Though Cowards Flinch

Direct involvement with politics almost always results in a move away from the man in the street and a move towards a rather specialised environment with its own vocabulary, its own points of reference and its own intrinsic assumptions. This isn’t a criticism; the same is true of joining a book club or a rugby team.

Yet it’s helpful to go back and look at some of the assumptions and points of reference every so often. For example, media bias. Almost everyone involved in politics considers the media to distort the truth; whether it’s the anti-BBC privateers or the Murdoch conspiracy theorists. So let’s look at this subject again.

For me, the explanatory power of Marxist analysis is its major attraction. A major bone of contention I have with the media, however, is the increasing prevalence of reporting for the sake of it, without any attempt at explanation, or sense of proportion for that matter. A recent BBC article about Italian politician Nichi Vendola highlights what I mean.

It states, ‘[Vendola] has been criticised for how he has managed Puglia’s health budget, which runs a deficit, and for his opposition to the privatisation of the water supply system.’

The article does not tell us who criticised him for opposing water privatisation. Nor does it set the attempt to privatise water supplies into either a national or global context. In fact it explains nothing about this criticism but uses it anyway. Such unattributable remarks are unacceptable in a Wikipedia article, so why is it acceptable in our national news and broadcasting service?

There are other parts to the article which seem to me objectionable. For example, in discussing Mr Vendola’s homosexuality and Catholicism, it states:

‘He is also a devout Catholic, and has no problem combining his faith with his sexuality. “Catholicism is like my homosexuality, like my political beliefs,” he says, “All these things are part of my identity.”

The quote is simply a reformulation of the original sentence. There is no attempt to actually explain how Mr Vendola reconciles these things. Since the article has chosen to highlight this element to the story, about an up-and-coming governor from Puglia and his beliefs, I think it hardly unreasonable to expect this.

Similarly, when attempting to ‘balance’ the article with some people who do not believe that Mr Vendola is the next Obama, rather than actually investigating the criticisms rendered by the chosen opponent, Rocco Palese, it simply gives over space to polemic, which goes unchallenged by the author of the piece.

I am indifferent to Vendola. I suspect that he is just another social democrat with a communist past and a fetish for identity politics, but I don’t know. My point in raising these issues was not to slap the BBC about for being left-wing or right-wing; it was to criticise the quality of reporting and the style of writing. It is my view that such an approach is near-universal when it comes to reporting on foreign countries. Rather than actually explaining, it simply asserts.

This approach to studying history has left us with endless vapid truisms about how Hitler and Mussolini ‘did some good things’ (often a reference to the autobahns and the trains running on time). Addressing foreign affairs in the same way is likely to leave us little better armed with understanding.

I’m not sure how many people consistently read news from abroad, except perhaps for the odd war or famine. My impression is that it isn’t that many. So what does it matter?

Superficiality encourages superficiality. Not everyone is an original thinker (certainly not me). It should surely be a consideration that, imbibed in quantities however small over a period of years, this damages any attempt at a consistent, collective approach to politics? This is how people end up professing love for the NHS and social welfare but joining the far right, whose real record when in office shows them to be more gung-ho privateers than the Tories. Repetition of assertion rather than explanation is plain dangerous.

It is even more dangerous than the annoying and endlessly self-referential witterings of Polly Toynbee, Martin Kettle and Jackie Whatserface, who are at least aiming at an audience already involved in their cosseted little world. Though, it must be said, they are equally dangerous in restricting the political consciousness of the Labour-voting type, not to mention by name any prolific young Labourite bloggers.

We can return to the Marxist trope that being determines consciousness – and in a great many cases that is true. Class background, the conditions of current struggle, how isolated one is from that and other formative influences all have a much greater part to play than the media do, I believe. But that small part is still worth focusing on, just as we focus on everything else – actual injustice, workers’ rights or discrimination – as a means to lay the path to a better future.

Reading the Economist this week, I noted an article which might provide the opening lines to the epitaph of Sunny Hundal’s idea (responded to by myself and Madam Miaow) that the right-wing Tea Party movement are somehow more successful at taking control of the Republican Party than their leftie counterparts.

The usual ideas (clichés?) are floated by Sunny – we socialists are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves etc, they’re more pragmatic while we’re more idealistic etc – but in actual fact, the seeming drift of the Republicans towards the Tea Party movement doesn’t change the nature of the Republican Party at all. Fiery rhetoric about slashing state powers on the ground, continuing corporate welfare when not stumping.

The Economist mentions the primary race for Georgia, in which all the candidates addressed the local Tea Party group and did a grip’n'grin. Candidates thought to be ‘establishment’ candidates – like Oxendine and Deal – lost out to Handel, who in her leaflets denounced her opponents, dubbed “the good ole boys” as “politics as usual”. Handel was also recognised to be more popular at the local Tea Party convention. So far, so good for the Tea Party movement, right?

Well, we’ll see. Ms Handel was endorsed by Sarah Palin, darling of the Republican grassroots, and surged ahead in polling shortly thereafter. Palin is the darling of the Republican grassroots and the Tea Party movement; her endorsements carry a huge amount of weight (or at least press coverage, which can amount to the same thing in races loaded up on TV spots) and she doesn’t wield them against Tea Party people – such as her decision not to endorse Jane Norton over Ken Buck in Colorado.

But who is she endorsing? In Handel’s case, whatever the candidate says about “the good ole boys” and ending “politics as usual”, she’s no outsider. One time President and CEO and a county Chamber of Commerce, having worked as an executive for companies like KPMG, she was appointed Chief of Staff for a previous Georgia governor, and from 2007 until 2010 she served as Secretary of State in Georgia. This is a full-time careerist politico, who, incidentally, has received numerous endorsements from the rest of the Republican establishment.

So what effect, really, is the Tea Party movement having on Republican politics? It would be easy to portray the Deal v. Handel run-off in August as establishment v. Tea Party-backed outsider, as the Economist does, but it would also be lazy. They are both political insiders, and actually, so the commentary from local sources seem to suggest, Handel is probably more liberal than Deal, but she has endorsements from well-known conservative figures to bolster her reputation.

My point in all this is to suggest that the Republican grassroots are being diddled in exactly the same way as Leftie grassroots activists. As has been noted with regard to the Labour leadership election, since the stinging criticisms a couple of months ago that most of the candidates fudged the question of gay marriage, more candidates have come out to back it – as it’s likely to be a popular position with a large section of Labour’s base (though very unpopular with another section).

It’s a sop – it won’t change anything fundamental about Labour’s approach, but it allows the candidates to appeal for grassroots support. The Tea Party movement is being used in the same way. At the bottom are people with a some genuine grievances – the belief that immigration results in worse employment conditions, or the wish that NAFTA should be scrapped, for example. Yet Republicans aren’t going to curb immigration, and they won’t scrap NAFTA. It’ll hurt economic growth.

Meanwhile, far from being grassroots-run, the Tea Party movement is basically a network of professional pressure groups which can link national political figures and large emailing lists, and which can fill stadiums with people who believe that these groups are the last-ditch American defence against socialism. The sort of hyperbole common to true believers here would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous – but the candidates they’re backing don’t share any of these beliefs. People who have served in state and national politics aren’t that naive. They are using the grassroots, and will then promote their own agenda once in office.

The odd sop will be thrown to the base, of course – that’s just good politics. But the disconnection between Right grassroots and leadership, and Left grassroots and leadership is exactly the same.

It should be a lesson that, after eight years of a Republican President, the grassroots of the Right – the sort who idealised things like the 9/12 campaign – were disillusioned and pissed off. Two years in to a Democratic Presidency and Congress which promised much and delivered little, the implication of Sunny’s remarks (though he might not see it like this) are that Democratic supporters expected too much – that blame should lie with the grassroots, rather than with tenacious corporate lobbying, a massively funded propaganda campaign, or with obfuscating Senators.

The grassroots American left has every right to be pissed off. They were taken advantage of – and the Republican grassroots will likely be in the same position once Obama can no longer be the whipping boy for every frothing congressional wannabe.

In the UK, we should learn this lesson. Whoever wins the leadership election now – John McDonnell having failed to make the ballot – the result is going to be a disconnection between what the activists of the party want and what the PLP and the trades union bureaucracies settled for. That’s not the fault of demanding activists – as in America, it is the fault of the process underpinning Labour Party politics.

At 12.04pm today during PMQs with Nick Clegg, David Burrowes, the Tory MP for Enfield Southgate, asked if there is “light at the end of the tunnel” for Gary Mckinnon – a constituent of his.

Clegg’s answer was a flat, prepared response: Cameron and Obama “hope to find a way forward”.

Mckinnon has found his name back in the papers since Cameron’s first visit to see Obama as Prime Minister, and it has not been short of optimistic responses; not least from Mackinnon’s Mother, Janis Sharp.

She commented that Cameron’s visit was a “landmark” moment:

I’m very proud that David Cameron has the guts to stand up for a British citizen – it’s wonderful. Our hopes are that a trial will happen in the UK and there’s much more chance of that now … It’s not over yet but it has given us hope.

During an interview with GMTV, she also stated that “It was amazing that we’ve now got someone brave enough in government to actually stand up for British citizens and to raise it with Obama.”

This shouldn’t offend anyone anymore than Alan Johnson, the former home secretary, who as Sharp seems to imply in the quote above with the telling use of the word “now”, was not brave enough to stand up for a British citizen – surely some clarity is needed here of what she means by this.

What people will think this means is Johnson made no effort to see the most just result in the Mckinnon case. But Johnson last year rightly warned that Mckinnon could legally be extradited to the US for crimes considered akin to terrorism – this is not a lie, yet it seems to have confused some.

Mckinnon claims to have wanted to check for UFO documents, but this is not the whole story by any means. During a period of hacking, Mckinnon posted a message on an army website the following:

US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days … It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year … I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.

The allegations held by the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) are not related to “a few isolated and chance examples of hacking”, as legal blogger Jack of Kent reminds, “but instead to a sustained hacking exercise which took place over fourteen months and involving 96 computers in five US government departments, and which came to an end (it seems) only with his detection and arrest.”

When Johnson was home secretary Mckinnon’s lawyers were permitted to carry out a judicial review into whether the decision breached his human rights.

It is still this which encapsulates the argument against extradition of Mckinnon, but as I have shown before, in response to research carried out by Jack of Kent, should not be of concern at all.

The process of the extradition would be as follows:

Two Deputy US Marshals would go to the UK, pick up McKinnon and transport him back to the US. At least one of those Marshals would be qualified as an emergency medical technician, or if the UK covered the costs, a UK psychiatric professional could assist in the extradition. Upon arrival McKinnon would be transported to Alexandria Adult Detention Center (AADC) with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and staff able to carry out medical and mental-health examinations.

If found guilty, a pre-sentence report would be made of McKinnon before the court makes an appropriate sentence based in consideration of his medical reports. If McKinnon faced prison, he would be entitled to a stay in a facility “which would provide such care and supervision” as stated above.

Paragraph 83 runs through the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) psychology services, which would cater for all of McKinnon’s mental-health needs.

The Extradition Act 2003 had not been prepared in time to be legible to Mckinnon’s crimes, but even if it had, the then home office minister John Denham assured parliament that “no one will be extradited for conduct that takes place lawfully in this country”.

Hacking is neither lawful in this country nor the US, though the gulf between prison sentences is far wider; it is this, along with “human rights” issues, which has spurred on opposition against the extradition, and not appeals questioning its legality.

The only light at the end of the tunnel for Mckinnon, to paraphrase David Burrowes, will be if Cameron and Obama change legal laws and the terms for extradition on the back foot – which may end up actually happening.

Unfortunately for them Abu Hamza is currently fighting the same battle, and will thus be used as an argument that the US, UK and European courts take preferential treatment to Hamza over a hacker (the type of which has already been used by the Mail).

Hamza’s lawyers argue that if he is sent to the US he will be treated “inhumanely”, though if evidence for this is based on similar grounds as that of Mckinnon, it begs for more scrutiny.

 Save for the unnecessary bombast of the title, David Blackburn has a point when he argues that: “it is absolutely incontrovertible that all are equal before the law; it should not privilege religious fanatics.”

Of course there is no evidence that our judicial system privileges religious fanatics, but it is a job trying to find the rationale here.

Nonetheless, the decision on Makinnon’s fate, far from being the difference between a politician willing to stand up for a British citizen and one who won’t, is actually the difference between a politician who can bend the law and one who refuses to.

I’ve only just had a chance to watch the video above, of Žižek’s performance at Marxism 2009. Probably the most powerful thought to come out of Žižek’s speech is the notion of victims with their own voices.

Žižek talks about how, at a Hitchcock conference in California, he was denounced by a man there for talking about such trifling things while the war in Yugoslavia raged. The implication was that those not involved could talk about whatever they wanted, but as a Yugoslavian, Žižek had a duty to dwell on his victimhood, on the trauma of his home country. Something in this struck home with me.

Sympathy with those whose countries have suffered civil war and the brutality which Žižek describes is the wrong emotion. Solidarity is the right one. The difference, I think, is that, through our sympathy we develop a tendency to impute noble qualities to the victims of trauma, when they are just people. For the Left, this is repeated in the myth of the ‘noble’ proletariat, the good but stupid pawn of the ruling class.

The answer, which Žižek doesn’t make explicit, is to focus on the material context in which the ideological must exist.

To give an example, Silvio Berlusconi, of late a favourite of Žižek, appears in the speech, this time as the masque worn by capitalism-with-asian-values, the authoritarian capitalism that Žižek contends is being developed. Italian political discourse faces being sidelined in favour of a grotesque pantomime that neuters political opposition by displacing real grievances.

Instead of talking about and understanding the actual material things which cause them hardship in their lives, instead of knowing who their real opponents are, citizens of the Italian democracy become invested in the spectacle at work on stage. Likewise the media, already aligned to act as a conduit from Westminster or the Palazzo Montecitorio, recycling consensus as if was news and adding to the distortion, remains glued to the spectacle.

There is a similar a phenomenon regularly talked about by Marxists. Racism, we often contend, is a displaced class struggle. Without effective means of expressing solidarity with one another, or challenging the ruling class, the ‘real’ mechanisms of power become concealed from the working class. They appear as the ‘normal’ background to life; “it’s how the world works”.

Without appreciating that this normal background is not permanent but changeable, blame for the ill-effects of the system are transferred to elements which appear as if from ‘outside’. Immigrants are the standard example, being literally as well as metaphorically from outside, and therefore the most common victim of this transference.

Real grievances in the Italian case can be blamed on the excesses of Berlusconi’s stupidity, much in the way people in America blamed their problems, come the recession, on the stupidity of George W. Bush. Many Americans couldn’t believe that the country had elected such an obvious bumbling moron as President. It was only when he was ousted, and Obama took his place without a real change in direction that the depth of the problem was revealed.

The result, absent a political alternative, has been apathy on the part of those who swung things for Obama. Arguably, at second glance, the process may still be at work, with the continuing deadlock being ascribed to Republican wingnuts, who, as poll after poll tells us, are wildly out of touch with reality. This forestalls deeper analysis.

Generalised stupidity or ignorance of the ‘real’ issues are thus not the cause of relative quiescence of our class, despite some furious outbreaks of resistance. Quite the opposite. The collapse and continuing weakness of once-powerful social solidarities are the failure of the politically conscious elements of the working class to articulate an effective strategy whereby resistance doesn’t merely explode on to the streets and then fade away.

That’s an extraordinarily broad group – including seven million trades unionists of all trades and disciplines, community workers, politicians and many other groups, not just the band of easily dismissed supposedly ‘middle class’ revolutionaries, professional or otherwise.

Instead of culminating in a march that is defeated when the government pursue their agenda regardless, resistance must be the method for forming links of more general purpose than solving the specific grievances raised. To give an example, the Public and Commercial Services Union has announced that it will ballot its members in response to the government’s decision to slash pension and redundancy entitlements, making laying off workers cheaper.

Many workers in jobcentres will be affected, the very place where some of them might end up as claimants. There is the opportunity here for workers and the unemployed to link up and show their solidarity with one another. The workers will appreciate, more keenly than ever, the threat of unemployment – and it’s suddenly in their broader interest to demand greater security nets for the unemployed.

Regrettably Žižek doesn’t deal in concrete activism, and so his discussion of what it means to be a revolutionary doesn’t provide much solid advice when it comes to day-to-day work, and his claim that the Left should ruthlessly use state power against the ruling class is rather undermined by the gap left as regards how we conquer state power.

Copyright Danny Miller @ Jew Eat Yet

There’s an interesting comment-piece by Stephanie Gutman over at the Telegraph which neatly feeds into the right-wing narrative that gay rights have gone too far, that political correctness has gone mad. It plays to the notion that we must rein in all these millions of rules about what people can say, think and do, using a fair dollop of ‘common sense’ and ignoring as a joke many things which might otherwise call for a bit of rigidly enforced political correctness in the form of a horsewhip. But enough of my editorializing.

“President Obama is searching desperately for a sop to throw his Left-wing base, and he must have thought he’d found one in the statement in his State of the Union address: “This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

“Like so many of the SOTU lines, this was a piece of flim-flam. [...] When Obama announced his new goal, the television cameras cut to the chiefs of the Navy, Army, Air force and Marines. They sat stony-faced.

“Are the service chiefs homophobes? I don’t think so. The US military is generally a very tolerant place. As one of my soldier friends put it, “I never saw any kind of witchhunt. Most commanders had their plates full with doing their jobs.”

“No, the main reason the brass resist changing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell now, while the country is immersed in two wars, is because they recognise that withdrawing the policy would create a new protected category and a new opening for battles over perceived discrimination.

“In other words, since it would be illegal to discharge for homosexuality, many discharges brought for other reasons will be challenged as if they had been brought for homosexuality, as we see in the civilian world when, for instance, a woman fired for lateness insists she was fired because she is a woman and demands a full fledged discrimination trial.”

Hang on, the US military is tolerant? An antidote to such a view should be the most recent rape statistics:

• There were 2,923 reported sexual assaults in the 2008 fiscal year, up from 2,688 in 2007 [63% of this number were allegations of rape or aggravated assault - Ed]
• There 251 incidents in combat areas, including 141 in Iraq and 22 in Afghanistan
• Investigations took place in 2,763 cases. In 832 cases, action was taken, including 317 courts-martial, a rise of 38%
• Of the 6.8% of women and 1.8% of men who indicated they had experienced unwanted sexual contact, the majority – 79% of women and 78% of men – chose not to report it.

This increase in courts-martial is a result of unprecedented public pressure, resulting from journalists throwing the spotlight on women who served in the military. Military policy actually changed in 2005, to improve the rate of reporting the various types of sexual assault, and even still estimates are that those cases which are reported are a small fraction of the incidents actually going on. A March 2009 DoD report suggests ninety percent aren’t reported.

Some of the stories are simply shocking and go beyond the statistics provided above by the BBC, by interviewing veterans who served. The following is an extract from an article written by Helen Benedict in The Nation.

“The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.[...]

“When Specialist Suzanne Swift reported her sergeant for repeatedly raping her over months and then refused to redeploy under him, the army tried her by court martial for desertion and put her in prison for a month.

“When Cassandra Hernandez of the Air Force reported being gang-raped by three comrades at her training acadamy, her command charged her with indecent behavior for consorting with her rapists.

“When Sergeant Marti Ribeiro reported being raped by a fellow serviceman while she was on guard duty in Afghanistan, the Air Force threatened to court martial her for leaving her weapon behind during the attack. “That would have ruined by career,” she said. “So I shut up.”

“All the men who were accused in these cases went unpunished. Several of them even won promotions.[...]

“Even those few men who are found guilty of sexual assault or rape tend to receive absurdly mild punishments, such as suspension, demotion, or a scolding letter for their file. In 2008, 62 percent of offenders found guilty received mild punishments like this. This amounts to a tiny fraction of the men accused of sexual assault. One particularly grotesque example of this sort of justice is the 2006 case of army sergeant Damon D. Shell, who ran over and killed 20-year-old Private First Class Hannah Gunterman McKinney of the 44th Corps Support Battalion on her base in Iraq on September 4. Shell pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and “consensual sodomy” with McKinney, an underage junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol until she was incapacitated. Having sex with a person incapacitated by alcohol is legally rape, and using rank to coerce a junior into a sexual act is legally rape in the military, too. Yet a military judge ruled McKinney’s death an accident, said nothing about rape, and sentenced Shell to thirteen months in prison and demotion to private. Shell was not even kicked out of the army.”

So US military personnel are completely understanding and tolerant of homosexuality, even though back in the good ol’ US of A, it’s widely denigrated and attacked, but the attitude to women is almost routinely crude and brutal? Something doesn’t quite stack up.

While it would probably be too simplistic to say that these forms of discrimination emanate from a single, shared, source, they do have a lot in common – especially the emphasis on the link between masculinity and male sexuality which, in an organization designed to blow shit up, is not in short supply to begin with. This is reflected in the view of the heirarchy that women should not be permitted to sign on as frontline combatants.

Simply put, the US military is not the environment one expects tolerant attitudes to thrive, as exemplified by the attitudes to women, and some effort should be made to correct that.

Repealing DADT is a good way to bring many gays and lesbians, who have contributed to the military, out of the closet. A Democratic Congress can amend the USC to get rid of the policy, and it has plenty of support from various former brass, contrary the ‘stony-faced’ image of those who were sitting in the US House of Representatives when Obama gave his State of the Union.

There’s good reason for the attitudes of the brass; during large combat operations, expulsions for being gay actually drop, presumably as it’s a case of “Every man for the front!” Pragmatism about US military recruitment and retention means that the military needs to be open to anyone and can’t waste time throwing people out after a costly and time-consuming investigation initiated because they happen to mention that they’re married to someone of the wrong gender.

Columnists who spin this one as a sop to Obama’s left-wing base are just dressing up their own homophobia as political cynicism. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell gets a lot of attention in college campuses which attempt to ban recruiters on the grounds that the armed forces discriminate, or as a result of a specific hate-crime [e.g.] that provokes media furore, but by and large the Left has a lot of other things to worry about right now – like healthcare and jobs. Anyone who thinks this will swing the mid-terms in November is a fool.

Finally, dismissing attempts to repeal DADT on the grounds that it is going to create another ‘protected group’ which might result in additional litigation is simply not good enough. It may well create such cases, but litigation is the means whereby the individual can defend him or herself against the institution. Even at the expense of frivolous cases where defendants cheekily assert that the dual circumstances of a sanction against them and their membership of a minority constitutes evidence of discrmination, one would have thought the Right would have been all for this.

Apparently not when the issue at stake is homosexuality.