Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis: Interview with George Paxton

Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis: Interview with George Paxton
by Ian Sinclair
Open Democracy
19 July 2017

In his 2016 book Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis George Paxton, a Trustee of the Gandhi Foundation, sets out what is effectively secret history in a culture that reveres the violent struggle against Nazi Germany – Dunkirk and Churchill being the latest films that focus on the military campaign.

Ian Sinclair asked Paxton about the nonviolent resistance to Nazi Germany in Europe – its breadth, the methods it used and how it compares to the military struggle.

Ian Sinclair: What was the scale of the nonviolent resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe? What were some of the methods used?

George Paxton: The extent of nonviolent resistance (NVR) used against the occupiers varied from country to country with the most active probably being Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. The attitude of the Nazis to Eastern Europe, which they wanted to clear of its population in order to settle Germans, meant that the resistance was different in nature.

The size of the different campaigns of resistance ranged from a single individual to large sections of the population. In the case of the Norwegian teachers opposition to Nazification of the schools it was around 10,000 teachers supported by about 100,000 parents. Some strikes elsewhere involved even more than this.

The methods used in the various campaigns were very diverse such as marches, wearing symbols of resistance, private and public letters of protest, refusing to be conscripted for work, resigning from professional bodies taken over by the Nazis, hiding Jews, helping Jews escape, listening to BBC radio broadcasts, producing underground newspapers, collecting funds for resistance, deliberate slow working and many more.

IS: You include a section with a number of case studies of nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. Do you have a favourite?

GP: It is difficult to choose one but for a small scale resistance, involving just dozens of individuals, the White Rose group in Germany is one of the most impressive. Set up mainly by students at the University of Munich and including a brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, the group produced leaflets attacking the immoral nature of the Nazi regime and also the likelihood of its failure. Leaflets were printed secretly then posted out to individuals and left in public places. Groups were also started in other German towns and leaflets were transported by a resister by train in a suitcase. But due to a careless act when Hans and Sophie were distributing leaflets at their university, they were arrested, interrogated, quickly tried and executed.  This was followed by other arrests, executions and imprisonments. While their resistance was a failure in that the revolt of students they hoped to trigger did not occur, knowledge of their courageous acts spread widely in Germany and indeed abroad.

A contrasting successful resistance was the rescue of Jews, mainly children, by the villagers of Chambon-sur-Lignon on a high plateau south-west of Lyons in France. This village (and others in the region) became a hide-out for those escaping the Nazis and became a centre of safety, particularly for children. The inspiration for this action came from the Protestant pastor and his wife, André and Magda Trocmé. André was an incomer from the north-east of France and a pacifist and his actions were a product of his Christian belief which influenced also the nature of the resistance. Thus he did not deny that Jews were hidden in the village and surrounding farms but refused to tell the police where they were hidden. André survived the occupation, although imprisoned for a time, and several thousand Jews and others hidden there survived until liberation.

There are detailed studies of these two cases published but many more have not been studied in detail and indeed no doubt some actions have been lost to history.

IS: What struck me reading your book was how Nazi Germany was not all powerful in the countries they occupied, but was often forced to compromise and, occasionally, to back down because of nonviolent resistance. Can you talk about some of the successes those carrying out nonviolent resistance had?

GP: One of the most outstanding successes of resistance was the rescue of the Danish Jews. Denmark was treated relatively mildly by the Germans in part because the Danes were willing to supply Germany with agricultural produce. Their own government was allowed considerable independence for a while although the relationship soured eventually and the Germans took over. The local German administration was then ordered to round up the Jews for deportation to Germany. But at the German embassy was an attaché, Georg Duckwitz, who contacted a leading Danish politician to tell him when the round-up was to take place. He in turn informed the Chief Rabbi who passed the word to the Jews, while non-Jewish friends hid Jews and then transported them to the coast where boats were hired to take them to neutral Sweden.  Although there were only about 8,000 Jews in Denmark almost all of them survived, even the few hundred who were captured and sent to Germany were not sent to the death camps as a promise had been given to SS General Werner Best, the German head of government in Denmark, that they would not be.

In the Netherlands an attempt to conscript former Dutch soldiers who had been disarmed by the Germans was met by the largest strike in the occupied countries. It began in mines and factories and spread until it involved half a million people who took to the streets. In response more than 100 people were executed but far fewer former soldiers enrolled than the Germans wanted.

In Belgium, students and staff at the University of Brussels protested at the employment of Nazi staff and then organised teaching underground.

In the Netherlands and Norway the Germans failed to bring the doctors’ professional associations under their control due to non-cooperation by the doctors.

Opposition in Germany, particularly by Catholics, forced the stopping of the ‘euthanasia’ programme although many had been murdered before it was abandoned.

A recent study, Hitler’s Compromises by Nathan Stoltzfus, shows that Hitler was very careful to keep the German population ‘on side’. He was wary of dissent and compromised if it looked as if opposition to a policy was growing, e.g. the euthanasia programme and the Catholic opposition to attempted Nazification in the Catholic Church; also the effective opposition of German wives to the deportation of their Jewish husbands from Berlin.

NVR in Eastern Europe was different due to the more ruthless methods of the invader. In Poland, in spite of the extreme repression, the Nazis failed to destroy Polish culture due to the extensive development of underground organisations. School and university teaching continued in people’s houses with degrees being awarded and research papers published; courts conducted trials; political parties operated with a parliament and government departments also; separate military and civilian resistance groups operated; money was obtained from the Polish Government-in-exile in London.

The hiding and rescuing of Jews was on a large scale throughout Europe with possibly as many as one million Jews being saved (see Philip Friedman’s Their Brothers’ Keepers); this being done at great risk to the rescuers.

IS: Why do you think some campaigns were successful and others not?

GP: I think solidarity within the resisting group must be of great importance. The absolute numbers of resisters may not always be significant. For example, in Belgium insufficient solidarity and firmness by the higher civil servants and judges led to the Germans ultimately achieving their aims. Support from the general population was important elsewhere, e.g. funds to pay teachers on strike or working underground.

There were some quite important incidental factors such as nearness of mountains and forests for hiding and a border with a neutral country for escape.

The use of nonviolence itself is of great importance. A violent opposition will be resisted with maximum violence from the controlling power but nonviolent resistance will send different signals, e.g. we are less of a threat to you. This may give rise to a degree of sympathy among the security forces. The resisters have to be firm but not aggressive. The occupied population has the advantage of superior numbers if they choose to use their power.

IS: You contrast what you call Gandhian resistance with the pragmatic nonviolent action that people like Gene Sharp advocate. What are the main differences between the two?

GP: There isn’t a great deal dividing Sharp and Gandhi. But most of the NVR used by resisters during the Nazi occupation was pragmatic in the sense that it was not usually underpinned by nonviolent theory; in fact it simply did not involve the use of weapons and so other writers prefer to call it civilian resistance.

Sharp developed NVR theory which was independent of religious belief, Gandhi’s or others. In reality Gandhi’s beliefs were very inclusive although he tended to use Hindu terms which Sharp wanted to avoid as he did not want to tie nonviolence to any particular culture. Both of their approaches are grounded in ethics. Sharp’s academic work actually grew out of his interest in Gandhi’s career but Sharp put more emphasis on the use of power in considering the possible mechanism of NVR; Gandhi hoped for conversion of the opponent.

IS: How do you respond to the argument that it was ultimately violent action that ended the Third Reich, not nonviolent resistance?

GP: People in general and governments in particular think of defence only in terms of military action. This is still true today as it was in the 1930s. Therefore for most of the occupied populations a nonviolent resistance was simply not in their minds, except for a small number of pacifists. However, when their country was occupied and they did not have the means to resist in the conventional way the braver and more imaginative sometimes turned to non-military means.

Most people expected their countries to be liberated by military means from outside but what we need to take into consideration is the cost of violent resistance, which in WWII proved to be enormous in terms of deaths and destruction. And as Gandhi pointed out before WWII began the Allies would need to resort to the Nazis’ foul methods in order to ‘win’. When one remembers the blanket bombing of the German and Japanese cities which were largely occupied by civilians it is difficult to disagree.

The NVR used in the occupied countries was too small in scale to defeat the invaders but I believe the potential is there, and with the knowledge we have today future conflicts could be handled by NVR.

Book review. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

Book review. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor
by Ian Sinclair
Red Pepper
June-July 2017

In 2015 Shashi Tharoor’s brilliant speech to the Oxford Union Society on the motion “This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies” went viral, receiving coverage across the world.

Tharoor, an MP for the Indian National Congress, former senior United Nations official, novelist and scholar, has now expanded the argument he made at Oxford into Inglorious Empire.

Justifications for the supposedly benign and wise British rule of India – including how the colonialists encouraged democracy, the parliamentary system, development and generously set up the railways – are set out and then eloquently demolished.

At the start of the eighteenth century India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent – the size of all of Europe combined. By the end of nearly 200 years of British rule, first under the proto-multinational corporation East India Company and then direct governance by the British crown after 1858, India’s share had dropped to just over 3 percent following the deliberate destruction of thriving local industries by the British.

Indians were effectively barred from senior positions in the civil service, meaning there were more statues of Queen Victoria in India than Indians in the higher echelons of the government administration. Given “the British had no intention of imparting democracy to Indians”, Tharoor argues “it is a bit rich” for the British to now take credit for the fact India is now the world’s largest democracy.

Perhaps most shocking is the section detailing the 30-35 million Indians who needlessly died in the series of famines under the British Raj, the latest of which was the 1943-4 Bengal Famine. Tharoor calls these “British Colonial Holocausts”, comparing them to the 25 million people who perished in Stalin’s collectivisation drive and political purges.

Well referenced and full of fascinating facts, quotes and anecdotes, Inglorious Empire is a scorching indictment of British rule in India, and British imperialism more broadly. Tharoor supports Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to teach unromanticised colonial history in British schools – a timely idea when one considers a 2014 YouGov poll found 59 percent of respondents thought the British Empire was “something to be proud of.”

Inglorious Empire is published by Hurst & Company, priced £20.

Retrieved from the memory hole: British intervention in Greece in the 1940s

Retrieved from the memory hole: British intervention in Greece in the 1940s
by Ian Sinclair
Open Democracy
19 June 2017

Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the Battle of El-Alamein, D-Day, Arnhem, V.E. Day, V.J. Day – the 70^th anniversaries of various well known engagements in the Second World War have been commemorated extensively over the last few years, with official events and widespread media coverage. However, one British engagement in the Second World War did not, as far as I am aware, receive any national recognition – has, in fact, been effectively scrubbed from the nation’s collective memory: the British intervention in Greece.

Though it garnered a huge amount of press coverage at the time, arguably British actions in Greece during and immediately after the war – including aerial attacks on Athens and working with Nazi collaborators – have disappeared down the memory hole because they fatally undermine some of our most sacred national myths: about the so-called just war of 1939-45, the “Greatest Briton” Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee’s much celebrated post-war Labour government.

The occupation of Greece

Before the Second World War Greece was ruled by fascistic General Ioannis Metaxas. Supported by the Head of State, King George II of Greece, and the British, “Metaxas’s regime was a fully fledged police state”, according to historian John Newsinger, “banning strikes, imposing rigid censorship and imprisoning large numbers of socialists, communists and trade unionists in concentration camps.” With the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Metaxas was keen to keep Greece out of the hostilities. Italy had other ideas, invading Greece in October 1940. This initial aggression was repelled, and British and allied forces were invited in to assist after Metaxas’s death in January 1941. However, Germany, keen to shore up its Balkans flank, came to the aid of its axis ally and quickly swept through Greece, taking Athens in April 1941. The king fled – first to Crete, then to London, before eventually settling in Cairo.

With Greece under a tripartite German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation, in September 1941 the Communist Party of Greece set up the National Liberation Front (EAM), and its military wing (ELAS) in spring 1942, to resist the occupiers. In his 1992 book A Concise History of Greece, Richard Clogg explains EAM had two principal aims: “the organisation of resistance and a free choice as to the form of government on the eventual liberation of the country.” The latter aim should be seen in the context of the pre-war dictatorship and the British preference for the return of the King, “for which there was little enthusiasm in occupied Greece”, according to Clogg – largely because of the monarch’s acquiescence during Metaxas’s rule.

Newsinger notes the EAM was “a broad based organisation with Popular Front politics… committed to social reform, women’s liberation, democratisation and national freedom.” With the military occupation biting hard, EAM “encouraged local food production, established soup kitchens, prevented hoarding and profiteering, and controlled the movement of foodstuffs”. ELAS played a key role in helping to save Greek Jews from the Nazis, often offering sanctuary in the hills, with Professor Mark Mazower noting in his book Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 ELAS’s actions “saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Jews.” Quoting Chris Woodhouse, the British Special Operations Executive’s senior officer in Greece at the time, Newsinger notes the resistance carried out hundreds of attacks on the railway network, derailing trains, destroying engines and blowing up tunnels and bridges. Writing after the war, Woodhouse noted ELAS tied down “about three hundred thousand enemy troops.”

Less well known was EAM’s organisation of a trade union front (EEAM), which opposed the occupation by strikes, industrial action and sabotage – an impressive campaign of nonviolent resistance. Newsinger describes EEAM’s success in defying the German’s plan to conscript labour to work in Germany as “one of the most remarkable in the history of the European labour movement during these grim years.” The credit for this achievement “belongs largely to the Communists”, Woodhouse noted.

Answering the question “Was EAM-ELAS a valid popular movement?”, in his 1961 book The Cold War and Its Origins 1917-1960 the historian D.F. Fleming notes it “had the allegiance of great numbers of people.” Newsinger concurs, arguing “In the course of 1942-43 EAM became a mass movement without any precedent in Greek history.”

Keen to reinstall the Greek king and a friendly government to shore up British strategic interests in the Mediterranean, the make-up and popularity of the resistance to the occupation posed a conundrum for Britain. As the British Minister of State in Cairo pointed out to Churchill in 1943: “our military policy (to exert maximum possible pressure on the enemy) and our political policy (to do nothing to jeopardise the return of the monarchies) are fundamentally opposed.” In an attempt to square this unpalatable circle, Newsinger explains the “SOE was charged with keeping assistance to ELAS to a minimum, while making every effort to sustain and encourage [a] rival right-wing guerrilla organisation”, which went on to set up a truce with German forces.

The Battle of Athens and the start of the Greek civil war

By time German forces retreated from a devastated Greece in early October 1944 (500,000 people had died during the occupation – about seven percent of the population), EAM claimed a membership of two million and ran a proto-government in the 80 percent of the country they controlled. Preparing to restore the king, British forces under the command of Lt Gen Ronald Scobie arrived in Athens in mid-October 1944 and installed a provisional government, which included EAM members. However, tensions were rising between the EAM resistance movement and British forces, with Britain hoping to disarm EAM supporters as quickly as possible. Tensions came to a head on 3 December 1944 when Greek police shot dead 28 people and injured hundreds at a peaceful pro-EAM demonstration. In response EAM supporters stormed police stations across Athens, and organised a general strike. On 5 December 1944 Churchill sent a telegram to Scobie, ordering him to clear EAM forces out of Athens, with the infamous instruction he should not “hesitate to act as if… in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” The subsequent street fighting included British tank offensives, artillery bombardments and aerial attacks on neighbourhoods by RAF Spitfires and Beaufighters. “The mortars were raining down and planes were targeting everything”, recalls one Greek eyewitness. Having studied families living in Athens at the time, anthropologist Nemi Panourgia notes that British and government forces “were able to make forays into the city, burning and bombing houses and streets.” One British seaman who was involved in the attack remembers it “was nerve-racking going on deck for all you could hear was the sound of women and children wailing and crying.” The British forces eventually prevailed, but only after releasing thousands of prisoners who had collaborated with the Germans so they could fight EAM, and by receiving reinforcements from Italy. 267 British troops died in the fighting, and nearly a 1,000 were wounded.

Churchill likely felt he has a free hand in Greece to crush the anti-Nazi resistance forces because of the cynical Risk-style Percentages Agreement carving up territories and markets in south-east Europe he had secretly signed with Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin in October 1944. According to the document – one single sheet of paper given a tick by Stalin – the Soviet Union would have 90 percent influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria; the United Kingdom would have 90 percent in Greece; and they would share 50 percent each in Hungary and Yugoslavia.

Following EAM’s defeat in the Battle of Athens – known in Greece as ‘The Dekemvriana’ – a ‘White Terror’ was instituted, with anyone suspected of supporting, or being a member of, ELAS rounded up and sent to concentration camps. “Thousands… were executed, usually in public, their severed heads or hanging bodies routinely displayed in public squares”, noted Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith in a 2014 Observer piece about the British role in Greece. With the British Police Mission recruiting Nazi collaborators and overseeing the repression, “nowhere else in newly liberated Europe were Nazi sympathisers enabled to penetrate the state structure – the army, security forces, judiciary – so effectively”, they explain. As the historian David Close argued in his book The Origins of the Greek Civil War: “The white terror was made possible only by British backing.”

More slaughter and division was to come. “The Greek Civil War that lasted from 1946 until 1949 completed the destruction of the left”, notes Newsinger. “By the time it was over 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting, 40,000 were being held in concentration camps, 5,000 had been executed and another 100,000 had fled the country.”

Shameful British history

The British intervention in Greece was a shameful episode in British history – one that deserves to be better known and which counters a number of cherished national shibboleths. For example, Seamus Milne’s assertion in 2014 that the Second World War was a “just war” sits uneasily alongside the fact RAF Spitfires strafed Athens and the British violently suppressed the Greek resistance who had sacrificed so much fighting the Germans by working with those Greeks who collaborated with the Germans. And this wasn’t a one-off. In a September 2016 Guardian article Ian Cobain highlighted how, in 1945, the British government used captured Japanese troops to quell a nationalist uprising in Vietnam (which had only just been occupied by the Japanese), so France could recover control of her pre-war colony. The British followed a similar strategy in Indonesia – working with the defeated Japanese forces to crush a nationalist uprising to re-establish Dutch rule.

The Greek drama also punctures the myth of Churchill as a great leader and ‘Great Briton’, and shows up the pro-imperialism of Labour Party heroes Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevan, who were intimately involved in the destruction of popular leftist forces in Greece, first under Churchill’s leadership and then during Attlee’s 1945 government, which oversaw the repression in Vietnam and Indonesia.

With Vulliamy and Smith noting the British intervention has “haunted Greece ever since… creating an abyss between the left and right thereafter”, Britain’s nefarious role has had a long and destructive legacy that the British, if they believe themselves to be a humane and fair-minded nation, would do well to remember.

Climate change: Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Green voters

Climate change: Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Green voters
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
12 July 2017

There is a tendency in the UK to look contemptuously upon the US political system. And nowhere are the deficiencies of the ‘shining city on a hill’ more glaring than its side-lining of climate change – “the missing issue” of the 2016 US presidential campaign, reported the Guardian. According to the US writer Bryan Farrell, the topic was discussed for just 82 seconds during the 2016 televised presidential debates, which was actually an improvement on the 2012 debates, when it wasn’t mentioned at all.

Tragically, this omission was mirrored in the UK’s recent General Election. “The issue of #climatechange was completely marginalised during the #GE2017 media coverage”, Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture tweeted about their election analysis. This absence, the media watchdog Media Lens noted, is “the great insanity of our time”. Why? Because climate change is arguably the most serious threat the world faces today. In January 2017 writer Andrew Simms surveyed over a dozen leading climate scientists and analysts and found none of them thought global temperatures would stay below 2°C – the figure world leaders agree we cannot exceed if we wish to stop dangerous climate change. Last year, top climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson told the Morning Star the pledges made by nations at the 2015 Paris climate summit would likely lead to a 3-4°C rise in global temperatures. Frighteningly he also told the author George Marshall that it’s hard to find any scientist who considers four degrees “as anything other than catastrophic for both human society and ecosystems.”

Surveying the environmental policies of the main parties just before 8 June, Friends of the Earth scored the Green Party top with 46 points, followed by Labour on 34, the Liberal Democrats on 32 and the Conservatives trailing last with a poor 11.

The environment and climate change did not play a significant role in the Labour Party’s hugely successful election campaign. And though Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn himself rarely mentioned the topic on the campaign trail, the manifesto was a pleasant surprise to many. “I’ve been really encouraged by Corbyn’s commitment to safeguarding our environment”, Nancy Strang, the Women’s Officer in Brent Central Labour, tells me. “The 2017 manifesto pledges to increase renewable energy production and investment, to tackle our air quality with a Clean Air Act, to protect Britain’s wildlife, and to ban fracking are all huge steps in the right direction… these pledges go beyond those in any previous Labour Party manifesto that I remember.”

The Green Party’s Dr Rupert Read agrees. “Corbyn’s Labour have some good environmental policies”, he tells me. “For example, their new-found opposition to fracking is much to be welcomed.”

However, he highlights a “fundamental problem” with Labour’s manifesto. “It is their unreconstructed insistence on ‘faster economic growth’”, Read, Chair of Green House thinktank, argues. “Faster economic growth means faster environmental destruction. It’s that simple. Net ‘green growth’ across the economy is a fantasy, nothing more; and in any case, that isn’t even what Labour’s manifesto promises. It speaks of an industrial strategy for growth across all sectors of the economy (i.e. ‘grey’/’brown’ as well as ‘green’).” He goes on to note “Labour is committed to a whole raft of de facto anti-environmental policies”, including a road-building programme, High Speed 2, the expansion of Heathrow, and Trident renewal.

“Whilst I may have been tempted to join the Green Party had Labour party members chosen a different leader, I genuinely believe that under Corbyn Labour will make meaningful steps towards tackling climate change in ways another leadership team may not have”, Strang notes. “Ultimately, I have to be pragmatic and make a decision based on which party is most likely to gain power and have a realistic chance of being able to implement their environmental policies.”

Strang’s reasoning has resonated widely, with many Green Party supporters switching their allegiance to Corbyn’s Labour Party – according to the polling organisation YouGov Labour managed to attract 59 percent of 2015 Green voters at the General Election.

Speaking to the Morning Star last month, the former Green council candidate turned Labour supporter Adam Van Coevorden concurred with Strang’s analysis. “Labour’s success is needed if we’re going to implement policies to protect the environment because at the moment big business has the whip hand, and as long as it does, nothing is going to change”, he noted. This echoes Canadian environmentalist Naomi Klein’s argument in her seminal 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate – that stopping the worst effects of global warming will involve massively degrading corporate power and “challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism”.

“Corporate power has undoubtedly been a big part of the erosion of our environment”, Read agrees. “Yet despite this we should not forget that some of the biggest ecological catastrophes that our planet has witnessed have come at the hands of big government initiatives – I am thinking particularly of the Soviet Union and China’s huge mining, deforestation and infrastructure projects, or even Venezuela’s state-run oil companies.” The crucial point for Read is “to challenge the logic of infinitely expanding production.”

Whether Corbyn’s Labour Party will begin to critically engage with the ideology of economic growth is an open question. Read is doubtful. “Environmental sustainability will never get a proper hearing from the Labour Party because it is at fundamental odds with Labour’s underlying philosophy”, he argues. “The Labour Party is built upon the principle of increasing production and sharing the proceeds (relatively) equitably among the wider society.”

However, one hopeful opportunity may be the Labour leadership’s attempts to increase democracy within the structures of the party – one way new and old environmentally aware-Labour supporters could decisively influence Labour Party policy. At the same time it is clear external political pressure from the Green Party – “they have led where others were not so bold”, says Van Coevorden – also has an essential role to play in pushing Corbyn’s Labour in the right direction on green issues. It should also be noted that Corbyn personally opposes some of the environmentally damaging policies the broader Labour Party currently supports, such as Heathrow expansion and Trident renewal. So, arguably, increased backing for the Labour leader and side-lining his neoliberal opponents within the party will likely improve Labour’s environmental policies.

Ignoring Western bombing in the Middle East endangers us all

Ignoring Western bombing in the Middle East endangers us all
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
29 June 2017

The terrible consequences of the West’s air campaign in Iraq and Syria have dropped off the news agenda. No doubt the media would argue they have been preoccupied with the era-shaking general election and the Grenfell Tower disaster but the unpalatable truth is our so-called fiercely independent and critical fourth estate have rarely shown much concern with the human cost of Western military intervention in the Middle East.

For example, the Guardian did report United Nations (UN) war crimes investigators recently saying the US-backed assault on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the defacto capital of Islamic State (ISIS), had caused a “staggering loss of civilian life” – in a tiny article hidden on page 22 of the paper. According to the UN inquiry at least 300 civilians have died in recent weeks, with over 160,000 people fleeing the intensifying air campaign. The local activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently stated the US-led coalition bombing has destroyed “almost every important building in Raqqa,” including schools and mosques. On top of this the New York Times reported local residents as saying the coalition were using munitions loaded with white phosphorus in eastern Raqqa (the use of white phosphorus in populated areas is prohibited under international law).

The coalition has also intensified its bombing campaign in Mosul, in an attempt to dislodge ISIS’s grip on the northern Iraqi city, including a March 2017 airstrike that is estimated to have killed around 200 civilians. In the same month the Washington Post noted “A sharp rise in the number of civilians reported killed in US-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria is spreading panic” with families describing “cowering in basements for weeks as bombs rained down around them and the Islamic State battled from their rooftops.”

In total, the independent monitoring group Air Wars estimates a minimum of nearly 4,000 civilians have died in the 22,600 air strikes the coalition has carried out in Iraq and Syria since 2014.

As well as killing thousands, like with the US bombing of Afghanistan and Pakistan the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria likely increase support for those they are targeting. “Its strongest recruiting tactic is to present itself as the one true guardian of Islam under attack from ‘crusader’ forces”, Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, argues about ISIS. Rogers’ analysis is borne out by the fact many of those who carry out terrorist attacks in the West cite Western military action in the Middle East as a justification for their actions. For example, the Wall Street Journal noted that “In the series of phone calls with the negotiator during the Orlando massacre” in June 2016 the perpetrator Omar Mateen “railed against US airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, saying they were killing women and children”.

So if Western military action isn’t the answer, what is?

First, we should work to close the external funding channels to ISIS and other extremist groups – the topic of a UK Home Office inquiry that has apparently been shelved by the government because it points the finger at Saudi Arabia, the UK’s closest partner in the Middle East.

In addition, it is well known that some of the “extraordinary amount of arms” that ex-US Secretary of State John Kerry says US has helped to send into Syria have ended up in extremists’ hands. In 2015 the Guardian reported ISIS captured 2,300 US-made Humvee armoured vehicles and huge amounts of weapons when it overran Mosul.

More broadly, it is important to understand the conditions that give rise to groups like ISIS – the extreme violence, chaos and sectarianism created by conflict. “There undeniably would be no ISIS if we had not invaded Iraq,” David Kilcullen, a top counter-insurgency advisor to the US military, argued in 2016. A similar relationship applies to Libya circa 2011 and also Syria – in both countries the West helped to escalate and extend the conflict by sending in arms and blocking peace initiatives.

So one of the most effective things the West could do to reduce ISIS’s power is work to deescalate the conflicts. In Iraq the West should be pressuring the Iraqi government to implement a political settlement that is fully inclusive of the Sunni community that has been alienated and marginalised since 2003 – conditions ISIS has exploited. And if military action is required Dr David Wearing, a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London, argues it is essential the fighting is left “to local forces that have popular legitimacy in those areas” – not Western forces.

That there is a connection between Western bombs killing people in the Middle East and terrorist attacks killing people on Western streets is obvious to all but the most blinkered. Stopping the former, which is likely to reduce the latter, is the pressing task facing concerned citizens in the West.

 

The BBC vs. Jeremy Corbyn

The BBC vs. Jeremy Corbyn
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
19 May 2017

The morning after a draft of the Labour Party manifesto had been leaked, Andrew Gwynne MP, Labour’s general election co-ordinator, was interviewed on the BBC Today Programme in the high profile 08:10 slot.

Ten minutes earlier, the 08:00 news bulletin had reported that the manifesto promises to “nationalise the railways as franchises expire and to abolish tuition fees in England… to return Royal Mail to public ownership, to bring in an energy price cap and introduce a levy on companies with large numbers of staff on what it calls ‘very high pay’.”

“It looks like a great big wish list… that no government could possibly push through in five years or even fifty years”, stated presenter John Humphrys, interviewing Gwynne. “It is just unrealistic, isn’t it? It’s also far too to the left, far too much to the left for the British public to stomach, don’t you think?”

Some listeners may have swallowed the subtle assumptions behind Humphrys’ question but luckily a poll released the next day inserted some reality into the debate. Far from being “far too much to the left for the British public”, the Independent’s report on the research was titled ‘British voters overwhelmingly back Labour’s manifesto policies, poll finds’.

According to the ComRes survey 52 per cent of people support the state ownership of the railways (22 per cent opposed), 49 per cent support the state ownership of the energy market (24 percent opposed) and 50 per cent of people support the renationalisation of Royal Mail (25 per cent opposed). In addition, 71 per cent said they back Labour’s proposal to ban zero-hours contracts, while 65 percent supported Labour’s plan to increase income tax for those who earn £80,000 or more.

These findings are not a one off – a November 2013 YouGov poll found 67 per cent of people thought the Royal Mail should be run as a public service, 68 per cent supported nationalising the energy companies and 66 per cent wanted to nationalise the railways.

Humphrys’ attempt to dismiss Labour’s policies fits with the broader media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn. Analysing press coverage during the two months after he was elected Labour leader, a 2016 London School of Economics study observed “an overall picture of most newspapers systematically vilifying” Corbyn, “assassinating his character, ridiculing his personality and delegitimising his ideas and politics.” Other left-wing leaders have received negative press attention, though “in the case of Corbyn the degree of antagonism and hatred… has arguably reached new heights.” Another study conducted by the Media Reform Coalition “indicated how large sections of the press appeared to set out systematically to undermine Jeremy Corbyn with a barrage of overwhelmingly negative coverage.”

The supposedly neutral and objective BBC, the most trusted news source in the UK, has played a key role in this political denigration and exclusion, with Sir Michael Lyons, the chair of the BBC Trust from 2007 to 2011, arguing in May last year there had been “some quite extraordinary attacks on the elected leader of the Labour party”. Lyons continued: “I can understand why people are worried about whether some of the most senior editorial voices in the BBC have lost their impartiality on this.”

One such senior voice could well be BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, who was found to have erroneously edited a November 2015 interview with Corbyn to make it look like he didn’t support a shoot-to-kill policy during an ongoing Paris-style terrorist attack. The interview breached the BBC’s impartiality and accuracy guidelines, the BBC Trust found.

More recently, the Today Programme’s Nick Robinson dismissively tweeted “No-one should be surprised that @jeremycorbyn is running v the ‘Establishment’ & is long on passion & short on details. Story of his life.”

Rather than being aberrations, this bias against Corbyn arguably reflects the BBC’s wider politics. “Its structure and culture have been profoundly shaped by the interests of powerful groups in British society”, Dr Tom Mills argues in his 2016 book ‘The BBC: Myth of a Public Service’. Unsurprisingly then, the BBC’s news output “has overwhelmingly reflected the ideas and interests of elite groups and marginalised alternative and oppositional perspectives.”

Analysing the number and type of guests invited onto the programme, research conducted by Cardiff University’s Dr Mike Berry into the BBC Today Programme’s coverage of the financial crisis, confirms Mills’s thesis. “It was clear that the people who had caused the crisis – the bankers and the politicians – were overwhelmingly the voices charged with defining the problem and putting forward solutions”, Berry told me.

With the Labour Party’s running on a transformational manifesto and Corbyn promising “a reckoning” with the unscrupulous sections of the British elite if he is elected Prime Minister, is it any wonder the establishment-friendly BBC is unable or unwilling to give the Labour leader a fair hearing?