Social justice or City profits - radical Yes or corporate No?

Another day, another threatening statement of 'corporate concern' over the potential 'instability' of an independent Scotland.

As dutifully headlined by an 'impartial' BBC:

The chief executive of the oil company Shell has said he would like Scotland to "remain part of the UK". Addressing the company's annual reception in London on Wednesday, Ben van Beurden said he valued the "continuity and stability" of the UK. 

I'll bet he does. When it comes to corporate self-interest, exploitation of resources, and outright suppression of human rights, you can be sure of Shell.

From the pillage of Nigeria and murderous repression of its Ogoni people, to the attempted billion dollar appropriation of the Arctic, Shell has shown a formidable capacity for exploitation posing as exploration.

Van Beurden, 'ethical' CEO, would have us believe that Shell merely want assurances over currency and monetary issues. What they really want is continued political licence to plunder. Hence this and other such 'non-political' interventions.
 
We hear much about 'worrying insecurity for the energy sector', and threats of corporate disengagement. What are Shell going to do if there's a Yes vote? Vacate the North Sea?

The greatest unexplored depth here, media and political, is the issue of climate change. While the corporate-political theft of oil revenues is an historic scandal, it doesn't supersede the massive calamity of even more carbon in the atmosphere - and the denial beast behind it. And while that's part of a much larger issue of global containment, it will not absolve any independent Scotland from its primary environmental duty.    

Yet, if, as seems obvious, oil is to be pumped, why not allocate such revenues for the social good, preferably as a Venezuelan-style nationalisation, or, at least, a Norwegian-type oil fund, to feed, house, educate and care for people, rather than stuff the accounts of corporate tyrants like Shell?

Beyond the 'worries' of Tory-minded outfits like Standard life - as amplified by BBC correspondent Robert Peston - and Alliance Trust lie the real, joint concerns of a Westminster establishment and high corporate forces, notably the privileged banks and Big Oil: profit and continuing political protection of it.
 
Yet concerns about corporate power, a business-first agenda and media prioritisation of such are almost nowhere to be seen.

This is part of a generally loaded reportage on independence, as revealed in academic John Robertson's findings of BBC bias. In one telling example he notes:

- On 26/4/13, in Reporting Scotland, a generally negative assessment of the future of insurance companies after independence finished with the Labour spokesperson’s assertion of ‘billions in costs’ and ‘potential closures’.

From the BBC to STV, the Daily Mail to the Scotsman, it's a daily-repeated diet of corporate insinuation, threat and blackmail.

For Iain Macwhirter at the Sunday Herald, this all amount to a "coalition of the City of London, the political classes and a UK-dominated media laying down the law." Thus:

The Scottish front pages have been reduced to a proforma. They just fill in the dots. Alliance warns of risks, Standard Life warns of risks...Lloyds...BP...Shell...Sainsbury's.

As Macwhirter asks:

Who are these people to make these threats? Who elected all these financiers and captains of industry? Bob Dudley, the boss of BP who earned $8.7 million last year, heads a firm that isn't even British any more. Since when did we allow banks to make our political choices for us? The degree of direct political involvement by big business in this referendum campaign is unprecedented and deeply disturbing. It is reminiscent of Latin America in the bad old days, of US dirty tricks and Yankee colonialism.

Alongside "these daily hectorings about the irresponsibility of independence from the finance houses", whose "unrestraind greed" has caused so much economic and social havoc, Macwhirter castigates "Owen Jones, BBC Question Time's favourite tame lefty", for failing to recognise the radical impetus behind the demand for independence or his willingness to welcome "an alternative political space opening up in which it is possible to challenge the neoliberal consensus."
 
There's no such timidity from noted leftist figures like Tariq Ali. As Jones departs the Independent for his new 'radical' sinecure at the Guardian, Ali  comes to Scotland this week to help make the case for real, radical independence:

He will tell his Scottish audiences that a vote for independence would "enable the rediscovery of hope of a better future, provide a much greater say for people over what their country looks like, and would finish off the decrepit, corrupt, tribal Labourist stranglehold on some parts of Scotland forever". [...]Ali is not much exercised by suggestions by businesses that would leave Scotland after a yes vote. "Large corporations are trying to frighten people,'' he said.

Again, all with complicit media help. 

Why the privileged headlines for the views of big business? What about the views of deprived people, actual voters? As this recent tweet put it:

Instead of @ScotlandTonight constantly asking big business and the rich what they think about#indyref, why not pop along to Easterhouse?

The latest £12 billion round of ConDem tax and benefits measures are set to cast another 100,000 children in Scotland into poverty. Is that not simply criminal? Deepening austerity and despair for the already poor, ongoing protection and bonuses for the already rich. And where's the much larger media outcry? Why is this not a predominant issue? A large part of the answer lies in the first of these two words: corporate media.
 
It's not just the problem of being run politically from Westminster by a cabal of neoliberal parties. It's the much bigger problem of being run by the City of London and a financial system which sets the very terms of those neoliberal policies.
 
That affects everyone, whether you live in Glasgow or Gloucester, Easterhouse or Essex. Poverty knows no boundaries, and any resistance to the poverty-makers will all need to be directed against that same privileged City and the greed credo by which it lives.
 
The question is, faced with such a depth of corporate-political power, what productive tactics can be deployed to challenge it?   
 
Beyond any imaginary hope of a leftist breakthrough under a stitched-up electoral system, the independence vote, as Tariq Ali asserts, offers some viable opportunity for breaking the matrix of Westminster rule, big-business parties and an imperialist, warmongering Union, while opening up, at least, some serious prospect of a post-neoliberal landscape. That can only benefit all progressive forces, within and beyond Scotland.

This decision isn't about the SNP, or Alex Salmond - all part of the same scare agenda - even if some of that governing hierarchy still have to be faced-down over its neoliberal accommodations, Nato approvals and eco credentials.  

It's primarily about saying Yes to radical empowerment and No to corporate hegemony.  

Duty media: framing the options on Russia and Ukraine

Current events in Ukraine offer yet another prime example of a Western service media jumping to dutiful attention.

While the BBC and other main media have been engaged in a brazenly one-sided view of the conflict, offering little, in particular, on the far-right and reactionary nature of the opposition, coverage of Russian military intervention has seen some of the worst examples of shrill, hysterical and slavish reiteration.    

A perfect example can be heard on yesterday's BBC Radio2 Jeremy Vine Show, with Paddy O'Connell standing in for Vine.

It's a classic package of BBC bias by headline selection, blatant omission, loaded language, guest selection and setting of discussion points.

O'Connell led the report with this introduction:

Now, it's been called the most serious crisis of the 21st century, a brazen act of aggression in violation of international law. Russian troops have moved into Crimea confronting the Ukranian armed forces. Given the fact that half the world seems now to be condemning what President Putin is doing, what exactly are we going to do to force Russia out of Ukraine again? 

Note, firstly, the non-attribution over who actually called this 'the most serious crisis of the 21st century'. It was, in fact, William Hague, but there seemed no apparent need to mention this. It was just assumed by the BBC as a generalised truth. A case of British state media automatically repeating the opinion of British state power.  

There's no mention either here of Iraq or Afghanistan as candidates for the 'century's most serious crisis'. Following Hague's line, it seems these crises have been ignored or 'timed-out', even as the daily crisis for Iraqis and Afghans goes relentlessly on. For many war apologists, like the BBC, these aggressions, it appears, are now just so 'early century'.

Consider, next, when the BBC ever used the words 'a brazen act of aggression in violation of international law' to describe any US/UK/Nato invasion or proxy intervention. Additionally, have we ever heard that phrasing used to describe Israel's multiple criminal actions of occupation, or its bombing of Syria?

Then there's 'the fact that half the world seems now to be condemning what President Putin is doing'. Where's the evidence for that 'fact', or how it 'seems' to the BBC, or even how a 'fact' can 'seem' to be the case?

And, of course, there's the key question: what are 'we', that assumed entirety of 'the free West', to do, using 'our' presumed right of force, to shift Russia out of Ukraine 'again' - one assumes 'again' to mean' after 'we' liberated it previously from the Soviet Union. 

A short synopsis of 'the crisis' follows, with various soundbites and some mild satire on the 'calamity' of leaked briefing papers suggesting the UK's reluctance to engage in punitive trade sanctions.

This sets up O'Connell's posing of four main options for how 'we' might act - smart sanctions, wider sanctions, war, or do nothing - to his two studio guests, ex-Falklands Admiral Lord West and Bill Browder, a hedge fund trader with Heritage Capital Management, whose lawyer had died in a Russian jail.

This, we're expected to believe, is a basis for 'balanced' discussion and consideration of 'our' 'legitimate' responses.

Browder proceeded to denounce Putin as a "maniac" and a "cannibal" who shouldn't be allowed to "dine at the fine tables" of the US and Europe. He approved the heaviest sanctions and ultimate move to war. Objecting that Putin is not a maniac, just darkly calculating, the more cautious Admiral dismissed the war option, approved some sanctions and urged diplomatic engagement.

While the latter understood the dangerous realpolitik of provoking Russia, neither figure had anything to say about Nato's own aggressive pushing on Ukraine's border, the EU's associate role in that exercise, or the West's more general hypocrisy in condemning Russian intervention.  

And nor did O'Connell. A few token comments from listeners were noted on the West having little moral right to judge Russia, but the key message of 'good versus bad' interventionism had been dutifully conveyed.

Cautious Obama, scary Putin  

The same framing of 'greatest century crisis', 'Putin the villain' and tortured reflection on what 'we' can/must do is evident all across what passes for a 'critical-independent' media.  
 
Thus could an Independent editorial lament that:

 Obama’s cautious style has left US foreign policy lagging events. On Ukraine, he must take the lead.

It goes obsequiously on: 

For Barack Obama, the de facto Russian annexation of the Crimea – not to mention the risk of further such encroachment into Ukrainian territory – is by far the greatest foreign policy challenge of his presidency. It is a test of both his own and his country’s credibility, in what increasingly seems a last act of the Cold War, the confrontation that dominated the second half of the 20th century. First and foremost, Mr Obama must reverse perceptions. His cautious and cerebral style in many respects is to be admired. His judgement is sound.

And with this shameless ingratiation, a plaintive warning that failure to act will only allow other suspect states to indulge in wider mischief: 

Not just Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, but other potential rivals like China, have surely gained the sense that this White House will not react as forcefully as others in the past, and that they can act with relative impunity.

So, what must be done? Beyond the token nod that "Russia has legitimate and unique interests in Ukraine", this:

does not mean it can simply annex chunks of the country as it sees fit. Mr Obama must articulate, loudly and clearly, a plan of action in the likely event that Moscow does not reverse course. Direct military intervention by the West is unthinkable, as Mr Putin knows. But there are other means of ensuring that Russia pays a price. The expulsion of Russia from the G8 (an organisation it should never have been permitted to join in the first place) should merely be a start. Stiff sanctions against Russian individuals and institutions should also be introduced by Washington and its allies.

So, a clean sheet for a 'peace-holding' West and its noble institutions, 'sensible liberal restraint' in taking on that much bigger foe, stiff headmasterly punishments instead, and, to round it all off, a stirring call to our reticent commander-in-chief: 

Most important of all however, Mr Obama must take charge – with a forcefulness and a conviction that of late have often been absent.

Similar Obama-approving sentiment with a more open inference to the war option was tweeted by regular Guardian columnist and blogger Sunny Hundal:

We should welcome that President Obama isn't rushing into war and confrontation with Putin. But no option should be left off the table 

And, while excusing Obama's own warmongering, here's Hundal with another variation on the 'dark Putin' psychology:

Partly feel Putin wants everyone to think he's lost his mind. People get scared of unpredictable opponents.

Thankfully, amid all this grovel and hype came some welcome perspective from Jonathan Steele, lamenting the "hysterical reaction to Russian military movements".

For Steele:

Nato should refrain from interfering in Ukraine by word or deed. The fact that it insists on getting engaged reveals the elephant in the room: underlying the crisis in Crimea and Russia's fierce resistance to potential changes is Nato's undisguised ambition to continue two decades of expansion into what used to be called "post-Soviet space", led by Bill Clinton and taken up by successive administrations in Washington. At the back of Pentagon minds, no doubt, is the dream that a US navy will one day replace the Russian Black Sea fleet in the Crimean ports of Sevastopol and Balaclava.

Alex Thomson provided another worthy counter to the hysteria, distortion and bias - a welcome independent view which, alas, not for the first time, seemed confined to his Channel 4 News blog.

A further admirable piece from Peter Hitchens at the Mail, of all places, offered real historical and political background to the situation, while dismissing shrill claims of Russian ‘paranoia’:

What continues to strike me about this whole row is the inability of most people to view Russia as a country, or Russians as people. Russia is portrayed as a bogeyman, and its people as either oppressed or as tools of a new Hitler.

All of which reveals the mass conformity of 'our' supposedly independent and critical media.

The assumed Russian 'threat' to 'civilized Western order' also prompted a bombastic Spectator piece from Nick Cohen, smearing Noam Chomsky over his and the anti-war movement's 'lack of solidarity' with Ukraine.

As ever, Cohen and his interventionist peers could never countenance the principle that opposing lofty Western intervention is the most valuable and proactive form of solidarity. 

In further bouts of unleashed enmity, 'our' media 'finest' have used the 'century's greatest crisis' to expose Russia's media 'subservience'.  

Thus, could the BBC's chief political correspondent Nick Robinson preeningly tweet:

This is Russia Today/Putin view of Ukraine - troops greeted with flowers, kisses & selfies http://rt.com/news/ukraine-crimea-photos-tweets-434/ @RT_com

Reminded in one response: "and then we have the #bbc propaganda #samedifference", Robinson countered, with seeming incredulity: 

You really think that there is no difference between Russia Today propaganda & BBC?! Wonder how many Russians would agree?

What, indeed, might observant Russians, with long memories of Pravda output, really make of Robinson's slavish quips and indignant denial of BBC propaganda, or of Paddy O'Connell's indulgence of 'our retaliatory options', or John Simpson's facile 'analysis' of Putin's 'contrived style' and 'the difficult challenges for the West', or even the BBC's flagship Newsnight with its safe-hand presenters and 'prestige interviews' with people like John McCain and John Bolton?

 

Last night's edition (4 March) saw a studio guest list of Nancy Soderberg, former US ambassador to the UN, Malcom Rifkind, Foreign Secretary, and Dmitry Linnik from Voice of Russia discuss the same framing issue of 'the West's available options'.

 

The following segment had presenter Kirsty Wark ask right-wing commentator Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder of Yale University what they thought about the possibilities of sanctions, Russia's expulsion from the G8 and other such 'problems' for Europe and the wider West. Again, the guest choice and framing of discussion precluded any serious assessment of Nato's own militarist part in the conflict and its ongoing agenda.   

 

Wark preceded the piece with a brief re-showing of how RT presenter Abby Martin had ended her show with an open denunciation of both Russia's military intervention and all such aggressions. Martin had also lamented the dire overall media coverage of the conflict.

 

Evasively, Wark framed Martin's statement as implied evidence of 'even a once-dependable Russian media now undermining Putin', with no thought offered on how state media like the BBC itself might compare as a source of free and independent comment. Like the West's own aggressions, another awkward issue neatly circumvented. 

 

The real question is could Wark, Robinson or any of their craven colleagues ever have the courage or independent mind to do on the BBC what Martin did on RT?

 

Whatever lies behind Abby Martin's words, and much of the liberal media's ready denunciation of her, there's no seeming chance of the BBC ever reflecting on its own journalistic output or propaganda function.

 

 

The illogicality of 'welfare abuse' within an abusive system

 

Iain Duncan Smith:
one face of an abusive system

Discussions about welfare and benefits will often have someone pronounce the familiar line: "Yes, but what about those who abuse the system?"

The 'logic' behind this question may range from liberal angst to indignant rant, from the protests of the 'heavy burdened tax-payer' to the angry denunciation of 'miscreant benefit cheats'. 

Rarely in political, media or reflected common usage does one find 'abuse' used to signify the deeply abusive nature of the system.

How conditioned we are to the message that not only is such 'abuse' taking place, but that the system is only subject to abuse.

Yet, consider how, under the pretext of 'welfare reform', zealous exponents of the system have crafted the most abusive and vindictive policies ever inflicted on the poor and sick.

In the latest instance of system-serving callousness, a leaked report suggests that the DWP plan to charge sanctioned claimants for the cost of their appeals.

As noted at the Guardian, this proposal comes as an apparent effort to quell the number of appeals being raised due to the staggering rise in people being sanctioned:

Earlier this week figures showed that in the past year nearly 900,000 people have had their benefits stopped, the highest figure for any 12-month period since jobseeker's allowance was introduced in 1996. In recent months, however, 58% of those who wanted to overturn DWP sanction decisions in independent tribunals have been successful. Before 2010, the success rate of appeals was 20% or less. One welfare legal adviser said the number of appeals being lodged at independent tribunals would be decimated if the government introduced a charge.

As with the bedroom tax, only already system-abused minds could have contrived such an idea.

This is the system at its most abusive towards the poorest and most vulnerable, part of a wicked larceny to pay for mass banker bailouts and protection of the rich; a system that, whatever party is in office, forces poverty and desperation upon those with the least in order to protect those with the most.

The term 'austerity policy' is often used to describe this process. But it too is ideologically loaded and misleading, denoting a measure of hardship 'beyond the norm'; that which, whether defended as a 'necessary measure' or 'unnecessary extreme', still fixates on 'abuse of the system' rather than an actual system of abuse. In truth, the entire system is built on abusive austerity.

The commonly-used 'welfare reform' fits well here as another false and constrained term, whether in its ConDem distortion or its liberal call for less harshness in the system.  

This is where Guardian-type reformism fails as a counter discourse, as in Polly Toynbee's castigating of Iain Duncan Smith and urging Ed Miliband not to endorse George Osborne's austerity and cuts. 

While Toynbee rightly condemns the "perversity in this brutal system" of benefit assessments and sanctions, it's still but a micro-liberal view of the human effects rather than radical recognition of a more structurally abusive system, and the vital role of all neoliberal-driven parties, Labour crucially included, in sustaining it.     

A well-meaning Toynbee may be displaying admirable compassion. Yet, such plaintive appeals to corporate-serving leaders like Miliband to deliver a 'fairer deal for the poor' only reinforce the flawed notion of 'meaningful change' under this 'politically-abused-but-still-decent' system.

Other liberal minds make similar valid distinctions on abuse of the system, notably the token amounts of benefit fraud compared to mass tax fraud.

It's a fair and potent point. But even this is a false rationalisation, just another way of saying that there's still that 'problematic abuse' of the system, thereby acknowledging its basic 'neutrality' and legitimacy.

Similar system-upholding can be seen in parliamentary committee 'grilling' of top corporate tax evaders, a posturing theatre which is vital in promoting the 'bad apples' line, and feeding the myth that the system is inherently good if, alas, subject to serious 'corporate abuse'.

Never will you hear such 'public servants' suggest that corporate power and a subservient political class is collectively and systematically abusive in itself.

So, while people struggle for basic necessities, and exist on meagre benefits, a liberal commentariat can only appeal for an easing of the pain rather than radically indict the abusive system that inflicts it, thus effectively shielding the core cause of such human detritus and a landscape of despair. 

While a system-serving media laud the vast profits of corporate grocers, people go hungry. Where's the headline discussion of a system which permits that kind of abuse?  

Recently, one of Scotland's biggest food banks was forced to close its doors after soaring demand from needy recipients saw its shelves run completely empty.

Following church leaders' denunciation of government policies, a vicar is going on hunger strike in solidarity with Britain's poor.

Food aid from the European Union has been blocked by a ConDem government, claiming this is 'interference' with its welfare policies.

For those surviving on the street and in doss houses, it's a grim existence of fear, violence and Dickensian squalor.

And, of course, the number of fragile souls driven to their deaths by a brutal government 'medical assessment' process continues to grow at an alarming rate.

With this level of organised cruelty, what kind of ideology persuades us that people are wilfully abusing the system rather than the system wantonly abusing people?

Answer: an ideology that depends on fear, suspicion and greed. 

One that urges us to deny or limit our compassion.

One that, as seen in Benefits Street, fosters ugly prejudice and pushes us to turn on struggling people like benefit claimants and immigrants.

One that has a vested interest in sustaining a top elite's enormous wealth and privilege through the fiction that, 'individual rogues' apart, the system proper is still there to facilitate all of our 'fair and competitive' aspirations.

Crucial to this is a corporate media which might 'alert' us to a certain 'corporate abuse' of the system, but never the more damning truth of the corporate system as serially abusive.

We read much about criminal and predatory abuse of people, yet rarely consider the way in which capitalism as a system is constituted, directed and managed as a criminal, predatory and abusive enterprise.

That's a pretty effective kind of hegemony; one that can still get us to believe that such a system is essentially benign and shouldn't be abused.

Which returns us to that illogical question, "Yes, but what about those who abuse the system?"

The logical answer: you can't abuse something that's already pathologically abusive.

Spooks and feudalism: Greenwald savages Britain's secretive, archaic state

Consider these two 'home' truths:
 
The British state is a deeply secretive, anti-democratic entity, with GCHQ and its associate 'security' apparatus engaged in the most illicit forms of surveillance, manipulation and other mass violations of civil liberties. 
 
The British state is a deeply class-serving entity, underwritten by archaic institutions and selective 'traditions', all giving ideological continuity to elite privilege.
 
In a stunning indictment, independent journalist Glenn Greenwald has brought these two facets of the British state's dark actions and ideological powers together, via a comment piece on the UK court decision to uphold an 'anti-terrorist' detention order against his partner David Miranda.

 Miranda was held for nine hours at Heathrow airport in August 2013 under Section 7 of the UK’s Terrorism Act (2000).

As Greenwald brilliantly observes:

That such repressive measures come from British political culture is to be expected. The political elite of that country cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire. The wig-wearing presiding judge who issued this morning’s ruling equating journalism with terrorism is addressed as “Lord Justice Laws”, best known for previously approving the use of evidence to detain people that had been derived from torture at Guantanamo (he can be seen here).

None of this behavior bears any relationship to actual reality: it’s as though the elite political class of an entire nation somehow got stuck in an adolescent medieval fantasy game. But the political principles of monarchy, hereditary entitlement, rigid class stratification, and feudal entitlement embedded in all of this play-acting clearly shape the repressive mentality and reverence for state authority which Her Majesty’s Government produces. That journalism disliked by the state can be actually deemed not just a crime but “terrorism” seems a natural by-product of this type of warped elite mindset [...]

Ex-UK ambassador, turned dissident, Craig Murray has also condemned the "disgraceful judges of Britain’s High Court – who have gone along with torture, extraordinary rendition, every single argument for mass surveillance and hiding information from the public, and even secret courts".

For Murray, the effort to castigate Miranda as a 'terrorist suspect' illustrates perfectly the British state's deepening vindictiveness, a ''totalitarian" slide, he relates, evident in the additional intimidation of Edward Snowden's legal representative on entering the UK.  
           
While the surveillance and detention of Miranda reveals the extensive scope of UK spookdom, the holding of such people on specifically 'anti-terrorist' grounds shows the very 'British way' in which the establishment seeks to demonise as well as control.

Of course, the treatment of Chelsea Manning, and threats towards Snowden, Assange and Greenwald, confirm that similar punitive action can be expected from the US. 

But, as Greenwald argues, Britain's conduct in such matters also points to a deeper political culture of assumed hierarchy and demanded subservience.

In assisting the US purging of Snowden, Assange, Greenwald and their associates, the British state is deploying its most oppressive technologies and a feudal-style intolerance of dissent.

Greenwald's broadside against Britain's secretive state brings to mind the UK's wider record of black-ops, subterfuge and global warmongering, as documented by historian Mark Curtis, while his searing attack on the establishment network and fiction of 'noble Britishness' helps evoke Tom Nairn's landmark texts The Enchanted Glass and The Break up of Britain. 

Fittingly, Greenwald's charges on British elitism and the tyranny of Empire reflects a gathering crisis of legitimacy for 'old Britain', as variously registered in the large public rejection of UK wars, demands for Scottish independence, and a growing refusal to accept that state spying on citizens is in the 'national interest'.   

A Nobel nominee and modern hero, Snowden's popular whistleblowing has helped undermine much of the traditional deference towards propagandist notions of 'vital state security', as have Greenwald's own key journalistic efforts in revealing US/UK criminality.  

Snowden's election yesterday as Student Rector of Glasgow University is another small but encouraging indicator that the old-order demonisation of dissidents is no longer holding.

Bit by promising bit, a modernist, radical politics and confident, alternative media is helping to expose not only the dark, malignant menace of the British state, but the "adolescent medieval fantasy" upon which its authority has been resting.     

Stone Cold Justice - Australian TV reveal Israel's brutal abuse of Palestinian children

A remarkable, courageous film from Australian ABC TV's Four Corners programme has helped expose the systematic detention, traumatic interrogation, physical torture, fear of death and threats of rape inflicted upon Palestinian children. 

Warning: disturbing images and information.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/02/10/3939266.htm

Jonathan Cook comments:

I never thought I would see it. A mainstream TV programme, this one made by Australian channel ABC, that shows the occupation in all its inhuman horror. The 45-minute investigative film concerns the Israeli army’s mistreatment of Palestinian children. Along the way, it provides absolutely devastating evidence that the children’s abuse is not some unfortunate byproduct of the occupation but the cornerstone of Israel’s system of control and its related need to destroy the fabric of Palestinian society.

This shocking film should leave viewers in absolutely no doubt about the scale and wickedness of Israel's treatment of minors as part of its deliberate and vindictive occupation policy.

It's also a vital reminder of the 'international community's' shameful failure to challenge Israel's state brutality. 

Please share widely.

Killing, abuse and denial - the West's Olympian-sized record

How eagerly our media adopt the term 'human rights record' to highlight the villainy of other countries, while safely avoiding that same term when it comes to Western state crimes.

The BBC's coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi is replete with reminders of Russia's gross authoritarianism, particularly its anti-homosexual repressions.

And critically alert they, like anyone else, should be over discriminatory attacks on any section of society.

But just try to imagine such media headlines over Britain's and America's own appalling human rights record in waging murderous, illegal wars.

It seems this sort of human rights record, the kind concerned with mass killing of others beyond our shores, doesn't really figure as measurable abuse.

For if it really did, the BBC would have to report and criticise UK/US conduct in the same, or much worse, terms as that reserved for demonised states like Russia, China and North Korea.

Highlighting the staggering scale of Britain's global crimes, as documented by historian Mark Curtis, John Pilger believes that the political and media deceit is becoming unsustainable.
 
Recalling not just the likely one million fatalities from the West's invasion of Iraq, but the half million dead from the effects of Western pre-war sanctions, Pilger says:

The truth about the criminal bloodbath in Iraq cannot be "countered" indefinitely. Neither can the truth about our support for the medievalists in Saudi Arabia, the nuclear-armed predators in Israel, the new military fascists in Egypt and the jihadist "liberators" of Syria, whose propaganda is now BBC news. There will be a reckoning – not just for the Blairs, Straws and Campbells, but for those paid to keep the record straight.

A day, indeed, to anticipate.

Yet, rather than shine a floodlight on Britain's shocking human rights record, 'smart' liberal 'journalism' continues to celebritise its greatest offenders.

Thus could the Independent's Andy McSmith muse dizzily over Tony Blair's 'pulling power' and alleged affair with Rupert Murdoch's wife, rather than even mention his arch criminality. This kind of titillation over the 'alpha personas' of our leaders contrasts starkly with the much darker denigration of enemy others, such as the 'menacingly-muscular' Putin, or the 'sex-crazed' 'Mad Dog' Gaddafi.   It's not that Gaddafi shouldn't be scrutinised. It's that you will never see our media use terms like 'Mad Dog' to label or scrutinise people like Blair, Cameron or Netanyahu. What makes a politician in a suit any less of an executive monster?  Prince 'flash' Harry can, likewise, boast of his brave killing exploits in Afghanistan, while his disturbing war-games penchant from an Apache attack helicopter are all media-filtered as the over-indulgences of a 'playboy Royal'. At least the literary Harry Flashman of Afghan and other Empire campaigns really was an entertaining villain and battle coward.   So much of the 'us and them' of public 'information', particularly over war, is distilled via this Hello-styled 'political info-tainment'. The adulation of Obama as some kind of pop star is a media industry in itself, rendering unthinkable any notion of him as a drone-directing killer.      From 'us and them' political selectivity, it's an easy step to an 'us or them' view of foreign others, as in the current media-hyped discussion on whether aid to UK flood victims should take priority over foreign aid. Why is the question of vital human aid, foreign or domestic, never considered against bailout aid to bankers, or the massive state aid given to corporate arms companies to keep prosecuting wars? Why is the cost of aid for people, internal or external, never pitched against the astronomically-draining cost of nuclear weapons? How conditioned we are by accountant politicians and a conformist commentariat to think about the 'onerous costs' to the state when it comes to helping human beings, rather than the funding used to kill and immiserate them. And what of all the selling of killer military hardware to allied regimes like Qatar and Saudi Arabia? Shouldn't that be on the human rights audit sheet?    Corporate-driven climate change has brought the planet's seven billion inhabitants to the point of real, possible extinction. Beyond close awareness of this crisis, papers like the 'greensleeved' Guardian should be screaming emergency headline messages for action from their front pages. It's not there.  A Guardian editorial talks alarmingly about a "Weather of Olympian extremes" and the need for greater climate change awareness, yet relentlessly refuses to end its own fossil-fuel advertising. Reports file in of flooded plains, unprecedented storms and weather-tossed railway lines. Yet where's the crucial framing of all this on the BBC news as intensifying climate change catastrophe?   Isn't all that a damning statement of our state-corporate media's very own dismal human rights record? Aren't they Olympian-sized contenders in the great 'triathlon' of power, hypocrisy and denial?

 

The admirable George Galloway, mistaken, alas, on independence

I once recall a kindly acquaintance telling me during the course of a discussion, "you're not wrong, just mistaken."

It wasn't intended as a patronising rebuke, just an encouragement to think more closely, or perhaps honestly, about how faulty claims can make for unsupportable arguments.

Sometimes it's not the case for something that can seem wrong, but the mistaken notions used to advance it.

Semantics? Perhaps, but still a useful thought process. 

Whatever the possible distinction, this little adage has been occurring to me, lately, in reading George Galloway's case for rejecting Scottish independence - or as the vernacularly-gifted George more directly urges: Just Say Naw.

Of course, the default tendency of our service politicians and media is to malign Galloway whatever he says. Few other prominent leftists have been so readily smeared and vilified.

How routinely we hear those standard barbs - 'controversial' and 'firebrand' - see him 'ambushed' by coy presenters, and trivialised by smug journalists - usually to their own detriment.

So, a small, appreciative caveat: George Galloway is not just a talisman for the left, he's a political treasure, a person whose moral defence of human beings has been as relentless as the imperialist wars and warmongers he's opposed. 

Being part of the same movements, I've supported him consistently, in discussion and blog, from his inspiring anti-war positions to his heroic defence of Palestinians.

I also uphold his complete and unobstructed right to campaign for a No vote in the referendum - wherever he's politically domiciled, wherever he wants to stage it and however he wants to state it.

But I'd also like to suggest, with all-due respect, that George is basically mistaken in three key ways over the formulation of that case.

The first concerns his depiction of Scottish independence as essentially 'nationalist' in motive, character and aspiration.

This may seem an odd qualifier. Isn't the desire for independence simply nationalism by any normal definition? 

Well, not if the aim of independence is based on factors which put progressive social advancement before territorial or national identity. And it's socio-economic concerns which appear to be the basic determinant of how most within the Yes camp will vote.  

Even where people might assert their 'Scottishness', who, even amongst most declared Yes supporters, view themselves as 'pure nationalists' or 'separatists', as in the possibility of 'full independence' from higher political and corporate forces?

If this is 'nationalism', it's of a very abbreviated kind, based on a common understanding that we're all, willingly or unwillingly, tied into much bigger political-economic networks, most of it oppressive.    

What's reassuring here is the strong relative absence of crude nationalism - flag-waving and jingoistic proclamations of 'freedom'. For many in Scotland, this is matched by a basic ambivalence towards the Union itself.  Indeed, it's a deep paradox that, while abhorring the sins of Unionism, George is arguing to maintain that very political entity - a Union that's committed so many imperialist crimes in the name of Britain and Empire.

George has also, I believe mistakenly, followed the mainstream's false presentation of independence as support or otherwise for the SNP. Hence, his concentrated attack on Alex Salmond, rather than an urge to depersonalise the issue and engage more particularly on what more socialistic opportunities may or may not lie with a Yes outcome.

Galloway is on firmer ground in citing the compromised version of independence pitched by the SNP leadership - retention of currency links, Nato membership and monarchy.  

Yet, none of this legitimate criticism invalidates the core case for independence. This is a referendum on creating a new political system, one that's open to ongoing pressure and radical change, not a vote for any party, policy or leader.

Nor should we be persuaded by George's dark warnings that removing a vital share of Labour MPs at Westminster will ensure continued Tory rule. Should voters, either in Scotland or the rest of the UK, be held forever hostage to Labour's own gross failures, and the stranglehold of this neoliberal party cabal?  

I also suspect that much of George's animus towards the SNP at large, even its mainly leftist core, is symptomatic of an emotional link to Old Labour.

But even this can't explain his negation of a growing Labour for Independence movement, and the expanding argument within those ranks that Labour Scotland could be a newly-invigorated left force within an independent parliament. Why is George so seemingy estranged even from that position?

It should be noted here that some Yes voices have themselves mistakenly charged Galloway with 'double standards' in supporting liberation for Palestine, but not independence for Scotland.

It should hardly need saying that there's no comparable case: one concerns a brutal occupation, and its difficult overcoming, the other an issue of how to pursue major political-economic improvement.

What does qualify for similar consideration, though, is people's universal right to remove elite-constructed institutions and barriers to the better society - in this case, a Westminster system historically underwritten by elite financial and City interests - English and Scottish - and a Unionist ideology which holds all those hegemonic fictions of a British 'national interest' together.

This ties-in, secondly, to George's questionable claim that independence is an abrogation of class politics and solidarity. 

In reality, class factors are driving the question of independence.

The latest polls and qualitative information show that the greatest rise in support for independence is amongst the low-paid, poorest and most marginalised of society, reflecting a growing mood for more leftist, independent control:

It seems that independence is a movement of Scotland's societal left, the part that used to profess undying fealty to Labour. It's not a socialist programme, but it reflects revulsion at Westminster's equation of "realism" with free markets.

Thus, a growing class body is realising that's there's nothing to be gained from traditional, sellout Labourism, or the neoliberal/austerity politics both Labour and the ConDems rigidly uphold.

Against this, John Wight, a close associate of Galloway, makes the worthy class-based case for a No vote. But, like Galloway, his argument is still based on the mistaken view of Scottish workers 'abandoning' their UK counterparts.

Why stay with a political system that locks all into neoliberal servitude? Why would a shift of direction negate solidarity with others - English, Welsh or anyone else - beyond any new border? Wouldn't the effort to forge a new left economic model inspire greater class politics, encouraging others to follow real alternatives? And isn't that set of radical prospects precisely why an alarmed establishment, corporate elite and media-serving network is trying so hard to kill the independence case?

Galloway and Wight certainly aren't wrong in questioning what class gains may derive from a Yes vote - it's by far their strongest line of argument - but they are, I believe, deeply mistaken in believing that independence will actually undermine class politics and the drive for socialist alternatives.      

Honourable socialists such as Ken Loach support a class-rooted argument for independence, just as John Maclean once did in considering the revolutionary case for breaking the Union.

Almost every leftist grouping in Scotland, including the Greens, supports independence, believing it can strategically advance radical change - including vital climate engagement and the best-ever chance of removing Trident. Mistakenly, it appears, that's the kind of leftist, humanitarian company George has decided to shun.

The third, and perhaps most, mistaken strand of Just Say Naw is its supposed concerns over 'sectarian instability'.  

Here, alas, George has indulged in his own disappointing variant of Project Fear, allowing irrational alarm to cloud rational engagement of a still relatively marginal issue.

In a recent Twitter exchange over an alleged 'sectarian' attack on Celtic manager Neil Lennon, George claimed this was further proof of Protestant-establishment power, and that the problem would only multiply with a Yes vote:

"but this element will be 12x more significant in Indy Scotland. Media and pol class scared of them"

If this really is the case, wouldn't Scotland benefit from independence, and a purge of those very forces most identified with virulent Unionism? Not, it seems, for Galloway.

George seems to be saying that the Union offers 'protection' from this lurking 'threat'; some guarantee of 'political security'.

But against what, precisely? Is it really credible that an independent state would start enacting anti-Catholic legislation? Would standard legal and civil protections no longer apply to Catholics?

Even with such sectarianism, would a 'Catholic community' really be threatened in an independent Scotland? Would they suffer political discrimination? Would we see a curtailment of, or end to, Catholic schools? Is there any serious evidence of such 'threats' just now? Why would that change?

While under no illusions about the spectre of sectarianism, the very notion of any post-independence threat to Catholics is not just mistaken, it's plain wrong.

I say this as someone raised in a Glasgow east-end Catholic-Marxist household, who knows all about the past oppression of my Irish family ancestry, who has witnessed all the ugly nuances of religious politics in the West of Scotland, but who also recognises the much greater extent of social integration, political-cultural complexity and, indeed, 'class ascendancy' of Catholics across many institutions.

Nasty, sectarian strands are still evident, for sure. Much of the media has been disgracefully mute on the issue. But the very idea that Scotland is anywhere near that kind of dark ethnic-religious fault line is simply untenable. The questions that absorb people here, Catholic, or otherwise, are basic day-to-day issues of economic existence.

Reactionary Protestant-rooted Unionism is still apparent, and no one can say that independence would eradicate it - all societies harbour such ugliness.  But, as a modern polity, independence would almost certainly be a healthier option than the status quo in helping to expunge it.

And even if the issue of sectarianism is as crucial as George suggests, should a society be hostage to an archaic Union through fear of atavistic prejudice and a bigoted minority?

In short, there is no decisive religious politics to speak of here. Beyond such peripheral 'religious identity', people of all religions and none generally think, act and vote on broad economic lines, many, across all social and religious backgrounds, now deserting a Labour establishment for the better, practical possibilities of smaller, independent governance. 

Whatever his campaigning approach, whatever the referendum outcome, my regard and support for George Galloway endures. Yet, Yes or No, George will likely be judged by many fellow leftists and progressives to have been on the wrong, or at least mistaken, side of history. 

Ever the shining politico, George says he might like to be prime minister in an independent Scotland.  A fascinating scenario, indeed - I might even support that. But, in contemplation of such office, real or imaginary, it would be great to see him acknowledge, at least, the case for independence as the legitimate pursuit of a real compassionate, socialist society.