Tag: history

Third World War is a Real threat

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column in the Plymouth Herald (16.4.24) linking the various recent quotes from Grant Shapps, Kier Starmer, Sharon Graham and Rishi Sunak but without naming them during this period of electoral party-political media purdah (space wouldn’t allow for inclusion of Biden and Netanyahu). The signs of war are with us. The plans are being laid, whilst a single error of judgement of mistake could start the conflagration now. Organise to Stop the War!

The unedited version below:

Historians can describe the signs of coming war: crisis of economy, class tensions at home, scarcity of resources, competition for land and food, pestilence and poverty forcing mass migration.

But war does not begin before they’ve built their armies. War needs advanced planning, not just of the military hardware but of the emotional commitment of the populations involved.

Politicians need to begin making carefully contrived propaganda speeches years in advance. Allying the individual citizen with national interests is a starting point.

Identifying and detailing the alien nature of ‘The Enemy” and broadcasting their atrocities is an essential prerequisite to the conscription of the population ready to fight and kill the subhuman hoards threatening all borders.

The guns and tanks, fighters and mass uniforms must be produced well in advance. New factories have to be built, paid for by a raise in the tax percentage of the Gross Domestic Profit siphoned-off for weapons in spite of any other social concerns and needs of the day.

A sense of national pride must be reestablished, especially if the nation has, to date, been internationalist and multicultural. This can take years and years. Friends who enjoy a variety of cultural lifestyles or faiths have to be set against each other. A new hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and beliefs must be enforced, mirroring the nations’ elite.

This takes a concerted effort that crosses all other political drives within the ruling class. There has to be governance that espouses national unity to the masses – the working class. Corporations that are in constant competition can unite in favour of the flag, even while seeking fresh profits inside a war economy.

Politicians begin public statements early on. Some of their kites fly immediately, others need to be thrown-up over and over again on the run. A likely lad, easily disposed of if scorned and derided by public opposition, has to be chosen to say, for example, “we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”, and “Britain needs to be prepared for war”. Now.

It’s important that the Leader of the Opposition agrees, amplifying the call that the tax-payer must “raise the UK’s defence spending to 2.5% of GDP as soon as resources allow”.

Better still, outdo the policies of the current Party of government. Emphasise the barbarity of the Enemy. Expel the anti-imperialists. Promise to extend and accelerate current development of weapons of mass destruction. Ultimate support for, say nuclear weapons, should trump all other pledges.

All tensions between employees and employers, profiteers and wage-slaves, must be eliminated, class consciousness replaced with nationalist fervour.

Most vitally, the spokespeople for the working class – the people who will be transferred into military uniforms to die for King and Country or be moved to essential military production – must be forcefully cajoled into accepting the changes and bundled into common effort for the coming conflagration.

Trade union leaders have that role to play, primarily to oppose and isolate all anti-warfare activists inside their ranks. In park until they must witchhunt “groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry. Jobs for death must replace jobs for life.

An enormous degree of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is needed because working class people know war is no good.

There has to be a period of one-off clashes, escalating violence and heightened tension between the opposing sides in order to prove that war is essential. Alliances need to be formed and tested between nations before the global war begins.

An enormous amount of top-down propaganda promoting the need for war is required because working class people know that war is no good. The doubters have to be identified as “The Enemy Within”.

War doesn’t make life better for us. Mostly, we die. A military economy is one of shortages and rationing, the absence of welfare, long queues for medical aid or charitable distribution of food aid.

War does make big money for the arms manufacturers and their big shareholders. On all sides. It produces long-term suffering for the rest.

It is time, in fact past time, for a fresh movement against war. The signs are with us, echoing the pre-war years of 1912-14 or 1937-39. The Third World War will dwarf the 70 million deaths of the last world war. All the efforts of those who care for the future of humanity have to combine to prevent the current drive to world war.

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Why all Racism Must be Defeated

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly comment column in today’s Plymouth Herald, 8.4.24, delayed by the Easter week, and shortened to fit a new layout (not by me). Here’s the longer version:

With the period of local council electioneering about to begin, a censorship of any issues deemed “political” will be placed on newspapers and public media. From next week the demand for “balance” and “impartiality” will be used to actually quash public debate in the name of fair play.

At the same time, Party people will push leaflets through our doors making all sorts of claims, with very little public space for debate. Tories and Labour will claim they’re the best for the country despite proposing much the same policies that have failed the working class for the past fifty years.

Socialists will demand investment in housing, welfare and social infrastructure, whilst environmentalists will emphasise the need for action to protect us from the extremes of weather and climate change.

Others will claim themselves “Independent” whilst inevitably espousing ideas from somewhere on the political spectrum, however partial, confused or contradictory.

But the far-right, and much of the mainstream media, will concentrate upon whipping-up racism, and especially anti-Muslim hatred, by focussing upon “terror attacks” abroad and “illegal” immigration at home. Fear and hatred of “the Other”, the “Outsider” will be the hallmark of the racist, however sweetly wrapped and smarmy-smiled.

In an election period where we should be asking why Britain has become so impoverished – from a million pot-holes to seven million waiting routine hospital treatment, 14 million of us in poverty with an income of less than 60% of the “living wage”, a housing crisis ensuring three-quarters a million of our children live in temporary accommodation and four million of our children in absolute poverty – we will be encouraged to blame asylum seekers, and by that implication, all Black people, people of colour, non-white and non-Christian.

The Race Card is being played to divert all attention from the extreme expropriation of our national resources and huge tax revenues by the super-rich executives and Corporations. We are supposed to blame each other and keep the fight inside our rotting communities. Non-white people are overwhelmingly working class, Black and White having far more in common than all the combined elements of diversity.

Racism is a way of diverting people’s attention from the causes of their problems, and finding a ‘scapegoat’ in some other group.

At root, it means making physical or cultural differences between people into a basis for treating them differently. It can involve skin colour, or language, or religion. In politics, racism is always a basis for reaction.

The conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. Defining black people as an inferior race meant that plantation owners could not only justify the enslavement of the black Africans they captured, but also of their children and their children’s children.

This ideology quickly hardened into a new pretend “science” which claimed to prove Europeans’ natural superiority. In 1760, when the slave trade was at its height, a 23 volume “universal history” was published. It described Africans as being “proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot and addicted to all kinds of lusts”, in truth, the accurate description of the rich White ruling classes.

The notion of a hierarchy of races suited the British ruling class as its empire expanded across the globe, violently subjugating whole peoples. Since then, the ideologies of racism have become more sophisticated but no less powerful, carefully espousing one set of values as superior to others, especially using religion as a mobilising force.

Today the far-Right are once again in Government in most European governments, and further afield. The drive for single-race, single ethnicity countries are at the core of the governments of India and Israel, violence the inevitable outcome of such inhuman concepts.

Racism has a huge and negative impact on millions of people in Britain everyday. Racism is not natural; it is not an inevitable outcome of human nature — it needs to be taught and regularly reinforced. It can therefore be challenged and defeated.

Segregation was defeated by the Civil Rights Movement, which united black and white against the racists and their laws. In Britain the anti-slavery movement was strong among workers in the cotton industry, and throughout the 20th century different forms of racism have been challenged, from Antisemitism and anti-migrant racism to Islamophobia.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been an inspiration to a whole new generation of young activists. The huge and unprecedented scale of protests for Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza proves that the majority of the diverse and multicultural working class here oppose the very idea that one group of people are superior to another because of their ethnicity. Racism must be challenged and defeated today, including during the local elections.