Norman Geras

As for ‘betrayal’: although it has been overused, I believe this notion is sometimes apt, in political as in personal affairs. People can betray comrades or supporters; or their own stated principles. I think an excellent example of the latter case to be, precisely, the conduct of many ‘anti-militarist’ social-democratic leaders at the outbreak of the First World War...
Norman Geras, 1988.

I am not going to pass any kind of extended comment on Norman Geras, who I never knew personally, and who passed away yesterday, other than to say that he was once a Marxist - indeed a Trotskyist - who wrote some important work on matters including Rosa Luxemburg and human nature before betraying his comrades and own stated principles by cheerleading Western imperialism in a vocal manner on the blogosphere for the last decade or so of his life while trying to keep up the pretence he was still somehow on the 'Left'.  One of his best and most important books was entitled Literature of Revolution - his blog in contrast might best be filed under 'Literature of Imperialism' - and so is destined to be ultimately confined (to borrow a phrase from Leon Trotsky) to the 'dustbin of history'.

Edited to add: Obituary in Socialist Review by Paul Blackledge

Against Liberal Imperialist 'Marxism'

It is understandable that a Social Democratic student of imperialism can easily find arguments in his theoretical luggage if he wants switch to the other side. He only has to regard Marxism mechanically and say: ‘Socialism is only possible on the foundations of the highest capitalist development, of imperialist development; therefore, let us first help consolidate these foundations with all our power, let us protect the world power of our own country against foreign imperialism; today we must be imperialists, but socialism remains the ultimate goal’ —in the remote future, because it has surely become apparent that the proletariat is still far too weak for victory.

It is obvious that, with this attitude, the quasi-Marxists do not prepare and promote the realization of socialism, but rather inhibit and delay it. The realization of socialism depends solely on the strength, independence, energy and clarity of purpose of the working class.
Anton Pannekoek, 1915

Know Your Enemy # 94: Neo-cons in Europe

The Neocon Europe site looks like a potentially useful resource, tracking for example country by country the 'useful idiots' of the American Empire: here for example are the British contingent.

Dave Renton on the pro-war 'Left'

From a review of The Liberal Defence of Murder

Something appears to have overtaken those previously liberal British journalists who in recent years have supported so determinedly the Republican Falange around George Bush. You can think of writers such as Christopher Hitchens, who opened the David Horowitz Freedom Centre in 2006 by telling his listeners that it was a pleasure as well as a duty to kill Muslims; or Nick Cohen, who was invited to meet Paul Wolfowitz and declared him a politician committed to extending human freedom; or Martin Amis, who told The Times in 2006 that perhaps the Muslim community should be subject to deportation, and compelled to undergo strip searches in the street.

The interest in this generation lies not in the fact that its members have gone over to the side of causes that once they fought. (The history of ideas is just as full of apostates as it is of converts, of course.) The more interesting point is that they continue to insist that their exile is in full fidelity with their past principles. Hitchens it seems is incapable of making a public speech without running through a roll-call of his heroes – Orwell, Victor Serge, C L R James – writers, it must be said, who had the chance in their own lives and disdained the journey he has taken.

Richard Seymour has now written a polemic, tracing the emergence of this group of writers and criticising them for supporting military interventions. The enduring folly of the pro-war left, Seymour suggests, lies in a combination of experience and innocence. The experience was the civil war in Yugoslavia. Seeing the great crime of the destruction of Sarajevo, the writers concluded that this was a moment, like the 1930s, to take sides. I remember friends arguing with me at the time: the defence of Sarajevo requires the formation of a new International Brigade. In the absence of volunteers, military action was required, and the glow of existential goodness was then conferred on all Bosnian allies, including the US, which became the main focus of the hopes of this set of progressives, and has remained so through the following decade. The innocence was a naive belief in the capacity of American military power to bring good things to Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Iraq.

Richard Seymour Speaks

The caretaker over at Lenin's Tomb will be speaking on 'The Liberal Defence of Murder- the 'pro-war left' and US foreign policy since 1989' - the subject of a book I am meaning to buy and review on this blog at some point - on Monday 1 December 2008, 17:30 - 19:30 in central London. See here for more info. Meeting organised by the London Socialist Historians Group, whose forthcoming conference in January on 1649 I plugged here.

English ruling class proto-fascists #94: EA Freeman

Professor EA Freeman - he would have preferred Adolf Hitler to Barack Obama

It has become customary among the 'decent', 'pro-war Left' to bemoan the apparent general state of the humanities in academia today. As one leading 'decent' , Professor Alan Johnson, so memorably put it, 'The postmodern academic tells students that the human condition has been blighted by "western-patriarchal-racist-homophobic-logocentric-capitalist-imperialism" and talks of the "multitude" that resist this new "Empire".' In the latest issue of his 'decent' journal Democratiya, he attacks the 'high theory and low sensibility [which] are increasingly important in the mass media, the arts, the academy and in what we might call graduate-popular-culture'.

Given this the 'decents' would surely want us all to remember the 'good old days' of academia in Britain when Empire was something that was celebrated and eulogised from the lecture podium (and the scruffy 'multitude' were kept safely out of the University altogether). The academics back in the day after all would of course all celebrate 'the human condition' wholeheartedly without any reservations whatsoever. Take, for example, EA Freeman (1823-1892), a forgotten figure today, but for a period during the nineteenth century he was one of the most pre-eminent English Liberal historians of his day, author of a History of the Norman Conquest , and in 1884 appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford by William Gladstone, a friend of his, a position he held until his death. What did this 'decent' Liberal intellectual with such close ties to the English ruling class of his day have to say about 'the human condition'?

Well this is EA Freeman on Jewish people, at the time facing bloody pogroms in Eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia:

'Every nation has a right to get rid of strangers who prove a nuisance, whether they are Chinese in America or Jews in Russia'. Indeed, 'it is the natural instinct of any decent nation to get rid of filthy strangers', and Jewish people were 'an instrument of Satan'. He had no time for what he called 'this Jew humbug', positing that Jewish people somehow controlled the world's media, and arguing 'Let every nation wallop its own Jews'.

And this is EA Freeman on black Americans, then being lynched on a regular basis, while on a visit to the USA:

'The really queer thing is the niggers who swarm here; my Aryan prejudices go against them, specially when they rebuke one and order one about. And the women and the children are yet stranger than the men. Are you sure that they are men? I find it hard to believe they are men acting seriously: 'tis easier to believe that they are big monkeys dressed up for a game...I am sure 'twas a mistake making them citizens. I feel a creep when I think that one of those great black apes may (in theory) be President. Surely treat your horse kindly; but don't make him consul.'(Quotes from 'The Failure of Liberal Racism: The Racial Ideas of EA Freeman' by CJW Parker, The Historical Journal, 1981)

Is it so surprising that this racist proto-fascist was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and celebrated among the English ruling class of his day at the high point of the British Empire? No. Nor is it surprising that the 'decent Left' today find themselves inevitably resorting to racism against Muslims in order to effectively wage propaganda war on behalf of the American Empire. The various Professors of the 'pro-war Left' have far more in common with Professor EA Freeman than they know. No wonder that fascists internationally are rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation at the rising tide of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant racism more generally - they are happy to ride the tiger of racism all the way to the gas chambers.

A warning from the future

There was something distinctly different about this years Labour Party conference, but it was difficult to put one's finger on exactly what that was...

From 2018: A Novel

The alarm clock was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers. Oliver Kamm wrenched his body out of bed — naked, despite a Times Leader Writer received only £3,000 pounds monthly, and a suit of pyjamas was only £60 — and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.

The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Oliver's mind the impression made by his dream. He was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late sixties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.

Oliver could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood. War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 2018 (if it was 2018), America was at war with Russia and in alliance with China. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Oliver well knew, it was only four years since America had been at war with China and in alliance with Russia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. America was at war with Russia: therefore America had always been at war with Russia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) — the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that America had never been in alliance with Russia. He, Oliver Kamm, knew that America had been in alliance with Russia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’

Oliver sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in the nineties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Oliver could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form — ‘English Socialism’, that is to say — it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Oliver pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Oliver's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Oliver examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 14.3.17 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.17 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.17 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.8.18 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons chomsky rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Oliver laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures...

When Liberals Really Lose Their Way...

...Lenin writes a book hammering them.

Who are the real 'post-leftists'?

Alan Johnson trying to recruit a merchant banker to the 'decent Left'

The British Professor Alan Johnson, a former Trotskyist* turned self-styled intellectual heavyweight of the pro-war "left", has been hard at work recently trying to come up with new ways to denounce those of us who still refuse to bow down before the power and glory of the American Empire. His last attempt to coin a suitable phrase to attack anti-imperialists was to say we had fallen ill with 'neoconitus', a disease of Johnson's own fevered imagination. Now one or other of his co-thinkers have come up with a new expression - 'post-leftism', which Johnson now seems very excited about indeed. The idea is simple enough, and I am surprised that it took the 'pro-war "left"' so long to come up with it, though like 'neoconitus' the problem with it is that it is really too simple to stand up to any critical examination. But lets at least try and follow Johnson's 'thinking':

Post-leftism has its roots in the inter-war decades of the last century when the old left's belief in a future socialist society first began to drain away. It grew, as the late Lionel Trilling put it, in the form of an "adversary culture" - a comprehensive opposition to "bourgeois" society ungrounded in a positive alternative. The post-left has radicalised this inchoate hostility until "Amerika" is the satanic principle in the world.

Can we really mark one single historical period where defeat led to disillusionment and claim that 'post-leftism' had its roots in that one period? Was there not some draining away in the belief in a future socialist society after say the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, an event which effectively killed the First International? Or what about say 4 August 1914, which effectively killed the Second International when that organisation (with one or two honourable sections an exception) decided to abandon internationalist principles and line up behind their own ruling class during the First World War?

But perhaps I am being slightly pedantic - we can concede that Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia in the 1930s inevitably and ultimately did lead to a wider disillusionment with the socialist project, and that various people ultimately decided to throw the socialist baby out with the Stalinist bathwater, leading to a phenomenon that one could legitimately call a 'post-leftist' one.

But where Johnson goes wrong is when he tries to claim that the history of the left since the 1930s is actually about the development of a 'post left' as though it represented one mass coherent intellectual current, albeit one rooted in 'inchoate hostility':

'The post-left luxuriates...in anti-Americanism, anti-westernism, anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, and anti-liberalism'

In reality, if 'anti-Americanism' grew in the post-war world it was because it was a response to the growing power of America and the whole bloody history of attempts by America to try and dominate the world through imperialism in the post war world. If 'anti-Westernism' grew during the post war world it was because 'the West' had before then bequeathed to the world the slave trade, colonialism, imperialist scramble for Africa, two barbaric World Wars, the Great Depression, fascism, and the Nazi Holocaust. Quite a few people had quite a few reasons to be raising doubts about 'Western Civilisation'. If anti-Zionism grew in the post-war world then that might have had something to do with the fact that in 1948 the State of Israel was established by force and terror in Palestine and has acted as a colonial outpost of the West in the Middle East ever since then. As for anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism, haven't 'the Left' always kind of opposed capitalism and counterposed socialism to liberalism? What is particularly 'post left' here?

Indeed, rather than Johnson's imagined community called the 'post left' it was those people who stayed ideologically committed to the 'old left' in whatever form who from the 1940s and 1950s onwards who tended to express what Johnson calls 'post left' beliefs. Johnson denounces Noam Chomsky as a 'post leftist' for arguing that 'America is the greatest terrorist state'. But Chomsky was someone who radicalised politically out of the Great Depression and general crisis in America in the 1930s and who made his name in part analysing and attacking American imperialism at the time of the Vietnam War. He is about as 'old left' as it gets. It was those who broke from the left (the 'post-left' if you like) in the 1940s and 1950s who went all over the place ideologically, but if they went anywhere initially tended to go towards 'Western' liberalism of one sort of another - and support for the Vietnam War. Indeed, Johnson kind of acknowledges this in his discussion of the 1960s 'New Left':

'The nihilist movements of the late 1960s denounced "Amerika" and the "great white west".'

It slowly becomes clearer what Johnson is really taking exception to, then. It is not an imagined community called the 'post-left' at all but rather the rise of the 'New Left' out of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and also in particular the rise of militant black nationalism and the raising of the banner of 'Black Power' as the American Civil Rights movement radicalised as a result of the Vietnam War and also in the face of vicious state repression. Indeed most of Johnson's article is precisely aimed at the radical black preacher Rev Jeremiah Wright - who seems to be coming straight out of this 'Black Power' moment. Now there are of course aspects of black nationalist thought that are problematic for socialists, but Johnson's attack on the 'anti-American' Rev Jeremiah Wright misunderstands American history, particularly African-American history, profoundly. Johnson may prefer to ignore completely the fact that American 'civilisation' was built up first on the racist genocide of native Americans and then on the slavery of black Africans, but it will take more than the election of Barack Obama for American society to truly face up to its legacy of its racist past - particularly when Obama seems to be committed to fighting future imperialist wars that will only allow racism of another sort to flourish. The Rev Jeremiah Wright, whatever his particular eccentricities, in attacking American power understands something profoundly important about American society, its past and present, while Johnson's attacks on Wright reveal only his ignorance.

Worse than that - Johnson's breathless praise for Obama as a hero of the 'decent left' shows exactly who are the real 'post leftists'. Obama may come across as a decent enough bloke, but there is nothing 'left' as far as I can see about him, while there is certainly no longer anything remotely 'decent' or 'left' about Johnson and the rest of the 'decent left'. There is however a political radicalisation similar to that in Vietnam going on today as a result of the movements against Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Johnson hates the way this new mood of against war, imperialism and racism is spreading up from the streets and 'gaining influence in the academy, media and politics'. Johnson attacks 'the postmodern academic [who] tells students that the human condition has been blighted by "western-patriarchal-racist-homophobic-logocentric-capitalist-imperialism" and talks of the "multitude" that resist this new "Empire".' Whatever the failings of postmodernism, and there are many (logocentrism anyone?), at least those who understand that America is an Empire and therefore oppose it not because it is American but because it is an Empire show that there is hope still for humanity. But for that hope to be realised means that it is vital that out of the political radicalisation seen in the international anti-war movements, a new left committed to revolutionary socialism emerges.

*'A PARALLEL REACTION AMONG MANY ON THE LEFT -- the so-called B52 Liberals or Stealth Socialists -- has been to look to the military power of the United States and NATO to police the globe in defense of human rights. This reaction is a reprise of Americans for Democratic Action [A.D.A.] of the 1950s which, after condemning the latest "mistake" in U.S. foreign policy, would then call on the U.S. government to lead a social revolution in Asia. Hal Draper's reaction at the time -- "How naive is a liberal allowed to be?" -- must be ours today' - Alan Johnson, New Politics, 1999.

New uses for Christopher Hitchens books

No. 94. Stopping Water Damage From A Leaky Roof

This morning I awoke to the sound of drip...drip...drip. Basically, my bedroom roof was leaking, but I only noticed because the rain water happened to fall down and bounce off the cover of a copy of Christopher Hitchens, For The Sake of Argument; Essays and Minority Reports, (London, Verso, 1994), which a friend had lent me and was conveniently lying around unread on my bedroom floor. If Hitchens's collected essays hadn't been there, perhaps the leak would have gone undetected, leading to untold water damage with who knows what consequences. I wonder if any Histomat readers have by chance found similar uses for old copies of Hitchens's writings...

Sicko

Dear readers, I fear I may have contracted 'neoconitis', which is apparently a 'disease endemic in the UK and the US'. According to Dr Alan Johnson, contracting the disease apparently 'blocks off any proper consideration of the social democratic antitotalitarianism of Paul Berman, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, Ladan Boroumand, Kanan Makiya, Azar Nafisi, Bernard Kouchner, Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown.' Still, if I am 'suffering' from neoconitis, at least I haven't got whatever the hell it is Johnson has gone down with. Anyone who can praise the likes of the wretched war criminal turned Wall Street investment banker Tony Blair or the champion of ID Cards and Trident nuclear submarines Gordon Brown for their 'social democratic antitotalitarianism' surely needs serious medical help fast. I am no doctor, but it seems to me that Johnson should be relieved of the burden of writing for the Guardian as a matter of some urgency, and possibly quarantined immediately to stop whatever it is he has got spreading. Not that I can see much chance of Johnson's disease spreading, to be honest, but it is usually better to be safe than sorry on matters like this.

We Are All Bourgeois Now

Lots of other people seem to have picked up on the decision of one of the 'thought-leaders' of the British pro-war 'Left', Alan Johnson, to finally publically renounce Marxism. It would be nice to think that this blog might do a careful point-by-point 'In Defence of Marxism' type rebuttal of Johnson's nonsense. But this renegade Johnson doesn't deserve that and so instead I am going to link to the lyrics of a satirical Manic Street Preachers song, 'We Are All Bourgeois Now', as it serves as more than an adequate political critique.

The hidden history of the Second World War

Was Churchill an 'anti-fascist freedom fighter' or an imperialist gangster?

On the 28 July 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, George Orwell declared that 'I should be the last to claim that we are morally superior to our enemies, and there is quite a strong case for saying that British imperialism is worse than Nazism.' Such anti-imperialist sentiment has thrown a few members of the soft Left blogosphere into shock. 'I’m still trying to get over it!!!' declares one. 'British Imperialism is morally superior to Nazism'!

Andy Newman of the Socialist Unity group provides comfort, declaring 'Socialists were 100% correct to support the war against fascism' and insists that 'Winston Churchill fought fascism':

'There was both an inter-imperialist rivalry AND a popular anti-fascist war running at the same time. This was why the political battle within Britain for the opening of a second front, for independence of the British colonies, and full implementation of Beveridge were so important, in determining the nature of the war...of course the British Empire was monstrous, but arguing that British imperialism was the main enemy when faced with fascism would have been madness.'

However, there is surely a problem with labelling the Second World War a 'popular anti-fascist war' with just 'inter-imperialist rivalry' tagged on - as Chris Bambery has argued in a recent short series of three articles about the Second World War for Socialist Worker, which those interested ought to read:

How the great powers appeased Hitler
Bloody conflict over competing empires
Crushing the tide of left wing resistance.

The idea that it was a 'popular anti-fascist war' was how that section of the British ruling class around Churchill who wanted to defend the British Empire against Hitler had to sell such a war to the British working class (who were going to have to actually do the fighting) in order to win the argument against the section of the British ruling class happy to make a deal with Hitler.

Churchill had to rely on his friends in the press and the Labour Party to launch a campaign against the Tory appeasers. That required stressing that this was an anti-fascist war. In the summer of 1940, pro-war left wingers were deployed against Tory defeatists. Churchill hoped this was a short term expedient. He was not fighting fascism as such, but defending the British Empire

The Second World War is therefore best seen as an imperialist war 'about the repartition of the world among the great powers'.

It was a continuation of the 1914-18 conflict. What made it different was the ideological question – millions of working people understood fascism posed a mortal danger to them and had to be resisted.

Accordingly, the mood of the British working class throughout the war was not that of jingoistic joy at being sent to fight and die in another bloody conflict - but rather resigned fate that there was no other alternative if Hitler was to be stopped coupled with a growing mood of militancy against the old rulers who had got them into this mess.

The left wing tide swept Britain too. But there was no force that could carry the tide beyond parliamentary limits. In 1940 Labour had backed Churchill. The Communists were anti-war until June 1941, following Stalin’s line. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia they opposed strikes, urging maximum production for the war effort. In the absence of any effective lead from the left, people’s attitude was generally that “Hitler was a bastard and we needed a bastard to fight him – Churchill”. But once the war was won people voted Churchill out.

Elsewhere in Europe, where left wing Resistance movements helped to bring down Nazi occupation, there were glimpses of the potential for the Second World War ending as the First World War had, with imperialist war being turned into civil war and workers revolution - but these movements were betrayed by the Stalinists and social democrats and successfully crushed by the old rulers.

How did the old rulers who had taken society into the bloodshed and horror of the First World War and then supported the rise of Hitler and Mussolini coming to power as a bulwark against the threat of Communist revolution survive? Why didn't the imperialist war end in socialist revolution?

Today I came across an article written in 1995 by socialist historian Raymond Challinor, published in Critique entitled 'The Second World War and its Hidden Agenda'. That 'Hidden Agenda' was the need to stop the possibility of the war ending in workers' revolution - a fear which haunted the leaders of all the capitalist countries.

On August 25 1939, three days after the Nazi Soviet Pact had been signed, Hitler met with Robert Coulandre, the French Ambassador to Germany.

'Hitler told Coulandre he was proud of his agreement - he described it as "a realistic pact" - and went on to express his "regrets" if it consequently led to French and German blood being spilled. "But," Coulandre objected, "Stalin displayed great double-dealing. The real victor in case of war will be Trotsky. Have you thought that over?" "I know" der Fuhrer responded'

As Challinor notes, the interview evoked a comment from Trotsky. His name had been used, he said, because Hitler and Coulandre liked "to give a personal name to the spectre of revolution". But this is not the essence of this dramatic conversation..."War will inevitably provoke revolution," the representative of imperialist democracy, himself chilled to the marrow, frightens his adversary. "I know," Hitler responds, as if it were a question decided long ago. "I know." Astonishing dialogue! Both of them, Coulandre and Hitler, represent the barbarism which advances over Europe. At the same time, neither of them doubts that their barbarism will be conquered by socialist revolution'.

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Challinor describes an intriguing meeting at the French Embassy in London on 14 August. 'Present were General de Gaulle, Marceau Pivot of the French PSOP and John McNair, general secretary of the [British] Independent Labour Party. The aim was to explore the feasibility of co-ordinating action of revolutionary socialists and the Free French. From the outset of the discussion, Pivert and McNair conceded their objectives were mutually incompatible - de Gaulle wanted to see a capitalist France, they wanted a socialist France. Yet, both were anti-Hitler and sought to end Nazi occupation. Did this not provide the basis for some co-operation?'

Yet despite the fact Pivert cited how the Bolsheviks and French army had worked together to save both capitalist France and the Soviet Union in early 1918 when faced with a German military assault on Russia, de Gaulle refused to collaborate - 'anxious to accrue greater backing from the existing power structures, de Gaulle understood even the remotest association with revolutionary socialists would be, from his standpoint, counter-productive. To acquire the backing from the British political establishment, as well as to have any appeal to the French upper classes, de Gaulle realised he must remain strictly inside the limits of political orthodoxy. A crucial lesson learnt by the ruling classes of the various capitalist countries from the First World War was the touchpaper of revolution must not be lit: short term military gain must not be purchased at the expense of endangering long-term capitalist stability.'

Challinor also notes the decision by the German High Command during the First World War to let Lenin re-enter Russia through Switzerland in the sealed train - only to find that once back in Russia, Lenin's Bolsheviks not only made a revolution which got Russia out of the bloody First World War through making a revolution as the German ruling class hoped - the Russian Revolution then inspired German troops to mutiny and this helped spell the end of the German Kaiser through a revolutionary upheaval at home!

Challinor's conclusion seems a fitting point to close this discussion:

'Unwittingly the various ruling classes had contributed to their undoing, by the creation of convulsions of revolution that rocked Europe for years after the First World War. From that fearful experience, they learnt the crucial lesson: the train to Finland Station must never be permitted to run again. Neither of the two warring camps in the Second World War did anything that might aid or comfort revolutionary socialists. They realised the potentialities for rebellion were much greater than in the previous conflict, and therefore it would be hazardous to give them any encouragement. Reinforcing their conservative caution came the bureaucracies of social democracy and Stalinism. Together they ensured that Trotsky's prediction that the Second World War would end in a socialist revolution did not happen.'

Book Review: Hitchens Is Not Great

When people try to imagine what Hitchens looks like, they invariably think of an old frail man dressed in white and with a white beard

Hitchens Is Not Great: How Imperialism Poisons Everything by G.O'Dot

Famed for his biting polemical satire 'Waiting for', G.O'Dot has now unleashed a tremendously fierce and impassioned attack on neo-conservative apologists for American imperial power and corporate greed, entitled, provocatively, 'Hitchens Is Not Great'. The same contrarian spirit that makes G.O'Dot delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has Hitchens placed in the dock. In this book, G.O'Dot exposes how if Hitchens did not exist, there would be a need to invent him, as imperialism has always needed and found shameless journalists prepared to lie and prostitute their talents in exchange for material reward. 'Hired prizefighters for the capitalist class', Marx called them. Yet their cause is incredibly damaging to humanity. Imperialism, G.O'Dot writes, is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children'. It truly 'poisons everything'.

Water into Whine

Yet G.O'Dot is especially damning when it comes to the question of Hitchens himself. Many have claimed for Hitchens special super-natural powers, particularly when it comes to hard drinking. For example, one believer, George Galloway, has claimed that 'What Mr Hitchens has done is unique in natural history; the first-ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug. I mention 'slug' purposefully, because the one thing a slug does leave behind it is a trial of slime'. This is remarkable stuff, remarkable, but though there are people around who claim to have seen such acts - 'miracles' - they are very thin on the ground and there is still no rational, scientific, reasonable proof of Hitchens' existence as of yet.

False Profits

Others have asked that if it is true that Hitchens exists, and if he is such a kind benign spirit, why does he let so much suffering and destruction at the hands of the American Empire happen without intervening? Indeed, at times it seems as though Hitchens positively glories in the death and misery caused by imperialism - what sort of idol is this? Overall, G.O'Dot's short work, while perhaps a little hastily put together, is both timely and important and highly recommended to readers of Histomat.

M.N.Roy on 'the liberal Labourites of England'

M.N. Roy was an early leader of Indian Communism, and in 1922 wrote this article, The Liberalism of the British Labour Party which should remind us that the Labour Party has always loyally supported British Imperialism and that the idea of a 'pro-war "Left"' as being something 'new' and 'unprecedented' and only resulting from 'Liberals losing their way' after 9/11 is clearly problematic. As Roy noted:

Ramsey MacDonald, Labour's leader, always 'forgets about the Irish political prisoners rotting until recently in subterranean dungeons—or the wholesale massacres in India, Egypt and the Rand'...

'We are expected to believe that the Social Democrats and the Labourites stand for freedom for all, as against the principle of proletarian dictatorship professed by the Communists. Well, the sincerity of the British Labour Party in this question cannot stand the test when its attitude towards the national movements in the colonies is examined. Let us look into its record. Never has the British Labour Party defined its attitude, on the Colonial Question. Of all its leaders, Ramsay MacDonald has written the most about the imperial administration of the subject countries. We search in vain all through his writings to find a sentence which unconditionally recognises the right of the colonial peoples to determine freely what sort of government they would like to have. The most liberal statement he makes amounts to this: the old jingoist imperialism is untenable under the present circumstances; more liberal methods have to be adopted if the safety and permanence of the Empire is to be insured; the word Empire has become too odious, a more democratic term—Commonwealth—has to be introduced. He is sure that the 'democratic Federation of the British Empire' will be safe and secure in the keeping of the Labour politicians; a Col. Wedgewood in the India Office and a Ramsay MacDonald in Delhi will be a great improvement upon the noble lords now occupying those comfortable positions. The Irish policy of the Labour Party has never committed the sin of exceeding the limits of Gladstonian liberalism. So much by way of generalisation; now a few particulars.

When at the beginning of the war the Boer Nationalists of South Africa rose in revolt with the object of declaring an independent republic, the liberalism of the British labour leaders fell into line with those rank imperialists who found German intrigue, behind that revolt and dammed it as treason. Not a murmur was to be heard from the British Labour Party when De Wet was sentenced to hard labour.

Such an event as the 1916 Easter Revolution in Ireland could not make the British Labour Party define its attitude regarding this thorny question. As a member of the War Cabinet, Henderson did not raise a finger to save James Connolly, not to speak of others whose genuine fervour for national independence cannot be blackened by the insinuation of underground German intrigues. The British Labour Party did not find it necessary out of loyalty to the working class at least to withdraw from the Coalition which has killed the champion of the Irish proletariat...

The British Labour Party has maintained a sublime indifference towards the brutal repression is India ever since the earliest years of the present century. When the so-called “war services ” of the Indian people—services for which even the pacifist Ramsay MacDonald congratulates the Indians and recommends a better lot for them—were paid for by the infamous Rowlatt Act, which practically put the entire country under martial law, not even a word of protest was raised by the British Labour Party. But the Amritsar massacre which followed upon the heels of the Rowlatt Act, disturbed the philosophic calm of the British Labourites and elicited a conventional protest from them. This document, signed among others by Henderson, J.H. Thomas, Robert Williams and Lansbury, deplored the foolishness of such a policy of repression, and pointed out that thereby “the lives of the thousands of English women and children in India were endangered.” The apostles of humanity...were only concerned about the precious lives of helpless members of the ruling class, when the unarmed workers of India were being bombed and blown up by hundreds...

A few words more about Egypt. The Labour Party did not have anything to say against the proclamation of the British Protectorate over Egypt at the beginning of the war. The repeated persecution and the ultimate deportation of Zaglul failed to inspire these champions of liberty with holy indignation. They tacitly support the present policy of coercing the Egyptian people with the help of a few landed aristocrats, bought with sham concessions.'

And all this when Labour was in opposition and before they had ever formed a Government!
No wonder that whenever these 'champions of liberty' have been in power since, they have carried out the imperial 'civilising mission' - or 'humanitarian intervention' as it is more fashionably called today - with as much vigour as any other British Government. The British Labour Party was born at the time when the British Empire was at its height - and along with the decline and fall of the British Empire has gone the decline and decay of British Labourism. That tradition does not deserve to be revived - even if revival of it were still possible. Fortunately the British working class has always contained more internationalist, more progressive, more revolutionary traditions which socialists can and must relate to if a socialist alternative to Labourism is to be built.

Chartist Songs for the Millions

The Charter

Today I had a stroke of luck while browsing in my local secondhand bookshop, which I thought I would share - I found myself a copy of Iu. V. Kovalev's edited collection, An Anthology of Chartist Literature published in Moscow in 1956 (so the Soviet Union did do one thing right that year) going for a mere £2.49. This has been described as 'An anthology of Chartist songs, poems, speeches and essays. The introduction and the notes are in Russian, but the text of the chosen pieces is in English. Ernest Jones is well-represented; Kovalev has collected many hard to find pieces, including stories and a novel. An important resource long out of print.' I intend to share some little gems from it as and when, but the page fell open on Benjamin Stott - a Manchester bookbinder by trade - and his three versions of 'Song for the Millions', the first of which was published in The Northern Star on March 12, 1842 and which I shall reprint for you below. 1842 saw the world's first General Strike - the 'Plug Riots' and Stott was part of this class movement. Chartist songs are what music should be about (imagine some sort of Iron Maiden style riffs underneath as you read the lyrics if you can) - music is for the people - not about rich idiots like Colin Greenwood betraying the anti-war ethic of Radiohead by praising Oliver Kamm's review of Nick Cohen's latest book, or Dave Rowntree from Blur betraying the anti-war activism of Damon Albarn and the musicial genius of Graham Coxon (and possibly the environmental living of Alex James) by standing as a candidate for New Labour. Anyway, check out the Chartists, y'all. Respect.

Song for the Millions

How long will the millions sweat and toil,
To pamper the lordlings' bastard brats;
How long will they till the fruitful soil,
To be starved by the base aristocrats?
How long will they bear the galling yoke,
Ere their bones shall burst, their chains be broke,
And vengeance come down like a thunderstroke?

The spirit of freedom yearns and bleeds,
And liberty lies in patriots graves;
Whilst the monster tyrant's ear unheeds
The suffering wail of weeping slaves;
But shall mankind for ever bear
The stings of woe, and grief, and care,
And live and die in dark despair?

Forbid it heaven, and all the powers
That rule the universal world;
'Twere better that this globe of ours,
'Mid lightning's flashes, swift were hurl'd,
And with it all the human race,
Into the gulf of endless space,
Further than mortal ken can trace.

Bondsmen and slaves in every clime,
Your voices raise in freedom's cause;
Despots, be wise; be wise in time,
Remember it is Nature's laws
That make men equal; and dare ye,
In hellish conclave met, agree
To alter Nature's wise decree?

Vain is your wish, your strong desire
Can never! never! be obtained;
Ye cannot quench fair freedom's fire,
Though ye of blood a deluge rain'd.
Seek in the rolls of lasting fame;
There shall ye find each honour'd name,
Whose memory feeds the sacred flame.

Oh! may that flame burn fierce and bright,
Within the breasts of all mankind;
May knowledge pour a flood of light
From out the intellectual mind;
A light, that shall illume the earth,
Whose genial rays shall soon give birth
To glorious liberty, that boon of worth.

Histomat Exclusive: Nick Cohen's next book

Fast on the heels of writing 'What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way', reviewed here and by Ian Birchall here, Histomat can exclusively reveal that Nick Cohen is in the process of writing a follow up work. Provisionally entitled simply Who's Right?: Why I Am Always Right About Everything, we have secured exclusive permission to publish the preface from an early draft of the work. While what follows is certainly not in keeping with the editorial line of Histomat, we decided that it was nonetheless important enought to warrant putting on the blog:

Who's Right? Why I Am Always Right About Everything by Nick Cohen.

Preface

All my best ideas always come to me after spending a day in the pub, and the decision to write this book was no exception to the rule. My friend, the famous Marxist Professor Norman Geras and I had been hard at work planning how we could best mark the first anniversary of the launch of the Euston Manifesto, an anniversary that was fast approaching. After the ninth round, we had come up with various ideas (my suggestion of organising a pub crawl around Euston was proving the most popular idea with us both), but as we staggered out from our favourite tavern, Norm was still trying to come up with something more imaginative and inspired. 'We are the vanguard of a fucking world movement, Nick...we are making fucking history...we may all be in the gutter now but we are looking to the fucking stars...'

Old Norm had a point. He may have now been literally staring up at me from an actual gutter, but I thought he really had put his finger on something important there. I was a 'fucking star', even if the world had yet to look upon me as one yet. Norm was now grinning inanely, and began mumbling something about frightful hobgoblins and the two of us being like Marx and Engels, but I was now deep in my own thoughts. Wasn't I the greatest satirist in the English language since Jonathan Swift? Hadn't my polemics been compared in prophetic power to George Orwell? I turned to ask Norm to confirm that all this was indeed the case, but he looked as if he had now fallen asleep on the pavement. No matter.

It was at this point that my mind went back to what Socialist Worker had said of What's Left?: '363 pages of tedious, self-righteous diatribe and monotonous whining'. They were hardly going to say anything else, of course. I thought back to the time I had been invited to debate with the SWP at their 'Marxism' festival a few years back. I accepted the offer and turned up after spending the day preparing my arguments in a nearby bar, something I slightly regretted when I urgently needed to relieve myself on mounting the stage. Nevertheless, despite this self-inflicted injury, I decided to press on and get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. I began, and bravely told them straight out exactly what I thought of their chilling totalitarian Leninist organisation. After about ten minutes into my speech, the Chair complained that the supposed topic of the particular debate was not 'Leninism' or 'the SWP' but 'Should fascists should have the right to free speech?' Oh, well. Like I was bothered.

Still there was, I reflected with hindsight, a grain of truth in the argument that my book had been a 'diatribe'. What's Left? was all about things I was against - I now needed to write about what my alternative was, what I was for. The Euston Manifesto was supposed to be about what we we stood for, a sort of updated Communist Manifesto, but alas it had been written by a collective rather than me alone and accordingly, in terms of literary style, it had suffered somewhat. What was needed was a statement about what I thought - but written solely by me and solely about me. Hence the idea for Who's Right? was born.

At this point I felt Norm's hand on my shoulder. He looked sad, but he seemed to have sobered up somewhat. 'Let's face fucking reality, Nick, it's you and me against the fucking world now. Euston's fucked, Iraq's fucked, its all shot to shite, my academic credibility is in tatters and everyone hates us. Even if we organised a pub meet up to celebrate the fucking anniversary of the fucking Manifesto the only people who would turn up would be us, and a few journalists who had come to take the fucking piss. Maybe its time, you know, to wind the whole thing up.' I was staggered. 'What, and let the totalitarian Islamists and Leninists triumph?' I fired back. 'What happened to "Stormin' Norman"?' Besides, I said, 'I have had a revelation...' After telling him of my cunning plan to write a book all about me and how brilliant I am, Norm seemed enthusiastic but had questions. 'An autobiography? Your last book told us more about yourself than it did about the War on Iraq, and now you want to write even more about yourself?' Yet Who's Right? aims not simply to be an autobiography. It aims to be nothing less than a new manifesto for the movement that was born a year ago in Euston...

International Socialism 113

Richard Seymour of the inimitable Lenin's Tomb blog has a timely article 'In the name of decency: the contortions of the pro-war left' in the latest issue of International Socialism, which has just come online. I like this bit in particular: 'A new initiative called ‘The Euston Manifesto’ was launched by bloggers and commentators from the soft left in April 2006. Its pioneers formulated their creed in a pub in Euston, and it shows.' Among what look like several other excellent articles, Hassan Mahamdallie's look at Muslim working class struggles in a twentieth century British context should also be read by those confused by the current climate of Islamophobia - while Neil Davidson looks back at the Great French Revolution.

While I am here, I may as well plug a London Socialist Historians Group conference coming up in February on The Cold War Sixty Years On which is being held in, er, London of all places.

Imperialism

The radical Liberal economist J.A. Hobson's Imperialism, A Study (1902), a critique which Lenin used for his classic Marxist study in 1916, is now online at the Marxists Internet Archive. The 'decent' 'pro-war Left' should be required to read it.

Remembering 1956 #3: The invasion of Egypt

Fifty years ago today, on 29 October 1956, Israeli forces - backed by Britain and France - crossed into Sinai desert as the first part of a plan for the West to 'topple' Egyptian nationalist leader Colonel Nasser. In July Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, which, after all, was in Egypt and had been built by Egyptians. As Egyptian troops rushed to engage the invaders, Britain and France made their demands for a ceasefire. The first British bombs were falling on Cairo by nightfall on 31 October. Six days later British and French paratroopers landed at Port Said at the mouth of the Canal. These events marks the start of what is euphemistically in the West remembered as the 'Suez Crisis', but really should be remembered as a colonial war, the Western invasion of an African state. Yet it was certainly to throw the British Empire into crisis - as historian Anne Alexander notes:

'With the regular [Egyptian] army in disarray as it retreated before the Israeli advance, the city [Port Said] was poorly defended. Here the strategy of popular resistance would be put to the test. According to Fathallah Mahrus:

There was no army to fight in Port Said, just some individuals and a few soldiers and small units. So the popular resistance against the invasion was led by the people of Port Said—women and children as well—armed with cooking pans, kitchen knives, walking sticks and anything they could find...

The ferocity of the resistance in Port Said was a grave setback for British and French plans. British officials had convinced themselves that Nasser was a hated dictator, and that the Egyptian people would welcome his defeat and overthrow. But as Fathallah Mahrus explains:

It wasn’t about Nasser, it was about our homeland. The imperialists wanted to reoccupy our country, and the invasion was over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company which was an imperialist company. And we forgot about what Nasser did to us, and we forgot our differences with him and the prisons and the camps and the torture because there was a common danger and a single enemy: imperialism which wanted to occupy Egypt.' The resistance won.

The lessons of Suez are then hopefully clear enough:

Fifty years ago Britain, France and Israel launched an invasion of Egypt. Their aim was to seize the recently nationalised Suez Canal. All three feared and hated the forces of Arab nationalism symbolised by Egypt’s President Nasser. As with Iraq the decision to invade split the British ruling class down the middle. There was widespread opposition to the attack. With the US refusing to support the invasion and the pound facing collapse, [Conservative] British prime minister Anthony Eden agreed to withdraw.

Even if the invasion plan had succeeded it is difficult to see how an occupation would have lasted. Britain had been forced out of the canal zone by a guerrilla campaign two years earlier. As with Iraq today, initial military success would have collapsed into ultimate defeat.

There is one huge difference in the parallel between Iraq and Suez. Fifty years ago, after some initial hesitation, Labour organised a massive rally against the war in Trafalgar Square. Eden resigned 18 days after the final British troops evacuated Suez. Tony Blair may have lasted longer than Eden - but he will be identified with catastrophe in Iraq as much as Eden is remembered for leading the British Empire to its final death throes.

Yes, that is right - the Labour Party organised a huge anti-war protest in Trafalgar Square under the banner 'Law not War'. As Stan Newens, then a young revolutionary socialist, remembered:

'With the prospect of armed intervention imminent, the Suez Emergency Committee booked Trafalgar Square for an anti-war rally on Sunday 4 November. I was in touch with Peggy Rushton, the MCF [Movement for Colonial Freedom] general secretary, by phone with the object of helping to mobilise support. On Thursday 1 November, when I phoned, she informed me that the Labour Party had been on the line to take over the booking actually, on behalf of the National Council of Labour, representing the TUC and the co-operative movement as well. I was delighted that she had already agreed and carried on with my plans to rally protesters. In addition, using the Epping CLP duplicator, I copied 6,000 leaflets drafted by myself and my Socialist Review colleagues, calling on workers to strike against the Suez intervention.

The Trafalgar Square rally turned out to be a seminal event in British Labour history. My 6,000 leaflets, which a crowd of dockers helped us to distribute, disappeared in a flash. All afternoon people were pouring into the square until it was impossible to move. At the height of the proceedings, a great chant went up in the north western corner of the square as a massive column of student demonstrators began to come in and went on endlessly.

"One, two, three, four! We won’t fight in Eden’s war", they chanted. The whole square and its environs were engulfed in a vast array of protesters who were jammed in tight. The sense of mass solidarity in a just cause held us spellbound and instilled in us all a common will to carry our protest forward.

At the end of the protest speeches, part of the crowd made for Whitehall, perhaps hoping to besiege Downing Street, and bitter clashes with the police followed in which 27 people were arrested. It was clear that the rally had awakened many thousands from their apathy and fired them as well as the pre-committed with an unbending determination to oppose British intervention in Suez.'

The same day of the protest - Sunday 4th November - saw the news come through of the Stalinist suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. Newens remembers that 'in Trafalgar Square Mike Kidron, a fellow Socialist Review supporter, told me (as he had left home much later) that the Russians were apparently going in to crush the uprising in Hungary...' Michael Rosen also remembers this vividly, as he noted earlier this month:

'I was with my CP [Communist Party] parents in Trafalgar Square to call for Britain out of Suez, when one of their Party comrades appeared and announced 'They've gone in. The tanks have gone in.' I was ten years old and thought that he meant that the tanks had gone into Port Said or Cairo or somewhere. Then he said, 'They're in Budapest' and I had no idea what they were talking about. I could see that it was utterly traumatic for the cluster of CP-ers I was looking up to (hoho) all around me'.

For more on the Communist Party Historians and 1956, see here

From the Suez Crisis to the crisis in Sudan

Yet the main lesson of Suez [invasion + occupation = war crimes + racism + poverty] still seems to miss too many people by today. Even after news that Blair's most trusted military commander thinks that NATO's attempted conquest of Afghanistan is 'cuckoo', and Iraq looks like it may be a worse defeat for the US Empire than even Vietnam was, there is still this notion that armed force by the West or 'international community' can bring liberation. These ideas are usually tied up with the whole notion of reformism - the idea that the capitalist state or capitalist states can be part of the solution, somehow. Hilary Benn enters the race for deputy leader of the Labour Party with a declaration that he wants to 'fight for social justice and peace in the world'. This sounds good, but given Hilary Benn's support for war on Afghanistan and Iraq, such a statement is slightly ominous. Even on the anti-war Labour Left, last month John McDonnell argued for armed UN intervention in Sudan, despite acknowledging that 'the role of the US and Britain in the Middle East has largely destroyed the credibililty of Bush and Blair internationally in being capable of leading a peace initiative'.

There are parallels here - of a sort - with the Labour Left over Suez, which was somewhat weakened by its leader, Shadow Foreign Secretary Nye Bevan, whose line over the whole disastrous war was very soft. As he put it in 1956, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal was not about social justice but theft: 'If the sending of one’s police and soldiers into the darkness of night to seize somebody else’s property is nationalisation, then Ali Baba used the wrong terminology'.

One group of people who should really hold their tongues during the anniversary of the Suez war are the self-styled 'decent Left' who support Bush and Blair's bloody 'war on terror'. Yet, today, Nick Cohen is still calling for a new war to be waged against 'genocidal states'. By genocidal states does he mean the US, the UK, or perhaps Israel? No, their genocidal past and present is not what concerns Cohen. He calls for a new war of the West against the people of Sudan, which as Richard Seymour has noted, would only make a tragic situation even worse. Those wanting to learn the real lessons of Suez should be demanding American and British troops do not get sent to occupy even more countries - but come home immediately. Otherwise, they will all eventually be coming home anyway - only in bodybags.