I hope very much that Corbyn’s Labour Party wins. Observed from afar, the campaign feels like a decent country of tens of millions, forever submerged, contending with a death grip of greed and military jingoism.
Friday night’s spectacle, on Question Time, of belligerent and pompous middle-aged men demanding Britain remain willing to incinerate millions ought to be seen as an excellent argument for getting rid of nuclear weapons. They bring forth genocidal urges in the population of the state that maintains them. They promote haughty indifference to the needs of other human beings, whether at home or abroad. Even though its manifesto proposes to maintain nuclear weapons, a Labour victory would provide some relief from this.
The mudslinging aimed at Corbyn with regard to the IRA is intended to stem any potential flow of older voters from Tory to Labour. Most younger voters in Britain, in the words of that lad’s mother, ‘don’t give a shit about the IRA’. Perhaps it is also supposed to sway men with memories -distant and not-so-distant- of singing ‘No surrender to the IRA’ in the pub after a football match.
It is also a means of shifting the focus away from discussion of actual policies, and from the possibility that matters such as funding and priorities for health and education ought to be decided democratically. This is clear from the response of Conservative politicians to the murderous atrocities in London last night. By seeking to make ‘security’ and ‘extremism’ the over-riding concern, the intention is to dampen deliberation and dissent with regard to vital matters in which the Tories and their backers currently hold the upper hand.
The use of the spectre of terrorist violence is not peculiar to Britain. But it is something common in other countries too. The ETA bogeyman was frequently raised in connection with Podemos in Spain, based on an even more tenuous connection than that of Jeremy Corbyn meeting Gerry Adams. People in the Republic of Ireland, too, are well accustomed to the IRA being brought up with dreary regularity any time the government of the day finds itself backed into a corner on any matter that might cause political embarrassment.
It is a way of browbeating people into not thinking about or discussing politics. “It’s all very well for you to want to safeguard the NHS, but hand it over to someone who has consorted with murderers? Really?” And, in the wake of an atrocity such as the one in London last night, this urge tends towards suspending politics -democratic politics- altogether. Talking about how the NHS is being destroyed is transmuted into an act of being in league with terrorists.
The influence of the military is palpable. Let’s recall how Army chiefs made their presence felt when Corbyn was elected Labour leader, muttering darkly about the possibility of taking action to rectify things if he ever got into power. If, as is often claimed, there is some British tradition of ‘fair play’ -though I have not seen anything there that I haven’t seen in other countries- it isn’t a tradition observed by the British establishment, which has no qualms resorting to any means, including murder, as we have seen in Northern Ireland, to achieve its ends. Unsurprisingly for those of us who have witnessed the effects of loyalist paramiltary violence, which killed 836 civilians –civilians, not members of the IRA or any other organisation- in the 25 years from 1969 to 1994, the entire controversy over Corbyn and his supposed links to the IRA in recent days has included little or no consideration of how the British State colluded with loyalist paramilitaries.
Most people do not want to be associated with terrorist violence, and may feel uncomfortable getting into an argument over it. How does one even process a claim such as that of Theresa May this morning, that there is ‘too much tolerance of extremism’ in Britain? There is nothing to debate here. It defies rational consideration. Willing the incineration of millions of people in other countries, or murdering hundreds of people out of loyalty to the Crown is not entertained as ‘extremism’, of course, even though it is certainly tolerated, when not encouraged. These facts have no part in any debate, because the whole point is not to have any debate. The overall intent is to suggest that those who ‘tolerate extremism’ are her opponents -and opponents of Britain- in the upcoming elections.
Democracy, if it means anything, entails facing down authoritarian threats from any quarters. The actions of the ruling Partido Popular, following the Atocha bombings in Madrid, led to its ousting days later in the elections as it became clear that the party had sought to manipulate public responses to the atrocity for its own electoral ends. The Tories deserves to be exposed in this light for what they are doing right now, and kicked out come Thursday.
Cunning Hired Knaves 