Emergency protest: No attack on Syria | August 28
London: Downing Street, 5—7pm, Wednesday 28th August
Britain, France and the US are committing to another disastrous military intervention. Apart from the inevitable casualties, any attack on Syria can only inflame an already disastrous civil war and would risk pulling in regional powers further.
Most people in this country have learnt from the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. According to a Telegraph/YouGuv poll on Sunday only 9% of the British public would support troops being sent to Syria, and only 16% support sending more arms to the region. Our politicians however have learnt nothing.
We need the maximum level of protest to stop them plunging us in to yet another catastrophic war
Join the Facebook event here
There will be a further protest at the weekend – details to come.
33 comments
33 responses to “Emergency protest: No attack on Syria | August 28”
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“Our politicians however have learnt nothing.”
they might be “your” politicians, but suppose i know what you mean –
the politicians have learnt that the huge arms and supplies companies and
massive companies winning contracts and greasing their palms will do
that even more if aggression goes ahead!
””and then there is this small point – forgotten or overlooked by all you stupid lefties, that the way to stop imperialist war is by industrial action
– remember Iraq 2003, and remember the FBU firefighters’ strike of 2002-3?
remember that the uk govt was unable to go to war in another country while
the firefighters were in dispute?
or did you forget?
hope that left unity is able to agree to oppose any us, french, british intervention in syria and call on its branches to call protests. of course to call demos with other forces, but call them.
i think the con of humanitarian military intervention is waring thin. britain out of the middle east. british arms supplies and these arms traders profits need to be sequestrated. the only way forward is for assad to resign and for a democratic constituent assembley to be convened. no support for muslim brotherhood, LIke many who called for a vote for them in egypt. THe syrian people need to establish and build armed militia to resist the jahardy insurgents and syrian armed forces. socialists should fratinise with the discredited army and seek to win parts if them over. assads generals should stand trial! or flee but with their corrupt wealth sequestrated.
seriously: left unity needs to act now!
peteb
I/ll be on the national demo Saturday.
kevin O’Connor
Islington left unity
To the young supporters of Left Unity, and I address only the young supporters because the older ones appear lost for the purposes of socialism, I urge you not to attend this `protest’. You will, I can assure you, regret it forever and look back upon it with a sense of personal shame and betrayal.
Our place is unconditionally beside the people of Syria struggling against the vicious Assad tyranny not protesting for his right to butcher and gas with impunity. By attending you are nothing more than an apologist for a war criminal and the foreign policy instrument of the Russian imperialist oligarchy that backs him. In any case there will be no imperialist action to defend the people of Syria. They have stood by whilst 100,000 have been brutally slaughtered and 4 million bombed off the streets and into refugee camps. They do not care about the Syrian people. Instead of protesting what has not and probably will not except in tokenistic form happen we should be asking: `where the hell have you been?’ All along we should have been demanding the lifting of the vicious EU/US arms embargo on the revolution and seeking international working class solidarity with it. Our failure to do so has boosted the Islamists and emboldened Assad’s military machine to perform innumerable war crimes and left the progressive Syrians begging for an imperialist intervention that will not happen or will not be effective. Assad has dipped his toe in the chemical sea a few missiles will only see him return to conventional mass murder.
Folks the `anti-imperialists’ that have organised this `protest’ are not politicians but sectarian ideologues. Like their intellectual precursors they are extremely casual about mass murder if it suits the cause. From gulags to mass famines and murder to tanks on the streets they will support it if it helps the cause of `anti-imperialism’. But of course it never does help that cause. It merely discredits the left. But make no mistake these same people are no strangers to creating illusions in imperialism. They are the same type who demanded, pleaded, begged the US and UK imperialist class to open a second front against Hitler or to come to the rescue of the Spanish Revolution when there was no chance of it.
This protest has the added downside of managing to make the war criminal BLair look reasonable in comparison. Young people think politically not like a sectarian ideologue. Marxism is critical thinking not a religion. Don’t oppose the Cruise Missile Left by becoming the Poisong Gas Left. The `decents’ and the `anti-imperialists’ are two apparently opposite sides of an ideologue’s coin but they are both as cynical as each other. For us the world is not always black and white but mainly shades of grey.
Once again: do not attend this `protest’.
You are an odd sort of Lefty, but I agree that a few missiles will only see Assad return to conventional mass murder; it will also bring meltdown in the UN. A few missiles will not be sufficient to change the direction or outcome of the conflict, in which far bigger forces are involved, which means it will be escalated at some point by embarrassed politicians in Washington and London, to a degree where it becomes a far greater humanitarian tragedy than the crocodile tears currently on view are telling us.
If we care about Syrians (all Syrians), which we should, we need to demand an alternative UN intervention, with western resources but not under western direction, that really does tackle the humanitarian fallout, by a more systematic approach to refugees, using the UN’s political pressure on surrounding states to provide the room and facilities and incentivising them to do so via conditional aid packages, by UN troops, resourced appropriately, being used to carve out safe areas where neither Assad’s troops not the insurgent militias can operate and get these built into civilised sanctuaries. Weapons inspections should be thorough and even-handed, not just aimed at the regime. Much of this has been tried sporadically, but not really in a fully resourced way or in a way that brings international opinion to bear.
Further down the line, a federal solution needs to be put into place by the UN, because the country is not viable except as a dictatorship based on ethnic and religious rivalry; like Iraq and the Lebanon, it was set up in this way by Britain and France at the end of the First World War and still has the same political geography which underlies this conflict. The reasons for this conflict are the same ones which produced the two conflicts in the Lebanon in recent decades and this needs to be dealt with by the UN, but even this would involve massive population movements just like India in 1947 and Palestine in the same year; it would therefore have to learn from these and require huge resources of UN manpower on the ground, as well as for an incentivisation programme for people to base their homes elsewhere in Syria. It is this that makes it a no-win scenario, but we need a proper plan and the resources and political will to make it happen as well as is possible .
The rest of what I have to say is already on th Discussion Thread on the Middle East, but I am copying it here nopt that the situation has changed:
We need to be aware that the Assad regime inherited its viciousness from the colonial power, France, which played upon minority differences and ignored the clear need to build a more fundamental underlying common identity. That problem – an ethnic and religious patchwork in which minorites have been cultivated as a mode of control – is there for the foreseeable future in Syria, as it is over most of the middle east, whatever the outcome of this crisis. It is the real underlying reason, along with the western mission to control oil, for the region’s instability.
Yes, the overthrow of the Syrian regime would be a serious blow to Iran’s influence in the Middle East, but that is not something to cheer, unless you are a firm supporter of the Israeli government. Western intervention is, to some extent, part of a proxy war against Iran that could escalate massively, and those who are anxious to press ahead with military intervention, including within the Labour Party, are being foolhardy for that reason.
When the war in Libya began, on the ‘humanitarian’ assumption that Benghazi’s residents were to be exterminated en mass, the death toll was 1,000 to 2,000. By the time Gaddafi was captured and lynched seven months later, it was estimated at more than 10 times that figure. Foreign intervention in Libya caused mass ethnic cleansing, torture and detention without trial, continuing armed conflict, and a western-orchestrated administration so unaccountable it resisted revealing its members’ names.
Imagine that x10 in Syria and the added dimension of a war that sweeps through Lebanon and involves Iran and Israel.
At least 100,000 people have died in Syria’s conflict, so why is western intervention being threatened only now, after 350 deaths that seem to be due to poison gas used by the regime?
I don’t buy the argument that when the cause of death is poison gas, this crosses a ‘red line’. Why has a ‘red line’ been drawn over this and not other, equally horrific killing sprees with far more victims?
What has happened is that the western supply of arms to opposition forces, often via its Gulf allies, escalated the war and then these arms started to get intot he hands of Jihadists. In short, the cheaper option for getting the kind of regime change the west wants is no longer possible, so something else needs to be tried.
If people are not prepared to move beyond the fake moralism and crocodile tears of western governments and see the bigger picture and the risks involved in it, then there is nothing more any of us can do. Once war propaganda gets going, reason will leave the arena of debate and even another million in the streets against war would be studiously ignored by our democratic leaders, just as it was 10 years ago. This country’s rulers have successfully re-manufactured a mass base of suckers for what was called ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in the 19th century, but this is an opportunity for LU to show itself to be a principled alternative.
Underneath all the rhetoric lurks a basis for interrograting the UK government: In January 2013, the Daily Mail uncovered leaked emails from a British defence contractor referring to chemical weapons saying ‘the idea is approved by Washington’. In this email exchange between two senior officials at Britam Defence a scheme ‘approved by Washington’ was outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons:
The December 25 email was sent from Britam’s Business Development Director David Goulding to company founder Philip Doughty.
It reads: ‘Phil… We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.
‘We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have.
‘They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.
‘Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?
‘Kind regards, David.’
The context for this is that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are funding the Jihadists and the US and UK are arming the Saudis; we should demand an Inquiry now to join these dots and to follow up the Mail’s story!
Meanwhile, the US-UK allies in Egypt are killing people en masse & nobody blinks an eyelid. The IDF has just raided the West Bank killing 3 civilians one of them a UN worker. Are we going to attack Israel, Nah!
Even as they condemn the Syrian regime’s use of cluster munitions, the U.S. is selling Saudi Arabia $640 million worth of American-made cluster bombs. Cluster munitions have been banned in 83 countries on account of their indiscriminate nature and their record of killing children.
As with virtually all wars, capitalist leaders lie and decieve in order to secure wht passes for a mandate from the uninformed. As Noam Chomsky put it, this is the manufacture of consent. Our main job now is to intervene in this attempt and try to show its true nature.
Baton Rouge’s contribution is not helpful. The reasons for Cameron wanting to intervene are dishonest, th elikely consequences would make matters far worse and there is an alternative, so LU should loudly support the protests and join them.
So you want to impose on the country your own brand of government? What happened to that pesky self-determination thing, again?
No surprise you want Israel to take rocket fire without a blink either, did you oppose action against the IRA on the same grounds? Where’s the usage of NBC weapons by Israel, for that matter?
You’re simply, in the end, creating a situation with millions of refugees who can’t go home and Assad supported by Russia, where he can’t ever back down or resign…
The consequences of this `protest’ being `successful’ are that those who participate in it will rightly be expected to shoulder the responsibility for Assad’s next chemical atrocity whilst the imperialists themselves will make a point of saying that they wanted but were unable to do anything because of Russia and the UK `left’ who tied their hands with the UN. The only saving grace is that the far right have taken the same position as the left and will probably be joining you on your protest. They too see in Assad a bulwark against the Arab Spring and `Islamism’. Whilst Cameron and official imperialism having done squat to save anyone will look like the reasonable but sadly hamstrung good guy caught in the middle.
Quote from the Guardian:
“The bulk of evidence proving the Assad regime’s deployment of chemical weapons – which would provide legal grounds essential to justify any western military action – has been provided by Israeli military intelligence, the German magazine Focus has reported”.
Further on it says “Senior Israeli security officials arrived in Washington on Monday to share the latest results of intelligence-gathering, and to review the Syrian crisis with national security adviser Susan Rice”.
Remember the Suez crisis, when Israel, Britain and France combined in a scam to make it look like Israel had been attacked so that a pre-arranged invasion could take place by British and French troops, using this as cover. For Cold War reasons and to show who was boss in the west, the US stopped this after the ANglo-French forces had hit the ground, but that kind of covert, deceitful fitting up of regimes these old allies wish to attack has a long track record.
It is absolutely true that the manufacturing of a bogus “cause for war” goes back as far in history as the existence of warring states. We all know in the 20th century of the Nazis bogus attack on their own German radio station on the German/Polish border which kicked off WWII, the Tonkin Gulf Incident drawing the US further into the Vietnam conflict, and of course all that bogus “evidence” of Saddam’s supposed WMD which justified the last Iraq invasion, and on it endlessly goes.
However the balance of probability is that the Assad regime did indeed carry out the latest chemical attack on a rebel-held area. But so what — the Assad regime has killed about 100,000 of its own citizens using “conventional” means already , so as a sectarian-based , kleptocratic hereditary dictatorship , we knew it was a nasty regime already surely ? (Well maybe not ALL of us – as some people on the “Left” still think that the Assad regime was some sort of “socialistic” and “anti-imperialist” progressive presence in the Middle East )!
The point for us as Left Unity is what our attitude should be to , a) the current threat of an “admonishing” cruise missile strike against the regime’s infrastructure , supposedly just for its use of chemical weapons, and b) the current civil war in Syria as a whole.
a) In my view the “reason ” for the US forthcoming missile strike is purely a “posturing” one to emphasise to the “small regional gangsters” who run the “lesser states” across the capitalist world , that despite its evident impotence to influence the outcome of the fiendishly complex Syrian civil war in a direction that re-establishes a clear positioning within the US hegemonic status quo, the US is still the numero uno , Don of Dons, boss state in the global hegemony stakes (supported by its craven satraps of the UK and France) – so here’s a completely pointless rain of cruise missiles to add some more rubble to the Syrian disaster – “Just because we fucking well CAN – and don’t any of you local upstarts forget it ! “. I think it’s as crude as that. In fact the Tory grandee , Lord Soames actually let slip a highly sanitized version of this , as ” western power must prevail” on TV last night ! It will achieve nothing else. So the Left needs to denounce the forthcoming attack – but NOT as pacifists , because we need to reaffirm support for the legitimate right of the Syrian people to fight against the Assad dictatorship.
As to the wider Syrian conflict – those on the “Left” who continue to wilfully rewrite history, whether denying the perfectly evident spontaneous mass nature of the original Libyan uprising , or the equally evident spontaneous mass nature of the original Syrian uprising, in order to justify their delusions about the “progressive” nature of the Gaddafi and Assad dictatorships, are free to wallow in their fantasies. The fact is that the spontaneous mass uprisings across the Arab world of the “Arab Spring” were legitimate “democratic peoples uprisings” against unsupportable vicious dictatorships. Of course they weren’t SOCIALIST uprisings – and were full of confused sectarian, religious fundamentalist , and other reactionary currents. So what’s new when dictatorships finally run out of room to oppress most of the people ?
In the Syrian conflict I’m afraid we have to admit that there is no significant, organised, “side” that socialists can uncritically support. The jihadists are profoundly reactionary. The Free Syrian army is deeply involved with US imperialist interests. And of course the Baathist Assad dictatorship is a completely reactionary fascistic police state. So I’m afraid we on the Left have to fall back on a version that old , admittedly impotent, but realistic slogan of the IS in the Korean war – “Neither Washington, nor Assad dictatorship, nor Islamic Jihad – but International Socialism”.
No, there is no “side” currently fighting who meet this criteria – but in the real world we as revolutionary socialists simply are sometimes marginalised spectators of the proxy wars and sectarian strife produced by centuries of colonial manipulation of regions of the world (in this case of course the “Great Imperial games played by Great Britain and France on the carcase of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East in the early 20th century).
One day, we may be a political force which CAN bring real aid and support to genuine socialist currents within national uprisings across the globe. Not today though.
Ahem, in the penultimate paragraph I of course meant to type ” socialist internationalists”. oops.
John, you are saying, on the one hand, that “we need to reaffirm support for the legitimate right of the Syrian people to fight against the Assad dictatorship” whilst ending ona different note – that we have no alternative to standing back and as spectators because “there is no significant, organised, “side” that socialists can uncritically support”. This, in turn, relies on your argument that the Syrian rising was “full of confused sectarian, religious fundamentalist , and other reactionary currents”. What this seems to boil down to is that we should support all struggles against oppressive rule, irrespective of what those struggling want to replace tehis rule with, yet you seem to back away from that.
I agree the Arab Spring as a whole was deeply ‘confused’ and still represents a fundamental attempt to move on from western-imposed dictatorship without agreement on what should replace this or a capacity to outflank the machinations of local power and its imperialist backers. In the case of Syria, Russia and Iran are the imperialist backers and, so, at its heart, the conflict is 3-sided, with the west wanting regime change, in order to take on this role itself, but finding it beyond its political reach. Iran and Russia are winning the proxy war and the Syrian people are doing the dying.
That is why I think we need to focus on a) what can be done to provide safe havens in and outside Syria for Syrians in danger and b) on the need for a messy federal solution, for the reasons I have stated.
The idea that western socialists can enter political debate in the significant way LU promises yet continue to adopt the sniffy and elitist position of ““Neither Washington, nor Assad dictatorship, nor Islamic Jihad – but International Socialism” is contradictory. We have to do more than this, otherwise we sound irrelevant and irrelevance is not an option. My a) and b) are based on recognsing and trying to address a humanitarian concern and on recognising the ethnic-religious geography hardwired into Syria by imperialism, which means that the state is unviable.
John, you say : “irrelevance is not an option”, Well sorry but in the complex politics of the current potential looming ” 1914 Balkan disaster ” of the Middle East, finding a few “progressive slogans” to impotently hurl about does not make the UK Left any less currently irrelevant.
You also claim:
“In the case of Syria, Russia and Iran are the imperialist backers and, so, at its heart, the conflict is 3-sided, with the west wanting regime change, in order to take on this role itself, but finding it beyond its political reach. Iran and Russia are winning the proxy war and the Syrian people are doing the dying.”
sorry John , this is a grossly over-simplified picture of the current Middle East conflict. This conflict has so many “sides” overlaying tensions, and “angles”, rooted in the extraordinarily complex history of the Middle East, that it defies attaching even a catch-all term of “imperialist conflict” to the conflict. Let’s try to list most of the key ones:
1. The attempt by US Imperialism and its lesser allies to steer the wholly unwelcome (for US Imperialism) spontaneous democratically inspired uprisings of the “Arab Spring” (which have destabilised its carefully fostered relations with so many local dictatorships – but also provided an opportunity to bring into the US hegemonic fold previously “awkward squad” regimes like the Assad one – which, pursued a slightly detached economic and foreign policy by virtue of patronage from Russia, China, and Iran), into a consolidation of the entire Middle East , and its OIL, under the US “Grand Area” imperialist umbrella.
2. Russia as patron of the Assad regime – dating back to Soviet days, giving the Russians at last that ancient Czarist ambition – the “Warm water port. – and “tweaking the nose” of its now hegemonic old US Imperialist rival of Cold War days
3. Iran’s sponsorship of the Assad regime. Here though we also have to overlay a really explosive, ancient ,conflict source to the mix – the old struggle for dominance between the Shia (and its Alawite subset) and Sunni schisms of Islam. The British/French 20th century colonial carve up of the Ottoman dominated Middle East played on these ancient schisms, and put artificial territorial “lines on maps” which are rapidly coming unravelled (the Lebanon carved out of Greater Syria by France for instance as the conflict continues to widen – drawing in co-religionists in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.
4. The Kurd dimension. The Imperialist betrayal of the demand of the Kurdish people for a national state after WWI continues to destabilize Turkey, Iraq and Syria. This is a completely distinct “conflict source overlay” to all the other dimensions of the conflict – and will only be “solved” by the creation of a unitary territorial expression of this Kurdish desire for statehood.
5. The class struggle dimension. There is of course, right across the Middle East an intermingled class struggle going on , with basic economic demands underlying the fundamental causal basis for the entire “Arab Spring” series of uprisings. Unfortunately the many other sectarian, cross-cutting, divisive, sources of conflict have so far completely submerged in Syria ( not so completely in the industrial zones in Egypt) the emergence of any significant organised power bloc or fighting force around a socialist or revolutionary socialist objective. And it hasn’t helped that the Assad regime , father and son, has always, like Gaddafi, postured its bogus “socialistic” credentials – on the basis of its dictatorial “stalinistic police state form” and its (now largely sold off) “Nasserite” state owned sectors.
6. The Israel/Palestine dimension; Hugely influential – for decades as a source of unity across the Arab world – and ideological “cover” for most of the dictatorships – quite happy to let most Palestinian refugees rot for generations in refugee camps – whilst weeping crocodile tears at the Palestinian Plight. There can be no final resolution to the complex territorial/religious disputes across the Middle East without a satisfactory resolution of this running sore – but it is hard to see at present this particular conflict point producing anything other than the possibility of Israel going for a “first strike” on Iran’s nuclear facilities – as one more “conflict overlay” component in the potential looming Middle East “1914 Balkan explosion Moment”.
So, John, I don’t actually disagree with your proposals for demands on “safe havens” or indeed the desirability of “messy federal solutions”. However the reality is that the incredibly complex multi-dimensional internal conflict fracture points in the Middle East, many predating Western Imperialism’s meddling by centuries, combined with the current multi power proxy war meddling in the Iraq and Lebanese and Syrian conflicts – holds out a very definite possibility of a real cathartic “1914-type Balkan explosion” right across the Middle East – with an eventual major redrawing of national boundaries and huge ethnic/religious population transfers on a India/Pakistan Post Independence scale. To posture that we, as socialists, with our puny limited “demands” have any “traction” in this dangerous explosive cockpit of conflict is simply unrealistic hubris. We are powerless observers of a potential looming regional catastrophe.
Hope we can have a large Left Unity banner on Saturdays national demo alongside the many Stop The War local groups banners that will be present and supported by Left Unity members.
It is amazing how quickly the Stalinist left have switched their allegiance from the degenerate Soviet bureaucracy to the proto-fascist imperialist Russian oligarchs barely blinking an eye in the process.
It is terribly unfortunate that we now have a Poison Gas Left to go with our Cruise Missile Left. What did the UK working class do to deserve these people who have a petit-bourgeois streak of cruelty running through them that would make Pol Pot blush.
Pull yourself together Left Unity. Don’t be branded appeasers of tyrants and apologists of mass murder. Stand with the Syrian people and the Syrian Revolution. Don’t let the Poison Gas Left blacken their names as Islamists as well as their faces by suffocation. The West has stood by whilst 100,000 have been killed and 4 million turned into refugees. Worse they have imposed a vicious arms embargo on the revolution whilst Putin supplies Assad and the Gulf states the Islamists. They have no and never had any intention of intervening to save the Syrian people. They have no strategic interests there and they are after all only Arabs. Cameron may eventually lob in a few missiles to save face but our attitude in that event should be to urge the Revolution to take advantage and press home their rebellion whilst bewaring false friends.
Friends this is not Iraq 2. Blair invaded nominally to bring democracy to the Iraqi people but unleashed a vicious civil war. Tragically many of the Iraqi dead would now be participating in the Arab Spring. Now that there is actually a revolution for democracy the West suddenly doesn’t want to know because it cannot control it and would rather see it crushed by the tyrants than spread across the region. A democratic Arab world is the last thing the West wants. Do not attend any more pro-Putin demos. Do not shoulder the blame for the next poison gas atrocity or mass murder by Assad as surely you must if it happens.
think baton and andrew are looking at this from a different viewpoint. our role is to oppose british intervention and be part of international movements against imperialist wars.
in my post i mention sequestrating the arms industry i would add to this to use the capital, machinary and technologies to social use.
we can link socialist aims to anti war aims.
Sorry Peteb but this is an example of pacifism in the service of reaction. Did you go on the embassy `protest’ yesterday? How many Putin and Assad thugs were mingling with the crowd? Perhaps they made up the majority? We are supposed to be offering an alternative to New Labour but LU is mimicking almost precisely Millibands appeasement of Putin and Assad. Milliband is going to lumber the Labour movement with the blame for Assad’s next atrocity.
Have you read John Rees’s new book: How I turned a 3 million strong anti-war movement into 20 apologists for Putin.
I wonder if Harry’s Place are no longer Cruise Missile Left now that New Labour have gone over to Poison Gas Left. Euro Stalinism sure has a lot to answer for.
Labour should have said to Cameron and Clegg: Get on with whatever you have to do. You control the means so it’s your decision to make. We in the meantime will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Syrian Revolution, we will organise solidarity with it and we will demand the lifting of the EU/US arms embargo so that the Syrian people can defend themselves against the Butcher Assad. A right that has too long been denied them.
My viewpoint is against all intervention, not just British. We shouldn’t be selective in condemning it – Russian and Saudi Arabian intervention has caused many of the nastier elements of the conflict, and Hezbollah’s role should also be condemned.
I’m not Baton, and I think his views are…not exactly left wing!
John, you have wriiten an awful lot in response to something I wrote which you miscontrued. “In the case of Syria, Russia and Iran are the imperialist backers” was what I wrote and meant. I am well aware of the wider Middle East and its various conflicts, which you accurately depict, but this is not what I was referring to and you have not used your description of these conflicts to show why you disagree with my proposal for LU demands on safe havens and a messy federal solution for Syria. In fact, you too foresee a re-drawing of borders emerging eventually, presumably because we both agree on the fact that none of these states were constituted from below or with any refernce to their ethnic / religious realities and so are fundamentally unstable.
Where there are genuine differences, I will debate them, but you haven’t posed a direct challnege to my view, or at least I can’t see it.
You have misunderstood the root basis of my disagreement, John. Probably my fault, as I did get rather drawn into the the anorak micro analysis of the cross-cutting conflict causing drivers in the middle east. I’m not personally opposed to your specific , “safe haven” idea, or your observations on and need for radical boundary redrawing. I just think they are completely irrelevant , if coming from Left Unity, today.
Frankly, I simply don’t think that at this stage of the unformed Left Unity project, with no organisational “weight” at all, and in the face of a regional conflict of gobsmacking historical complexity (and with no clearly “progressive” or “socialist” mass movement in the arena of conflict which we can support) ; other than stating generally our support for the right of the Syrian people to fight against the oppressive Assad dictatorship, and expressing opposition to cynical and militarily meaningless limited punitive strikes against the regime; for Left Unity at this time to start making specific detailed “demands” of the UN and others is simply impotent slogan mongering.
I simply don’t see it to be necessary for Left Unity to have an ” agreed position” on every conflict across the globe. We need to focus, at this important formative stage on building a coherent radical mass movement opposed to the UK Austerity Offensive, NOT expecting everyone we recruit to have bought into the general Left viewpoint on the role of Israel in the Middle East, or a huge range of other geopolitical issues. Trying to establish a party with agreed positions on everything is , I suggest, all part of recreating yet again the usual exclusive Far Left party, for the far Left socialist inhabitants of the tiny “sect bubble”. Do we really all need to agree about US policy towards Israel or Iran to build a radical MASS political movement to kickstart the fightback against austerity in the UK ? I think not.
John, thanks for that. I actually think it unlikely that LU will reach an agreed postion on much, domestic or international, the way things are going. There are some real outliers on these pages, who have surreal positions on all sorts of things. However, I think thre are ways round that which we need to talk through closer to conference.
I don’t share your view that we focus just on domestic anti-austerity work, though, for three reasons – one is that it has been clear, ever since Marx took on Bakunin over the need to have the First International Secretariat double up as the British one, that there remains a particular problem in this country, rooted in the working class, of hanging onto the coat tails of imperialist ideology, that has been used by our rulers on various occasions to stop struggles geeting beyond the point of militancy. In other words, a succeesful struggle against auterity, or at least a significant and political one, has to be combined with a growing awarness of how this relates to wider international issues.
The second is that this has been made more profound by the War on Terror, which crosses the boundaries between domestic and international politics and the third is that Labour and the trade unions continue to be wedded to British nationalism and imperialism. The political space to the Left of Labour is not just about the economy.
John, I forgot to mention the way in which the far right has been far better than the Left at taking advatage of Labour vacating so many urban white working class areas. This is only partly because the BNP and now UKIP link competition for services to race, cutlure and nationality – much of what they put forward and that resonates is about Britain’s place in the world. WIthin many working class areas, it is the far right, not Labour, who will be LU’s direct rivals, and to tackle this we need to be able to provide a more convincing narrative about imperialism, racism and the nation state than they do. This is hard poltical activity.
There is too much either / or thinking in much LU debate IMHO.
Andrew Crystall
I knew when I joined Left Unity that it would be a broad church, and I largely agree with John Penney that we do not, as Left Unity, have to agree on a particular analysis of the middle east, or have an agreed plan as to how it should be run or how socialism (or “mutualism”) achieved.
Having said that, I really am startled to be confronted by you, an explicit Zionist in Left Unity, that is, an apologist for ethnic cleansing, illegal colonial settlement, and military attacks by one of the biggest and best equipped armies in the world on a civilian population who have nowhere left to run, as they have been chased twice from their homes and restricted to what amount to ‘reservations’ behind and enormous concrete barrier. I don’t want to give a longer list of the crimes of the Zionist Israeli state. They are, or damn well should be, known to anyone who is really on the ‘left’.
I am no supporter of Hamas, but they are the elected representatives of the Palestinian population of Gaza, and to compare the rockets they (wrongly) fire into what was until very recently their OWN country in order to liberate it, with the state-sponsored extreme violence of the Israeli army is simply indecent.
We don’t need to have an agreed position on one state or two states, or any other potential deals in between. I have my own views on these questions, but I am more interested in avoiding the ‘no state’ solution, where the last remnants of the Palestinian people are crushed, transferred, or completely cleansed from their own country.
In the light of this situation, can we, as Left Unity as least agree to support the campaign to boycott, disinvest and sanction the state of Israel until they abide by international law and United Nations resolutions, withdraw completely from the occupied territories (and dismantle the wall), guarantee full personal and national equality to Palestinian people living inside the 1949 borders of Israel, and implement UN resolution 194 on the right of refugees to return, or to receive full compensation.
I note from another thread that you are very fond of United Nations General Assembly resolutions. Can I take it that you support all the UN resolutions on Israel/Palestine that are routinely ignored because of the veto by the USA? Or is your support of the UN rather more selective.
I’m afraid I’m not in the least bit interested in engaging with someone who insists that I am responsible for ethnic cleansing. Bring a lawyer or go home.
Ray G;
You immediately attack me with some very extreme accusations there, apparently demanding Israel’s people be punished for the actions of their government, while you use a very different approach to Hamas, who seized power in Gaza in 2007!
In reality, I am a Labour Zionist, and if (I am not) I was an Israeli citizen, I would have voted for Meretz, a party of the left which is in fact in the Socialist International, and is very much involved in the Israeli peace movement. I light a candle for Rabin’s death every year, to this day.
I am nothing like the snarling demon which you apparently immediately see, based on a single word. I am completely against intervention in Syria, by *any* other county, again.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for the Safe Spaces policy to be invoked here, because I can’t see Ray G’s post as appropriate.
The idea that the safer spaces policy is invoked to resolve political debates is absurd.
I note that Meretz is indeed a Zionist Party, which you freely acknowledge.
Its place in the Socialist international is neither here nor there; so is the Labour Party
So let’s cut to the chase. Are you for the implementation of the United Nations resolutions that have been passed since 1948 on the subject of Israel/Palestine or not?
Are you in favour of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against the state of Israel until they abide by international law and United Nations resolutions, withdraw completely from the occupied territories (and dismantle the wall), guarantee full personal and national equality to Palestinian people living inside the 1949 borders of Israel, and implement UN resolution 194 on the right of refugees to return, or to receive full compensation.
Simple really.
Further to Andrew Crystall
I absolutely did not say that I supported the actions of Hamas or of Islamic jihad in Gaza. I said that it is indecent to equate the violent resistance of a people who have been ethnically cleansed from their own country with the massive state-sponsored violence of a settler state armed to the teeth by Western imperialism that is bent on their further ethnic cleansing.
To invoke the concept of a people being punished for the actions of their government is ironic in the extreme. The entire Palestinian population, both in Israel/Palestine or scattered around the world are being constantly punished for the crime of not being Jewish Israelis. I refer you and the other readers to the websites of ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’ and to the ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign’ for more detailed information.
Let’s cut to the chase, RayG – Either bring your lawyer to court and bring your accusations of crimes such as ethnic cleansing against me, or don’t bother, I’m not interested in engaging with your hatred.
To the mods; This is clearly an issue for the safe spaces policy. I’ll email you again.
Noted
a – That I did not accuse you off ethnic cleansing – but that being a ‘Zionist’ by defintion makes you an “apologist” for ethnic cleansing. I do not need a lawyer. My language is absolutely clear.
b – You refuse to answer any questions on your analysis of the state of Israel or implementation of UN resolutions on Palestine. Readers will draw their own conclusions.
I invite you again to address the politics of Zionism rather than hide behind a purely synthetic sense of persecution.
I address you to the courthouse, where you should try and prove your slander rather than trying to keep demanding I engage with your hated and bigotry here.
I consider your repeated posts harassment on top of everything else.
Why all this talk about lawyers and safe spaces? Nobody is being slandered or harassed here and nobody has expressed hatred or bigotry, and this reaction is entirely uncalled for.
Ray made the simple, and to my mind incontrovertible, point that Israel is committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. Andrew clearly disagrees with this, as is his right; but he has no right to attempt to censor Ray, and to make vague threats of invoking a safe spaces policy (which, as far as I am aware, has not yet been agreed) to discipline Ray. Such a threat makes a complete mockery of any Safe Spaces policy, which is surely intended to protect comrades from bullying, and to prevent racist, sexist or other discriminatory behaviour. It is surely not intended to prevent the open expression of political views. Such a misuse of the policy would in effect trivialise the real discrimination experienced by women, by black and ethnic minority members, by LGBT comrades and others.
I agree with Ray’s characterisation of Zionism. I’m not calling for Left Unity to agree this, or for all members to agree; but I hope and expect that we will, at the very least, agree to support and promote the call by all elements of Palestinian civil society for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to oblige Israel to comply with its obligations under international law. If you disagree with this, it would be helpful if you tried to explain why, rather than flying off the handle and invoking legal and disciplinary threats.
No, he said I was “an apologist for”.
I can only view your post, given that gross mischaracterization of Ray G’s posts, as being of exactly the same nature. If you want to accuse me of complicity with ethnic cleansing, bring your charges in court. Or it is indeed bullying.
Well, that’s quite simple. Do you accept the outcome of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine since 1947, or do you oppose this and support the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and their communities? If the former, then you are indeed an apologist for ethnic cleansing. If the latter, then I would agree that Ray owes you an apology. If the cap fits…