Tag: Politics

Armageddon in Gaza

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W B Yeats

The decision by the Israeli war cabinet to try to fully occupy Gaza to “eliminate Hamas” will kill many, many more people, with intensified military action adding even more to the steadily mounting total of people being starved to death; and, as a side effect that Netanyahu is well aware of, ensure the deaths of all the remaining hostages. As the Duke of Warwick says in Shaw’s St Joan; “It was nothing personal. Your death was a political necessity”.

The reported stand up row with IDF commanders, and the letters from thousands of reservists and nearly 600 retired Israeli security officials and former intelligence agency heads who see no achievable military objective, also reflects the strain that the war so far has placed on the IDF itself and Israeli society more broadly.

Their casualties are tiny by comparison with those suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza of course. The 60,199 fatalities for which the Gaza Health Ministry has records are generally accepted to be a serious underestimate.

There is no doubt that, unless a change of course is forced, there will be many more dying very soon. 12,000 children under five alone are reported as suffering from acute malnutrition in July; and this number is growing as the trickle of food aid forced in by international pressure and condemnation is spread thinner and thinner as time drags on.

Nevertheless, the impact of the war on the IDF is far from negligable, and this will accelerate once they move into the quagmire of Gaza City.

So far, they have lost 454 fatalities and 2,870 injured in the 22 months since October 7th.

To think of that in UK terms, with a population almost ten times bigger – that would be 4,358 dead and 27,552 injured.

To put that into perspective, 179 UK soldiers were killed in Iraq, and 457 in Afghanistan (the latter over nearly 20 years); roughly a tenth as much at a much slower rate. It led to quite a strong sentiment against overseas interventions, even with a proffessional armed forces, that is still a factor to be taken into account.

In US terms, with a population 48 times bigger, that would be 21,798 soldiers killed and 136,320 injured. To put that in perspective, that would be at a rate almost twice as fast as the 58, 281 soldiers the US lost in their nine year invasion of Vietnam.

The Vietnam comparison is instructive, because the US and its allies killed over a million Vietnamese. And they were still defeated, partly because the scale of their murderousness became globally apparent, its inability to stop the Vietnamese became apparent with it, the morale of their conscripted soldiers was crumbling, and draft resistance fuelled a counter culture that was letting all sorts of dangerous ideas loose; so they had to cut their losses and bide their time.

What we are seeing in Gaza is a level of barbarism even more concentrated than when B52s were carpet bombing Vietnamese cities and dropping Agent Orange all over the countryside. The Gaza City invasion will make this much worse.

However, Israel is more capable of sustaining this than the US, even with conscripts, because the war is right in their faces, not in “a land far away”, a high proportion of their population are settlers on a mission to drive Palestinians out, and most see the conflict as zero sum communalism, “us or them”; which has a genocidal dynamic.

Nevertheless, the strains are real. Up to the end of 2024, 672,000 people, mostly young and educated, had left the country. Thats almost 10% of the population. This is paralelled by a 10% hit on its economy, which any Gaza City invasion will compound.

The question now is how bad things have to get before Netanyahu runs out of road, or their society cracks, or the US makes the calculation that the damage to its own global standing from underwriting all this is worse than the salutory effect of the apocalyptic warning it gives to the whole global South of what could happen to you if you step out of line, and pulls the plug. Which it could have done at any point since this began, It hasn’t.

When Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has (almost) given up on apologetics and even Tim Stanley can write in the Daily Telegraph that “its now impossible to ignore the nevidence of human suffering (try as you have, Tim) or the sham of the official Israeli narrative that says no one is starving or, if they are, its because Hamas stole all the food“; the tectonic plates have already shifted and Netanyahu is standing on thinner and thinner ice, and every bomb he drops cracks it more.

In the period ahead, we will have to mobilise more and more against this, and break the complicity of our government in it.

Previous

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

This morning, instead of the Guardian flopping onto the doormat at 4 in the morning, the great, grey, grim, gruesome masthead of the Daily Telegraph was visible poking through the letterbox like an ultimatum in Gothic.

The Telegraph is a gloriously reactionary paper, whose columnists barrage its readers with nerve edgy variations on the theme of “we’ll all be murdered in our beds” to keep them scared and angry, and its news sections are barely calmer. It was ever thus. When I worked permanent nights in a choclate factory many years ago, I used to read the Telegraph to keep me awake; because a mind that is boggling finds it hard to drift off.

A characteristic article this morning headlined Hunter gored to death by buffalo he was stalking explains how “a millionaire trophy hunter…was killed almost instantly by ‘a sudden and unprovoked attack’ by the animal”.

They write this with no sense of irony; after all, all he was doing was stalking it to shoot it. The natural order of things. No provocation at all. There’s a whole world view in that.

Doing its bit to calm down tensions over “migrant hotels”, their lead article on p4 is headed Migrants in hotels linked to hundreds of crimes, with the strapline, in case anyone misses the point, Residents have been charged with violence, child abuse,domestic assault and shoplifting and a little highlighted indent gives the figure 425 for the “number of offences people living in hotels the Home Office use to house migrants have been charged with”.

Many of their readers, happy to have their prejudices confirmed, that “they” are a threat to “us”; and that this is a characteristic that can be freely atributed to all “migrants”, will read no further. But the tortuous use of language in the headlines, for anyone paying attention, is explained by sentences buried deep in the story, but which explode it from the inside out, again, for anyone paying attention.

First, these are figures for people charged, not people convicted. So, this will be the highest possible number.

Second, “Not every defendent who lists one of these hotels as their place of residence is necessarily an asylum seeker. It has not been possible to establish how many of the offenders identified by the Telegraph are currently applying for asylum in the UK”. So the highlighted number is bollocks. They know it. But they print it anyway.

Third, “The court records show that a significant proportion of these offences are alleged to have been perpetrated against other apparent asylum seekers”. Its notable that they don’t specify a figure, or proportion for this, though doubtless they could. Possibly because it draws the sting from the implication that “they” are a threat to “us”.

Showing the same inversion of reality that they deploy in the Big Game Hunter vs Buffalo story, they state “…police are under pressure to routinely disclose the nationality and migration status of suspects to protect community cohesion and to address a perception among some groups that asylum seekers are carrying out a disproportionate number of offences”. Note the unspecified character of “some groups”. Who might they be, I wonder?

Perish the thought that papers like the Telegraph, in its own revealing words, offering “a sense of the numbers involved”, and doing so by playing them up, could be promoting that “perception among certain groups” the better to whip them up, while retaining implausible deniability with weasel words.

On this issue, as on so many others, like so many of those arrested in the racist riots last summer, the Telegraph definitely has previous.

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Another Ukraine is impossible – without a defeat for NATO and the Oligarchy; update – Ukrainian support for war sinks even lower…

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

It is all too often a characteristic of movements without power to seek consolation in fantasies – and delusions of granduer.

The Plan for “Another Ukraine” from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, and endorsed by John McDonnell and others rests on gigantic contradictions.

Graph from Ukrainian support for war effort collapses, which continues

More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing to fight until victory has hit a new low. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Ukraine — conducted in early July — 69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.

This marks a nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022, when 73% favored Ukraine fighting until victory and 22% preferred that Ukraine seek a negotiated end as soon as possible.

  • With a majority of Ukrainians now wanting peace,
  • and recognising that reconquest of Russian speaking territory in the East and Crimea is not realistic, even if they wish it were,
  • and driving the war on and on is now dependent on increasingly aggressive and deeply unpopular press ganging,
  • as soldiers from the front desert in increasing numbers

USC nevertheless continues to play its role of covering NATO’s control of Western Ukraine with a series of progressive sounding fig leaves.

On the one hand they call for “trade unions and civil society” to bloc with the British, European “and allied” imperial states to carry on cheerleading for the war, on the other they call for outcomes which cannot possibly be achieved through working class subordination to such a bloc.

  • The chance of a Ukrainian reconstruction under the aegis of Western powers that does not leave Ukraine’s natural resources exploited “by Western corporations and oligarchs” is nil. The existing reconstruction plan, agreed by the Ukrainian government and the West in 2022 hands the job over to Blackrock. This simply cements the process of privatisation of land and assets that accelerated sharply after 2014, and is partly what Western intervention in Ukraine is FOR.
  • Likewise, what level of fantasy do you have to be capable of to imagine that any reconstruction deal in Ukraine, run by its current Oligarchy in subordination to the EU and US, would “empower Ukrainian trade unions and civil society” or “withdraw the proposed Labour Code that restricts workers’ rights and unions”? Thats the last kind of deal they’d even consider, unless they are defeated. The authors of this “plan” must be aware of that, but they put it up all the same.

To achieve either of these aims would require the defeat or overthrow of the Ukrainian oligarchy. Or sufficient pressure on it by a mobilised working class in western Ukraine, with international support in the context of a defeat, that would force it to make concessions. This is not possible if sections of the Left in Ukraine, and internationally, continue to subordinate the working class to backing the war effort in a framework of a national unity that lionises Fascists like Stepan Bandera, denies self determination to the large Russian speaking minority, and seeks to “Ukrainise” the others. When the resistence to conscription becomes a movement for peace, on this “plan”, USC will oppose it.

Trying to mobilise support for increased weapons flows, and the (unspecified but enormous) finance required, means an attack on working class living standards across Europe. Do John McDonnell, or any of the other signatories, imagine that European imperialist governments are going to put the costs of this war onto the backs of the class whose interests it serves? And, if we did have governments committed to massive wealth redistribution in the imperial heartlands, would they also not be looking for a peaceful modus vivendi with the Russians, and others?

This line of thinking becomes positively farcical when they state that we have to “Recognise Trump’s alignment with Putin”. Really? Now?

This line was a convenient one for the European ruling classes, who have used it to mobilise support for exactly what Trump wants, a doubling of European “defence” expenditure, when they already outspend the Russian by 3.5 to 1, during the period when Trump was trying to woo the Russians away from their international bloc with China – the better to pick them both off later. This has been characterised as a “reverse Nixon” or “reverse Kissinger”; which underlines one reason it hasn’t worked. The Russians have a bitter experience of how that worked out for them last time.

Commentators from Timothy Garton Ash to George Monbiot talked this up a storm while they could; and its possible they believed in it. Its a bit more difficult to sustain now that Trump is shooting his mouth off about apocalyptic sanctions on countries that continue to trade with the Russians and deploying nuclear armed submarines “close” to Russia as an explicit warning. And, after a brief revival during the Alaska talks Trump is now making statements like this.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia”.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have NEVER happened if I were President – ZERO CHANCE. Interesting times ahead!!!”

Making Trump’s “betrayal” of Ukraine, as if it was ever anything other than a poisoned pawn for US interests, a major plank in mobilising opposition to his state visit in September now looks absurd as well as self defeating. Getting angry that the core of global imperialism is not being aggressive enough in one of its proxy wars, is a self destructive emotion. What do they want him to do, send more nuclear subs?

Now he knows that his wooing attempt on the Russians has failed, Trump is trying to cut his losses. If he goes for a deal at the Alaska talks, this will be to try to freeze the conflict more or less as it is, so that the current inexorable Russian advances are stopped before the Ukrainian Armed Forces collapse like the South Vietnamese Army did in 1975 – putting the asset stripping deal he has already made with Kyiv at risk. This is not inevitable, but tipping points do get reached. Either way, even if he doesn’t, he has already outsourced the resourcing of the war to Europe. So, if the war continues, Ukrainians will fight and die, US arms firms will profit, and the European working class will pay for it.

This is not in our interests.

The last, and probably most important, point is what they mean by a “just peace”. It seems an a priori position on their part is that a “just peace” is one that does not take any Russian concerns into account; a Western imposed one.

In my last blog on this issue I asked USC supporters three questions about the initial Russian proposals to settle the conflict in Ukraine without a war in 2021. These were;

  1. No further NATO expansion
  2. No forward deployment of US forces or weapons into Eastern Europe
  3. A ban on Intermediate Range Missiles
  4. A limit on military manouvres and activities
  5. Limits on nuclear weapons
  6. A Mutual Security Pledge
  7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms
  8. An Indivisibilty of Security Principle.

These seem to me to be to be the basis of a just peace, not simply for Ukraine, but for Europe as a whole. The questions for USC supporters are

  • which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
  • Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
  • Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?

I have had no answers. The silence is deafening.

As it is impossible at this point in the war for the West to impose a peace on its terms, the USC “plan” is nothing more than the subaltern Left playing its part in NATOs current attempt to spin the war out in the hope that something will turn up, while it retools its military industrial complex enough to intervene more directly by the end of the decade.

This would, of course, be a suicidal course of action that will be averted by resistance to rearmament and a NATO defeat in Ukraine; at which point “another Ukraine” becomes impossible to avoid.

Russia’s “Maximalist demands”? Three questions for supporters of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In his February article, Ukraine’s defeat and the fall of the West, Owen Jones argued that “if we were always going to end up at a point where Russia was going to take land, and Western leaders thought that, but claimed otherwise and made promises to Ukraine to keep the war going to achieving what they believed to be unachievable – well, what that means in terms of countless wasted lives is truly hideous“; noting that this has been in pursuit of what the Washington Post described as “a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill”.

We are now getting to that point.

The way the war ends, or is spun out, is of enormous consequence to whether Europe will remain locked in an escalatory spiral towards the fever dream of a further, wider, deeper – and suicidal – pan European war that infects the minds of General Staffs and newspaper editorial boards; or whether there is an attempt to find a sustainable modus vivendi with Russia that enables de escalation, avoids mutually assured destruction and dislocates Europe from the US imperative to shore up its slipping global dominance with ever more adventurist wars.

The media here reflexively dismisses Russia’s bottom lines for ending the war as “maximalist”; by definition unreasonable, to be dismissed with no further thought or examination. This is of a piece with their usual tactic of obscuring reality with adjectival clouds of emotive association, so it is vital for even those sections of the Left that have cheered on the war, and are still doing it even as a majority of Ukrianians want peace, to get beyond the emotional red mists and look seriously at what the Russians are actually proposing.

A majority of Ukrainains want peace.

These are the key points from the published text of the draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees” that Russia presented to Biden in December 2021; and which the US/NATO dismissed out of hand and refused to discuss.

  1. No further NATO expansion
  • The US would commit to preventing further enlargement of NATO, specifically barring Ukraine and other former Soviet republics from joining the alliance.
  • This also included a ban on NATO military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

2. No Deployment of US Forces or Weapons in Certain Countries

  • The treaty would forbid the US from deploying military forces or weaponry in countries that joined NATO after May 1997 (such as Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and others).
  • NATO infrastructure would have to be rolled back to pre-1997 locations.

3 Ban on Intermediate-Range Missiles

  • Both Russia and the US would be prohibited from deploying ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in areas of their own territory where such missiles could strike the other’s territory.

4 Limit Military Maneuvers and Activities

  • Limits on heavy bombers and surface warship deployments: Both sides would restrict the operation of heavy bombers and warships in areas from which they could strike targets on the other’s territory. (Note: In September 2020, Trump’s DOD authorized a B-52 to fly along the Ukrainian coast in the Black Sea.)

5 Nuclear Weapons Restrictions

  • All nuclear weapons would be confined to each country’s own national territory. Neither side could deploy nuclear weapons outside its borders. (Note: US just sent a batch of nukes to England.)
  • Withdrawal of all US nuclear weapons from Europe and elimination of existing infrastructure for their deployment abroad.

6 Mutual Security Pledge

  • Each side would agree not to take any security measures that could undermine the core security interests of the other party.

7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms

  • Proposals included the renewal or strengthening of direct consultation mechanisms, such as the NATO–Russia Council and the establishment of a crisis hotline.

8 Indivisibility of Security Principle

  • Included a reaffirmation that the security of one state cannot come at the expense of the security of another, formalising Russia’s interpretation of the “indivisible security” concept.

The three questions that supporters of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign should ask themselves is,

  • which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
  • Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
  • Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?

Gaza – the Holocaust and the Bengal famine.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“Dead or dying children in a Calcutta Street. Photograph published by the Statesman, Calcutta, on August 22nd, 1943.”, Public Domain

Even right wing newspapers now have front pages showing Palestinian children who look just like these with headlines like “For Pity’s sake stop this” (Daily Express 23/7/25) without saying how. The limitations of the Excpress approach are well explored here.

The latest UN Report states

  • Gaza’s one million children continue to bear the brunt of continued bombardment, deprivation of access to life’s essentials, including food, water and adequate health care, and exposure to traumatic events. In a briefing to the UN Security Council on 16 July, Catherine Russell, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), stated that more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza over 21 months, which is the equivalent of a classroom of 28 children killed in Gaza on average each day. (My emphasis)

Starvation is already the common lived experience of everyone in Gaza.

Genocide by industrialised intent.

In the 1940s, the Nazi’s industrialised the mass extermination of people, mostly Jews, that they considered “untermensch”, lesser humans. Around 6 million were killed, initially by being shot by Einsatzgruppen, marching them out into the woods (see Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning) then by mass gassing, starvation and being worked to death in the extermination camps. No one kept exact records, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.

Genocide by neglect.

In the same decade, around 3 million colonial subjects of the British Raj in Bengal starved to death in the Bengal famine. Again, no one kept exact records, and estimates vary from just under a million to just under 4 million, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.

It is, however, much less well known. They died “from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies and lack of health care.” What Wikipedia describes as “poor British wartime policies” covers limiting food aid overall, on the argument that this was needed for the war effort, and manipulation of what food aid there was to communities that were considered politically loyal. This was a material factor in exacerbating communal tensions that were later to explode at partition.

This was not an aberation in British India. It took independence to end famines. See Mike Davies, Late Victorian holocausts.

Genocide by deliberate deprivation.

Without food, people can survive for just over two months before they starve to death. In 1981, the longest lasting IRA Hunger Striker, Kieren Doherty, survived for 73 days, the shortest, Martin Hurson, died after just 46. Most died after 60, 61 or 62 days. Two months. And these were fit young men who were able to drink clean water.

Without food, the entire population of Gaza is a risk of starving to death by the end of the summer. 43 have died in the last three days, and this is accelerating.

The deliberate, calculated, performative cruelty of the GHF “aid” operation will slow the pace of this a little, spin out the suffering, but also aims to destroy community. As Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation puts it, “You can’t approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience. Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of survivors than the individual biological experience. All these traumas are why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this.”

So are we. This cannot be allowed. Demonstrate on Friday. Let’s break our government’s complicity in it. The six demands of the Bogota Declaration are a good basis for getting beyond David Lammy’s stance of wringing his hands while passing the ammunition.

Local actions so far

Thursday, 24 July

Hastings: Murial Matters House, TN34 3UY, 6pm

Friday, 25 July

Abergavenny: St. John’s Square, 6pm

Birmingham: Barclays Bank, 79-84 High Street, B4 7TE, 5pm

Cambridge: Addenbrooke’s Roundabout, 6pm

Cardiff: UK Government Building, Central Square, CF10 1EP, 6pm

Coventry: Foleshill Road/Ring Road roundabout (near Eden School), CV1 4FS, 4.30pm

Exeter: Bedford Square, High Street, 6pm

Leeds: City Square, LS1 2ES, 6pm

Liverpool: Lime Street Station, 5.30pm

London – Hackney: Hackney Town Hall, 6pm

London – Ilford: Wes Streeting’s office, 12a High View Parade, Woodford Ave., IG4 5EP, 6pm

London – Newham: Stratford Station, 6pm

Milton Keynes: Milton Keynes Central Station, 302 Eldergate, MK9 1LA, 6pm

Newport: Jessica Morden’s office, Clarence House, NP19 7AA, 6.30pm

Oxford: Carfax Tower, Queen Street, OX1 1ET, 6pm

Portsmouth: Constituency Office, 72 Albert Road, Southsea, PO5 2SL, 6pm

Reading: Central Railway Station, RG1 1LZ, 6pm

Sheffield: Sheffield Train Station, Sheaf St., 5pm

Slough: Aldi, Farnham Road, SL1 4BX, 6pm

Worcester: Cathedral Square, WR1 2QE, 6pm

Saturday, 26 July

Brighton: Churchill Square, 12pm

Carlisle: Barclays, 33 English St, CA3 8JX, 1pm

Slough: Meet outside Empire Cinema, SL1 1DD, 11.30am; 12noon departure for march

Kaiser Franz solves a problem.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Emperor Franz Josef V, sighed, pulled on his weaved mutton chop whiskers – now Imperial regalia – and twisted the dial on his wireless to shift the channel from Das Lichtprogramm – playing its usual diet of whirling Waltzes by Johan Strauss the very, very, very much younger, as if to prove that music, like History, had nowhere to go but interminable circles – over to Der Heimat- Service for the latest reports from Today in Parliament.

There was something oddly comforting about these reports. Like all the Sturm and Drang of the Shipping Forecast: all those rising squalls and Force Ten Gales, that menacing low visibility in Sea areas with comfortingly obscure and poetic names – Varangian, Black, Dogged, Austrian Bight, Trieste, Italian Sea, Palermo automatic lighthouse weather station – full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, to him, more than how much more comfortable it was to be sitting by the fire with a cup of tea and a crumpet.

Reports from the Diet were always incomprehensible. All the way across the Greater Austro-Hungarian – Balkan Empire, from Bavaria in the West to the Caspian Sea in the East and Naples in the South, members of the diet were allowed to make speeches in their own languages; on the proviso that no translations were allowed. This meant that members could sound off in full fury, to be approvingly written up in the local papers at home, blaming everyone else for local problems, securing their continuous re election as local champions – safe in the knowledge that no one else in the Empire, unless they understood Slovak, or Azeri, or Sicilian dialect, would have a clue what they were saying, so everyone could remain friends. All the broadcasts were also in the original languages, so everyone could tune into their own bit and be reassured that their worries were being expressed, if not heard. Thus, peace and harmony could be assured, as a grievance carefully nurtured, with no hope of resolution, is a soothing balm for everyone who enjoys suffering from it and being able to complain about it. If these problems were to be resolved, people would be lost. They wouldn’t know who they were any more.

Kaiser Franz scratched idly at his paunch, feeling a bit sleepy, when the newsflash he had been waiting for came up right on time. A solemn burst of Bruckner – titanic, overwhelming, monumental and oddly static, like the Empire itself – was followed by an announcer sounding even more po faced than usual. The troublesome, playboy heir apparent, Archduke Ferdy, had met with an unfortunate accident while trying to act out the bow flight scene from Titanic on the 3:30 Zeppelin from Zagreb to Odesa while drunk (and drugged too, though he knew it not) to be followed by an Inquiry and four days of official mourning – because there was no point in overdoing it – announced by the Prime Minister, in his familiar flat nasal tone; the one that sounds a bit like he’s been chewing cardboard most of his life. Satisfied that Plan B, with its aerodrome arson squad and threat of high profile collateral damage (and all the awkward questions that go with it) had not been necessary, the Kaiser chuckled to himself and put Zadok the Priest on his record player.

May the King live, may the king live, may the king live FOREVER, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Alleluhia, Amen…

This England (and Wales) – Summer 2025

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In the 1960s the New Statesman used to have a short column of clips from right wing papers that illustrated the absurdity of their view of the world called “This England” (from John of Gaunt’s dying speech in Richard II; you know “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”, the sort of pompous pontification that cued his nephew the King to remark, on hearing that he was dying, “Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him: Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!”

I was reminded of that in recent weeks by several parts of articles in the Guardian that I had to read twice to make sure that the point that I was reading really did say what it did; usually dropped in and passed on without comment; as though it were perfectly sensible, nothing to be bothered about.

Housing

The extra money (for affordable housing in the Spending Review) will help housing associations to buy up thousands of new units which have already been built by private developers as part of their affordable housing commitments, but which are sitting empty because they cannot afford them. My emphasis.

Housing projects that protect natural habitats, include public transport and divert wastewater from running ino local watercourses are deemed too expensive (by the government, as Labour’s message in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is that the developer knows best and other considerations can take a back seat).

Prevent

Asked about the government’s counter extremism programme, Prevent, Cooper said she was “very concerned” by evidence of increasing extremism among young people. “We are seeing the counter terrorism caseload trebling in three years involving teenagers”, she said. She said there had also been a doubling of the numbers of young people being referred to Prevent since last summer. And yet…“I continue to be concerned about the threshold ending up being too high and not enough Islamist extremist cases being referred to Prevent and the need to make sure more of those cases were being referred…”

Trubble at pit

These are not a quotes, simply retelling of comments from Any Answers on Radio 4 on 14/6/25. Any Answers can usually be relied upon for a rich vein of emotionally charged comments, more often than not unhinged from any knowledge of the subject being discussed. Nigel Farage’s proposal to reopen coal mines in South Wales that have been long flooded, and Blast Furnaces that have cooled solid, sparked several of these. One person thought it was a good idea in principle, but because no one local would want to do it they’d “have to import immigrants” to work in them – and that would never do. Another, in response to the same problem, argued that prisoners should be sent down the mines “like they do in America”. That’d learn ’em because, as we know, the problem with prisons is that they are “too soft”. Salt mines, unfortunately, are not available.

Legally illegal

“Britain’s decision to allow the export of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, despite accepting they could be used in breach on international law in Gaza, was lawful, London’s High Court has ruled.”

Trump and NATO – Europe picks up the tab

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Trigger warning. This blog contains sycophancy in high places.

Those on the pro European Right like Timothy Garton Ash, and most other opinion columnists in the Guardian, even George Monbiot, who have argued that “Europe” should increase military spending to break with the US, and those on the Left who are arguing that there is now a fundamental rift between the US and its subordinate allies, should consider the following three quotes addressed to Donald Trump from former Dutch Prime Minsiter and NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte at the end of the NATO Summit.

“You are flying into another big success”

“Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran. That was truly extraordinary, and something no on else dared to do.”

“It was not easy, but we’ve got them all signed on to 5%! You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way , as they should, and it will be your win. Safe travels, and see you at his Majesty’s dinner.”

“Daddy sometimes has to use strong language.”

And these from Trump describing the 5% target as “something that no one thought possible. And they said ‘you did it, sir, you did it’. Well I don’t know if I did it…but I think I did“ and “a monumental win for the United States” and “a big win for Europe and for actually Western Civilisation” because Europe would be “stepping up to take more responsibility.”

So, there you have it.

Increasing military spending is giving Trump exactly what he wants.

European NATO governmnets will now seek to impoverish their populations and stunt their own development to find the resources to double militray spending.

Europe tooling up for a future continent wide confrontation with Russia gives him a free hand, with his now $1 trillion”defence” budget to prepare for military confrontation with China.

And not only does none of this undermine Trump’s push to domestic authoritarianism; it requires it at home. Proscribing Palestine Action in the UK is part of a drive to a more militarised society in which our children are dragooned into cadet corps, non violent direct action is elided with “terrorism” and Yvette Cooper’s desire to “lower the threshold” for Prevent referrals to catch more “Islamists” is aimed clearly at the mass pro Palestinian movement in an attempt to define dissent of foreign policy as “pre terrorist ideology” that can be legally harassed and crushed even more than it already is.

Nazis in everyday life

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A standard schtick of films and children’s TV dramas in the sixties was the moment that a previously anonymous villain was revealed to be a former middle ranking Nazi official, seeking to act as a seed for the regeneration of the movement; and thenceforth filmed looking Aryan while standing on yachts in front of mountains with a 1,000 Year Reich stare accompanied almost invariably by the crescendo from Wagner’s Tanhauser overture. (1)

This coincided with a lot of Nazi hunting stories sparked by the Eichmann trial in 1961, and the fact that no one had caught up with the Auschwitz “Angel of Death” Dr Josef Mengele, which gave the impression that the only surviving fragments of the old order – with the exception of Werner Von Braun, who was leading the US moon mission at the time and was therefore given a free pass – were leading lives of exiled obscurity in Argentina or Paraguay which, to be fair, some were. Mengele himself died when he drowned after suffering a stroke while swimming in Sao Paulo in 1979; having been given a passport in his own name by the West German Embassy in 1956 and actually visiting Europe using it in the late fifties.

This is a fairly extreme example of the way that former Nazis were reabsorbed into West German society in a wave of amnesia and omerta as the Cold War dug in. Von Braun, it turns out, was more the norm than Mengele or Eichemann. Though the Nuremburg Trials in 1945 -6 pronounced death sentences against 12 leading Nazis including Herman Goering and Joachim Von Ribbentrop, the number of former Nazis convicted of war crimes in the post war years up to 1958 was just 6,093. In the same period 729,176 had been amnestied. That looks like this.

Total Nazi Party membership in 1945 was 8 million, so most of them had no process at all.

Many others, not members of the Party, who committed war crimes were never held to account and simply melted back into their pre war roles. The unit of Hamburg policemen who formed an Einsatzgruppen execution squad (2) following on behind the Wehrmacht to march Jews, and sometimes Poles, out into the woods and shoot them in the back of the head, simply went back to Hamburg to direct traffic, follow up on petty crime and do all the usual things the police do. Only their commanding officer was held to account, executed after being extradited to Poland because of a massacre of Polish villagers. Their interviews in the early sixties were for historical purposes, and they were never held to account. Similarly, lower level former army, and even SS, officers provided the backbone of the Bundeswehr when it was reformed in 1955.

1 A belting piece of music which is well worth a listen if you’ve never heard it.

2 Documented in Ordinary Men. As grim a piece of reading as you’ll ever do. Its front cover illustration is of a squad of these men looking relaxed and grinning with local Jewish civilians kneeling in front of them with their hands up, was so abhorent that I couldn’t leave the book face up while I was reading it. It is chillingly echoed by some of the gloating social media posts by IDF soldiers in Gaza that show that fascism can infect anyone in the wrong circumstances.

“Defence” Review is completely insane.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

And the end of the Tale, is the widow’s veil, that she got from the Russian steppes. Bertold Brecht from What was sent to the soldier’s wife?

Speaking today, the Prime Minster stated that the UK has to get into a position to fight a war with Russia. It is a premise of the “Defence” Review that such a threat exists.

However, last week’s Observer published a graphic that shows the actual balance of forces now in Europe, between the European NATO powers and Russia. This reflects a level of spending that is three and half times the Russian level.

This is it. Have a look at this and ask yourself, who is threatening who here?

Then consider that the proposed 10 fold increase in lethality of the UK armed forces is part of a Europe wide drive to get the imbalance of spending between Euro NATO and Russia up to 10 or 11 to 1. So, this is not about “defence”. It is about being in a position to launch a war. Our current crop of lightweight leaders don’t seem to have studied much History. Invasions of Russia do not go well. As Charles XII, or Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler found out.

Given that Russia is a nuclear power with a nuclear war doctrine that would use nuclear weapons in the face of an existential threat to the country, the suicidal futlity of this drive boggles the mind. Needless to say, NONE of the interveiwers on the Radio or TV today have posed any questions of this sort. In fact, the Veterans Minister told the BBC Interviewer on PM this evening that it would be part of his job to “tell the truth”, which he interpreted as telling a story that projects “the national interest”. So, don’t ask the awkward questions. Close them down. Like we have now, but more so.

Four short points.

  1. The Review states that “you can’t defend on the goal line”. What they mean by this is that the UK armed forces would be fighting wars in other countries – as they have done regularly and consistently since WW2. Nothing new there. But there is a particular emphasis on Russia. How they envisage fighting even a conventional war with Russia without utter devastation for any country unfortunate enough to be on the front line, or within reach of even conventional missiles, isn’t elaborated on. We just get the old chestnut that to defend peace we have to be able to fight and win a war. That’s what everyone said in the run up to 1914, and look how well that turned out.
  2. The Review envisages mobilising the whole population for war readiness. That means a huge propaganda effort directed at civil society and through the school curriculum, presumably boosting cadets corps as part of the process, and weeding out dissent, either through Prevent or something more bespoke. A robust resistance to this from educators in defence of peace and sanity will be essential. As the Minister on PM said, this will be what we did “in the Cold War”. Similar conscientious objection will be needed, as it was then, to attempts to impose a stifling conformity, and any of the rituals deployed to shore that up.
  3. Complaints have been made in the press that the Armed Forces are losing people faster than they can recruit them, “even though the government has pledged to provide peacekeepers for Ukraine”. Has it not occured to them that this might be one of the reasons why more peopple are leaving than joining?
  4. The government is keen to talk about “military Keynesianism” rebuilding the economy, and some unions will go along with that on a “British Bombs for British Workers” line. This is nonsense. Military investment is, hopefully, wasted. The weaponry produced doesn’t build anything. Quite the reverse if used. This is unlike investment in, say, Health or Green transition, both of which produce much greater returns in value added and job creation. Explored in depth here. So, this is a dead end, in both respects.

The bottom line is that this is a political and military posture of choice. Impoverishing our society to ramp up arms spending, some of which will be exported to allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia to pursue genocidal attacks on Gaza or Yemen, in pursuit of a confrontation with Russia that will kill all of us if it follows its own impetus to full scale war, is not inevitable, not an imperative. Seeking a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war and an ongoing modus vivendi with Russia that cools off military confrontation across the whole of Eurasia is an alternative that the whole Left should fight for. Some of the framework for this is explored in the Alternative Defence Review produced by CND and the RMT.

Please note. My Blogs are banned of Facebook because they say they “look like spam”. This has somewhat reduced their reach. If you think the arguments are worth passing on, and want to help break the ideological blockade embodied in this sort of action, please pass it on to anyone who you think might find it interesting or useful.