... and on the Left generally.

... and on the Left generally.

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

Left Unity's John Tummon Supports the Islamic State (IS) & Caliphate


 



Many Leftists have gone way beyond merely defending Muslims (against what they claim to be racism, etc.) to defending and even championing Islam itself.
 
I first noted this when I was debating (if that's the correct word) with a supporter/member of the communist-run group Hope Not Hate. This Facebook activist began by saying all the usual stuff (e.g., all the critics of Islam are really “racists” and/or “fascists”in disguise). However, she soon began posting stuff about Islam itself. More correctly, she began cutting-and-pasting large chunks of material from various Islamic websites and even from the Koran. (To read an account of this, see my'Hope Not Hate Defends Shia Blood Rituals'.)
 
It's no surprise that such people have the hots for Islam as it's as collectivist and indeed totalitarian in nature as Marxism/Leftism itself is.
 
Like Marxism, Islam offers “totalist” (to use a word from post-structuralism) solutions to.... well, all problems. And Leftists, like most Muslims, like that. Many Leftists also deem Islam to be intrinsically anti-capitalist; as well as being (conveniently for them) anti-Western.
 
So it's not a surprise either that John Tummon (of Left Unity) has also gone way beyond defending Muslims to now embracing all sorts of Islamic ideas and causes; including the Caliphate, the Islamic State (IS), the Ottoman Empire, the Ummah,sharia law, Islamic legal traditions and so on. Unlike my Hope Not Hate friend, however, he stops short of actually quoting from the Koran or hadith.
 
John Tummon made his outrageous claims at a Left Unity Conference which ran between the 15thand the 16thof November (2014). More specifically, his words formed part of an 'Amendment' to a 'Session' entitled 'A socialist Response to the actions of the Islamic State'.
 
The Progressive Islamic State (IS) 
              



John Tummon is a revolutionary Marxist. Thus he sees literally all things in terms of the Manichean battle between capitalist evil andnon-capitalist good. It really is that simple to him (despite his academic jargon and regular use of the word “analytical”); as it is to all Marxists.
 
On the other hand, anything negative that's said or written not just about Muslims - but also about IS - is almost automatically deemed (by John Tummon) to be a “piece of western propaganda” (August 22, 2014).
 
John Tummon puts his most basic (Marxist) point in a brutally simple way.
 
That point is that most – or even all – Islamic terrorism and violence (including that of the Islamic State) is simply “Muslim resistance to imperialism” (August 15th).
 
Moreover, John Tummon's sees the Islamic State (IS) and everything that's currently happening in Iraq and Syria
 
"as the latest tragic chapter in the complex and divided resistance of the peoples of the Middle East against the imperialist intervention of the western capitalist powers”.
 
As for what John Tummon says about the Ottoman Caliphate, it exactly replicates the position of the Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir. And since Tummon himself mentions Hizb ut-Tahrir, one must conclude that he has read its publications. Either that or a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir has actually helped John Tummon write the Left Unity 'amendment'.
 
According to Tummon, not only do conservatives or right-wingers suffer from Eurocentrism and Western propaganda when they criticise the beheadings, sex-slavery and other oppressions carry out by IS: so too do fellow Leftists. Or as John Tummon rather patronisingly puts it (August 18th, 2014):
 
Without meaning to insult you, your criteria are extremely Eurocentric and irrelevant to the options available for the region.”
 
In other words, whereas John Tummon thinks that it's wrong to “accept [ ] western secularism’s assumptions about what is and is not progressive”; it's nonetheless right (in his eyes) to project Marxist, white and middle-class European anti-imperialism into the minds of the Sunni jihadists who are killing and beheading in Iraq and Syria.
 
All along John Tummon paints the jihadists of Islamic State (IS) as victims.
 
Quite simply, to John Tummon, “Sunni Jihad [is] against imperialism”.In other words, Sunni jihadists are just like John Tummon; though with brown skin and an a-causal (epiphenomenonal) glow of religion (i.e., Islam) around them.
 
This effectively means that Tummon himself is as “Eurocentric” (his word) and even as racist as he accuses his critics of being. That is so because he's projecting his Marxist Western values into the heads of Arab Sunni jihadists.
 
Muslims are always victims to white, Western, middle-class Leftists like John Tummon. They are victims essentially because they are deemed - by such Leftists - to be children. They have no free will or conscience. They are but cogs in Marx's capitalist/imperialist socioeconomic machine (unlike the Marxists who completely transcend it). Thus they can never be held accountable for their thoughts; let alone for their actions.
 
So Tummon thinks he's being proudly anti-Eurocentric, anti-racist and anti-imperialist when he says the “atrocities” of IS “are not on a different moral plane to other atrocities committed over recent years in the region”. In fact “they emerge out of it and the brutalised context resulting from imperialism and the struggle against it”.
 
What John Tummon is conveniently forgetting here is that many (perhaps most) IS jihadists aren't even Iraqis. Thus their violence simply couldn't have emerged “out of” the “brutalised context resulting from imperialism and the struggle against it”. In other words, many IS fighters – as everyone except Tummon knows – went to Iraq (as well as Syria) specifically for the violence (as well as the sex slavery, etc.). Their violence didn't grow out of the conflict or even out of Marx's terrible socioeconomic conditions.
 
John Tummon also argues for the “progressive potential” of IS and its Caliphate. (Clearly is pathological hatred of capitalism has turned his brain to mush.) He says:
 
"Unlike a continuation of the framework of western-imposed nation states, it therefore, theoretically, has progressive potential....”
 
John Tummon advances his progressive-IS thesis by saying that that there's more hope for“progress” with IS than with any other group. In his words:
 
My question back to you, therefore, is do you think more space for progress exists within the status quo or within a proto-Caliphate which breaks with the imperialist settlement?”
 
John Tummon even defends IS by defending Stalin (or vice versa) in this way:
 
If the Left feels there was nothing wrong with Stalin providing an overarching stability to eastern Europe in these circumstances.... why should we by shy of supporting ISIS’s attempt to provide a new, overarching settlement in the northern Middle East?” (August 13th, 2014)
 
John Tummon's Hizb ut-Tahrir Version of the Caliphate
 


Perhaps the worst part of John Tummon's screed is his defence of a Caliphate that just before it destruction (in 1918-24) had slaughtered over two millionArmenians and Chaldeans (i.e. in the Armenian Genocide) and the Assyrian Genocide) and which had sided with the Central Powers(including Germany)in World War One. (Ironically, many of the Armenians were slaughtered in Syria and 25,000 Armenians also fled to Iraq.)
 
As I said at the beginning, John Tummon's whole position on the Islamic Caliphate - and indeed on IS's attitude towards it - is straight out of Hizb ut-Tahrir's book. (Though Hizb ut-Tahrir is not entirely happy with the idea that the Islamic State has taken ownership - as it were - of the Caliphate from itself.)
 
John Tummon also reprimands us for not knowing about – or accepting –Hizb ut-Tahrir's stance on the Caliphate. He says that
 
[c]riticisms of the call for the Caliphate must be countered by knowledge and understanding. Painting it as inseparable from violence or empire building is a false association that lacks historical, political and intellectual credibility”.
 
And then Tummon tell us the truth – the Hizb ut-Tahrir truth – about the Caliphate:
 
The Caliphate represents an alternative political vision that is gathering support amongst Muslims across the Muslim world because, for its adherents, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, it stands for replacing the brutal regimes in which they live with a political system based on Islam that sets up an accountable executive, an organised judiciary, representative consultation, the rule of law and citizenship.”
 
(See the close similarity between John Tummon's vision of the Caliphate and Hizb ut-Tahrir's in this Hizb article entitled 'Muslims Will Not Compromise on the Khilafah!')
 
Conclusion
 

John Tummon is on the right.

As we have seen, some (many?) Leftists have swiftly and easily moved from defending Muslims to defending and even championing Islam itself.
 
So what could possibly happen next?
 
Yes, that's right: the obvious next step will be for some (many?) Leftists to actually become Muslims. In fact this has already happened on a fair few occasions.
 
The International Socialist “reverts” to Islam are doing exactly what many National Socialist (Nazi) war criminals did immediately after World War Two: embrace an equally-totalitarian and collectivist ideology by the name ofIslam.
 
                                                    ************************************
Note:Most of the quotes from John Tummon are from the Left Unity conference mentioned in the introduction. The other quotes (with dates) are from a Left Unity article entitled 'Arabia– the demise of the old colonial order'. John Tummon didn't actually write this piece, his words can be found in the 'Responses' section after the article.

***************************************

Notes

1)There's not much information on John Tummon. According to his own Facebook page,he was educated at Brewood Grammar School and then went on to Birkbeck, University of London. He teaches IB History at a college. (In other words, he's yet another middle-class Marxist academic.) He lives in Manchester.

2) The Left Unity 'amendment' (by John Tummon) itself is astonishing in its historical, political and theological ignorance. However, that ignorance may be willed in that this subject (like so many others) is simply a tool to advance the socialist revolution both (believe it or not) in the Middle East and here in the UK. Thus anything that advances that cause goes: including defending Islamic caliphates, IS and blaming everything (bad) that happens in the Muslim World on“Western imperialism”.

3) One point John Tummon often makes is that IS “has managed to attract substantial support from among Sunni Muslims”. Yes, that's true. And? For a Trotskyist it's strange that he places so much credence on the IS reception amongst fellow Sunnis. (The Nazis gained a lot of support in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.)

More specifically, Tummon claims that his own group, Left Unity “does not accept the claim that all or most of these people only tolerate IS rule because of extreme coercion”.

4)Since all Westerners are evil (or at least the ones attached - in any way - to “capitalist states” or capitalism generally), then it follows, according to Marxist Manicheanism, that “[h]manitarian war is imperialist war by another name”.

5) John Tummon even accuses the Church of England of indulging in a crusade against IS, despite the C of E's almost complete silence - until relatively recently - on the widespread and massive killing and oppression of Christians in the Muslim world. As Tummon puts it:

Since the Church of England made the crusading call on Friday, quite deliberately demanding that Christian victims of military attacks by ISIS should be privileged over Muslim ones & asking Christians to‘prey for the government’...” (August 17)

6) If John Tummon had read more “Western propaganda” (as he calls it) and less Marxist/Trotskyist theory, he would have known that from 2003 onwards it was outside jihadists who were doing there best to create and cause the violence in Iraq. Their violence didn't “emerge”out of anything. They required violence and chaos in order to further their jihadist dream of a Caliphate and full sharia law. It can be argued that if it weren't for outside jihadists (along with Iranian interference), things simply wouldn't have got as bad as they did in Iraq after 2003. Though since Tummon is a (positive/inverse) racist towards all Muslims and a Manichean anti-capitalist, there is no way he could recognise that. It simply must be the case (according to white, middle-class Marxist logic,) that all Muslims are always victims and the evil capitalist West is always and solely responsible for all the wrongs in Iraq (as well as everywhere else for that matter).

7) In an incredible example of Marxist psychological projection, John Tummon even believes that IS

represents an attempt to break fundamentally with the structure of religiously and ethnically divided nation states imposed on the region by Britain and France at the end of the First World War”.

The willed ignorance here is staggering.

For a start, IS has been one of the keenest supporters of religious division known in recent times. IS has slaughtered Christians, Shia Muslims, Kurds and any other group that deviates in any way from its own Salafist(Sunni) Islam. (There is the problem here in that Tummon believes all negative information about IS is a result of “Western propaganda”.)

The Caliphate IS wants to resurrect - as was the last one - will effectively be a imperialist empire much like the ones that John Tummon is arguing against. It may not be an capitalist imperialist empire; though does that really matter that much in these cases? Will somehow less people be “oppressed”, killed and subdued simply because it's an Islamicimperialist empire rather than a Western capitalistimperialist empire? Is it imperialist empires that socialists like Tummon are against or only Western capitalist imperialist empires? (Millions of communists and progressives supported the Soviet Union's imperialist empire from the early 1920s until, in many cases, after Stalin's death.)

8)John Tummon doesn't believe in what he calls the “atrocity count”approach to what IS is doing. John Tummon puts this point when he says:

...do you really think we should try to build policy on the basis of the atrocity count? That is the Amnesty International approach, which results in no attempt to analyse cause and effect!... (August 17, 2014)

In other words, it's not important how many people IS kills or subdues, what is important is why the Islamic State is doing this. And, of course, every single violent act by IS - as well as by Muslims across the word - is basically a response to “Western imperialism” or capitalism.

In any case, even the atrocities John Tummon admits to are nonetheless all the fault of Western imperialism and the break up the Caliphate. Thus Tummon fully understands the Islamic State's actions (just as his fellow Leftists justified, rationalised and were even jubilant about the 9/11 attack).

You see, mass murder and mass oppression are okay as long as they aren'tcapitalist/imperialist mass murder and imperialist/capitalistmass oppression. For dunderheads like John Tummon, it really is that simple.

Remember here that to these Manichean Leftists, capitalism/imperialism is so evil that any action whatsoever taken against it is either legitimate or at the very least understandable.

Of course John Tummon sometimes does have the decency to acknowledge the many“atrocities [IS] has carried out and its attack on the Kurds”.Nevertheless, elsewhere he more or less contradicts this statement. For example, he then talks about the “slimly-substantiated atrocity reports” (August 15th, 2014) against IS.

9) John Tummon's following words - give or take a few - could quite easily have been cut-and-pasted from Hizb ut-Tahrir's website:

Its call for a Caliphate holds out to Middle Eastern Muslims the promise of a return to something more like the Ottoman Caliphate that preceded western domination and held sway over a vast, complex and diverse empire, home to many ethnicities and faiths.”

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Tony Blair's 'Neocon' Globalism

 




Attached to much – or all - neocon foreign policy is a particular strand of globalism. Or, at the very least, that's certainly the case when it comes to Tony Blair's position on foreign policy.

Now I'm fully aware that the notion of globalismis a favourite of many people - on both the Left and Right - who are often deemed to be paranoid conspiracy-theorists. However, when you read what Tony Blair has to say on these matters, you may well come to think that they (or at least some of them) have a point. (Tony Blair is kind of British version of the United Nation's MauriceStrong.)

The problem is that anti-globalists say different things. For example, some say that's it's all a “capitalist global conspiracy”; whereas others say that it's a “communist global conspiracy”. Indeed, according to some conspiracy-theorists, many of the conspiracists who say mutually-contradictory things are actually in league with one another. (This is a variant on the unfalsifiable Protocols of the Elders of Zion meme that Jewish communists, Jewish capitalists and Jewish whatevers are all in league with one another.)

Conspiracy-theorists about globalisation also give different reasons as to why politicians and others are “globalists”.In addition, all sorts of mutually-contradictory groups and individuals are classed as globalists.

Despite saying all that, even if many claims about globalism contradict each other, that may just mean that various globalisms (as it were) are at work at the same time; though without necessarily being in league with one another. In other words, some globalists may be attempting to bring about X; whereas others may be attempting to bring about not-X.

Tony Blair's Globalism



Tony Blair often uses the word “globalisation”(if not the word “globalism”) himself.

More specifically, Blair believes that the “clash [is] not so much between civilisations”. Instead, it's a result of“the force and consequence of globalisation” (346) itself.

Blair explicitly committed himself to globalism at the Labour Party conferenceof 2001. At the time he said:






"The issue is not how to stop globalisation. The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice....







".... Because the alternative to globalisation is isolation.







"Confronted by this reality, round the world, nations are instinctively drawing together.... In Europe, the most integrated groping of all, we are now fifteen nations, with another twelve countries negotiating to join, and more beyond that...”(365/66)


In terms of Tony Blair's own strand of globalism, he realised that in order to encourage the fight for globalisation, you have to convince people that's there's a globe to fight for in the first place.

This is how Blair sees that globe:





"All around the globe, the new technology –the Internet, computers, mobile phones, mass travel and communication– was opening the world up, casting people together, mixing cultures, races, faiths in a vast melting pot of human interaction.”


What Blair says about globalisation – in the above- actually sounds like sales-speak for a global company of some kind.

For a start, take the “new technology” he speaks so glowingly of. Why does it necessarily work towards “casting people together” and the rest? Osama bin Laden, for example, used the new technology in the caves of Afghanistan to plot mayhem and destruction. The Internet generally is also a hotbed of radical and extreme Islam.
And as for “mixing cultures, races, faiths”, in the literally dozens of Muslim ghettoes in the UK, there's no evidence at all any of that. Instead there has been what has amounted to the (non-violent) ethnic cleansing of white people (or non-Muslims generally) from these areas; alongside their accompanying Islamisation.

Everyone Wants Blairite Globalism
Neocon globalists also have to convince people that every person on the planet – apart from cartoon baddies – wants freedom and democracy. Indeed if that weren't the case, then political globalisation could never be achieved (not even in theory).

And it's here that Tony Blair is at his most philosophically, historically and politically illiterate.

Basically, Blair doesn't believe that human rights, democracy and freedom are Western creations. Or, alternatively, hedoes believe that (deep down); though it doesn't matter now because everyone around today wants these things.

Or as Blair himself puts it:






"There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don't; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values...”


Now some of that is just plain false: historically false. In other words, what Blair says isn't the case, is (largely) the case.

And even if it's true that “others” do now “love freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law”, it's still categorically and historically the case that these things are “a product of our culture”. Sure, at certain times and in certain places certain non-Western societies might have had systems and cultures which approximated to ones which valued freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law... it's just that I can't really think of any.

Tony Blair then goes on to argue for globalism or universalism. He says:





"Members of Congress, ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit.”


Again, either this is historical illiteracy on Blair's part or he's simply letting sentiment, desire and rhetoric get in the way of fact, history and even in the way of human nature.

However, as I said before, we can indeed make a distinction here between the historical reality of “Western values”and the fact that today many non-Western peoples do indeed want to embrace these values.

Blair claims that





"anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police”.


Now I don't want to be too pedantic here because this was a speech given to Congress; not to a gathering of philosophers or political theorists. Nonetheless, even if all “ordinary people”do want some of these things, it doesn't follow that they want all of them.

For example, of course it's the case that most people don't like “the rule of secret police” (though even that's a generalisation). On the other hand, it may not even be the case that most people are against “dictatorship”. In fact, in many cases, they're not and that has been the case throughout the 20thcentury and indeed throughout the world.

The other problem is that many of the peoples subject to what Blair calls “tyranny” or a “dictatorship” won't see the regimes they live under as being either a tyrannies or dictatorships.

In the end, then, one gets the feeling that Tony Blair isn't actually arguing about what is the case. (He's certainly wrong about what has been the case.) He's arguing about what should be the case. To Blair, it's not really that non-Western and Muslim peoples “want to be free”: it's that theyshould want to be free.

Hence the neocon attempted “imposition of democracy and freedom” (Tony Blair's own words) on the almost hopeless case of the Muslim and Arab world...

Saturday, 15 November 2014

Prophet Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate'


 


Like most prophets, Naomi Klein's message is both messianic and Manichean:i.e., the good of progressocialism vs. the evil of capitalism. (Or in her own words: “capitalism vs. the climate”.)




Naomi Klein was born to be a prophet: as all prophets are.
 
Her paternal grandparents were communists, her grandfather was a “social activist” and her parents were war-resisters as well as “rights activists”.
 
So now try to imagine the amount of Leftist ideological “brainwashing” Naomi Kleine would have experienced in the first two decades of her life (as did Noam Chomsky). I'd reckon that would be about the same amount that she and her fellow Leftists (such as her husband Avi Lewis) would accuse the children of “Christian evangelicals” (Avi Lewis’s term) or “conservatives” of having undergone.
 
(I may as well add here that Naomi Klein's just-mentioned husband has hosted shows for Al Jazeera, sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali's support of American democracy and thinks that the criticism of Islam is racist. Clearly Naomi Klein doesn't like to stray too far from her Leftist “herd of independent minds”.)
 
And along with Naomi Klein's prophethood comes the inevitable talk of end times(as with the Prophet Karl Marx). Or as Kline herself puts it:
 
"Climate change is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It's about changing the world - before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe.”

All that reminds me of what the writer Christopher Booker had to say in his magnificent The Real Global Warming Disaster.He writes:


"... [warmist language] had much in common with ancient myths and Biblical tales of the world being visited with 'extreme weather events', plagues, fires, mighty winds and above all floods so immense that whole cities would vanish below their waves.”(340)


So what does Christopher Booker think about warmists themselves? This:


"The true believers in global warming similarly exhibited a moralistic fanaticism, justified by the transcendent importance of their cause. The basic narrative by which they live was one familiar from the history of religious sects down the ages, the conviction that the end of the world was nigh, thanks to the wickedness of mankind, and could only by saved if humanity acknowledge its sins and went through a profound change of behaviour....”



And since Naomi Klein fuses warmism with Marxism, I'll also quote Booker on Marxism when he writes:
 
 
".... [Marxism's] dogmatic explanations for everything; it's incredibly moralistic view of the world; and above all its capacity to inspire its followers to a kind of righteous fanaticism, convinced that it was their destiny to save mankind from those 'heretics' and 'unbelievers' who did not share their world-saving creed.”

Reviews
 
Let me give you a taste of some of the rather sycophantic reviews of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything:Capitalism vs. the Climate.
 
One blurb says it's “her most provocative book yet”. The strange thing is that other blurbers also said that The Shock Doctrine was “her most provocative book yet”. (The same was true of No Logo.) In other words, it must be important to Naomi Kline and her fans that her latest book is her most provocative book yet.
 
There's also a review by Owen Jones (Son Of Dave Spart) which tells us that This Changes Everything “[w]ill be one of the most influential books of our time”. As forThe New York Times, it says that Naomi Klein's book is the “most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring”.
 
Don't you just love it when book reviewers wax lyrically about books which simply restate exactly what it is they already believe (give or take some minor details)? It's a kind of political narcissism.
 
The Independent, on the other hand, is slightly more level-headed when it says that the “proposition that the world's political and economic institutions are preventing us from meeting the lethal challenge of global warming is hardly novel”.
 
Global Warming is Capitalism
 


When I accuse anti-global-warming activists of really being against capitalism, they usually deny it. They say it's not about wanting to destroy capitalism: “it's all about the science”,or “saving the planet”, etc. In fact warmists often return the criticism and say that it's us sceptics (about anthropogenic global warming) who are really just “immoral supporters of capitalism”.It's people like me who aren't concerned “with the science”, or the planet, or mankind.
 
Yet one of the most important (certainly the most popular) “progressive” writers around today - Naomi Klein - explicitly agrees with us global-warming sceptics. She now says (well, in a sense she always did) that it is indeed all about capitalism. Or, more correctly, it's all about being against capitalism.
 
Just as Marxists/Leftists think that capitalism has sole responsibility for – believe it or not – racism, sexism, poverty, inequality, war and (according to Marx) prostitution; so Naomi Klein and nearly all her fellow Leftists believe that capitalism has sole responsibility for global warming.
 
This could lead people to the perfectly acceptable and justifiable conclusion that - all along - most of the Leftists who've spoken out against global warming were really speaking out against capitalism. It may well follow from that many of these virulent anti-capitalists might therefore have simply manufactured (or at least endorsed) the global-warming theory (or at least parts thereof) in order to attack capitalism. After all, anti-capitalists (or socialists) did exactly the same thing with the global-cooling scare of the 1970s.
 
Not only that: all sorts of other causes, theories and movements have been used as a means to bring about the death of capitalism: anti-racism, “black rights”, “gay liberation”,the adoption of environmentalist positions, anti-globalism (another idée fixe of Naomi Klein's), mass immigration and, more recently, the defence of Islam and Muslims. (The furtherLeft you go, the truer this becomes.)
 
Don't take my word for all this, listen to Naomi Klein's own words in her new book:


"Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.”


Commentators have said that Klein only “turned to environmentalism” in 2009. What took her so long? Were there other weapons in her anti-capitalist arsenal before 2009 and have they now become a little blunt?
 
Neoliberalism or Capitalism?
 
Naomi Klein has done more than almost anyone else to popularise the word “neoliberalism”.
 
Even though there may well be semantic differences between the words “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”, it's clear that this doesn't really matter in the end. It's often a difference that doesn't really make a difference.
 
For example, what would change if you substituted the word “neoliberalism” with “capitalism” in Klein's following words from This Changes Everything? -



"This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism’s [capitalism's] single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.”


The average Leftist zombie, of course, wouldn’t be able to distinguish capitalism from neoliberalism (unless he had a handy book by Chomsky or Naomi Klein in his backpack). That's not to say that some Leftists wouldn't be able to do so. And it's not to say that there are no differences.
 
Leftists often seem to hint – rather than state – at the fact that neoliberalism is capitalism gone bad/extreme. (Or, as Noam Chomsky put it, neoliberalism is “capitalism with gloves off”.) But, when you think about it, they shouldn’t believe this because that would imply that they also believe that once-upon-a-time capitalism – i.e., before contemporary neoliberalism - wasn't (that) extreme/bad. Yet they can't possibly believe that. Leftists have always believed that capitalism is bad/extreme.
 
So what's all this guff about “neoliberalism”? Is it just a gimmicky “sign-substitution” (to use Jacques Derrida's word) used to disguise the fact that people either got bored with - or embarrassed by - the use of the word “capitalism”? Either that, or communists/socialists/progressives wanted to pretend they were talking about something entirely new when they dropped the word “neoliberalism” into every conversation.
 
The best was to put all this is that way Doreen Massey put it in 2013 in an article for The Guardian:'Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary'. Except, of course, I would put it this way: The word 'neoliberalism' has hijacked our vocabulary.

Friday, 31 October 2014

Ann Coffey’s “child exploitation” report only uses the word ‘Muslim’ once

 


C_71_article_1492329_image_list_image_list_item_0_image
Ann Coffey, Labour MP and (ex)social worker. Coffey looks the part: Leftist fashion-consciousness and conformity at its best.

This BBC News piece – ‘Child sex exploitation “social norm” in Greater Manchester’ – mentions just about everything else but the Islamic and Pakistani nature of what has happened with the sex-grooming gangs all over the UK.

This article is basically a response to the now well-publicised Muslim sexual-grooming gangs in the north of England and elsewhere.

And let’s not forget that – as the title states – this article is specifically about the problems in the Greater Manchester area. Need I say more?

BBCreportbanner

The BBC also uses the near-euphemism “some areas of Greater Manchester”. Even a moron could work out that “some areas of Greater Manchester” is another way of saying those towns and areas which have large Muslim ghettos: Rochdale, Oldham, Bury, Bolton, etc.

What we have here is the same old BBC deceit and obfuscation about these issues.

It must have taken some considerable editorial skill for the writer of this piece (who is, surprisingly, unnamed) not to mention Muslim or Pakistani grooming-gangs a single time. Indeed it must have taken a very high level of ideological bias not to do so.

In other words, the BBC has learned precisely nothing in the last few months.

That’s because the BBC can’t learn anything on this matter because the very mention of the ethnic and/or religious nature of the criminals concerned will necessarily and automatically lead – so Leftist theory has it – to racism and even fascism. And as we learned in Rotherham, the fight against racism is far more important than the lives of young girls.

This pious, zealous and eternal fight against largely fictitious racism has so far meant that:

*) The National Union of Students (NUS) won’t condemn the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria.
*) Parents who are also members of Ukip can’t adopt children.
*) When people express a problem with mass immigration that they are automatically castigated.
*) People are sacked for harmless jokes and membership of political parties.
*) People can’t speak in public (universities, public meetings, on the BBC, etc.).
*) People’s Facebook accounts are closed down.
*) People a thrown into prison for what they think; not what they do.
*) Demonstrations are banned.
*) Academics and politicians are stopped from entering the UK.

Ann Coffey’s Report


Not only does the Labour Party’s Ann Coffey fail to mention the Muslim/Islamic nature of the sexual-grooming gangs, she systematically attempts to place the entire blame elsewhere: whether that be “music videos” or the lack of “training”. (The SWP similarly blamed it all on “cops and cuts”.)

10502520_10204427550956193_4681279028998586991_n-375x459

The previous academic report on the Rotherham case, for example, didn’t mention “music videos, sexting and selfies” (even if they are indeed “fuelling the increased sexualisation of children”). Yet these things seem to the basis of Ms Coffey’s own report: ‘Real Voices’.

These are separate issues.

If it were all about videos, sexting or a lack of training, why have these problems been worse in places like Greater Manchester – places with large Muslim populations – than anywhere else?
Muslim grooming-gangs have existed since the mid-1990s and possibly earlier. So Ann Coffey seems to be deliberately trying to fudge the issue here.

That’s not a surprise. Coffey’s own Labour Party is largely responsible for the issue in Rotherham, Greater Manchester and elsewhere. It was Labour Party councillors who believed that racism was the ultimate sin and that anyone and anything could be sacrificed in the fight against it.

Ann Coffey is also quoted as saying that the “prevailing public attitude” blamed children for what happened in Greater Manchester and elsewhere.

No it wasn’t the “prevailing public attitude” at all, Ms Coffey.

It was the “attitude” of people who belong to your party; as in the Rotherham case. It was also the attitude and ideological views of Leftist social workers, Labour councillors and those police chiefs who’ve been hoodwinked by Marxist theology (i.e., theory).

These cases were most certainly not the fault of the “public”.

Indeed various members of the public in Rotherham and elsewhere attempted to do something about Muslim sexual-groomers. And guess what: Labour councillors, Leftist social workers and the police didn’t allow them to do so.

Ms Coffey shouldn’t blame the public at large for the Leftist hegemony we now have in Greater Manchester and elsewhere in the UK.

In fact this BBC piece itself includes a quote from Tony Lloyd (the Greater Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner) which states that it wasn’t the public which was at fault at all: it was the “system”. Tony Lloyd says:
For too long their voices were ignored or, worse, dismissed by the system.
Again, Ms Coffey herself implicitly states in her report – despite what she said earlier – that it wasn’t really the fault of the public (or “sexualised videos”, lack of “training”, etc.) at all: it was the fault of “social workers, prosecutors and juries” all of whom “carry [anti-racist or Leftist] attitudes around with them”.

rotherham-gordon-jelley

So let’s face facts: Ann Coffey MP has the perfect credentials to be part of the problem: not part of the solution. She’s not that much unlike the SWP social worker Gordon Jelly – formerly an employee of Rotherham Council – who blamed Muslim sex-grooming on “cops and cuts”.

Coffey was also was trained in sociology at the Polytechnic of South Bank, at which she was vice president of the students’ union. She began work as a social worker – like Gordon Jelley – in Birmingham, then Wolverhampton and, finally, in Stockport. She was also Tony Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. (Coffey is now married to the vice-chair of the University of Sussex’s University Council, Peter Saraga.)

The BBC


As for this BBC News article (rather than the views of Ann Coffey MP), it says, for example, that “girls in uniform were regularly stopped by men outside schools”.

Now I’m willing to accept that on a few occasions non-Muslims have done this. However, in the vast amount of these cases this is being done by Muslim gangs and by Muslim individuals. (I have personal experiences of this happening many times in Bradford.)

And even when the BBC gets more specific, it still doesn’t mention Muslim or Pakistani grooming-gangs. For example, it states the following:

[The report] was commissioned by Greater Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Tony Lloyd to assess the improvements in protecting youngsters after nine men were jailed in 2012 for running a child sex ring in Heywood and Rochdale.
Now it just so happens that the nine men who were jailed for running this “child sex ring” in Heywood and Rochdale were all Muslims. But that’s not a surprise because all the other sexual-grooming gangs – from Rochdale to Oxford to Oslo – have been overwhelmingly made up of Muslim men as well.

Conclusion


After reading this BBC News piece, you may have the feeling that nothing much is going to change when it comes to tackling the nationwide and widespread problem of Muslim grooming-gangs. To the BBC, the fight against racism is the ultimate fight. So much so that the ideology of anti-racism demands that that the writer of this piece never once mentions the word “Muslim”; never mind the word “Pakistani” or even “Asian”.

And if racism is still regarded as the ultimate sin of the early 21st century, then it’s a good bet that many Muslim grooming-gangs are going to carry on doing what they’ve been doing for up to twenty years.

Finally, the only mention I could find of Muslims in Ann Coffey’s report is this:

I visited the Council of Mosques in Rochdale in March 2014. They are concerned that, as a consequence of the media coverage, they are seen as part of the problem and not part of the solution. They are emphatic that the behaviour of the offenders was criminal not Asian, and are concerned that this distinction is not being made by the wider public.

The BBC and Ann Coffey MP are part of the problem.

************************************************

The Report's References to “Pakistanis” and “Asian”

There are four usages of the words “Pakistani” and five of “Asian”in Ann Coffey's 75-page report; though everyone one of them tells us that it is problematic or simply wrong to think in these terms.

Put simply, Ann Coffey is continuing to make the political and ideological mistakes which were highlighted in the previous report on Rotherham.

These are the references:

1)A small minority of British Pakistani men are criminal sex offenders as in other communities. So it is important to understand why those particular men became criminal sex offenders. The assertion that it was a racial crime in that the girls were targeted because they were white is undermined by the fact that one of the men in the Rochdale case was also convicted of a serious sexual offence on a British/Pakistani girl. We do not know whether these men also abused other British/Pakistani girls.”

The reasoning above is intentionally grotesque. One Muslim (out of well over a hundred who've been convicted), in one gang (of dozens or more) abuses a single“British/Pakistani girl” and Ann Coffey automatically assumes that this can't be a Muslim/Pakistani and an anti-white problem?

2)One British/Pakistani woman who I talked to was concerned about an underreporting of sexual assaults in the community because of the shame it is felt to bring on the victim and the victim’s family.”

3)Part of the problem is that people think of CSE as the Rochdale model of predominately Asian men sexually exploiting white girls so there is a poor understanding of the broader picture.”

4)Sunrise CSE Team in Rochdale..... Rochdale is characterized as being identified with the particular form of child exploitation of groups of predominantly Asian men abusing white girls as a result of widespread media coverage of recent trials. However they report that 85 per cent of the cases they manage are single offenders, many peer on peer.”

Exactly, “85 per cent of the cases they manage” would have been “single offenders”because, as everyone now knows, the Muslims in the grooming-gangs weren't being “managed”: they were being ignored or even enabled to do what they were doing.

5)High-profile court cases, such as Rochdale, have elevated CSE into the public consciousness, but at the same time have left the impression that CSE is only about vulnerable white girls being exploited by groups of Asian men.

"If offenders are always portrayed in a particular way, e.g. Asian males, then the signs in people who don’t look like offenders will be missed and with them opportunities to protect children.”

6)Sian Griffiths... said: 'Being Asian is not an explanation of the motivation for the offending behaviour. There needs to be an understanding of the combination of personal, cultural and opportunistic factors that created the conditions for sex offending.'....”

7)In Rochdale, the nine men convicted of grooming girls with alcohol, drugs and gifts and then passing them round multiple men for sex were predominantly British/Pakistani.”


Tuesday, 28 October 2014

Gramsci's Dream Came True: We Have a Leftist Ruling Class


 

I chose James Joll's book's book not only because he has written about Antonio Gramsci, but also because - after having read it - it became clear that he was a fan of the Italian Marxist. Thus it can be said that the text is a fair account of Gramsci's ideas. And if there is any bias in the texts I've chosen, it's bias in favour – rather than against – Gramsci.
 
It can also be said that James Joll was himself a perfect example of the Gramscian elite. For a start, as Gramsci urged, Joll “took over” parts of at least four “institutions”:Oxford University, the London School of Economics (along with numerous other Marxists), the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and the British Academy.
 

James Joll was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford University. He was then elected Fellow of New College, Oxford. He also held the Stevenson Chair of International History at the University of London.
 
Joll also wrote The Second International 1889-1914 and, appropriately enough, Intellectuals in Politics.
 
What I've done in the following is partly quote - in full - various passages from James Joll's book, Gramsci. However, I've also included various short square-bracketed additions within the text to update and clarify the content; as well as three short introductions to Joll's quotations.
 
(Saul Alinsky is a later American version – at least in some important respects - of Antonio Gramsci. See 'What Did Gramsci Teach Saul Alinsky?' at Tavern Keepers.)
 

Hegemony

 


“The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.” - James Joll

Because Marxists or revolutionary socialists see everything in terms of “class conflict”, they also see everything in terms of “class power”. For old-style revolutionary Marxists, the natural response to this “material reality” was a violent revolution in which the working class – led, of course, by an elite of middle- and upper-middle-class Marxists (the “vanguard”) - seized power from the “capitalist ruling class”.

However, by the time that Antonio Gramsci began writing (in the 1920s and early 1930s), successful revolutions in Europe and America hadn't been forthcoming. Thus another strategy was called for.

Gramsci effectively gave up on the old Marxist theology (or theory) that “material conditions” (the “modes of production and exchange”) determined what Marxists call “consciousness” (or what most others call mind) and came to acknowledge what everyone else had already acknowledged: that mind – or “consciousness” – has at least some independence for its material environment.

Thus, instead of a violent revolution in which young– and old – revolutionaries could indulge in their violent fantasises of killing “capitalists” and all sorts of other people, Gramsci realised that a revolution could be carried out without violence and storming the barricades. Because mind is indeed free of its material environment, what Marxists now needed to do was to “take over the institutions” and thus create an “hegemony” of revolutionary ideas, theories and values.
 
Quotes From James Joll

Abu Qatada & Gareth Peirce, private-school girl & Trotskyist "super-lawyer" (ex-SWP, Socialist Action, etc.) who freed Qatada.










“.... Gramsci saw, in a way that few other Marxists have done, that the rule of one class over another does not depend on economic or physical power alone but rather on persuading the ruled to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling class and to share their social, cultural and moral values.” (8)





“The hegemony of [the Leftist and left-liberal] political class meant for Gramsci that that class had succeeded in persuading the other classes of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values. If the [Leftist and left-liberal] ruling class is successful, then this will involve the minimum use of force, as was the case with the successful liberal regimes of the nineteenth century.” (99)

 


“... 'hegemony' which explains how a [Leftist and left-liberal] class can establish its cultural and moral superiority independently of its direct political power.... to suggest ways in which a Communist party [or Leftist individuals and groups] might... expand its influence and increase its support even without actual control of the government.” (11)




“'The realisation of an apparatus of [Leftist and left-liberal] hegemony, in so far as it creates a new ideological soil and determines a reform of consciousness and the methods of knowledge... when we [Leftists] succeed in intruding a new morality in conformity with a new conception of the world...” (99)

 


“... the achievement and maintenance of [a Leftist] hegemony is largely a matter of education: [To use Gramsci's words] 'Every relationship of [Leftist] hegemony is necessarily a pedagogic relationship.' The degree of success of such an [Leftist] educational process will be shown by the extent to which a new [left-wing] consensus or, to use Gramsci's phrase, a 'collective national will' is formed.” (101)

The Leftist Elite & Revolutionary Parties
 
Seumas Milne, public-school boy, Stalinist, Assistant Editor of The Guardian.

Leftist “intellectuals” and Marxist revolutionaries were – and still are - the people to bring about Gramsci's “hegemony”. As I said, they are to do that by taking over the institutions: primarily the education system; though also the law, regional and national newspapers, rights and race groups, the charities and even churches.
 
Quotes From James Joll

 


“... [Gramsci] writes of [Leftist] intellectuals in the usual sense as the intelligentsia who provide philosophy and ideology for the [working class and others] and who enable the [Leftist and left-liberal] ruling class to exercise their hegemony by supplying the system of belief accepted by ordinary people so that they do not question the actions of the [Leftist and left-liberal] rulers.” (90)





“The role of the revolutionary party [the SWP, socialist parties, the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Democrats, etc.] and the [Leftist] intellectuals who are its leaders was, in fact, to be much the same as that of the priesthood in the Catholic Church in its prime, when they were able to preserve [in Gramsci's words] 'the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and to unify'.” (94)





“.... in Gramsci's political thinking, and the task of a revolutionary party [the SWP, parts of the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, the Democrats, etc., as well as revolutionary/radical individuals].... is to establish such hegemony, if necessary by a slow modification of people's consciousness during a period of 'passive revolution' or a 'war of position'.” (98)



The Radical Left Rules, OK?

 


 
Alex Callincos: Kings College professor, SWP leader, public-school boy & descendent of a lord..









Quote From James Joll







“.... Communists can perhaps claim that they are well on the way to establishing their hegemony with the collapse of the old hegemonic system. They have achieved a dominant position in local government in many areas and in so far as they attract support not only from organised labour but also from very many intellectuals and professional people, they seem to be establishing their hegemony very much along the lines which Gramsci had suggested.” (110)




Even when Antonio Gramsci was writing (in the 1920s and 1930s), and certainly when James Joll was writing (up to the late 1970s), it was clear that Marxists had already been successful – at least to some extent – when it came to installing their own“hegemony” within Western society. In fact according to Joll, even Gramsci realised that “Marxism was beginning to exercise its own hegemony within the system of traditional culture” (111). That was around 90 years ago. And since the 1960s (some 50 years ago), the march of Leftism has been relentless.
 

The revolution, it seems, is permanent.