Joe Glenton on the root causes of the Woolwich killing

Excellent response by former soldier Joe Glenton - author of  Soldier Box - his personal account of fighting in - and then rebelling against - the 'war on terror' - to the murder in Woolwich.

Edited to add: Stop the War Coalition statement and petition

 Edited to also add: 

London UAF counter demo on Monday 27 May, 3pm, Downing Street

Hoping to grow off of the back of the attack in Woolwich the EDL have called a demo at Downing Street on Monday 27 May at 3pm. UAF have called a counter demo, assembling at 2pm at Downing Street. Please bring trade union banners.

Prince Harry on the riots

After the riots - and amidst the brutal state clampdown - has come a tidal wave of commentary on them - some informed and much simply the rehashing of reactionary old mantras. It is interesting then to hear amidst all this the voice of one young person in Britain who, despite his own experience of living in a family all trying to survive on state benefits while suffering unemployment, did not, for some reason, feel the need personally to take to the streets and riot. Yes, Prince Harry of Buckingham Palace Row, London, has now commented at last on the riots, and apparently he found them
'shocking and outrageous'.

Prince Harry himself of course might have never felt the need to riot as such, but he has recently partaken in a quite brutal, violent and criminal act of looting - as part of a wider smash-and-grab raid known as 'Western Imperialism in Afghanistan', so perhaps his attempt at trying to help seize the moral high ground over the riots for the government, police and the ultra-rich 'over-class' in society lacks a certain je ne sais quo.

Stop the War Protest at Downing Street

HANDS OFF THE MIDDLE EAST - NO MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA - TROOPS OUT OF AFGHANISTAN
Join the day of action this Saturday March 12th – Downing Street 2pm in London - called by Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative

New film: John Pilger: The War You Don't See

On Tuesday 14 December, ITV1 will broadcast John Pilger's new film 'The War You Don't See' at 10.35pm GMT. Speaking of great TV, the drama Any Human Heart based on the novel by William Boyd concluded last night, which from its Mad Menesque title sequence at the beginning onwards I thought a fine portrayal of the twentieth century through the life of one writer.

Grace Lee Boggs on why Obama was shellacked

Two years ago, in the fall of 2008, over a million citizen activists of all ethnic groups, mostly young people, often accompanied by middle-aged or elderly independents, went door to door, urging voters to go to the polls and elect Barach Obama to the White House.

We/they did this because we believed and hoped that this charismatic black man could bring about the transformational changes we urgently need at this time on the clock of the world when the U.S. pursuit of unlimited economic growth has reached its social and ecological limits.

In 2010, despite the impassioned appeals of Barack, Michelle and Democratic Party stalwarts, many of us didn't even go to the polls ourselves on November 2, let alone urge others to do so, Ralph Nader estimates there were 28 million NoShows.

We need to probe the lessons of this experience, shared by many millions directly or indirectly.

The main lesson, I believe, is that the tremendous changes we now need and yearn for in our daily lives and in the direction of our country cannot come from those in power or by putting pressure on those in power.

We ourselves have to foreshadow or prefigure them from the ground up.

Civil and Voting rights for blacks didn't come from the White House or from masses demonstrating in front of the White House. They came after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-6, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the 1963 Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Mississippi Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools, and the 1964 Selma to Montgomery March.

In other words, they came only after hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their white supporters had accepted the challenge and risks of ourselves making or becoming the changes we/they want to see in the world...
Full article here - see also this piece by Charlie Kimber. The struggle against Obama's and Cameron's imperialist war in Afghanistan continues this Saturday with a demonstration in London, Afghanistan: Time to Go

Ralph Miliband on the perils of 'humanitarian intervention' in Afghanistan

'...Almost by definition, a regime imposed upon a hostile population by foreign arms (or for that matter without the help of foreign arms) will be strongly repressive: opposition must be put down, civil rights must be denied, and civic life must be severely controlled, and thereby impoverished. This also deeply affects economic life and activity...The result is resistance or at best indifference, inefficiency and corruption. Poor performance and non-cooperation aggravate economic difficulties; and these in turn enhance popular dissatisfaction.

In this perspective, the notion that these regimes can eventually come to enjoy a large and growing measure of popular support must appear illusory. For not only are they deeply marked by their dependence on foreign intervention for survival (and for the most part by their origin in foreign intervention); but also by the essential nature of the regimes which military intervention (or the threat of foreign intervention) serves to maintain. The point is that the regimes in question are not simply monopolistic and repressive from temporary necessity and transient adverse circumstances, but by their very structure...

[There] is the argument that, whatever may be said against military intervention in most cases, it is defensible in some exceptional cases, namely in the case of particularly tyrannical and murderous regimes, for instance the regime of Idi Amin in Uganda and of Pol Pot in Kampuchea...The argument is obviously attractive: one cannot but breathe a sigh of relief when an exceptionally vicious tyranny is overthrown. But attractive though the argument is, it is also dangerous. For who is to decide, and on what criteria, that a regime has become sufficiently tyrannical to justify overthrow by military intervention? There is no good answer to this sort of question; and acceptance of the legitimacy of military intervention on the ground of the exceptionally tyrannical nature of a regime opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation than is already rife in the world today.

The rejection of military intervention on this score is not meant to claim immunity and protection for tyrannical regimes. Nor does it. For there are other forms of intervention than military ones: for instance economic pressure by way of sanctions, boycott and even blockade. Tyrannical regimes make opposition extremely difficult: but they do not make it impossible. And the point is to help internal opposition rather than engage in military ‘substitutism’...

’Security’ is perhaps the reason most commonly invoked to justify military intervention...In considering this argument, much confusion may be avoided if a clear distinction is made between two essentially different propositions. The first of these is that it is useful and desirable for any given country to have uncontentious, cooperative and friendly neighbours. This is indisputable. The second proposition is that the requirements of security do not only make it useful and desirable for this or that country to have such neighbours, but essential, to the point, where possible, of justifying military intervention when the requirements threaten to be no longer met. I think that this second proposition is dangerous and unacceptable from a socialist standpoint, and that it rests on short-sighted and mistaken calculations...

In any case, security by virtue of occupation, and the maintenance of power of a puppet regime must be set against a number of contrary considerations. One of these is the fierce hostility which military intervention generates and the nationalist upsurge it produces. ‘Security’ is here turned into a mockery by the massive unpopularity of the occupier and his puppet government; and it is further degraded by the war of pacification which [the occupier has to pursue], with all its attendant horrors. What kind of security is this? It was in relation to American military strategists that C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘crackpot realism’...'

Ralph Miliband, 'Military Intervention and
Socialist Internationalism' (1980) .

Some holiday reading for his warmongering son David and David's brother Ed perhaps?

Priyamvada Gopal on modernity, women and Afghanistan

The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed. The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

Full article here

Afghanistan: Time to Go Stop the War Rally

On Monday 26 July, Joe Glenton, the soldier who said no to the war in Afghanistan, will make his first public speech since his release from military custody. He will speak at Stop the War's Time To Go rally in London, when he will be joined by Caroline Lucas MP, Mark Steel (comedian and Independent journalist) and Ross Williams, another soldier jailed for refusing to fight an unjustified war (full list of speakers below). Joe Glenton suffered months of imprisonment for making his stand against the war, and has shown great courage and principle throughout (SEE http://bit.ly/reppW ). The anti-war movement owes him a great debt and we hope everyone living in the London area who can, will be there on Monday when we show our appreciation. Please circulate details of the rally to welcome Joe's release and encourage as many people as you can to join us on 26 July.

RALLY: AFGHANISTAN - TIME TO GO
MONDAY 26 JULY
7PM
CONWAY HALL,
25 RED LION SQUARE,
LONDON,
WC1R 4RL
SPEAKERS: Lance Corporal JOE GLENTON, just released from prison following court martial for refusing to fight in Afghanistan, ex-soldier ROSS WILLIAMS, jailed in 2008 for refusing to fight in Iraq, CAROLINE LUCAS MP, JEREMY CORBYN MP, MARK STEEL, comedian and columnist, LINDSEY GERMAN, Stop the War Coalition, YASMIN KHAN, War On Want.

John Pilger on the warmongers wanting your vote

Here in Britain, Polly Toynbee anoints the war criminal Tony Blair as "the perfect emblem for his people's own contradictory whims". No, he was the perfect emblem for a liberal intelligentsia prepared cynically to indulge his crime. That is the unsaid of the British election campaign, along with the fact that 77 per cent of the British people want the troops home. In Iraq, duly forgotten, what has been done is a holocaust. More than a million people are dead and four million have been driven from their homes. Not a single mention has been made of them in the entire campaign. Rather, the news is that Blair is Labour's "secret weapon".

All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the darling of former Blair lovers, says that, as prime minister, he will "participate" in another invasion of a "failed state" provided there is "the right equipment, the right resources". His one reservation is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandal­ised by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.

For Clegg, as for Brown and Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as cluster bombs, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims' lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone, Britain will spend £4bn on the war in Afghanistan. That is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the health service.

Edward S Herman explained this genteel extremism in his essay "The Banality of Evil". There is a strict division of labour, ranging from the scientists working in the laboratories of the weapons industry, to the intelligence and "national security" personnel who supply the paranoia and "strategies", to the politicians who approve them. As for journalists, our task is to censor by omission and make the crime seem normal for you, the public. For, above all, it is your understanding and your awakening that are feared.

John Pilger on the warmongers running for Parliament who may not have 'broken Britain' but who collectively have done a pretty good job of 'breaking' both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regime Change Begins At Home

As John Pilger notes, 'in the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun...' The Stop the War Coalition has a few ideas about how to use the election to begin to go about this...

Tariq Ali on the state of British politics today

As another NATO airstrike kills at least 90 people in Afghanistan (prompting this piece of genius analysis from the BBC) and as an aide of Brown's quits in protest at the slaughter going on out there, what better time to read an interview with Tariq Ali by Socialist Review, where among other things he discusses the state of British politics today.

Gordon Brown is relying on propaganda about "supporting our boys" and demonisation of the Taliban as his sole defence of the war in Afghanistan, but the rise in soldiers' deaths has opened up a public debate about the war and why we are there. Are we seeing the beginning of the end for the perception of this as "the good war" in contrast to the unpopularity of the Iraq war from the start?

Brown is a pathetic figure because he knows what he's saying is total nonsense. Tony Blair actually believed in holy wars. New Labour are so gutless and spineless that they cannot even now admit that their foreign policy of positioning themselves in the "arse of the White House and staying there" has been a disaster and is now leading to unnecessary deaths. Playing up these deaths as patriotism plays straight into the hands of the local fascists who have replaced Jews with Muslims in their demonology (at least for public consumption; in private they remain anti-Semites). The fact that not a single political party is calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan is a symptom of where this country is at the moment, the moral equivalent of the Vichy regime in France during the Second World War...

The Labour government appears totally bankrupt and incapable of recovering, and everyone now assumes that David Cameron will be the next prime minister. What are your thoughts on the prospect of seeing the Tories back in power?

It will make absolutely nil difference. New Labour were very proud of being even more right wing than the old Tories. I think a crushing defeat for the New Labour project would be very positive, regardless of who wins. We shouldn't, of course, ever pretend that a New Labour defeat will automatically lead to an opening for the left. The mood in Europe is very right wing. The fact that the bank bailouts in Britain have excited little anger is a sign of the times. Those who cling on to New Labour from a sociological assumption that it represents the working class are living in the clouds.

International outrage as 'bomber' goes free

The man wanted in connection with the criminal bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan is free and greeted by Col. Gaddafi instead of spending the rest of his life in prison

Turn Imperialist War into Civil War

Writing in this week's New Statesman, the former supporter of the orthodox Trotskyist International Marxist Group turned New Labour's Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth attacks what he calls (in pseudo Leninist language) the 'defeatist' attitude of the British people with respect to the 'Good War' in Afghanistan. As Ainsworth argues, 'The coalition is operating as a force for good - not as an occupier or an invader.' I suppose if you say something enough times you may eventually convince yourself, though it don't necessarily make it so.

Yet what is particularly insidious about New Labour is less their lies and propaganda offensive at a time of war - those have a long pedigree both in Labour's history and in British history more generally and are in a sense inevitable. Nor is their authoritarianism and attacks on civil liberties - including attacks on the right of migrants to join anti-war protests - a surprise - such things are part and parcel of imperialist warfare. What I find insidious is that having lost the intellectual argument for war, they continue to attempt to 'bring the war home' by trying to get more active consent from the British public for their militarism and warmongering on behalf of multinational corporations and the American Empire under the guise of 'Britishness' by organising symbolic rituals such as 'Armed Forces Day' and military parades of the living and the dead. New Labour do this while hypocritically claiming that such things are not in any sense 'political' and having nothing to do with them trying to appease racists and the right wing press. As Ainsworth puts it, 'The war in Afghanistan is too important to be reduced to a political football'. As a result, as John Pilger noted recently,

These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. On the BBC’s Newsnight, the heroic Afghan MP Malalai Joya, tries, in her limited English, to tell the British public that her people are being blown to bits in their name: 140 villagers, mostly children, in her own Farah Province. No parade for them. No names and faces for them. The suppression of the suffering of Britain’s and America’s colonial victims is an article of media faith, a tradition so ingrained that it requires no instructions.

The difference today is that a majority of the British people are not fooled. The cheerleading newsreaders can say "Britain’s resolve is being put to the test" as if the Luftwaffe is back on the horizon, but their own polls (BBC/ITN) show that popular disgust with the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq is strongest in the very communities where adolescents are recruited to fight them. The problem with the British public, says a retired army major on Channel 4 News, is that they need "to be trained and educated". Indeed they do, wrote Bertolt Brecht in The Solution, explaining that the people...

Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

In such an extraordinary 'officially apolitical' political atmosphere, and with the number of dead British soldiers in Afghanistan about to hit the 200 mark - it seems to me that the Left have to therefore redouble our efforts to also try and 'bring this war home' and make New Labour pay for their crimes. Everyone who is disgusted by New Labour's catastrophically bloody and disastrous war on the people of Afghanistan abroad - which every day brings more horror - as well as their war on public services and jobs massacre at home should try to join and help build two upcoming demonstrations, and so help cement the rising tide of resistance from below into a real movement for 'regime change at home'.

Rage Against New Labour - 27 September outside Labour Party conference in Brighton.

Troops Out of Afghanistan - 24 October, London.

Would you buy a used war from this man?

Strike! Demonstrate! Get the Troops Out of Afghanistan Now

On Afghanistan

Good, clear, socialist analysis on why the occupation has to end now

John Pilger on breaking the lie of silence

Vintage Pilger:

Britain's political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other...The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal [Tony Blair] a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain's part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, "Can hope win?" and, my favourite, "Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?"...The Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister [Gordon Brown] "resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement". What is this one error of judgement? The bank-rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister's "folly" is "postponing the election last year". This is the March Hare Factor. Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

Tariq Ali on the Khyber Impasse

An extract from Tariq Ali on Afghanistan: The Mirage of the Good War:

'The current occupation of Afghanistan naturally recalls colonial operations in the region, not just to Afghans but to some Western myth-makers—usually British, but with a few Subcontinental mimics—who try to draw lessons from the older model; the implication being that the British were ‘good imperialists’ who have a great deal to teach the brutish, impatient Americans. The British administrators were, for the most part, racist to the core, and their self-proclaimed ‘competence’ involved the efficient imposition of social apartheid in every colony they controlled. They could be equally brutal in Africa, the Middle East and India. Though a promise of civilizational uplift was required as ideological justification, then as now, the facts of the colonial legacy speak for themselves. In 1947, the year the British left India, the overwhelming majority of midnight’s children were illiterate, and 85 per cent of the economy was rural.

Not bad intentions or botched initiatives, but the imperial presence itself was the problem. Kipling is much quoted today by editorialists urging a bigger Western ‘footprint’ in Afghanistan, but even he was fully aware of the hatred felt by the Pashtuns for the British, and wrote as much in one of his last despatches from Peshawar in April 1885 to the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore:

Pathans, Afridis, Logas, Kohistanis, Turcomans and a hundred other varieties of the turbulent Afghan race, are gathered in the vast human menagerie between the Edwardes Gate and the Ghor Khutri. As an Englishman passes, they will turn to scowl on him, and in many cases to spit fluently on the ground after he has passed. One burly, big-paunched ruffian, with shaven head and a neck creased and dimpled with rolls of fat, is specially zealous in this religious rite—contenting himself with no perfunctory performance, but with a whole-souled expectoration, that must be as refreshing to his comrades as it is disgusting to the European.

One reason among many for the Pashtuns’ historic resentment was the torching of the famous bazaar in Kabul, a triumph of Mughal architecture. Ali Mardan Khan, a renowned governor, architect and engineer, had built the chahr-chatta (four-sided) roofed and arcaded central market in the 17th century on the model of those in old Euro-Arabian Muslim cities—Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Palermo or Córdoba. It was regarded as unique in the region; nothing on the same scale was built in Lahore or Delhi. The bazaar was deliberately destroyed in 1842 by General Pollock’s ‘Army of Retribution’, remembered as amongst the worst killers, looters and marauders ever to arrive in Afghanistan, a contest in which competition remains strong. Defeated in a number of cities and forced to evacuate Kabul, the British punished its citizens by removing the market from the map. What will remain of Kabul when the current occupiers finally withdraw is yet to be seen, but its spreading mass of deeply impoverished squatter settlements suggest that it is set to be one of the major new capitals of the ‘planet of slums’.

Exclusive Offer: The Royal Warrior Celebration Plate

Barbarism: A village in Afghanistan

By exclusive appointment, Royal Doulton are pleased to announce the limited edition The Royal Warrior Celebration Plate, lovingly made to commemorate HRH Prince Harry's ten week tour of duty during the Fourth Anglo-Afghan War. This is a limited edition plate and only 4,000 will be made. Issued to commemorate the inspiring heroism of His Royal Highness the Prince Henry Charles Albert David as he singlehandedly takes on 'Terry Taliban', it will allow you to remember forever the unforgettable highlights of HRH Prince Harry's tour of duty...from the daily ritual of a morning kickabout after breakfast...to calling in his first airstrike on an Afghan village from a fortified position miles away before lunch...driving a Spartan tank around the base camp during the afternoon...to hosting his famed 'colonials and natives' themed dinner parties in the barracks in the evening.

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Cry God for Harry, England and St George!

The Royal Warrior Celebration Plate measures 9 inches (23 cm) in diameter and weighs unpackaged approximately 375 grammes. Don't miss this exclusive opportunity - contact us while stocks last.

The Fourth Anglo-Afghan War

...looks like it will go the same way as the past three - down to defeat for the West. As Seamus Milne notes, 'it seems the western powers are going to have to learn the lessons of the colonial era again and again'.