If in doubt, bomb something? Or, What A Difference A Year Makes…

Way back in February 2011, Vogue ran a grovelling interview and photoshoot of Asma Al-Assad entitled A Rose in the Desert, which went out of its way to praise her 'wildly democratic' family and enlightened views (as well as her exquisite taste in designer clothes), pausing only to gently chide her country for not being as secular as Vogue might like (Vogue has a theological position: who knew?) while describing the murderous regime's state as 'the safest in the middle east'.

The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”

The article has – amazingly – vanished without trace from that magazine's history (insert gag about make-up remover), but you can read a summary here and the whole thing here. Astonishingly, it turns out that a PR agency was paid lots of money to arrange the Vogue article. And there was me thinking that we could at least rely on the fashion press to uphold basic journalistic standards of integrity and incorruptibility…I'm not sure I can take many more of these disappointments.

The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”

Well, I guess you could say that she achieved her goal: one way or another, millions of young compatriots are very actively engaged, often at the point of a gun. Things didn't work out quite so well for Asma and her husband Bashar. As well as being the other half of a seriously well-dressed woman, he was hereditary President of Syria, and for various complicated reasons connected with trying to look vaguely in favour of the Arab Spring at least when it turned on our enemies, the West decided to support the various rebel groups calling for (it appeared) freedom and democracy. Supporters of the aforesaid fighters for freedom and democracy included utopian, freedom-loving countries such as Saudi Arabia, so there was no doubt at all that this was a principled war of liberation. Anyway, it was about time for another little war in the area. Those countries have had it too easy for too long and besides, the West has spent a lot of money on desert camouflage in recent decades and we need to get full use out of it. Alright, some of those bearded Johnnies in the queue for guns and cash sounded a bit earnest about the old prayers-and-beheadings, but it was nothing that couldn't be sorted out by placating them with planeloads of hard currency and heavy weaponry. And in any case, we'd lined up Turkey and those lovely Kurds to help out. We know they've had their differences now and then but that nice Mr Erdogan could be relied on to do the decent thing in a tight spot, rather than take the chance to fix an election, murder his own Kurds and bomb the blazes out of our Syrian Kurdish pals. Couldn't he?

So there we were in August 2013, all set for another spot of dictator-biffing, having triumphantly brought about a soporific peace from Afghanistan to Iraq, when those damned conchie traitors in the Labour Party and their allies in the Conservatives conspired to vote against the government's plan to bomb Syria. Hard words were bandied around about Mr Miliband. 'Playing politics'. 'Giving succour' to a brutal dictator. Paddy Ashdown said he was 'sad' and 'a little ashamed' by Parliament's decision not to bomb Assad's forces.

And yet today, we have another chance. Parliament is voting today whether or not to bomb Syria. Hard words are once more being applied to the leader of the Labour Party. For opposing the bombing, Mr Cameron described Jeremy Corbyn (and any doubtful Conservatives by implication) as 'terrorist-sympathising'. That's right: bombing Assad's enemies now isn't giving succour to a dictator, while opposing Assad is 'terrorist sympathising'. What a difference a year or two makes…

There's one crucial difference: this time we're going to be bombing the rebels in support of Bashar Al-Assad's regime. That's right, the brutal one that uses chemical weapons, barrel bombs and torture on its freedom-loving people. Mr Cameron and his friends have suddenly discovered – only a few decades late – that not all the enemies of Western-backed dictatorships are members of the WI or the Liberal Democrats. Coming around very late to the policies of vultures like Henry Kissinger and Henry Jackson, he's decided that we're actually in favour of brutally repressive dictatorships because they keep the lid on millenarian fundamentalists who take the weapons we give them and use them on the streets of our capitals.

It's all rather Orwellian. In the space of two years the same Prime Minister has gone from wanting to bomb Assad to support the rebels, to wanting to bomb the rebels in support of Assad. The Russian role has moved from being reckless interventionism to principled foresight, and the Turks' genocidal treatment of the Kurds has quietly been forgotten about (this, at least, is continuity cynicism). In 1984, George Orwell wrote of the condition of unending war conducted between the great power blocs. I don't think he meant it literally, but history has a funny sense of humour and 'we have always been at war with Eastasia' has come true. In the novel, enemies become allies and allies become enemies over the course of Hate Week: the two years its taken to turn Assad from enemy to friend and Isis and co from friend to enemy isn't much less shocking. While we're at it, here's another ironic snipped from 1984 which you may find thought-provoking.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.

 So here we are. Multiple murders in Belgium, Paris and less recently the UK have contributed to the feeling that we must Do Something. Or as Steve Bell put it:

Obviously I have it easy: I'm not my MP, wondering how to vote this time, nor a minister or security official. It's tempting, surveying recent history, to put my head in my hands and reply to 'what would you do?' with 'I wouldn't start from here'. It's the telescoped nature of this volte-face that really gets to me: two years from 'brutal dictator who must go' to 'essential bulwark against terrorism'. 

However, that's a more philosophical perspective. What about the 'something must be done' argument? Those in favour of bombing say that attacking ISIS isn't like the meaningless 'war on terror' because ISIS is effectively a state: it has territory, supply lines, administrators, an economy and so on.  I don't really buy it. For starters, Afghanistan is a country of sorts, and allied pacification seemed to involve an awful lot of bombing wedding parties, cattle-herders and other 'collateral damage' alongside driving out the Taliban. ISIS territory is packed with captive populations who didn't meet the requirements for genocide (i.e. being in a different ethnic and sectarian category to ISIS) but who aren't supporters. I saw the British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon explaining that British weapons can actually distinguish between terrrorists and innocent people and RAF bombing hasn't killed a single Iraqi civilian over the past years campaign and just wanted to weep at the cynicism fuelling that kind of blatant untruth. Let's not forget that the British police couldn't distinguish from a Brazilian man who was late for work and an Islamic terrorist with a bomb from a couple of yards away, let alone from 35000 feet or 3000 miles away.

I think the argument that bombing ISIS is a good plan fails for the obvious reason demonstrated by Iraq and Afghanistan – that repressing enemies requires long-term occupation alongside nation-building of a kind that we certainly haven't mastered – but also because the Brussels bombings can't be stopped by crushing head office. While ISIS has an administration in Raqqa and no doubt helps operatives commit crimes across the globe, defeating it in Syria/Iraq doesn't defeat the ideas and techniques which lead to bombings on the street. I tend to agree with the argument that ISIS is eagerly awaiting the drones and bombers. It will confirm to its supporters everywhere that they're fighting the war they want to fight: one to the death between its own religious purists and the West/Christians/enemies of its version of Islam. Bombing ISIS will simply encourage more disaffected people in the miserable slums to which they've been confined that an existential and theological confrontation is to be welcomed, and the result will be more, not fewer, atrocities. While not every bomber will be familiar with the very specific doctrines ISIS espouse, they will concur with the argument that the answer applied by the West to every outrage is to bomb brown people. 

I would take a different, perhaps harder tack. I would separate dealing with violence at home from global politics. Rather than bombing Syrians for the crimes of Belgians, French and British people, and tacitly elevating the perpetrators to the status of combatants, I would relentlessly pursue them through the criminal law. Very very sadly (I'm not sure yet) I'd be tempted to do nothing about ISIS where it is. We've tried bombing people into peace, freedom and democracy, and it hasn't worked. We've a long and shameful history of supporting brutal torture states: Israel and Egypt are only the most recent examples of the West deciding that stability is more important than human rights, so perhaps ISIS should be the next beneficiary of this familiar rejection of universal values. The problem here, though, is that al-Sisi wants to be left alone to murder his opponents while Netanyahu will be satisfied with crushing the Palestinians and taking their lands: they have specific, limited aims, whereas ISIS is expansionist, fuelled by the theological drive to impose their version of religion on everyone. Much like capitalism, actually. 

So in the end, I don't have an answer and don't know what to do. But I do know that bombing for the sake of it is no answer either. 

We get Mail

Well after yesterday's relaxing and non-political blog-post, I'm sorry to say that we have to return to bitter and impotent ranting, because everything's gone wrong.

Firstly over the pond our American cousins – or the Republican half – have decided that they don't need democracy any more. Instead they've shut down the government (except for the NSA spying, the drone strikes and Guantanamo: just the good bits like paying employees and opening the Statue of Liberty).

Why? Because the Republicans won't pass a budget unless Obama suspends his health insurance laws. You know, the laws that were passed four years ago by a democratically elected government, then upheld by the Supreme Court, then endorsed by the electorate when Obama was re-elected. That looks like the will of the people to me, but the Republican Party has decided that it would rather suspend an entire country's normal operations than allow people to have a weak and (from our perspective) rather poor mode of health provision. It's a matter of principle, that principle being your right as an American to sicken and die on the street without Big Guvmint interfering with their communist dialysis machines and defibrillators.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has finally gone off the deep end. It's always been evil, but now it's added wild and vicious idiocy to the mix. On Sunday, it published an article (The Man Who Hated Britain) about Ed Miliband's father, who died in 1994. Ralph Miliband was a Belgian who in 1940 at the age of 16 fled the Nazi invasion by the skin of his teeth, thus avoiding the fate of many of his Jewish family, murdered in the concentration camps. He ended up in London, working hard, pursuing an education and trying to come to terms with a world war and personal tragedy. The Mail has a single diary entry, four lines long, from when he was 17, in which he records a few caustic thoughts about British isolationism and imperialism.

'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

I don't know about you, but I go red and wish the ground would swallow me up whenever I think about anything I said or did at that age. And I don't have a body of beautifully-argued political science to form my adult oeuvre, as Ralph did.

What happened to Ralph Miliband? By the time he was 20, he'd decided that whatever Britain's faults were, it represented Europe's best hope for freedom and he joined the Royal Navy, serving with distinction. Afterwards, he became a leading socialist thinker (I strongly recommend his Parliamentary Socialism). Despite the Mail's best efforts to claim, Ralph utterly failed to convince his sons that the Labour Party was no longer a useful tool in the struggle for socialism. Ralph wasn't a communist, let alone the Stalinist monster the Mail claims: but he was a proper socialist, unlike David and Ed.

What was the Mail doing around the time Ralph Miliband arrived on these shores as one of the millions suffering at the hands of one of the world's most evil regimes?

Er… supporting the Nazis, both German and British. Here's it's owner proclaiming his support for Oswald Mosley's anti-semitic, pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists.

And here he is having a cozy chat with Adolf Hitler:

And here he is in another newspaper again calling for fascism in the UK. Had he succeeded, Ralph Miliband would no doubt have been gassed in a concentration camp on Salisbury Plain or the Yorkshire Moors and the camp guards would all have been Mail readers only to eager to help.

Today, the Mail grudgingly gave space to a rebuttal by Ed Miliband, and surrounded it by an editorial on Ralph's 'Evil Legacy' and a re-run of the original hatchet job, with the added detail that Ralph is buried only a few yards from Karl Marx, the traitorous bastard. Apparently the man lampooned last week as Wallace (of Gromit fame) is 'menacing' and determined to 'drive a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation'. In Mail land, you're a traitor if your father is a) a foreigner and b) dreams of a different political philosophy. I detect a clear line of inheritance from the 30s Mail fascism to the smearing articles they're publishing today. Their problem with Ralph Miliband is that he was foreign and intellectual: terms repeatedly used to cover anti-semitism. The phrase used in the 30s was 'rootless cosmopolitans': men and women with no national allegiance and a set of ideas opposed to 

the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished

Except that – oops, easily done – that list of Great British Institutions is taken from today's attack on Milibands Senior and Junior. Personally, I too oppose the 'great' (i.e. fee-paying) schools, the Established Church, the army which tortures and bombs its way round Ireland, the Empire, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I especially despise the tabloid newspapers which spent the last decade bribing, bugging and stealing. Today's Mail is still, at heart, a nasty-minded, anti-semitic toad. 

But I can think of one foreigner at the heart of the Daily Mail, a man who has done more damage to this country than any forgotten and unregarded political scientist. A man who, rather than pay his taxes to keep this great country on the road, claims to be French… for tax purposes. That man is Viscount Rothermere. Yes, he has a British title and yes, his main residence is a massive mansion in Wiltshire, but for legal purposes, he's discovered that he's French. How very patriotic. 

And that's not all. You'd think that the Mail, which has always wrapped itself in the Union Flag, would be horrified by its owner avoiding his responsibilities. See, for example, this campaign from the 1920s:

Sadly, racism and consistency don't go together. Whisper it, but the Daily Mail isn't a British paper. It's owned by a series of tax-avoiding Bermudan and Jersey shell companies to ensure that while it robustly lobbies on a range of political perspectives, it's never going to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us - and yet it calls Ralph Miliband The Man Who Hated Britain. Very patriotic!

There is a positive side to this story. Ed Miliband, while not my kind of socialist (i.e. not a socialist) has repeatedly displayed considerable backbone in standing up to this kind of bile. He demanded rebuttal space in the rag to demonstrate that his father did in fact love the UK for which he fought with distinction, and goes on to identify the true poison in British politics: overmighty press barons and their vicious, ad hominem attacks. I'm of course disappointed that Ed feels the need to adopt the language of kneejerk patriotism, and most especially by the (not entirely surprising) assertion that:

I want to make capitalism work for working people, not destroy it.

but that's because I'd rather Ralph had led the country than most other people. But I'm impressed with Ed here, and rather less impressed with David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the other Tories who've been sniggered and quietly applauding the Mail's piece.

The other bright side is that this vile, unsubtle, bilious and incoherent attack, clearly carried out in connivance with the Conservative Party, shows that the right is genuinely scared of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. They've dropped all pretence of principled opposition, fighting on the battleground of ideas, contrasting policies: they've gone right back to the days of the Zinoviev letter and the hysterical scaremongering of a class which knows things are falling apart at the seams. This is panic, but it's a panic which reveals the festering insecurities of a party and a newspaper which have happily hacked, bugged and burgled their way around Britain for too long and now spies Nemesis approaching in the form of a mild-mannered Miliband who has rather admirably decided that he's going to take them on. Once you've decided that the only line of attack is to assert that a dead man was once a) foreign and b) opposed jingoism, you've pretty much given up on any positive vision and turned back to spreading fear and lies.

What links the US government shutdown and the Mail? Simply that their political strategies are identical. Having failed ideologically, they have to invent boogeymen to scare the children. They have no ideas, only the power to spread fear and loathing. It's poisonous, and it will subvert even the lily-livered democracy we have left. What happens if the Tea Party and the Mail get their way? It won't be back to an imagined paradise of Mom'n'Pop niceness and Neighbourhood Watch: it'll be corporate terrorism, joblessness, mistrust and social decay. Have we learned nothing from the 80s Culture Wars?

Update: I gather that Peter Rhodes has used this blog as a source for snide comment in his awful little column in the local rag. Just to be clear Peter: I'm glad you're a reader, because you really, really need the education provided here, but I'm entirely unimpressed with this, and with everything you write. You are a hate-fuelled bigot with the emotional and cultural range of a slug.