For they are an easy target.
A 10p tax band payer looks forward to redistributing her earnings to management.
So, don’t forget to buy the less well paid members of staff or colleagues a small treat, like a nice box of chocolates, to thank them for the pay cut they are taking to fund your tax cut. No one can accuse Gordon Brown of not being in favour of the redistribution of wealth…
Iraq’s largest and most dangerous militia, the Mahdi Army, will disband voluntarily if leading Shia scholars advise its leader to do so, officials said today, in a dramatic move that could quell much of the fighting in the country.
Aides to Hojetoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, who is under mounting political and military pressure, said that the militia chief would send delegations to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a moderate religious leader in Najaf, and to senior clerics in Qom in Iran to consult on whether he should stand down his 60,000-strong militia.
New Hitchens here
The torch relay was called off in Paris today:
French demonstrators wrecked the Olympic torch parade through Paris, succeeding where their London counterparts failed.
Police were forced to cancel the last part of the route after having to extinguish the flame at least five times and move the torch into a bus to escape protesters.
The farcical scenes came after more than 3,000 officers had been deployed in an attempt to avoid the disruption that affected the London relay.
…..
At the start of the relay, on the Eiffel Tower’s first floor, Green Party activist Sylvain Garel lunged for the first torchbearer, former hurdler Stephane Diagana, shouting “Freedom for the Chinese!” Security officials pulled Garel back.
About 50 deputies from all French parties stood behind a banner reading “Respect Human Rights in China” as the torch passed the seat of the National Assembly[.]
Meanwhile Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, a socialist worthy of the name, displayed a banner reading “Paris defends human rights around the world” on l’Hôtel-de-Ville, and later
[C]ancelled a ceremony to mark the passage of the Beijing Olympic torch as officials draped a Tibetan flag over the city hall’s facade.
Mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced the cancellation just after Green party members of the city council hung out the Tibetan flag along with a black banner with the Olympic rings turned into handcuffs.
Given her predilection for self-parody, I would say that Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting possesses a healthy sense of humour. Maybe the sorrowful one has been trawling the often amusing blog “Stuff White People Like” for ideas.
“Britishness is like a scab and we can’t stop scratching,” says the noted “thinker and writer”. While this statement has a ring of truth about it, I’m not sure if I would interpret it in the way the author intended. In fact I’m really not sure what to make of this particular example of left-liberal angst.
It doesn’t help that in the second paragraph Bunting castigates Rageh Omaar for “…shame on him – giving an airing to Britain’s vibrant tradition of racism” in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to be broadcast this evening. Now Omaar may be a meedja tart with an arse the size of which could block out the Sun, but the award-winning black journalist is hardly an Uncle Tom.
I eagerly await the verdict of esteemed Bunting scholar Professor Norman Geras.
Terry Glavin has a superb essay up at Z Word about the anti-Zionism of the Canadian left. It is an essential read. His analysis has much to inform a wider audience. I particularly liked his take on the contemporary ‘peace movement’ as reflecting a counter-cultural rather than a social-justice tradition.
He sees anti-war campaigners emerging from the mobilisations of the anti-globalisation movement and quotes Moishe Postone that these “did not express any sort of movement for progressive change”. I haven’t read Postone, but if that judgement is applied to the anti-globalisation movement as a whole it is harsh, certainly for a section of the movement. However, is easy to see how it could be seen in that way.
Firstly, the most visible face of the movement was presented by the decidedly counter-cultural methods of tactical frivolity. However amusing it is to see someone on stilts dressed as a giant pink fairy confronting baton-wielding riot police, it doesn’t inspire confidence in analytic rigour.
Secondly, the movement was partially a defensive one against a specific model of global capitalism that was not based on free markets, as often stated, but on markets fixed and governed by powerful multi-lateral institutions, which were rapidly transforming societies and destroying communities. In such a situation a movement against change is a progressive one.
Finally, the alternative political economy that the movement offered was disparate and inchoate, ranging from anarchist inspired localism to the more conventional left social democracy of those such as Susan George.
The anti-globalisation movement was always trying to shake off that label in favour of being known as the global justice movement and its heart was not the young activist, but the coalition of trade unions, landless peasants, small farmers, indigenous peoples, worker co-operatives, leftists and environmentalists. And this is where Terry’s essay really hits home. As the global justice movement morphed into the anti-war movement, where did this coalition go? It vanished to be replaced by groups of activists with a simplistic anti-Western sentiment. There was always a struggle by political activists to try and wrest control of such an iconic movement. The events following 9/11 allowed an unrepresentative section of the left, informed by “cultural codes” and “ideational packages”, as identified by Shulamit Volkov, rather than the real interests of the global poor, to take control and build an explicitly political anti-Western coalition.
It was a disaster, Islamists were embraced and the landless jettisoned. Iraqi trade unionists faced a barrage of abuse. The left flirted with anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory. It divorced itself from reality in a rather convenient way. There was no need for any great sacrifice for the ’struggle’, just for the constant expression of the requisite anger. But we should not feel too smug. There is a parallel with some in the anti-totalitarian left. So when Marco Attila Hoare recently wrote that “the principal ideological division in global politics today” is “pro-Western vs anti-Western” I think that he too was oversimplifying. For the left, it is not about being reflexively pro or anti-Western. It is about standing with the poor, the oppressed and the exploited. It is about being consistently pro-social justice.
This is where Terry’s piece is devastating. He writes that the left’s obsession with anti-Zionism at the expense of social justice has meant that:
They have preempted the possibility of a legitimately robust international peace movement that might have found a way to intervene on behalf of ordinary Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese during the bloody crises of this century’s first decade. And they have given courage and comfort to antisemitic fanatics and anti-modernist zealots from the crowded tenements of Gaza to the scorched opium fields of Kandahar.
In Canada, they have effectively infantilized important Canadian debates about the Afghanistan mission, upending these debates into a lurid discourse about American imperialism.
They have undermined labor-movement solidarity campaigns on behalf of the persecuted trade unionists of Iran. They have “problematized” the potential for Canadian leadership in a multilateral intervention on behalf of the suffering people of Darfur.
Reading Terry’s article makes it perfectly clear that a left that simply defines itself purely in terms of its position vis a vis the West is not just a left that has lost its way, but one that has abandoned judgement and, thereby, integrity.
