Monday 28 January 2019

It Is Time To Pick A Side

And so ends the war in Afghanistan. Or will do, soon enough. It has been waged for as long as the Covington Boys have been alive. Or many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, which is how, while in many cases they have quite a lot in common with the Covington Boys, they have come to be supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.

And it is culminating, as it was always going to do, in the victory of the people who had never had anywhere else to go. After the Second World War, full denazification would have caused German society to have collapsed. Quite the reverse occurred, with West Germany, NATO and the EU all founded in no small part by former, meaning recent, Nazi officers.

Over the Wall, one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD.

In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The fairly recent obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl have been as frank as they themselves always were. And then there was Austria.

Apparently, the restored "Taliban" are going to be made to promise not to allow Afghanistan to be turned into a base for jihadis. Well, good luck with that, but it would at least be an improvement on Kosovo, Iraq or Libya following our own works of improvement there. Or on Saudi Arabia, whence came the attacks of 11th September 2001. Or on Sudan, the oil-rich country that is in the midst of a popular uprising but which is not all over the news.

In the form of Elliott Abrams, the oil-rich country that is in the midst of a popular uprising and which is all over the news is now under the benign gaze of the people who brought peace and order to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and to Libya. Oh, yes, they did. They did not in any way bring Islamist terrorism, or rampant pederasty (Afghanistan), or rampant people trafficking (Kosovo), or rampant heroin-trafficking (both Afghanistan and Kosovo), or open and public slave markets (Libya). Oh, no, they did not.

The neoconservatives are simultaneously conspiring to bring down the Trump Administration over ridiculous claims about Russia, and to direct its policy of regime change in, for the time being, Venezuela. They have effectively taken over both parties, making meaningful electoral choice an illusion, if that. As on the cause that is dearest of all to neoliberal hearts, the legalisation of drugs, so also on much of foreign policy, Bernie Sanders and Kween Alexandria are little or no better than the neocons.

Donald Trump's promise of a break with neoconservatism has itself been broken, and far from withdrawing from NATO, he is lining up with Colombia, which is a candidate for NATO membership, and with Brazil, which has also now expressed the desire to join. NATO already commits us to the defence of Turkish Islamists and of Eastern European neo-Nazis. To them, we may soon be adding Latin American caudillos. We need to get the hell out of it, before it gets us into Hell.

On the grounds of the presence of Islamist militants, there was more of a case to invade numerous European countries or at least four of the Five Eyes than there was in to invade Iraq or even Afghanistan. Likewise, there is widespread, crippling hunger both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but no one is suggesting an invasion of those countries because of the economic incompetence of their governments. Nor is anyone proposing to invade France, where dissent is currently being repressed more forcefully than in Venezuela.

Why, there are not even the sanctions that, as in Iraq, could starve even an oil-rich country into submission, because that is the point of them. Except, of course, that even sanctioned into starving Iraq did not submit, and nor will sanctioned into starving Venezuela. We all know what comes after that. We all know what comes after that, too.

Trump is not a politician. He is a patriarch and a businessman, in that order, which is the correct order. He fulfils those roles in whatever capacity he happens to find himself, and his present capacity is as the President of the United States. As that, he seeks North Korea's coal so that his dynasty might supply it to a dependent world deep into the twenty-second century, an arrangement to which the people who run North Korea seem perfectly amenable in principle.

But as that, he also seeks Venezuela's oil so that his dynasty might supply it to a dependent world deep into the twenty-second century, an arrangement with which the people who run Venezuela will have no truck. So the people who run Venezuela are just going to have to go. And in order to make them go, this businessman and patriarch now has at his disposal the full resources of the Imperial Presidency of the United States.

It is indeed time to pick a side. On one side, as ever, will be most Democrats and almost all Republicans, most Labour MPs and almost all Conservatives. They could not have shown you on a map which was Kosovo and which was Montenegro, which was Afghanistan and which was Pakistan, which was Iraq and which was Syria, which was Libya and which was Algeria, which was Syria and which was Iraq.

They could not now show you on a map which was Venezuela and which was Colombia. They pedalled, and they possibly even believed, any old rubbish about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, put about by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi. They are now pedalling, and they possibly even believe, any old rubbish about the privations in Venezuela, put about by startlingly similar characters.

On the other side, as ever, will be a handful of commentators from the Unofficial Right, together with the rather larger but still mostly ignored or derided Left, which of course has always included Jeremy Corbyn. We have been right every time in the past, and we will be right again. We already are. But we know how far that, in itself, has ever got us among either Conservative or Labour MPs.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I will stand for this seat of North West Durham, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

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