Lest We Forget

1. Tony Bliar and George W Bush walk free - while Julian Assange has languished for 11 years first in asylum and, for the past 3 years, in a British jail for exposing the evils perpetrated particularly by the Americans over this period.

I was deeply moved last week by the testimonies of the witnesses to the Belmarsh Tribunal about his imprisonment which gave the lie to the US assertion that he had endangered the lives of agents. The Chairman was able to testify that he had been with Assange the days Assange spent redacting no less than 10,000 names. If you want gripping television, I would beseech you to watch the proceedings. And be very scared!

2. In September 2021, 30 former US officials went on the record to reveal a CIA plot to “kill or kidnap” Assange in London. In case of Assange leaving the embassy, the article noted, “US officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.” These assurances most likely came from the Home Office.

The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government. The Australian journalist has been in the UK Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potentia 175-year sentence after the UK High Court green-lighted his extradition to the US in December 2021. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case. But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on “Operation Pelican” to put an end to his stay in the Ecuador embassy. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions. The then home secretary Priti Patel ordered Assange’s extradition to the US in June. The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated.

3. On the decision to go to war 20 years ago in Iraq, let Chris Hedges be my first witness

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China.

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes.

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq. “I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.” Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine. “I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle Eas cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca.

4. Lawrence Freedman is a UK Emeritus Professor of Military history. That means he has been a fully tenured academic for most of his life – and was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry set up in 2009 by Gordon Brown to investigate the run-up to the war, the military action and its aftermath, to establish how decisions were made, to determine what happened and to identify lessons to ensure that, in a similar situation in future, the British government is equipped to respond in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country. It took the Inquiry seven years to report.

I have some respect for Freedman – not least for the superb book he wrote recently "Strategy – a history" (of all sorts) - but he should be ashamed of his expectation of payment for the substack column he runs with his son Sam

5. And here's an up-to-date report about what the West has done to Iraq

The Iraq Disaster

Exactly 20 years ago, on 18 March 2003, the UK House of Commons voted in favour of Tony Blair’s motion for war against Iraq - although 139 Labour MPs, along with every Liberal Democrat and a few Tories, voted for the contrary amendment, which said that “the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established”, words now hard to argue with. Robin Cook - who had been Foreign Secretary for four years and was now Leader of the House - had just resigned in protest and made what most regarded as the most powerful resignation speech in half a century (the link gives the speech in full). Alastair Campbell was, at the time, Blair's notoriously belligerent press secretary and at the heart of the small policy group around Blair until 2003 (the character of Malcolm Turner played by Peter Capaldi In The Thick of it in the TV series is based on Campbell).

Campbell has now transformed himself into a serious commentator and, for the past year, has run a highly successful podcast with an eccentric centrist Conservative politician Rory Stewart who had taken two years off from Foreign Office duties to walk across central Asia in 2002-4 and then resumed duties – as a Governor in one of the Iraqi Provinces and duly produced a book about that experience "Occupational Hazards – my time governing Iraq" (2006). This week the two came together for an amazing double episode of the podcast to explore their very different perspectives on the war – Campbell from the control centre and Stewart from an increasingly disillusioned periphery. As you can imagine, it's one of the best bits of broadcasting I've ever heard!

Updates; 

Chris Hedges has been a Pulitzer prizewinner and war correspondent for almost two decades which has made him one of the US's strongest critics of their military aggressivness. In his latest article, he recalls the death threats he and the few other sane journalists receiived on the outbreak of the Iraq war.  

3 hour BBC radio podcast – starting with https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k0cg

This week's "New Statesman" (which had what we might call a "good" war) marks the 20^th anniversary of the war with a special feature (behind a paywall) but let me offer some excerpts -

How did it happen? Twenty years on it’s obvious that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a catastrophic failure. It was the most damaging adventure by any British government since 1945, far worse than the Suez fiasco in 1956. In fact, the Iraq War now seems for us what the American grand strategist George Kennan called the world war of 1914: “the great seminal catastrophe of this century” from which all subsequent calamities have flowed.

Not only were the consequences of the Iraq War wretched, the reasons given for the invasion proved to be false. There cannot be many, even among Blair’s dwindling band of admirers, who still pretend that those claims for war were made in good faith. In the summer of 2002, when George W Bush told Blair that Britain didn’t need to participate, the Labour leader insisted: “I will be with you, whatever.”

Far more than with Suez, British action in Iraq was in defiance of popular opinion. On 15 February 2003 more than 1.5 million people protested against the war in London, and opposition was expressed in the opinion polls in the weeks before troops were deployed.

So how did it happen? Despite public sentiment and the weakness of his case, Blair was counting on the corrupt servility of his cabinet and Labour MPs, as well as the supine credulity of the media. His estimation of both proved correct. British participation in the Iraq War was a dismal failure of British politics and journalism, which have barely recovered…….The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee was ecstatic. Writing under the revealing headline, “He promised to take on the world. And I believed him”, she said the speech “will stand as a moment British politics became vigorously, unashamedly social democratic. The day it became missionary and almost Swedish in pursuit of universal justice.”

A group of American neoconservative ideologues, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, along with the right-wing militarists Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, regarded Saddam Hussein as the greatest enemy of the US and of Israel and had wanted to overthrow him since the Gulf War of 1990-91. In 2000, those men came to power when Bush won the presidential election. As soon as he was inaugurated, the White House began planning the destruction of Saddam, and less than nine months later the 11 September attacks in New York City gave Bush and his cabal an excuse for enacting those plans.

In August 2002 the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who was then chair of the Culture Media and Sport Committee, wrote an essay in the Spectator entitled “Why I oppose an attack on Iraq”. He lucidly explained why such a war would be unjustified and likely calamitous. But at the end Kaufman declared that, if it came to a vote in parliament, “my loyalty to Blair would lead me to vote with him”. In March, like Mandelson, Kaufman voted in favour for what he knew to be an unjustified war – out of loyalty. Kaufman was just obeying instructions. Is it any wonder politicians have fallen into such disrepute among the public?

The media’s record over Iraq was just as dismal. Rupert Murdoch warmly supported the war, not least because he said that the best result of invading the oil-rich country would be“$20 a barrel for oil”. All of Murdoch’s London papers supported military action. Individual columnists such as Simon Jenkins and Matthew Parris were allowed to voice their opposition in the Times, but Murdoch has never minded dissenting voices as long as they don’t affect the main tendency of his titles. Murdoch always saw th  Sun as his most important paper, and it was gung-ho for war: “He’s got ’em, let’s get him”, it declared on its front page on 25 September 2002. At one time the Daily Telegraph might have expressed reservations about the war, and seemed that the Iraq adventure was worse than Suez, when Britain and France colluded with Israel to attack Egypt and remove another dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, before the US stopped them. More than 40 years later, the British now conspired with the Americans, against French and German opposition.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia

Let me start with a short quotation from a short piece "Nostalgia makes us all tick"

"Whether we are inclined, personally, to be nostalgic or we are somehow bound up in the external and contextual nostalgic webs, nostalgia dictates our lives. Beyond the intimate bittersweet immersions of nostalgia, conjured by aging, remembrance, death, time, childhood, loss, recovery, and melancholia, we are influenced by such things as retro shops, local produce, concepts of national states, xenophobia, communities, technology advancement, migration, and the climate crisis”.

Some three years ago. I wrote about “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” (2018) - a highly original analysis of how feelings seem in recent years to have overwhelmed western societies. Its author, William Davies, is very good on how 17^th century trade led to the development of the system of trust which allowed bills to be issued and exchanged; and subsequently to the wider system of trust of middlemen and experts.

A veteran scholar of neoliberalism, Davies has drawn on a wide set of genres 
— history, philosophy, political science, medicine — to explain the “decline of 
reason” subtitle of his book.
In the seventeenth century, a twin set of abstracted languages were born: the
 abstract system of signs set up by modern commerce and science and the 
system of “abstract” representative government. Each of these moments has 
its own protagonists in Davies’s book. Not just Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes
 and Francis Bacon but, arguably, the first technocrat William Petty’s “political
 arithmetic” - as inventors of the modern state, commerce and modern science.
Then there is the anti-rationalist camp, in which we find Friedrich Hayek,
 Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Napoléon, and Donald Trump, who together
 initiate the much-lamented “decline of reason.”
Modernity’s twin system of representation (modern science and the
 representative state) has seen a dramatic loss of legitimacy in the last
 thirty years.
- Science has lost its glow and has retreated into a citadel of expertise.
- Party-politics and parliaments, in turn, have lost their attraction, with
 decreasing memberships and increasing popularity for referendums from 
populists.

The result is a two-pronged “crisis of representation,” both on scientific and political
 fronts. But today I turn my attention to Nostalgia - 

Social scientists interested in studying emotions – which became a particularly thriving and promising research concern from the 1980s and onwards – have to a large degree neglected nostalgia and focused more intensely on emotions such as fear, love, trust, shame, guilt, anger, envy and so on. At least this was the case until quite recently, when nostalgia gradually stated to attract the attention of scholars working within the social sciences and humanities. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, historical science, political science, literary studies, business studies and so on have now discovered nostalgia as a potent and inexhaustible source of knowledge about individual behaviour as well as about ongoing cultural changes.

According to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), we now live in the ‘age of nostalgia’. In fact, it seems as if in recent years we may have witnessed nothing less than a ‘revival of nostalgia’ in many quarters of the academic world with numerous new books published on the topic and an increasing number of journal articles testifying to the fact that nostalgia is indeed still with us and alive and kicking

Nostalgia has become very fashionable in the past decade. Perhaps first noticed by Gary Cross in Consumed Nostalgia – memory in the age of fast capitalism (2015) although Post-communist Nostalgia by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille had also drawn attention to the phenomenon in 2010 but mainly for a central european audience.

Both books passed me by – and I have been able to download them only because a friend passed me yesterday "Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe – from Literature and Film to Media" by Alexandru Condrache (2022)

Alexandru Condrache’s book scans nostalgy’s landscapes with gusto aplenty and no little faith. He knows what he’s talking about even if some of us don’t care, while others might try to not remember the scars that once were wounds, some deep. As a devoted interdisciplinarian, he chronicles the kinds and binds of (mostly Eastern European) nostalgies stalking literature and film, journalism and ads, ideologies left and right, and our less or more fictitious selves. Ostalgie, Yugonostalgia, and especially Romanian post-communist aches are taken to task, sifted through fine meshed analytic strainers, found wanting or desirous, and placed in inviting synthetic containers where nostalgias cohabitate, whether personal or collective, painful or just playful, ridiculous, dramatic, or passées. “Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe: From Literature and Film to Media” sets up and charts off one of the most inclusive networks of nostalgias to date. At that, it is to be reckoned with as a lucid study in interdisciplinary communications

Further Reading

"Nostalgia Now – cross-disciplinary perspectives on the past" MH Jacobsen 2020 The full book

"Media, Communications and Nostalgia" 2016 useful overview 113pp