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Tom Mellen in The Morning Star reports:

Germany's defence minister visited the 4,500-strong Bundeswehr contingent in Afghanistan as a new poll indicated that almost two out of three Germans want its military brought home.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg toured German military headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif before heading to Kunduz, where German troops mistakenly shot dead six Afghan soldiers on April 2 following a guerilla ambush in which three Bundeswehr personnel were killed.

Berlin's military intervention in the impoverished country is deeply unpopular among German voters.

Stern magazine has published a Forsa poll which found that 62 per cent of the 1,004 people surveyed want the troops withdrawn.

That is a considerable jump from September 2005, when only 34 per cent of those polled by Forsa said the Bundeswehr soldiers should pull out.

Washington is increasingly concerned over declining support in Europe for the war.

Well, Washington certainly has no grounds for concern in the forthcoming General Election in One-Party Britain. All three of our main parties- including the 'progressive' Lib Dems, support continued British involvement in this costly and unwinnable war.

Lorna Fitzsimons was right- in Britain, foreign policy is an ‘elite’ issue. What ordinary people want doesn’t come in to it. Sadly, it seems that's the case in Germany too.

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Well, we're only 8 days into the year, but George Galloway has already established himself as an early favourite for the 2010 Man of the Year award.

As one of the commenters on The Guardian thread says: This is the kind of politician we need in this country.
A politician who doesn't just talk about injustice, but who tries to do something practical to help end injustice.

And as for Egypt, the country which has arrested and deported George, what can we say? There have been many calls for a boycott of Israel in response to its cruel treatment of the Palestinians and its inhumane blockade of Gaza, but if we are concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, then surely we should also be talking about boycotting Egypt too- so long as the current corrupt regime stays in power.

As Seumas Milne pointed out yesterday, it's interesting- and revealing- to compare the virtual silence of large sections of the western media when it comes to anti-democratic practices in Egypt, and the brutal clampdown on opposition forces there, with the wall-to-wall coverage of anti-government demonstrations in Iran.

UPDATE: In similar vein, Mehdi Hasan over at the NS writes:
In recent months, there has been much talk of a "boycott" of Israeli goods but -- as defenders of Israel often point out -- advocates of such a strategy have to be consistent. If you're going to boycott Israel because of its morally reprehensible and near-criminal economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, why not boycott its accomplice Egypt as well?

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video: ady cousins.

Stop the War reports:

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, the soldier who faces desertion
charges for refusing to return to Afghanistan, has been
arrested and charged with five further offences for leading
Stop the War's demonstration in London on 24 October and for
expressing his opposition to the media in defiance of orders.

The new charges carry a maximum of ten years imprisonment in
addition to the sentence of three to four years that Joe could
get if the desertion charge is upheld.

Joe's mother, Sue Glenton, has spoken out against his arrest:
"You've got government ministers, army commanders and MPs
speaking every day in support of the war. What's so scary
about a Lance Corporal having his say? My son is only speaking
out for what he thinks is right."

Joe's arrest and imprisonment are signs of panic by the government and military commanders, faced with an ever growing majority of the British public opposing the war and an increasing number of prominent voices in the media calling for
the withdrawal of British troops.


Stop the War has organised an EMERGENCY PROTEST at 5pm tomorrow (Thursday 12 November), at the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall (opposite Downing Street). Details of other ways you can help Joe can be found here.

And if you're an anti-war blogger, in the UK or overseas, please do all you can to publicise the campaign to defend Joe. Joe Glenton is not a criminal, he's a national hero. It's the politicians who launch illegal wars which have nothing to do with defending the realm who should be arrested, not the brave soldiers who oppose such conflicts.

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video: Inspector Foyle

It’s Remembrance weekend- so to mark the occasion here’s a clip from what for my money remains the greatest- and most powerful- anti-war film of all time: All Quiet on the Western Front.

At about 7.15 in to the clip, you can watch the wonderful scene when Paul, who has returned from the horror of the trenches, visits his old school and turns on his warmongering teacher Professor Kantorek who is still urging pupils to go out and fight.

Whenever I read articles like this one and this one in the British press, I always think of Kantorek and the other armchair warriors in the bar.

For, as Paul says in the clip, it is much, much easier to tell others to ‘go out and die’ than it is to do it yourself.

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video: ady cousins

For those weren't able to make it to London, here, thanks to the wonders of You Tube is Seumas Milne's brilliant speech at the recent anti-war rally organised by Stop the War. As you'll see from the clip Seumas is a great speaker as well as being a great journalist, but to the best of my knowledge he has never appeared on the BBC1's Question Time programme, nor has he ever been a panellist on Radio 4's Any Questions. In fact, ask yourself how many true socialists you have seen/heard on Question Time or Any Questions. Pro-war neoliberals and faux leftists are invited every week and dominate the panels-(they even had a fascist on a few weeks back, I believe), but how many true socialists like Seumas, John Pilger or Jeremy Corbyn ever get invited?

It's supposed to be 'our' BBC, so shouldn't we try a little bit harder to get panels that actually represent public opinion?

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(video: egonchris)

Another day, more dead soldiers in Afghanistan. The British public wants out. So too does former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells. It's time to say enough is enough and bring British troops back from Afghanistan without further delay. And let those who want this wretched, unwinnable war to continue go out and fight it themselves.

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It's time for the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards.

I've voted for George Galloway. These are the reasons I gave in my nomination:

It has to be George Galloway. He's one of the few MPs not tied to the neocon/neoliberal junta that has dominated British politics for so long and which has embroiled us in a series of catastrophic and very costly wars. He has been proved right on Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The neocons, who even after Iraq, have such a powerful media presence, hate Galloway, which is a sign he is on the right track.
He has been attacked, smeared and demonised, but he hasn't let that stop him from speaking his mind.
The positions Galloway has taken- whether it be his opposition to the neocon war agenda, or his support for railway renationalisation, are shared by the majority of the British people. His views are mainstream, it's only the neocon/neoliberal elite who try to portray him as an 'extremist'.
On top of all of that, he is easily the best, and most inspiring, public speaker of his generation.

The Spectator has described me as ‘plucky’ for nominating Galloway and says that so far I’m a ’fairly solitary voice’ in voting for him. The ’fairly’ is positive- it means that George has got at least one other vote. Let's try and get him a few more.

Serb readers should remember that Galloway was not only one of the few MPs to oppose the criminal bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, but he’s also taken a very strong line on Kosovo.

The neocons would hate it if Galloway won the award. So let's try and make it happen.
Here is the link to the vote. But don't delay- voting closes on Monday 26th October.

Vote Galloway: the man the neocon warmongers love to hate.

Above you can watch George in action- giving neocon David Frum- the man who coined the notorious phrase 'Axis of Evil', a real roasting on Newsnight. Notice how Frum's first tactic is to try and smear Galloway, talking sarcastically about his 'integrity'. And note how George responds.

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......is pictured above.

Well, at least he would have been my choice.

How about you?

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The great man is 80 years old today. By way of a tribute, here's my article on Chomsky from the New Statesman's 'Great Thinkers of Our Time' Series.


The charge of both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism is regularly made by propagandists of the new world order against those who do not happen to share their enthusiasm for biennial invasions of sovereign states and the spreading of neoliberalism by B-52 and cluster bomb.

What the likes of Michael Gove, Barbara Amiel and Melanie Phillips cannot explain away, however, is the inconvenient reality that some of the most outspoken opponents of their world-view are either American or Jewish, or very often both. The international anti-war movement owes much to the efforts of Gore Vidal, Ramsey Clark, Michael Parenti and Howard Zinn. But the greatest of their number is Noam Chomsky, who has spent more than four decades warning of the danger that US imperialism poses to the peace and security of the world.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, the son of Russian immigrants who had strong pacifist leanings, Chomsky's early education was at a progressive school and at the city's Central High School. At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied mathematics and philosophy, as well as linguistics. Since completing his PhD in linguistics in 1955, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was appointed Institute Professor in 1976.

His contribution to linguistics is profound. His Syntactic Structures (1957) is considered to be one of the intellectual achievements of the 20th century. Chomsky pioneered the idea that each human child has an innate capacity to master the grammar and deep structure of language. His insight was based on the observation that children learn grammar at a rate far greater than can be explained by their extrapolating from examples given to them. They must therefore have an innate capacity not only to learn language but also to understand how it works. Because language acquisition is universal, all languages must share the same fundamental structure or "depth grammar".

Chomsky's revolutionary work on grammar and language deeply influenced not only linguistics, but also cognitive science in general. It has had a major impact on his political thinking as well. What Chomsky offers is, in the words of the author Collin Coyne, an "account of international power exchange from the linguist's perspective". For Chomsky, the word "democracy" has two quite distinct meanings. According to the dictionary, a system is democratic to the extent that its citizens have ways to participate in decisions about public affairs. In the ideological sense of democracy, a society is deemed democratic by the US only if its business is run in a way that is subordinate to the interests of US business. Anyone still in doubt as to why Guatemala in the 1950s, Nicaragua in the 1980s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s were denied the label "democratic" by the US state department, despite the holding of free elections in these countries, need no longer be puzzled.

Chomsky came to prominence as a social critic of US foreign policy during the Vietnam war. His first major political text, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), was critical of a liberal intelligentsia that had supported the Vietnam conflict or, if it opposed it, did so not because it was wrong but because of the high level of US casualties. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky was, together with John Pilger, one of the few to speak out on the "hidden" genocide in East Timor, where, over a 20-year period, Indonesian forces armed and supported by the US were responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people.

As a non-Marxist, libertarian socialist, Chomsky embraced the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, he understood the dangers that would be created by the new power vacuum. His fear that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the US military-industrial complex would seek out new enemies to justify its existence has been borne out by subsequent events. That it has done so successfully owes much to what Chomsky calls an "unholy alliance" between the US state and the "corporate media".

In works such as Manufacturing Consent (co-written with Edward Herman in 1988) and Necessary Illusions (1989), Chomsky challenged the orthodoxy that a "free press" acts as a "watchdog" in a capitalist democracy. He argued instead that by "framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting discussion accordingly", the media help to preserve the status quo and the hegemony of global finance.

Chomsky's understanding of the mechanics of US imperialism and his ability at all times to see the "big picture" have led him to oppose recent US military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as President Bush's war on terrorism. As befits a true liberal, he has never compromised his belief in the freedom of speech, even to the extent that in 1980 he wrote the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson that doubted the truth of the Holocaust.

In 40 years of writing about politics, Chomsky's errors of judgement - he was wrong to think that the fall of communism in eastern Europe was a "triumph of the spirit" and that the west missed a "great opportunity" to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 - have been remarkably few. For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in, for anyone who does not understand why the US ignored the genocide in East Timor but intervened so aggressively in a low-scale civil war in Kosovo, there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.

He may be widely disliked by establishment commentators, but through exposing unpalatable truths about the way his country is run and by reminding us that US military spending protects not US citizens but the interests of the big US corporations, Chomsky has done his country and the world an invaluable service. This, together with his pioneering work in linguistics, makes him one of the great thinkers of this or any other time.

Noam Chomsky: Born 1928 in Philadelphia, US. Has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, where he is Institute Professor and professor of linguistics. Regarded as the father of modern linguistics, founder of the field of transformational-generative grammar, which relies heavily on logic and philosophy. A persistent, radical critic of American and capitalist hegemonic power, his pioneering linguistic works include Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966) and Knowledge of Language: its nature, origins and use (1986), while political books range from American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) to Terrorizing the Neighborhood: American foreign policy in the post-cold war era (1991)

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This article of mine appears in The First Post

Anyone who argues that, as a political force, socialism is dead, ought to visit the Netherlands. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP) is the fastest growing political group in the country.

They won 25 seats in the last general election - an increase of 16 seats - and made huge gains in last year's local elections. They are now the third largest party in Holland in terms of members and could well replace the Dutch Labour Party as the main alternative to the Christian Democrats.

Why are they so successful? I would suggest that it is because they are a socialist party that actually has socialist policies. They oppose the privatisation of public services, advocate higher taxes on the very wealthy and have condemned the "the culture of greed" caused by "a capitalism based on inflated bonuses and easy money". They oppose war and Nato and the nascent European superstate. They were the only left-wing Dutch party in Parliament to oppose the new EU Constitution in the 2005 referendum.

Of course the fact that they have one of the most charismatic - and photogenic - of all of European political leaders in the 41-year-old epidemiologist Agnes Kant (pictured above) does them no harm.

Part of its popularity with the voters lies in one particular policy which differentiates it from British or other European parties of the left: they oppose large scale immigration. The SP see the 'free movement of labour' as part of the neoliberal globalist package - something which benefits big business but not ordinary people. Their opposition to immigration is not based on racism - as tends to be the case with the BNP and other far-right parties in Europe - but on their socialist ideology.

A recent publication by the SP asserted that labour migration in the EU was making "more acute the contrasts between rich and poor and competition between different groups of workers within the EU". Instead of lauding the free movement of labour as other parties on the left do, the SP calls for policies "to make migration unnecessary" and for the EU funds to be used to enable poorer regions of the continent to be self-supporting.

The SP's opposition to large-scale immigration is not a recent development. In the 1980s, the party's booklet Gastarbeid en Kapitaal (Migrant Labour and Capital), denounced the migration of foreign workers into the Netherlands as a capitalist ploy to drive down wages and destroy working class solidarity.

This is a far cry from the traditional position of the British left - which despite overwhelming evidence that large-scale immigration does reduce wages - still clings to an the ideology of open borders. In doing so, they are not only complying with the wishes of big business, who for obvious reasons welcome the influx of large numbers of people from low-wage economies onto their labour market; they are also espousing a policy which is unpopular with large swathes of the electorate and which is likely to become even more unpopular as unemployment grows.

The success of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands shows that there are lots of votes to be won by an unequivocally left-wing party which has the courage and sense to oppose large-scale immigration on non-racist, anti-capitalist grounds.

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Back in September 2001, I wasn't blogging and so there was no 'Wally of the Week Award'. But had there been, I've no doubt I would have awarded it to a certain 'Thomas Smith' from Bristol.

These extracts from an article of mine from The Spectator, written to mark the first anniversary of the Twin Tower attacks in September 2002, explain why.


'I am 25, a graduate who has travelled extensively after university and a Labour voter. To people of my type, across Europe and the English-speaking world, Americans are a laughing-stock, known mainly for their vacuous culture and profound ignorance. We all have a “dumb Yank” story on our travels. This is why Americans are so hated by us on the Left, however much we condemn the outrages.'

Such were the thoughts of Thomas Smith of Bristol, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph not long after the events of 11 September.

I am 35 - ten years older than Smith. I am also a graduate, and I, too, have travelled 'extensively' - to more than 30 countries at the latest count. I, too, consider myself to be 'on the Left', although, unlike Thomas Smith, I actually stopped voting Labour when, in 1995, it ditched Clause Four and thereby ceased to be a party of the Left. Why, then, when our backgrounds and viewpoints appear so similar, did I feel such anger and indignation on reading Smith's letter?

It would be nice to think that Smith's views are just the unrepresentative opinions of a rather arrogant and puffed-up young man. Yet sadly, he is probably right when he talks about how people of his 'type' see Americans.

Although Smith's assertions, thankfully, did not go unchallenged by American readers of the Telegraph, one can only wonder what greater commotion would have been caused had our young Bristolian used the term 'dumb' to describe, for example, Nigerians or Pakistanis instead of Americans. If he had done so, he would probably have been visited by officers of the Commission for Racial Equality, and all prospects of a glittering postgraduate career would have been nipped in the bud.

Moving on to the dreary 'Dumb Yanks' jibe, I write as one who has taught both American and British students for more than ten years. While it is true that knowledge of European geography is not usually the American student's strong point, once again, one can't really press this too hard when only 8 per cent of our own schoolchildren have heard of Winston Churchill and 12 per cent believe Tony Blair to be a football player. And while we castigate Americans for their ignorance of Europe, how many Britons can name the capital of Nebraska, or know which states border Iowa?

All in all, unthinking attacks by the Left on Americans are not only nasty but they don't add up.

Does that mean, then, that we all have to love Uncle Sam? Not a bit of it. I have written thousands of words condemning US foreign policy, most of which were considered too strong to be published in mainstream publications. I have organised petitions for the indictment of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright as war criminals for their role in the illegal bombing of Yugoslavia, and have taken part in vigils and demonstrations outside US embassies at home and abroad. I have resolutely opposed President Bush's never-ending 'war against terrorism' since day one, and am appalled at the prospect of forthcoming US military strikes against Iraq.

Yet I have never personalised the strong feelings I have regarding US foreign policy into attacks on individual Americans or Americans in general. Refraining from doing so does not constitute a cop out or appeasement of the enemy. Slobodan Milosevic, a man who has more cause than most to feel bitter about Uncle Sam, shows that he understands this nuance perfectly when, after a long, arduous day at his US-financed show trial, he unwinds each evening with his collection of Hemingway's works and his Frank Sinatra CDs. Similarly, no more scathing critiques of American society have been written than Brave New World and After Many a Summer, yet their author, Aldous Huxley, liked America and Americans so much that he spent the last 30 years of his life living in California. By the same token, there have been few more devastating critics of US foreign policy than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Ramsey Clark, American citizens all.

It is important for all of us who share that distinguished triumvirate's world view to continue to break bread with individual Americans, for it is not with individual Americans, or indeed with America in general, that our argument lies. If we do otherwise, and start to label whole nationalities as 'dumb' and 'ignorant', we are already one small step away from the undeniably racist mindset of those who perpetrated the atrocities in Manhattan 12 months ago. By all means refer to US foreign policy as 'dumb', Mr Smith, but please not its people.

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This is what they call the 'good war'.

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The deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan yesterday means that the British death toll in that conflict has now reached 100.

Anyone care to explain what we are fighting for?

UPDATE: The Exile gives his thoughts on this most unwinnable of wars, here.

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