Showing posts with label enemy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enemy. Show all posts
Thursday 2 November 2017
Wednesday 19 April 2017
Crush the saboteurs! How hard-Brexit rhetoric turned Leninist
Steven Poole in The Guardian
Hatred of dissent, it seems, is the new normal in British politics. “Crush the saboteurs,” screamed the Daily Mail, announcing Theresa May’s calling of a snap election. “Crush pro-EU saboteurs, PM,” advised the Sun for good measure. But what exactly are saboteurs and how should we crush them?
Surprisingly, the language of hard-Brexit Tory supporters is now that of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved Russia’s democractically elected constituent assembly on the grounds that it was a front for the bourgeois counter-revolution. “All power to the Soviets!” Lenin declared. “We shall crush the saboteurs.” For a while, it had seemed as though neo-Soviet rhetoric was the preserve of squabbling factions within the Labour party, with both Corbyn and his opponents accused of organising “purges”. But since three judges defending the rights of the British people were denounced in the rightwing press last autumn as “enemies of the people”, it appears to have become the de facto mode of political argument on left and right. Supporters of the two main parties are complicit in creating an ambient political atmosphere of paranoid permanent revolution. (Rather sweetly, the Mail devoted pages two and three on 19 April to a Soviet-style heroic-agriculture tribute to a British farmer who insists on ploughing his field with horses, which is just as well, since he probably won’t be able to afford a tractor, post-Brexit.)
The political saboteurs Lenin complained of were alleged conspirators, working behind the scenes to ruin his virtuous plans, but the word actually originates in the language of industrial disputes. “Saboteur” and “sabotage” are of French origin, and a popular etymology relates them to “sabots”, the wooden clogs that Luddite workers supposedly threw into machines to break them. Whether or not that is true, the verb “saboter”, meaning to deliberately mess something up, came to be used in the late 19th century by anarchist thinkers, and “sabotage” appeared in English in 1910 to describe the destructive actions of French railway strikers.
The word’s origins in the struggle between workers and capital, then, makes it an appropriate term for enemies of the modern Conservative party in particular. (Home counties Tories, of course, are especially likely to disdain people thus characterised, given their historic battles with “hunt saboteurs”.) And it is no doubt thrilling for well-lunched tabloid editors to dream of “crushing” people they wouldn’t dare pick a physical fight with in person. But Theresa May did not call anyone a saboteur, so perhaps this is all just an unfortunate case of macho projection.
Yet May’s speech announcing the election was, paradoxically, profoundly anti-democratic. “At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division,” she complained. “The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.” This rather charmingly combined a totally made-up fact (the country is coming together) with a bizarre whine that parliamentary democracy is functioning as it should. Any persistent total unity in an elected assembly, after all, would signal that it had been hijacked by a fascist. If there were no “division” in Westminster, we would find ourselves in a de facto one-party state, in which the wisdom of the dear leader is all – a vision of “strong leadership” at which Vladimir Putin would nod sagely.
May’s contempt for the democratic functioning of government neatly mirrors Lenin’s own nearly a century ago, when he asserted that the workers’ councils were better than any democratically elected body: “The Soviets, being revolutionary organisations of all the people, of course became immeasurably superior to all the parliaments in the world.”
In Theresa May’s implicit view, too, superior to all the parliaments in the world would be a British establishment that offered zero obstacles to her “getting on with the job” of delivering what she considers best for the British people (whatever that turns out to be, since apparently no one needs to know right now). In May’s habitual way of phrasing things, the normal workings of parliament – in which MPs and members of the Lords may disagree with a government’s plans – are nothing but “playing politics” or “political game-playing” which must not be allowed to continue lest it cause “damaging uncertainty and instability”. To cast disagreement as game-playing is to characterise dissent as fundamentally unserious, and to bring the very idea of politics into disrepute.
And so, despite her disavowal of the term, the tabloid characterisation of May’s plan as one of crushing the “saboteurs” does not seem inaccurate. Indeed, the recent finale of the TV drama Homeland, which saw the newly elected president Elizabeth Keane holed up in the Oval Office ordering arrests of senators and congressmen, now looks as relevant to British as to American politics. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a paranoid aspiring autocrat, everyone is a potential saboteur.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith invents the heroic historical figure Comrade Ogilvy, who had “no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally”. Theresa May’s world, too, seems to have shrunk to one in which the greatest enemies are the enemies within and democracy must be democratically eliminated for the good of the people.
Hatred of dissent, it seems, is the new normal in British politics. “Crush the saboteurs,” screamed the Daily Mail, announcing Theresa May’s calling of a snap election. “Crush pro-EU saboteurs, PM,” advised the Sun for good measure. But what exactly are saboteurs and how should we crush them?
Surprisingly, the language of hard-Brexit Tory supporters is now that of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved Russia’s democractically elected constituent assembly on the grounds that it was a front for the bourgeois counter-revolution. “All power to the Soviets!” Lenin declared. “We shall crush the saboteurs.” For a while, it had seemed as though neo-Soviet rhetoric was the preserve of squabbling factions within the Labour party, with both Corbyn and his opponents accused of organising “purges”. But since three judges defending the rights of the British people were denounced in the rightwing press last autumn as “enemies of the people”, it appears to have become the de facto mode of political argument on left and right. Supporters of the two main parties are complicit in creating an ambient political atmosphere of paranoid permanent revolution. (Rather sweetly, the Mail devoted pages two and three on 19 April to a Soviet-style heroic-agriculture tribute to a British farmer who insists on ploughing his field with horses, which is just as well, since he probably won’t be able to afford a tractor, post-Brexit.)
The political saboteurs Lenin complained of were alleged conspirators, working behind the scenes to ruin his virtuous plans, but the word actually originates in the language of industrial disputes. “Saboteur” and “sabotage” are of French origin, and a popular etymology relates them to “sabots”, the wooden clogs that Luddite workers supposedly threw into machines to break them. Whether or not that is true, the verb “saboter”, meaning to deliberately mess something up, came to be used in the late 19th century by anarchist thinkers, and “sabotage” appeared in English in 1910 to describe the destructive actions of French railway strikers.
The word’s origins in the struggle between workers and capital, then, makes it an appropriate term for enemies of the modern Conservative party in particular. (Home counties Tories, of course, are especially likely to disdain people thus characterised, given their historic battles with “hunt saboteurs”.) And it is no doubt thrilling for well-lunched tabloid editors to dream of “crushing” people they wouldn’t dare pick a physical fight with in person. But Theresa May did not call anyone a saboteur, so perhaps this is all just an unfortunate case of macho projection.
Yet May’s speech announcing the election was, paradoxically, profoundly anti-democratic. “At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division,” she complained. “The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.” This rather charmingly combined a totally made-up fact (the country is coming together) with a bizarre whine that parliamentary democracy is functioning as it should. Any persistent total unity in an elected assembly, after all, would signal that it had been hijacked by a fascist. If there were no “division” in Westminster, we would find ourselves in a de facto one-party state, in which the wisdom of the dear leader is all – a vision of “strong leadership” at which Vladimir Putin would nod sagely.
May’s contempt for the democratic functioning of government neatly mirrors Lenin’s own nearly a century ago, when he asserted that the workers’ councils were better than any democratically elected body: “The Soviets, being revolutionary organisations of all the people, of course became immeasurably superior to all the parliaments in the world.”
In Theresa May’s implicit view, too, superior to all the parliaments in the world would be a British establishment that offered zero obstacles to her “getting on with the job” of delivering what she considers best for the British people (whatever that turns out to be, since apparently no one needs to know right now). In May’s habitual way of phrasing things, the normal workings of parliament – in which MPs and members of the Lords may disagree with a government’s plans – are nothing but “playing politics” or “political game-playing” which must not be allowed to continue lest it cause “damaging uncertainty and instability”. To cast disagreement as game-playing is to characterise dissent as fundamentally unserious, and to bring the very idea of politics into disrepute.
And so, despite her disavowal of the term, the tabloid characterisation of May’s plan as one of crushing the “saboteurs” does not seem inaccurate. Indeed, the recent finale of the TV drama Homeland, which saw the newly elected president Elizabeth Keane holed up in the Oval Office ordering arrests of senators and congressmen, now looks as relevant to British as to American politics. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a paranoid aspiring autocrat, everyone is a potential saboteur.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith invents the heroic historical figure Comrade Ogilvy, who had “no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally”. Theresa May’s world, too, seems to have shrunk to one in which the greatest enemies are the enemies within and democracy must be democratically eliminated for the good of the people.
Friday 24 February 2017
Pakistan and Radd-ul-Fasaad
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.
The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.
If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.
In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.
But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.
The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.
These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.
The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.
The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.
If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.
In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.
But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.
The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.
These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.
Wednesday 8 October 2014
Our bullying corporations are the new enemy within
The demands of business dominate our politicians and embed inequality. It’s a full-blown assault on democracy
The more power you possess, the more insecure you feel. The paranoia of power drives people towards absolutism. But it doesn’t work. Far from curing them of the conviction that they are threatened and beleaguered, greater control breeds greater paranoia.
On Friday, the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, claimed that business is under political attack on a scale it has not faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was speaking at the Institute of Directors, where he was introduced with the claim that “we are in a generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market against people who want to undermine it or strip it away”. A few days before, while introducing Osborne at the Conservative party conference, Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, warned that companies are at risk of being killed by “regulation from ‘big government’” and of drowning “in the mire of anti-business mood music encouraged by vote-seekers”. Where is that government and who are these vote-seekers? They are a figment of his imagination.
Where, with the exception of the Greens and Plaid Cymru – who have four MPs between them – are the political parties calling for greater restraints on corporate power? When David Cameron boasts that he is “rolling out the red carpet” for multinational corporations, “cutting their red tape, cutting their taxes”, promising always to set “the most competitive corporate taxes in the G20: lower than Germany, lower than Japan, lower than the United States”, all Labour can say is “us too”.
Its shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, once a fierce campaigner against tax avoidance, accepted a donation by a company which delivers “tailored tax solutions to individuals and organisations internationally”. The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, cannot open his lips without clamping them around the big business boot. There’s no better illustration of the cross-party corporate consensus than the platform the Tories gave to Jones to voice his paranoia. Jones was ennobled by Tony Blair and appointed as a minister in the Labour government. Now he rolls up at the Conservative conference to applaud Osborne as the man who “did what was right for our country. A personal pat on the back for that.” A pat on the head would have been more appropriate – you can see which way power flows.
The corporate consensus is enforced not only by the lack of political choice, but by an assault on democracy itself. Steered by business lobbyists, the EU and the US are negotiating a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This would suppress the ability of governments to put public interest ahead of profit. It could expose Britain to cases like El Salvador’s, where an Australian company is suing the government before a closed tribunal of corporate lawyers for $300m (nearly half the country’s annual budget) in potential profits foregone. Why? Because El Salvador refused permission for a gold mine that would poison people’s drinking water.
Last month the Commons public accounts committee found that the British government has inserted a remarkable clause into contracts with the companies to whom it is handing the probation service (one of the maddest privatisations of all). If a future government seeks to cancel these contracts (Labour has said it will) it would have to pay the companies the money they would otherwise have made over the next 10 years. Yes, 10 years. The penalty would amount to between £300m and £400m.
Windfalls like this are everywhere: think of the billion pounds the government threw into the air when it sold Royal Mail, or the massive state subsidies quietly being channelled to the private train companies. When Cameron told the Conservative party conference “there’s no reward without effort; no wealth without work; no success without sacrifice”, he was talking cobblers. Thanks to his policies, shareholders and corporate executives become stupendously rich by sitting in the current with their mouths open.
Ours is a toll-booth economy, unchallenged by any major party, in which companies which have captured essential public services – water, energy, trains – charge extraordinary fees we have no choice but to pay. If there is a “generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market”, it’s a struggle against the corporations, which have replaced the market with a state-endorsed oligarchy.
It’s because of the power of corporations that the minimum wage remains so low, while executives cream off millions. It’s because of this power that most people in poverty are in work, and the state must pay billions to supplement their appalling wages. It’s because of this power that, in the midst of a crisis so severe that the world has lost over 50% of its vertebrate wildlife in just 40 years, the government is organising a bonfire of environmental protection. It’s because of this power that instead of innovative taxation (such as a financial transactions tax and land value taxation) we have permanent austerity for the poor. It’s because of this power that billions are still pumped into tax havens. It’s because of this power that Britain is becoming a tax haven in its own right.
And still they want more. Through a lobbying industry and a political funding system, successive governments have failed to reform, corporations select and buy and bully the political class to prevent effective challenge to their hegemony. Any politician brave enough to stand up to them is relentlessly hounded by the corporate media. Corporations are the enemy within.
So it’s depressing to see charities falling over themselves to assure Osborne that they are not, as he alleged last week, putting the counter view to the “business argument”.“We don’t recognise the divide he draws between the concerns of businesses and charities,” says Oxfam. People “should be celebrating not denigrating the relationship between business and charities”, says the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. These are good groups, doing good work. But if, in the face of a full-spectrum assault by corporate power on everything they exist to defend, they cannot stand up and name the problem, you have to wonder what they are for.
There’s a generational struggle taking place all right: a struggle over what remains of our democracy. It’s time we joined it.
Monday 10 June 2013
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