Material World: Gangsterism rules OK (2026)

The Material World column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whether you believe the stories about US officials issuing veiled threats by reminding Vatican diplomats of the Avignon Popes (when the French Crown asserted secular power over the church and moved the seat of the Bishop of Rome to France), that they are circulating at all is a sign of the widely held sense of American lawlessness. An American official, according to the gossip, opined that the US has the power to do what it likes in the world, and the Catholic Church should take sides. Some have seen this as a threat to the Pope.

It has been doing what it likes for decades. In 2001 the US Congress passed a resolution, Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, which stated:

‘That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.’

In justification, it noted:

‘the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.’

This became the basis for the campaign of targeted killing by executive order, as part of the so-called War on Terror. It was a carte blanche, and, as with any executive authority, the office holders since that date have sought to strengthen and extend the scope of authority for actions taken under this resolution. It extended from the battlefields of Afghanistan to become a universal reach, justifying strikes in Libya, Somalia, Oman and even, under the present administration, to the strikes against alleged narcotrafficking boats in Venezuelan waters.

In 2011 even Obama took the step of killing an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in an overseas strike.

Although there are no exact figures available, the estimate is that in over 14,000 strikes, over 10,000 people were killed and wounded, of whom around 15 percent were civilians, including hundreds of children.

The laws of war

The ‘rules of war’ permit civilian casualties in proportion to the value of the military objective to be achieved: that is, the decision to adopt the targeted killing policy was a decision in advance to kill entirely innocent civilians.

The argument of presidents and their hangers-on is that such death tolls save more lives and stretch the limits of liberty and legality less than alternatives. But it does, in the end, put the President in the same place as a gangster, killing anyone who might get in his way (and threatening anyone thinking of doing the same). It turns the end sequence of the first Godfather film, where Michael Corleone orchestrates a string of murders of rival bosses, from a fictional scene into real government policy.

Of course Trump, who most likely will have encountered the real-world mafia in his career as New York real estate developer and casino owner, has extended this policy even further. His strikes on Iran this year included the direct slaying of the Iranian head of state, as well as top government officials. This is close to saying all bets are off.

The laws of war, such as they are, were developed by professional militaries and soldiers to make a life of warfare possible. They limit the actions either side can make to prevent a cycle of violence so destructive that the entire game of war grinds to an exhausted halt. It was always a hypocritical gloss on the murderous business, but it did offer some respite and protection.

The chief victims of Trump’s extension of the remote murder strategy are likely to be members of other governments. The US position is that it will retaliate with untold ferocity should someone dare to slay its head of state: but other governments may not have that luxury. And, as Iran has demonstrated, the technology for a sudden and surgical missile strike is within the reach of many countries.

Iran, for its part, has come out swinging: its retaliation against US bases and the countries that host US bases has been to try and impose costs on any US attempt to repeat the Iraq adventure of siege and invasion. They aim to pressure the US to back off by causing pain to US allies.

Whilst the fog of war still prevails, it’s clear that deaths have been many and widespread: at the time of writing over 2,000 Iranians have been killed, with over 20,000 injured. Around 15,000 have been injured in US-allied states (with around half of those in Israel), and about 200 dead (including 15 Americans).

Given the interconnected worldwide system we all rely on, the direct casualties in modern wars are very likely dwarfed by the number of deaths later incurred due to damage to infrastructure. Both sides in this war have threatened desalination plants essential for life in the region, as well as power plants (including nuclear installations).

Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will lead to disruption around the world, as we see fuel prices rise dramatically (already there are serious fuel protests in Ireland).

With Trump threatening to counter-blockade the strait (which will bring the US navy within range of Iranian missiles), the prospect of damaging the world economy in the medium term is real.

Leaving simple morality to one side, war makes us all poorer. Every death is the loss of a mind that might have come up with brilliant insights in the future. Houses, roads, bridges all get destroyed and inhibit economic activity in a wide area (the same has already happened in the war between Russia’s and Ukraine).

Universal gangsterism over trade routes and resources means everyone has a stake in ending war, and the only means to do that is the common ownership of the world.

Pik Smeet

News in Review: Verwoerd—hypocrites at work (1966)

The News in Review column from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Verwoerd—hypocrites at work

Anyone who had been able to forecast the assassination of Dr. Verwoerd would also have had no difficulty in imagining the comments of world statesmen.

These comments, in their many tones, were all determined by the international interests of the countries whose leaders were making them.

It was also predictable that there would be widespread condemnation of the use of violence, and that many world leaders would say the use of force can solve no problems.

President Johnson, for example, said the assassination was “a stroke of violence that shakes the sensibilities of men who believe in law and order”. It was clear that the President was grimly forgetting some inconvenient facts.

During the last war the Allied leaders did not condemn the violence of the attempts on Hitler's life; they did not say then that assassination is a primitive and savage act.

The United States is now keeping hundreds of thousands of troops in Vietnam—much to the outrage of the sensibilities of many Americans who also believe in law and order—in an attempt to prove that their kind of violence works.

This is typical. Cyprus and Algeria are only two recent examples of the results of politicians stubbornly believing that violence can be useful.

Capitalism, in fact, is a social system which uses force constantly and which can never attempt to solve its disputes in any other way.

Hypocrisy is an art which politicians must learn to master. There is no more apt occasion to employ what they have learned than when one of their number dies.

Perhaps, when Verwoerd died, they were all secretly agreeing with Malta's Borg Olivier. “Let us hope,” he said, “That it does not happen to us”.

U Thant exposes UNO

Few things have more cruelly exposed the futility of that international white elephant, the United Nations Organisation, than the possible standing down of its Secretary-General U Thant.

UNO was once supposed to be the answer to war, because the major world powers would all be members, because every country would bring its disputes to be settled at the Assembly and because the Organisation would have at its disposal an international armed force which would police any trouble spots.

It did not take long to break down this image.

U Thant complained that UNO has not yet ". . . achieved universality of membership”—meaning that the United States, as part of its struggle with China, vetoes that country’s attempts to join.

He condemned the fact that the Vietnam war is an example of ". . . relying on force and military means. . .” as if there has ever been any sign of a capitalist power carrying on a struggle in any other way.

Over Vietnam, the United States pretends that UNO does not exist. This is not the first time this has happened. In many cases when a country’s interests have been threatened, and it has not been sure of the formality of UNO support, is has simply ignored the so-called peace-keeping Organisation.

Russia has done this several times. Britain did it over Suez and the Americans went into Korea before UNO had had a chance to consider the matter. (There was never any pretence that, if UNO had voted against America over Korea, the troops would have been withdrawn.)

UNO was founded on the idea that capitalism’s problems can be settled around a table and that the trouble in the past was that the big powers had not tried hard enough to do this.

A fatuous notion, which has been exposed again and again. Now UNO’s secretary has himself spoken up, and revealed that he too realises the Organisation is trying to do the impossible.

Confusion on the left

It is obvious that those trade union leaders who back the wages freeze are not acting in the interests of their members. But even those who oppose the freeze are hopelessly confused when it comes to politics. This was well shown at a meeting on September 1 organised by five of the unions opposing the freeze.

Not seeing Socialism as a practical alternative, the five general secretaries who spoke offered their own solution to the present financial problems of the British capitalist class: cut military spending overseas; impose import controls; launch a productivity campaign and end the status of sterling as a reserve currency. On this last point, loud applause followed a statement of the general secretary of the Association of Scientific Workers in which he said that they did not want “our” currency being a commodity traded in by foreign bankers! Again, Clive Jenkins of ASSET commended De Gaulle’s policy of erecting a fence round France to prevent Americans buying up French industries. “I’d like to see the same here”, he said amidst applause.

This petty patriotism expressing itself as a dislike of international bankers (and America) is a characteristic of the Left, one which clearly distinguishes them from Socialists. Socialists know that patriotism is a delusion as workers have no country.

Jenkins' main charge against the Labour government was that it was incompetent. Wilson was wrong, he said, in claiming to have been blown off course; he had steered right into the eye of a hurricane. “Had the government not heard of Keynes?” he asked, suggesting that since Keynes any government that allowed unemployment to grow must be incompetent

This is another myth of the Left. Governments fail to solve our troubles not because they are incompetent or insincere or irresolute but because they are trying to do the impossible. Our problems just cannot be solved within capitalism. The Left, with their so-called solutions, merely serve to keep alive the myth that capitalism can be made to work in our interests. That is why Socialists oppose them.

Retreat to the Thirties

In some mysterious way, the Labour Party have been able to establish themselves as the party which can control capitalism’s economy.

Perhaps this idea can be traced to the pre-war years, when Labour embraced the Keynesian doctrine which was supposed to have the solution to the sort of slumps which persisted during the Twenties and Thirties.

It was all supposed to be very simple. A slump meant low purchasing power, investment in the doldrums, reduced demand for workers.

The solution was to increase purchasing power by cutting taxation, step up investment with tax incentives and promote a demand for labour by launching out on public works schemes: roads, hospitals and so on.

These so-called remedies are, in fact, quite useless. And perhaps the Labour government have realised it.

At last month’s TUC, Harold Wilson threw out the warning which is an especial favourite with him lately: “. . . one false, careless, regardless step . . . could push the world into conditions not unlike those of the early Thirties”.

If this were true, and the Labour Party were keeping faith in the Keynesian economics they have propounded for so long, the government would now be stimulating investment, cutting taxes, building hospitals and schools as fast as they can.

But, in fact, as we all know, they are doing exactly the opposite.

Does Wilson now think that Keynes' theories are bunk? Has he forgotten all his party ever said about slumps? Does he realise that capitalism is out of control and always has been?

Or does he ponder on another event of the early Thirties? Some people would say there is no need for Wilson actually to leave the Labour Party to imitate Ramsay MacDonald. Others would reserve their judgment.

History repeats itself

The oft repeated phrase “History repeats itself’ is a half truth. It derives from the desire.to put into fewer words the idea that like situations produce like results.

In the latter half of the 18th century the proposal was made that, as wages were so miserably low, they should be supplemented by poor relief.

Eighteen Berkshire justices, including seven clergymen, met at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland near Newbury and set down a minimum scale for workers and their families. This scale was adopted throughout the country and where wages did not provide the minimum it. was built up by payments from the rates.

Historians have not failed to point out that this could only, and did, resultin employers paying the lowest wage possible in the knowledge that their workers would get by on the combined wage and poor relief.

Compare this with the following from the Teddington and Hampton and The Richmond and Twickenham Times of Saturday, August 13, 1966.

This paper quotes from the parish newsletter of the Reverend Emrys Evans, vicar of All Saints’ Church. The Rev. Evans urges

the elderly to take advantage of a part-time employment scheme organised by the Richmond upon Thames Council for Social Service, in which they may work either on a casual basis or a 24-hour week at an hourly rate of l/3d.

He adds that those who have already applied for work have a wide variety of skills, ranging from former book-keepers to shop assistants and that they may still be of real service to the community,

“and at the same time augment your pension”.

Words and deeds

On April 29 the Hampstead Labour Party passed the following resolution by 26 votes to 6:

This Hampstead Labour Party views with alarm the Government’s increasing and continuing support of the American war in Vietnam. It is aware also of the pressure on the Government to make a token military commitment in this war, perhaps in the form of British ‘‘observers” or “advisers".

We therefore wish to state in advance that should the Government yield to such pressure, the Hampstead Labour Party will re-examine its relationship with the national Labour Party and invite other constituency parties to do the same.

On July 25 a Foreign Office spokesman stated that there were four hundred British military engineers in Thailand helping to build a military airport at Loeng Nok Tha (see Financial Times, 26 July). Loeng Nok Tha is in north-east Thailand and it is from this area that three-quarters of the air raids against North Vietnam are launched (see Economist, 3 September). So troops, under the control of the Labour Party government are helping the war effort in Vietnam. They are in fact helping to build an airfield which American planes can use for bombing raids on North Vietnam. If this is not "a token military commitment in this war” what is?

Yet, to date, there has been no news of any breakaway move by the Hampstead Labour Party.

Charlie Kirk: A victim of his own ideology (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Charlie Kirk is dead, the CEO of ‘christo-fascist’ Turning Point USA, the man who built a career attacking queer people, striking workers, students, bled out on stage in Utah after being shot in the neck. His death was streamed live, his last words delivered in response to a question about whether trans people should be allowed to own firearms. In a final moment of irony, the man who weaponised speech was silenced by a bullet.

His followers scrambled to crown him a martyr to ‘free speech’. But what they mourn is not free speech. What they mourn is the collapse of their own manufactured spectacle.

Turning Point USA Campaigns have never been about dialogue. They have been about stalking, smearing, and silencing. Kirk built an empire on ambush videos, ‘debates’ edited into propaganda, and campaigns of harassment targeting professors, students, and workers. What TPUSA calls activism is in fact a weapon: surveillance masquerading as politics, intimidation dressed up as freedom.

At the University of Illinois, TPUSA turned graduate worker Tariq Khan into a national target, dragging his family, including his children, into a torrent of racist abuse. At Arizona State, English professor David Boyles was blacklisted, stalked, smeared, and beaten bloody. Across the country, countless educators have been doxxed, filmed, and threatened until they censored themselves or fled their jobs. Students, too, are thrown into the crosshairs, forced to navigate a campus environment poisoned by manufactured confrontation.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy. Behind TPUSA’s empty rhetoric of ‘free speech’ is a campaign of fear designed to corrode academic freedom and terrorize opposition into silence. It is a politics of humiliation, coercion, and intimidation. And now, that politics has come full circle. That is the inevitable logic of a politics with violence as its core.

This is not just about Charlie Kirk. It is about the capitalist system that made both Kirk and his killer, a world where capitalism enforces its order through alienation and hierarchy, a world shocked by bloodshed even as it marinates every social relationship in class violence. Kirk’s end is not a tragedy of free speech. It is the mirror of the politics he championed: politics through religious domination, politics enforced by fear, politics that ends with blood.

A.T.

The assassination of art (1975)

From issue number 1 (1975) of The Western Socialist

In a democratic society, art is politics in the widest sense, a celebration of common values which sweep away the old and clears the way for the new needs of man.

Victor Jara, Chilean play producer, singer guitarist, was a supporter of the Allende regime. In the military coup that followed he was assassinated on 15th September 1973. They broke his guitar fingers before breaking his spine. Bullets were then shot into his body.

He is one more addition to the many creative people in history who have become too dangerous to live. For the arts are not amusements, ornamental skills, diversions, comforts for tired businessmen or social polish for the pretentious. At least, not to the men who wield political power. The arts communicate and communication is the most potent force for progress and change.

History is full of the power of the arts, not the overt expression of dissatisfaction nor the blatant clarion call to rise and fight but the uniquely potent expression of ideas which show that man is ready for change. Art is a barometer and a celebration, a mirror to the emotional and intellectual development of man. The artist says, “This is man, how he feels, how we feel,” and once said, it can never be repealed. The ideas catch fire in the minds of men, not because they are new and logical but because they express clearly what people feel but cannot quite themselves make known.

George Bernard Shaw provocatively said that art is propaganda. It is this but far more. In a democratic society, art is politics in the widest sense, a celebration of common values which sweeps away the old and clears the way for the new needs of man.

This does not mean that artists are consciously political in the modern use of the term. In fact, the moment an art becomes consciously political, it usually ceases to be art. The pamphleteer is not an artist because he knows rationally exactly what he wants to say before saying it. He may express new values but they are communicated on a mechanically logical level. There is no bridge of feeling between the old and the new for the mass of the people, still struggling to understand their own feelings, to make the crossing. Art does not lead the needs of man; it expresses them and man, whose evolution is on a social and economic level rather than a physical one, can develop further because he then knows clearly where he is. He recognizes as his the values expressed by the artist.

But some artists do not communicate in their own time. They may lead the way for other artists to follow but they themselves may be a little too far ahead of their time. These artists are sometimes called “important” as distinct from “great”, the universally recognized artists who signify a whole epoch or “celebrate” a common feeling.

Both kinds of artists can be dangerous to the established powers but the “important” artists are more easily destroyed than the “great” ones. They are less supported, less recognized and their deaths provoke less reaction.

The Un-American Activities Committee could not destroy Charles Chaplin or Arthur Miller nor could the Soviets destroy Yevtushenko but artists with less recognition, ahead of their time and people, are frequently destroyed in the power struggles of the world.

President Allende did not have the control of the Chilean parliament or of the army and his own political programme did not have the understanding of the peasants. He was supported as a leader and all this suggests that he was not really the spokesman for the people. The intellectuals and artists who supported him were therefore not truly representative of the people; they were a little before their time. Victor Jara died because his death meant a delay in his ideas developing among the people. Had he been expressing true national feelings, his martyrdom would have been too dangerous because of the possible reaction. More importantly, his martyrdom would have been irrelevant because his values would already be held by the majority of people anyway.

Throughout the world, the fate of the Allende administration has been hailed by the left and the right wings as an illustration that a majority of people cannot change society by democratic and constitutional methods. In actual fact it merely illustrates the futility of a vanguard group trying to lead an ignorant mass of followers into a change which the majority do not understand. When you can destroy a leader and destroy a cause, destroying a leader is obviously the best solution.

A second moral can be drawn. We must learn to respect and protect our artists whatever their political opinions. A society which neglects them is destroying its capacity to change.

Mark Fury, 

S. P. of New Zealand

Assassinations or class struggle? (2025)

Street art in San Francisco

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated the capitalist Brian Thompson, CEO of a health insurance company, after seeing his own mother’s prolonged suffering after being denied health insurance coverage in North America, where healthcare is unsocialised by design. The shot was heard around the world and ignited the long dormant class consciousness of North America. The outpouring of support for Mangione’s alleged act has been politically surprising for many of the lapdogs of capital. The media especially has been caught on the back foot, seeing political pundits booed by their own audience as the public celebrate the alleged act.

Capitalism and political violence go hand in hand. As Malcolm X said, ‘violence is American as cherry pie.’ It’s just not usually cutting in this direction. We will see this same political opera play out again and again as capitalism tumbles from one crisis to the next, economic and environmental, and as society becomes more individualistic and fragmented from both wings of the political spectrum, as well as an increase in violence inspired by conspiracy theorists. Examples abound from ‘pizzagate’ or the ‘MAGA bomber’ Cesar Sayoc.

Western society’s morals advocate for people to only use peaceful means of achieving social change, but capitalism is anything but peaceful. The inherent tensions between classes in a capitalist society lead to situations where violence is inevitable when the oppressed are spoken to everyday in the language of violence by capital.

The state, as argued by Max Weber, is defined by its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. In this regard, the 1 percent wields power through the apparatus of the state, enforcing laws and maintaining order to protect its property. So, when the working class resorts to violence, it is typically a reaction to an unyielding system that allows no channels and permits no voice.

Consider the words of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who once stated, ‘Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.’ Where the state fails to provide avenues for dissent, the working class feels compelled to take matters into their own hands, an act not of frivolity but of desperation. To condemn such an act will serve the oppressive structure of the status quo that continues to render peaceful protests ineffectual.

The job of a socialist party in this context is not to support the wild actions of rugged individualists but to provide paths of mass action with a coherent philosophy, uniting disparate efforts into a collective strategy. Antonio Gramsci emphasised the importance of a ‘war of position’ in establishing hegemony, advocating for a broad ideological struggle that counters individualistic acts of defiance with systemic solutions. The party must provide structure to the movement, demonstrating that the fight against oppression is not one of isolated and ultimately futile gestures but part of a large revolutionary struggle.

The late historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed out the ‘social bursts’ of violence that erupt during times of severe inequity. The working class mobilisation amidst such strife, far from being vilified, should be understood within the broader narrative of class conflict.

The state’s response to dissent is a reflection of its inherent class interests. The role of a socialist party is not only to channel individual acts into a collective aim but also to recognise and respond to the realities of revolutionary action, acknowledging that, while peaceful revolution is its aim, understanding the circumstances that lead to violence is crucial in the pursuit of a free society. It is through this synthesis of theory and practice that the socialist movement can articulate its vision for the future, one where productive resources are held in common, and where the state, and its monopoly of violence, will be a thing of the past.

A. T.

Danger: conspiracists at work (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump immediately gave rise to a frenzy of conspiracy theories. One story that quickly spread was that the whole thing was staged by supporters of Trump. One US-based YouTube account said the picture was just ‘too damn perfect” and described how they got ‘the flag positioned perfect and everything’. But more widespread was the idea that assassination was ordered by anti-Trumpers of various kinds – the CIA, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Mike Pence, or even Joe Biden. What has unfolded since then has been straight out of the conspiracy theory playbook with committed activists on social media who deny almost everything (the Covid pandemic, climate change, mass shootings, terror attacks) putting out a panoply of overwhelmingly improbable stories. In their minds not just one thing is suspect and said to be the subject of a hidden conspiracy but very many.

Another striking example of such ‘invented knowledge’ is the idea that ‘weather manipulating’ or ‘geo-engineering’ is taking place enabling governments to control both weather and climate for sinister purposes. Such stories have been around for some time but spread more widely in the UK recently based on the erratic and unusually cool weather experienced in June and July followed by one of the wettest winters in recent years. This is being done, so the claims say, by such methods as ‘cloud seeding’ (which does actually exist and was experimented with in the 1950s but shown to have only small, localised impacts) and ‘solar radiation management’. There is even talk of ‘chemtrails’, said to be a secretive plot to spray people with dangerous chemicals. As a result, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, weather forecasters have been on the end of significant abuse from conspiracy theorists on social media, accused of hiding truths about weather from the public. One user on ‘X’ wrote, ‘Imagine watching the geoengineers at work, and you report the weather without telling the truth about what really is going on. That is sick’. No attention is paid of course to the reality that, on a warming planet, warm air is able to hold more moisture, which in turn fuels more intense rainfall and erratic weather conditions. All this is dismissed as ‘climate scam propaganda’.

The BBC’s fact-checking service, ‘Verify’, which looks into stories circulating on the internet that may seem the result of some form of conspiracy theory or at least questionable, has found no evidence for such theories and credibly debunked them. But what one writer has termed ‘belief perseverance’ among conspiracy theorists persists even in the face of solid contradictory information and facts. Of course those who spread such ideas will say that the BBC is itself part of the conspiracy seeking to exercise control over people and the environment and take away their ‘freedoms’ and therefore its findings cannot be trusted. And it must be said that it has been ‘verified’ that in past times the BBC did function as a servile collaborator of the Secret Services when it came to the British state’s attempts to sniff out ‘subversion’.

Luckily the myths propagated by conspiracy theorists are rarely shared by whole populations, as they might have been in the past. They tend rather to exist among a certain segment of the population, perhaps as an expression of despair among people who find their existences particularly confusing, stressful and alienating, feel impotent to influence events or their own lives, and so seek consolation in such theories. It is only a pity that many other myths are shared by large swathes of people: for example worship of non-existent gods, devotion to leaders, the idea that one’s accidental country of birth somehow makes that place superior to others, and in particular the acceptance of class-divided society based on obscene wealth for the few and just getting by or dire poverty for the many as a natural and unchangeable way of organising human society.

Howard Moss

Editorial: Instant recoil (2024)

Editorial from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outrage and condemnation poured forth from the forked tongues of world leaders at the ‘horrific and heinous’ assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which left him posturing bloodily but heroically unbowed, and soon plundering his spectacular PR gift for all it was worth (oh yeah, and y’know, sorry about the dead people, whatever). Biden once again failed miserably to rise to the occasion by describing the attempt as ‘not appropriate’. Smelling blood, press hacks were all too quick to drag up his embarrassing quote from only days before that it was ‘time to put Trump in a bullseye’. Things just couldn’t have got any worse for Geriatric Joe. After he’d staggered incoherently through a TV debate that left his supporters aghast and huge numbers of his own influencers publicly wanting him out, this rifle shot was the coup de grace. Biden duly quit, leaving lame-duck VP Kamala Harris with an impossible uphill battle and Trump the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. His more wild-eyed acolytes even started wearing simulated ear bandages, as Trump’s bloodied ear raised him to mythic and, it would seem, unprosecutable status. They may bury him one day, but that ear belongs in a museum.

Some of the ‘outrage’ will have been for form’s sake. A lot of people might have privately wished the attempt had succeeded. Trump is a blustering renegade who can be expected to disregard facts or reason. His comments about a possible ‘third term’, in defiance of the constitution, have sown plenty of disquiet. His implied warnings about withdrawing support from NATO could spark a budget-busting arms race across the world as individual states look to their defences in the face of real or perceived threats from Russia or China. In practice though, the administration may well rein in his worst excesses.

Nonetheless, he is an abject and repulsive metaphor for capitalism’s screw-you ideology. Perhaps that’s why so many of the rich love him, and dismiss concerns about his MAGAlomania as Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don’t seem unduly worried that he might turn the powers of the state against them, if he decides he doesn’t like them. He’s one of them, after all. Meanwhile many poor Americans have somehow convinced themselves that this fraudulent, conceited, misogynistic man-baby is their best friend. Just like turkeys welcoming Thanksgiving.

The shooter, barely out of his teens and apparently a young conservative, tragically wasted his life for another delusion. Politicians, even populist demagogic ones like Trump, can’t change how capitalism fundamentally works, so shooting him wouldn’t make any difference. That’s thinking with the heart, not the head. He would just be replaced by someone else who, if not necessarily as personally repellent, would nonetheless still carry out the repellent work of managing the system in the interest of the rich, and entirely at the expense of the poor and the planet. And besides, socialists could never condone political murder. There really is only one solution to all this. If the collective misery of the 99 percent is ever to end, capitalism itself needs putting down.

Pathfinders: Death by algorithm (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world held its breath last month as April showers of Iranian missiles descended on Israel, only to be blown out of the sky by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system. Would regional war flower as a result? Iran has around ten times the population of Israel, but Israel has an elite air force, courtesy of the USA, and some of the best technology in the world. Now insiders have revealed that it has been using AI in the war in Gaza.

According to a non-profit magazine run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists, Israel has been using AI to identify ‘tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties’. According to six Israeli intelligence officers involved in the Gaza war, some of them actually in the targeting rooms, the AI system, known as Lavender, is designed to remove the ‘human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets’. The officers say that, in the early stages of the war, the Israeli Defence Force almost completely relied on Lavender to identify the domestic homes of up to 37,000 high to low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad military personnel for potential drone strikes. Such was the cursory nature of IDF oversight, which is demanded by international law, that Lavender’s outputs were treated ‘as if it were a human decision’, and the kill lists given ‘sweeping approval’ without anyone checking the raw intelligence data. This was despite it being known that the system had a 10 percent error rate.

Moreover, the AI system was designed to target militants at their most vulnerable, when they had returned to their domestic dwellings to be with their families. A second AI system, chillingly known as ‘Where’s Daddy?’, identified when the militants actually entered their family homes. ‘We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,’ one intelligence officer said. ‘It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.’

For lower-ranking militants, the army decided not to use smart bombs, which can take out an individual or a car, but unguided ‘dumb’ bombs which destroy entire buildings or apartment blocks on top of the target individual. ‘You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage’, said one officer. Two others added that the army had also agreed that ‘for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians’, while for a battalion or brigade commander, the permissible civilian deaths could be over 100.

This explains why the number of women and children killed has been so enormous. In previous operations, the IDF had strict rules of proportionality, in compliance with international law, and requirements to cross-check, verify, incriminate and confirm the target’s presence in real time. Because human targeting generated limited results, it was feasible to stick to these rules. Since October 7, targeting has been given over entirely to AI, which has produced gigantic kill lists, and all the verification rules have gone out of the window. Who the system identifies as a target depends on where the users set the bar. It could be little more than changing one’s address or mobile phone. ‘There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs.’

To call this unprecedented is an understatement. Nothing like it has been known before in Israel’s military operations, nor that of anybody else’s including the USA, not even against high-ranking targets like Bin Laden. A US general and former commander of operations against ISIS said, ‘With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.’ For the Israeli Defence force however, things were different. ‘There was hysteria in the professional ranks,’ said one officer, ‘They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen.’

What will be the long-term upshot of this policy of indiscriminate, AI-assisted slaughter? The Israeli whistleblowers are under no illusions: ‘In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.’

So, never mind rules, never mind international agreements, this is the shape of wars to come, where the critical factor is not law but LAWS – lethal autonomous weapons systems which track, target and destroy human life with no human oversight at all. The irony is that capitalism’s technological revolutions have created a global productive capability that could put us all beyond any need for outdated capitalist trade relations, where we could live in peace without markets, prices, wages, debts – or wars. Yet capitalism’s internal logic is to compete for profit, to grow or die, and the inevitable extension of that logic is war. Now AI targeting and LAWS are genies out of the bottle. If we don’t abolish capitalism soon, the human race could end up being obliterated by its own technology.

Paddy Shannon

Kennedy and after (1964)

From the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is part of the mystique essential to the leadership cult that the leaders themselves, dead and alive, are surrounded by myths. When they die in as dramatically horrible a way as the late President Kennedy, the myths may become more exaggerated than usual. Everyone, except for a few lunatics like the Deep South segregationists who cheered when they heard it, must have felt a chill of horror at the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Everyone must feel for Mrs. Kennedy in her endurance of an experience to haunt her for the rest of her life. It is never pleasant to look upon the results of violence, especially the sort of which simmers beneath the garish shell of a city like Dallas.

But the world is larger than one man, no matter how powerful he may be—and Kennedy was a very powerful man indeed. The eminence of the people who attended his funeral is proof—if more proof were needed—of the fact that the United States stands supreme in world capitalism today. But whatever sympathy we may feel for Kennedy we also feel for the millions of other people who suffer under capitalism. We feel it for those who meet, without headlines, equally horrible deaths in wartime. However much we sympathise with Mrs. Kennedy in her grief, we have the same feelings for the relatives of those who died in battle, or in air raids. We feel for all the unnecessary suffering which property society imposes on the human race—for the hunger and the fear and the cruel struggle that is so often the business of living.

Because we feel these things, and want to do something about them, we are Socialists. And because we are Socialists we try to dispel the myths which help to sustain capitalism, no matter what or whom they concern.

The first notion we have to examine is the one which is held, in different ways, by the man who shot the President and by the people who applauded, and by those who grieved, his death. This is the notion that murdering Kennedy will substantially alter the course of history. Predictably, there have been many comparisons with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the American Civil War. Yet Lincoln’s murder did not change anything. It did not alter the fact that the North had won and that as a result the American Union would continue to be solidified and to develop into the great power that it is today. If the American Negro is still, in many parts of the United States, held in near slavery, that is only because one of the real factors in the moulding of history—the massive will of a people—wants him to remain so and not because a man who is mistakenly supposed to have stood for Negro freedom was murdered.

In the same way, the policies which Kennedy followed, whatever superficial effect he himself had upon them, were basically determined for him by the conditions of his time. Kennedy, it is said, regarded politics as the art of the possible which means, among other things, that he tried to acknowledge the realities of modern capitalism. The new President, Johnson, lost no time in declaring that he, too, would work within these realities. Thus there will probably be no change in Washington’s new attitude towards the Soviet Union. This attitude sprang, not from a change of heart on the part of Mr. Khrushchev, nor from a pacific impulse on the part of President Kennedy, but from the new balance of power after the rift between Russia and China. This rift, incidentally, was symbolised by different reactions to the news of Kennedy’s assassination—regret in Moscow, jubilation in Peking. This situation has brought about a change in Russo/American relations; American policy is now the compound of firmness and caution upon which the dead President put his stamp.

We are accustomed, now, to hearing such changes described as the actions of peace-loving leaders. President Johnson has run true to form on this; in, his first speech to Congress he said:

“We will be unceasing in the search for peace—resourceful in our pursuit of areas of agreement even with those with whom we differ—and loyal to those who join with us in common cause.”

There will, too, be no change on civil rights. Racial intolerance is a considerable obstacle to the advance of organised industry in some parts of America; any government which faces modern realities must be opposed to it. Here was one of Kennedy’s greatest difficulties. He knew the importance of desegregation but he also knew that to push a programme of equal rights would cost him votes. And so it did. He was, in fact, in Texas in an effort to heal a split in the local Democratic ranks, and to rally support for his presidential campaign next year, when he was shot down.

The Kennedy policies, then, will continue because they expressed the conditions and the needs of American capitalism today. If some Congressmen opposed them, if fanatical racialist Senators from the South persisted in regarding Kennedy as a dangerous revolutionary, that is only a measure of the fact that they reflect the ignorance of the people who elected them. This ignorance need not concern only such things as class consciousness; it can also apply, as it does in the case of racial intolerance, to the realities of modern capitalism. Johnson will also do his best to make the United States face these realities. “I hate this as much as you do,” he once shouted at some obstinate Congressman, “But this is happening.” Which is a typically Texan way of summing it up.

Kennedy’s image was of a gracefully relaxed, yet energetically driving, young man. A cultured, sincere man; a man whose good looks, background and accomplishments made him something of a model for every modern sales executive. Kennedy was rich enough to have had, and to have taken advantage of, a very good education. One report put his personal fortune at between £3½ million and £4¼ million, and that of his father at something like £100 million. His social regime in the White House showed that he was deeply appreciative of the arts. But at the same time Kennedy was a very cool politician. He planned years ahead for his assault upon the Presidency. The manner in which he convinced the Democratic Party that his comparative youth and his Roman Catholicism did not weaken his power to attract votes was a classical example of his single-minded political campaigning. His professed sincerity and ideals did not prevent him, when he named Johnson as his Vice-Presidential candidate, from working the vote-catching compromise which is usual in American presidential elections. The campaign itself was a masterpiece, with Kennedy the man very much in control. Alistair Cooke reporting the campaign for The Guardian, contrasted the possible reactions of the candidates if they lost. Nixon, he thought, would take defeat bitterly but Kennedy would not let it worry him—he would “sleep sound o’nights.” 

There is no reason to suppose that Kennedy’s death will basically change anything. Perhaps there will be different decorations at the White House, or fewer famous musicians performing there. But the ideas and the policies which come out will be to all intents and purposes the same as if Kennedy were still alive. This is what American investors thought; Wall Street slumped when the President was shot, but a couple of days later it recovered with a rise the like of which has not been seen for over thirty years. The Stock Exchange in London, and its equivalent in other capitals, were also not slow to express their opinion that, whoever is in the White House, capitalism is going to live on.

The Cuban crisis made Kennedy the first man ever to have wielded, in apparent earnest, the threat of nuclear war as an instrument in capitalism’s international disputes. The manner in which he handled that crisis may be enough to set him down as one of the world’s more incisive leaders. Because of this, he will be buried in the myth that a leader’s political skill, or lack of it, substantially alters history. In fact, Kennedy was very much like the men who were Presidents before him, and the man who has succeeded him. He worked within the art of the possible. Perhaps at times he hated what he was doing yet was compelled to do it—because it was happening.

Ivan

Death of a politician (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Have you recovered yet from the death of Ian Gow? How devastated were you by the assassination of that implacable, unquestioning, indiscriminate supporter of capitalism as administered by Thatcherite Tories? In one respect Gow's death was unremarkable: we were told how clever, brave, considerate, reliable he was (readers can add their own laudatory adjectives from the vocabulary they will have amassed from the tributes paid to other dead politicians). Apparently, political life is teaming with such estimable people and we should grieve deeply when they die. The only problem is why, if we are governed by such capable leaders, is the world in such a mess? Are we worse off, when one of them dies, than we were when they were alive?

Ian Gow was the son of an eminent doctor. He went to public school and did his National Service as an officer in one of those regiments which liked to pretend they still rode into battle on horses. He qualified as—and always looked like—a solicitor before turning his attention to politics. After contesting a couple of constituencies where the Labour majority made his a hopeless cause (in one, at Coventry East, the voters were so impressed with Gow’s qualities that they gave his Labour opponent—Richard Crossman—a doubled majority) he was handed the plum seat of Eastbourne. In 1945 the Labour Party, fielding a personable ex-officer against the remote and disdainful Tory incumbent had come within shouting distance of winning there. But the colonels and landladies of that seaside town quickly got their political bearings back and by the last general election they were presenting Gow with a majority of almost 17,000 while the Labour candidate could scrape up less than 5,000 votes.

Selsdon man

In parliament Gow soon put down his markers, joining the Selsdon Group which opposed Ted Heath’s drift away from the policies agreed by the conference of Conservative bigwigs at the Selsdon Park Hotel in the run-up to the 1970 election. Selsdon foresaw a Tory government declining to intervene in disputes between employers and workers, or in the case of an unprofitable company, or to use official influence on wages and prices; state interference in such affairs had led to the dire condition of British capitalism in the 1960s: henceforth they would all be left to be sorted out by the pressures of the market. The Labour Party delightedly likened these ideas to the emergence of a primitive being—Selsdon Man.

Heath put Selsdon Man out of his misery. attempting to resolve the crisis which hit his government by his famous U-turns on Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and some other issues. The Selsdon Group—Nicholas Ridley was another member—campaigned against this abandonment of what it saw as the policies essential for the salvation of British capitalism: the free market, privatisation, education vouchers, private health services and big cuts in taxation and public spending. It might have occurred to the Selsdon Group that theories about state intervention had developed because private enterprise left to itself had failed to control capitalism but people like Nicholas Ridley have never been susceptible to arguments based on fact.

Gow's membership of the Group could not have harmed his reputation with Thatcher, who when she came to power in 1979 made him her Parliamentary Private Secretary, which was a polite name for her whipper-in and nark. In that job he was a meticulous note-taker at any meeting of potentially rebellious Tones and infuriated his colleague Jim Prior by openly stimulating opposition to Prior's Bill to set up an Assembly in Northern Ireland to start "rolling devolution" there. Prior called it a “disgraceful episode" but to Gow it was all in the day's unsavoury work; he was. in any case, a hard-line unionist.

He also irritated a lot of Tories by his sickening admiration of Thatcher, at one time saying that she had no great need to admit that she was ever wrong because she was almost always right. At times he was too much for even the Thatcherites to bear; one complained that, while he was preparing himself to contribute to the usual grovelling ovation at the end of one of the prime minister's speeches. Gow was "blubbering" before she had even begun.

Thatcherite Christian

If Gow had any ability beyond this kind of work it was not glowingly evident during his time as Minister of Housing (for which he was qualified by his ownership of a large and lovely 16th century house in the Sussex countryside) and then as Minister of State at the Treasury. When he resigned over the Anglo-Irish Agreement he could spend more time on church affairs, for he was as dogged a Christian as he was a Thatcherite.

It comes as no surprise that Gow should complain about the Church being too political (which meant critical of the Thatcher government and voicing concern about issues like deep poverty and homelessness) and not sufficiently Christian (which meant blindly supportive of Thatcher and careless of any human suffering). Although he was a Christian he clearly had reservations on that stuff about us all being god's children equally loved by our maker, for he opposed sanctions against South Africa and voted against legislation designed to relieve sex discrimination. He demanded an unquestioning acceptance of the killing of the three IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar—a predictable attitude from a man who operated on the simple principle that "our" side was always right and "their" side always wrong. His physical concept of Jesus is unknown but he did not like men with beards since he suspected them of being what he called socialists.

At all events Gow was doing very well. A partner in a successful firm of solicitors, a member of Lloyds and of several costly and exclusive London clubs, with a liking for mixing and drinking exotic cocktails, he would have had reservations about the meek inheriting the earth. There is indeed little progress towards that illusionary object under the Thatcher government, which is perhaps why Gow supported it so ardently.

This is not the place for any detailed account of what this government has done: it can be summarised by saying that it has taken advantage of the present world economic conditions to inflict such damage on the trade unions as will take them a long time to recover from. It has ferociously attacked working class living standards and in particular those on the lower levels of poverty, who have been treated most savagely. It has seen the dreams of many of its bedrock supporters—small business people and those with a mortgage on their home—turn into nightmares which they can't wake up from. And while it persistently assures us that this suffering is necessary so that things can become better in the long run, and better permanently, the fact is that the problems persist. The rate of bankruptcies and insolvencies is increasing; price rises are accelerating and the CBI has recently stated that British capitalism is on the brink of another recession. This is the chaos which Ian Gow stood for so blindly.

To criticise the victim of an assassination, to take a hard look at how they thought, spoke and acted, is not to condone their murder. Political assassination is a futile business, which removes one twister to make room for another; the only effective way to deal with society’s problems is through democratic political action aimed at getting rid of capitalism and its twisting politicians. This is a social system which brutalises its people, under which life is cheap and millions die every year through wars or unnecessary diseases and “accidents". Being assassinated means that politicians who glorify in this inhumane way of running human affairs can go to their graves on a wave of outrage against their killers instead of against capitalism.

Ivan

Mountbatten: ruling class casualty (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Violence, within and between individual states, is inescapable under the social system of capitalism. States often disagree over their mutual boundaries; each, in normal circumstances, wishes to preserve, or to extend if possible, its frontiers. The larger the territory, the greater the chance of profit. The ideas of ‘race’ or nationalism, of separate language-groupings or cultures, or the traditions of such groupings, are often called on by both sides in such disputes. So is religion. Among capitalists in Great Britain and Ireland at the present time, and among those who take up the banners of either the British or the Irish capitalist class, there is such a dispute. Should Northern Ireland become part of Irish capitalism, or should it remain part of British capitalism? Cultural and racial traditions are appealed to by both sides. The slogan of a ‘united Ireland’ is opposed by the cry that the six counties are really British. Catholics are exhorted to support one side, and Protestants the other.

Many Northern Irish workers, deceived by the ever-active propagandists of capitalism, have strong views as to whether they would rather be exploited by Irish or British capitalism. Capitalist boundary disputes cannot be ‘solved’, except by the forcible transportation of thousands or even millions of people such as we saw, for example, in eastern Germany and eastern Poland after 1945.

In the capitalist struggle over Northern Ireland, twenty-two people were killed by the IRA on Monday August 27. As a single day’s casualty list, it was high by Ulster standards, being rivalled only by the numbers of demonstrators killed in Londonderry on one day in 1972 by the British army, and by some massacres in public houses caused by bombs planted by the other side. Among the twenty-two dead in August was Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Why was his death greeted with such grisly satisfaction on one side, and such ostentatious horror on the other?

Unemployed royalty

Mountbatten was by descent a member of a kind of condottieri of minor German royalties who ranged over Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking new positions, new countries, and (with luck) new thrones While in northern and western Europe the feudal barons had given way to kings and eastern and south-eastern Europe was split among the Russian, Austrian and Turkish Empires, in the middle of Europe the barons had evolved into petty princelings of small states, mostly German-speaking. Some were consolidated by Napoleon, and the 160 principalities of 1789 became only thirty-eight in 1815. Nevertheless, that still meant a lot of royal families, all with younger sons and daughters to be provided for as improved medical care led to the survival of more babies.

At the same time, two careers opened to the fortunate: marriage into the more important royal houses of Europe, or the filling of new thrones in the east of Europe as the older empires crumbled and new independent states were established. Others of the successive ducal broods followed their more fortunate brothers and sisters, and commanded armies or navies or found other well-paid niches — or rich spouses, or both — within the ruling hierarchies of the larger European countries. Some had to try two or even three different states before finding a satisfactory position for themselves.

The royal base from which these adventurers set out was obliterated in 1871 when Prussia swallowed up most of these petty territories in the creation of the new greater Germany. But the destruction of the thrones did not mean the destruction of their occupants, and for many decades after 1871 these ex-royalties continued their ancestral occupations.

British connection

Mountbatten came from the line of dukes of Hesse. Already very well connected, the Hesse royal family came into the British royal family's circle of acquaintance, and two of the four sons of Alexander and his Polish countess (Louis, Alexander, Henry, Francis) decided to become British and make their fortunes in the UK; Prince Louis of Battenburg was chosen as the husband for another of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, and Prince Henry was accented as the husband for Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter. Honours quickly flowed in: Louis became Admiral of the Fleet, personal aide-de-camp to Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and First Sea Lord.

Jackpot

Another of the Battenburg boys seemed to have hit an even bigger jackpot. In 1879, the Bulgarian capitalist class established its de facto independence from the Turkish sultan and invited Prince Alexander of Battenburg to become the country’s monarch as Prince of Bulgaria. Immediately, Alexander’s younger brother, Prince Francis, the fourth of the Battenburgs, turned up as a colonel of Bulgarian cavalry, only too ready to swear undying allegiance to Bulgaria as soon as he could find it on the map. After Alexander had enjoyed only seven years as front man for the Bulgarian ruling class, however, Russia decided the country was getting too big for its boots and kidnapped Alexander, forcing him to abdicate. This nasty experience subdued him, and he returned to Hesse, still financially well provided for, and settled down there as an ex-monarch. Prince Francis, however, was not beaten yet. He married the daughter of Nicholas I, King of Montenegro; but his efforts to learn the Montenegrin national anthem were in vain, as the country, and its royal house with all the perks attaching to it, disappeared in the First World War.

These royal adventurers often fought loyally for ‘their’ countries, despite relatives on the other side. Nor did they worry too much about how repressive or otherwise the regime they served turned out to be: relatives of the British royal family ran anti-Semitic pogroms and jailed or executed opponents in Russia and elsewhere, and other relatives of British royalty fought for the Nazis in the last war — Prince Charles has a German cousin, born in the 1930s, named Adolf after Hitler. The international background of this stratum of ex-German royalties contrasts strangely with the jingoism and chauvinism — ‘my country, right or wrong’ — which each state shoves down its workers’ throats in war and peace.

Mountbatten

The British Battenburgs found themselves under suspicion in 1914 when a wave of anti-German hysteria swept the country. Prince Louis of Battenburg, whose brother-in-law was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial German navy, was forced to resign as First Sea Lord. They avoided all such future complications by changing their name to Mountbatten. George V further anglicised his cousin’s husband by creating him Marquis of Milford Haven. Prince Louis had four children: George, second marquis; Louis, later Earl Mountbatten; Victoria, who married Prince Andrew of Greece and was the mother of Prince Philip; and Louise, who married Gustav VI of Sweden, becoming Queen of Sweden. Louis entered the British navy and eventually became an admiral, filling many top posts in the armed forces and elsewhere. He was personal aide-de-camp to Edward VIII, GeorgeVI and Elizabeth II. He was Chief of Combined Operations in 1942-3, Supreme Allied Commander in south-east Asia in 1943-6, Viceroy of India in 1947, Governor-General of India in 1947-8, First Sea Lord in 1955-9, and Chief of Defence Staff in 1959-65.

He chaired a committee investigating security in British prisons, and recommended the formation of new high security units. His personal fortune was greatly extended by his marriage to the Hon. Edwina Ashley; her father was a Conservative MP, a government minister and a peer, and her mother the only daughter of Sir Ernest Cassel, who made much money out of publishing. Mountbatten’s personal record of prominent positions in the service of British capitalism, particularly in the titanic struggles (so costly in destruction and in human suffering) of the British state earlier this century against its rivals, together with his close relationship to the royal family, ensured him the panegyrics which duly appeared in every national newspaper on his death.

Slaughter

It is true that some past criticisms were mentioned in the obituaries. Some recalled the heavy loss of life, allegedly through faults of advance planning, in the Dieppe raid of 1942 which Mountbatten masterminded. Others referred to the slaughter which followed when he went to India in 1947 (the British ruling class not being able any longer to keep such a vast country as its own private possession), pushing through the partition into India and Pakistan so quickly that many minorities were caught on the wrong side of the new frontier and were promptly massacred; perhaps half a million died.

Northern Ireland

Both sides in the Northern Ireland dispute stand aghast at violence — when it is committed by the other side. The IRA deplore British violence, but they have not only killed British soldiers and prominent men like Mountbatten; they have frequently killed also mere bystanders. The Mountbatten bomb also killed a local boy who worked on the yacht. British newspapers were horror-struck at such indiscriminate homicide, but the British army in Northern Ireland has also killed innocent bystanders who got in the way of gun-battles (apologising afterwards, like the IRA does). And during the Second World War, while Mountbatten played a leading part in the direction of the British war effort, many innocent German women and children were deliberately slaughtered in bombing raids. The 100,000 killed in a single Allied raid on Hamburg (many of them burned alive in a fire-storm) must have included thousands of babies, boys and girls, women and old people, as well as hundreds of foreign conscripted slave-workers — besides all those left mutilated, crippled and disfigured. Nor was any apology considered necessary. Where were the horrified newspaper articles and broadcasts then?

If you handle pitch, you get dirty fingers. If you support and work for capitalism, violence — committing it and suffering it, as Mountbatten did — is likely to be part of the deal.

Alwyn Edgar

The Killing of Bin Laden: Who’s Terrifying Who and Why? (2011)

From the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the War on Terror? Why do governments want us to be afraid?

The execution of Osama Bin Laden, announced on 1 May by President Obama, has been fêted as a great tactical victory by the White House, by Western governments and the world’s media. The longed-for news saw a wave of nationalistic, back-slapping hysteria in the US and the killing has served as a sorely needed propaganda tool to enhance the standing of the US military in the eyes of the domestic public.

Some in the Obama administration quickly seized on the Pakistan achievement to promote their own sinister agenda, with Americans reliably informed that their doubts on the use of torture were misplaced and that Bin Laden was actually found as a direct result of information gleaned by the CIA’s torture of captives

Despite world-wide celebrations and Obama’s rise in popularity at home and the propaganda value of the killing, there is no evidence that the death will have any impact on the flagging military and political situation of the US in South Asia, the Middle East and other theatres of high tension.

The death of Bin Laden has been seen as affording the US an escape strategy from Afghanistan, bringing closure to a decade of embarrassment in the country. To be sure, the US attempts to create a pliant puppet regime in Kabul are failing. The Taliban, or indeed, Al Qaeda, are no nearer defeat than ten years ago and still notching up US casualties. Quite significantly, in the latter regard, at Kabul airport on 29 April, nine high-ranking US military officers were assassinated by a “reliable” Afghan fighter pilot. That this attack happened in an ostensibly high security area, implies that no place in Afghanistan is secure from attack, that anyone is vulnerable, and that not even allied Afghan military personnel can be trusted.

With the US tied down in an unpopular war in Afghanistan, domestic woes rising and his political standing falling, it would seem Obama was desperate for a military success story, more so considering 9/11 is now a decade ago and years of rampant military expenditure are factoring high in the current budget deficit.

Terror, what is it?

Undoubtedly, the ‘War on Terror’ will continue to serve many interests, with politicians promoting the concept at every opportunity to justify overseas military actions and to keep the public in a state of mild panic. It is thus worth looking at the concept of terrorism itself and to judge the definers by their own definition.

The US Army Manual definition of terrorism is “the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence, to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature, through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear.”

This is quite close to the British government’s definition, which is “the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government, or intimidate the public, and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological case.”

One aim of The War on Terror is to frighten us – to get us all paranoid about a freedom-loathing bogeyman who is just waiting to come and destroy all we hold sacred – and to get us to fall in line behind the wider objectives of US and British foreign policy, which are in reality the objectives of a small corporate elite who really call the shots in both countries.

George Bush was every bit the terroriser when he introduced the “Shock and Awe” strategy of 2003 and indeed when he announced, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. Likewise with Tony Blair who announced to a terrified British public that Saddam could reach Britain with his WMDs within 45 minutes – a fact that that later proved to be total fallacy.

It is, perhaps, important to set the war on terror in context. America, for 45 years, terrified us with the threat of the Soviet menace, meanwhile expanding its reach all over the world. When the Kremlin’s empire collapsed, America suddenly found itself deprived of its hegemonic credentials, no longer able to use its anti-communist passport to interfere in global affairs from Cuba to Vladivostok. The end of the cold war meant it was stamped null and void.

It now needed a new propaganda framework through which to assert its authority on the international stage, a new enemy, a new bogeyman to protect us all from – and the first bogeyman who reared his head was Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait within two years of the Berlin Wall falling, sparking the first Gulf War and the start of the US obsession with Iraq that has lasted 20 years. Saddam would later be joined by Bin Laden in 2001 after 9/11, the events of which all of us are now over-familiar with.

Notably, the language and jargon used to discuss the War on Terror, all its definitions, is chosen by the US political elite. Likewise it is the US that gets to delineate the ideology of the enemy, whether it be fascist or communist or militant Islamic. In the case in question it would have been insensitive in the extreme to declare a war on Islam, so North Korea had to be incorporated into Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, lest the entire Islamic world rise up against the USA.

The US has certainly benefited from the War on Terror, extending its reach like no empire in history. It now has in excess of 700 military bases around the world, and these bases can be found in 177 of the world’s 193 UN recognised countries. More likely, it seems the War on Terror has everything to do with full spectrum dominance and the desire of the US capitalist elite to control the world’s mineral wealth, trade routes, foreign markets, areas of influence and to maintain the strategic sites from which all these sources of profit can be defended. Little wonder there are many who claim that if Osama Bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to create him to get into Afghanistan.

Then why Afghanistan? The Caspian Basin, which the country borders, contains an estimated $12 trillion dollars worth of oil. It is not the case that he US wants this oil for itself, but needs a presence in Afghanistan to be able to control just who does have access to it.

Big lies

There are real contenders against US economic supremacy, namely India, Russia and China, all with a growing and insatiable thirst for oil to lubricate the wheels of their own profit machines. By controlling as much oil as they can, the US gets to stack the odds in its own favour.

But before you can mobilise to take over the world’s scarce resources you first need to get your people on your side. You need their consent, their support and their approval of you as the champion of freedom. This is why George Bush could so cleverly tell the American people: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another,” and that “you are either with us or with the terrorists.”

This was not just Orwellian double-speak. This tactic came straight from Nazi Germany and from Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie … The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Since 11 September, 2001, the governments of George W. Bush and then Barack Obama and Tony Blair told and repeated a “lie big enough” to confirm Joseph Goebbels’ statement, and the American and British people have come to believe it. It is the “War on Terror.”

Whilst we were informed that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were in retaliation for 9/11, it is now clear that the Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and set in motion as early as 3 February 2001, some seven months before 9/11 and thus they had nothing to do with terrorism.

The War on Terror has not only validated the US passport –  that allows it to play the role of globo-cop to further the interests of its own capitalist elite, pushing aside anyone who gets in its way – it has also strengthened the hand of the state at home also. For out of the war on terror came the Patriot Act (USA) and the Terrorism Act (Britain) which put civil disobedience on a par with a felony.

Orwell’s words come only too readily to mind when contemplating White House pronouncements: “Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future.”

John Bissett

The Killing of Bin Laden: Understanding the American Reaction (2011)

From the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large majority of Americans – 87 percent, according to one poll – approve of the killing of Bin Laden. Many were visibly overcome by joy when they heard the news, and the subsequent warning by CIA director Leon Panetta that the operation would actually increase the terrorist threat to the US only slightly damped their spirits.

Within a few days of the operation, video games were on the market offering simulated experiences of killing Osama – or, in one case, his ghost! If you get killed by him first, never mind: you can just start over again.

Sam Sommers, a sociology professor at Tufts University, explained the jubilant reaction as follows: “September 11 shook our belief [that] the world [is] a just and fair place where you get what you deserve. Innocent people died senselessly. Seeing this closing scene, for many people, provides a just ending.” Hence the “sense of relief” expressed by the widow of one 9/11 victim.

What can account for this strange belief that the world is a just and fair place? How is it possible not to know that innocent people die senselessly every day? Perhaps it has something to do with religion, which has more influence over people’s minds in the United States than in most of Western Europe. Perhaps it also reflects the complacent platitudes of “positive thinking”.

Good sense

Besides, was 9/11 senseless? It made good sense to Bin Laden. In his journal, captured by the Navy Seals, he wondered how many Americans it would be necessary to kill to make the United States withdraw its forces from the Moslem world. He pursued a carefully devised strategy – to lure America into a long and exhausting war of attrition that would eventually lead to its economic collapse. It was the same strategy he had used – in alliance with the US – against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This time too, the strategy so far seems to be working very well.

The worst that can be said of Bin Laden is that he was a ruthless warlord willing to sacrifice innocent people on a large scale to achieve his political goals. Let us grant that this makes him an evil man. But let us be consistent and place this judgment in a broader context. World history is full of such evil men (and a few evil women). They are called “great statesmen”.

And look who’s talking!

Many American presidents, whether Republicans or Democrats, have been no less ruthless. Osama killed some 2,800 Americans on 9/11. Compare this with the 3,500 civilians killed by Bush Senior in the December 1989 invasion of Panama – a minor affair as American military interventions go. Or the 3,800 Afghan civilians killed by American bombing within three months of 9/11. Or consider the statement by then US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright (in an interview on 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996) that the deaths of half a million children caused by the US-led embargo on Iraq were “a price worth paying”.

The United States has now avenged 9/11. “Justice has been done,” says Obama. Bin Laden also saw himself as an agent of justice and vengeance (neither of them drawing any distinction between the two). In 2004 he revealed how he first got the idea of destroying the Twin Towers. He was watching the destruction of tower blocks in Beirut on television in 1982, when Israel, backed up by the US Sixth Fleet, was invading Lebanon. Why, he asked himself, should he not “punish the unjust in the same way”?

Clearly, the Towers in New York are not the only twins in this story. It is also a story about twin barbarisms. (Gilbert Achcar elaborates on this thought in his book The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder, Paradigm Publishers 2006.)

The assumption of benevolence

The Americans who celebrated the death of Bin Laden were not bothered by reflections such as these. But let’s not be too harsh on them. Facts that might inspire critical reflection are never mentioned in the mainstream corporate media aimed at ordinary people. Now and then it is admitted that the United States may sometimes make a mistake, but the assumption of benevolence – the idea that America is inherently a force for good in the world – can never be questioned. No alternative perspective is ever presented. And this “patriotic” outlook is drummed into American hearts and minds from the earliest school years.

And yet it is not just a matter of information and ideas not being available. After all, while by no means a democracy in any real sense, the United States is not a totalitarian state either. Thanks in part to the internet, alternative ideas and sources of information are now easily accessible to those determined to seek them out. But not so very many do seek them out.

Why? One reason is that most people are too preoccupied with earning a living, ensuring their own survival. Social pressures are a very important factor. But perhaps the crucial barrier is within the psyche. If your positive self-image is based on the idea of how marvellous “your country” is, then even if you do encounter discordant information it must be rejected or interpreted as somehow irrelevant. Accepting reality would be too painful, too threatening to the self.

Stefan (World Socialist Party of the United States)