A ramble through some of the fictions of 'rancid' (past) foreign policies - and notes towards establishing a more 'true' (future) history
by Phil Talbot
Historical evidence points to a 'rancid' stream of disinformation in the representation of foreign policy in our mainstream British culture over the past decade.
The result of such a 'toxic mix' of part-truth and outright-fantasy (masquerading as 'historical fact') is the often 'absurd' atmosphere we find ourselves in - where the world, as represented in the mainstream media, seems disconnected from the world in which we actually live.
In our own local world, South Tyneside Stop The War Coalition (STSTWC) was founded by a relatively small group [less than 100] of 'concerned' people from South Shields, Jarrow, Hebburn, and associated areas, in February 2003 - a month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
A dozen, or so, people from the (then) newly-formed STSTWC travelled to London to take part in the mass anti-war demonstration on 15 February 2003 - when a million, or so, people marched to oppose the then impending invasion of Iraq.
That London march was a 'defining moment'.
At that time anti-war opinion was clearly and over-whelming 'majority' - not some marginalized 'minority'.
During that march a mass of committed people from all over Britain stated clearly - in a complex mixture of vocal and physical ways - that:
+ wars of foreign conquest were NOT in their name;
+ illegal invasions - and following occupations - were NOT liberation(s);
+ another, better, world IS possible.
It is reasonable, on the basis of the number of people involved, to claim that 15 February 2003 event was the 'biggest ever single political demonstration in British history'.
Sadly, the mass opposition to their war plans was ignored by Tony Blair and his New Labour Government - including present South Shields MP (and also former Foreign Secretary - and failed Labour leadership contender) David Miliband.
At that time Mr Miliband falsely claimed to the people of South Shields that ‘yes’ there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ that Saddam and his Iraqi regime possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ - and 'so' - by implication - were 'threats' who 'had' to be removed quickly, by military force (Shields Gazette, 15 March 2003).
Mr Miliband has never even acknowledged that ‘error of judgement’ - let alone apologized for it.
His 'reward' for getting that vital foreign policy issue so grossly wrong was ... to be promoted several years later to the top Foreign Office job.
People like Mr Blair, Mr Bush - and allies such as Mr Miliband - ignored all the warnings voiced before, during, and after the London February 15 event.
They willingly decided in favour of the invasion Iraq, contrary to international law (as all the state-funded international law advizers in the British Foreign Office actually explicity warned the then government it would be - prior to the attack), in March 2003 - with the terrible consequences that are now widely known ...
The present coalition British Government, led by the Conservative David Cameron (supported by the previously purportedly 'anti-war' Liberal Democrat party) seems to remain a 'poodle' to big corporation imperialist U.S.-led foreign policy - with the imperialistic aggression now extending from the Middle East into Africa and beyond ...
Many fear the aim of this 'rancid foreign policy' is to impose the interests of the 'big' Western corporations on the world - and to plunder 'smaller' countries of their wealth and resources.
Ten years on, like many people of Britain and the wider world, I continue to oppose what I see as the 'crudely violent' styles of foreign policy broadly described as ‘the war on terror’.
This does not make me a supporter of - and/or 'apologist' for/of - ‘terrorism’: on the contrary, I strive to oppose 'terrorism' in all its forms, including the 'state terrorism' of Britain, France, the USA, and other 'big powers'.
People - locally, nationally and internationally - are taking up the questions of how to end 'pro-war forms of government', and of how to defend 'national sovereignty' against 'corporate attack' - and of how to make 'social progress' based on people’s own 'peaceful efforts'.
We in the Stop The War movement invite people to take part in on-going informed discussions of these issues.
We encourage people to think, to discuss, and to act - to make another, 'better', world possible in the here and now ...
This issue of Silence Is Shame focusses on 'thinking of 15 February 2003', but it is not merely about looking back to that demonstration itself: it is, more positively, about the past, present and future 'progressiveness' of the anti-war movement ... in our local area of South Tyneside, and beyond that ... throughout the country ... and wider world ...
Like all aspirant 'progressive' humans anywhere, we in STSTWC act locally but think globally ...
As the mass demonstrations on 15 February 2003 illustrated, the contemporary anti-war movement is more than merely a movement 'for peace' and 'against war'.
It is part of a world-wide popular movement against those 'small circles' at the head of presently powerful states, such as the USA and Britain, which can be reasonably accused of 'committing crimes against peace and humanity' as they pursue 'domination of resources, markets and spheres of influence'.
This movement of the people against (in fact, in terms of numbers of people involved) small 'corporate power elites' - of the 'big powers' - involves a positive vision of how to build a better 'world without war' - based on defending the sovereignty of countries threatened by the big powers.
The stronger this movement becomes, the harder the 'war-mongers' will find to operate: ... as their under-lying ideas are exposed, again and again, by a 'fundamentally anti-war collective world consciousness' - and as people such as Mr Blair and Mr Bush, are pursued for what can 'reasonably' be described as their 'war crimes'/'crimes against peace'.
While, as a 'coalition', we in the anti-war movement are not a single political party, with a 'fixed ideology', we strive to promote a 'new politics', where people in all sections of society, of all political, ideological, religous and other beliefs are included in political decision-making'.
This 'new [form of] politics' aims to direct humanity away from the rough tracks of 'barbarity' towards the high roads of 'civilization' - in which outright 'conflicts', and the many more 'less violent disruptive problems', are resolved 'peacefully'.
Most people - when asked - say they want to live in a more 'peaceful' world without the present wars, mass poverty, disease and destruction of life and the environment.
Anti-war groups such as STSTWC, individually and collectively, desire to plant the 'seeds' of this potential 'better new way' forward ...
Thinking back to February 15 2003 is part of a process towards setting such a more positive 'future agenda' ...
[Back-Ref[erence(s)]: Silence Is Shame, Volume 2, 2004
www.northeaststopwar.org.uk/southtyne/Silence_Is_Shame_2.pdf]
'Just that one march, then everyone shrugged and went home.'
This line, from a best-selling work of fiction [David Nicholls, One Day, 2009, p374], indicates indirectly how the Stop The War movement was side-lined - and mis-represented - in popular culture.
Those of us who have attended more than a dozen major Stop The War events since 15 February 2003 - some involving hundreds of thousands of people - and many more smaller events - know this for the 'fiction' of our own 'history' that it really is.
The London event of 15 February 2003 has, however, sadly, entered popular culture as 'the march that failed [to stop the war]'
This sidelining of the anti-war movement - by making it seem a futile waste of time - has in fact been part of the 'war-mongering process'.
As Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out, a 'top-down' imposed 'philosophy of futility' is often actively fostered by 'power elites'.
Chomsky says in Hegemony Or Survival [2004]: ‘Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the populations a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life” to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption”. Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinated lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry and, in the political realm, to the self-described “intelligent minorities” who serve and administer power.'
It is hence in the interests of power elites - and their cheer-leaders in the mainstream media - to make people feel as if any truly democratic political action is essentially 'futile' - a 'waste of time' that will 'achieve nothing'.
And so it has been made a 'false truism' of popular culture that 'even that march of more than a million - which represented the majority anti-war opinion - was a waste of time and failed to stop a war'.
A Westminister Village 'insider' mainstream political correspondent actually said to me at the time: 'The march is all very well ... but they are going to do it anyway'.
Such a world view reduces politics to a competitive game played by few 'significant players' - with the rest of us side-lined and reduced to spectators/or consumers (or even 'victims').
The underlying thinking of modern ‘power elites’ is well illustrated by some comments by Ron Suskind, an American journalist: ‘In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like ... I had a meeting with a senior advizer to Bush ... he told me something that at that time I didn’t fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.‘That’s not the way the world really works any more,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
Of late, the two 'main players' of contemporary mainstream British politics, David Cameron and Ed Miliband, have been competing to be 21st century 'heirs' to the 19th century 'One Nation Conservatism' of Benjamin Disraeli (indeed, rather bizarrely as it might seem to some, it is the Labour leader Mr Miliband who makes the greater claim to this 'title' of 'Disraeli's Heir').
Disraeli was a flamboyant novelist turned self-styled 'pragmatic' politician, who was frequently short of cash, and who likened political careers to ascents up 'to the top of the greasy pole'.
He saw Liberal Party foreign policy in the second half of 19th century as 'faint-hearted', and thought Britain could best maintain its standing as a global power 'actively' and 'forcefully'.
The empire, he thought, was and 'asset' to be 'cherished'.
Much of his public rhetoric was directed towards fostering 'jingoistic' elements of the growing 19th 'working class' electorate.
In effect he tricked significant proportion of British people into voting against their own better interests - and for him - by appealing to the basest forms of 'jingoism'.
In a keynote speech at Crystal Palace, London, June 1872 Disraeli said: 'When I say '[one nation] Conservative', I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness - that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial Country.'
His 'one nation' party was to be closely identified with jingoistic patriotism, the monarchy and above all aggressive empire building.
But of course - as with modern war-mongering politicians - one of the abiding fictions of Disraeli's public discourse was that Britain's leaders only ever led the nation into war 'reluctantly'. He echoed a popular music hall song of the time:
'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,
we've got the ships; we've got the men; we've got the money too!'
The present Labour leader Ed Miliband got his job, in 2010, in part because he had opposed the illegal attack on Iraq, in 2003, whereas his brother, David - whom he defeated in the leadership contest - had supported it.
It was therefore something of a suprize, in 2012, to some to find this previously 'anti-war' Ed declaring himself a devotee of the old imperialistic war-monger Disraeli.
Rather bizarrely to some, Ed Miliband in his October 2012 Labour Conference leader's speech presented himself as a natural follower of Disraeli - using the 'one nation' phrase himself more than 40 times in that speech (and he was to be heard using it again repeatedly at the Trade Union Congress 'March for the Alternative' several weeks later).
Disraeli's core 'vision', Ed Miliband told the Labour Conference, was 'a vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses trhough the veins of all - and nobody feels left out'.
Hence Ed seems to have swallowed whole the mirage/fiction of Disraeli as a selfless and dedicated servant of the national interest devoted to the well being of the poor.
In fact, as William Gladstone rightly said back in the 19th century, Disraeli was 'all show and no substance' - and his entire ideology 'some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance - a misleading fiction - a brazen fantasy'.
In fact, even the phrase 'one nation' actually derives not from one of Disraeli's political speeches but from one of his overtly fictional works: the novel Sybil [1845].
[The rather greater 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope even dismissed Disraeli's literary fiction work as basically 'fraudulent' - and said he 'affected something which has been intended to strike readers as uncommon and therefore grand'.]
Professor Jon Parry, Cambridge University historian, and Disraeli biographer, has described his fundamental quality as his 'astonishing egotism'.
Others have been even less kind.
One historian, Dominic Sandbrook, has described him as 'a vacuous egotistical hypocrite who sent British soldieris to die needlessly in foreign wars' - remind you of anyone? - and a 'shameless mountebank' who 'loved the glamour and intrigue of military adventures abroad'.
During Disraeli's longest spell in office in the 1870s British soldiers were sent abroad to fight a literal 'A-Z' of foes - from Afghans to the Zulus.
As so often happens, the ordinary soldiers from home and the local populations of the distant lands paid the bloody price for the prime minister's vanity.
In Afghanistan, almost 10,000 young British men lost their lives forcing the Afghans to accepting London's control of their affairs.
In south Africa, British troops went down to one of their most humiliating defeats when Zulu warriors slaughtered more than a thousand of them in a devastating ambush [needless to say the popular culture British version of this conflict - as represented by such films as Zulu - has focussed on other aspects].
Critics from his even own time thought Disraeli represented all that was 'worst' about British imperialism.
Like many a self-defined 'pragmatic' politician, in the absence of concrete policies or principles, he instinctively fell back on base jingoism.
In 1876 he even conferred on Queen Victoria the excessive title of 'Empress of India' - to the outrage of commentators at that time [many of whom have been edited out of the history books] who objected that such tawdry imperialistic 'bauble titles were basically 'alien' to the better British traditions.
It was typical Disraeli - eye-catching, vainglorious, without shame, and ultimately demeaning to all concerned (including Queen Victoria).
British history in the 19th century is often represented - by both 'left' and 'right' (even if for different underlying ideological reasons) as 'one long imperial expansion'.
In fact - and in some contrast to the present situation [where New Labour and Conservatives compete to be the most enthusiastic in their foreign military adventures - with or without Liberal Democrat support] - there was a strong 'anti-imperialistic' component to the mainstream public discourse in 19th century politics.
William Gladstone was no left-wing pacifist, but he won the 1880 general election against Disraeli by campaigning vocally in opposition to Disraeli's 'unwholesome political cocktail, whose main ingredients were amoral opportunism, military adventures, and disregard for the rights of the others'.
Gladstone told an election audience in Glasgow in that year that thousands of Zulus had died 'for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery their homes and families'.
Similarly he told the same audience that villages had been razed in Afghanistan and their inhabitants left in desperate conditions because of the Disraeli-led British government 'bent on conquest'.
[It is, by the way, almost impossible to imagine a mainstream leader in contemporary politics using such language about, say, the civilian people of Pakistan killed in 'drone' attacks on their homes.]
Under-pining such election rhetoric by Gladstone - and in contrast to Disraeli's brutish jingoism - was a strong core of anti-imperialist sentiment among the British public.
This sentiment feared the growth of empire - even while it was happening - as engendering belligerent forms of nationalism and militarism - and being fundamentally AGAINST Britain's best interests and real national virtues.
It was best summed up by the Manchester Radical MP John Bright when he said: 'In as much as 'supremacy of the seas' means arrogance and the assumption of dictatorial powers on the part of this country, the sooner it becomes obsolete the better.'
Mr Bright's anti-imperialist 19th century 'vision' of Britain's future - which has, needless to say, largely been reduced to footnotes in the mainstream history books - clearly represents a more 'progressive' one than Disraeli's - and a better example for the 21st century way forward.
Chomsky more recently has clarified the main contemporary ‘dialectic’:‘One can discern two trajectories in current history: one [American-led corporate capitalism] aiming towards hegemony, acting rationally within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens [the] survival [of humanity]; the other dedicated to the belief that “another world is possible”, in the words that animate the World Social Forum, challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives rf thought, actions and institutions.’
And that, perhaps, on our small local scale, is what we in South Tyneside Stop The War Coalition are trying to do: ‘challenging the reigning ideological system and seeking to create constructive alternatives of thought, actions and institutions ...
February 2013
