Sunday 17 February 2013

Five Years On

On this fifth anniversary of its Unilateral Declaration of Independence, Kosovo remains a failed state shamefully sponsored by the United Nations, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

We ought instead to celebrate the past achievements of workers’ ownership, self-management and profit-sharing within a multinational state which pursued a strongly multilateral and pro-peace foreign policy while eschewing weapons of mass destruction and transnational military power blocs. That state included both culturally Christian and culturally Muslim places and peoples.

Our own multinational state, the United Kingdom, ought to be the new global beacon of such economic arrangements, of such constitutional order, and of such international relations. We need to make it so, both as a good in itself, and by way of reparation for the British role in their destruction by an axis of Islamists and neoconservatives who wore revived Nazi uniforms on the European Continent in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

The resources necessary to develop the United Kingdom’s new and proper role are to be found in the trade union, the co-operative and mutual, the Radical Liberal, the Tory populist, the Guild Socialist, the Christian Socialist, the Social Catholic and Distributist, and the other non-Marxist roots and fruits of the Labour Movements in these Islands and in the Commonwealth.

In the deployment of those resources are to be found the means of meeting the best aspirations of Robert Owen, Edward Bellamy, Karl Lassalle, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Viktor Chernov, Alexander Kerensky, Nikolai Bukharin, Joaquim Maurín, Marceau Pivert, Antonio Gramsci, Josep Broz Tito, Ken Coates, Tony Topham, Fred Singleton, Slavoj Žižek‏, and a host of others.

The United Kingdom, historically the home of the Independent Labour Party and of the London Bureau, is the morally, culturally and strategically appropriate world leader in that deployment.

13 comments:

  1. The break-up of Yugoslavia is all the work of the EU.

    John Pilger wrote (New Statesman; 4th August 2008)....""Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War..."This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany""

    I was delighted to see a left-wing newspaper printing an article exposing the role of the EU in destroying Yugoslavia.

    The EU seeks to abolish nation states, so strong, independent multi-ethnic nations like Yugoslavia (and the United Kingdom) are a threat to that ambition.

    Only Peter Hitchens has so far noticed the connection between this, and the move towards Scottish independence-the destruction of another multi-ethnic nation state the better for absorption of its constituent parts into the EU.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Only Peter Hitchens (and I don't wish to belittle his work on this) if you only read the right-wing papers!

    If then, in fact. I am tempted to say, "Only Peter Hitchens, if you only read Peter Hitchens." But on this as on many other things, he does reach a huge audience.

    But of course the searing critiques of the destruction of Yugoslavia appeared in the left-wing media. For the most part, where else were they going to appear? Yugoslavia, a tellingly Anglophile place, was as I describe in this post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, you don't normally see severe critiques of the EU in left-wing newspapers! Have you never read the Guardian or the Independent?

    Have you now come round to this view? You previously said it was untrue, when I argued that the EU was connected to the disintegration of Yugoslavia.Presumably you've now changed your mind.



    ReplyDelete
  4. I never said any such thing, nor would I. Moreover, the links between your own party and The Commentator, and thus the Henry Jackson Society, put you in no position to criticise the original, any more than any subsequent, neocon wars.

    I said that very few people on the Continent cared much what became of the United Kingdom, or really understood what it was, and I stand by that. The same is true of the United States, at least where this side of the Irish Sea is concerned. For people who understand, and who care either way, you need to look to Ireland and to the Commonwealth.

    The Independent now does at least have Owen among everyone else; he is to address the Durham Miners' Gala this year, and he is terribly excited about it. Last year's was addressed by an erstwhile No2EU candidate on the same bill as Ed Miliband, with Bob Crow on the platform that bore an advertisement for the Morning Star.

    But The Guardian, which advocated a vote for what is now a Coalition party and which had endorsed that party at the previous two General Elections, is only left-wing in terms of occasional contributors.

    You could say the same thing about the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail. Both of which thought that opposition to the EU was Loony Left when it was the policy of a major political party, the only time that it ever has been.

    Now, on topic, please.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Your party took part in the two ultimate "neocon wars" (Iraq and Afghanistan) and STILL doesn't repudiate them, so you are in absolutely no position to talk, sir!

    ""The Independent now does at least have Owen""

    Owen Jones wants to stay in the EU-he just thinks it should be re-modelled and made more left-wing (which is precisely the same position as Paddy Ashdown and Michael Heseltine).

    The Guardian and Independent are read by more Labour and Lib Dem voters than any other British newspaper.

    So if they are not left-wing, you need to explain that to their readership.

    If your version of "left-wing" were the mainstream one, then the Morning Star would have as many readers as the Guardian.

    It doesn't.

    ReplyDelete
  6. That was not what Owen, or anyone else, was saying in Dublin this week.

    A hugely important international event, duly blacked out by the media. They'd rather have buffoons. Farage, for example. That has been the attitude ever since Maastricht.

    I am not a member of any political party. And UKIP does pretend to have been against the war in Iraq. It should take that up with by far its most powerful faction, if a mere faction is what it is. The same goes for the destruction of Yugoslavia.

    On topic, please.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh, and while it gives em no pleasure to say it, the newspaper read by the most Labour voters is probably The Sun. Almost certainly, in fact.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Interesting that your Ukip stalker is doing his foam-flecked act off topic here and not on topic here: http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/there-never-was-social-europe.html

    What is he afraid of?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Yugoslavia was destroyed by its internal contradictions. John Pilger would be prepared to overlook that though to satisfy his fetish for bashing the West.

    Serbia is the same. Serbia should do what the Argentinians should do and accept that not everyone wants to be ruled by them. I know it's hard David but you just need to accept that like the Irish Republic, a majority of the Kosovans don't want to be ruled from Belgrade.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Indeed. After World War II, Great Britain under the Attlee Government was the model for many left-wing Christian Democrats. In Germany, for example, the British occupation was a source of support for social democrats and left-wing Christian Democrats until increased American influence sidelined those tendencies in favor of more liberal politicians.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Quite so, John.

    No, Marneus Calgar, it was not that at all.

    ReplyDelete
  12. John.

    I'm glad to hear Germany benefited from Attlee-because the Attlee Govt's foreign policy was utterly disastrous everywhere else in the world.

    From the India/Pakistan civil war, to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the disgraceful partition of Kurdistan that causes such suffering to this day and, of course, the Sunni/Shia civil war in Iraq.... all are the direct product of Attlee's hasty scuttle from Britain's imperial possessions and his ill-thought-out carving up of the territories we departed.

    Most of the problems in the Middle East today are directly attributable to the Labour Party and the anti-imperialist British Left in general.

    Ask Enoch Powell.

    ReplyDelete
  13. No one wanted rid of the Empire more than he did.

    ReplyDelete