ALB
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The Labour Party, despicable lot that they are, supports the Israeli state’s “right” to try to starve the population of Gaza into submission but this has understandably disgusted a couple of their councillors in Oxford:
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23853529.oxford-labour-councillors-resign-keir-starmer-comments/#
There is this letter from a couple of years ago:
Unbelievable. Now the Israeli government announces a plan to ethnically cleanse part of Gaza by advising over a million people to leave the area voluntarily. Hopefully this is just a threat but the leaders of Israel could be sufficiently unbalanced to try to carry it out.
Talk about a rogue state. And the US and Britain are sending warships to support Israel
Yes, that’s a good statement, in plain English. Better than the CWO one, whose heading “The Latest Butchery in the Middle East is Part of the March to Generalised War”, reflects their mistaken view that another world war is economically necessary for capital accumulation to continue.
Both are far better than that other one that calls on Israeli soldiers to turn their guns on their officers. What they should be doing, if anything, is not agreeing to serve in the Israeli armed forces in the first place (as a few do each year).
Well, if socialism is pie in the sky and capitalism the only game in town, what do you see as the answer within capitalism to the oppression of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants?
Our opposition to Zionism does not mean that we support the PLO or Hamas. While we can sympathise with our fellow workers when they are so obviously being oppressed, we cannot support armed uprising – even less massacres of fellow workers – to establish a Palestine state.
It is not just Jewish nationalism that we condemn. We condemn all nationalisms equally. The ‘Palestinian nation’ is just as much a myth as the ‘Jewish nation’, or any other nation. Just like most Jews, most Palestinians are workers and should also seek freedom from oppression through uniting with workers from the other parts of the planet to establish a world of common ownership and democratic control. A Palestine state would be just another capitalist state in which workers are exploited for profit, as they are in all capitalist states.
Nationalism is the ideology which seeks to justify the capitalist division of the world into separate ‘nation-states’, each competing to gain a place in the sun for its ruling class and each with killing machines at its disposal. We utterly reject this view of the way humanity should organise itself.
Our view is that all oppressed peoples should seek their liberation, not as members of nations or religions or ethnic groups, but as workers. They should unite to abolish the division of the world into so-called nation-states and to establish a world cooperative commonwealth of in which we will all be free and equal members – citizens of the world, not subjects of nation-states.
”The Zionist state is solely responsible for the ongoing escalation due to its continuous violations of the rights of the Palestinian people, including the recent repeated incursions into the al-Aqsa Mosque under the protection of the Israeli police.”
What has happened? Lizzie has ceased to be a sniping cynic and expressed a political view of her own. Sounds as if you have just got back from demonstrating outside the Israeli embassy.
I don’t think the some perceived violation of a Muslim holy building can justify the massacre of young men and women at a music festival. If it does, that doesn’t say much for Islam. But I wouldn’t have thought that most Muslims would agree it does.
I wouldn’t say it’s “very good”. It’s on the right lines but I expect they are in favour of an international civil war to try to establish socialism. Which would of course see the same massacres and destruction as we are seeing now in Palestine.
An international civil war, can you imagine it. The break-up of Yugoslavia on a world scale.
”There’s a resounding noise, from the PM, Sunak, Biden, that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ (and, in international law, it does, but proportionately”
There’s no chance of the response being proportionate. The Israeli state has rewritten the Book of Exodus to read “a hundred eyes for an eye” and consistently practised this revised commandment from their holy book.
I prefer the simpler theory that Harper is just stupid and just used the conspiracy theory, probably not realising that it was one, as part of the Tory party’s current pro-motorist rhetoric.
More on the conspiracy theory of 15 minute cities here;
Still, playing the pro-motorist card is not as bad as playing the anti-immigrant one.
If the SSP had stood in Vauxhall and got 0.9 percent that would be 13 votes (271 Rutherglen).
So they are in the same league too — or maybe even the sane league as at least they employ the language of socialism. Or more probably not as they are both reformist and petty nationalist.
Yesterday Putin gave a speech which the Russian authorities billed as important. In it he defended the Russian capitalist state’s war in terms of Realpolitik (rather his other nonsense about Ukrainians being lost Russians or defending the values of Orthodox Christianity). Basically, his argument was that the Russian state was threatened by Western expansion up to its borders.
In the course of the speech he mentioned something that is often overlooked — that at one time post-Soviet Russia considered joining NATO:
“I have said this publicly to both our allies and partners. There was a moment when I simply suggested: perhaps we should also join NATO? But no, NATO does not need a country like ours. No. I want to know, what else do they need? We thought we became part of the crowd, got a foot in the door. What else were we supposed to do? There was no more ideological confrontation.”
I don’t know if there was any realistic prospect of Russia joining NATO but, as Putin pointed out, why not as “there was no more ideological confrontation”? After all, Russia like the NATO countries was openly capitalist.
And it only cost £105 to print 2000 leaflets and nothing to distribute them.
Nobody has yet made the point that in the Rutherglen by-election in Scotland yesterday that the TUSC candidate got the same percentage of the vote which in number of votes was 178:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Rutherglen_and_Hamilton_West_by-election
And they campaigned for a whole raft of reforms. In any event, we are both in the sane league.
