HezBollocks and IsRabies

New stuff added 5th September

I.

I hate to endorse London Class War for a second time (see here for the last time), but I got to their piece on Lebanon via Commie Curmudgoen, and I kind of liked it. The Curmudgeon picks out the best bits:

Lebanon is being turned into a grotesque war-games board as the real protagonists - The USA and Iran - use their proxies to slug it out Neither the Israeli army nor Hezbollah give a flying fuck about 'their' civilians, except as bloody totems to hang in front of the cameras of the world's press in order to justify their own next atrocity. ... The Israeli state oppresses the Palestinians, driving them into the hands of the fanatics of Hamas out of despair at the failure of the secular Palestinian left. In turn the suicide bombers provide for the Israeli state 'proof' of the murderous nature of the Palestinians and drives the Israeli public to support harsher and harsher measures against the 'terrorists'. This is a self destructive spiral and must be broken. ... We should stand shoulder to shoulder with those struggling against the oppressors of the Israeli state and the Palestinian bantustan. We fight against our 'own' rulers who attempt to use this slaughter to their own ends and use measly words 'condemning the violence' whilst writing out the receipts for the latest arms contract. Any state solution is a continuation of the same bullshit. No Borders No States No Gods No War but the Class War

(There's some daft stuff too, but this is the key bit.) My current political position is some sort of schizophrenic location between left communism and muscular liberalism so I get to attack the pro-Hizbollah left from both the left - for supporting authoritarian, clerical fascist and petty bourgeois nationalist movement instead of opposing all forms of nationalism - and from the right Sensible blogging: Recording Surface, Michael Berube.

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II.

Jogo writes:

LondonClassWar says: No Borders No States No Gods No War but the Class War Bob says: (There's some daft stuff too, but this is the key bit.) Do you think the No/No/No/No mantra ISN'T daft?

Well, of course it's daft on one level. Here's the great Roger Scruton (via Blimpish):

Of course it is not easy to put my kind of conservatism into slogans. That is a defect in slogans, and not in my conservatism. You cannot put Hayek’s theory of the common law, Kant’s theory of republican government, or Hegel’s theory of civil society into slogans. But they are true, for all that... To aim also to persuade is commendable, and for this reason it is necessary for a political thinker to learn how to write. Marx solved this problem, unfortunately, but then so did Burke. Good writing affects the minds of the literary elite, and ideas in the minds of that elite will eventually filter down, to the point where some slick but ignorant journalist will find the slogans that correspond, at his level of mental life, to those distantly and vaguely perceivable notions. This is in part what Plato had in mind, when he advocated the noble lie. Not “noble” but elegant; not a “lie” but journalism.

To me, "No borders, no states, no gods, no war but the class war" is a noble (if inelegant) lie. Daft, because so extreme and abstract that it can't be true. But at the same time expressing some important truth on some level. The "no war but the class war" slogan is noble, in a sense, because it subverts those who claim to be speaking for the workers (such as the misnamed Socialist Workers Party), who go on anti-war marches while opposing not war, but one side in the war. The "no war but the class war" slogan exposes the lie of the Stop The War Coalition's version of anti-war politics. If the left really followed through a Marxist critique of nation-states and imperialist war, they would never support the likes of Saddam (or Hezbollah, Hamas, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Here's another London Class War leaflet:

NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR! TROOPS OUT NOW! Victory to the Iraqi workers! Down with the ‘resistance’! There is no answer for the workers of Iraq from the Fundamentalists and nationalists of the ‘Resistance’ who butcher men, women and children in the name of ‘allah’ or ‘nation’. The Working Class has no country! The main enemy is always at home! The so-called left in Britain, who lead the STWC, hide their timidity at home with their bloodthirstiness abroad, giving full support to the religious maniacs and Ba’athist (pro Saddam) fascists that dominate the ‘resistance’ in Iraq. In doing so they reveal their contempt for the Iraqi working class in its struggle to emerge from both Saddam’s dictatorship and US occupation. Here they show their contempt for us too; for the British working class, the answer is ‘Pussy’ George Galloway, for the Iraqi working class it’s a Jihadist suicide bomb.