The Cummings Storm

Dominic Cummings is the story of the week. There is little doubt about that, But what have we really learned apart from the fact that Cummings is not the sort of person you should have as a friend. His revelations that Number 10 was a mess and had no plan for how to deal with the pandemic seem to have come as a massive shock to journalists, who whilst enjoying the spectacle of Cummings ripping into his, now, political enemies do completely miss the point.

The British people have been let down

Back in March 2020 I wrote a poorly read blog post which started: “The British people have been seriously let down during the current pandemic by the dithering of the Government and its reluctance to take decisive action earlier. This indecisiveness will undoubtedly cost lives. And, whilst it may seem that this was more a consequence of the speed with which the crisis developed than any malignant intent on the part of the Tory Government, that is a very generous interpretation of events.”

Whilst this article acknowledged that the pandemic was an extraordinary event, I also made clear that at the heart of our problem was successive governments who had failed to properly prepare for a pandemic experts had been warning them of for years. As I wrote then: “Let’s be clear this crisis has occurred relatively quickly, but nonetheless, it was first identified as a potential pandemic by the World Health Organisation, on January 10^th 2020. In other words, the UK Government have had over 3 months to prepare. Moreover, they have had access to both the gene sequence and the good practice provided by Chinese researchers since January 12^th. At that stage, the disease was clearly viewed as something happening overseas. In short, they did very little because they didn’t expect it to get here.”

This much was clear even to an observer without any access to government scientists and the array of information, much of which was not in the public domain. “If by early March the Government was preparing to take fairly drastic action it had already wasted as Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, has pointed out the whole of February. On February 27^th The WHO issued a list of 9 questions for Governments. They included questions about dealing with the first case, having vital equipment (including ventilators), ensuring health workers had protective equipment and the training to use it, and the knowledge and capacity to deal with the number of cases that were likely to occur.” 

Needless deaths

All that Dominic Cummings has done with his appearance this week is confirm that which we already knew. As he said: “Tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die.” But, why was that? Was it simply incompetence at the heart of government? Obviously that didn’t help. But two other things didn’t help either. First, was that the opposition failed to oppose. Starmer, far from holding the government to account offered them his support as incompetent misjudgement after incompetent misjudgement piled high. What is galling now is that some 14 months too late Labour frontbenchers have started to question the Government’s whole strategy. It is as if they had to wait for a Tory to open the criticism before they felt safe to do so. When the architect of the disastrous strategy that led to so many deaths appears more left-wing than the opposition it really is time people woke up to the fact that there is not just a policy black hole at the heart of Labour but a moral one too.

The second key omission, and one which allowed Labour to get away with their lack of opposition was the total failure of Britain’s National media to hold the Government to account. I stand by what I wrote at the time: “It really is incredible that so-called journalists some three months into a pandemic seem to have developed so little actual knowledge of either the disease or the way in which it is being dealt with elsewhere. I would have thought that it was the job of any self-respecting journalist to prepare for briefings. That might be expected to consist of rather more than having a coffee with a minister to get the inside track, and actually doing a little bit of independent reading. The public are certainly being let down in a major way by the politicians who are supposed to protect their interests but they are also being let down by a press corps who are failing in their duty to hold those politicians to account.”

Are we expected to believe that a Whitehall as full of dissent as Cummings suggests, managed to keep the conflicts under wraps so that not one journalist on the national media had access to it? Are we really gullible enough to believe that journalists being briefed on a daily basis by politicians and their aides had heard no whispers of dissenting voices? Or, is it more plausible to think that a mass media and opposition who had spent the best part of four years ensuring that we should not elect a left-wing Prime Minister were completely in awe of the politicians they had put in place? One of Cummings lines, reported without a single opposition or journalistic voice was that the country should not have had to choose between Johnson and Corbyn. As if Jeremy Corbyn, a man who has spent a lifetime championing the oppressed is actually comparable to a lying, philandering, racist, Eton posh boy who has had privilege granted to him by dint of his good fortune in being born wealthy. But, of course, the national media do not like Jeremy Corbyn so continuing their smear campaign against him to deflect from their role in Britain’s worst peacetime disaster is considered fair game. 

Poor journalism

In March 2020 I wrote: “As one minor example of how poor these “award winning” journalists are, when the UK Government committed its U-turn on March 16th Laura Kuenssberg justified it on the main BBC News by saying that “the science had changed”. That was simply untrue. There had been no change at all in either the science or the advice coming from the WHO about what needed to be done. What had happened was that Imperial College had modelled the science and come up with a figure. Something that they could have done weeks before, and something, in fact, that may or may not turn out to be either an over or under-estimate of the actual death rate. For the BBC to keep repeating the lie that “the science has changed” is not just misleading it turns them into government propagandists not independent journalists capable of holding the government to account.”

It really is no surprise that Johnson was too busy to deal with the pandemic, that he treated it as a joke or that to Carrie Symonds some nonsense about a puppy was far more important. It’s also no surprise that Matt Hancock is unfit for public office. What is a surprise is that it seems to be a surprise to the mass media. How have these highly trained and multiple award winning so-called journalists managed to miss all of this shambles taking place under their very noses? 

Let’s just pause for a second though and reflect that it was the entire establishment letting down the people of the U.K. In my article I noted the following: “Jenny Harries, one of the Government’s advisers and Deputy Chief Medical Officer, said on Thursday evening in relation to the WHO’s urging to ‘test, test, test’ that the UK was not the same as other countries. Her claim that “They are addressing every country, including low and middle income countries” seems absurd and it is also untrue. The claim is that the UK does not have the same public health systems as other countries. That is true, the majority of developed countries have better health systems than we do.I have studied the World Health Organisation advice very carefully. They do not distinguish between countries based on wealth or income. Indeed, they have been urging a rigorous testing regime since February. To  claim that the WHO advice does not apply to the UK based on the spurious claim that our health system is better prepared is not only wrong it is dangerous. And, it shows how the scientists flanking the PM see, at least part of their role, as justifying the inactivity of the government rather than protecting the citizens of this country.”

Holy triumvirate

So here we have the holy triumvirate completing the job of obscuring the truth whilst thousands of people were sacrificed on the alter of government incompetence. An opposition too scared of its own shadow to ask questions even under cover of parliamentary privilege, a mass media too in love with Johnson and his corrupt cronies to do even basic homework and a scientific community prepared to sell its soul for the illusion of their own self-importance. Meanwhile people were dying in their thousands needlessly. If only the government, opposition, media or scientists had paid attention to what had happened in Italy or how effectively New Zealand had coped with the virus. Neither of these countries are that far removed from the U.K., but instead if a comparison was sought it was with anti-lockdown Sweden fuelling the most outrageous conspiracy theorists about the motivations of government. 

In September last year I spent some time investigating the Sweden success story, and this is what I found: “Fast forward to June 2020. The British Medical Journal had an article by Heba Habib, which claimed that “Sweden’s public was supportive of the strategy but is now paying a heavy price.” The Swedish strategy was not one of pretending that the virus does not exist, nor of seeing it as an invented disease by some shadowy organisation as conspiracy theorists would have you believe, but rather was to develop a ‘herd immunity’, the same strategy which the British government were pursuing until they lost their nerve.As Habib notes the early success of the strategy was quickly overtaken by events. “Sweden has the largest number of cases and fatalities in Scandinavia—around 37,000 confirmed cases at the time of writing, compared with its neighbours Denmark, Norway, and Finland which have 12,000, 8,000, and 7,000 cases, respectively. All three neighbouring countries adopted a lockdown approach early in the pandemic, which they are now slowly lifting. All three have since re-opened their borders, but not to Sweden.”

But, let’s not dwell on the past when the present is so much more fun. Cummings account rather than precipitating a period of national mourning for the thousands who died needlessly, the death of effective political opposition, the death of anything resembling a campaigning press or the death of trust in science, has led to a routine and rather predictable further round of lies and obfuscation from the main players. The right wing press, that is to say most of it, have aided the government to go into damage limitation mode by describing Cummings testimony as an ‘act of revenge’.  Let’s just explore one contestant for the ‘should give up that job title as completely untrue’ award. Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s award winning Political Editor, writes: “The hours of testimony gave a disturbing sense of an administration simply overwhelmed by the scale of the Covid crisis at the start of last year - scrambling, and failing to keep up on many fronts.” That’s paragraph 2, by paragraph 3 the tone shifts somewhat: “In one sense, given that the situation was unlike any other event in recent history, that was not surprising. With the success of the vaccination programme, there is little sign that much of the public right now is in a strong mood to punish the prime minister for those early mistakes.” Is this just honest exposition? Or, is this Laura preparing to do the unimaginable: criticise the Prime Minister? If she has to criticise the Government, and even somebody as prone to covering for them as she appears could not really ignore the weight of evidence, then first soften the blow. It was an unprecedented time, and besides the public love Johnson not least because of ‘his’ successful roll out of the vaccine. Of course that is not exactly what she says, but it is easy to see that is precisely what she is inferring.

Plausible deniability

The point here is not to dismiss the plausible evidence that the government was incompetent but to remind readers and viewers that anybody would have struggled (don’t mention Jacinda Ardern). And, then, when the evidence is overwhelming turn on the witness. “But the testimony also showed that Mr Cummings himself had only told the partial truth about his own journey out of lockdown. His bizarre press conference all those months ago in the Rose Garden was not "the truth, and nothing but the truth", as today he cited security concerns about his family, rather than just his wife falling ill” Strangely at the time Kuenssberg was very quick to jump to Cummings defence, answering the Mirror’s Pippa Crerar who tweeted that he had broken the rules with these words: “Source says his trip was within guidelines as Cummings went to stay with his parents so they could help with childcare while he and his wife were ill - they insist no breach of lockdown” That, my friends, is impartiality in action. And, just in case, you didn’t get the point, towards the end of the current piece we are reminded: “And remember, Mr Cummings' own reputation is not stain free.” Interestingly enough, not only Kuenssberg, but most mainstream journalists, let the fact that he almost certainly broke the lockdown law (not just guidance) something they could quickly move on from.

I’ve cited my own previous articles here not to say ‘I told you so’, though I did, but more to show how easy it was to reach what have turned out to be the correct version of events. Of course, when privately educated ministerial aides are briefing there will always be much that they keep from the public. But, if Kuenssberg, Peston and the rest of the dross we rely on for news had an ounce of journalistic integrity it would not need somebody like me, existing on the margins, to document the truth. If, the scientists advising the government, had an ounce of scientific integrity they would not have covered for this shambles because they were rather too enamoured of their self-importance and if the opposition had an ounce of political integrity it would not have turned its back as tens of thousands died merely to appear “governmental”. This pandemic has shown starkly, and not just in Britain, that the whole system is rotten to its core. Frankly, whether Johnson and Hancock resign is irrelevant. Cummings is right they are not fit to hold office, but the fact is that what we now know is that virtually none of the establishment are fit to hold office. They do so based on a system of privilege and patronage. We can only grieve for the 127,748  dead and commiserate with their families. But, to avoid the same outcome we must not forget that the vast majority of them could have been saved if only the establishment cared as much for our lives as they do theirs. I don’t want to change a few faces at the top table, I want to see the top table completely demolished. That is my lesson from this shameful debacle.

The way forward for the left

 

Calling an article ‘the way forward for the left’ is probably a hostage to fortune. It suggests that I have answers when the truth is I’m not even sure I know all the questions. And, it risks disappointing those who might want to skip the waffle and jump to the final paragraph and find out where we go from here. Let me be honest then. I don’t have a magical, unifying idea that will make the left in the U.K. or anywhere else suddenly dynamic or successful. Sorry. All I can do is offer an idea of how we might survive in the here and now. If others agree with me that is a bonus. My most important disclaimer is this: beware of false prophets offering shortcuts. Especially those that involve you voting for them.

Politics is complicated

Just in case anybody is thinking we might get some insight from Labour’s frontbench, this is a brief summary from Corbyn-hating Alison McGovern: “Politics is complicated....Nostalgia on the left is a political disease. ...The only way to win is to focus on the future.....To govern is to choose, and if you can’t choose, you can’t govern. So, priorities must be clear – not just to us, but to the public, too.” Unfortunately, those priorities disappeared in a bit of fog that meant that not only were they not clear to the public, they didn’t appear to be clear to the author either. Hopefully, I can do better.

So, if we are thinking about how the left can go forward we have to be clear why it is not doing so now. After all, have we not seen in the past few weeks massive demonstrations, on a worldwide scale, against the genocide in Gaza? Have we not also seen in the U.K. mass protests against the Police and Sentencing Bill? Have we not also seen successful strikes against fire and rehire? How can I think that the left is not on the march? But these movements, as important and affirming as they are, are not a sign of our strength but rather show up our weakness. We are reacting. We are on the back foot. We are, to quote a phrase, fire fighting. We do not control the agenda. And, not just because of the media as some will no doubt argue. Do you think the ANC controlled the media in South Africa, or the civil rights protestors controlled the media in America during the sixties? In no battle that we have ever won, have we controlled the media.

The truth is that despite some illusions to the contrary the left in the U.K. is in disarray. Between 2016-2019 an uneasy alliance was formed to support Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to turn a turgid Labour Party into a campaigning social democratic force. In the end, turgidity won. But one sure sign of the weakness of the left is that new so-called socialist parties are springing up like a manic whack the mole game. Added to Resist, we have the Northern Independence Party, the Harmony Party,  and now the Breakthrough Party. You can add these to the list of existing parties including the various versions of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Labour Party, Workers Party and the former Militant, now Socialist Party. 

Space to the left of Labour

What they all have in common is that they are trying to inhabit a space they feel has been vacated by the Labour Party. I’ve outlined previously and in some detail why it is going to be difficult for a left of Labour party to make an impact. The fact is that Labour has a core vote of around 8 million voters. Not enough to win an election but enough that losing a couple of thousand to left parties will not damage their prospects. The vast majority of that 8 million will not abandon Labour at the next election. I could be wrong. I’d like to be wrong, but in reality I suspect that based on what is going on now SirKeith will, if still leader, lose with a vote something like 5 million less votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2017. But, those lost votes will not propel any left parties into parliament. Most of them will simply abstain. To those who have joined those parties that will be seen as me being incredibly cynical and/or defeatist. But actually I would love to see a coalition of left parties genuinely challenging Labour. But, even if they could it is unlikely to change the nature of the system very much.

Let me be clear here. I am not hostile to the new parties or most of the old ones. I would probably vote for any of them if they stood in my area. But, that is partly because I don’t think who I vote for will make any great difference. Not because the electoral system is rigged, though it quite probably is, but because it is a bourgeois, neo-liberal parliamentary system designed to perpetuate bourgeois, neo-liberalism. That is why I am sceptical, not cynical, about the possibility of a left wing party winning parliamentary power. But, this does not answer the question set: what is the way forward for the left? If not in a new party, then could it be by remaining in the Labour Party?

Certainly not if it is to follow the likes of Alison McGovern for whom politics is too complicated to actually reduce to anything like a popular policy. But others are more optimistic about the Labour lefts prospects. Former Communications Director for Jeremy Corbyn, James Schneider, outlines what he calls a strategy to win. According to Schneider it is possible to use the membership to win progressive policies. This will be done, he says through “a formal alliance between the Socialist Campaign Group MPs, the left-led trade unions and Momentum” who somehow will drag a Labour establishment, devoid of any actual ideas but absolutely convinced that every time Jeremy Corbyn breathed another Labour voter turned into a Tory, into a programme of radical reforms. “We will be more likely to win policies we support, internal elections, selections of candidates for elections and perhaps even vote out general secretary David Evans at party conference this year,” Schneider confidently predicts.

Conference motions

Winning conference motions, if the members are allowed to even put them, may make people feel that they are winning, but the reality is that we had the entire manifesto in 2017 and 2019 and it made not one jot of difference to the right who used their control of the PLP and full-time bureaucracy to ensure that the left would never be in a position to implement it. This is not just a matter of a difference of opinion. Any objective analysis of the facts would tell you that there is simply no way that the left in the Labour Party is winning the party back. To suggest otherwise is not just wrong, but dangerously misleading.

The problem is that the emphasis on parliament as “the state” blinds us to the fact that parliament is just the legislative arm of the state with much power resting elsewhere. But ignore that inconvenient fact and consider how we get to use this state. First, we have to win back the Labour Party. That is as likely as my winning the next Mr Universe competition. But, if we could we then have to win an election. If we are trying to take control of, rather than radically transform the state, even if we could get a socialist government it would be lucky to last ten days. The state is not neutral, like a car just waiting for the right driver. The state, as currently constituted is a capitalist state. It is a vehicle to maintain the dominance of a small elite of super-rich capitalists. It is not set up to do anything else.

Of course it has taken on lots of other functions as capitalism has grown more complex but the reality is that the state at international, national and local level exists to support global capitalism. The only way that will change is through a social revolution, but I don’t think that’s what James has in mind. Labour is so encompassing in his thoughts that everything else seems secondary to it. His series reads like a long job application to be future Communications Director in a Starmer-Momentum Labour Party dedicated to socialism and the working class. And then a small boy in the crowd shouted “look the Emperor has no clothes...”

Left elitism

Not everybody sees Labour as an oasis of socialism in a capitalist World. Not everybody sees the Labour left through rose tinted spectacles. Natalie Strecker takes issue with a left that engages in: “virtue signalling, [and] condescension”. James should have read her before he wrote his series! Describing her own experience of the left Natalie says: “All too often there seemed to be a club on the left that you could not join if you had not read all the books and did not know the difference between a Marxist, a Trotskyite and a whole number of other distinctions.” Is she right? Can anybody on the left put hand on heart and say they have never been at a meeting of the left with people who seem more concerned to show you how much they have read than just talk to you as a person? The Labour movement, and not just the Labour Party, can intimidate people out of activity by making them feel uneducated and unworthy. 

Political parties, whether mainstream or of the left replicate, despite their best intentions, parts of the capitalist culture that most of us want to escape. They create bureaucracies which rather than encourage radicalism start seeing their own survival as the goal of the party. They create elites who feel that it is in their gift to elevate some people and denigrate others. They, inevitably, create factions because the very nature of the parliamentary system we remain obsessed by is adversarial. Even well meaning, left wing parties do this because they have structures which are focussed not just on getting things done but creating leaders, committees, delegates, all based on adversarial principles of in-groups and out-groups. Political parties may well turn out to be part of the problem, not the solution.

I realise this is not what people want to hear. Hell, not so long ago it was not what I wanted to hear either, but I’ll say it again because I think it is highly relevant.  The electoral system is an integral part of a capitalist social order. It is set up to support, for want of a better phrase, big business. Parliament is simply the political wing of the economic order. It is there to provide legitimacy and to enact laws that make the smooth running of capitalism possible. If capital gets worried about the functioning of parliament then it has, well, bodies of armed persons to close it down. As it does on a regular basis in other countries.

We are doomed

Which might make things seem particularly futile. After all, if we can’t win political power we are doomed, are we not? Not quite. Societies don’t change because of parliamentary elections but despite them. By absorbing all our energy into parliament, and mini-parliaments (councils) we can leave insufficient for the struggles that really matter. That might sound as if I’m saying that fighting in elections is a distraction from real revolutionary activity. That is not my intent. At some points fighting elections certainly can be a viable option. It can, if done successfully, raise issues and the profile of the left. But, getting a couple of hundred votes is humiliating and potentially damaging for the left. It paints us as losers and a much smaller minority than we actually are. So, should we put our energy into revolutionary activity instead? Truth is I’m not entirely sure what such activity would look like. Self proclaimed revolutionaries spend a lot of time learning “the line” and promoting it on paper sales, is that revolutionary activity? Possibly, but probably not. Okay, so what should we do in the here and now? What is the way forward for the left?

Well, in my opinion and you are perfectly entitled to have a different one, we start by recognising that there is not one unified left. There are a collection of individuals all who at some level feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with our current society. Those people belong to different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, nations, parties, and every other device you can think of to divide us. Some are well read, some not. Some think they have all the answers. They don’t. What we all share is a belief in change. 

To go forward we have to start building organisations that challenge capitalist norms. Not just norms of inequality but of elitism. Left elitism, as Natalie Strecker reminds us, is no less pervasive than right elitism. We need to build organisations that nurture people, that make them feel valued as individuals and members of the collective. Organisations where people can make mistakes without being castigated and piled on. We need to stop finding ways to divide ourselves on whatever spurious grounds are in fashion, and find ways to work together. That means listening to people’s experiences but taking those individual stories and understanding them as part of a wider narrative of inequality. The left is not going anywhere unless it loses a growing tendency to divide itself like a parody of a Monty Python sketch and concentrates instead on what unites us. Concentrates on the real battle not the phoney wars that some people get so excited about. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you are inside a political party or, like me, reject the value of parliamentarianism, we all want the same thing. That thing is socialism, because that is the negation of capitalism which is at the root of most of the ills that confront us. I’m continuing to promote a vision that involves creating socialism in the here and now, if you would like to join me get in touch.

Hatred, condemnation and propaganda

 

The Jewish Chronicle, the voice of British Zionism, started its leader this week with the words: “The story is depressingly familiar. Israel acts to defend itself and the response from many mainstream figures is to condemn Israel.” This is a paper widely read by the Jewish community in the U.K. and it starts by reasserting it’s familiar cry - ‘no matter what atrocities our side commits, don’t forget we are the real victims here’.  After I wrote last week about freedom of the press, or rather the lack of it, two events occurred that pretty much summed up why we should be very alarmed about our ability to find the truth. The Jewish Chronicle alludes to the first event and most of this article is going to be about the alleged Palestinian attacks that meant Israel, that poor beleaguered, friendless state in the Middle East had to defend itself.

But before discussing that I did not want to let this pass. On Tuesday, blogger Craig Murray was given an 8 month prison sentence for, according to The Guardian “repeatedly breaching a court order protecting the identities of women who accused Alex Salmond of sexual assault.”  The BBC, meanwhile led by saying that the “former UK diplomat has been jailed for eight months over blogs he wrote about the trial of Alex Salmond.” Neither of these erstwhile defenders of the liberal notion of a free press mentioned that the terms of his right to appeal included a revocation of his right to travel meaning that he could not give evidence in person in Spain in support of Julian Assange. I don’t know the ins and outs of the Alex Salmond case but I do know that he was found not guilty and that his defence consisted in part of an allegation that he had been targeted by political rivals. It was this defence that led to Craig Murray, a thorn in the side of the establishment since he revealed that the British army used torture, finding himself on the wrong side of the dock. I can’t say for sure that Craig has been targeted for revealing the use of torture or for supporting Julian Assange, but it’s one hell of a coincidence.

Palestinian Aggression

But, this week has also been characterised by an intensification of Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza, and the unconscious bias of the British media asserted itself once again. On Newsnight Emily Maitlis spoke to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K. Her sole concern was that Mr Zomlot, a Palestinian, should condemn Hamas for retaliating in the face of intensified Israeli aggression which left 9 children dead. When he refused to do so, rather than entering into a debate, Ms Maitlis simply closed him down. The BBC can barely bring itself to mention Palestine so Husam Zomlot gaining five minutes of airtime to express his anger at the treatment of his people should be applauded, but that throughout that time he was continually berated as if defending yourself against an occupying army is itself an act of aggression rather supports the claim that I made last week that the BBC, together with most of the mainstream media, have a specific agenda, all be it an unspoken one. That agenda is to support the status quo and we should not forget that the weapons Israel uses are often provided by the United States. In February Israel confirmed the purchase of $9 billion of American weaponry. 

To be fair to Newsnight and to Ms Maitlis, and you might ask why should I give them a consideration they so often lack for others, they also interviewed the Israel Ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely. It was not a friendly interview but it is striking that there was no demand that Ms Hotovely should condemn Israeli aggression as if that was the main problem. There was no exasperation that Ms Hotovely kept referring to “Palestinian terrorism”. There was no questioning of Israel’s right to be occupying parts of the West Bank, no reminder to Newsnight viewers that Israel is in contravention of numerous United Nations resolutions calling on them to withdraw from the lands they occupy illegally. What Ms Maitlis was concerned about was that Israel should act “responsibly” and not respond with excessive force to the Palestinian provocation. There was also no mention of the ‘coincidence’ that Netanyahu, currently being investigated on corruption charges, lost the recent election leaving the balance of power in the hands of Raam, described by the New York Times as “an Islamist group with roots in the same religious movement as Hamas” 

This is how propaganda works. Not massive placards declaring that Big Brother is watching you, but by repeating slanders against one side, whilst always, apparently giving the other side a fairer hearing. It is a process known as ‘framing’, and it ensures that the propaganda is not readily apparent. Jason Stanley, a writer on propaganda, put it this way: “Propaganda arises even if no one intends it. And that’s because it’s a corporate media. There’s a relationship between the media and the government. The government won’t share secrets with the media if they don’t comply, like we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War.”  His point is that news media are forever chasing ratings but at the same time they have adopted a quite perverse view of balance. As Stanley says: “the purveyors of propaganda want you to think that in order to be real, we’ve got to counterbalance everything. We have to always have the “other” side, the other perspective, the other truth.” The result has been to allow conspiracy theorists and cranks equal billing with scientists, academics and those with a deep factual knowledge.

Dominant narratives

Whilst Jason is undoubtedly right, what it leaves out is that having both sides is not the same thing as treating both sides fairly. Most readers of this blog will recall Emily Maitlis turning to camera during an interview with Barry Gardiner and raising her eyebrows. This was a blatant display of bias, for which nobody at the BBC reprimanded her, because it was part of a dominant narrative which the BBC were promoting. In short Labour with Jeremy Corbyn as leader are untrustworthy. In terms of what is happening in Israel the BBC, like most of the mainstream media, simply choose not to report the daily acts of aggression against Palestinians. It is as if they never happened. But when Israelis were tragically killed in a religious festival that was widely reported. 

I am not saying that the deaths of Orthodox Jews do not matter. But, that was one tragic event. Every day a Palestinian family lose their home as the Israeli’s forcibly remove them and steal the land for themselves. As Mondoweiss reported in August at the height of the pandemic which was disproportionately affecting Arabs who were denied access to the vaccines which Israel was providing its own citizens: “On Monday, two Palestinian families in the Silwan and Jabal al-Mukkabir neighborhoods of the city were forced to demolish their homes, under the pretext that they were built “illegally.”Israel’s Jerusalem Municipality had given the family two choices: either demolish their homes themselves, or wait until Israeli authorities come to destroy them, and then incur the hefty demolition fee from the municipality.”  There is no justification for this. It is an illegal act carried out by an illegal occupying force and is ‘ethnic cleansing’. These daily acts of illegality only become news when those being brutalised fight back. At which point we are asked to condemn them for using violence.

As human rights activist Natalie Strecker told the Socialist Hour  podcast: “Who of us would tolerate a 14 year brutal blockade where our hospitals are failing, where there isn’t enough basic supplies, and where periodically we see the Israeli government doing what they do, which is mowing the lawn. Where they go in and they’re bombing civilian neighbourhoods. Who of us would tolerate 73 years of ethnic cleansing, of apartheid, of incremental genocide…Who of us would tolerate this. This is the thing, when we look at the situation and this whole condemn Hamas, well what would I do?”

When we die, we die together

The truth is that none of us really know how we would react. Because for most of us living in the comforts of Western Europe war and occupation are things that happen far away. We can express outrage but at the end of the day we can go to bed safe in the knowledge our homes won’t be blown to pieces during the night. By now most of us will have heard of the famous Israeli Iron Dome,  which intercepts over 90% of Hamas’s rockets. Meanwhile, a Palestinian Twitter user Eman Basher tweeted “Tonight, I put the kids to sleep in our bedroom. So that when we die, we die together and no one would live to mourn the loss of one another.” (Thanks here to Rachael Swindon who used this quote in her blog post). This is heartbreaking enough, but the truth is that the Palestinians have no defences against the Israeli bombardment. 

On Newsnight, as on most of the mainstream media the pounding of the Palestinians is presented as a “conflict”. According to my dictionary a conflict is “a struggle or clash between opposing forces”. This suggests some kind of symmetry between the two forces. What is happening in Gaza is not a struggle between two opposing forces. It is an assault by a well armed, aggressive army with tanks, guided missiles and jet planes and a civilian population armed with prayers and a few rocks from the rubble of houses destroyed by the missiles of their attackers.

Of course Hamas has rockets. At the last count they had about 2,000 home made short range missiles. Unlike the Israeli weapons they are countering these are not precision weapons. But, we should be clear, they are not fireworks either. If they hit they can do a considerable amount of damage. The problem for Hamas is that they don’t usually hit. One reason they tend to fire a barrage is that they know that the Israeli’s will intercept over 90% of the rockets Hamas launch. But these rockets can, and occasionally do, kill. Should we therefore condemn Hamas for launching weapons they know can kill and maim?

Who are the real victims?

The concentration on Hamas aggression is an attempt to paint the Israeli’s as victims. Therefore, whatever the Israeli’s do in retaliation is legitimate because they are defending themselves. But as Noura Erakat wrote in 2014 as an occupying force Israel has no right to “defend” itself. As he explains:

“A state cannot simultaneously exercise control over territory it occupies and militarily attack that territory on the claim that it is “foreign” and poses an exogenous national security threat. In doing precisely that, Israel is asserting rights that may be consistent with colonial domination but simply do not exist under international law.”

The problem with the Israeli victimhood claim is that it rests on a falsehood. As Husam Zomlot tried to explain to Emily Maitlis the media, in a typical ahistorical approach to any story, start from a point that paints one side as the aggressors. Before Hamas fired a single rocket Israel had launched an attack on a mosque. Gangs of Israeli’s were, literally, rampaging through Jerusalem shouting “kill the Arabs”. And this was not even the start of the Israeli aggression. Unseen by most people because the BBC don’t consider it news Israel have been slowly persecuting Arabs out of their homes and handing them to Israeli “settlers” for the past couple of years. Arab villages have been bull dozed. Palestinian youth have been used for target practice. Perhaps you knew this but not if you were relying on the BBC for your news.

As Jacobin Magazine report: “Since 2008, Israel has killed roughly 6,000 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians — 1,250 were children. By comparison, 251 Israelis have been killed in the same period. Since 2009, Israeli demolitions have displaced over 11,400 Palestinians, more than 2,600 of them in East Jerusalem. Almost 620,000 Israelis are settled on Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in violation of international law.” 

The death toll is not an accident, it is not, as the media constantly tell us, a reaction to Palestinian terrorism. Let’s be clear here. There are terrorists. Nobody should deny this. But they are not Palestinian, but come dressed in the olive green uniform of the so-called Israeli Defence Force. They are supported by a civilian population whose views were laid bare in a widely shared video from Empire Files in which young Israelis were unanimous in their belief that the appropriate response to Arabs was to ‘carpet bomb them’, because “we need to kill the Arabs”, as “the Jews have the right to hate them” . 

We shall overcome

A recent poll reported in The Times of Israel found that between 23-49%, dependent on religious group, expressed hatred for Arabs. As the paper notes: “Given that people often avoid admitting their hatred toward another group when responding to polls, the aChord study noted that the high rates “may show that expressing hatred is considered acceptable.””  Among Arab Israelis who were polled hatred toward Israelis was much lower, 12-23% depending whether they were asked about secular or religious Israelis. This culture of hatred toward Arabs is not the sole reason for the continued aggression, that is political and economic, but provides the backdrop for the widespread support amongst Israelis for the continued ethnic cleansing.

In 1935 the Nazis passed the Nuremberg laws which removed  Jews from German citizenship.   In 1950 South Africa passed the Population Registration Act which made blacks second class citizens.  In 2018, Israel passed the Nation State Law which made Arabs second class citizens.   In 1935 few outside of Germany reported what the Germans were doing or opposed it. In 1950 the world’s press regarded what was happening in South Africa as their business. In 2018 the World’s media paid little attention to the fact that Arabs had just been made second class citizens. In all three cases there were reports in the press but no outrage. For most people life went on as normal.

But by 1945, despite most of the British establishment having Nazi sympathies Germany was fought to a standstill. By 1990, the African National Congress, derided by the establishment (many of whom are still in Government) as terrorists and supported by millions of supporters around the World overcame apartheid. The message here for Israel is: you are not the victims. You picked this fight and millions of us around the World stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Palestine and in the words of the old song “we shall overcome”.

Free The Press

So this week was World Press Freedom Day. Were you celebrating? If you were you probably either own or work for a media corporation or, like so many people, you accept what the press tells you uncritically. Perhaps it simply passed you by as you were far too busy concentrating on the various elections taking place this week. 

In this article I’m going to concentrate mainly on the U.K. press. For many on the left journalism has been discredited as a profession and that means, by definition, journalists are seen as agents of a right whose main job is misinformation and deception. But before I get into that, and I know most people on the left tend to take a dim view of what we have come to call, the mainstream media, it is worth sparing a thought for journalists around the World who far from being agents of their governments face harassment, imprisonment or death simply for doing their job. 

Julian Assange

Of particular note in this respect is, of course, Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder currently being held in Belmarsh. We’ll return to Julian in a moment. But I want to start by just asking you to take a moment to think about the 49 journalists killed this year. They include TV reporter Adeeb al-Janani killed in an attack on Aden airport, on January 2, 2021 and Spaniards David Beriain and Roberto Fraile killed in Burkina Faso last week. It is easy for us to see journalists as “the enemy” and often they are in a political sense, but it’s equally important we don’t forget that viewing the World from the comfort of the U.K. can blind us to the very real dangers faced by journalists in other parts of the World. Not every journalist is hostile to the values we cherish - justice, equality, truth, community, and many face extreme danger to expose the injustices that governments seek to hide.

That said, the press, particularly the national press in the U.K., has, like the BBC which feeds off it, a very partial view of the World. The absolute failure of the media to defend Julian Assange, and in some cases worse to spend time they should have spent campaigning for his freedom vilifying him, may well go down as the biggest failure, of a profession to protect even its own self-interest, of all time. The coverage of his trial was minimal, to say the least, and commentary, such as there was, tended to avoid entirely the wider implications of his incarceration.

In case you need reminding Julian was the founder of Wikileaks which according to its website: “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.” In other words, Wikileaks brings into the open documents that governments would prefer you did not see. Doing this of course, means that Wikileaks is not popular with governments around the World who rather like keeping their dirty laundry out of the public eye. 

WikiLeaks

Wikileaks was founded in 2006 but it was not until 2010 that the US Government began legal action against it. This followed the trial of Chelsea Manning who received a 35 year sentence for leaking documents detailing US abuses in Iraq. Ms Manning served 7 years and was released in 2017. Amnesty International note the following:

“Prosecuting beyond the information leak to WikiLeaks constitutes ‘overcharging’: rather than punishing Chelsea just for the leaking offences she had already admitted to, the prosecution brought wider ideological charges against her. In doing so, the prosecution said they intended to send a harsh warning to other potential whistleblowers – an action that could prevent information about human rights abuses and wrongdoing being revealed by military personnel in future.”

In other words, Chelsea Manning’s sentence was intended to ensure that military wrongdoing would not find its way into the public domain in future. 

The United States indicted Julian Assange in 2012 on charges of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack into a Government computer. He was then hounded through Europe eventually seeking sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. In 2019 after Ecuador removed him from the embassy he was arrested in London where he has been held in Belmarsh Prison for the past two years. Despite the US losing their attempt to extradite him earlier this year he remains in prison whilst they prepare an appeal.

Now, if they believed in press freedom, as they often assert, you would probably think that journalists around the globe would have rallied around Julian Assange. Sadly, their belief in press freedom seems to stop at their ability to print or say whatever they like free from criticism. Whilst a few journalists have championed his cause seeing his indictment as an attempt to stifle investigative journalism, the more common journalistic response has been indifference. There are a couple of possible explanations for this. It could be that journalists genuinely believe that Wikileaks should be hounded out of existence for it represents a threat to the lives of the laughably named intelligence community. It could be that the majority of journalists are so far removed from anything that might reasonably be called investigative journalism that this story and its implications simply has no meaning for them. Or, it could be that journalists, particularly in the mainstream media, are so far embedded within the pockets of the rich and powerful that they see their role as defending their interests not investigating them.

Elite journalists

According to the Sutton Trust’s analysis journalists in the U.K. are 6 times more likely to be private school educated than the general population with 43% being educated at private schools (compared to around 7% generally). Amongst newspaper columnists who, as the Sutton Trust notes are in “a unique position to shape the political agenda, as they are able to share their views on the political issues of the day on widely read and shared platforms”, some 44% are private school educated. The fact is that whilst journalists are not exclusively from a particular strata of the population, many are. Whilst they do not necessarily share a World view it is clear that there is a dominant view of the World which is supported by the national print media, the broadcast media and many of those who pursue a career in politics. 

When journalists such as the BBC’s Huw Edwards mount a defence of the media it is that “critics imagine a world in which thousands of BBC journalists – of all backgrounds, nationalities, outlooks – work to a specific political agenda ‘dictated’ by ‘a few powerful individuals’ as one commentator insisted recently on social media.” I’m not sure most people do imagine that is the case. The reality is that corporate socialisation is rather more insidious. As Noam Chomsky famously said to Andrew Marr who was aghast that he was seen as anything other than an objective reporter: “I don’t say that you’re self-censoring - I’m sure you believe everything you are saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting.” 

You might recall a short while ago as Covid raged Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis opened the show with a customary monologue. But, this time she was angry at the government’s inactivity over Senior Advisor Dominic Cummings blatant flouting of the lockdown rules. In it she said: “Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The whole country can see that, and it is shocked that the government cannot. The longer ministers, and Prime Minister, tell us he worked within them, the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be. He was the man, remember, who always ‘got’ the public mood, who tagged the lazy label of ‘elite’ on those who disagreed. He should understand that public mood now. One of fury, contempt, and anguish. He made those who struggled to keep to the rules feel like fools. And has allowed many more to assume they can now flout them. The Prime Minister knows all this, but despite the resignation of one minister, growing unease from his backbenchers, a dramatic early warning from the polls, and a deep national disquiet, Boris Johnson has chosen to ignore it.” 

BBC apologists

Surely, it could be argued, if a presenter on the BBC’s flagship show could be so critical of a senior advisor this is irrefutable proof that the BBC is impartial? But, if that were true what happened next would not have. Maitlis was removed as presenter the next night (although she claims this was her decision - yeah, right!) and the BBC immediately issued an apology for allowing journalism to get in the way of their role as government propagandists or in their own words: “we feel that we should have done more to make clear the introduction was a summary of the questions we would examine, with all the accompanying evidence, in the rest of the programme. As it was, we believe the introduction we broadcast did not meet our standards of due impartiality.“ Fair enough, you might think, here’s the BBC asserting its impartiality. But, the BBC rarely issues apologies when it gets things wrong about the left. They routinely engaged in amplifying lies about Jeremy Corbyn and never felt the need to reprimand a presenter. So, what was going on?

Jonathan Cook, in an excellent article on this issue, sums up the issue succinctly: “The usefulness of the Maitlis “row” is not in weighing whether she was impartial or partial on this occasion, or conversely whether her BBC bosses were enforcing impartiality rules or being partial. Rather, it helps to shed light on whether the BBC and its journalists ever actually aspire to be impartial, and whether impartiality is even possible.” Cook brilliantly shows how the carefully cultivated image of journalists as ‘holding power to account’ is fundamentally flawed. Journalists, he points out, and as one of the better examples of the genre we can assume he knows, are driven by their own career goals in much the same way other professions are. The ‘currency’ of journalism is access. In the case of political journalism it is access to senior politicians, particularly those in government.

It is not just access to government that drives journalism but also ensuring that they reflect a worldview acceptable to their proprietors and advertisers. In the case of the BBC, of course, officially there are no proprietors. But, naturally a government with close links to big business will also reflect the worldview of the same small elite. As Cook says: “The room for ideological manoeuvre enjoyed by newspaper journalists is a narrow window on issues either that the billionaires and advertisers do not care strongly about or that they disagree among themselves about. This is what journalists are typically referring to when they speak of “freedom of the press”.”

For Cook, the Maitlis affair is an example of how journalists are taught how to behave. The message for those coming through the ranks was quite clear. If somebody as high profile as Maitlis can be publicly reprimanded then if you want to get on tread very carefully indeed. The entire business of the mass media is to ensure that political debate is conducted within a very tightly controlled set of parameters. But, you knew that already. I think it’s safe to assume if you are reading my blog and have got this far in this article you are searching for alternate voices. The problem for those of us on the left is that, with a few honourable exceptions, we did not go to the right schools or have the family connections to become, let’s say, a Spectator or Telegraph journalist despite lacking any journalistic training. 

Alternative media

We do not have access to the huge amounts of money needed to subsidise a National newspaper. There is a view that newspapers are effectively the playthings of a handful of billionaires. As OpenDemocracy have detailed the majority of Britain’s National press is owned by 6 billionaires. More importantly, advertising revenue makes up nearly 50% of their revenue leading to a situation such as that described by Peter Oborne: “From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged…Its account, I have been told by an extremely well informed insider, was extremely valuable. HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is 'the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.'”

There is a left-wing media. Many people support The Morning Star,  The Canary and Double Down News, and, of course, this blog. The Canary is possibly one of the biggest success stories. Started on a budget of £500 by 2016 it could claim 7,532,000 page views, according to Similarweb.com. By comparison, The Guardian  had 387,701,000, whilst the BBC topped the pile with a staggering 1,986,494,000. What is clear is that, despite The Canary, the news is dominated by the mainstream. That is why freedom of the press remains freedom of the establishment to do more than tell you what to think, but can through a variety of techniques tell you, well not you exactly because by being here you are rejecting it, but the wider population what to think about. 

This is dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for pioneers like Julian Assange who the mainstream abandon because he provides a mirror on themselves that they do not want to look at and it is dangerous, most of all, for those who uncritically accept whatever they are told because nowhere are they told that questioning the dominant narrative is an appropriate response to real lives that are more like existing than living.

War Games

 

If I say “war, what is it good for?” and you don’t immediately think of the brilliant Edwin Starr track and reply “absolutely nothing” then you need to spend 3 minutes on the You Tube link before continuing. Edwin, or at least writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, weren’t a hundred percent on the money though. War, whilst wasteful of human life and destructive of the environment has been a feature of human culture for as long as we have records. You might recall being told during the Brexit debate that the EU had prevented war since 1945. Actually there has not been a single year since 1945 when there has not been armed conflict somewhere.. Although the number of conflicts varies as do death rates, war seems to be an endemic feature of modern civilisation, if indeed it is fair to characterise as civilised a species whose main form of conflict resolution seems to be violence.

Wars in the World

According to the website warsintheworld.com there are currently 70 countries involved in armed conflict (as of April 22nd 2021). I challenge anybody to be able to list even half of them. Is it because we don’t care or don’t know? Are you shocked at that number, especially bearing in mind that we are still in the midst of a pandemic which has been responsible for over 3 million deaths worldwide.

The Stop The War Coalition quote research by the International Institute for Strategic Studies which shows that the top military spenders (USA, China, India and U.K.) all increased their spending in 2020 compared to the previous year. Between the four of them they spent a staggering $1,057 billion in 2020 on military spending, an increase of $76 billion. Part of the problem is that these figures are so huge that it is almost impossible to compute them.  So to put some context a study sponsored by the German government calculated that the cost of ending World hunger by 2030 would be $330 billion.   In other words if the top 4 military spenders were to reduce their spending by just one-third, they could afford to eradicate food poverty within 10 years. Will they do so? Hell, no. 

Some of the biggest companies in the World are almost entirely reliant on military expenditure for their profits. In 2019 Business Insider listed the top 25 arms manufacturing companies in the World. Unsurprisingly, most of the companies were American. The thirteen American companies, including the World’s biggest arms manufacturer Lockheed, had sales of $180 billion. The four Russian companies, still huge companies, but sales of “only” $23.3 billion. The two British companies - British Aerospace and Rolls Royce - had sales of $50.6 billion. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the warmongerers are this side of what we used to call the ‘Iron Curtain’. Malala Yousafzai has estimated that the cost of providing primary and secondary education for all children throughout the World would be $340 billion.  Given that most countries are already financing education this would not all need to be new money. Is it possible that arms profits could be used for educating children? Not a chance.

Save The Children

War is a constant in human history and has been a driver of both human greed and human misery throughout our evolution. That does not mean, however, that it is inevitable. Many people, in many different countries and on different continents, will live their lives, relatively, untouched by war. But the number of people caught up in warfare is both staggering and terrifying. Save The Children estimates that 415 million children worldwide are living in war zones and areas of conflict. That’s almost 18% – or 1 in 6 – of all the world’s children. It is difficult to imagine for those of us who have lived in relatively peaceful countries what daily life is like if you are a non-combatant in a combat zone.

At the UN Security Council in May 2017 delegates heard that life in war zones around the world remained grim, with suffering “pushed to the limits” as cities turned into “death traps”. There were widespread reports of attacks against hospitals and wide-spread sexual violence. There is no war on racism or sexism in a war zone. Warfare is a breeding ground for racist attitudes as the ‘other side’ must be dehumanised to make killing them easier. Sexual assault and rape are commonplace in war and always have been as women are treated as possessions to be fought over and used by the victors for their own ends. Whilst female non-combatants are often targeted so are children. As Christine Beerli, Vice-President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), points out some 50 million people in urban areas now bear the brunt of conflict.  “At the ICRC, we see daily the realities of what happens when civilians are not protected,” she said, describing cases of children as young as three years old being killed or treated for the loss of limbs.

I did try to find testimony from those who have actually lived through a war zone as a non-combatant but they seem to be few and far between. There are plenty of soldiers memoirs and some from aid workers but the voices of those most affected are, as far as I can tell, mostly silent. My friend and comrade Ted Parry  located an article by Nadine Sinno which included accounts by women who had lived through the conflicts in Gaza, Iraq and Libya. Laila El-Haddad wrote a blog, later published as a book Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between, between 2004 and 2010. In one entry she notes the destruction caused by Israeli troops during a raid:

“Some fifteen houses, citrus groves, olive trees, two green houses, one chicken pen (with about 10,000 chickens), a water well, cattle, and other animals—all were eviscerated out of existence. The only surviving animal was a donkey. The poor beast was shot in the neck but survived with a battle scar and a bandage on his wound.”

It is difficult to imagine a life where almost everything you own can disappear in the blink of an eye. Where it is not only your life that is at stake, but also your livelihood. It is worth reminding ourselves that around one-third of the land mass of this planet have ongoing armed conflicts. There is not just a human cost to this but an environmental one. Zena El-Khalil’s “Beirut Update” provides a personal account of the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war that lasted for 33 days. In it she describes the devastation of war along with the raw emotion it creates:

“I fear that one day I am going to wake up and everything around me will be black.... they have been dropping chemical weapons on the south ... I also heard that they are using depleted uranium. Does this mean that after this is all over with, we are going to be looking at a generation of cancer victims?”

War is a thousand miles away

If you are worrying about how to pay the electric bill or how to afford to feed your children, you don’t need somebody like me telling you that you are lucky, because you are not. But, these problems which appear as belonging to one nation state are not disconnected to problems that are happening thousands of miles away. The same powerful elites who refuse to provide a decent standard of living for citizens in England, Wales, Scotland, America, France and elsewhere are profiting from wars that mean that people like Zena, not just a statistic incidentally but a real person with hopes and dreams just like the rest of us, are living their lives in fear of weapons manufactured in countries like Britain, America or France. They fear the long-term effects so that even when the war finishes they worry that they, or their families, will still be affected by the weapons.

I don’t wake up every day thinking about those in war zones, do you? They somehow seem incredibly remote. I glimpse them on my TV or through social media, but they are no more my lived reality than waking up in a mansion to be served by my entourage. It is worth considering though that for the 2 or 3 billion people caught up in a war zone that they would very much like the luxury of falling out with somebody on social media or having to endure a partial lockdown in the comfort of their own home. It is also worth remembering that Covid 19 did not pass by the war ravaged countries. In Afghanistan, Palestine and Syria not only are people trapped by armed conflict they are also facing an onslaught from Covid, though to those in those places a virus they cannot see may seem fairly remote compared to bombs and bullets and soldiers which are highly visible.

According to a recent article in The Lancet “After decades of war, Afghanistan has a weak public health system, with only 2·8 doctors for every 10 000 patients according to the World Bank. Poverty is endemic and so is a lack of education.” The main hospital is in the capital of Kabul. So far reported cases of Covid 19 are around 59,000 and there have been 2,600 Covid related deaths. But Covid is not the focus of most people in Afghanistan. There have already been over 8,000 fatalities from armed conflict in 2021, bringing the total since the war began again in 2018 to 227,510. This after the estimated 2 million casualties from the war in 2014. As Jaffer Shah, a researcher at Drexel University puts it:

“For the millions who have lived through an endless war, and who now face rising violence across huge swaths of the country, in addition to poverty, job losses, hunger, and more, COVID-19 is yet another thing to worry about—or not. If you've survived the Taliban and non-stop war, and you've grown up in an environment of insecurity where every day can be a life or death situation...you just don't have space to see the severity of COVID-19 and how widely it can spread”. Of course they may not have survived the Taliban because as the Americans pull out, it is the Taliban (once backed by the Americans of course) who look most likely to fill the vacuum. And that is particularly bad news for women and girls whose position will return to that of a second class citizen with no access to employment or education. 

War is good for business

The good news for the west, of course, is that armed conflict feeds the profits of some of our biggest companies thus ensuring that shareholders continue to enjoy massive dividends whilst keeping themselves well clear of the danger the products of the companies they are investing in bring to the World. Afghanistan is only one example. We could also mention Yemeni (6,199 deaths so far this year in its war with Saudi Arabia). Or, Tigray (up to 50,000 deaths so far this year in a war between Ethiopia and Sudan). Or, of course Palestine, where according to Human Rights Watch the Israelis “robbed with rare exceptions the 2 million Palestinians living there of their right to freedom of movement, limited their access to electricity and water, and devastated the economy.”

According to Von Clausewitz in his classic text On War, “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” often rendered as “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” I used to think that this was profound as well as correct. And, to be fair, it is. But, I now feel that this is only true if politics rather than being a means to decide policy is actually a means by which we bully others into agreeing with us. War in this definition is not a continuation but a failure. In the same way, and more trivially, that politics is often reduced to name calling, the idea of war as a form of politics is the belief that ‘might is right’, a point made by Plato in The Republic. I won’t go into Plato here (sighs of relief all round), but it is the case that the history of warfare is also the history of technology. The side with the most advanced technology - weapons wise - tends to win, although the Vietnamese managed to beat America despite their lack of sophisticated weapons. 

War is inevitably wrong. I know that people point to wars against fascism as so-called just wars, and they have a point. In the face of a bully diplomacy rarely works. But the reason socialists tend to be what Michael Foot described as ‘peacemongerers’ is because wars once started favour only the ruling classes who are happy to sacrifice our young in pursuit of their economic goals. It is invariably young working class people who suffer the brunt of the military casualties and it is ordinary women and children who find themselves caught up in the battle zones or forced to become refugees to escape the carnage.

If we want to both stop wars being propagated by an elite who profit from them and deal with racism, sexism, ableism, and poverty etc then maybe, and this is just a suggestion, we have to get to the root of the problem. What drives all these things? The answer is that they are rooted in social relations and those social relations are characterised by the pursuit of profit by the elite who are happy to see the rest of us squabbling amongst ourselves. To put this simply the root of the problem is capitalism. A failure to address that means that all the other problems we can so easily prioritise can only be scratched at. That is not to say we should ignore them, but that we should always remember that until and unless we change the social relations which dominate our lives that people such as Laila El-Haddid will continue to see their lives quite literally blown apart. What do the elite fear more than anything? That the 99% who do not benefit from war, oppression and discrimination (even if it appears that some of them do) realise that what unites them is more powerful than what divides them. A united working class, across national borders would be a truly terrifying spectre for those who assume their entitlement to rule. The question is are we big enough to put our differences to one side and unite to win the big prize. As the great German socialist Rosa  Luxemburg put it: “Today, we face the choice: either the triumph of imperialism and ..depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism..” Its up to us to choose.