A Modern Revolutionary Interpretation?

Even if the circumstances leading up to it were questionable in the extreme, sometimes a helicopter crash in the fog is just a helicopter crash in the fog. We shall never know. But having destroyed, in Artsakh, one of the oldest Christian civilisations in the world, Azerbaijan is the main supplier of oil and gas to those who are actively trying to destroy the oldest of all, including the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, burning down churches and spitting on priests as a matter of religious obligation. In turn, Israel arms Azerbaijan to the teeth, whereas Iran's air fleet is not very advanced at all, even if neither Iran, nor Russia, nor China, quakes at the prospect of war with the country that cannot find enough planes to stage a parachute drop on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day.

Although it has made it all the way to his Wikipedia page, never before today was Ebrahim Raisi called "the Butcher of Tehran". Now, don't get me wrong. He was a very nasty man. With very nasty enemies. The 1988 executions were mostly of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq), which the Americans relocated to Albania between 2013 and 2016, not without local resistance, although it also maintains a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.

The longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim has been to install as Iran's new regime the weirdest political cult in the world, which has been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population is under 30 years of age. Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. When Raisi was slaughtering its members in Iranian prisons, then they were there for having waged a terrorist campaign in support of their country's enemy in time of war, an enemy that had invaded that country. During the Iraq War, Biden's, Bush's and Blair's Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn.

Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But now the plan is to hand over Iran to the people who really do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet who were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein. Or is it? Affections seem lately to have been transferred to the ridiculous fantasist Reza Pahlavi, who is supported by a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and by almost no one else in the world. They have been prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-ceasefire encampment at UCLA, along with the charming Narek Palyan.

Throughout this century, the Israeli flag has been prominent at Far Right events the world over, while the Iranian monarchist flag may also be seen at the small but vicious pro-Netanyahu counterdemonstrations in London, at which Palyan would be entirely at home. Those habitually assault the Police, who nevertheless have to tolerate them under political pressure to provoke a confrontation with the peaceful marchers for peace, and thus to provide a pretext for banning those events and for rounding up tens of thousands of dissidents for the Julian Assange treatment. If you rightly thought that that threat were real now, then imagine that the Prime Minister had been the Director of Public Prosecutions who had tried to send Assange to Sweden for transportation to the United States, and the Leader of the Opposition who had called for Gaza to be starved as a method of warfare.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.