Propaganda from Iraq (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Last year we received, via the Iraq Embassy in London, the following circular letter signed "Comrade Latif Nasayyif Jassim, Member of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party. Baghdad. Iraq". Jassim is also the Iraqi Minister of Information.

The Foreign Relations Bureau of the Regional Leadership of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party is pleased and honoured to extend its warmest greetings of friendship and solidarity, reaffirm its keenness to maintain our relations with you on the basis of our common principles, and present to you herewith a copy of the documented historical and legal paper recently published on the question of the relationship between Kuwait and Iraq.

The paper also offers a political review of the conspiratorial role played by the former Sheiks of Kuwait, in collaboration with the United States of America, in order to destroy the economy of Iraq, undermine its national security and impoverish its people to the benefit of imperialist and zionist interests.

We are confident that these facts will help you to understand the background of the events taking place in the Arab Gulf region and to follow their developments. We stress our categorical rejection of the USNATO invasion of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, along with our conviction of the ability of the Arab Nation to settle Arab problems without foreign intervention and on the basis of the initiative of H.E. President Saddam Hussein announced on 12 August 1990. We also reiterate our resolve to resist the military alliances with which Washington plans to fetter the Arab Nation in order to ensure its absolute hegemony over our oil and free will.

Comrades and Friends,

We call upon you to denounce the inhuman economic boycott and blockade aiming at starving our people, depriving us of our medical needs and our children of their milk.

We also call upon you to expose war mongers and aggressors, and to uphold the peace option as a means to resolve all problems in the Middle East on basis of uniform criteria and principles.

Our reply:

We are fully prepared to denounce all war-mongers in the area: Bush. Mitterrand, the unlamented Thatcher—and His Excellency President Saddam Hussein. As the Gulf Crisis reaches its flashpoint, we of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties overseas, constituting the Movement for World Socialism, reaffirm our unequivocal opposition to all the belligerents, be they major powers defending the interests of their capitalists or despotic oil-producing states anxious to extend or maintain their arbitrarily-established frontiers and to raise the price of their oil on the world market.

We wish to make it absolutely clear that we have no “common principles” with the so-called Arab Ba’th “Socialist" Party find that they are no “comrades and friends" of ours. We have never had any relations with them and never will have. No doubt they have mistakenly assumed that we form part of the rag-bag of trotskyist and maoist organisations like the SWP. RCP, WRP. etc, etc which have taken up a pro-Iraq position in the Gulf conflict.

The Arab Ba’th “Socialist” Party is no more socialist than was Hitler's “National Socialist German Workers Party” in whose tradition of aggressive and totalitarian nationalism it is to be placed. As the governing party in Iraq and, under a rival faction, in Syria its record in both countries has been one of oppression, torture, assassination and mass murder. And its doctrine that all Arabs form a single nation with a common interest is mistaken and divisive. Like all cultural and language groups, the Arabs are divided into two classes with antagonistic interests: workers and their exploiters and rulers. Those who are workers form part of the world working class, not of some mythical “Arab Nation".

Regrettably, the notion of a unified Arab nation-state, however illusory, still holds great sway throughout much of the Arab world. It is to this public that Baathist propaganda is addressed, in the hope that they will see Iraq’s tyrant in a Napoleonic role challenging the no longer divine rights of the billionaire oil sheiks to rule and benefit from their statelets set up and protected by the Western powers.

Naturally, as Socialists, we have no sympathy whatsoever for the oil sheiks but, equally, we hold that national entities, actual or envisaged, offer no solution to the problems of the working class majority anywhere in the world.

While the horrors of war are about to be unleashed yet again, we re-iterate even more urgently our call for the World Working Class to take conscious democratic action for the creation of a world without markets, frontiers or classes in which the oil of the Middle East will belong, together with all other productive resources, not to this or that “nation" but to all the people of the world in common—a world free, at last, from the wars that result from the competitive struggle for profits that is built-in to the capitalist system.

Schooled for capitalism (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

When our first daughter was eighteen months, there came through the post some pictures to colour, some stickers and a mobile. “Congratulations! You’ve won a FREE Rupert Funpack in our competition”, said the accompanying blurb. Which was news to me because I didn’t even know we had entered. You thought Rupert Bear was a creation with a taste for natty scarves and a propensity to talk in rhyme? Wrong. Rupert has become an investment adviser. Rupert has diversified into Unit Trusts.

The sales pitch is aimed at the emotional underbelly of the anxious parents who, being unaware of socialism, still realise that there is never something for nothing in capitalism. The investment can easily grow into the kind of money they’re going to need when it’s their turn to face the world, wheedles Rupert. Think of the cost of a car. the deposit on a house, think of all the money your child is going to need when they reach adulthood. How can you refuse an offer couched in those terms? Easy. Investigate socialism, a society based upon production for use, not profit.

But we’re still living in a capitalist society. Capitalists arc determined to keep it that way. A little indoctrination goes a long way. Especially when your child enters the laughingly-called education system. In May 1990, a guidance document on education for economic and industrial understanding was published by the National Curriculum Council. It outlined ways in which the government wanted to see schools introduce pupils to greater economic understanding and awareness. It gave examples of how pupils might be taught to develop an interest in commerce and the economy and learn how to handle their own finances. It suggested that seven-year-olds learn about money through tackling simple maths problems. John MacGregor, the then Education Secretary, said:

We have been encouraging too many of our brightest youngsters to go into non-profit-making activities. I think it is important that more of them understand that we live in a competitive world, including the need to make a profit by meeting customers' requirements.

The Education Secretary was obviously ignorant of the fact that profits derive from the economic exploitation of the majority by a minority ruling class. Or was he?

The enterprise education unit at Durham University is also doing its bit to instil free market values into children. With financial backing of £200,000, given by Marks & Spencer, the Durham University Business School has devised a scheme to teach children as young as five how to become “classroom capitalists”. They are to be encouraged to run their own business and enterprises. The scheme intends to show five- to eleven-year-olds, by the use of comic-strip instruction books, how to make a business plan and how to borrow money from a bank. Durham University’s David Absalom, denying that the scheme would brainwash children into Thatcherite thinking, said

"It’s not political. We hope the children will become more enterprising and have more confidence in their ability to communicate. negotiate and work with other people”. There has been an increase in the number of sightings of flying pigs in the Durham area recently.

The status quo

Emphasising other areas, such as law and order, nationalism and responsibility to society—capitalist society— reinforces the acceptance by the individual of an economically exploitative social system. Education for Citizenship, a draft report prepared for the National Curriculum Council, suggests that from the age of five children should be taught to be active citizens. It says a fundamental requirement placed upon all citizens in a civilized society is the need to acknowledge and accept the rule of law.

The success of the type of tactics employed on the young and impressionable is evinced by the results of a survey carried out for industry at the end of 1989. A survey of attitudes amongst 16- to 24-year-olds found that they were rejecting idealism, looking after number one. and turning against minority groups. A third of those surveyed were racist, a half were homophobic and ninety-four per cent thought that hard work was the key to success. (Young Britain: A Survey of Youth Culture in Transition). These findings, no doubt, give quiet satisfaction to the ruling class who can consider the money it costs them to train the working class and instil acceptance of the status quo into them well spent.

But the cost of training future generations of workers has to come from the total share of the surplus value expropriated from the working class by the ruling class. So why do the working class any favours? A study conducted by government education inspectors at the end of 1989 found that primary schools are increasingly relying on money from parents for a reasonable stock of school books. At the beginning of 1990, MacGregor ruled that schools could charge pupils rent for classroom lockers and parking space in bicycle sheds.

As my daughters reach their teens in the twenty-first century, what can they look forward to? They may come out of the "educational” system with a few certificates and the opportunity to encumber themselves with a loan to fund their passage through university. Perhaps they will think that continued training will result in their getting a "good job". What aspirations for their lives may they have? Well-paid wage slavery? Marriage? House owned by building society? Children? Will they still unconditionally accept a social system that limits their potential to experience the fullest possibilities of emotional, personal and social growth with its reduction of all human experience to a cash nexus? Will their continuing exposure to the prevailing ideas in society, those of the capitalist class. have turned them into homophobic, racist, right-wing, sullen youngsters?

Enough is enough

Capitalism is an anarchic market system—it lurches from boom to crisis with the regularity of the sun rising every morning. It is unnecessary for this generation or the next, or the next, to wait until life has become so intolerable under capitalism that the majority decide enough is enough and look for the alternative. By then it may be too late. By then there may not be a society or planet left to change. The alternative exists now. All that is standing in the way of a transition to a social system based upon production for use, not profit, is a lack of understanding of capitalism, and of a determination and political will on the part of a majority of the worldwide working class to alter the insane society in which we live, capitalism, for a sane one. socialism. It's not enough simply to create another life. That life has to have a future. Which future would you rather have for your children, capitalism or socialism?

Dave Coggan

War games (1991)

Book Review from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Playing Them False: A Study of Children's Toys, Games and Puzzles. By Bob Dixon. Trentham Books. £11.95.

From earliest age children’s toys are clearly divided into boys’ and girls’: the boys’ miniturising outdoor pursuits, construction and “manly” activities while the girls’ are based on the kitchen and domestic activities.

Adventure kits for boys as young as three are intended to "make little men out of boys” with gear appropriate to various aggressive roles. Take you pick from, among others, the Para Kit. Assault Kit or Tank Commander. Speaking of tanks. Bromley Council in 1981 purchased for its playgrounds fighter plane and tank climbing frames; on the latter there's a gun which you can fire in the turret.

The first toy soldiers, made of flat tin, were produced in Nuremberg in 1775 and Germany remained the main producer and exporter until the late nineteenth century. By 1893 hollow-casting had been developed in Britain, making the toys cheaper and more widely available. During the 1914-18 war a printed rag-doll soldier called Tommy Atkins became so popular that filename was adopted for British foot soldiers. During the 1930’s khaki-dressed dolls were on sale. Their sophisticated descendant, Action Man, is described in the trade magazine Toys International as “a fully mobile moulded plastic toy for boys which could be equipped for every phase of military service".

IPC have, since 1975. published a comic Battle (now called Battle Action Force). If you grow up thinking that war is a game it will be easier to persuade you to participate in the real thing when you grow up; the war games entered into by certain groups of adults are evidence of this. Even "peaceful" boys’ dolls such as Star Wars. Masters of the Universe. Power Lords or the latest Turtles craze, stress the desirability of toughness, domination and strength. Books, games. T-Shirts and even cakes and yoghurts promote these toys and keep tills ringing.

As children grow older the process continues with games promoting wars. These arc considered OK as long as they don’t get too near home. When they do, there is an outcry— Waddington’s Bomb Disposal and Mayfair's War in the Falklands in this country are examples. Avalon Mill’s USA game about the Arab/Israeli conflict was fine when it came out but. with the present US involvement in the Gulf, would be condemned today.

Board games became popular in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century and, until the twentieth, were mainly concerned with improving morals and teaching children their "correct" place in life (including the superiority of the male and the subject position of women). The suggestion that poverty is caused by laziness often propounded by these games is mouthed with equal hypocrisy by politicians today. Monopoly and Rat Race are about the "desirable" goal for workers under capitalism—the need to succeed when entering the labour market. Role playing and simulated business games arc encouraged in schools and are often sponsored by interested parties such as the Financial Times or banks.

Eva Goodman

The first casuality (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Shouting has turned into shooting and war fever is being whipped up into a national delirium. The producers of the poisonous propaganda are out to infect the minds of the millions with the required hatred. War thrives on hatred: it does not just kill young men and tear off their skins with ever more disgusting weapons; war attacks the minds of those who remain alive and the warmongers seek to convert us into murder-loving monsters.

    The propaganda of war calls upon humans to sacrifice that which is at the centre of our humanity: our ability to think critically and intelligently, to co-operate, to be social. In war the sight of a dead enemy must inspire pleasure; the ruins of a devastated Dresden or an annihilated Nagasaki are propaganda coups. We hear pathetic little men in dirty raincoats talking about “nuking Baghdad" and office boys in suits munching their sandwiches and speaking of “taking out Saddam". What has happened to them?

It was Churchill who said that in war truth is the first casualty. And so the deadly deceits are blasted from the BBC, oozing out of every obscene headline of the tabloids. Remember the story of the six Iraqi helicopter crews who defected just before 15 January? Front-page headlines, first item on the news—a complete fabrication invented by Saudi propaganda agents and now admitted. The weekend before the UN “deadline" (handy term that, dead-line) the British press, radio and TV signed a censorship agreement to suppress war news when so required by the government. Days before that the government issued its first D-Notice of the war (later exposed by the Irish Times) to suppress news about the computer with military secrets which had been stolen. In wartime we will be told what they want us to hear, and told again and again what they want us to repeat.

On Christmas day the Queen came on to disrupt whatever retreat from hard times we might have enjoyed. After the mince pies it was time for some warmongering, so she droned on about the awfulness of big nations invading small ones. So now we knew: imperial conquest is a bad thing and that, unlike Ceaucescu, there will be no knighthood for Saddam Hussein. But— well, excuse me your Royal Highness— how exactly was it that the British Empire came about?

With a straight face the leaders of Western imperial conquest shed crocodile tears in response to a leader who has had the temerity to ape them. When East Timor was invaded and annexed by Indonesia there was not a murmur of disapproval from the US government because, as its former UN ambassador, Daniel Moynihan, explains in his memoirs “the United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about”.

Super-thugs

The Hitleresque proportions of Saddam Hussein have been built up to the point where his name makes workers spit. To be sure, Saddam is a lout and those who armed him (including Britain) have created a super thug in the Middle East. But Hitler caricatures are facile—that is why they make good propaganda. What is the difference between Saddam of Iraq and Assad of Syria? Answer: the latter is now a Western ally and so must be courted, even to the extent of dropping the claim that Syrian-backed killers brought down the plane at Lockerbie—the new culprit is Iraq-backing Libya.

Saddam is presented as the personification of evil, and now that evil has a face and voice it can be shown in the media as the personal enemy of each and every worker. Reds under the beds? No. no. Gorby is “our ally” (even if he does preside over his very own Saddam Hussein game in Lithuania); these days you must watch out for Ba’aths in the bathroom. And if Saddam is Evil made flesh, those who even talk to him are devil-worshippers. So, when Heath went there the London Evening Standard joined the screams of abuse against him with a cartoon in which he carried a placard with a picture of Saddam.

For legalised murder to be supported every card must be played, including the religious joker. God has expressed his support for the West. On 11 January the Archbishop of Canterbury told the BBC that in Christian terms a war to free Kuwait from Iraqi control was justifiable. Asked whether god favoured “our boys” going into Iraq and finishing the job, the man of cant was less certain. God afraid to take a stand? He must have joined the Labour Party. As the mad Christian bishops bless Western bombs, the mad mullahs bless the lethal killing devices of the other side. At a Muslim Congress a lunatic jumped up and told Saddam that he was the new prophet. In the Pentagon there is much talk of profits too, as they look at the map of the oil wells for which men will die to ensure supplies of cheap oil.

Over a third of the US forces in the Gulf are black. They are drawn from the poorest American wage slaves. They have no profits to look forward to if they come home with a limb missing. They are being fed with a sickly diet of propaganda about how they are defending what is morally good. If they were asked to die to make oil billionaires safer in their class affluence and privilege how many of them would fight? Iraqi radio is aiming a propaganda service at the Western troops, telling them that their wives at home are being screwed by film stars. In Aldershot there are several army wives who wish you could believe what you hear on the wireless. A Western propaganda effort against Iraq is also under way. The workers are being urged to overthrow Saddam. Overthrow the tyrant they should, but not in order to install a Western puppet dictator in Iraq of the sort they have in Saudi Arabia and had in Kuwait.

Propaganda of hate

The good news is that it is getting tougher for the con-men. The workers are not so easily duped. In 1914 workers were demonstrating in the streets calling for war. In 1939 the myth that Churchill was a defender of world democracy—later aided by the “democrat” Stalin—was all too easily believed. In 1991 the poison is swallowed less willingly. Even on the eve of war a poll showed that less than half of the British people favoured a war after the UN deadline expired and 43 percent were positively against war. In the USA a population exhausted by post-Vietnam angst are not the same suckers who rallied behind the invasion of Vietnam in the belief that war is an extension of a John Wayne movie. Vast numbers of Americans are opposed to dying for oil and profits.

The propaganda of division and hate is only as loud as the case for working-class solidarity and the unity of the human family is unheard. In the USA there were 23,000 murders last year—more people than have been killed in Ireland over the last twenty years. In the first day of 1991 there were eight murders in New York City alone. The poverty of material conditions and lifestyle which give rise to this are the real enemy for American workers to fight rather than conscripted Iraqi kids who do not know what they are doing. The British wage slaves in uniform should think of their grandparents living on the pittance of a pension, think of the slum-like council estates on which their families are forced to dwell, think of the one in four British people living below the poverty line, amongst which are probably some of their friends, and ask themselves who their real enemies are: a selected foreign dictator or the capitalists who live well by trampling on their needs?

Beyond the sound of desert battles and the deranged screeching of a trigger-happy media there is a bigger war to be fought—a war which begins in mental realisation and develops into mass, democratic organisation. It is a war between Profit and Need in which the only victory can be for the freedom of humankind to live in peace and dignity and the first casualty must be the lies that make weak men strong and the many weak.

Steve Coleman

Capitalism unleashes war (1991)

Editorial from the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

So capitalism has again unleashed the horrors of war. The Socialist attitude is clear. Wars are never justified from a working class point of view. They are fought by capitalist states over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investments. None of these are issues of concern to wage and salary workers, the majority in society.

The present war in is a particularly blatant example of the sort of issue wars are fought over under capitalism. What is at stake for both sides is quite clearly control over oil supplies and trade routes. Everybody knows this, and the propaganda machines of the Western powers are having great difficulty in portraying it as a war for "democracy" and "our way of life". With the official war aim being to restore the filthy-rich Al Sabah dynasty to rule over and exploit the the people in the puppet-state of Kuwait and with mediaeval and religious fundamentalist Saudi Arabia where women are not even allowed to drive cars as the main local ally, this is hardly surprising.

Iraq is being attacked, under the flag of convenience of the United Nations, because its emergence as a strong regional power with expansionist ambitions represents a threat to Western domination of the area and a challenge to the security and free flow of Western oil supplies "at market prices".

This gives the Iraqi ruling class a propaganda advantage. They can truthfully present the war as one waged by Western powers to protect and further their imperialist interests. But Iraqi workers should not be fooled. They are members of the international working class who have been conscripted by a particularly brutal local ruling class to fight for its interest in having a secure trade outlet to the sea and in building itself up as the dominant regional power. Issues, once again, that are not ones of concern to them as wage and salary workers. Iraqi workers, like those of the Western countries and their local allies, will be dying for interests which are not theirs.

The outbreak of any war is an unmitigated disaster for the working class. It is the workers who are hired or conscripted to do the fighting, the destroying, the killing - and the dying. It is workers and their families who suffer from the bombings, the destruction, the restrictions, the famines and the epidemics that accompany all wars. War brings nothing but suffering and misery.

This is why, as Socialists representing the working class interest, we are opposed to all wars. always. We are not prepared to support under any circumstances the killing and maiming of our fellow workers in the pursuit of capitalist profits. Ideally, from the point of view of the working class within capitalism, it would have been better if the capitalists had settled this conflict peacefully and, now that the war has started, it should stop immediately. Unfortunately this can only be wishful thinking. Capitalism does not work that way. War will always be a policy option invoked by capitalist states from time to time.

We denounce the war as yet another example of the barbarous nature of the capitalist system and call upon our fellow workers in all countries to unite even more urgently to bring the war-causing capitalist system to a speedy end by establishing in its place a world socialist society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth's resources by all the people of the Earth.