Matthew Carr's Blog, page 17

Sour Times

   

Like the Jacobeans, the 21st century likes its dramas dark, but even the grimmest entertainments tend to end with evil thwarted if not vanquished.  This is what happens in Breaking Bad and The Bridge, and in so many of the Scandi noirs that have accompanied the 21st century’s descent into political hell.  

No matter how terrible the protagonists, we expect them to receive some kind of comeuppance by the time the series ends, and the restoration of a semblance of order with at least the promise of  justice and redemption .

These endings might look good from the average sofa, but those who consume such dramas should be very careful not to confuse television with the ‘interesting times’ that millions of us have been living through these last years.

Because in the world that we have, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the rightwing populists and assorted authoritarian nationalists who have corrupted and co-opted so many democracies across the world can easily be expunged, or that the normality we once took for granted can ever be restored.

If our populist era were a Netflix series – let’s call it The Age of Extremes -, the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu and Johnson would see their personal and political ambitions thwarted and their grandiose charlatanry unravelled  by voters who finally see through their dishonesty, malfeasance, destructive incompetence and divisive ideological extremism.

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Imagine the final sequence, in which the scene moves from one country to country, as the people who once supported the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro fall silent or stare in open-mouthed disgust at the politicians they thought were their salvation, or listen solemnly and repentantly as someone like Joe Biden or Keir Starmer delivers a moving speech about national unity, the triumph of truth and democracy, and how we have more in common than the things that divide us.

In this grand finale, the beasts would all be vanquished, and the politicians who once followed in their toxic wake would be driven from public life even as they fled from those who one time did they seek, and we would all go to bed with a warm, glowing feeling. 

Goodness would be restored, however flawed.  Wise, benign government would prevail; battered democratic institutions would recover from the authoritarian onslaught with a renewed sense of common purpose. 

The political conversation would turn away from inane ‘culture wars’, hating on immigrants, ‘wokeness’ and other shibboleths, towards the basic nuts and bolts that hold societies together,  and which should be the basis on which all governments stand or fall.

In this happy ending, bitter enemies would make up and turn their wrath on the Pied Pipers they once followed, instead of each other. Rather than act as a vehicle for weaponised lies, conspiracy theorising, and a general incitement to be the worst people and the worst society you can be, politics would coalesce once again around a new notion of the common good, and how that might be achieved.

Liars, charlatans and demagogues would no longer get airtime in order to achieve a false ‘balance’ or generate a few minutes of angry television.  Voters would turn away in droves from the networked engines of destruction that have helped the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro to propagate their clamorous and hateful messages.

National elections would be decided on the basis of evidence-based arguments, and realistic and achievable proposals rather than nationalist fantasies.   In country after country, rightwing extremists would lose their seats and tumble humiliated from power.  In some cases, their leaders might even find themselves in court or even behind bars.

Mainstream conservative parties that allowed themselves to be hollowed out and taken over by their more sinister fringes would purge themselves of their most extreme elements and re-learn the rudiments of political decency, such as tolerance and loser’s consent.  

Having weathered the storm, 21st century democracies march together in a renewed search for justice, equality and decency.

The Beast is Back

Needless to say, we are a long way from any of this, despite the more positive developments we have seen over the last month or so. Watching the US midterm count unfold, it’s striking how many results were decided by the narrowest of margins that came down in some cases to a few thousand or even a few hundred votes. 

As welcome as they are, these results should certainly remind us that every vote really does count, but they are still way too close to suggest a comprehensive turning point, let alone a decisive rejection of right-wing extremism in which the firewall between the far-right and mainstream conservativism has ceased to exist.

Faced with these results, no one should be surprised that losing Republicans have talked about ending mail-in votes or raising the voting age to exclude a new generation of ‘brainwashed’ young voters.  

Now, a weakened but still dangerous Trump has now made his long-expected pitch, and regardless of its lacklustre quality or its impact on Republican Party unity,  there are still dozens of election-denying MAGA members of Congress who will use their narrow majority to undermine Biden and drag his administration into multiple legislative black holes in order to protect Trump – and themselves.

In Israel, Netanyahu is back – another leader who should never have been allowed even the sniff of power again, at the head of a far-right coalition that includes the political descendants of the racist Meir Kahane, and an admirer of the mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein.

In the UK, a failing Conservative party that bet everything on Brexit and then staggered out of the casino with nothing to show for it, refuses to even acknowledge that its own attempt to ‘Make Britain Great Again’ has been a national political and economic calamity.

Faced with the prospect of losing their slender majorities and their new-found careers, a number of Tory MPs have made statements about the Channel ‘migrant crisis’ that would not be remotely out of place in a BNP chat room.

Some of them have taken to publicising the names of hotels where asylum seekers are staying, in a brazen invitation and incitement to hate that should have no place in the governing party of a self-respecting democracy.

But this is precisely the point - politics is no longer ‘self-respecting.’ The rules of engagement have changed, the expectations placed on politics have been lowered, and the moral threshold has all but disappeared. Instead of trying to do the best they can, Trump and Johnson & Co have shown that politicians can say and do whatever they can get away with.

And while the Conservatives seek to crawl out of the whirlpool that they jumped into, the ghastly reactionary Richard Tice and his Reform Party are watching their vote share creep up – a development that one can’t help thinking might have something to do with the election of an Asian-heritage Prime Minister.

Tice and Farage – the Burke and Hare of post-Brexit disenchantment – are still looking to bring political corpses to interested parties dreaming of sovereignty and ‘controlled’ borders. 

Tice rails at a failing ‘globalist’ (ahem) Tory Party, and serves up a toxic Trumpy brew of climate change denial, anti-lockdown sentiment and migrant criminals-at-the-border rhetoric with empty promises to Make Britain Great by lowering taxes and not much else.

Farage, meanwhile, is clearly itching in the black uniform that he wears under his suit, as he rants on Twitter about Albanian gangsters, not trusting Zelensky, and foreigners taking our bodily fluids after two world wars fought for freedom or whatever.  

These developments have a potentially hopeful dimension; A resurgent Reform Party with Farage at its head could make just enough inroads into Tory marginals to help Labour. 

But it could even win a seat or two - if only to get Farage into the House of Lords. And even without winning any, its rise in vote share could push the Tories even further to the right than they already are.

Right now none of these outcomes can be discounted. And just because Trump is weakened now, he - or someone like him could still become president. 

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And even as these processes unfold, Orban, Erdogan and Modi remain in place and there is nothing to suggest they are going to be leaving soon. A fascist has just been elected in Italy. The French far-right will be waiting for Macron to fall. Even the Tories might navigate their way through the next two years to another victory. 

So we are very far from that satisfying denouement and reversal of fortune that so many of us want to see, and even after so many plot twists, it’s clear that the reversals of fortune of a few high-profile individuals do not in themselves mean the end of the movements they represent.

The Trumps, the Netanyahus, the Johnsons, Orbans, and all the others are there because millions of people want them there,  and either don’t care about their lying and authoritarianism, and actually approve of the behaviour that most people to the left of the political spectrum and even many to the right find totally abhorrent.

How to defeat, weaken, divide, and marginalise these movements – without becoming like them – and even win over some of their supporters, remains the key challenge in 21st century democratic politics. 

It’s a problem that can’t be solved by any single party or ideological tendency, or by a simple return to politics-as-they-were.   Though the left must be part of any solution, the left by itself cannot defeat these movements.  Nor can the centre and the centre-left simply hope to cruise to power because it is not as bad as its opponents.

If we are to have a chance of a new and more hopeful era – we need coalitions and alliances of voters and parties, based on the common recognition of our serious the threat to democracy these populist-nationalist movements really are.

Because these movements are not playing the game that too many of our politicians think they’re playing. And if there is one thing our Age of Extremes have taught us, it’s that no matter how low we think we have sunk, there is always another rung to descend.

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Twilight of the Monsters

History is on no one’s side, even if we sometimes like to believe that it might be on ours. When we talk about the ‘judgement of history’, or being on the ‘right side of history’, we are always projecting our own hopes onto a future that we have no way of knowing will turn out the way we want.

It brings consolation in bad times to believe that history may be waiting to vindicate us or that things that are wrong will ultimately be put right.

It’s comforting, especially in a world where the worst and most corrupt people seem to get away with everything, to imagine that somewhere in the future, historians will look back on our era and deliver the damning judgement that too often the present fails to pronounce. To imagine that possibility is to imagine that the dark times will have been vanquished and surpassed by better ones.

But history offers no such guarantees. And regardless of where we think it’s going or where we would like it to go, we may find that it takes us to some unpredictable and unwanted places. Consider the predictions that were made at the end of the Cold War.

This was the time when ‘walls’ were supposedly crumbling everywhere, when democracy seemed to many to be an unstoppable process, when the advent of a borderless world based on trade, connectivity and global markets seemed to point towards a future without political or armed conflicts, where history itself would come to an ‘end.’

No one imagined that the same countries which hailed a borderless world would erect ‘hard’ militarised borders to keep out poor migrants from the global south.

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No one foresaw that democracies would swoon in the arms of authoritarian nationalists, charlatans and brazen con men, who boast about how many drug addicts their police forces have murdered, who mock a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of their own citizens, or incite armed insurrection when they fail to win an election.

Who could have predicted that, thirty-two years later, pundits in the country that ‘won’ the Cold War would be seriously discussing the possibility of civil war, and that voters would send a malevolent narcissistic sociopath to the White House, and then continue to vote for him even after four years in which lies rained down on them on a scale never seen in American history?

The world was supposed to be too intelligent and too enlightened for that. Hadn’t we learned the ‘lessons of history?’ from World War 2 and the Holocaust, from Europe’s ‘age of dictatorships’? Didn’t we recognise that democracies can be fought for and defended, but also given up? Couldn’t we read the telltale signs that indicated a slide into authoritarianism and fascism?

Having seen how Nazism invented false racist conspiracies in order to justify genocide, weren’t we wise enough to look askance at cynical two-bit demagogues ranting on their YouTube channels or social media platforms about evil ‘global elites’ controlling and dictating everything, from migration to pandemics?

Apparently not. And the 21st century has reminded us something that we should have already known: that even the most stable societies can fall apart and succumb to their own worst instincts; that voters, faced with the choice of the least bad, the lesser evil or simply something mediocre, and a brazen monstrosity, will sometimes go - smiling and waving the national flag - with the monstrosity, because why the hell not?

The Age of Monsters

This is the era in which we find ourselves, and for those of us not celebrating or revelling in the new-found ‘freedoms’ to be the worst you can be that this age of monsters has conferred on us, it has been a painful and distressing experience to watch this bleak endless parade of the bad and the worst, pouring through public life like the contents of a broken sewer pipe.

Faced with this seemingly unstoppable descent, there have been some positive developments that at least provide a breathing space and grounds for hope, however insubstantial and belated.

The public outrage and disgust that forced Johnson’s own MPs to reluctantly take action against him; the stunning implosion of Liz Truss’s non-government and the failure of Johnson’s attempted comeback; Lula’s victory in Brazil - all these outcomes are to be welcomed, even they aren’t a cause for ecstatic celebration.

And now, against all the odds, the Republican Party has drastically underperformed in mid-term elections when it would normally be expected to make huge gains. To put it more precisely, Trump has drastically underperformed, and a number of high-profile candidates that he personally endorsed have fallen at the first or second hurdle.

It might seem a little underwhelming to take some consolation from the fact that the Democratic Party didn’t lose by as much as it was expected to lose by, and still stands to lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, but beggars can’t be choosers and this result is definitely worse for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats.

It’s already causing ructions and recriminations within the Republican party, and - without wanting to tempt history again- may prove to be a watershed moment that changes America’s seemingly relentless downhill trajectory.

Had the Republicans met expectations, they might well have used their position not only to stymie any legislation they don’t like, but also to halt the Jan 6th Committee’s investigations into Trump’s role in the Capitol insurrection.

Now they can’t, at least not so easily. Now the Trump bully pulpit looks suddenly shaky, and he may yet be kicked off it by a craven party that only values those who can help it win. Or the party will rip itself to pieces as the embittered narcissist seeks to undermine any potential successor.

So all this good, even if it isn’t great. And the huge participation of young voters that helped make this happen is another sign that the rancid reactionary politics that Trump embodied and emboldened may be losing their wider purchase.

None of this is a reason to put out the party balloons. Because Trump may be dying, but Trumpism is very far from dead. Millions of Americans will still vote for him or for someone like Ron DeSantis, who ships migrants across the country in a Trumpite attack on ‘woke elites.’ Political rabble and far-right conspiracy theorists like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene walked easily back into office.

In Brazil the same caution should be applied. Lula may have won, just. But 52 million Brazilians still voted for the gangster-politician who mocked the virus that killed so many people, and who revelled in his willingness to burn down the Amazon regardless of the consequences for his country or the planet. In the UK, the fall of the corrupt Johnson and the epically useless Truss threatens to usher in a new period of Tory austerity in a country where public services have already been cut to the bone.

But nevertheless, Lula did win, and now has a chance to make Brazil a better country than it could ever have been under Bolsonaro. And the midterms have provided the Democrats with a platform that they can build on in the next election, and a new constituency that the Republicans will struggle to reach. In the UK, the Sunak/Hunt tandem now faces a divided and demoralised Tory party, an opposition that now senses that its moment has come, and opposition from unions across the country that have had enough, to the point when even nurses are now coming out on strike.

So by the dismal standards of our ongoing age of monsters, when the worst thing always seems to be waiting around the corner, the autumn of 2022 has not been as bad as it could be.

And regardless of where history ends up in the long term, the present is still in our hands, and the future is still ours to win or lose.

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The Last Post

On March 9, 2011, I wrote the first post on this blog.  When I first set it up I was rather tentative about doing it.   I was still an Internet novice and I was only just beginning to get to grips with Facebook and Twitter.   My daughter helped with the technical stuff, which I never did fully grasp.  More than once I’ve pressed the wrong button and seen posts or even the entire webpage disappear, and I’ve been forced to make desperate appeals to friends or technicians to save me from oblivion.

I still don’t know how to use code, or Cloudfare, or most of the plugins that I was advised to install.  Nevertheless I got it off the ground and I’ve managed to keep it going for more than a decade, and what began as an experiment turned into a kind of addiction,  to the point when I often felt bereft if I didn’t post something.  Sometimes I wrote almost every day, because there always seemed to be some outrageous thing to speak out about or respond to, and the blog gave me an immediate outlet that was not available anywhere else.

Of course it wasn’t always possible to do this regularly. Writing and researching pieces for this blog takes time, and sometimes when I was in the middle of writing a book there just weren’t enough spare hours in the day.  But even when I stepped away from it, I always came back.

I named the blog after my history of terrorism, because the nineteenth century name for anarchist bombs seemed to capture something about the dystopian times I lived in and also about the way I wrote about them.  I subtitled it ‘Notes from the Margins’ because the margins was the place I felt most comfortable writing from.   This space wasn’t intended to be an ivory tower or a badge of superiority.  It was intended more of a declaration of the independence which I think all writers must have.  And what I appreciated about this blog was the opportunity to write without any mediation or regulation, without anyone looking over my shoulder telling me what to think or how to say it.

I’ve written about war, militarism, racism, Brexit, Europe, Covid, and so many events that came and went during this bleak decade.   This commentary sometimes made me friends, and sometimes it got me into trouble that I hadn’t anticipated.  Regular readers will know what I’m referring to!

Now, after more than ten years, and more than a million words, I’m here to announce that this is the last time I will be writing on this blog.  In the new year I’m giving up my domain, and the Infernal Machine will wither away and vanish into the ether.

I want to thank all the readers who have stayed with me throughout this adventure, including those who didn’t always agree with me.   Your comments and contributions have always been welcome and your support has made me feel that was worth doing, even when I sometimes doubted it.

I can’t sound the bugle however, because the Infernal Machine is not shutting down for good.   I will be writing under the same name on my new subscriber platform on substack.  In effect my blog will become a newsletter, delivered weekly to your email.   If you’ve followed this blog, I would really appreciate it if you would check out its new iteration here, and subscribe and tell your friends.

So goodbye is not really goodbye.  I hope it only means see you later.

And whether or not you choose to make this move with me, I wish you fortitude, good health, and good company, as we navigate our way through these very trying times.

 

The post The Last Post appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Of Cats and Dogs

Given the scale of the disaster unfolding in Kabul right now, it might seem a little frivolous to write about Paul ‘Penn’ Farthing, the ex-Marine Sergeant and founder of the Nowzad animal rescue charity, who has just arrived back in the UK on a plane filled with cats and dogs – and no people.

So let me explain.  I have great affection for cats and dogs, but I don’t feel any particular joy in the fact that Farthing managed to get his rescue animals safely out of Afghanistan.

Of course I’m glad the animals weren’t shot or abandoned, but given that so many Afghan men, women and children have been left to an equally terrible fate, this is not something that I want to celebrate or draw much satisfaction from.

Nor do I want to hail Farthing as a hero.  I have no idea if he is or not.  He certainly does seem to be a decent, courageous and committed man, but I don’t believe we should be looking to extract heroes or happy endings from the calamity that is unfolding in front of us.  Nor do I want to criticise a man whose mission clearly went beyond a supposedly misplaced British obsession with ‘pets.’  It’s clear that these animals were more than that, and not only to Farthing but to the servicemen and women who these animals have helped deal with combat trauma.

For me the real significance of the Farthing saga lies in what it tells us about the most corrupt, inept and venal government in British history – a government that set out to destroy the reputation of an ex-serviceman who had the temerity to criticise and humiliate it in public.

We’ve already seen the almost pathological inability of the government and the Tory Party in general to tolerate criticism.  We saw it when Tory MPs attacked Marcus Rashford for his foodbank campaign, and later accused him of ‘putting politics over football’ because he missed a penalty.  We saw it when Tory MPs called Gareth Southgate ‘a tool of Deep Woke’ because he asked his players to take the knee during the Euros; when Matt Hancock lectured Dr Rosena Allin-Khan on her ‘tone’ when she questioned the government’s ‘non-existent’ Covid testing strategy; when Ashfield MP Lee Anderson called anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray a ‘scrounger’ and a ‘parasite’.

Sometimes these attacks are orchestrated.  Sometimes they are made by individuals.  And in the case of Penn Farthing, we appear to be dealing with the former.

The facts of the story are complicated, but the gist of the matter is that Farthing raised money from donations to charter a private plane and fly Nowzad’s 60-odd staff and  170 dogs and cats out of Kabul.   These efforts provoked a row between Farthing and the UK government, in which Farthing accused the MoD of blocking his attempts to get his plane out.

In response Defence Secretary Ben Wallace claimed that Farthing was taking up valuable military resources,effectively ‘queue jumping’  and undermining the government’s efforts to evacuate refugees who were already in Kabul airport.

The row worsened when Farthing claimed that the MoD had left him to ‘fend for himself’ and prevented him from evacuating his staff and animals.  Farthing pointed out that his animals travelled in the hold, not seats, and argued that he had spare capacity on his plane to take refugees who were already in the airport.  On Friday Farthing revealed that he and his staff and animals had been turned back inside the airport by the US military, because their paperwork did not meet with bureaucratic requirements that had been introduced by the Biden administration only hours before.

And on Saturday Farthing flew out of Kabul with his animals but no staff, apparently because his staff did not have paperwork from the British government that the Taliban would accept.

Even before his plane landed Farthing was being transformed into a villain, as Tory politicians and commentators in the mainstream press and social media accused him of putting ‘animals over people.’ Tom Tugenhat, who has become the conscience of the Tory Party in the last few weeks, told LBC’s Matt Frei.

We’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs; meanwhile my interpreter’s family is likely to be killed. When one interpreter asked me a few days ago, ‘Why is my five-year-old worth less than a dog?’ I didn’t have an answer.

Tugenhat’s advocacy does not sit well with his consistently hardline voting record on asylum and refugees.  but  the same could be said of many of Tories who are now accusing Farthing of prioritising animals over people.  The ‘people before animals’ accusation also ignored the fact that the animals travelled in the hold, and Farthing’s offer to fill his plane’s spare capacity with other refugees.  Nevertheless the mud stuck, as it was intended to, and the former ‘hero soldier’  found himself transformed into the symbol of the heartlessness and misplaced priorities of the United Kingdom or the West in general.

In the wider scheme of things these criticisms are entirely correct.  An empty plane filled with rescue animals but no people did fly out of Kabul on Saturday, providing a heartwarming story for animal lovers while thousands of Afghans were left stranded.   But where these criticisms slip into dishonesty and hypocrisy is in their singling out of Farthing as the symbol of British/Western moral terpitude.  There is little doubt that this has been deliberately orchestrated from within the government.

Bear in mind that this is a government that still refuses to publish emails and Whatsapp messages from government ministers pertaining to possible cronyism and the mismanagement of the pandemic,  yet it was able, in the midst of the evacuation,  to find time to leak Farthing’s sweary rant to an MoD official in the Times.

This followed Ben Wallace’s accusations that Farthing had ‘bullied’ his officials and civil servants – this from the government that has ignored accusations of consistent bullying from its Home Secretary.  Farthing has since apologised for his outburst, and claimed that it was made under stress, which given the events of the last few weeks may well be true.

Once again however, this is not about Farthing’s character – it is about a government that cannot stand to be criticised, and will do whatever it takes to undermine anyone who attempts to reveal its failings, especially when doing so enables it to distract from them, even if only temporarily.    This is why Farthing has become the centre of the ‘people not animals’ outrage of the last few days, and why he has been subject to tweets like this from the Tory tv presenter Kirstie Allsopp:

 

If I were left in Afghanistan, or were trying to get a member of my family out, I simply could not conceive how we could get dogs & cats on a plane to the UK but not humans. We have betrayed and let down so many people and then told them straight up that animals matter more.

— Kirstie Allsopp (@KirstieMAllsopp) August 30, 2021

 

The Guardian has also joined in, with a comment piece from Gaby Hinscliff  which observes:

What a story to tell the world about ourselves, amid the chaos of our leaving. What a gift to extremist movements across the Middle East and beyond, who draw their power from the idea that the west holds foreign lives contemptuously cheap; that cats of no conceivable interest to the Taliban can be airlifted out but not human beings at risk of being hunted down and executed.

Once again, Hinscliff’s headshaking is correct on the general picture, even though she leaves out the specifics. For example she claims – on the basis of the Sunday Times piece this weekend – that ‘real anger and frustration have been reported in military circles’ regarding Farthing’s supposed misuse of resources.   Yet even the Spectator, which has published two pieces on the ‘shameful’ evacuation of Farthing’s animals and the ‘moral abomination’ in which the UK government ‘caved in under pressure from an animal-loving mob’ has issued the following postscript:

 

 

So we – as well as ‘extremists’ – may well question how and why a plane filled with animals but not people was able to leave Kabul airport last week, but it is as unfair to blame Farthing for this as it is to accuse him of being a ‘white saviour’ – a narrative that Farthing did not choose.

If we want to talk about misplaced ‘priorities’ we need to look further back, at the passivity of a government that  – unlike France – did not take action to protect Afghans until it was too late; a government whose prime minister and foreign minister lounged around on holiday while a humanitarian crisis unfolded in front of their eyes; a government that did not even bother to read thousands of emails from MPs and charities pleading for Afghans who may have been eligible for rescue.

If we want to look further back, we might ask why more than 32,000 Afghans were denied asylum in the years since the invasion.  But these are not subjects that this government wants to think about or have people talk about.  Far better to tarnish the reputation of a well-meaning ex-soldier while presenting the government as the real humanitarians.  Meanwhile in the US, a different narrative is unfolding, as critics of Joe Biden accuse the US president of abandoning military dogs at Kabul airport.

 

 

In this case, animals are being used to criticise the president.  In the UK they are being used to distract from criticism of the Prime Minister.   In both cases, we are dealing with political gaslighting.  We should learn to recognise it when we see it, instead of vilifying Penn Farthing for moral failings that are not his.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Of Cats and Dogs appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

The Return of Saint Tony

It’s a truth not universally acknowledged in British politics, that if you have men like Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab in government, everyone who isn’t them can look good, or at least better,  by comparison.  In a (dis)United Kingdom sinking ever deeper into multiple crises of its own making, this tendency can make it difficult, if not impossible to reach the new understanding of ourselves that is essential if we are to have even the ghost of a chance of becoming a better country, particularly when it comes to Britain’s wars.

Take the re-emergence of Tony Blair, who has just commented ‘dramatically’ on the withdrawal from Afghanistan this weekend in an article in the Daily Mail, no less..

Across the board, Blair’s article has been hailed as evidence of a great statesman, with a grasp of geopolitical strategy that is absent amongst his successors  Even worse, a chorus of liberal pundits have united to praise Blair while condemning what Ian Dunt called the ‘idiots’ and ‘ideologues’ who opposed Blair’s wars.

So a curious situation arises, in which the principal architect of what even Tory politicians recognise is a gross strategic failure is praised for his wise statecraft, while the critics of the ‘9/11 wars’ are depicted as inherently ‘ideological’ or ‘extremist’.

Add this to Blair’s bitter criticism of the ‘imbecilic’ American decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and you have a situation in which it is possible to believe that we Brits were the real heroes all along, and if only we’d listened to Tony it would all have come out right in the end, even though when we did listen to him it all came out wrong.

At no point in any of this, have I seen any critical analysis of the points that Blair made in his piece.  It’s enough for Blair to sound cleverer than the shambling fraud currently occupying Number 10 (not difficult) to evoke a painful combination of nostalgia and counterfactuals amongst British politicians and the Tory-liberal commentariat.

If only Tony were in charge.  Tony wouldn’t have let Biden do this.  Tony understood what was at stake.  If only Boris could be like Tony. If only people could stop blaming Tony for everything etc, etc

Just to be clear, it’s quite right that Blair should not be blamed ‘for everything.’ But that doesn’t mean he can’t be blamed for some things, and his speech is a typically slick attempt to avoid blame for anything, and project blame onto others, while also essentially advocating the same combination of limitless militarism and neo-colonial occupations that have proved so disastrous in the past.

Blair rightly condemns the botched US withdrawal that has been carried out without any regard for Afghans or any attempt to hold the Taliban to their promises.

He castigates the West for its lack of ideological commitment, its inability to ‘define our interests strategically’ and assert its ‘traditional global leadership role’.

In referring to his own decision ‘to join the United States in removing the Taliban from power’, he congratulates himself, as always, on his willingness to accept the difficult ‘decisions of leadership’, even though he repeatedly ignored or refused to consider evidence and expertise that contradicted his own messianic belief in his moral rectitude when he was in power.

Some might conclude that this unwillingness to look beyond your own preconceptions is a flaw in a leader rather than a virtue, but Blair still seems as devoid of self-doubt as he was in 2001.

He reiterates the same lie used to justify the invasion of Iraq: that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was intended to prevent another terrorist attack – ignoring the ease with which the al-Qaeda leaders escaped from Afghanistan after the invasion.

He claims that the commitment, ‘of turning Afghanistan from a failed terror state into a functioning democracy on the mend…may have been a misplaced ambition, but it was not an ignoble one’ while leaving out any reference to the warlords and mass murderers with whom the US collaborated to topple the Taliban, or the series of corrupt governments who siphoned off millions of dollars and rigged elections during the attempts to create a ‘functioning democracy’ in Afghanistan.

Such allies should have cast some doubts over the ‘nobility’ of the invasion.   Though Blair refers to ‘mistakes’ and ‘lessons learned’, he doesn’t say what they are.

He doesn’t ask why not a single one of the post- 9/11 ‘interventions’ has produced a viable democracy or even a functioning state.

He claims that ‘The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics’ – as if ‘grand strategy’ and ‘politics’ were diametrical opposites.

He attributes the American withdrawal to the ‘imbecilic’ political slogan about ending “the forever wars”, as if that was the only reason the US withdrew from the longest war in its history.   He offers no explanations for why a battle-hardened Afghan army of 300,000 (nominal) soldiers, equipped and trained by the world’s only superpower, simply refused to fight, beyond the sudden lack of ‘effective air support’.

He rightly refers to the ‘real gains’ made during the occupation as ‘something worth defending. Worth protecting’, without mentioning the corruption, insecurity, thieving, and nepotism of a central government that 300,000 soldiers and whole swathes of the Afghan population did not want to defend.

He rightly argues that ‘We must evacuate and give sanctuary to those to whom we have responsibility – those Afghans who helped us, stood by us and have a right to demand we stand by them’ and points out that there are forms of pressure that can still be brought to bear on the Taliban to protect civilians.’

He insists that the occupation ‘often dashed our hopes, but it was never hopeless’, even though the US military itself had decided that it was.  He even has the gall to insist that ‘If it matters, you go through the pain’ – this from a politician who has spent the years since leaving office enriching himself to a degree that no British politician has ever achieved.

He leaves open the question that ‘we have not had another attack on the scale of 9/11, though no-one knows whether that is because of what we did post 9/11 or despite it’ while ignoring the staggering rise in terrorist incidents worldwide.

He then goes into a boilerplate neocon depiction of ‘radical Islam’ as the ideological successor to communism,  conflating Islamist governments and movements across the world into a common phenomenon aimed at ‘ creating a state based not on nations but on religion, with society and politics governed by a strict and fundamentalist view of Islam’.

He manages to include Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, and sub-Saharan Africa in the list of countries and regions where this ‘exclusionary and extreme’ ideology has taken root to varying degrees, while curiously managing to leave out Saudi Arabia, and the ‘Islamist’ movements that have acted as Western strategic assets.

In revisiting the Cold War, he notes that ‘The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan saw jihadism rise, without referring to the role of the West and its allies in helping it ‘rise’.   He insists that ‘Iran and al-Qaeda…cooperate’ even though there is no evidence to suggest any such cooperation.

He claims that ‘Iran uses proxies like Hizbullah to undermine moderate Arab countries in the Middle East. Lebanon is teetering on the brink of collapse,’ as if Hizbullah and Iran were responsible for a failure of governance that reaches across the Lebanese political class.  He claims that ‘In the West, we have sections of our own Muslim communities radicalised’ without addressing the extent to which the ‘war on terror’ has contributed to that radicalisation.

On and on it goes.  Reaching into the neocon playbook, he compares the West’s unwillingness to commit to a policy of open-ended militarism against ‘Radical Islam’ to its previous willingness to confront ‘ Revolutionary Communism’ both ‘ideologically and with security measures.’

Blair does not mention that these ‘ security measures’ included the overthrow of democratically elected left-of-centre governments, the Vietnam War, support for dictatorships, covert ‘rollback’ operations, torture training programs in Latin America, collusion in massacres and gross acts of state terror.

In asking the question ‘This is what we need to decide now with Radical Islam. Is it a strategic threat? If so, how do those opposed to it including within Islam, combine to defeat it?’ he already has the answer.  E

Even though he claims that ‘We have learnt the perils of intervention in the way we intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed Libya’ he doesn’t say what these lessons are, beyond great ‘commitment’ to the interventions that he continues to advocate:

For Britain and the US, these questions are acute. The absence of across-the-aisle consensus and collaboration and the deep politicisation of foreign policy and security issues is visibly atrophying US power. And for Britain, out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation, we have serious reflection to do. We don’t see it yet. But we are at risk of relegation to the second division of global powers. Maybe we don’t mind. But we should at least take the decision deliberatively.

Blair doesn’t even consider the possibility that the policies he advocated may have contributed to the ‘atrophying’ power he describes.  Instead he argues only that ‘If the West wants to shape the 21st century, it will take commitment. Through thick and thin.’

Why should it be up to ‘the West’ to ‘shape the 21st century?’ Who gave us this role?  Why should we be able to do it better than other countries? Why should any particular country or group of countries have such a role?

For Blair, as always, the answer lies in using military power to ‘uphold our values’ and a new interventionism based on ‘a sense of rediscovery that we in the West represent values and interests worth being proud of and defending.’

This, from the man who urged the West to support the al-Sisi coup in Egypt, even after the Egyptian military had massacred more than 1000 people and was busy locking up and torturing its opponents; who tried to give Saudi Arabia a carte blanche after the state-sanctioned murder of Khashoggi; who has never seen a dictator he didn’t want to work with or make money from; who never once questioned the lawless swathe of violence which the Bush administration unleashed across the world.

Now he wants to wage a new global war against ‘Radical Islam’ that will uphold our ‘values and interests’ and deter China, Russia, Iran etc

This, according to Blair, ‘is the large strategic question posed by these last days of chaos in Afghanistan. And on the answer will depend the world’s view of us and our view of ourselves.’

Some may suspect that this question had already been asked and answered long before the unfolding calamity we are now witnessing.

But Blair, perhaps more than any other British politician, has a special ability make us look benign, noble and benevolent to ourselves even when we appear to be disastrously failing.

That ability, more than anything else, explains why the British political class is now extolling this shallow and dangerous ideologue as the best statesman we have.

He believes that war is necessary to ensure that we remain a ‘great power.’

So, despite all the evidence to the contrary, do they.

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Spain and the Origins of ‘People’s War’

Watching the collapse of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, I’ve been rereading Albert Jean Michel de Rocca’s powerful memoir of the Peninsular War In the Peninsula with a French Hussar.  This might seem a little tangential, but bear with me.  Sous-Lieutenant de Rocca was a Swiss soldier who enlisted in Napoleon’s army, whose regiment the 2nd Hussars was deployed to Spain in 1808, and his memoir is a keen-eyed account of what was then the historical novelty of ‘people’s war’ or ‘patriotic war’ that emerged in response to Napoleon’s victories in Europe.

This phenomenon wasn’t as novel as it sometimes seemed.  Irregular warfare has a long history that reaches all the back to classical times.  But it shocked nineteenth century armies steeped in the notion that countries whose armies had been defeated on the battlefield had no right to continue fighting afterwards – let alone fight without uniforms.

On the one hand such warfare was depicted as cruel, barbaric, and dishonourable, in comparison with cavalry charges and the organised mass slaughter of clashes between uniformed armies.   At the same time it was increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that these wars were waged in defense of the nation against foreign occupation – a motive that was generally considered to be honourable and admirable.

Nowhere was this apparent contradiction more glaring than in Napoleon’s ‘Spanish ulcer.’

In The Art of War (1838), the great French military strategist Baron Antoine de Jomini looked back nostalgically to the lost era of eighteenth-century warfare in which ‘the French and English guards courteously invited each other to fire first’, which had been displaced by ‘the frightful epoch when priests, women,, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.’

This is the war that de Rocca describes, in which Spaniards would get French soldiers drunk and then massacre them, and guerrilla ambushes were so common that French soldiers could only travel on the roads in force to keep their supply lines and lines of communication open, and where Spanish peasants, ‘ Like avenging vultures eager for prey, …followed the French columns at a distance to murder such of the soldiers as, fatigued or wounded, remained behind on a march.’

 

 

French reprisals were equally cruel and savage, as Goya makes clear in the sombre iconography of Los desastres de la guerra:

 

 

Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, like all his conquests, was motivated primarily by geopolitical considerations.   But it was presented to the Spanish people and to the French army as a generous act, that would liberate Spain from backwardness, religious ‘superstition’, and a reactionary Bourbon dynasty,  and expose the Spanish to an enlightened and superior French culture.

Faced with ferocious resistance from a people that remained faithful to its religion and also to its hateful autocratic monarch Ferdinand VII, the French army responded with stunning savagery.  In Ronda, de Rocca describes how ‘The mountaineers hung their French prisoners or burned them alive; and in return, our soldiers rarely gave quarter to a Spaniard found under arms.’

De Rocca describes his own relief on being wounded and sent back to France, at being able to ‘quit and unjust and inglorious war, where the sentiments of my heart continually disavowed the evil my arm was condemned to do.’

Like many French soldiers, de Rocca saw Spain through an Orientalist lens, which attributed Spanish guerrilla warfare to its Moorish past, but he was also intelligent and clear-eyed enough to recognise that Napoleon’s attempt to foist his brother onto the Spanish throne occupation was unjust in principle, and was bound to be opposed by a Spanish people ‘ animated solely by religious patriotism…but they had but one interest, but one sentiment – to revenge, by every possible means, the wrongs that the French had done their country.’

De Rocca also recognised the moral degradation of the French army, as it attempted to impose its will by force on a hostile population:

The French could only maintain themselves in Spain by terror; they were constantly under the necessity of punishing the innocent with the guilty, and of taking revenge on the weak for the offences of the powerful.  Plunder had become necessary for existence, and such atrocities as were occasioned by the enmity of the people, and the injustice of the cause for which the French were fighting, injured the moral feeling of the army, and sapped the very foundations of military discipline, without which regular troops have neither strength nor power.

Looking back on the war, de Rocca recalls how

The Spanish, as a nation, were animated by one and the same feeling, love of independence, and abhorrence of strangers who would have humbled their national pride by imposing a government upon them.  It was neither armies nor fortresses that were to be conquered in Spain, but that one, yet multiplied sentiment which filled the whole people.  It was the inmost soul of each and every one that resisted the blow – that entrenchment which neither ball nor bayonet could reach.

De Rocca concluded with this remarkable tribute to the enemy that had killed so many of his comrades:

These events have changed the face of Europe; they demonstrate as fully as the long and noble resistance of the Spanish people, the real strength of states does not consist so much in the number and strength of their regular armies, as in that religious, patriotic, or political feeling which is alone powerful enough to interest every individual of a nation in the public cause as if it were his own.

Years later French résistants motivated by very similar motivations would use methods that the Nazi occupiers regarded as ‘terrorism’.  And within a decade of World War 2 French armies would fight anti-colonial resistance movements with their own investment in the ‘public cause.’

Today the same dynamic can be seen across the world, in the wars on terror, in the Somali resistance to the Ethiopian invasion and occupation of 2006.   And the scenes that Goya once depicted have often been repeated, whenever foreign armies seek to impose their will be force on a population that is prepared to resist them.

Such resistance may not be virtuous or admirable.

It may not meet with conventional standards of ‘civilised warfare’, but it is to some extent inevitable, and therefore it behoves any government considering such occupations to think through all the implications and possibilities beforehand, otherwise they will create their own ‘ulcers’, that they may be obliged to retreat from, leaving a trail of death and devastation behind them.

 

 

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Imperial Sunset on the Rocks Please

Some empires take a long time to die.  The Roman Empire was already in decline centuries before the final collapse of the Western Empire in c.376-476.   By the end of the seventeenth century the weaknesses of the Spanish/Hapsburg Empire that spanned Europe and Latin America from the late fifteenth century onwards were already apparent, but it wasn’t until the Spanish-American war in 1898 that the last nail was hammered into its imperial coffin.  Britain’s ‘informal empire’ crumbled slowly following World War 2, in the face of independence movements, colonial insurgencies, and the self-interested opposition of the United States to its colonial presence.

Even after its managed ‘retreat from empire’ its imperial dreams continued to haunt the national body politic and rattling their chains, as Dean Acheson once observed when he noted that ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire but not yet found a role.’

Other empires seem to collapse very quickly, if only because the longterm weaknesses that may have been invisible before their collapse suddenly become so glaring that they can no longer be hidden or ignored.  To this category we could include the Soviet Empire, which fell apart in a couple of years, or the Aztecs who collapsed in less than a year at the hands of a few hundred Spanish adventurers and their indigenous allies.  And now,  in the wake of the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, can we add the United States to the second list?

Up to a point, yes.  The origins of the American ’empire’ can be traced back to the emergence of the United States as a global superpower after World War 2.  This was the period in which the American ’empire of bases’ was created, and America used its military, economic and diplomatic power to exert ‘moral leadership’ through its role in the reconstruction of Western Europe and its ability to impose governments favourable to its interests across the world – and depose governments that weren’t.

As a self-consciously imperial project, America’s rise and fall can be traced back to the 9/11 attacks, when a wounded and humiliated superpower set out not simply to eliminate the networks responsible for these atrocities, but to use its military power unilaterally to reshape the world in its own interests.  The underlying assumptions behind that endeavour were summed up in famous 2004 rejection of the ‘reality-based community’ attributed to Karl Rove:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.  And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, that’s how things will sort out.  We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

To which one can only reply, seventeen years later, ‘not so fast’.  Because Rove’s hubristic arrogance explains, in part why America has just lost a war to a guerrilla army equipped mostly with kalashnikovs.

Neither empires nor states create their own reality – at least not indefinitely.  Of course powerful states can do big things for a while.  They can bomb their enemies into submission.  They can deploy their armies halfway across the world.  They can topple governments and regimes that they don’t like.  All good old-fashioned imperial stuff.

But in the end empires and states survive and/or expand through their ability to make sound geopolitical calculations in their own best interests.  They can only do this by listening to sound advice about the world in which they operate, by recognising the extent of their power and also its limitations, by understanding the relationship between ends and means, by assessing the nature of their enemies and rivals, and by avoiding wars that they don’t stand a realistic chance of winning

If you can’t do these things, your ‘new realities’ are unlikely to be as solid or as permanent as you think.  America has not done any of them.  In has the most powerful military the world has ever seen.  In twenty years it has spent more than six trillion dollars on fighting wars across the world, and it has not won – in the long term – a single one of them.

Throughout these years it has repeatedly shown – and still retains – an ability to defeat any adversary in a conventional theater war, and yet even though it has been ‘preeminent’ in its use of military power, it has not been able to use that power to impose ‘dominance’ anywhere, let alone the stability that its ‘constabulary’ role supposedly demanded.  It has repeatedly failed to transform its hard military power into any tangible gains beyond profits for the military-industrial complex and the private military and logistics companies that have become part of it.  Not only has it failed to make the world better, it has actually made it worse.

Of course it still has the ability to obliterate most of the world many times over, but that ability is not what counts in the early twenty-first century.  China has not fired a shot, but it is now the world’s dominant economy.  America, by contrast, has never stopped firing.  It began the century by trying to be Robocop, and in 2016 it elected a psychopathic idiot as president who told voters he could ‘Make America Graet Again’, and who, did not have even the most basic understanding of the world in which he was operating in.

We can’t blame Trump entirely for perpetrating these fantasies.  Bush did too.  And so did did Tony Blair, who sought to extend Britain’s ‘greatness’ by hitching it to American military power.  Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, and these instruments of hard power are now definitively blunted.

By 2019 the American empire could not even protect its own citizens in the midst of a pandemic.  In January 2020 it discovered that the antidemocratic barbarians were not the turbanned fundamentalists out there in the world’s ‘lawless spaces’, but bearded fat white supremacists in camo living in the suburbs who attacked their own Congress.

And now, in August 2021, Joe Biden has joined the ‘reality-based community’ and – clumsily and ineptly ‘ withdrawn the US from the longest war it has ever fought – and lost.

And over here, the country that wanted to play Greece to America’s Rome, that rode shotgun through all these imperial gunfights has also tried and failed to ‘create its own reality.’

For a few years Britain seemed to have found Acheson’s ‘role’ as a bridge between America and the European Union.  In 2016 it foolishly abandoned the latter.  Now America has abandoned its faithful lieutenant, to the point when Biden did not even consult with the Johnson government over its withdrawal.

Now we have a country that has walked away from the EU and lost its ‘special relationship’ with a failing empire, a country led by the most useless government in its history, that can only boast about importing industrialised meat from Australia.

Once again, it might have helped this country and its superpower ally, to have paid more attention to the ‘reality-based community’.

Because reality, in the end, is like gravity.  Only cartoon characters can run off a cliff and keep running, but in the end they fall too.

 

 

 

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Through a Kaleidoscope Darkly: Afghanistan’s Groundhog Day

To anyone who wants to look, it is clear that the grim scenes unfolding in Afghanistan are not just another tragedy for a country that has been repeatedly smashed and abused in the latest variations on the ‘great game’ for more than forty years now.   The ignominious collapse of the US-led ‘nation-building’ project also marks the passing of what may well go down as the shortest ’empire’ in history, and it also brings to an end a brief period in which America – and more broadly ‘the West’ – tried and failed to use its unrivalled military power to remake a world in its own interests and its own image.

Watching this debacle unfold has brought back memories of Tony Blair’s speech on October 3, 2001, in which the lineaments of the new ‘liberal humanitarianism’ were presented to the Labour Party Conference only four days before the US-led coalition began bombing Afghanistan.  Blair’s speech was aimed primarily at his own party, and was partly intended to assuage the anxieties of his own party members and ministers who were anxious about the more belligerent statements emanating from the Bush administration.

Blair’s message was no less belligerent, but it was also much cleverer than anything the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld came out with, and it was steeped in the ‘progressive’ moral fervour of a politician who came from a very different political tradition.   No American politician could have made the following famous statement:

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.  This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken.  The pieces are in flux.  Soon they will settle again.  Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

This formulation was very different from the ‘we’ll smoke ’em out/whoever isn’t with us is against us’ rhetoric that George W. Bush was prone to.  Unlike Bush, Blair presented the new era of limitless war as a progressive and humanitarian enterprise.

To do this he invoked a 21st century vision of the world that ‘nineteenth century ‘white man’s burden’ imperialists would have understood – a world in which civilised nations had an obligation to use military force to raise up those sick, and ‘savage’ regions that had been decoupled from the train of progress.

Seen through  Blair’s humanitarian/imperialist gaze, those parts of the world that needed saving were reduced to their imagined geographical/cultural components.

Thus Gaza consisted of ‘slums’ rather than refugee camps – a recognition that would have drawn attention to the inconvenient role of Britain in creating the Palestinian diaspora.   ‘Northern Africa’ was nothing but ‘deserts’ – lawless spaces where terrorists can breed – a construct that entirely ignored the role of the Algerian state, for example, in the Algerian civil war.  And Afghanistan was nothing but ‘mountain ranges’.

All these areas were located in what US military strategists would later call the ‘arc of instability’ or the ‘periphery’, and which Blair’s favourite foreign policy guru Robert Cooper called ‘the jungle.’  All these areas would be subjected in the years to come to regime change, war, invasion, occupation, drone strikes, special ops, extraordinary renditions etc.   To Blair’s imperial geography, these areas were only home to ‘ignorant’ and ‘starving’ people who were ‘our cause.’

Many commentators at the time commented on Blair’s ‘moral fervour’.  Few commented on the curious combination of binary ‘good versus evil’ imagery and the glib shallowness that characterised his invocation of a world supposedly crying out for a dose of purgative military violence.

Blair agreed that ‘we’ should try to ‘understand the causes of terror’ while at the same time insisting that ‘nothing could ever justify the events of 11 September, and it is turning justice on its head to pretend it should.’

This conflation of ‘understanding’ and ‘justifying’ is typical of the slick and banal ‘debate’ prevailing on both sides of the Atlantic in the aftermath of 91/11.

No one with any sense or decency was attempting to ‘justify’ the 9/11 attacks, but there were many who questioned the response that was emerging, and feared -rightly as it turns out – that the attacks were being used as a justification for a swathe of lawless ‘counterterrorist’ violence that would be counterproductive and even more destructive than the disease it was intended to cure.

Blair insisted that the action ‘we’ take would be ‘proportionate; targeted’ even as he invited his listeners to support limitless war in the regions he invoked.   And beyond the moral fervour, he also made arguments like this:

Today confidence is global; either its presence or its absence.

Today the threat is chaos; because for people with work to do, family life to balance, mortgages to pay, careers to further, pensions to provide, the yearning is for order and stability and if it doesn’t exist elsewhere, it is unlikely to exist here.

This notion that the ‘chaos’ over there impinges on our yearning for order and stability ‘over here’ has been a recurring theme in the war propaganda of the ‘war on terror’ ever since – almost invariably as a pretext for military action. In the case of Afghanistan, Blair made the following promise:

To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The conflict will not be the end.  We will not walk away, as the outside world has done so many times before.

Now, nearly twenty years later, we have walked away, and the Taliban are back in power.  An army of 300,000, trained, equipped and funded by the world’s only superpower has collapsed overnight, after a war that has cost nearly a trillion dollars and killed more than 100, 000 Afghans.

All this is a calamity for a country that has been the victim of its strategic position throughout history.  We should lament this tragedy.  We should pressure our governments to help refugees, and to use diplomacy and aid to ensure what protections can be put in place for women, girls, and ethnic groups that are likely to be the victims of the Taliban’s latest iteration.

And when politicians like Rory Stewart tell us that ‘The West needs to take an extraordinary long hard look at itself’, he’s right – up to a point.

But from what I have seen and heard these last few days, neither he nor any other politician is looking as far back as they need to, let alone take responsibility for twenty years of militarism that have created more ‘chaos’ and more destruction than the ‘order’ that Tony Blair presented to a country that, even then, should have known that it is easier to break countries than it is to put the ruins back together.

 

 

 

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In the Court of the Brexit King

If there’s  important lesson about politics that tends too often to go unlearned, it’s this: You don’t need to be a genius or a titan to take power and use that power for malign purposes.  In Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi – a surreal parody of Macbeth – the  foulmouthed, halfwitted childlike slob Pere Ubu massacres the King of Poland and his family and reduces Poland to servitude under his tyrannical and arbitrary rule.  The murdered Polish king’s son Bougrelas laments the destruction of his family and his kingdom by ‘vulgar Pere Ubu, an adventurer from who knows where? A vile scoundrel, a shameful vagabond!’

The twentieth century provided many examples of societies undone by politicians with far greater influence than their personalities or intellect might suggest, and our own era of rightwing populism has already brought forth a succession of malignant clowns to power in one country after another.

Here in our own disunited kingdom, we have seen a country that once prided itself on the caution, professionalism and sang froid of its ruling classes reduced to a gaggling chaotic madhouse by the most grotesque procession of charlatans that any era in British politics has ever produced.

All this was made possible by Brexit, and Brexit has given these men – for they are mostly men – the power that they are now exercising over all of us.  At the top, seated in his gilded – and recently re-adorned – palace at 10 Downing Street, is our own clown-king with his consort Carrie Antoinette.  Day after day we see him at one photo-op after another, wearing one new costume after another, thumbs up and hair all carefully-tousled, snickering, posturing and pouring out a stream of Christmas cracker puns and bumbling upper class affectations like a cross between Bane, Benny Hill and Bertie Wooster.

It’s all a bit of a larf really.  Or it would be, if it wasn’t for the 120,000-odd dead, the queues of people lining up for foodbanks, the corruption, the cronyism,  the abdication of responsibility, the evasion of accountability, the misgovernance and the ungovernance, the ongoing economic calamity of Brexit, the pathetic, dimwitted and reckless tinkering with the Northern Ireland Protocol, the baleful gloating at the EU’s botched vaccine rollout and the utterly dispiriting lies, evasions, diversions and distractions that ceaselessly flow from the mouths of Herr Bunter and his pals.

None of this seems to bother the government and his supporters, who often seem as indifferent to the nation’s dizzying descent as Pere Ubu was when asked about the state of the Polish economy:: ‘The finances are going fairly well.  A considerable number of dogs in woollen stockings pour into the streets, and the dognappers are doing fine.  On all sides one sees only burning houses, and people bending under the weight of our finances.’

There comes a point, and perhaps we’ve reached it now, when all this becomes so familiar and so routine that it starts to lose its ability to shock, when you’re tempted to shrug your shoulders and think ‘oh well what else can you expect from the Plague Island Banana Republic?’  But we really shouldn’t allow this to happen, and not only because this government has proven itself again and again to be dangerously useless, but because uselessness is not the whole story here.

It’s now nearly three months since Brexit was ‘done’, and the lineaments of the post-Brexit state are beginning to emerge.  It is not an appealing picture.  In the last week the Johnson government has rammed through one of the most draconian policing bills in British history.  It has sketched out what a post-Brexit foreign policy would look like, and announced its intention to increase the British nuclear stockpile by forty percent.   You really don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to work out what the impact of this increase is likely to be on nuclear proliferation, but there is no indication that the government has even thought about this, or gives a damn.

Now, the Sun reports that the government will be announcing changes to the Modern Slavery Act this week in order to ‘prevent ‘child rapists, terrorists and serious criminals as well as failed asylum seekers…from exploiting modern slavery safeguards to stay in Britain.’

According to the Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole – a greasy political lickspittle who really does embody the absolute worst the British press has to offer – this proposed legislation is aimed at ‘lefty lawyers’ and ‘dinghy-chasing’ lawyers who supposedly mount ‘spurious’ attempts to ‘pull illegal immigrants off deportation planes.’

How does Cole know these attempts are ‘spurious’ or without merit?  Don’t ask, because he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.  For spivs like him, it’s enough for a Tory Home Secretary to assert that ‘criminals and terrorists ‘ are ‘diverting resources away from genuine victims of trafficking, persecution and serious harm’ to believe it.

Now, according to Cole ‘ judges will have the power to slap massive costs on have-a-go lawyers who use template papers and every excuse they can think of to try to stop deportations without merit.’ Never mind, as the Secret Barrister has pointed out, that judges already have these powers.  Never mind that  ‘illegal immigrants’ may well be refugees and asylum seekers with very good reasons for not being deported; all of them are now reduced to the generic category of ‘child rapists, terrorists, and serious criminals.’

As everybody knows, we Brits don’t like that kind of foreigner, and for the constituency that Patel is catering too, there is no other kind.

These policies have been rolled out against a new ‘battle’ in our neverending post-Brexit culture war, in which BBC journalists have been censured for making a joke about the Union Jack, and Huw Edwards – not exactly the Ed Murrow of the UK media – was told to take down a tweet of the Welsh flag.   Meanwhile the government is proposing to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol  – which the Brexit neanderthal Mark Francois has called ‘Danegeld’ – regardless of whether it will be breaking international law – again.

So there you have it.  Police powers to make a Belorussian president blush.  Bellicose ‘global’ posturing backed up by Trident missiles to enable ‘Global Britain to punch above its weight – regardless of whether it instigates a retaliatory arms race.  An appeal to British racism and xenophobia that (almost) makes Theresa May look liberal by comparison.  Aggressive unionism – expressed through flagwaving culture wars and a vicious attempt to unseat one of the few respected politicians in the country

This is our post-Brexit UK, and if it looks just a teeny bit authoritarian and fascistic, we shouldn’t be surprised by that.  Leaving the EU was never an end in itself. Brexit was and is a radical rightwing nationalist ‘revolution’ that has no choice but to continue in the same reactionary trajectory.

To stop or change course would mean recognising the scale of the folly and disaster that the Brexiters have inflicted upon us. They will never do this.

That means we are stuck in this trajectory as long as this government is in power.  It means an intensified ‘war on woke’ to whip up hostility to popular movements for racial justice, gender rights and the rights of minorities, and climate change protests.  It means an orgy of flagwaving, capdoffing monarchism, and ‘if you don’t like this country, leave’ patriotism.

And while these barkers’ sideshows unfold, the government will continue to grind away at the essential constructs that make representative democracy possible – even in its imperfect form – and continue the construction of a strong (Tory) state that will become ever more difficult to shift.

Some may still insist that a liberal like Johnson would never do any of these things.  But he is doing them, and a politician so devoid of morality and integrity was never going to oppose the populist surge that brought him to power.  Johnson was always more rightwing than he pretended to be when he was mayor, which was one reason why he so easily became the poster boy of the Tory extremist wing.

Too many people didn’t see that, or didn’t care.  And now millions of us are trapped in the new country that he and his cabal are attempting to build, and if we can’t recognise the seriousness of the threat that it poses and find a way to build a broad movement of opposition that reaches out beyond the usual comfort zones, our Teletubby Ubu Roi will take us all down to a very dark place indeed, in which it will be very difficult to turn the lights back on.

 

 

The post In the Court of the Brexit King appeared first on Matt Carr's Infernal Machine.

Ursula in Blunderland

At first sight, the government of a country that has just reached the grim figure of 100,000 covid-related deaths and the third highest per capita covid death rate in the world shouldn’t have much to celebrate.  Yet a poll this week suggests that  Johnson and his cabinet-of-the-damned have gained four points, bringing its potential vote to 41 percent.

The main reason for this is the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine program, which unlike most of what the government has done these last twelve months, is moving forward successfully, and has left its European neighbours far behind.

This week Johnson has also received a further boost, thanks to the shambolic response of the European Commission to its botched vaccination roll out.  In the space of a few days the  EU has announced that it will block exports of vaccines to ‘third countries’, including the U.K, and the Commission then announced yesterday that it would triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, effectively imposing a trade border with the Republic of Ireland.

These gambits have been widely-criticised, and  they have given Johnson and his cronies an unusual taste of the moral high ground.  The origins of this dispute stem from the decision by the European Commission to take  control of the EU’s vaccination procurement effort in June, rather than leave it to individual states to do their own procurement.

Whereas the UK had confirmed orders for both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines by June, the EU did not secure its contract with Astrazeneca until mid-August, and the Pfizer contract until November.  The vaccine rollout was further delayed by the slow administrative process, which required input from each individual member state before vaccines could be approved.

It was not unreasonable in itself for the Commission to take overall control of the rollout program, because individual state procurement could have resulted in ‘vaccine nationalism’ and lack of coordination between member states.

In the end the EU signed contracts for 2.9 billion individual doses – more than enough in theory to take care of the continent’s needs.  But frustration at the slow procurement and approval process has now been compounded by a series of disastrous setbacks.  First the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNtech announced that would not be supplying the agreed amounts their vaccines.

Now AstraZeneca has said that it will only be able to deliver 30 million of a promised 80 million doses of its vaccine by March, due to production problems at its Brussels manufacturers.

The EU has accused these companies of reneging on their agreements, which may be true, but there also seems to have been some naivete in the way the contracts were negotiated, which allowed them to look for loopholes, for reasons which are not yet clear.  In any case the EU did itself no favours when it demanded that the UK hand over supplies of vaccines produced by AstraZeneca, on the grounds that the UK’s plants belonged to the same company.

On a purely technical level, this might not be an unreasonable assumption.  But the political optics are terrible, and they were made even worse by the Commission’s out-of-the-blue decision to invoke Article 16, after five years of warning of the dangers of a hard Irish border.  These hamfisted attempts at vaccine diplomacy  have not exactly covered the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her team in glory.  According to Der Spiegel, von der Leyen has a history of poor leadership, and an equally poor record of  unaccountability.

Given the behaviour of our own government, it’s probably not a good idea to linger too much on how a person like that got the job of Commission President. But von der Leyen’s ineptness also has wider implications for the global response to the pandemic. It is utterly and wearyingly predictable that the Brexit press and an army of social media commentators  are absolutely revelling in all this and hailing the UK’s vaccine roll out as a retrospective vindication of Brexit and even a kind of ‘Falklands moment’ for the government (go figure).

Today the Mail on Sunday was citing the row as proof that ‘the nation state, with its lasting common interests, its short lines of communication, its existing structures of experience and co-ordination, its single language and law’ will always do better than transnational entities like ‘the lumbering EU monster’.

The UK’s death toll was not mentioned in that juxtaposition, but no one would it expect it to be. But it really does take the absolute dog biscuit to find Brexiters waxing indignant about the EU’s threat to the Good Friday agreement, but that is what they’re like and they can’t be tamed.

Never mind that they ignored these warnings for five years.  Never mind that Johnson himself has threatened to trigger Article 16.  Never mind that the UK could have done what it did as a member of the EU, and that the EU might have rolled out its vaccine procurement program more successfully if the UK had been a member, which also would have benefitted the UK.   Never mind all that. For the Brexiters, Brexit can’t be considered a success until the EU collapses, and if the pandemic helps to achieve that, then that will be a happy ending for them.

Personally I don’t think this will happen.  Those 2.9 billion doses will eventually appear, and Ireland does not appear to see the Article 16 fiasco as lethal blow to its relations with the EU, even if Brexiters would like to believe that. But there is no doubt that von der Leyen and her team have committed a series of damaging errors, and unless it can recover from them, many Europeans will lose faith in the European project.

Beyond its implications for the European project, the UK-EU standoff raises serious questions about the global management of the pandemic and the dangers of ‘vaccine diplomacy.’   Brexiters might regard the vaccination ‘race’ as a test of national expertise, and revel in the fact that its European neighbors have not yet made it out of the vaccination world cup qualifying groups, but it won’t be much use if the UK achieves its vaccination targets and its neighbours don’t – unless we intend to cut all ties with the continent.

And these disputes between rich countries over vaccine access and procurement also ignore the global disparity between rich and poor countries.  Even if – or rather when – Europe and the UK manage to successfully inoculate their populations, the pandemic will not be eliminated until the whole world is vaccinated.

That is an awesome challenge, and it doesn’t take an epidemiologist to point out that there needs to be international coordination and collaboration  in order to mobilise vaccine production, maximise vaccine access, and turn vaccines into a common social good.

If this doesn’t happen, the world faces the impossible anomaly of post-covid societies coexisting with covid-ridden zones in which the virus continues to run rampant, or which are inoculated with inferior vaccines that maximise the possibility of mutant variants.

That is a lose-lose situation.  No wonder the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that the world is ‘on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure’ because of the global disparities in vaccine access and provision, and the ongoing hoarding by rich countries

The EU has been just as guilty of this as the UK and the US, and it will get us nowhere.  Because Covid, like climate change, is a global threat, that requires countries to act in tandem in their common interests, and to recognise that altruism is also self-interest.

Like so many of the world’s problems it demands that we think globally and act locally – and also unselfishly. That is not what we’ve been seeing over the last week.  No one expects to see it from Brexiters, but the EU – at least according to its own self-image – ought to do better and act in accordance with the values that it supposedly represents.

Otherwise we will slip into a global pandemic response that merely mirrors the gross inequalities that already undermine our attempts to respond to climate change.  We need coordination, fairness, justice – including the suspension of intellectual property rights so that generic manufacturers can make their own affordable vaccines.  The sooner we get all this the better, because contrary to what Brexiters are now saying, these ongoing ‘vaccine wars’ are  not an argument against international cooperation and collaboration, but another argument in favour of both.

 

 

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