Missing in Action

The evil of ISIS understandably provokes a desire to 'do something', and this has caused not a few people who should know better down a bellicose path. One voice of wise caution in recent weeks has been Michael Meacher, who - in an interesting blogpost - said this,

It is imperative that Britain isn’t drawn into this imbroglio all over again. Britain’s record in the Middle East has been irredeemably negative and counter-productive from the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, through backing for the Shah as a weak Western puppet and then the arming of Saddam Hussein to fight the proxy war against Iran, and then to the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 on utterly false pretences to gain a permanent foothold on the oil.

Quite.

Yesterday, parliament voted to authorise air-strikes on ISIS. Labour whipped in favour, 23 MPs rebelled . They were:

Diane Abbott (Hackney North & Stoke Newington), Graham Allen (Nottingham North), Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South), Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley), Martin Caton (Gower), Katy Clark (Ayrshire North & Arran), Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North), Ian Davidson (Glasgow South West), Paul Flynn (Newport West), Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow), Kate Hoey (Vauxhall), Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Sian James (Swansea East), Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North & Leith), John McDonnell (Hayes & Harlington), Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde), Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby), Grahame Morris (Easington), George Mudie (Leeds East), Linda Riordan (Halifax), Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Graham Stringer (Blackley & Broughton) and Mike Wood (Batley & Spen).

Notice a significant absence?

Michael Meacher was in parliament yesterday.

Iraqi Christians

As if the past few days didn't contain their fair share of human misery, the accounts coming out of Iraq about the treatment of Christians at the hands of ISIS are harrowing in the extreme. I urge you to read Tim Stanley's account here, lightly inflected though it may be with problematic politics.

One paragraph mid-way through the piece merits attention here:

Yet, having been so intimately involved in the collapse of Iraq, the West is now bizarrely silent about events in Mosul. The streets of London fill with thousands marching against Israel’s military operation in Gaza; the West rails mightily against the Russian separatists in Ukraine. But of Iraq there is nothing. Why?

Unlike Stanley I don't think there is any such thing as 'the West' which has raged against Israel and the Moscow-aligned separatists. On the contrary, the rulers of some Western countries have focused on the latter, some (but not all by any distance) of the ruled on the former. Nevertheless, there is a fair question to be asked of the Left. What have we to say about the persecution of Christians by groups like ISIS? More pointedly, the question could be rephrased: why the silence?

Now, I think the silence has been well-motivated. Any case of Christians suffering at the hands of Muslims is, in the current climate, ripe for appropriation by the Islamophobic Right in the cause of a warmed-over clash-of-civilisations narrative. This whole area is made difficult by the fact that plenty of concern for persecuted Christians, and not a few agencies devoted to their relief, are tainted with this politics. The Barnabas Fund is an example of one British group this blogger would not touch with a bargepole.

It is tempting to think, therefore, that political discourse in this area is polluted beyond the possibility of emancipatory use. This is a temptation, however, and one to which we shouldn't succumb - it is an admission of intellectual defeat, and much more importantly a cowardly abandonment of innocent victims. Another reason for silence is more sophisticated: we make noise about Gaza because, as citizens of imperialist States closely aligned to Israel, our own ruling class is directly complicit in the attrocities there in a way they are not in ISIS. This strategy is compatible with the recognition of an indirect complicity in the actions of ISIS, which were - after all - a foreseeable probable outcome of the war in Iraq.

On this second point: the differing political relations between Western ruling classes and Israel, on the one hand, and ISIS on the other, constitute good reasons to treat the two cases differently. They are no reason to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians altogether. There are things we can say about their situation. We can, for example, make the connection between ISIS and the Iraq war explicit (there are more intriguing questions to be asked about Western support for ISIS' antecedents as well). We can actually condemn ISIS - it is amazing how this is a somewhat controversial position in some radical quarters. If there are ways of expressing solidarity with the victims of religious oppression and violence in Iraq, we should make use of them (and this is something I need to explore). The time will come, I fear,  when we are supporting some of these people against the UK asylum and immigration system. Perhaps the biggest debt we owe, though, to suffering humanity is not to forget it. Thus far, we have failed.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream

It is, as eagle-eyed readers of my previous missive will have noted, New Years Eve. Hurrah!

A cursory glance at the TV schedules suggests that the way to celebrate this is with footage of Scottish people singing. Not wanting to deprive you, digital comrades, here we are:



As fortune would have it, Thatcher did die this year. And parties were had:



Predictably, the moralists came out of their coffins even as Thatcher was put into hers. Isn't it wrong to celebrate death, they urged. The religious left, to which your host finds himself attached by creed if not by the details of politics, were especially tiresome on this score. Doesn't all death diminish us, they asked. Shouldn't we refrain from politicising the passing of one of our fellow human beings? A funeral is no time for protests, let alone celebrations. They stood, pious and sombre, as the establishment roared.

What these people failed to recognise was that this was never just a funeral for the frail old woman who succumbed to a stroke this year. It was always from the word go a political event. From the word go this death was narrated by Thatcher's political heirs: the State funeral (the first for a British premier since Churchill), the nostalgia, the silencing of dissent, all invoked Thatcher in death in support of austerity in the present. Like one of the undead, she exercised power beyond the grave, digging a subtle knife into those suffering under policies of which she was the remote architect. Ironically, it was her supporters in life who would not allow her to rest in peace, for she was needed in death.

All of this was entirely foreseeable, and was pre-empted by the party-goers. "No," they said, "we will not allow this story about the Thatcher years to pass unchallenged. We will not celebrate what she represents, we will celebrate the opposite of that". And celebrate they did, a joyful collective refusal to be bundled into State-orchestrated grief. And however much Owen Jones may ultimately be right that the ultimate prize is the death of Thatcherism, not of Thatcher, will all need a party from time to time.

There is a politics to remembering the dead. That was clear in the case of the other great political departure of 2013, as Nelson Mandela's one time foes raced one another aboard the mourning bandwagon. In death, the radical Mandela died absolutely; an ideologically cleansed global statesman took his place.

Next year, marks the centenary of World War I. We will be invited to remember, to misremember, or somehow recall not world leaders, but millions of conscripts, slaughtered in the cause of national boundaries. The question will be whether we are content to see them called into a horrid afterlife by politicians intent on bolstering national unity in the face of austerity, and on justifying present-day wars, or whether we can wrestle back the friends, husbands, daughters, girlfriends, lovers, sons, the millions upon millions of ordinary, wonderful, largely non-heroic, flawed, beautiful, wasted, human beings, and allow them, finally, to rest in peace. There is no glory to be had.