Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains, the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse. "Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right wails as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the new corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other which allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to slip the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

On Propaganda

I just had a conversation on Facebook in which some people were trotting out Israeli propaganda in its most undiluted – almost self-parodying form – in which the harm done to Israelis is amplified and magnified, whilst the harm done to Palestinians and others is denied, or minimised, or justified as necessary and proportionate.

In fact, such is the breadth of the Israelis' denial of harm, where it is acknowledged at all it is excused as unavoidable collateral damage caused by the actions of the enemy “other”. 

By means of the argument that by having forced "the world's most moral army" to be killers of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the enemy has inflicted psychological harm on them, the slaughter is then added to the harm done to Israelis. 

In both the style of warfare it wages, and in the type of propagandising about it, Israel follows the US.

I was accused by one of the people in the conversation of claiming that "Muslim extremism" is “Israel’s fault”, which actually occurs because Islam is an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler religion". As proof of that she claims Islamic terrorists have committed 40,000 acts of terror across the globe in the last decade alone, and cites several especially horrible examples.

This is classic Israeli spin. Israel's critics describe it as an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler state" so the Israeli spin doctors turn that back on Islam which, like Christianity still is, was the religion of empires. 

Only an ideologue or an idiot would claim that Israel alone has caused terrorism committed by people who are Muslim or in the name of Islam, although the right in Israel has played a major role in its genesis and growth. 

The Israeli state itself was rooted in terror; it always was and still is an “expansionist supremacist colonising settler” state that has cynically weaponised the holocaust, and promoted anti-Arab racism and wider anti-Muslim feeling to ensure enough support for its expansionist, supremacist, colonising tactics. 

Leaving aside the antisemitism implicit in the idea that it is Jews wagging the US or wider West’s tail, the originator and main beneficiary of Islamic terrorism is the USA which has the biggest stake in its creation and perpetuation. 

It's very hard to justify a global, on-going "War on Terror", with all the pouring of $trillions into the military-industrial complex, without the public seeing an obvious and terrifying terrorist enemy.

Trump’s ritual self-anointment (dick-waving) as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the least developed countries in the world, allegedly in pursuit of Islamic State. 

People surely cannot ignore the global manoeuvres of US Inc which have contributed to the genesis of Islamic militancy.

Surely all these pro-Israelis admit how odd it was for an estimated 6000 Hamas fighters inside a geographically tiny and heavily surveilled region to have been able to plan and train for an attack on a vastly more powerful neighbour without that neighbour’s much-vaunted military and civilian intelligence apparatus knowing a thing about it.  

We’re expected to believe that an intelligence apparatus which later could plan what, if it was carried out by an Islamic country or group would be called a "terror attack", on a mass of individual Hezbollah operatives living in a sovereign state, did not know an attack involving upwards of 6000 fighters was being planned by Hamas in an open-air prison? 

Israel is governed by a far right coalition which is being held to ransom by a gang of fascists who’d happily carry out their own “final solution” against Palestinians, and some of them are lunatic enough to use the nuclear weapons they’re not supposed to have on the basis that, “if we can’t have it, no one will”.

Exposing the lies that are pumped out to obscure the truth, is not being antisemitic; in fact, it’s antisemitic to not call the liars and warmongers to account because, however powerful the Zionists think they are, it’s power by proxy. 

If it is expedient to do so, the real power holders will pull the military aid plug and do deals with compliant Arab regimes because this is all about US Inc and control of trade routes, oil, rare minerals and fresh water. 

You could cite endless examples – historical and contemporaneous – of acts of group and individual terror committed by people motivated by some form of religious bigotry / zealotry, and keep ignoring the wider context of the extent to which some states have been and are complicit in those acts of individual/group terror whilst using them as justification for committing vastly greater acts of state terror.

Israel’s primary ally and role model terror-bombed Japanese and German cities at the end of WW2, including using nuclear weapons against civilian targets, and it planned to use them against the USSR. 

It then bombed North Korea into oblivion in a proxy war against the USSR and China, killing upwards of 20% of the total population.

To protect western oil interests, the US toppled a secular government in Iran, installed a brutal tyrant whose repression of the left and intelligentsia opened the door to the current Islamic theocracy which the US now wants to wage on.

It blanket bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, poisoning the land and water with carcinogenic  and DNA damaging chemical defoliants. It used the same tired old excuse that they were not to blame for the mass civilian casualties because the “enemy” hid among them. 

It fomented Islamic extremism in Indonesia to topple the leader of the emergent Non-Aligned Movement, and to destroy the world’s largest per capita communist party, anywhere up to a million of whom were killed.

It armed anti-government rebels in Afghanistan and convinced a load of western liberals that the muhjaheddin were "freedom fighters" against the “Soviet-backed” socialist government. 

Now it lies about who armed the mujahheddin and thus provoked Soviet intervention, and blames it on the new target of its war-mongering, Islamic terror group, Al Qaeda.

It told blatant lies (remember the Kuwaiti babies hauled out of incubators?) to swing public opinion behind its appalling acts of state terror in Iraq. 

After using the twin towers attacks (carried out by nationals of its ally, Saudi Arabia) as the justification to intensify the “War on Terror”,  it invaded and heavily bombed Afghanistan before stealing Afghani state assets and abandoning the place to the Taliban, of which it now stands in pious judgement.

In alliance with NATO it destroyed Africa's richest nation, Libya. Trump’s self-anointment as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world, under the guise of attacking Islamic State.

And then there are US Inc's maladventures across Central and South America, Europe , the Caribbean …. and on and on and on…. 

The defining characteristic of US Inc, of which Israel is a key part, is that in pursuit of the right to carry on exploiting, they lie, and they lie, and they lie ....

With “friends” like that, Israelis should not be surprised when they make enemies of pretty much everyone else and most people do not believe a word they say.