Thought for the Day

[Ben in LA]

Yes Roseanne has the right to have a reboot of her famous show. But if you want to support a Nazi-sympathizing, transphobic asshole that actually DID disrespect the American flag while performing the national anthem be my guest. Just don’t be surprised with the criticism.

[Stavros]

You have to recall that this facebook group was started by people concerned about the humanitarian situation in Palestine and ended with people posting caricatures, posting the word Holocaust in the Hollywood hills, numerous articles about the Holocaust being a hoax, about Jewish blood making people barbarous, and the merits of Mein Kampf. Some of these same people were active in the protest against the protest of anti-semitism. The party is probably going to suspend some of these people, but I wonder how left-wing movements committed to the principles of anti-racism could fall so far.
Although I agree with Cohen, I'm not as convinced it began with Corbyn or that he has much control over it at this point. But it doesn't help when he acknowledges there are pockets of antisemtism within the party while those pockets are busy yelling it's a smear campaign and starting petitions to try to punish Labour Mps who are concerned about the issue.

I fear we are dealing with a movement that is proceeding along parallel lines. It is clear to me that in one direction, the failure to undermine Corbyn's support in the last General Election by depicting him as 'soft on terrorism' because of his 'links' to Provisional Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, has led to this new attack on anti-semites in the party, who exist in spite of, not because of Jeremy Corbyn. Orchestrated by supporters of the Conservative Party, he is being made responsible for a lot of social media content he has never read, but his inept response to the Mural in East London is an example of how he tends not to condemn but be lenient if the people he has been told are on his side. The Mural itself did not depict 'bankers'; as the artist has pointed out it includes JD Rockefeller and Aleister Crowley neither of whom were bankers, but doesn't explain why their natural features disappear into a grotesque parody of Nazi anti-Jewish iconography. Even if the Mural is satire, it is a poor example of it, and the failure of Corbyn to see it before commenting on it helps his enemies.
But he is not a great politician anyway, so why do we expect him to act like one?

The other rail is the more complex one of racism, which has existed in the Labour Party since its inception in 1900 even though the Party itself is not racist - and let's not forget the racists who vote for it!- just as Jeremy Corbyn is not racist even though some of his supporters are. Just as Corbyn could deny support for the armed struggle in Northern Ireland though I once sat in a room with Labour Party members who did, and still do. You have to wonder how someone selling The Starry Plough outside a GMC meeting stuffs the papers in a bag before joining the meeting as a delegate, though I stress this was not in JC's constituency.

The Trotskyist group identified by their paper -Militant!- were a pain the arse like all Trotskyists, but their rank and file members were drawn from the working class and at one point after the Samson Bond fracas in Liverpool were -not amusingly- dubbed the Labour Party's 'Strasserites', which is even odder as the founder, Ted Grant, who erased his personal history before leaving South Africa for the UK in the 1940s, was rumoured to have been born Jewish.

I have explained before the difference between the Labour left's attitude to Israel before and after 1967 and how it reflects changes on the left of the Labour Party as well as the changes in Israel. I don't see how one can understand it without noting these changes, but I must admit that while David Collier is a hypocrite and a grade A shit, the evidence from social media has surprised me but perhaps I was just not aware of it in the days when I was in the party, due to it being undercover whereas social media has given people who would normally be ignored as cranks and racists a voice we don't want to hear. Also I was in two CLP's in London both of which had sizeable Jewish residents and party members.

And how different is the current problem in the Labour Party from the other racism that was in the news nearly two decades ago? I leave you with this blast from the past, with its eerie echoes from the week-

One of Britain's most prominent black politicians has launched a withering broadside against the Government and the Labour Party for being guilty of erecting 'institutional barriers' against black and Asian people. In an attack that echoes the 'institutional racism' phrase in the Macpherson report, Trevor Phillips, the Labour Party's candidate for deputy mayor of London and now Labour chair of the Greater London Assembly, said that the party had to take a deep look into its soul if it was to regain the trust of its huge black and Asian support.

Writing in The Observer, Phillips said many of Britain's democratic bodies looked as if they had been 'ethnically cleansed' of black people.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...may/21/uk.race

[broncofan]

I agree with what you say. I won't be "online" until next week as I'm typing this on a phone and my thumbs are too fat to write anything useful. David Collier is a very bad person to present this evidence for a lot of reasons, some actually evident from the text of what he wrote, a large portion of which I would redact.

I don't come close to thinking Corbyn, McDonnell et al are actually are exponents of most of the views we see. I do think the response is often "oh shit this looks bad" which they're human and I'd have to be stupid not to understand where that's coming from. I think they went through stages of thinking the complaints were primarily politically motivated to understanding there's something there beneath the level they operate at which is too difficult for them to address and maintain their dominant narrative that they're being smeared.

The world is infinitely more interesting than this issue but I think this is coming up so frequently because many people's personal experience is different from what goes on at many levels of interaction. If you look at shawcrofts response the most charitable interpretation is that she just got tired of dealing with things she thinks haven't been substantive and didn't consider the evidence. But what Alan bull posted only required a cursory glance to understand its abhorrence. This is the problem with trying to deal with important issues in a polarized environment.

[Stavros]

And I agree with your post, and the article that Jonathan Freedland posted in The Guardian earlier today.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...mine-fake-news

What puzzles me is why someone like Alan Bull (is that his real name?) would consider the Labour Party his natural home, just as I must admit to being somewhere between amazed and depressed at the drivel I have seen in relation to this issue in the Labour Party. My parents were born before the First World War and thus their lives were shaped, indeed, joined together as a result of the wars and revolutions that punctuated the first 50 years of the 20th century. I grew up in the shadow of those events although neither parent told me a great deal about their experiences, and although I was aware of the Holocaust I did not read much about it until I was in my early 20s and reading the essays in George Steiner's Language and Silence. So much has been written that has increased and improved our knowledge of what happened I am dismayed that anyone would deny it, only to understand they do so because they want to believe something else, be it for emotional or political reasons, much as those who feel a deep need to deny that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11.

In this context, fake news is not just an attempt to twist an event to make it seem something other than what it is. It becomes an assault on language itself. Steiner, in one of the most provocative passages in an essay in the collection I cited above, wrote-

"Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness [...] But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. [...] Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace."
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/steinerls.html

Steiner later had to admit that Paul Celan had in fact gone some way to disproving his own theory, as well as Adorno's desperate cry 'there can be no poetry after Auschwitz', writing in German a poetry of 'that silence' that restored an element of the human spirit, if not its grace. I discovered Celan through Steiner, but wonder if the strenuous campaign against the truth that it is being waged by the semi-literate moron in the White House and his friends risks reducing the human situation to a sequence of events that culminate in some barbarity later generations will query -how did this happen?

[Stavros]

“James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR,” Trump tweeted. “Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH.”

In his next tweet, Trump wrote: “He is a weak and untruthful slime ball who was a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case will go down as one of the worst “botch jobs” of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!”

And he calls himself President of the United States of America. How much longer is this insult to the intelligence going to last?

[peejaye]

Favorite programme of the "far right".

[filghy2]

You really think these people are watching the BBC in their spare time?

[peejaye]

& who exactly branded those cunts above as the " far right".
Don't tell me.... You think this Government are slightly "right of center" like that other Public fucking schoolboy twat on here? They're called the "nasty party" for a reason!
You two probably call Blairs' warmongering Government left wing ! Those cunts above are extremists.

[Stavros]

Listening to the radio over the last few says I have been thinking about 'red lines' and come to the conclusion that the phrase is either without meaning, or is just sophistry, an excuse, and it doesn't matter who uses it, be it George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Theresa May. The point for me is that chemicals and biological weapons were first outlawed after their use in the First World War, in 1928 and in various other laws since then, and the OPCW believes most stocks of chemical weapons in the world have now been destroyed.

But there has always been the problem of 'verification' -such as the nuclear arsenals of the USA and the USSR-, but in the case of chemical weapons the use of Napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam by the USA proves that states continued to develop varieties of chemical agents -sometimes for medical purposes which were then transferred to the battlefield, as an experiment- while the evidence that Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran during the war as well as the Kurds during the Anfal campaign, is not contested.

So red lines are not needed, as the use of chemical weapons is illegal and has been so for 100 years. So why use the term? Mostly because there is no international police force, and the states with the powers to 'punish' transgressors either do so, or don't. The USA was not going to prosecute its own President, Lyndon B. Johnson, for breaking international law. When the USA broke international law through its illegal war in Nicaragua, it withdrew from the Court that issued the judgement and ignored it. On the other hand, while Saddam Hussein was not 'punished' for using chemical weapons in Iran and Iraq, 'weapons of mass destruction' was a term invented to suggest his stockpile of such weapons included chemical ones, though the international team of inspectors reported most of them had been destroyed by 2003, and those that remained were of no practical use. Whatever, the decision had been made to overthrow the government and the USA and the UK did just that.

Red lines, it seems, are more likely to appear under the eyes of people who don't get enough sleep. They don't appear on the faces of those who sleep easily at night no matter how many lives are destroyed through bombs and bullets.

But however necessary, international law remains a compelling but often it seems, a useless instrument -is there any way to make it effective if the only people who can do so also break the law?

[Ben in LA]

The same ones that were yelling “Blue lives matter!” are now the same ones with the most criticism of the FBI.

If WWIII does happen, these second amendment fetishists, the “well-regulated” militia and those loud mouthed “patriots” should be the first ones to go fight, not the poor.