Al Sidrah, Ras Lanuf, Al Barygah ( a crucial LNG plant ) he seemed set to battle to the end, knocking out an important oil supply.
Evidently, this would have affected the oil supplied to Italy, one with a pipeline to Libya and which derives much of its oil from that source. France gets oil directly from Libya as well. Shell has large oil concessions in the east in the Sirt Basin oil fields.
Set against the background of the debacle in Iraq, the Western powers had already responded to Gaddafi's offer to supply the shortfall in oil production caused by the collapse of Saddam's state into violent warfare. That was why Blair went to Libya in 2004 and struck a deal with the Libyan dictator.
The problem with the opposition to the war, the "anti-war" movement is that it fails to grasp that Western prosperity depends on controlling these oil supplies. Orwell wrote in the 1930's that it was easy to be anti-imperialist but that if the empire stopped then many would have to subsist on herrings and potatoes.
Oil underpins the consumer societies of the West. This does not mean it ought to nor that resource conflicts are right. It simply means that those who state Libya is "all about the oil" need to start engaging with the need to offer alternatives to oil instead of pretending there is an infinite growth utopia.
In which case those stating that Libya is" all about the oil" should stop being hypocritical, as Galloway has been, in pretending that its about promoting the profits of oil corporations. It is not. Wars from Iraq to Afghanistan ( one crucially concerned with the TAPI pipeline ) are about preserving Western lifestyles.
The Sarkozy and Cameron governments no doubt believed they could use the undoubted potential humanitarian crisis caused by a massacre in Benghazi to promote intervention as enlightened self interest. A No Fly zone simply to stop Gaddafi's planes bombing could have been justified.
Gaddafi's available air force, however, consisted of a small number of Soviet era jets . The creation of a "No Fly Zone" really was intended so Gaddafi could not offer opposition to the use of Western air force to pummel his ground forces and tilt the advantage in favour of the rebel opposition.
That may well have prevented Gaddafi's forces causing bloodshed in Benghazi. But from there, the scope and scale of the intervention can not have said to be contained as the endgame is to depose Gaddafi. If the Libyan opposition can not do that, Gaddafi will remain a great threat both within Libya and elsewhere.
The hope was that elements within the Libyan regime would give up and depose Gaddafi, as seemed to be the pattern in the first few weeks after the protests started. Many of the leaders of the opposition are those who have defected or fallen from favour with the regime.
It did not happen and two dangers have followed. Firstly, if Gaddafi remains in power in the West of Libya he can set up a para state sponsoring terrorism. Secondly, he has a real support base in Tripoli with a stake in the regime. As rebel forces advance West the battle for Tripoli will lead to great fighting.
Even then the danger of intervention is not that the rebels will win with the West's help, thus compromising the revolutionary purity of the Arab Revolution, as pseudo "anti-war" ideologues such as Milne and Murray fear, but whether by getting rid of Gaddafi, the new government will be able to ensure peace and prosperity.
Conflicts over control of diminishing oil reserves are set to be pathological. The West needs to wean itself from dependence upon oil as a strategic priority.
Houellebecq has a new novel out entitled La Carte et le Territoire which has already won the Goncourt Prize in France, he is by far the most most prescient and devastatingly accurate novelist of Europe's contemporary lot
Houellebecq's landscapes are dreary wastelands of supermarkets and trashy architecture and he writes of the spiritual loneliness of the modern European, confronted by a meaningless consumerism, the corporate work ethic and of a civilisation in decline.
Relentless post-political, Houellebecq's characters think politics is mostly bad entertainment, an obvious fact given the rise of the bland Tony Blair who turned banality into a political art and the odious media-political star Berlusconi in Italy.
Citizenship has declined. The nation state has decayed and individuals live lives of quiet desperation connected merely through the computer ( e.g Facebook ) where people attempt to re-present themselves.
In Possibility of an Island, communication simply happens from behind the computer screen and all traditional forms of social intercourse have been progressively eliminated. Cloning takes place so there is no hurry to live intensely with passion
The message is quite clear in all the novels: Europe is dying in decadent and complacent apathy.
David Coward gave an accurate precis of the ideas in Houellebecq's novels, far more interesting than the stream of drab Orange and Booker Prize nominees that fail to engage people in what is really happening in the West.
Since the 1960s, market forces have reorganised the economic activity of the Western world. With the collapse of religion and the death of ideology, capitalism acquired a free hand to interfere in those parts of our lives previously governed by faith and political belief…. In the wake of the Enlightenment, believers became citizens. Citizens have now turned into customers, who cannot conceive of a future, let alone of an afterlife, except in terms of increasing wealth and the acquisition of consumer products for status and satisfaction. Individualism, the antechamber to barbarism, is the grave of communal life and ultimately of civilization. It is also an illusion. Only the decay of the flesh, and death, truly belong to the individual. The rest – behaviour, ideas, ideals – is fed to us by politicians, advertisers and assorted stars who want our votes, our money and our admiration. Even sexuality cannot be explained in terms of desire and pleasure, for they themselves [desire and pleasure] are sociologically determined by widely touted semiologies.
The creation of a family is for Houellebecq, as Coward puts it, ‘the last remaining outpost of the collective spirit, whose members serve each other without hope or expectation of tangible reward’.
For Houllebecq, however, atomised individuals no longer are prepared to make the sacrifices upon which social reproduction are based: sex is a value free means to a sensational encounter, wholly cerebral and based on pain/pleasure calculus.
Yet Houllebecq is ostensibly anti-religious and regards the destruction of all forms of communal life as part of what he regards as the barbarism that flows from the social, intellectual and moral deregulation of the 1960s.
In Western European nations the economic system is brutally competitive and yet the general trend of politics "leftist": Houellebecq makes it clear that New Left libertarianism has actually benefitted and given further stimulus to neoliberal capitalism.
For Houellebecq, the sinister reduction of all relationships to one of impersonal cost/benefit analysis is inherent in the transactional universe of which blights and infects every aspect of public and private life in the West
Houellebecq depicts the way sterile dreams of love have become reduced to packaged pleasures and the fundamental human right to total satisfaction that consumers just must have as an imperative.
What people commonly call 'love' is nothing mere cosmetic measure concealing the sordidness of their petty lusts and crass desires for the lust object, a makeshift balancing of made over time in view of their insecurity and perfect partner which also affords status and competitive prestige.
Atomised is a great novel and packed full of ideas with regards the seeming inevitability of cloning, the decoupling of sex from procreation as a value free end to pleasure which Bruno can't get because neoliberalism in the sexual market place works against inferior biological specimens i,e the ugly and old.
Houellebecq also sees Islamism at least partly as a result of the sexual resentment and frustration young Muslim males feel because the emphasis on restraint and puritanism, however "hypocritical" has no meaning in societies where transgression is ritualised.
Naturally, the contradiction between a religion based on denial and on the other hand of eternal rewards of pleasure when consumer society makes a mockery of all pious sentiments which act as a barrier separating the individual from the marketplace.
The promise of instant gratification makes such a religion increasingly futile, redundant and contrary to consumerism, the notion that pleasure through shopping and 'bonking' others is the only meaning to life, a frantic race to cram pleasure into youth before the onset of death.
Platform is even better as a Swiftian satire on consumer 'ethics' when applied to the quest for some kind of "authentic" experience of life through the exotic, a trait pretty evident in Central and Eastern European nations where disillusioned British males can pick up good looking Slavic girls.
The Polish girl in turn fetishises 'de English dzentlemans' and dreams of the consumerism that had bored the male in his own country in tandem with the petty carping feminism and self promotional careerist zombies he might have otherwise had to put up with.
Platform deals with the inability of neurotic Westerners to form meaningful and long term relationships is developed to its logical conclusion-mass packaged sex tourism in Third World nations where the spontaneous nature of their unspoilt sex is to be commodified
It is designed to serve the needs of those desperate for natural and uninhabited sexual contact they can no longer have due to the dehumanisation of relationships in the West, stupid feminist ideologies, political correctness, and fake male bonhomie.
Having lived across the globe and heard the misery of interminable ex-pats complaining about how much more "demanding", cold, unsexual and egotistical women in the West are compared to Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and Thais
This has been accompanied as well as Western women fetishising the virility of Cuban or black men, a trend shown in the weird obsession with getting married to African chieftains in places such as Kenya.
It seems to me that Houellebecq is a visionary for his ability to draw conclusions about the nature of our society from the relentless observation of it as it really is in its everyday crummy banality as once did Celine in Journey to the End of the Night.
Where all connection to the past and all dreams for the future have died and only a horny and desperate desire for sexual diversions and consumer satisfaction provide an anodyne to the pain and separation of atomised individuals
Those who live bleak existences devoid of any feeling of belonging, fraternity or where hatred and bitterness easily turn into strategies of rationalisation through fanatical political creeds, fundamentalism, conspiracy theorising and racism.
Houellebecq is the ultimate antidote to the sentimental and vacuous platitudes mass produced in or media by the liberal left about how wonderfully diverse and tolerant it is as a sham, a willing form of delusion.
Instead Houellebecq sees the underlying symptoms of sadism, malice and voyeuristic cruelty unleashed by the sexual revolution as, like with all other revolutions, devours its children. The natural consequence of a consumer mentality pushed into all aspects of life.
For the older generation obsessed with the cult of the body beautiful and sex as a "human right" in the 1960s found that just as they rejected their parents, they are now rejected with scorn by their successors.
After all, for Houellebecq, the sexualisation of youth as the pinnacle of all human desire which by its nature is transient and serves a regressive function, reducing humans to infantile consumers who want to buy happiness.
I have not had time to look in too much detail as to the significance of the "people power" events in Tunisia or Egypt. But instead of obsessing too much about the possibility of Islamists getting into power, in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a need to let people there determine their own future.
The best thing is that Western governments accept that democracy in the Mahgreb and the Middle East will produce governments that large numbers of the people there have willed-for good or ill. It's far better that that is accepted and even if Islamist governments are voted in to accept them.This was accepted by the most perceptive writer Malise Ruthen in his brilliant A Fury for God.
The alternative is for the Western nations to keep backing dictators, as the craven and pathetic Blair has effectively done, due to "vital interests" and further aid the cause of terrorism.It might be that a wave of revolution will cause "instability" in the the Middle East.
Yet its better the west does not interfere as any new governments must trade with Europe anyway and even if the government were Islamist it would find itself having to deal with economic realities rather quickly.
As a result of decades of migration, the young Arabs whom you see chanting angrily on the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Amman already have cousins in Madrid, Paris and London.
If these uprisings succeed, and what emerges is not another Islamist dictatorship, these young, often unemployed, frustrated men and women will see life chances at home. The gulf between their life experience in Casablanca and Madrid, Tunis and Paris, will gradually diminish – and with it that cultural cognitive dissonance which can lead to the Moroccan suicide bomber on a Madrid commuter train. As their homelands modernise, young Arabs – and nearly one third of the population of the north African littoral is between the age of 15 and 30 – will circulate across the Mediterranean, contributing to European economies, and to paying the pensions of rapidly ageing European societies. The examples of modernisation and reform will also resonate across the Islamic world.
If these risings fail, and the Arab world sinks back into a slough of autocracy, then tens of millions of these young men and women will carry their pathologies of frustration across the sea, shaking Europe to its foundations. If the risings succeed in deposing the latest round of tyrants, but violent, illiberal Islamist forces gain the upper hand in some of those countries, producing so many new Irans, then heaven help us all. Such are the stakes.
It is getting tedious having to read this or that criticism of President Obama for just not being the sort of president that progressives believed him to be, not least in foreign policy where he gained votes and support from being against the Iraq War ( though subsequently not removing all US troops from Iraq in 2009 ).
The president is expected to propose a larger military budget for the third year in a row next month. And he has thus far consistently used off-the-books supplemental bills to add more funding to his wars.
Progressive groups have made so much noise cheering for the elimination of this or that weapon, that the overall increase in the military budget each year has been missed, just as it will be missed by any casual viewer of this week's speech. But a group of hundreds of prominent activists, authors, and academics has recently released a statement outlining Obama's militarist record and committing to oppose his candidacy for the Democratic nomination next year unless he changes course.
The amount of self righteous twaddle peddled on Afghanistan and Iraq from those both for and against the "imperial wars" downplays the centrality of controlling oil and gas and that resource wars are made necessary by the sheer scale of consumption in societies such as the USA and EU.
Like it or not, for large numbers of Americans , democratic freedom is bound up not in politics but the freedom afforded by the mobile society, The Great Car Economy around which The American Dream was constructed in the twentieth century. The war against Iraq was to provide the secure supplies to fuel that dream.
Vast numbers of those who are against the war in Iraq need to start dealing not with populist outrage or that Obama has been derailed from progressive politics by the legacy of Bush's forthright imperialism. For Iraq was a war to preserve the USA's democracy as based on consumerism and delusive hopes of infinite growth.
Swanson has a book entitled War is A Lie which does not have one chapter devoted to the desperate search for secure supplies of diminishing fossil fuels. Any book that extrudes devoting a large part to considering energy security is not going to add much to what is already know nor ask difficult questions.
These have to be confronted but progressives want to believe that they can earn cheap popular points from condemning war ( as if most people in placid consumer democracies are going to actually like war as opposed to the pleasures of shopping malls, McDonald's Drive-Thrus and so on ).
For what large numbers cannot see is that their lifestyles necessitate these resource wars to be fought. Even Afghanistan is part of a colossal geopolitical project to get Afghanistan integrated into Central Asia and act as an "energy bridge" taking gas through the TAPI pipeline.
The criticism of war has to make it plain that it is the consequence of the failure of energy policy and conserving energy supplies. Not in ideological thrusts that claims that the West is uniquely imperialist when there is a New Great Game on in Central Asia that could be destabilising.
The alternative to controlling oil supplies is to reduce the USA's level of car use, reduce its living standards and hand control of the global economy to China, which has already made inroads into controlling natural resources in Africa and Central Asia but without war and hypocritical human rights prating.
War is not a Lie: its a reality today bred by conflict over precisely those resources that make large numbers of even anti-war activists, materially comfortable. Tell citizens in the USA that war is created by their prodigious fossil fuel use and that will be difficult to accept. But it's the truth nevertheless. Tell them its due to ideology and bad people and that is easier.
On January 29 2011 Rick Rozoff ( Washington Intensifies Push Into Central Asia ) writes of the expansion of military presence in the region. And this is connected to the pursuit of energy security through diversity of outlets, a point made by Michael T Klare in his Blood and Oil.
Rozoff writes,
The U.S. and Britain, with the support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, invaded Afghanistan and fanned out into Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in October of 2001, less than four months after Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to foster expanding economic, security, transportation and energy cooperation and integration in and through Central Asia.
In 2005 India, Iran and Pakistan joined the SCO as observers and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has attended its last five annual heads of state summits. Now the U.S. and the NATO have over 150,000 troops planted directly south of three Central Asian nations.
The State Department's Blake delivered a speech at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas entitled "The Obama Administration's Priorities in South and Central Asia."
"Central Asia lies at a critical strategic crossroads, bordering Afghanistan, China, Russia and Iran, which is why the United States wants to continue to expand our engagement and our cooperation with this critical region."
In furtherance of U.S. designs in an area that not only abuts the four nations named, but if controlled by the U.S. would prevent regional cooperation between them except insofar as it is mediated by an outside power, Washington...
The complaint that if people really valued small independent shops that they would use them seems to ignore the fact that the way that the concept of "choice" works is determined by the manner in which public policy works. Not least in deferring control over it to powerful global supermarket chains.
The reality that needs to be dealt with is that in an atomised society based on car use, supermarkets are going to get the bulk of trade. Take Tamworth in England. The small centre of this old market town consists of shoe shops, travel agents, down marker supermarkets, the Co-Op, personnel agencies etc.
Just outside near the by-pass that runs through the expanded town and links the legoland estates with one another are ASDA Walmart, Sainsbury's, Burger King, McDonalds Drive Thru, Matalan and all those warehouse style retain chains precision placed for the car owner as in the USA.
The old shops have died out. Truckle's Cheese Shop has gone. a notice saying 'Use or Lose' was up there in the 1990s. The sign and shop are gone. The old pubs with their historical names have gone. The poor frequent noisy chain retail pubs such as the Wetherspoon's pubs with their pubby affectation have replaced many of them.
These bleak warehouses of booze with their feeble attempt to recreate what pubs once were are pub re-enactment chains. Replete with sepia photos of local history and glossy magazines telling the punters why there beer is cheap and what offers are on in future mediocre substitutes for the old pubs.
Friday nights are noisy and full of violence waiting to break out and frequented by roving police vans waiting for trouble and omnipresent CCTV cameras. The reality of what was once a lovely market town is now a floodlight wasteland and one that has got worse as the out of town retail park has gutted the centre.
The fact is that a large number of people use supermarkets because they are convenient and often cheaper than small shops. The design of whole towns since the 1980s and the Great Car economy has encouraged these patterns of consumption.
Small shops are there for those who live within walking distance. The car has killed that off and contributed to a society with growing problems with boredom and obesity. In London, ironically, such small shops can continue as those who live there find the car more difficult and time consuming due to the traffic.
Hence it is easier to get back after work and go to the local grocer, usually run by immigrants or the families of immigrants who are willing to work hard to make money by servicing local needs. Even then supermarkets open up "Local" branches will self service machines.
Perhaps people favour the alienation of modern life. The fact it is possible to get Tesco to come to the door to drop off food. To order most things online and never have to bother with social interaction other than via the Internet. After all, the important human requirements can be ministered to through it.
The old small shop was not just a place where things were bought but at the heart of a community, a people where people met and talked. All of that has gone. Modern consumerists want freedom, autonomy, control and choice. A cold, impersonal world. Yet one freer to spend less time thinking about anthing other than the consumer goods "I" want.
Yet it is most likely this is what people want. accepting this is hard but the Internet will replace what were considered normal human interactions. Even "love" is now part of the supermarket economy through Dating Sites where autonomous consumers precision select partners from the list of personality profiles.
Britain is one colossal supermarket and those who do not like it need to get in step with the reality that they have willingly colluded in. And accept responsibility for the torpor that ensues, one enlivened only by football kitsch, the craving for violence and sensation.
Yet the over dependence on the car is one that means all Western nations depend on oil supplied from places like Iraq as a necessity, despite the hypocrisy over criticising Blair for trying to secure the long term viability of this model of consumerism.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Leo Tolstoy
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.
The poor state of history teaching in British schools has been a major concern of Michael Gove. The kind of complaint that the replacing of the teaching of battles and dates must consist only by simply getting pupils to think about how in must have felt to be an impoverished labourer displaced by eighteenth century enclosure acts.
With the coming of a "multicultural society", the old narrative certainties about Britain's world historical role, its Empire and Industry, its unique "island story" became seen as antiquated and failing to to take account of the real history of oppression and killing upon which imperial domination was founded.
In 2009, Michael Gove as then Shadow Education Secretary stated that it was time to get back to patriotic, inclusive, and integralist narratives, not least in the wake of terror attacks in 2005, the rise of Islamism and a number of sympathisers ( and leftist non-Muslims ) who clearly detested everything Britain was supposed to have stood for,
"There is no better way of building a modern, inclusive, patriotism than by teaching all British citizens to take pride in this country’s historic achievements," he said. "Which is why the next Conservative Government will ensure the curriculum teaches the proper narrative of British History - so that every Briton can take pride in this nation."
He won applause from the conference for attacking the body responsible for writing the curriculum - the QDCA - and its budget of £100 million a year.
"After hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill. Never in the field of public expenditure has so much been spent by so many to distort World War Two."
Simon Jenkins wrote today in The Guardianthis, a rebuttal of the call to make history conform to some simplistic national pageant of seamless Good,
Time and again the message echoes down what Gove quaintly calls "our island story". The British army fights best when Britain is threatened, and fights worst when ordered overseas on vanity ventures by politicians desperate to cover themselves in glory. Given the frequency with which today's pro-war party refers to Hitler and appeasement, it would be useful if the nation stopped for a weekend and received a crash course in distinguishing the "necessary wars" of Elizabeth I, Pitt, Lloyd George and Churchill from the "wars of choice" of Edward III, Walpole, Palmerston and Blair. David Cameron and his foreign secretary, William Hague, see no difference. That is why they are stuck in the deserts of Afghanistan, their ears blocked to history.
Interestingly, Gove's prescription omits the history of the British Empire, the most important reason why British civilisation and culture influenced the world.
The people who make up Britain - Celts, Anglo-Saxons.
The Roman Invasion
Dark Ages
1066
Liberty and the Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort
War of the Roses
Tudor revival
Henry VIII
Elizabeth I
English Civil War
Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights of 1688
Union of Parliaments in 1707
The Growth of Liberty in the early 18th century
Beginnings of industrial revolution
Napoleonic Wars
The Struggle for the Vote in the 19th century, including Great Reform Act, Chartists
Queen Victoria and Great Victorian scientists such as Darwin and Faraday
Growth of the mass media and the mass franchise in the Edwardian Age
Great War
Great Depression of the 1930s
World War Two, including Churchill's role
New Elizabethan Age,
SSWindrush and the New Britain
Modern history to the present
History teaching needs to emphasise teaching on the British Empire far more, not least as Afghanistan can be seen as a war more in common with nineteenth century struggles over geopolitical hegemony in Asia between Russia and Britain and the Silk routes ( now the control of oil and gas pipelines ).
There is need to take history in schools beyond the celebratory banality of "our island story" as well as leaving the history of the British Empire to those who only seen it as "rapacious" and evil, as if empire were not, for good or ill, a recurrent feature of history.
History needs to be taught as something vital that can equip citizens to try to understand the world they live in beyond mere propaganda and reciting dates, as that is no more meaningful that rote learning football statistics and which team won the league in 1970.
The importance of teaching the history of the British Empire is that it made the world as it is today and often the decline of empires leads to even worse conflicts and ethnic hatreds, a lesson that would at least help young people to understand complexity.
This is not happening. Students concentrate too much on World War Two which means that every world event is looked at through this lens, as if the war in Iraq was "Fascism" or that the "resistance" is either nationalist, a bit like the French resistance ( which it was not ) or else "Islamofascist".
Ironically, public discussion about wars and conflicts tend to portray every one of them in binary terms. Gove would know as a member of the Henry Jackson Society, a fanatic neoconservative think tank that sees Anglo-US history as one inevitable and inexorable unfolding of liberty against existential enemies.
Alternatively, those disliking wars such as Iraq see them as 'racist imperialism' more akin to fascism as they have read their Pilger and would like to think the invasion of Iraq reflects the stalling of democracy in Britain as opposed to one of its consequences as it was about satisfying the oil needs of a consumer society.
The focus of history should downgrade World War Two somewhat which has become a kind of foundation myth for Britain as a power essentially bent on saving the world from "new Hitlers" and seen as being the "People's War". And everything since as a betrayal or enhancement.
Those who see post 1945 in social terms see the continued pretensions of Britain as a world power as a betrayal of the investment in peaceful alternatives to a world of war whilst others have seen Britain is a permanent state of decline and a betrayal of "our finest hour".
It is about time this narrative was changed and history taught differently, that there are not binary oppositions of Good vs Evil in the world and that power, greed, hypocrisy and stupidity are universal and apply as much to Britain as it does to other parts of the world and that Britain is important but not that much.
History lessons, instead of getting people to rote learn facts or else to be taught to daydream about how it must have felt to be like a fourteenth century peasant or industrial worker, should be posed with the kind of moral questions that are simple but induce thought and the average person often thinks about.
For example, are all wars about control of strategic resources and if so, then if the empire or power that controls them is a better alternative than the others contending for them, does that give any legitimacy to "liberal empires" ? Is "humanitarian intervention" ever justified ?
There are a number of British foreign policies that have been based on that since the end of the Cold War. From Kosovo to Iraq and they have a history going back into the nineteenth century when imperial rule was used to end inhuman practices. Did that outweigh the negative side ?
These are questions that need to be posed, not least in a Britain heading towards ethnic and religious sectarian divisions and polarisation between "Us" and "Them", as though only total cultural self repudiation or idiotic celebratory nationalism were the two options.
The worst thing is a refusal to look at history beyond fitting the facts to the prescriptions of ideological creeds. To refuse to even mention the centrality of the TAPI pipeline and the New Great Game for control of Asia as the reason why British troops are in Helmland.
It's guff to suggest Britain is only in Afghanistan for women's lib or selfless democracy promotion. To follow Gove's "neoconservative "prescriptions will lead young people to think the idea of 'Britain's seamless record of noble good intentions' is a load of codswallop and propaganda with legitimate reasons.
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 ?".
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.
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".
"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.
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 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 )