An Uncertain And Volatile Time

To be able to evolve, capitalism needed the legally free person who had the formal right to exercise economic choice. The creation of a class of persons cut free from the physical and ideological ties of feudalism or chattel slavery, to be able to sell their labour in a free market, always was an illusion, an ideological sleight of hand.

Such was the disparity in actual power, the only way an individual worker doing the selling could stand in any sort of equal relationship with the capitalist doing the buying, was to be in some sort of collective, i.e., to be in combination with others.

 

Those collectives enabled the sellers of labour to negotiate more equally with the buyers. This is why they always were and still are, hated and feared by the capitalist class, which will try to drive down labour costs by any means possible. (1)

 

Thus, the extension of the formal right to sell one’s labour, helped to create the modern individual and the notion of that individual's formal and social rights.

 

The strongest (2) of the working class collectives were eventually able to use the growing power of the modern state, which initially was the creation and servant of the capitalist class, to codify workers’ rights and to extend, and protect both individual and collective rights.

 

Trade unions, and other liberatory collectives, then sought to use the power of the modern state, to turn it into a force for wider social progress, or at least, to stop it from being an opponent to it.

 

This harnessing of the power of the state for social progress, reached its apogee in the decades after World War Two. 

Internationally, there was the rise in the power of the Soviet bloc, China’s emergence as a communist controlled state, and a global surge in national liberation movements as peoples sought to gain freedom from their European colonial overlords. 

 

Domestically, in the developed world, liberation movements ranged from women's, black and indigenous, gay and lesbian, and prisoners' rights, to the anti-psychiatry movement which sought to protect the rights of people with mental illness.

 

For a brief moment in time, in the affluent countries of the world, the people best placed to push past the essential iniquities and unsustainability of capitalism were diverted by the illusion of social democracy –  the idea that the modern state could and would act to control capital.

 

Concessions made by the state ensured that too many of the people who were best placed to push for structural change, bought into the illusion that those concessions meant capitalism could be controlled, even be forced into being a benign force for social progress and justice.

 

The power of the myth of capitalist social democracy resides in the people who are wedded to it because they continue to benefit from it, materially and in term of status.

 

These people were and are not the most oppressed and hyper-exploited of the world – the mass for whom the era of post war Keynsianism brought far fewer real benefits, if any; they are the members of the ruling class’s buffer zone: the managers, the professionals, the academics, the career politicians, the technocrats and commentators – all those who keep the system running.

 

And to keep the system running, the most important thing they have to do, is to destroy the belief in any viable alternative.

 

Thus, a key clause in their compact with capital is to make the argument that communism is a greater enemy than fascism; that both are extremes which end in totalitarianism, and the only safe place is in the middle, huddled around what the ruling class declares to be the social and economic fulcrum point. 

 

That the entire set of scales is owned and controlled by the same tiny, venal, power-obsessed, pathological elite it always was, is either not understood or is ignored.

 

The warning signs were posted when national liberation movements were derailed by overt and covert destabilisation and regime changes, and military action by the US and its allies even before WW2 had finally ended, and ramped up immediately after.

 

Any objective reading of history from the end of WW2 to the victory of global corporate finance capitalism with the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and the Warsaw Pact, shows there never was “peace”; and the blood-soaked foundations for the emergence of “neo-liberalism” had been laid much earlier than 1990.

 

The granting of social and legal concessions, important though they are in giving breathing space to oppressed peoples, was always, at base, in the service of the economic status quo.

 

The so-called neo-liberal era saw shifts in the way the capitalist class operates, from extremes of social and economic stratification, grossly ostentatious expressions of power and privilege, and European global domination exercised via settler and extractive colonialism, to the American empire’s apparently more democratic meritocracy, and its global domination via finance-based, neo-colonialism. 

 

There has been a seventy year long heyday for the global buffer class in the form of a steady flow of extensions of formal rights, loosening of conservative traditions, and a widening of social acceptance of previously proscribed lifestyles. 

Accompanying this was what rapidly built into a flood of various sorts of consumables, often useless, or quickly obsolete accoutrements signalling status, and serving as markers of progress for those in the coordinator class whose primary role is to convince people that an essentially predatory and unsustainable system works for the benefit of all.

 

The mass of easily repealed formal rights, the veneer of increased social acceptance, and the bribes of consumer baubles continue to help obscure the fact that the political, economic, and consumer choices available to the buffer class inside the imperial heartlands are denied to the bulk of the world’s population, and inside the belly of the beast itself, the distribution of wealth and power is grossly skewed. 

In a real sense, US corporate capitalism is a leap back, slamming shut the small windows of opportunity that had been opened for a relatively select few after WW2.

To obscure the reality that for most people, the era's social freedoms, formal rights, and consumer choices are either a trompe l’oeil, or are highly conditional and proscribed, capitalism continues to create a mass of obfuscating ideologies.

 

These encourage people to be content with living vicariously via brief, curated glimpses of the lives of the rich and powerful. By dispensing latter day fairy stories, myths, and legends, they allow the mind at least to escape the often terrifying and ugly realities confronting us every day on the screens which now surround us.

 

It is in this wider context that via the alchemists of the medical-industrial complex, capitalism dangles the illusions of body-identity alignment, and attainment of, if not eternal, at least an extended youth.

In the context of all this and a growing right-wing backlash, such things as a declaration of a state of emergency about the rights of the LGBT+ community, by the US Human Rights Campaign, may well be warranted.

It’s both tragic and ironic that in pursuit of their political aims, so much hyperbolic rhetoric and catastrophising was deployed by gender identity lobbyists and activists, many people are either no longer listening, do not believe it, or do not care.

Most worrying, is the fact that some people are now in the grip of payback fever, a virulent contagion which can lead to otherwise sensible and decent people committing atrocities, or allowing them to be committed by others.

 

Some of us have long predicted a strong right-wing and socially conservative backlash against "radical transgenderism", which, if it gains enough momentum, could sweep away everything from such advances as women's reproductive and employment rights, no fault divorce, and criminalisation of marital rape, to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and equalisation of marriage rights - i.e., an entire gamut of formal rights and the accompanying shifts in social acceptance.

 

The target of the right-wing backlash is not just trans people but everything that the growing ultra-conservative coalition includes in its definition of "gender ideology", i.e., any social shifts and formal rights it sees as destructive of the core tenets of familial patriarchy, and of wider androcentric and highly stratified forms of social organisation.

 

This is not just a resurgence of facets of male supremacy in wider society but a livening of its roots in patriarchal familial organisation – the man as head of a household based on religiously sanctioned, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, with women back in their divinely ordained and biologically proscribed place.

 

What the naifs, cowards, and payback merchants on the left/centre of Neo-liberalism (i.e., those who never had, or have given up on any hope of systemic change) failed to realise or to take account of is that we are living in an uncertain and volatile time –i.e., in a degree of wider social disequilibrium that could rapidly tip into chaos.

 

Inside the velvet glove of state granted formal rights to women and to marginalised minorities, and the heavily conditional support of a range of institutions, is the steel fist of neo-liberal corporate capitalism which has a death grip on the throat of the planet.

 

 

1.   From the anti-combination acts, military action against strikers, depictions of unions as "the enemy within", entryism and use of agents provocateurs, buying off leaders, and the use of the "contract culture", capitalism demonstrates its implacable opposition to working class collectivism.

2.  Numerically or by virtue of importance, to the enterprise, of the work being done.

 

More On Matters Maternal

I read what used to be called a tweet on the platform that used to be called Twitter, in which someone argued that scheduled elective caesarian section deliveries are a part of a woman’s right to choose.

I wrote a number of linked tweets about it because it got me thinking about the importance of labour and vaginal delivery in preparing the newborn for entry into the world. Typically for my threads on the spot marked X, it sank without a trace. Hence this post.

 

I had been doing some research into foals born with neonatal maladjustment syndrome.

 

As a prey and flight species, foals need to be up and about quickly, and the mare wouldn’t do well if the long legged, hoofed foetus was trying to gallop whilst in the womb or birth canal.

 

In utero, the production of a neurosteroid acts as a sedative on the foal, making it largely quiescent. 

 

Production of that neurosteroid is switched off during the twenty to forty minutes of the second stage of labour, which prepares the foal for almost immediate standing, suckling and maternal bonding, and movement.

 

If delivery is too quick, or via caesarian section, the foal can remain in a sedated, dissociated state. 

 

Vets found that mimicking the constriction of the birth canal for twenty minutes had the effect of reviving the foal, presumably by stopping the production of the neurosteroid.

 

Human infants are very different obviously but there’s a mass of evidence that delivery via caesarian section is associated with a range of neonatal health issues including respiratory morbidities, asthma, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and neuro-developmental impairments. 

 

Add in the increased maternal risks, and some researchers and health professionals are now arguing that the trend to elective, scheduled caesarian section must be reversed.

 

A caesarian section may be as the result of an emergency, or scheduled when natural delivery is contraindicated for reasons of maternal or foetal health.

 

It is elective when there’s no physical danger but a woman, for whatever reason, elects to undergo surgery to deliver her baby.

 

Caesarian sections are now performed in more than 1 in 5 births globally and the rate has risen steadily in all regions since 1990 –correlating with the global rise of the neo-liberal Medical-Industrial Complex. (MIC)

 

I don’t have data on how many of those caesarian sections are performed because of a proven health risk to mother and/or foetus, but the fact that the increase is at a time of claimed improvements in wider maternal / foetal health parameters suggests it is a combination of: women being talked into it by private medical providers; overstretched and underfunded public health services trying to improve efficiency, eg predicting demand and reducing the hours/days pregnant women spend in the care of medical staff; and/or because of the fear of labour and the effects of vaginal delivery.

 

Regionally, the lowest rate of caesarean section is in sub Saharan Africa at 5%.

 

The highest is in Latin America and the Caribbean, at 43%.

 

At current rates of increase, by 2030, 28.5% of women world-wide will have a CS and the projected rise in east Asia is from a current rate of 45% to 63.4%.

 

The rate in the United States for all hospitals is 32.9%; and in 2005-2015 the rate rose by 50%.

 

Elective caesarian section rates are higher among people of colour: 36% of Black, 33% Native American, and 31%of Asian and Pacific Islander babies. (2018-20)

 

Brazil has a rate of 55.5% overall but 84% in private hospitals which cater to the rich. 

 

In NZ, in 2020, it was 31%; in Australia - 38%.

 

The lowest rates in countries in the affluent global north are in Iceland, Israel and Norway.

 

All surgery carries risks which have to be balanced against the benefits. Surgery, in effect, inflicts degrees and types of harm in order to save lives, cure or slow diseases etc.

 

Caesarian section is known to involve an increased risk for mothers of haemorrhage, infections and blood clots.

 

90% of women who have a caesarian section for the first delivery will have one for all subsequent deliveries and each one increases risk of uterine rupture – scar tissue is never as strong.

 

Caesarian section has long been statistically associated with a range of neonatal health issues including respiratory morbidities, asthma, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and neurodevelopmental impairments.

 

The latter is thought variously to be caused by exposure to toxins from general anaesthesia, the acquisition and composition of microbiota in neonates which occurs in passage through the birth canal, and oxytocin levels.

 

Given the increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) globally since 1990, and the rise in deliveries via caesarian sections, there has been research into possible links, some of which have concluded that the correlation is compelling enough to avoid unnecessary caesarian sections.

 

With the rise of the medical-industrial complex which now dominates medicine, studies that might bring the MIC’s profit-centred and ethically dodgy practices under scrutiny, struggle to get funding and/or the findings are suppressed in various ways.

 

Thus possible links between ASD and birth via caesarian section are dismissed as being statistically insignificant, and researchers and health professionals calling for a reversal of the trend to more and more elective caesarian sections are not listened to.

 

 

The Vendors of Violence

There’s a lot of hypocritical cant pouring out of the western alliance (WA) via its compliant legacy and social media, about the operation of the Wagner Group – the corporatised private army that has been contracted by the Russian state to advance its interests in various parts of the world. (1)

The problems posed for the Russian state by Wagner were very likely exacerbated by its owner's personality and personal ambitions. Once Yevgeny Prigozhin came out of the corporate shadows, he began to act as though he was a national hero and an experienced military leader and tactician. His public profile, and allegations of Wagner’s brutality, compounded the civil-legal problems created by the use of a large and visible military contractor in Ukraine once the Donbas region was formally incorporated into the Russian state.

It’s also very likely that he stomped on the toes of both career politicians and high ranking members of the Russian military. 

As always with its propaganda, the WA, and the US especially, act as though they never use such tactics, let alone acknowledge they were initiators, and are still the key enablers of the privatised military industry which has emerged over the past half century.

The WA’s propaganda – the dissemination of which is enabled by a largely compliant legacy, and easily manipulated social media – obscures the fact that since the end of WW2, its vast military-industrial complex has expanded into the creation of cohorts of powerful private contractors, used by governments or corporate entities, to carry out military-style activities inside other nations. 

The propaganda machine also obscures the fact that those activities always benefit the WA’s (and especially the American) vast military-industrial complex.

In truth, this is not new, it’s a step back into the overt use of violence in pursuit of private or corporate profit, and it flows from the demented logic behind corporate capitalism’s drive to commodify everything. From intangibles like debt and influence, to pornography and prostitution, murder and mayhem – everything can be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold in the global marketplace.

The modern state

The modern bureaucratic state is a relatively recent form of governance, and it was a necessary component of the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Although capitalism grew in tandem with the nation state, initially it controlled the direction the state took, ensuring that it essentially acted as an enabler. 

However, as the power of the various institutions of the state grew, and as it democratised in various ways and degrees, it also served as a brake on capitalist excesses and abuses of power. 

Neo-liberal capitalism, led by US corporate and finance capitalism, needed to rein in the state and return it to its essential role of protecting and enabling capitalist enterprises, whilst maintaining the appearance of democracy and protection of formal rights and civil liberties. 

The first step was to remove state controls over the movement of capital in order to freely shift investment to economic zones where profit could be maximised through more intense exploitation of labour and extraction of natural resources, and the weakening or removal of laws governing environmental hazards. 

Working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives came under heavy attack. (2)

The public’s trust in state owned and run enterprises and institutions was undermined in order to ensure the cementing in of the myth of the greater efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of the private sector. 

Most crucially, the monopoly of the state in the control of coercive agencies such as the military, the police, and prison service – had to be broken.

The redrafting of key clauses in the social contract and selling it to the masses was enabled by the numerical expansion and increase in the power and status of a managerial-professional class – the coordinators and system adjusters whose stake in the economic status quo ensures that most don’t see or acknowledge, let alone question, its rotten core.

This social and economic buffer zone has been crucial in the creation and implementation of the ideology of the aspirational individual, and the promotion of interest groups within the left’s collectives. Latterly this has taken the form of the promotion of groups loosely bound together by identity, moving steadily towards the zenith of hyper-individualism, the ideology of gender identity. (3)

The Vendors of Violence

Given there’s always the possibility that even a fully corporate-compliant state may not act as quickly or decisively enough in the desired direction, coercive and violent services can now be purchased openly from corporations in the form of land, sea, and air militarised forces, and/or security in suits. 

This is not a new phenomenon, like neo-liberalism’s move to the use of contracted out labour, it is a return to older arrangements. 

The idea of the armed forces of the state fighting in common cause against a common enemy is both a heavily mythologised, and a relatively recent, phenomenon.

In feudal Europe, aristocrats or wealthy merchants provided the manpower for their own battles and their ruler’s wars, from among men who owed them fealty of some sort. The most hapless of these feudal conscripts usually wore their own clothes with some sort of token to distinguish them as being on one side or the other. 

Until the agricultural and early industrial revolutions there were practical limits on how many men could be wasted in battle, or how long they could be away from the land or other vital enterprises. It took major advances in both primary and secondary production to “free up” labour, and to create the wealth needed to provide uniforms, arms, and training. 

Prior to the formation of fully state-funded and controlled standing armies and the move to functional battle dress in the twentieth century, most soldiers wore their aristocratic master’s colours, which are still seen in regimental dress uniforms in Europe. 

The precursors of the English navy were privateers, pirates who preyed on Spanish treasure ships and were granted license to so by the English Crown. In effect these privateers carried out acts of undeclared war which the Crown and state could disavow if necessary.

The men who massacred unarmed people at Peterloo in 1817, were a mix of a relatively new state controlled army and private militias formed by landowners and business owners. 

The English and Dutch East Indies companies were the organisational and ideological precursors of the transnational corporations which now dominate the globe. They operated almost completely independently of any state. In pursuit of private profit, they deployed their own armies and navies,  minted their own money, made their own laws, and employed their own bureaucracies to govern the lands they had stolen. 

With the rise in the power and reach of the state, and the use of state funds to maintain standing armies, navies and, latterly, air forces, the operation of organised private armies was reduced, although mercenaries still operated as individuals and small groups.

The end of the cold war 

The principle that the state ought to have the monopoly on coercion i.e., the armed services, the police, and prison, has been under steady attack since the 1970s. These days, nation states, international organisations, corporations and individuals increasingly rely on a wide range of privately owned and controlled military and security services. 

The existence and rapid growth of this industry has been normalised in part by propaganda offensives and in part by the successful embedding of core facets of the Neo-liberal contract culture.

From the end of WW2 there was a drive to pour all direct government to government aid into the development of infrastructure that would not only make extraction of natural resources more efficient, it would enable the movement of armed forces, either of the state or private “security” agencies, to protect the activities of companies hoping to benefit from the infrastructural improvements.

With the shifts in the balance of power that followed the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the digital era and increasingly mechanised warfare, often involving civilian specialists, there was a reduction in the global numbers of military personnel, several millions in total, and a sell off of massive amounts of military hardware. 

As the neo-liberal era also resulted in a reduction in wider employment opportunities in the global north, corporate sharks, especially in the military-industrial complex, seized the opportunity to fill the gap in the market. 

The result was a rise of corporatised armed forces, literal vendors of violence, sometimes presenting as security services wearing civilian kit and bearing only side arms, and sometimes as full scale military, providing a wide range of land, sea, and air services to both government and private entities.

These corporate entities operate openly as legitimate businesses in an international market, most deploying the same sort of opaque financial arrangements that characterise other sorts of global corporations. Some are subsidiaries of larger public companies; some are branches of corporations within the wider military-industrial complex. 

As fully legal commercial entities, the corporate private armies of the twenty-first century enter into formal contracts with their clients and openly advertise their services, all prettied up with the requisite corporate jargon. These include combat and combat training, logistics, and post-conflict resolution, and might include a range of extra-judicial actions such as abduction, arrest without warrant, imprisonment without trial, or assassination.

Neo-liberal capitalism’s commodification of violence, and the positioning of the vendors of violence as legitimate businesses, are logical outflows of globalisation, out-sourcing, asset-stripping the public sector, and returning the state to its core role of enabling and protecting private corporate, profits. 

This is now a huge industry which openly markets and profits from violence and its existence and its increasing power should be giving all sane people pause.

The infamous Leopold II of Belgium privately purchased a vast tract of Africa, and brutally policed its indigenous people with a private army comprising for the most part, thuggish mercenaries. How much moral distance is there between his vile actions, and those of the latter-day vendors and purchasers of violence?

Ultimately, this shift back to the operation of privateers leaves open a number of huge moral-legal questions.

Who monitors them; who regulates and controls them; who ensures the civil-military balance in respect of public policy; who can and will take steps to rein them in, or to punish transgressors?  

What price human rights and international law in such a market place?

 

NOTES: 

1)The brutality of some of the Wagner operatives has been used by the WA in anti-Russian propaganda which, as always, is breath-taking in its level of both gall and dishonesty.

2) There is a contradiction at the heart of the labour-capital relations – the legal right to enter into an employment contract rests on the existence of the individual person operating freely in the employment market. However, that freedom always was, and remains, highly conditional, and never more so than when the might of capital confronts one worker or a small group of workers. In arguably the greatest of all power struggles – that between capital and labour – the more powerful the former, the weaker the latter becomes. To get any sort of balance of power, labour has to organise collectively and the wresting of all labour advances from private employers, and from the bureaucratic state itself, has come as the result of mass collective action. The promotion of individually negotiated employment contracts and the use of fully contracted out labour are retrograde steps aimed at undermining working class collectivism and rolling back labour advances. 

3) Whilst collectivism was the only viable response to the embedded power of capitalism, it exists in tension with the “free” individual created by capitalism, and with the struggles to establish, extend and protect the legal rights of the individual, and of groups of individuals with commonalities. It is no accident that over the past half century – as working class and other great liberatory movements and collectives have been under attack, and the role of the state in moderating capitalist excesses has been rolled back – the ideology of the individual, aspirational self, has been heavily promoted. Like finance capitalism itself, the attendant political movements, have been made possible by the digital revolution.  Like all that capitalism does, this promotion is short-termist – there is no long-term vision; all capitalism cares about is the maximisation of profit and the entrenchment of power, in the here and now. How far the identity politics pendulum will swing and how much damage it will cause on its inevitable return arc, depends on forces that the hyper-exploiters and their compliant minions have probably not calculated as they believe they will be able to manage the outcomes to their benefit. After all, not only have they destroyed, or divided and distracted their only viable opposition – working class collectivism -– they also have compliant state machines at their disposal across much of the globe. Gender identity ideology drags political action into loose and shifting coalitions of individuals who are bound together only by a subjective sense of self. Ahistorical, metaphysical, ineluctably individualist and individualising, gender identity ideology, and much of its praxis, is neo-liberalism’s creature. 

 

 

The first casualty of war

The first casualty of war is truth. It's stating the obvious that reportage can serve an ideological agenda as much by what it does not say as by what it does; by the way reports are headlined; through the ordering of the facts, and by the choice of words.

It's not accidental that RNZ CEO, Paul Thompson, described the text changes that have caused him embarrassment by showing up the laxity of RNZ's editorial controls, as "pro-Kremlin garbage." 

His choice of words is semiotically interesting. "Pro-Kremlin" can be seen as a nod to Cold War rhetoric, and he uses the US-English term"garbage", not the more common NZ English term, rubbish.

The leaders of the old empires and their battalions of besuited minions used to draw arbitrary lines on maps to delineate imperial borders – lines that cut across ancient commonalities of culture, history and religion. This happened across Europe and Asia, including the region that is now the nation state of Ukraine.

Via settler and extractive colonialism, the Euro-imperialists subjugated indigenous peoples across the globe – either dispossessing and ruling them as a militarily and economically powerful minority, such as happened in large parts of Africa, or swamping them numerically as well – as was done across the entirety of the American continent, the Caribbean, and in Australia and NZ. 

US neo-colonialism relies on ideological and financial hegemony, and the seeding of other countries with hundreds of military bases, a process in which NATO plays a crucial role. Since the 1990s US foreign policy has been aimed at forced regime changes. 

Far from the post WW2 era being a time of peace, there have been constant military conflicts, almost all of which, directly or indirectly, have been fomented by, and feed the vast US military-industrial complex. 

In line with the blitzkrieg tactics developed by the Nazis, the US typically wages its wars by targeting civilians, covering the horrors of this state-sponsored terrorism under the euphemism of “collateral damage”. 

When the target’s a tiny Caribbean island, the US manages alone but mostly it does its global “policing” under the legitimating cover of the UN and/or NATO, increasingly from the air, and these days via drone.

Even when its armed services drop thousands of tonnes of incendiaries and toxic, DNA damaging defoliants, or rape, torture, and gun down hundreds of defenceless women and children, as they did in Vietnam, the US propaganda machine writes it out of history, justifies it, or sanitises it.

The blood-sucking planet-killers – those who stand to profit economically and/or politically from war – generate vast amounts of propaganda to foment and to justify it, and these days, to allow only a heavily censored view of it.

Some of the propaganda is so shallow and crude, it could and should be easily exposed and debunked but if it is, it’s always so long after the event or so mired in the digital swamp of disinformation and misinformation that too few people register it, and fewer still care.  

The tactics of feeding censored, ideologically skewed intel to “embedded” (ie politically vetted and approved)  journalists, allowing others to view the action via heavily censored live video feeds, sit in the wider landscape of a heavily shackled profession which, for the most part, has been turned from journalism into churnalism – cranking out schlock to a dumbed-down, distracted audience.

Ideological obfuscation is made easy.

The tsunami of lies that poured out of the US and its accomplices to legitimate the invasion of Iraq included the now infamously untrue claim of Iraqi atrocities against Kuwaiti babies. The claim was made by a Kuwaiti teenager whose anonymity, it was alleged, had to be protected for fear of reprisals.  

She turned out to be the 15 year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA, and she was not even in Kuwait at the time she claims to have witnessed the atrocities. 

The media’s acceptance of the story was aided immensely by Amnesty International which not only confirmed the story but exaggerated the numbers of babies left to die. It helped cement the image of the USA’s former ally, Saddam Hussein, as a Hitler-like monster, and the invasion as being as morally righteous as the fight against Nazism.

None of the leading media outlet, including the much vaunted neutral news agencies, did a background check on her or even thought to question why a country with a population of fewer than 1.5 million people, would have in excess of 300 incubators.  

Instead, they all dutifully parroted the warmongers’ lies – just as they had done fifteen years earlier in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to legitimate the US engaging in its ugliest and most brutal war on civilians since the one in which it set out to bomb North Korea “back into the Stone Age”. 

Russia was wrong, morally and tactically, to invade Ukraine but the failure to contextualise all that led up to the invasion and to put it into the wider picture of the death throes of old empire and the emergence of the new empire is also wrong.

It is not excusing Russian warmongering to point up the USA's calculated expansionism via NATO that provoked this conflict.

No one would question how unacceptable to the US, Russian bases in Cuba were and would be now, or if Russia had a nuclear powered aircraft carriers patrolling the waters around the USA, but our media expect us to swallow the line that Russia has no right to be threatened by hundreds of US bases all around its border, including bases with nuclear missiles or its possession of seven of the world's eight nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and most of the world's NP submarines. 

For the record - a far from exhaustive timeline of US & NATO “global policing”.

1945: end of WW2.

1945-73: Vietnam. Persistent US interventions before & after the defeat of the French by the Viet Minh; with no formal declaration of war, built up to conventional warfare & extensive aerial bombing with incendiary & chemical ordinance.

1947: Treaty of Dunkirk between France & UK.

1948: Treaty expands to Treaty of Brussels & includes Benelux countries – the Western Union.

1948: Communists take control in Czechoslovkia.

1949: Victory of communist forces in China.

1949-1960s: On-going US attempts to overthrow Chinese government.

1949: The  anti-Soviet North Atlantic Treaty signed, signalling revival of European militarism. 12 original members: USA, Canada, UK, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway & Portugal.

1949-63: US interventions in Albania.

1950s:  On-going US meddling in the GDR.

1950: NATO formed to operationalise the North Atlantic Treaty.

1950-53: Korean War. US carpet bombing is aimed at complete obliteration of the North’s infrastructure. Massive civilian casualties.

1952: NATO’s first maritime exercises & first expansion when Greece & Turkey join.

1953  Korean cease fire leaves country divided; larger pro-US, strongly anti-communist & repressive regime in the South; isolationist communist regime in North.

1953: Toppling of democratically elected govt in Iran by by US/UK; installation of Shah whose 25 years of brutality & repression of the left & the intelligentsia sets the scene for an Islamist revolution.

1954: US intervention in Guatemala; resulting in regime change.

Mid 1950s: US meddling in Costa Rica.

1953-64: US interventions in British Guiana resulting in regime change.

1955-70: US interventions in Cambodia, resulting in regime changes.

1955: West Germany joins NATO.  

1955: In response, the USSR & seven countries in Eastern Europe form the Warsaw Pact.

1956: Soviets intervene in Hungary.

1956: US intervenes in Syria.

1957: US intervenes in Egypt.

1957-58: US intervenes in Indonesia.

1958- 60: US interventions result in regime change in Laos.

1959 to present day: US economic embargo, & undermining & support for attempted coups in Cuba.

1960: US meddling in Congo resulting in regime change.

1960-63: US meddling in Ecuador -> regime change.

1962-64: US meddling Brazil – regime change.

1963: US meddling in the Dominican Republic –> regime change.

1964: US meddling in Bolivia -> regime change.

1964: Formation of the G77; the Non-Aligned movement.

1964-73 Vietnam: US  engaged in full scale but undeclared war largely reliant on air strikes including use of napalm, & chemical defoliants aimed at terrorising & demoralising civilians.

1965:  US confrontations with France over NATO resulted in De Gaulle booting out US troops.

1965: US backed regime change in Indonesia; up to 1 million communists murdered. 

1966:  US backed regime change in Ghana.

1967: US backed regime change in Greece. 

1968: Soviets intervened in Czechoslovakia.

1970-71: US meddling in Costa Rica.

1971:  US meddling in Bolivia -> regime change.

1973: US meddling in Australia -> regime change.

1970s and 80s: US meddling in Angola.

1974-76: US meddling  in Portugal -> regime change.

1975: US meddling in Zaire.

1976-80: US meddling in Jamaica -> regime change.

1979: Islamist revolution in Iran makes country USA’s main Middle East enemy.

1979-81: US meddling in Seychelles.

1981-90: US meddling in Nicaragua -> regime change.

1980s: US meddling in Libya & Afghanistan. 

1981-82: US meddling in Chad -> regime change.

1982-84: US meddling in Sth Yemen & Suriname.

1982: Spain becomes the 16th member of NATO.

1983: US invasion of Grenada -> regime change.

1987: US meddling in Fiji -> regime change.

1989: US meddling in Panama -> regime change.

1989: US meddling across Soviet block -> anticommunist revolution in Czechoslovakia; fall of Berlin Wall.

1990:  False assurances from US and European leaders that NATO would NOT expand closer to the Russia borders.

1990: US meddling in Bulgaria -> regime change.

1990-91: US leads 39 nation coalition against Iraq in the Gulf War.

1991: The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are dissolved.

1990s: Manic looting of state owned finances and industry by US led financiers etc caused extreme social unrest, poverty and hardship in Russia.

1991: US meddling in Albania -> regime change.

1993: US meddling in Somalia. 

1994: Finland & Sweden join NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme.

1995:  Finland & Sweden join the European Union, ceasing to be neutral, but remaining militarily nonaligned.

1996: US meddling in Russia, backed pro-west & corrupt Yelstin; probably rigged the elections.

1999-2000: US meddling in Yugoslavia -> regime change, dissolution of Yugoslavia.

1999: Three former Warsaw Pact nations — the Czech Republic, Hungary & Poland — join NATO in same month that US/Nato bomb Russian ally, Serbia.

2000: US meddling in Ecuador -> RC.

2000: Ousting of Russian ally Milosevicz in Serbia.

2001: US leaves ABM Treaty unilaterally. 

2001:  9/11 attacks are used as an excuse to launch the Global War On Terror & NATO expansion, & Article 5 in the NATO treaty, which stipulates that an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all, is triggered for the first time.

2001: US meddling in Afghanistan -> RC.

2002: The NATO-Russia Council is formed to help NATO members & Russia to work together on security issues.

2002: US meddling in Venezuela -> RC.

2002 - current:  US covert and overt ops in Yemen including 400 missile strikes under guise of WoT & support of ally Saudi Arabia.

2003: US leads coalition & invades Iraq -> RC.

2003: US backed “Rose” revolution in Georgia.

2003: NATO takes command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF).

2004: US meddling in Haiti -> RC.

2004: The biggest NATO expansion to date as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania become members:. The latter three are former Soviet republics & place NATO troops right on Russia’s borders

2004: US backed Ukrainian “Orange” Revolution.

2005: US backed Kyrgyzstan “Tulip” revolution.

2006: Belarus revolution.

2007-ongoing: US meddling in, & drone attacks on Somalia.

2008: NATO countries welcome Ukraine and Georgia’s aspirations to join the alliance, angering Russia. 

2008: Russia wins a short war with Georgia over breakaway regions of South Ossetia & Abkhazia, which Moscow recognises as independent states.

2009: US meddling in Honduras -> regime change.

2009: Croatia and Albania become NATO members.

2009: US backed colour revolution in Moldova.

2010: 2nd US backed colour revolution in Kyrgyzstan after PM closed a US air base.

2011: NATO enforces a no-fly zone over Libya. Sweden takes part with fighter jets on reconnaissance missions destroying the lie of its military non-alignment.

2011: US meddling in Syria.

2014: US backed Maidan revolution in Ukraine  -> pro-west RC.

2014: NATO suspends most cooperation with Russia after its annexation of Crimea.

2015: NATO ends the ISAF mission in Afghanistan but remains in Afghanistan to train local security forces.

2016-17: US launched 165 drone strikes in Yemen.

2017: Montenegro joins NATO.

2017: US special forces launch attack in Yemen.

2020: North Macedonia becomes NATO’s 30th member.

2021: NATO & US stage rapid pull out from Afghanistan leaving country in grip of Taliban.

2021: US suspends overt support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen but continues to sell arms to pro-US regimes in the region; SA continues to blockade humanitarian aid. 

2022: Russia invades Ukraine.

2022: Sweden and Finland explore the possibility of NATO membership after Russia’s invasion.

Low hanging fruit

I recently listened to a poet on Tik Tok skewering the UK's equivalents of Clinton's "deplorables" – the "gammons" with their narrow obsessions about celebrities and "woke"– aka politically correct – politics.

He was very clever, and correct in many ways but I couldn't help but wonder, why choose such an easy, low hanging target?

Why not aim at the nexus of entrenched power and all those who serve and protect it?

The creators and beneficiaries of the globe's ever widening economic rifts – those who force vast numbers of people onto narrow and perilous life paths, a fall from which is seldom recoverable. 

The system adjusters who are so focused on the retention or expansion of their delegated power and privilege, they either don't see the looming abyss, or believe they'll be spared by the grace of god, or their talents and hard work, or simply because they're worth it.  

The system manipulators who curate the appearance of democracy, and those who control a mass media that feeds a constant stream of toxic froth and propaganda aimed at distracting people from the very existence of the abyss. 

All those whose cynical and self-serving designs, in the context of rapidly accelerating time scales of interconnected social and natural disasters, make any sort of meaningful position to the power nexus slide from difficult to virtually impossible. 

Why is it just the soft, low hanging, about-to-fall fruit and the windfalls that this poet chooses to macerate?

 

 

 

Striking a pose

 You can be sincere and still be stupid.” 

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Back in the day, Thatcher's bully boys in the right-wing British media coined the phrases loony Left and PC madness. They used them to label and to demonise left-wing local authorities, feminist, and anti-racist organisations, and the trade union movement that was fighting to protect jobs and services. 

The motivation was to weaken opposition in advance of the ravaging effects of the disinvestment and privatisation being ushered in by neo-liberal, global corporate capitalism.

The first thing the Thatcher government did was to remove the controls on the export of capital. That signalled the start of a massive flow of investment to places in the world where corporations could extract more profit by paying less for labour and have the bonus of being able to pollute and spoil to their heart's content. 

They did not invest to improve the lives of workers in those regions. Like the first wave of transnational corporate investment and its associated governmental aid, neo-liberal corporate investment was purely in the pursuit of profit. 

The first wave of investment had been aimed at developing infrastructure to facilitate the extraction of natural resources; the second was aimed at the exploitation of “human resources”. (1)  

Neo-liberalism has been in the driving seat for almost half a century. During that time there has been an explosion in digital technology and a dramatic rise in the living standards, choices, and expectations of the buffer class. 

The price for that is a massive increase in energy consumption, the development and use of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals, the dumping of billions of tonnes of toxic waste, along with galloping species’ extinctions and accelerating climate change. 

The threat posed by AI is yet to be fully grasped. 

Arguably neo-liberalism’s greatest harm is also its greatest ideological success – the virtual destruction of the belief in the possibility of foundational economic change. 

In this on-going process, its media game has become more subtle.

The second-wave feminist idea that structural change needs to be accompanied by attitudinal change, has been transmogrified into the idea that attitudinal change alone is sufficient to bring about such structural change as is necessary.  

For neo-liberalism’s well-padded buffer class, whose members are the most heavily invested in identity politics, what constitutes necessary structural change is radically different from that demanded by the traditional left operating in the interests of the working class.

Underlying much of identity politics (rhetorical flourishes on Twitter bios notwithstanding) is the acceptance that a radical change of the economic base is either not necessary or is unachievable.  All that needs to be, or all that can be achieved, are some accommodations for those who are disadvantaged and belong to one or more of the categories on the current list of approved oppressed-minorities. 

This locates the adherents of identity politics as the progressive wing of neo-liberalism, or the neo-liberal Left. It does not make them left-wing in the original meaning of the term. 

What worsens the situation is that for some of the neo-liberal left,  all that is needed to bring about attitudinal change is attitudinising. As a result, posturing on social media often becomes the measuring stick of what is progressive.

That attitudinising has been deemed by the Right to be left wing and the older, discredited right-wing slurs of PC madness and the loony left have been replaced by woke, the radical left, or hard left.

The neo-liberal left falls into the trap set for them by not questioning why it is that demands which question arguably one of the most universal and foundational of human understandings – that there are two sexes  – are not just accepted but are actively promoted by neo-liberal governments and the giant corporations whose interests those governments serve. 

Their narrow focus effectively privileges demands for extensions of, or even entirely new, formal rights within a politico-economic system that is either perpetuating or deepening gross inequalities and injustices in other spheres.  

Those on both sides of the Identity Question who fail to look beyond the labelling and the rhetoric, are helping to fuel the most recent iteration of capitalism’s campaign to keep divided the constituent parts of a global movement which could bring about foundational change.  

  
(1)   Human resources is a phrase that speaks to the dehumanisation of the process ­­– ­­ living human beings reduced to a factor in an economic equation aimed at increasing the obscene wealth of a ruling elite.