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In light of the failures of mainstream politics across the board, socialist writer Alex Niven wants to inject a sense of hope back into contemporary life. A champion of the North of England, he believes that literature can help.

Detail from the Newcastle Civic Centre. (Martin McG / Newcastle Civic Centre / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Niven’s project is to reinject a sense of belief back into British life. In his seven books on regionalism, music, and poetry written since Folk Opposition (2011), Niven has championed the radical North of England — and more broadly, of radical “outer Britain” in general — as a plausible counterweight to a country centralized more than ever before around London and Westminster, the twin centers of financial and governmental power. Within those books, especially New Model Island (2018), are particular plans and ideas, but treating his books like they’re simply policy papers makes no sense. What makes them exciting is that they’re mythic — and about much more than the issues of the day.

Though he is quiet and restrained in person, Niven writes in what an eighteenth-century critic would call “the grand manner.” What makes him one of the British left’s most valuable writers is that he is never embarrassed. Much English writing today, including on the Left, is cliquey and priggish — terrified of being caught out. Niven’s work is as loud and as achingly sincere as a lay preacher in some rusty methodist chapel. It is motivated by an unfashionable intensity of belief. That belief is socialism to be sure — and something more traditionally devout, too (Niven is a practicing Catholic). But it is also a belief in what literature and culture more generally can accomplish. W. H. Auden, an upper-middle-class Midlander and disenchanted former leftist, once argued that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Niven is constantly trying to use poetry to make things happen.

His latest, The North Will Rise Again (2023), appears at first as his most conventional book, and is his first with a mainstream publisher. It presents itself as a straight-up polemic for Northern modernism, a sort of rallying cry for some putative utopian version of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to pick up. So, unlike in New Model Island, there is no moment in which Niven finds himself in Dorset and suddenly breaks into verse.

But that apparent simplicity is deceptive, and the book remains deeply personal, sometimes eccentric. Whereas New Model Island was powered by the evanescent euphoria of Jeremy Corbyn’s near-victory in 2017, which made Niven, like so many of us, think that a decisive change in the organization of class and regional power in Britain was not just possible but actually plausible, The North Will Rise Again is motivated by intense grief at the shock of the 2019 election, and the even more drastic immiseration that has followed, with the pandemic and yet another round of punishing austerity.

Looking around for another motivating myth, Niven has come to urban modernism, and an urban North — on the face of it, something of a switch, given that his first book, Folk Opposition, was aimed against the undervaluing of rural and small-town culture by a certain kind of metropolitan left modernism. What seems to have caused this switch is most of all the experience of canvassing in the pissing rain in 2019 — when, outside of urban Newcastle and Sunderland, the aging small towns and outer suburbs of the Northeast thumped the young, multicultural, urban new left in the face. There is one photograph of the author in the book — on a doorstep in that election, waterlogged and downcast.

The common response to this thumping was, for a while, genuflecting toward a typical socially conservative “red wall” voter — a significant part of Keir Starmer’s early reign was based on it, until he in turn was humiliated by the same red-wall man in the Hartlepool by-election. Today, after having been handed a hefty polling lead by the Conservative Party’s self-immolation, Starmer’s party’s appeal is being calibrated to focus groups in Stevenage, a postwar “new town” just outside London.

Niven will have no part in any of this. Politics has failed, for the moment at least, so hope has to be found somewhere else. For Niven, it’s in the culture of the urban North. But politics is always just out of shot, and it can briefly channel the cultural opposition, as seen in the defiance and rage displayed toward the Tory government by Burnham at the height of the pandemic — the only sign of life from the Labour Party that has been recorded since December 13, 2019.

Politics has failed, for the moment at least, so hope has to be found somewhere else. For Niven, it’s in the culture of the urban North.

I’ve always enjoyed Niven’s work, but it is always estranging to read it as a Southerner — a representative of the region of the country whose economic model of finance and property has gradually steamrollered everywhere else, and reshaped it in its own suburban image. But writing as a Southerner, the focus on the urban North makes complete sense to me, because I’ve found much of the North to be vastly more urban in its culture and landscape than anywhere in the South outside of London and, to a certain extent, Bristol. I first spent an extended amount of time in Northern cities between 2009 and 2012, at the tail end of the New Labour years and at the start of the long, bleak Tory reign. I was tasked with writing about the architecture of Blairism — the riverside cultural complexes and colonies of “luxury flats,” the jerry-built schools and hospitals constructed through the Blair-era private finance initiative. If the brief was to explore New Labour’s postmodernity, what I actually found interesting and ended up writing about just as much was Northern urban modernity. I was stunned by the iron and glass arcades and markets of Leeds; the opulent, gigantic textile warehouses of Manchester; the sandstone and spires of Bradford; the De Chirico colonnades of the Piece Hall in Halifax; the American scale of the Liverpool waterfront; the epic classical streets suddenly surmounted by steampunk iron bridges in Newcastle.

All this was the product of the first waves of industrial capitalism, when the North became, for a few decades, the engine of the world’s first industrial economy. But just as often, my shock was at the audacious achievements the twentieth century and the built environments mostly bequeathed by the labor movement and by past Labour governments — the municipal socialist hilltop public housing citadels of Sheffield; the neo-Constructivist headquarters of the Halifax Building Society; the glorious, rippling lines of Preston Bus Station; the wildly ambitious concrete skyway city of the University of Leeds; the Scandinavian democratic socialist townscape of the Byker Estate in Newcastle; and the Miesian stations of the Tyne and Wear Metro that link that city to its postindustrial hinterland. Seeing for the first time the place where one of these crashes into the other — when the gracious classical town of Newcastle abruptly becomes, in the east of the city, a multilevel futuristic concrete landscape — was stupendous, unforgettable.

I was so floored by these places because in the urban South (outside of London, of course), we don’t have anything remotely like this. You will not find anything of even remotely the same pride, grandeur, and scale in, say, Luton, Swindon, Southampton, Portsmouth, Reading, Colchester, Ipswich, Plymouth — the pull not only of London, but of the suburbs is just too great. An extreme but useful example is the part of the country where I grew up — the South Hampshire urban area, where the small historic industrial cities of Southampton and Portsmouth have long been effectively converted into shopping malls serving a much more populous, conservative, and wealthy exurban hinterland. Despite the national obsession with a handful of overpraised historic towns like York, the cities in England that most resemble the great noncapital cities of continental Europe — Milan, Naples, Munich, Hamburg, Marseille, Lille, Rotterdam, Barcelona, and Gdansk — are Newcastle, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester, Hull, and Liverpool. The first is a list of European cities that young Londoners visit on holiday. The second is a list of cities in which young Northern Britons flee in order to get jobs in London.

It is also this comparison that reveals the intensity of these British cities’ neglect, and the insulting nature of their shoddy new architecture. Those European cities, different as they all are — from the chaos of Naples to the order of Munich — all have real self-governing powers, and have the real infrastructure to make a truly urban life possible: public buildings and public institutions, along with rapid mass transit systems. In a city like Leeds, one constantly feels a sense of being pulled in two directions: an elation at the grandeur left by the 1860s and the 1960s alongside the youthfulness and multiculturalism of the present city. But with that comes a deep frustration at the lack of public investment (this city of 750,000 people has no rapid transit system), horror at the overwhelming density of cheap and shoddy student flats, and the unavoidable facts of class and racial segregation. But in the immense energy of the place, it is hard not to believe in it, and to feel that when change comes, it will come from here, and from the young working class in cities like it.

In the immense energy of Leeds, it is hard not to believe in it, and to feel that when change comes, it will come from here, and from the young working class in cities like it.

Conversely, the North I encountered as a child growing up in Southampton was dark, sublime, and rural. One of my maternal grandparents grew up near Alston, in the far North of England in the heights of the Pennines, not far from where Niven grew up in Hexham. On visits there, I remember no towns or cities, but a scattered sequence of damp, dark villages, and my ears popping as the car drove up and along the hills and mountains, seen through the fog beneath a purple sky. The North Will Rise Again has been criticized for its disparaging of the rural, but it’s worth pausing to look at the exact rural he criticizes. One totemic place that switched to the Tories in the “red wall” is Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old constituency. Always described as a former mining area, this is wholly deceptive. As Niven points out, its pits had all closed by the 1960s. Almost nobody living now in Sedgefield could have worked as a miner. Alston used to have pits too, mining lead and zinc, but they closed in the nineteenth century.

It is increasingly senseless to define these places by the industry and the labor-movement culture that they once had. Rather, they are defined by an impoverished version of the economy of the South of England — property and tourism, both largely among the retired. There is much less money in this in the North than there is in the South, but there is nothing else. “We have to face the fact,” Niven writes with evident reluctance, “that at this point of the twenty-first century many northern areas are simply vastly less wealthy versions of the southern pastoral heartlands of Middle England.”

Reading Niven reminded me of a common experience among Southern socialists like myself — the annual visit to the tiny Dorset town of Tolpuddle, where, in the 1830s, farm laborers formed an early trade union, only to be deported to Australia until they were later freed thanks to a massive public campaign. In that era, the South was aflame with revolt: whether it was the solid, methodist radicalism of Tolpuddle or the deliberately farcical insurgency of the Captain Swing riots, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset were the centers of resistance to early capitalism.

And then, they weren’t. They lost their battles. The rural laborers were then subsumed into the slums of London; the docks of Bristol, Plymouth, and Southampton; and the factories of the North and the Midlands as Britain became the first country in history to become majority urban. Every year, the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival brings thousands of Southern socialists to listen to music, hear trade union speakers, and generally congregate in an otherwise hostile part of the country. But the fact is that Topluddle has returned a Conservative MP at every election for the past 140 years. There is no reason to think that the future of the Durham Miners Gala, the annual festival that provides a similar role for the North, will not be much the same. Niven writes about the rural North with great affection as well as anger, but the stories he tells here — of the poet Tom Pickard in Alston, and the great electronic musician Delia Derbyshire in Gilsland — are bleak.

The alternative to this is found in rooting through the history of the urban North for moments in which this process was arrested. Newcastle has long since lost its industries — it’s vastly poorer than a big regional city like this should be in a rich country like England — but it has retained its identity and its belief in itself. That identity is what is so striking to a Southern urban visitor. You feel it too in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds — an enduring sense of civic pride, that people know where they are, know who they are, and care about the place where they live.

Newcastle has long since lost its industries — it’s vastly poorer than a big regional city like this should be in a rich country like England — but it has retained its identity and its belief in itself.

One of Niven’s heroes, the ex-Trotskyist Labour council leader T. Dan Smith, made it his project in the 1960s to stop the hollowing out of the North, through a Faustian combination of capitalist investment and socialist planning. It failed overall, and Smith was caught with his fingers in the till and jailed — but what he got built has lasted. “For all their flaws,” Niven writes,

T. Dan Smith’s schemes for the post-war North-East had at least been based on the notion that regional renewal would have to depend on a comprehensive new infrastructure — a Metro train system, a new Education Precinct, a Civic Centre to house local government and, most ambitiously of all, a determined social housing programme to provide long-term security (in theory) for the city’s working-class populace.

In Newcastle, Endless, a book of sonnets on Newcastle with photographs by Euan Lynn, published in 2021, Niven focuses on one of these, in the poem “Civic Centre,” capturing the enduring existence and grandeur of the municipal complex Smith commissioned, a beacon of modernist ambition even among the tawdry neoliberal city that surrounds it:

Here above the street it is the future

we see the city as a map of

change diagram of unintended

glissade by arachnids in Marks &

Spencer suits but here and there

everything is open the burgess

the planner the council clerk

all for a minute led a quiet

crusade out of impulse or chivvied by a

phrase read dimly in outline

in borrowed books though recently

the lapses are everywhere the Metro

station shouldering a corpse the stag do

tank the student oubliette yet at sky

height the town is still moving sunk

in the groove between mountain and sea

Poetry, in Niven’s telling, was central to Newcastle’s brief attempt to transform itself into a socialist metropolis. Smith’s city government channeled money into the new organization Northern Arts, and into the Morden Tower, a part of the city’s medieval defenses that, in 1964, was turned into a venue for music and poetry readings. For a time, Morden Tower united working class R&B musicians and experimental poets based at the city’s university. Smith could be something of a poet in his own right — Niven quotes a passage from his 1970 autobiography in which he asks:

Why do you like water or mountains? . . . Think about it, talk about it. Why is it that when buildings are put on the landscape they appear to offend? Yet cows don’t, sheep don’t, dogs don’t, trees don’t, and flowers don’t. . . . Can we do this consciously as human beings? Of course we can. We can give just as much attention to a street lamp, or a litter bin, or a bus station, or a bus shelter, or a house, or the colour of a house, or the colour of a brick.

But the poet who is central to Niven’s North is Basil Bunting. He was, like another of Niven’s enthusiasms — the novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis — part of the modernist literature scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and a friend of the increasingly fascistic American experimental poet Ezra Pound. After decades of his own personal decline, he was discovered and welcomed by the young modernist poets around the Morden Tower, and they inspired him to write his greatest work, the fiercely regional, harshly Northern cycle Briggflatts.

Bunting is the subject of Niven’s previous book, an annotated collection of The Letters of Basil Bunting (2022). To those not already familiar with the poet, it can be a grueling read, as Bunting was very much a man of his time, a sometimes bitter, sometimes preening middle-class dilettante with a tendency to casual racism and self-importance. But there is one sequence of letters of great interest, which come when he gradually and then decisively breaks with Pound over his antisemitism and his support for Mussolini and Hitler. In one of those letters, in 1934, Bunting tells Pound exactly what it is he doesn’t understand about England and about capitalism, recounted through his own memories of the Montagu Main View Pit Disaster of 1925, when thirty-eight people were killed in a colliery in the outskirts of Newcastle. The Tories, Bunting tells Pound, “live by the dregs of the country, always have done. Plus of course what they can get from the bloody middle-clarses with the gent education and what they can scare with newspaper forgeries” like the “Zinoviev Letter” that saw the first Labour government thrown out of office a decade earlier.

But because of this, someone who had only known England from London, as Pound had, did not know England:

You saw England largely from the vantage ground of the nobs who ran the show. If you’d seen it from the prisons and the mining villages you’d have a pretty good idea that whatever the Tories touch is damned, they spread their dirt over it. The other parties are dumb and corrupt and all that, but they haven’t that record. Some of them sometimes have done something good.

Reading these words is a little uncanny, after thirteen years of spectacularly nihilistic Tory misrule, where, again, they have destroyed everything they’ve touched and have been bafflingly rewarded for it by a plurality of the English electorate. Bunting’s eventual response to this appalling situation was to set up a countermyth of the North, which reached fruition three decades later with Briggflatts. Of course, Bunting himself didn’t recognize the role that the youthful modernist culture of Morden Tower and T. Dan Smith had played in his resurgence (he pauses in the ’70s to denounce one of Smith’s modernist projects as “a huge slave-barracks built by a team of lunatics”), but for Niven, these are all inextricable parts of the same project.

Bunting’s return to write his last great modernist epic, the public reliefs and sculpture created by Victor Pasmore for Newcastle Civic Centre and Peterlee New Town, the new public housing estates and the Metro, are all part of the same movement — a heroic moment where people in a place that was falling apart asserted themselves through pure self-belief, and reshaped the place for the better. Could it happen again?

People in a place that was falling apart asserted themselves through pure self-belief, and reshaped the place for the better. Could it happen again?

It just might. That is the wager of The North Will Rise Again. This poses the question of what then happens in the case of success. One of Niven’s Faustian heroes in this book is Tony Wilson, the broadcaster and former student Situationist who so inflated the self-belief of Manchester through his TV programs and in his record label and club — Factory Records and the Hacienda, respectively — to the point that he was instrumental in halting the apparently irreversible decline of England’s second-most important city, and transforming it into a center for pop culture, education, science, design, and the arts, much as Smith dreamed of doing in Newcastle.

But by the 2000s, Wilson’s dream had curdled into something much more conformist, a macho urban boosterism that made Manchester into the unofficial capital of New Labour, a city of endemic property speculation that not only refused to build public housing but actively destroyed much of what it already had. Inner Manchester is the only really “successful” city in the North — it has, throughout the twenty-first century, been growing and booming. But as in London, its success is based on the immiseration of the majority, in the dead textile towns of Greater Manchester and in the inner-city housing estates in the shadow of the city center’s shiny new towers.

If Smith’s Newcastle exemplifies the tragic but heroic potential of using “poetry” (or for Wilson, music) to “make things happen,” Manchester is an example of how that dream can be perverted and, instead, used to reshape a city in the image of capital. Niven knows this risk very well, but it is, he suggests, worth taking when the only other option is miserablism, decline, and depopulation.

By believing once again that the English North is one of the great places on Earth, and taking pride in its achievements and dreaming of new possibilities based upon them, it could be possible to make the first step toward actually accomplishing it. As a Southerner, I wish it well.

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The post The EU Is Over-Invested in the Ukrainian War-Project appeared first on Global Research.

IDF chief of staff hints at ‘action’ against Tehran amid reports Iran is building new underground nuclear facility.

By The Algemeiner

The top Israeli general raised the prospect of “action” against Iran on Tuesday even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser played down any immediate threat posed by a new underground nuclear facility being dug by Tehran.

World powers’ efforts to negotiate new curbs to Iranian uranium enrichment and other projects with bomb-making potential have been fruitless so far, fanning long-bruited threats by Israel to resort to force if it deems diplomacy a dead end.

“Iran has advanced with uranium enrichment further than ever before … There are negative developments on the horizon that could bring about (military) action,” Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi, chief of Israel‘s armed forces, said in a speech.

He did not detail what those developments might be, nor what action might be taken and by whom.

“We have capabilities, and others also have capabilities,” Halevi told the Herzliya Conference, an international security forum, in an apparent allusion to Israel‘s U.S. ally.

Experts are divided over whether the Israeli military has the clout to deal lasting damage to Iranian nuclear facilities that are distant, dispersed and defended. Iran denies seeking the bomb and has vowed devastating reprisals for any attack.

There has been speculation Israel might use countries on Iran’s borders as springboards for strikes. One such country, Azerbaijan, dismissed that idea despite its strong Israel ties.

“We refrain from interfering in the disputes or problems (of other countries), including by allowing or giving our territory for some operations or adventures,” Deputy Azeri Foreign Minister Fariz Rzayev said at the conference.

The Associated Press on Monday reported Iran was building a new underground site in the Zagros Mountains to replace an exposed uranium centrifuge manufacturing center at nearby Natanz that was struck by an explosion and fire in July 2020.

“This of course limits the capacity to carry out an attack, relative to above-ground facilities, which is of course easier. But what can be said about this matter is that there is nowhere that cannot be reached,” Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told the conference.

Following the 2020 incident, Iran announced in 2021 that it was working to move some of its centrifuge manufacturing halls into the “heart of the mountain near Natanz”, an area where Iranian engineers have long carried out excavation work.

Hanegbi declined to threaten an explicit Israeli attack and even suggested the onus would be on the United States by noting that it has massive GBU-43/B bombs which are not in Israel‘s arsenal.

In any event, Hanegbi added, “this (underground facility near Natanz) is years away from being completed”.

Though Washington prefers to pursue diplomacy with Iran, the allies see “eye to eye” and have no significant difference on potential “red lines” for last-resort military action, he said.

The post Top Israeli general says ‘action’ is on horizon over Iran nuclear work appeared first on World Israel News.

In Germany, even radical left-wingers who long distrusted state power are today calling for more tanks and jets for Ukraine. Lacking alternative solutions to the conflict, parts of the Left increasingly fall in behind the government’s call to rearm.

Ukrainian military personnel operate a Leopard 2A4 tank during a training exercise. (Paul Hanna / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Among Western left-wing politicians — from “the Squad” to European left parties — a small but loud minority is voicing its opinion on the war in Ukraine. In publications and institutions rooted in the radical left, as well as those in the surroundings of the ruling US Democrats or German Greens, these voices are not a minority, but form a majority. Who? The supporters of arms deliveries to Kiev.

My intention here is not to discuss the pros and cons of such arms deliveries and these forces’ underlying assumptions about history, the functioning of international politics in an anarchic system of states, etc. Nor is it intended to answer the question of why younger leftists, or Greens with a leftist self-image, are especially inclined to this position. Suffice to say, this has causes that extend beyond the dominance of the pro-weapons supply position in the wider media or the fact that the aforementioned center-left parties are today in power.

Rather, it is important to understand that Ukraine’s self-defense has points of contact with strong leftist sentiments — an antiwar stance, anti-fascism, and the desire to act in solidarity, internationally, with the vulnerable — which is why it should be understood as a “leftist” as well as “liberal” cause. At this point, however, this article’s aim is to help clarify the differences within the Left, by exploring the fundamental contradictions and shortcomings of left-wing and radical-left advocates of arms deliveries.

The Right to Self-Defense

The position in favor of weapons supplies can be briefly outlined as follows: Russia — there is no doubt about it — invaded Ukraine in violation of international law. There is a right to self-defense, and international solidarity therefore means supporting Ukraine (or at least its current government) in exercising that right.

Solidarity, in this case, does not just mean the demand of far-reaching humanitarian aid for refugees, asylum for deserters from both sides, support for civil resistance in Ukraine and the Russian antiwar movement, or possibly building up domestic pressure for a cease-fire to prevent an escalation of the war on the backs of Ukrainian civilians. Rather, it is meant in the narrowest military sense.

Vladimir Putin is a Great-Russian nationalist and “völkisch” fascist who has publicly denied Ukraine’s right to exist and who — following this genocidal ideology (instead of material economic, geopolitical, security-political, etc. interests) — has imposed war on Ukraine. Following this genocidal ideology, he is overrunning Ukraine with a “war of extermination.” Many explicitly say “like Adolf Hitler once before,” others only suggest it. Hitler, however, could only be stopped by force of arms. Hence, it must happen in the same way now.

From all this, it is immediately deduced that one must be in favor of the delivery of armed vehicles, battle tanks, and possibly fighter planes, in favor of training Ukrainian forces to use all this equipment outside and inside the country — ultimately, everything that is needed to throw Russia (“the Russian fascists”) out of Ukraine. Many think: this must happen, because otherwise “evil” would still be rewarded for its deeds.

There are also others — like the Ukrainian Marxist intellectual Volodymyr Ishchenko or the Ukrainian pacifist activist Yurii Sheliazhenko, or the 785,000 signatories of the “Manifesto for Peace” by Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the German second-wave feminist Alice Schwarzer — who warn of an escalation spiral in Ukraine with further Russian war crimes (such as the destruction of energy and water supplies), of a bloody war of attrition and sleepwalking into a third world war.

Critical of arms deliveries, they instead demand that Western governments support the diplomatic efforts of the UN secretary general, Brazil, China, Spain etc., for an internationally mediated peace settlement. For this, they stand accused of merely succumbing to Putin’s propaganda of intimidation, wanting to leave Ukraine to its fate and forcing it to surrender, advocating an “appeasement” policy like Neville Chamberlain once did with the Munich Agreement of 1938, merely encouraging Putin to continue, possibly to invade the Baltic States (although, in contrast to Ukraine, they have long been part of NATO), just as Hitler then invaded Poland in 1939, and so on.

From there, it is not far to the liberal ruling-class accusations today leveled against critics of the current direction of German politics. That is, the charge of being a “lumpenpacifist” (as liberal Spiegel columnist Sascha Lobo puts it), “conscienceless subjugation pacifist” (as per liberal political scientist Herfried Münkler), “fifth column of Vladimir Putin” (claims Alexander Graf Lambsdorff of the hawkish-neoliberal Free Democratic Party) or “peace-rubbish talker” (Lobo, again).

Left-wing voices in Germany who once kept a wary eye on the ‘singularity’ of the German war of extermination and the ‘civilizational breach at Auschwitz’ today have little to say about this new historical revisionism.

Now, such ahistorical-schematic comparisons are characterized by ignorance of history as well as of the present. There is a historical revisionism lurking behind it, since it relativizes the Holocaust and Germany’s “war of extermination” in the East, which sought to systematically murder at least thirty million people, including through systematic starvation of cities, to enable the enslavement of the colonized local population. Left-wing voices in Germany who once kept a wary eye on the “singularity” of the German war of extermination and the “civilizational breach at Auschwitz,” as the German-Israeli historian Dan Diner called it, today have little to say about this new historical revisionism — or are even suggesting it themselves.

The demand for military defense of Ukraine, presented with firm conviction, is rarely thought of from its end point and justified in terms of the concrete military-strategic situation, which makes a military victory without direct deployment of NATO troops and a collapse of the entire Russian military highly unlikely, or indeed the fact that it has entered into a war of attrition with daily deaths of around one thousand for a few square kilometers around Bakhmut, an eerie reminder of Verdun and the “Green Fields of France.”

Moreover, those who demand arms exports to Ukraine usually never reflect possible unintended consequences of “their own” actions. Yet these latter are much too real and, given Russia’s dominance of escalation they are, ultimately, inevitably incalculable, including the use of Russian thermobaric, chemical, and tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and a nuclear World War III beyond Ukrainian borders.

Bankruptcy of Left-Wing State Theory

What is particularly striking now, however, is that those who before February 24, 2022 were still active in socialist reading groups where they read Karl Marx, Nicos Poulantzas, and Ellen Meiksins Wood, wrote articles and books about questions of materialist state theory, and strictly focused on radical movement politics based on Gramscian or even anarchist principles warning against any government participation or even voting — that these same people are now suddenly discovering the bourgeois-capitalist state, as currently governed, as a vehicle for their politics.

No less striking, in Germany, the aged leftists from the pro-Israel “anti-Deutsch” tradition, of all people, who emerged during the Gulf War (1990–91) criticizing the traditional communist and socialist left’s anti-imperialism and antiwar stance, are now, after years of retreat into a more or less private life, at the forefront of left-wing demands for arms deliveries to Ukraine.

One can hardly miss the irony that those who once fought against the old national liberation movements and the old anti-imperialism — arguing that their “people’s wars” were brutal, nationalist, and blurred class antagonisms — are now especially passionate about the “people’s war” of “the Ukrainians,” simply because once again old ghosts, the peace movement and the old anti-imperialism, have to be hunted down.

Left-wingers who until recently warned against any government participation or even voting are now suddenly discovering the bourgeois-capitalist state, as currently governed, as a vehicle for their politics.

Now, one would think that those Western leftists who argue in this way, as outlined at the beginning of this article, would organize international solidarity in a very practical way, against the background of their specific political and theoretical points of reference. That they, following the historical model of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War or today’s International Freedom Battalion in defense of the Kurdish autonomous regions, go into the trenches in front of Bakhmut as international volunteers. Or that they would start a campaign to collect donations from other leftists and sympathizers similar to the radical left’s “weapons for El Salvador” campaign during the 1980s.

At least one would think that they would use their journalistic outreach to call for participation in the fighting there, which US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley, the highest-ranking US soldier, has described as “a very large attrition battle with very high casualties, especially on the Russian side,” because poor people from the remotest parts of Russia are being downright burned there without soldierly training, adding to the roughly three hundred thousand war dead so far.

Instead of this, however, left-wing radicals today demand the delivery of MRAPs, HARMs, and Abrams, of “Gepard,” “Marder,” “Leopard 2,” or even fighter jets from the power apparatus, which they once saw through as a capitalist and imperialist state, a state over which they have zero influence. Or they essentially approve of this discourse because they either do not present any alternatives of their own, remain silent on the prevailing discourse, or even shift their activism to attacking the critical voices within the Left. In all that, they usually refuse to see that the logic of Western politics in Ukraine ultimately means involving also NATO troops due to the imbalance of manpower between Ukraine and Russia.

Now, Ukraine is not the Spanish Republic, nor is it Rojava. It is not an anarcho-communist revolution defending itself against fascism, or a new democratic model in the Middle East, but a state that is completely dependent on the West militarily and financially. It is a state in which — hardly less authoritarian and oligarch-capitalist than its neighbor Russia — socialist opposition parties and communist symbols were banned as “pro-Russian” even before the war began.

One in which, after the banning of the large “Opposition Platform — For Life” and eleven other parties, the party of the oligarch and ex-president Petro Poroshenko is the only remaining opposition. One in which a state of emergency was declared even before the war began, fundamental civil rights are suspended, eighteen- to sixty-year-olds fit for combat are recruited from the streets, and well over ten thousand conscientious objectors have been arrested at the border and shipped back into battle.

It is also a state in which a brutal anti-union law (dated August 17, 2022) forces workers to negotiate individually with their bosses over their wages. Given the unemployment rate of 24.5 percent, wages have fallen accordingly by 27 percent in 2022. Meanwhile the government is in the process of “negotiating” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a “structural adjustment program” that will force Ukraine to undertake gigantic privatizations of large state-owned enterprises, significant social spending cuts, trade liberalization and market deregulation measures.

Those who once fought against the old national liberation movements and the old anti-imperialism are now especially passionate about the ‘people’s war’ of ‘the Ukrainians.’

Ukraine, said Ukrainian minister of economics, Yulia Svyrydenko, in late 2022, was becoming a “model open economy,” while Oleksandr Pysaruk, CEO of Raiffeisen Bank Ukraine and a former IMF representative, rejoiced: “I hope this is Ukraine’s third chance. The first was the Orange Revolution in 2004, which unfortunately was a missed Raiffeisen Bank opportunity. Maidan (2014) was not completely lost, but we have never had a reform of this magnitude in Ukraine!”

In Chorus With the Rulers

In short, the comparison with Spain in 1936 or Rojava in 2016 fails, at least from a left-wing perspective; unless, of course, left-wing and radical left-wing advocates of arms deliveries fundamentally share the US and German governments’ assessment that the war in Ukraine is a “conflict of values” in which “Ukraine” is defending the “freedom and democracy” of the “West” against “Eastern authoritarianism.”

Either way, when left-wing radicals speak of military self-defense against the Russian attack, it would only be consistent to talk about setting up international brigades to help. But such initiatives are not to be found in Western countries. For instance, from Germany only neo-Nazis have joined the Ukrainian forces. All this means, conversely, that the normally anti-systemic left-wing radicals today simply want and support exactly what the rulers are currently doing and what they are currently pushing in media as the majority opinion. Or rather, are trying to enforce, since they are only managing in part.

For example, in Germany, before Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to supply Leopard 2 battle tanks, a majority was still against it, while a large majority of 64 percent to 23 percent also opposes the supply of fighter jets that came into discussion immediately afterward; an absolute majority sees Germany’s arms deliveries as “active war participation”; and a majority of 58 percent — and rising — agree that “diplomatic efforts to end this war do not go far enough,” while 30 percent consider them “appropriate.”

Those who are furthest removed from the army and military-strategic issues display a much higher willingness to find solutions by force, while it is senior military officers who warn against the illusion of a military solution in Ukraine.

Admittedly, a position may be correct even if it is in line with the ruling class and even if it contradicts a majority in the population. Left-wing supporters of arms deliveries argue that, faced with Russia’s war, we should, after all, be in solidarity with Ukraine and defend its sovereignty.

Perhaps it would be too much to expect leftists to show their solidarity with Ukrainian workers in this exceptional war situation by focusing on the Ukrainian trade unions’ international campaign against harsh anti-union laws. Or to expect them to defend the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state by raising a scandal over the ongoing looting program of the IMF and international capital and launching a major campaign to cancel the debt of this country and its bitterly poor population.

This would all be necessary — but it could also appear to some as shadow fighting or even be interpreted as a form of sedition and defeatism, undermining military morale. So, there is also a need for answers to the question of how to stand in solidarity with the people who are currently victims of a war imposed by Russia.

In this regard, however, it is notable that the left-wing supporters of arms deliveries say solidarity “with Ukraine” or “with the Ukrainian resistance,” but understand by this the Ukrainian government, which is provided with weapons by Western states, and the Ukrainian military leadership which uses them. That these leftists, moreover, apparently cannot imagine any other form of left-wing solidarity with the Ukrainian civilian population than having the imperialist state supply weapons to a war zone. That it is alien to them that another form of solidarity would be to prevent an escalation of the ongoing proxy war on the backs of the Ukrainian population and to push for a cease-fire, to promote civil resistance, to encourage the flight of all people from this war (including all deserters), to help the Russian antiwar movement, etc.

All this reveals how far the logic of military force has penetrated leftist thinking. For evidence of this we need only note that, as a rule, those who are furthest removed from the army and military-strategic issues even display a much higher willingness to find solutions by force, while it is senior military officers such as US chief of staff Mark A. Milley or retired Bundeswehr generals such as Harald Kujat, Erich Vad, or Helmut W. Ganser, freed from restraints of obedience, who know from their own experience the limits of such force and warn against the illusion of a military solution in Ukraine.

But let us return to the argument that there is a United Nations Charter article 51 right of self-defense for states (peoples) that become victims of wars of aggression. At the beginning of the war, Die Linke politician Gregor Gysi said that this entailed a moral obligation to enable these states to follow up on those rights, i.e., by supplying them with weapons. According to Gysi, one cannot on the one hand acknowledge that such a right exists, but then also deny the attacked the weapons to exercise this right. So in essence, he said, arms deliveries are the right thing to do. Only in the case of Germany they are not, out of historical responsibility for the German war of extermination in the East, which twenty-seven million Soviet citizens — Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, etc. — paid for with their lives, half of them civilians. No German tanks should ever again be deployed to kill the ancestors of those who were killed during World War II.

So in the end, also Gysi sided with the party leadership and spoke out against Berlin’s arms deliveries — but only against the backdrop of German history. The logic, however, is clear: if a country is attacked, there is a moral obligation to supply weapons. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, and most published opinion also see it that way.

It gets tricky and a bit unsavory when one then realizes that according to this logic, the German government would have to deliver weapons today to the Yemeni population for self-defense against the genocidal war of aggression of dictatorially ruled Saudi Arabia. And weapons to the Kurdish populations in northern Syria and northern Iraq so that they can defend themselves against the war of the Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

That in the recent past they might even have had to demand sending weapons to Western Sahara (against Morocco), the Palestinians (against Israel), to Yugoslavia in 1999, to the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002, to Iraq in 2003, and to Libya in 2011. Today, the Saudi invasion in Yemen has resulted in more than 380,000 deaths, four million refugees and nineteen million people suffering from hunger to date, according to UN figures.

According to Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners . . . are bombing hospitals, kindergartens, schools” and are responsible for countless “war crimes.” The Turkish war of aggression against the Kurdish autonomous regions in Iraq and Syria, in turn, has displaced more than half a million people, claimed tens of thousands of lives, including countless civilians, while Erdoğan has consistently bombed Kurdish residential areas in his own country as well, in the manner of a war criminal.

Value-Oriented?

Instead of following its moral automatism, however, the German government not only covers for, but even actively supports, the wars of invasion waged by its autocratically ruled NATO partner Turkey and the Saudi dictators, another Western ally. For example, the Green foreign minister Baerbock traveled to Turkey after the war began and praised “our strong German-Turkish partnership” and their common stance against Russia; in turn, in September 2022, the Economic Affairs Ministry led by Robert Habeck, also from the Greens, lifted the ban on exporting weapons to the belligerent dictatorship that had been issued after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and approved the export of German munitions and military equipment worth €38.8 million for the same fighter jets responsible for war crimes such as bombing civilian targets. All of this apparently — as even the German state news outlet Tagesschau suspected — in “hope of oil and hydrogen.”

Nevertheless, German government representatives are not ashamed to describe their actions as “value-oriented foreign policy” in the sense of a “rules-based international order” or — as Baerbock recently did during the Munich Security Conference 2023 — as “guided by the European peace order, the United Nations Charter, and international humanitarian law.”

Now, undoubtedly, most leftists who, in line with the German government, advocate the “right of self-defense” and arms deliveries also denounce this Western hypocrisy and double standard. There is agreement on this. However, intellectually they are not following Egon Bahr, the architect of the 1970s détente policy called “new Ostpolitik” under then Social-Democratic chancellor Willy Brandt, who warned the younger generation in 2013: “International politics is never about democracy or human rights. It is about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what they tell you in history class.”

Instead, they stand — consciously or unconsciously — on the position that the policy of the government is, of course, morally twisted and hypocritical, but that a “value-oriented foreign policy” could exist in principle even with this capitalist state and that as such it is a good thing but merely needs to be implemented consistently and credibly.

But this would mean that political leftists are now those who, in practice, demand from the state, on which they usually have little to no influence and which they reject in theory: “Deliver weapons to (almost) every war zone of this world!” “Antifa means deliveries of battle tanks!” Because in the vast majority of wars in the world there is an aggressor or invader (and far from rarely it is NATO states or their allies).

The German government not only covers for, but even actively supports, the wars of invasion waged by its autocratically ruled NATO partner Turkey and the Saudi dictators, another Western ally.

Moreover: because even more people on the Left are in favor of sanctions than in favor of arms deliveries — even in the party executive of Die Linke, this is today the majority position with regard to Russia — and in the future they would have to demand sanctions against countless states in polemics and demonstrations, they would have to write this into their election programs, and they would have to justify the effects on the working classes of (almost) all countries as well as the intensification of international confrontations, etc.

Of course, no radical left-wing intellectual or politician of Die Linke would do all this, not even the political class of Greens and other liberals, who rely on “military solutions” and sanctions as quite normal means of foreign policy. But it would be only logical and consistent.

Unpleasant Answers

However, the fact that the left-wing advocates of arms deliveries (and sanctions) do not do all this does not make it any less awkward. On the contrary, the question arises: Why do they call for arms deliveries (and/or sanctions) in one place — as in Ukraine — but not in another — for example, in the case of Yemen, or the Kurdish regions in northern Syria and Iraq — even though it would be the logical consequence of their own values? Why don’t they write long editorials and biting commentaries, interrogate the government in the German Bundestag, organize rallies and events, until they are finally heard, the state bows to left-wing pressure, and justice finally prevails?

There are only two possible answers to this question: either it is the result of an intuitive racist attitude that considers Christian-white Ukrainians to be of higher value than non-white Muslims. This is unlikely to be the case — except perhaps among some “anti-Deutsch” socialized leftists and ex-leftists. Or it is that their own politics — at least the ones directed outward (which today override everything else) — are a (variously determined) appendage of the ruling class and its politics. That is, attached to the politics of a state once seen as capitalist and of a bourgeois-media public sphere that we used to learn to consider an “ideological state apparatus.”

Both answers are likely to make the left-wing supporters of the prevailing policy of arms deliveries extremely uncomfortable.

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“I am sad to say that all our brothers who were martyred had their cellular devices with them,” said Ziyad al-Nakhalah.

By JNS

The leader-in-exile of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization has blamed cell phones for the assassination by Israel of six of the group’s senior commanders during Israel’s “Operation Shield and Arrow” in early May.

“Our brothers were negligent in assessing the situation, and how the enemy monitors these devices,” Ziyad al-Nakhalah told website Haya Washington. “I am sad to say that all our brothers who were martyred had their cellular devices with them.”

“Operation Shield and Arrow” was launched on May 9 with the targeted killings of three senior PIJ members in the Gaza Strip. During the five-day conflict, that saw Palestinian terrorist groups fire 1,500 rockets at Israeli territory, the IDF killed three other top PIJ commanders.

Nakhalah, who has led PIJ since 2018 and is said to be living in either Lebanon or Syria, also claimed that the assassinated commanders had been immediately replaced.

“Even if we lose a leader in one of the battles, the deputy assumes responsibility in his place immediately,” he said. “Their martyrdom does not cause confusion in the military structure.”

In response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that PIJ leaders could be targeted for assassination outside of the Gaza Strip, Nakhalah said, “We are also able to bomb their capital and cities from other arenas.”

The post Islamic Jihad accuses its own senior terrorists of negligence appeared first on World Israel News.

Post Content

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett touts first legal victory in series of defamation lawsuits, forcing Rabbi Ronen Shaulov to retract claims Bennett and his parents are not Jewish.

By World Israel News Staff

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett notched his first legal victory Wednesday in a series of lawsuits filed for defamation last year.

Last December, Bennett filed a one-million shekel ($290,000) lawsuit against Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, after Rabbi Shaulov claimed during a live-stream online lecture that the former premier and his parents are not Jewish according to Halacha, or traditional Jewish law.

During the lecture, Rabbi Shaulov cited rumors claiming that both of Bennett’s parents, Jim and Myrna Bennett – both American-Jewish immigrants to Israel – had not been born Jewish and in fact had converted through the Reform Movement.

“Bennett is not Jewish, look it up on Google,” Rabbi Shaulov said, before accusing Bennett of “selling out the country to non-Jews.”

“He was their dog.”

Reform conversions are not recognized by Orthodox Judaism.

The Magistrate’s Court ruled in favor of Bennett Wednesday, though the presiding judge has yet to determine to what extent Rabbi Shaulov must compensate the former prime minister. Bennett has vowed to donate whatever he is awarded in the lawsuits to charity.

Following the ruling, Rabbi Shaulov issued a statement retracting his previous claims against Bennett, Israel National News reported

“During the year 2022, I spoke out against the former Prime Minister, Mr. Naftali Bennett, and against his mother, Mrs. Myrna Bennett, based on information which I received which later turned out to be incorrect – that the Jewishness of Mr. Bennett’s late father, Mr. Jim Bennett, and that of his mother, Mrs. Myrna Bennett, was in doubt.”

“After an investigation, I would like to emphasize that these things are false. These things said by me reached a wide circulation. I regret saying these things and apologize from the bottom of my heart to the Bennett family for the heartache caused to them by this publication.”

Bennett and his legal team touted the win, calling a victory against the “spreading of lies.”

“It is important that the court sends a clear message of its unwillingness to put up with the spreading of lies, and specifically – that the claims that Mr. Bennett is not Jewish are a complete lie,” Bennett’s attorneys, Oded Gazit and Eliram Bekel, said in a statement Wednesday. “Mr. Bennett has already stated in the past that he will donate the compensation he receives.”

Bennett has also filed a lawsuit against Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi, an Israeli-born lecturer and popular online personality who lives in Monsey, New York.

During his sermons, Rabbi Mizrachi also claimed Bennett is not Jewish and that he “doesn’t have a Jewish soul,” and that he should be “impaled with a spear.”

The post Rabbi who claimed Bennett is not Jewish apologizes after losing defamation lawsuit appeared first on World Israel News.