Syria, a moment of truth - for Britain

Diane Abbot, a British MP and opposition Cabinet member for Overseas Development was interviewed on the leading radio news programme, Today programme (30 November) following a weekend of massive anti-war protest across the UK.

Abbot pointed out that British attitudes towards PM Cameron's plan to join the bombing in Syria, were moving fast towards a resounding 'No'. The 'Independent' newspaper reported a nearly 60% majority against bombing after polling on 28 November.

But the key question for the interviewer was whether or not Labour leader Corbyn would put the 'whip' on his fellow Labour MPs to vote against the Tory government on this issue. Some Labour MPs, including John McDonnell, the shadow Chancellor and a Corbyn supporter, have called for the vote to be 'a matter of conscience.' But what the interviewer really wanted to do was to open up - again - the splits between the bulk of Labour MPs and the Corbyn leadership. That has been the issue of the hour for the last three weeks in the British political media. What she got was a rebuttal of the priorities implied by her question in favour of a different priority. Abbot firmly suggested that what was involved here was a decision that would have immediate and deadly consequences for some and that added more obstacles to any chance of peace. Abbot continued to underline the necessity to stop the war-mongering. If 'whipping' the Labour MPs to vote no meant that Cameron would withdraw his proposal (he requires a big majority after his spectacular failure 2 years ago, when he wanted to bomb somebody else in Syria) then if leader Corbyn decided to whip she felt stopping more war was the priority, that it was the best thing that the UK could do to end the war - and therefore much more important than any other consideration.

Corbyn has emailed Labour's new membership to check their views. His novel approach breaks entirely with the history of British war mongering. In the past, including in the case of two world wars, the British establishment have started their wars by the decision of the smallest possible clique of the 'great men', and they were all men, who believed that they ran the country. Part of their scheming included how best to engineer popular support. War was always too important to leave to the public. The issue today, the moment of truth for Britain's future as a country, is whether that legacy is overturned; whether a new branch of Britain's war and its deadly effects can be stopped by the decision of its people.

Blair started this avalanche with his foul war in Iraq. He and his successors had to agree, after the stench of the lies and the deaths had settled, that the MPs would have a vote on future wars. (It is astonishing that this simple act was never previously considered necessary!) Today, Labour leader Corbyn can take a further step in elementary democracy. His party will overwhelmingly oppose Cameron's bombing. And so should his MPs. This is an important test. Whether Labour represents its base, its supporters (and now the majority of the population) or whether a collection of individual MPs represent their establishment consciences. Firm action, like Abbot's firm words this morning, based on the real priorities, will have the greatest chance of success both against the bombing, and also against the coming internal rebellion by some Labour MPs.

Osborne, the settlement and the 36%ers

In the UK, prior to World War 1, government spending was around 15 % of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Then, after the war it rose to 25 % of GDP and remained at that level, except for a surge at the start of the depression in the 1930s. After World War 2, public spending returned to a steady 35 % of GDP and this level was maintained through the 1950s. By 1960, state expenditure began a steady rise that peaked in the early 1980s at 45 % of GDP. This period coincided with the highest point of trade union strength and organisation ever achieved by the British working class movement.

During the 1980s public spending declined from 45 % of GDP to 35 % by 1989. But then, with the ERM sterling crisis and associated recession, it rose back to 40 % of GDP before reducing again to 36% in 2000. After 2000, public spending increased rapidly, with a peak of 45.5 % of GDP in 2010 - in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 - followed by reductions to 42.2% (2014-15.)

By way of comparison as a share of national income, German government expenditure was about 15% before World War 1, 25 % during the interwar period, 35% in 1960, 48 % in 1975, and 50% by 1980-81. The German share of government spending rose to well over 50 % during the early 1990s - but Merkel's government's main policy was to drive down public expenditure and Germany now spends 44% of its GDP which is described in leading German economic circles as 'healthy.' The government's share of spending in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, Italy etc., all showed the roughly same gradual increase in spending as occurred in the UK the 1980s but in modern times they have all reached far higher levels of state expenditure relative to GDP than that of the UK.

In contrast to these European nations, in the most recent period, the United States government expenditure averages 37% and Japan, (before last year’s trillion dollar Quantitative Easing) around 33 % of GDP. (As a matter of interest Japan's QE spending now means that Japan's national debt has risen to 300% of their GDP, 180% higher than the national debt of Greece.)

The point of all this is to give a context to current and previous Tory strategic economic goals since WW2. It is no surprise that by 2020 George Osborne mostly hopes to be Prime Minister but he is also certainly expecting (as a result of his current spending review) for government spending to have reduced to 36% of GDP or less by 2020. Starting from where Thatcher left off, and already with a record of cutting government expenditure by 10% in the course of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, George has high hopes of triumph on both counts. With a another round of privatisation of state assets including air traffic control, he expects to be leading the final charge towards lean US government spending levels as the new norm and therefore to reach the, thus far, elusive Tory economic Nirvana.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (27 November) put it this way:

Total government spending (is) due to fall from 40.9% of national income in the last tax year to 36.5% by the end of the decade. As part of that, spending on non-pension benefits (is) being cut to the lowest level in 30 years relative to national income. Also that 'the 3% cumulative increase in health spending over the next five years is not far off the average annual increase in spending in the last 50 years.'

But George has some problems.

First the entrails of his magic trick in the Spending Review are quickly being exposed. Most people interested now know that Universal Credit - less than 2 years away - is going to make nearly 2 million of the poorest people in the UK a lot poorer. Second, stating last July that the cuts in Tax Credits were essential to Britain's successful economic future Osborne reversed himself in November apparently as a result of listening to those Liberal Lords he previously lambasted and threatened with sorting out. Third, Osborne's assumptions rest on the creaky predictions of the Office of Budget Responsibility's figures for government income over the next 5 years. These people have the worst record for predictions since Chamberlain gave the British 'Peace in our Time.'

The real problem for Osborne is of course that there is an entirely new factor in British politics - and it keeps pushing into the previous settled life of the mainstream. Osborne had to retreat because a mass movement, that has so far successfully stopped a Tory PM from bombing Assad's Syria, that most recently occupied the empty Labour Party and set up its new leader, had started the most holy of public rows and public actions about Osborne's latest attacks on the poor. This is the new and nerve racking reality that would-be PM Osborne faces. That there is now a genuine anti-austerity (and anti war) alliance in society, the latter about to be tested once again, that stretches out from the streets, across parties like the Greens and the SNP and now the Labour Party leadership was not expected. These new alliances face a Tory Party that achieved barely 37% of the vote. The real relationship of social forces in British society are beginning to show themselves, and Britain's ancient, corrupt and overweaning political system is feeling the strain. It cannot contain the new person on the bloc.

This weekend Tory grandees are ringing right wing Labour MPs to set up their own alliance - to counter the anti-war movement and sentiment in the country. And so the emergence of two great coalitions is gathering its momentum as British society begins to decide where it stands and starts to polarise on the great issues of War, Wealth and Power. The Tories, leading a (big) section of the Labour MPs on the most critical questions, supported in the county by 9/10ths of the media, the rich, sections of the middle classes, the Generals and the key officers of state; face a new Labour leadership, a growing movement in the streets led by the Peoples Assembly, a range of the more radical parties, most of the unions and the social campaigns and movements and most of the young, in what will be the only fight worth having for the future of Britain.

This is strong stuff and Osborne's petty ambitions are begining to melt away, as the Scots will have it, 'like snow off a dyke.'

The real origins of ISIS.

A reader has chided this blog for adopting an out of date and simplistic view of ISIS in particular, and of Islamic fundamentalism in general. (See 'War on France', 16 November.) Imperialism's role in the Middle East, according to the reader's view, does not wholly or even mainly explain fundamentalism's emergence and its significant impact on world politics today.

The specific origins of ISIS and the unrolling of its etymology are detailed on many sites (see for example the 'Independent' 14 June 2014.) However, from the point of view of political analyses it is perhaps more tempting to start from the US President's assertion that ISIS emerged, albeit as an unwelcome consequence, from the US led Iraq invasion. But this statement could certainly lead to crude misjudgments. The modern resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism (its origins are in the late 19th century) predates the Iraq invasion and first surfaces, in terms of its global impact, from two events, the Iranian revolution and then the Mujaheddin's successful war, sponsored by the US, against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, 1979 - 89.

The USSR's defeat in Afghanistan was a progenitor of the unraveling of the Soviet Union. And it is common ground among commentators and political historians today to see the collapse of the Soviet Union as the final moment, if not the cause, of the slow motion car-crash of radical Arab nationalism that had been the dominant political form of insurgency against western imperialist powers in the Middle East from 1949 until the end of the 1970s. (The highpoint of Arab socialist-nationalism was best summed up by the brief United Arab Republic 1958 - 61 - a unification of Egypt and Syria until a Syrian coup brought it down.)  After Nasser, both Quaddafi in Libya and the Palestinian fight for nationhood started from the previous Egyptian model. The long term corruption and degeneration of the Libyan regime and the failure of the Palestinian leadership that had been schooled and supported by the USSR, meant that Nasser's 1950s victory against France and Britain was never enlarged into a cross Arabic 'solution', and the Palestinian cause never became, in practice, the prime cause of all the Arab nations. Instead, Arab nationalism, despite the brief unity between Syria and Egypt, remained stillborn.

As a result, from the late 1950s the US, aided and abetted by the British, installed and then continued to consolidate a series of pro-western regimes (including the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as well as in Israel) across the region. So by the time the USSR collapsed there was no longer any Arab based, independent, radical and autonomous, mass political current, to give expression to the aspirations of one of the most downtrodden and badly ruled sections of the world's population.

In the absence of a nationalist/socialist perspective, and following the defeat of the US in Vietnam, the revolt against the domination of imperialist power and its local regimes finally found a way to erupt in Iran under the banner of Islam - as the only available means to express independence from the West. Meanwhile the Mujaheddin, fellow Muslims (albeit for some, members of the wrong sect) in Afghanistan, had started the long journey which would 'bring down' an 'evil empire' in the East.

The final collapse of the USSR stunned the world. The US century was announced. 'History' had apparently ended, and a third world guerrilla army (albeit with access to enormous funds) had defeated one of the monoliths of the 20th century - which - together with the Sunni Islamic victory in Iran, attracted most of the Middle East's attention. It is therefore no surprise that this world shaking event, coupled with the complete failure of the nationalist/socialist project, inspired a new cadre of leaders in the Middle East to return to the fantasy of the glory days of the Islamic Medieval Empire for their inspiration.

All this is relatively familiar ground. But the criticism of the reader remains unanswered. The absence of something, in this case a political current promoting Arab nationalism and socialism, does not explain what is it that comes to fill that absence or why that new force is seemingly so successful.

First though, the calumny promoted by Western 'Arabists', that the whole fundamentalist mobilisation in the Middle East is simply a return to the factional and sectarian wars equivalent to the wars of the Western European Reformation in the 16th and 17th century, should be challenged. The current divisions in Islam politically speaking are nothing to do with deep scholarly argument. In the modern world they are the factional response to a leadership crisis - both at the level of rulers of states and their influence, and at the level of the competition to build mass movements on the streets.

The key to this leadership crisis is how a mass movement can best be built and for what. Al-Qaeda, led by rich sons of a dispossessed western caste, understood their role in terms of the drama of violent political action, inspired by a God like figurehead, against the de facto Western domination of the holy centre of Islam. ISIS has such leaders but has moved beyond the Al-Qaeda model in favour of the creation of a physical and geographical base that is deliberately hostile and belligerent to all surrounding political entities. From this pole ISIS seeks to create an international mass movement with an equally polarising perspective where the world joins the army of the blessed or is annihilated.

In other words Sunni and Shiah hostility may exercise the ruling families in Iran or Saudi Arabia and may be used as a means to an end by ISIS, but ISIS has killed a virtually equal number of Shiah and Sunni Muslims, and many more of each branch of Islam than western Christians or Atheists. It is in no way parallel to the early modern European experience. It is not one sect taking on all the other local sects for dominance of its branch of Islam. It has a global purpose. It is a global phenomena emerging from its regional context. Its purpose is to change the whole world or to die trying.

ISIS has its own Sunni - Wahhabi version of Islam and, for example, uses Saudi books in its schools - but its main philosophy, and recruiting sergeant, is its continuous references to 'the End Times' which fill ISIS propaganda. It is particularly aimed at foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today (Iraq and Syria) lend credibility, ISIS claims, to the prophecies in the Quran. ISIS has stoked this apocalyptic fire. For Bin Laden's generation the apocalypse was not the point. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and local tyranny than against the unbelievers. Today, apocalyptic recruiting makes much more sense. (See William McCant 'The ISIS Apocalypse ...')

And the 'end of days' has a particular potency in the world of 2015.

At the beginning of the 20th century Lenin described imperialism as 'the highest stage of capitalism.' This idea got tangled up with the notion developed by Marx that social and economic systems continue to dominate when they continue to develop the productive forces. They falter when they reach the end of their potency in that regard. The subsequent combination of these two ideas often resulted in cast iron 'scientific' predictions about the inevitable fall of capitalism. And, in the middle of WW1 or the Great Depression the idea of the imminent collapse of capitalism was a great succour to many - and so the leaders who promoted this idea (like Kautsky) tended to receive a lot of support.

Instead capitalism survived, as did imperialism. And many thinkers and leaders in the West, the East and the South would claim today that capitalism is permanently revolutionising itself, and is therefore constantly capable of reorganising the productive forces of the planet. The process may be brutal. It may be profit driven. But China and other members of the BRIC, with the intendent reduction in absolute global poverty, are the latest demonstration of the constant emergence of novelty in the capitalist system of production.

At the same time the 'old' imperialism has been pushed back, militarily defeated in the case of India or more latterly SE Asia. The West still dominates the world economically, but the West's influence is reducing, dramatically. Western Imperialism's grip on the world (compared with most of the 20th century for example) seems to be progressively slipping.  So; we have the continued advance of the capitalist system at the same time as the continued decline of imperialism, which was supposedly capitalism's highest stage.

From the oppressed of the world's point of view however, this pleasant scenario seems deeply flawed. There is of course a connection between the weakening of Western imperialism and the tremendous growth of several of the major ex-colonial countries in the world. It starts from the fact that millions in the colonial part of the planet spent decades and their blood on an enormous scale to push the imperialists back. And there is no doubt that poverty was reduced when Western nations were no longer able to organise their own interests in these colonies and dependencies at the point of a bayonet. But the response to this weakening of global capitalism's political and military structures was not the renovation and renewal of its technological and productive forces. The ex-colonies could now have their own industrial revolutions. They could allow capitalist economics in; in the shape of the great multi-national companies while sharing their profits and technologies for the first time - a completely impossible state of affairs under the previous dispensation. And what commodity could they sell in return? Labour.

Globalisation is the capitalist system's response to the weakening of western imperialism. Globalisation, and even the new means of communication, are not at all the renovation of capitalism, not the renewal of technique and of all of the other productive forces. They are the expansion of the 'traditional' imperialist market, with its dependence on finance and the banks as the core or dynamo of the system, (as Lenin described) to the biggest ex-colonies. Imperialism has turned out to be the 'highest stage of capitalism' by virtue of ... the partial defeat of the imperialists!

This is the opposite picture to the idealised notion that capitalism has overcome its contradictions. The decline of capitalism's political and military global reach stands in stark contrast to its apparent economic success. And a moment's reflection about the nature of this economic 'success story' is enough to realise that our present dominant economic and social system is less able than ever to resolve the major problems our society faces. (By way of comparison consider the approach of the capitalist world and its leaders in 19th century Britain or in the 20th century US.) From global warming to economic and social polarisation, to the almost total absence of genuinely new technologies which expand the productivity of labour, the decline of invention and the failure of the 'electronic and digital revolution' to transform production, as opposed to the increased exploitation and concentration of labour in the creation of new and inessential or labour monitoring products, the absolute 'investment strike' by capital in the field of new forms of production - all these describe an economic system that is motoring down. And that of course is what is happening, first in the most developed countries.

The decline of imperialism and the gradual degeneration of global capitalism is, of course, reflected politically - most dramatically - in those places which focus the world's contradictions, like the modern Middle East. Western imperialsm failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, failed in its project for a two state solution for the Palestinians, failed to defend the 'Arab Spring', is now bombing two Middle East countries and is likely to have to ally with Russia (and Assad) simply to gain some sort of stasis. Western populations are full of fear and open to any 'solution' to make the Syrian problem 'go away.'

This is the context for the emergence of apocalyptic and reactionary projects. It is the material base for irrational movements that are based on the belief of the coming end of the world. The strength of their appeal lies in the increasing barberism of daily life in countries like Syria or Iraq, now almost completely ruined by the West. Once this is seen as the cockpit, the meaning, the centre of the world, then the 'great conflict' between the saved and their enemies can begin. There are many parallel developments, even in the US, where the traditional Republican right has been transformed by a populist millenarianism which is also stowing away its machine guns and counting down the days - as well as promoting a racist, religious bigot, or two, for Republican President.

Reactionary populist movements are the sign of the breakdown of capitalist and imperialist 'rationality', or 'common sense.' When social systems began to labour and groan in face of the mounting contradictions of their world in past history, large sections of the population comforted themselves with ideas that the world would soon end. Christianity largely served that purpose as the Roman Empire fell. The ragged collapse of Fueudalism across Europe saw the same sublime madness break out of the insecurities of daily life and the toppling of the old world. The English Revolution of the 1640s produced similar ideas and organisations.

Today, when we understand that the world can only be turned to the better by the conscious action of the billions who inhabit it, where, since 1789, humanity has been struggling to find a rational and moral way to run society in the interests of the majority; succeeding here and there, driven back, leaving this question of question still to be resolved; those who have only seen the collapse and apparent failure of such rationalist purpose are still angry and still feel crushed. They also act, in their rage, and in their imagination such a world that they are in cannot possibly continue to exist,

The emergence of organisations like ISIS is a response to the weakning grip of Western Imperialism including its grip on its client regimes. It is also a response to the weakening world where the dominant social and economic system seems to have betrayed the future and polarised humanity. It uses the grandious and empty fantasy of the past to rationalise its own dead-end purposes. It is not simply a product of a 'hammering' by Western imperialists, nor the decline and defeat of the 1917 revolution and its sway across the world. Ultimately its flirtation with death and the final trump is but another torrid reflection of an economy, a politics, a society that has no answers and which seems to be shaking and cracking apart.

Blair's ghost riders in action

Yesterday (17 November) the British parliament saw a dry run in the construction of the new cross-bench war party. Tory leader, Prime Minister Cameron, was supported and praised by a selection of Labour MPs in his call for British bombing in Syria and the need to accept the use of deadly force when fighting domestic terrorists. In the background Westminster was speculating about the date that Cameron would put the Syria vote to Parliament to reverse his 2-year-old defeat. Behind that came the news that the Scottish National Party were putting an anti-Trident motion in 2 weeks while Labour MPs were queuing up to vote it down - despite the Labour leadership's call to abstain.

Labour's PARTY crisis is deepening. A new and separate Labour Party, a Labour Party completely independent of the bulk of its membership, is emerging in Parliament.

The argument over bombing or not bombing Syria has not changed. The killings in Paris have created an emotive edge in the debate in Britain, although terrorist bombings have been crashing through a swath of countries since the end of the summer. Paris makes it more local. But it was only 3 November when Britain's Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee, chaired by leading Tory, said no to bombing. Yet efforts are now in overdrive among Britain's political leadership to finally tear down and clear away the effects of the stinking remains of Blair and Bush's Middle East adventure in the minds of the British public.

As for 'shooting to kill', Cameron (and his Labour followers in Parliament) were careful to dissolve what is already common law in the UK into the argument about the British state's historic 'shoot to kill' injunction. It is has always been perfectly legal (and moral) for police personnel, or any person, to defend themselves from mortal danger - up to and including causing the death of their attacker. Of course this may be tested later in court but the principle is clear. Equally, if a member of the police force kills someone who is in the act of trying to kill another person, then that is also regarded as legitimate defense. If one of the Paris murderers who were killing people in a concert was shot and killed by the police, this would be entirely legal under British common law. But that is not, and has never been, Britain's 'shoot to kill' policy.

Under the British policy people were shot and killed who were carrying no weapons, which presented no danger to the public at the time of their death, who were not involved at the time in any action that could be identified as dangerous to public safety. These were the opinions and the statements of enquiries and courts not political 'appeasers.' When state authorities are allowed, even encouraged, to blur the key distinctions between a suspicion that someone is plotting harm, and the harmful action itself, as the basis of their response, in this case a deadly response, that is a disaster. Not only have they created a secret state beyond and above the law we all are required to live by, they have created martyrs and heroes, and destroyed families and trust across key communities.

The crisis in Labour's parliamentary party illustrates a modern fact of life. The old political structures are unable to contain the new political forces at work in our society. The traditional parliamentary lines of divide do not represent and therefore do not contain the attitudes and issues that animate increasing numbers of the British public. Labour's parliamentary right wing have started to take their leave. It is surely time for Labour's left leadership to reach out for those practical, day to day alliances, both inside parliament, Holyrood in Scotland and in the Welsh Assembly as well as to the movements outside the collapsing Westminster bubble, to begin the creation of a new, wider formation, with the combined strength of purpose to show a new way for the whole of society.

British media shoot Corbyn from the hip

A great row about killing has broken in the British media and among a large number of Labour MPs. The 'terrorist appeaser' as the Daily Mail called the new leader of the Labour Party said that he was not happy with a state policy of 'shoot to kill'. The demand has now been raised more generally that he must not attend the Stop the War Coalition Christmas fundraiser on December 11 as that might signal that he doesn't want to kill terrorists enough.  The British State's 'shoot to kill' (constantly officially denied) policy has a terrible history. But Jeremy Corbyn has a noble part in it.

The May 1984 Stalker enquiry noted that at least 5 Irish Republicans had been killed by British Special Forces without legal reason. The European Court of Human rights (1982 -92) echoed the lack of legal basis for 14 separate British killings. The Bloody Sunday Report (June 2010) meant that Prime Minister Cameron had to apologise to the Irish people for the exercise of a 'shoot to kill' policy by the British Paras on the streets of Derry. Corbyn fought long and hard for these enquiries, for the families who had lost their members, against the braying, jingoistic media, the legions of Tory and Labour MPs who's reaction to critical questions was to wave their union jacks more vigorously than ever and bellow 'hear hear' to the bellicose pronouncements of a string of pumped up Defence Ministers.

So, it turns out that Britain's 'shoot to kill' policy has nothing to do with the police defending people when someone is shooting at them. A moment's thought makes that clear. Even if the police were inclined to act in that way, it is virtually impossible that they would find themselves in the middle of such an incident. No. It is, in effect, the right of the state to kill people that it thinks might be dangerous to its interests without any evidence that could stand up in a court. (Hopefully when no-one else is looking.) Almost by definition the shoot to kill policy could only apply after a terrorist attack or worse, before a 'suspected' terrorist attack.

Sadly (for the police) the last time they applied the 'shoot to kill' policy in a 'suspected terrorist' situation they shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian student at Stockwell Tube Station in July 2005, just after the 7.7. bombings - in front of everybody.

Next: more on Britain's political leaders and 'terrorism.'

War on France

Nabila Ramdani, a French journalist writing in the British ‘Observer’ (15 November) reminded her readers of the French victory in football’s World Cup in the Stade de France in 1998. A team that mainly consisted of working class boys from immigrant families won the cup for France. Ms Ramdani waxes nostalgically over the unity of the country expressed by that moment and now lost.

In 2005 the Paris (and many other French city’s) ‘banlieues’ erupted. But the subjects of the riots were the alienated and disengaged youth. The political, social and psychological investigations and polls that subsequently analysed and then re-analysed these ‘eventements’ disposed of the notion that their object had anything to do with a wish for a universal Caliphate.

Has this changed? When French president Hollande spoke to the nation on the night of the attacks, he told his fellow citizens that France ‘was at war.’ More than one commentator wondered in the acres of worldwide print and internet chatter that have followed Hollande’s speech, exactly who is this war to be fought with? Part of Hollande’s answer came on the Sunday 15 November when French warplanes ‘attacked’ ISIS in Syria. The raid, including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped. Revenge – even from a half mile high – is obviously sweet.

The terrible killings in France (and Hollande’s response) have wide and deep roots and will have similar extensive consequences. But it is better to look first at one significant detail to establish some solid ground before contending with the sea of fevered speculation now roaring across the western world. It was not widely reported in the western media but the internet reaction by ISIS to Germany and Sweden’s initially positive response to the wave of refugees flooding across Europe to escape the results of the Syrian war was entirely negative. ISIS has a global perspective (unlike the idiots in France, the UK and elsewhere who now turn their dream of closed borders into the apparent means required to prevent the influx of terrorists.)

Borrowing from Mao and Latin American revolutionaries ISIS has established its own version of ‘Red Bases’ across Iraq and Syria and is now looking for a population (an agency – in the terms of various Marxist theorists) to float its global boat. The ISIS leadership is well aware that it can already use some of the flotsam and jetsam produced by the friction of racism, economic and political polarization and alienation in the west. When the 5% of France’s population that are from North African heritage are dubbed ‘the Muslim community’ (when barely 50% acknowledge any religion at all) it makes it all the easier to badge the discontent of the most lost souls in the banlieue with a religious emblem. But these are a handful of people in a whole nation. The wells that ISIS wants and expects to draw from are the vast Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and the Lebanon. Here there are least 4 million  – without any of the facilities of modern civilization, teeming with boys and girls without education, without any economic life, with the experience of victimhood by way of war, increasingly without hope and yet full of a most furious energy.
It is the west’s imperial past and its consequent disastrous initiatives in the Middle East today that have produced the critical combination that exploded in France on 13 November (and in Syrian skies two days later, and in Turkey, the Lebanon, and over Egypt and in the Yemen, all in the last two months.) So racist responses in the west, like closing borders, will help turn the ISIS support in besieged communities in the west from the handful to the hundreds perhaps, but much more significantly produce a potential mass base in the Middle East that are able to find no succor in or from Western Europe.

Blair and Bush’s’ war in Iraq opened the gates of hell in the modern Middle East. First they destroyed Iraq. The US and the west’s staunch allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, created the initial nucleus of ISIS as a means of capitalising on the Iraqi regime’s weakness.  Of course the Saudis and the UAE still fund it. The west’s utter irresponsibility over Syria’s civil war, first arming and promoting their own opposition to the Assad regime – which opened the door to Sunni fundamentalism and now bombing – has destroyed a second nation and created the prospects of more millions facing the devastation of their country and society.

The old imperial connections to the Middle East in Britain and France led these two nations to simply assume their right to be a part of this US led horror story in the last decade and a half.  But their last-gasp imperial pretensions meant that all they have achieved is to share the blame for the Frankenstein monster that they, together with their leader in the US and the west’s ‘friends’ in the region, have created in the formation, the military successes and the consolidation of ISIS.

These are major events in human history. Millions of lives, perhaps a billion are now affected across three continents, in wars, in huge movements of populations, in the destruction of nations built by the last imperial settlement of the Middle East region.  It is no wonder that the entire mood music of the last 5 years in the west has changed, and now the west is willing to accept peace on its previous enemy’s terms. Why? To deal with its new enemy whose existence and success is a direct consequence of their own actions. Peace at any price in Syria is now the call. Except none of the Syrians are at the peace table: Except the Syrian war will continue even when the last western and Russian bomber leaves: Except there will be no new Marshall Plan to rebuild a country from the acrid dust And the seething discontent of millions whose lives are destroyed by the west’s wars and surrogate wars for oil, for geo-political influence, as a reaction to losing the Far East, because they are having to share Africa and Eastern Europe again, have created the opening of a new variety of barbarism of global proportions.

What can western European countries do? Get their war machines right out of the Middle East, immediately. Accept responsibility for the refugees from war that want to come to Europe. Prepare and promote a new Marshall Plan as part of the reparations required to rebuild a stricken part of the globe, with access premised on democratic conditions. Take on the racists at home. Simple enough. Of course the absence of the political and economic conditions in Western Europe to take these essential steps is yet another warning that the current politics and economics of these societies is sorely, even dangerously wanting.

Next; British views and intentions