George Galloway's historic speech

It is a misunderstanding created by circumstances that I am interested only in Middle Eastern affairs - notably, the struggle for self determination of the Palestinian people and against the horrific effects of sanctions and war on the Iraqi people during Saddam's vile dictatorship.
I have been, of course, passionately engaged in these issues but my interest in opposing all forms of imperialism - including the fashionable neo-liberal version of Mr Blair - arises from a deep patriotism about my own islands.
Empire resulted in the cruelty and oppression of millions outside these islands but it also helped to sustain the power of a ruling elite whose basic greed and sometimes malice, where it was not mere indifference and incompetence, oppressed its own people first before it turned its gaze on peoples of different hue and faith.
Caring about the Middle East is merely a reflection of my deep sense of moral responsibility as a Briton for the dabblings in the region by irresponsible, greedy and incompetent officials over many years.
We have opposing us, a surprisingly small national elite that hangs on to power generation after generation by capturing every popular movement of resistance and turning it into a junior club member. In the Middle Ages, Wat Tyler's head was struck off by the King. Today, he would be put in charge of some regulatory Quango.
Empire builders
It is to the credit of Labour that it took nearly a hundred years for its body and soul to be captured so that it could start to expel radicals such as myself, but it is a process that started with the National Government of Ramsey Macdonald and has concluded with that of Tony Blair.
This is the same elite network that once turned its back on Irish Home Rule and thereby split these islands into two, that almost bankrupted the nation to keep high the financial profits of empire-builders and that, when empire proved untenable, sold us, the people, out to a former colony as its aircraft carrier.
These rulers of ours would have been on a plane out of the country or deep in bunkers when the rest of us fried as America's forward base if there had been a misjudgement in the sixty year war on communism. We owe them nothing.
We, in turn, have been complicit in the deaths of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands or millions, of Asians and Africans since 1945 and we have heard not a word of protest from our ruling family, our media proprietors and the profit-takers in the City.
Harold Wilson did his best and kept us out of Vietnam whereas Tony Blair reflected on thirty years of slow absorption into North American culture, society and economics and responded with his slavish political obeisance to the White House.
Homicidal war
The public is unaware, because it is convenient to some that they should not be aware, that I was condemning Saddam Hussein when he was backed by the anti-communist West in his homicidal war against Iran and using chemical weapons supplied by our Allies.
I met Saddam Hussein twice, the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld met him.
The difference is that Rumsfeld met him to sell his regime guns and gas and to give them the maps necessary to target them while I met him to try and avert suffering sanctions and war.
If I have said words which taken out of context have upset some people, I refuse to forget that context.
If I appeared to flatter a dictator, I was not. My praise was for the courage, strength and indefatigability of the Iraqi people not their dictator - qualities which have had to be demonstrated all too often in the near decade since I made those remarks I could not oust this Dictator so my first duty was to help his people where I could.
Sovereignty
Let's not forget that the real crimes of Saddam Hussein against his people were largely committed during a period when he was a client and ally of the west; and when I was protesting against him. Most of the suffering of Iraqis in the last decade and more has been inflicted by the White House and Number Ten Downing Street.
So what do I believe in?
Well, first of all, I believe that sovereignty lies in the people and that the English Revolution of 1688 lies unfinished.
Second, that the State should be the servant of the people, transparent and accountable.
Third, that the Defence of the Realm should mean Defence of the People of these islands and not defence of the State or the promotion of special interests in hock to foreign powers.
A strong defence force should not be expended on foreign adventures. No British son should die on foreign shores unless the threat is direct and material to these islands or, as a volunteer, he has signed up to humanitarian action under international law.
Cavalier attitude
These three beliefs alone have placed me on a collision course with a State where monarchical power, cloaked in Parliamentary democracy, has simply been transferred to a Prime Minister whose monomaniacal vision of global intervention, whose cavalier attitude to international law and whose willingness to make sacrifices of other parent's sons is carried out unquestioningly by a loyal State without moral compass.
Politics today can be boiled down to this issue of the morality and legitimacy of the State.
These beliefs, now shared by many others, have been crystallised by a major grassroots peace movement that covered all shades of opinion on social and economic matters within one grand coalition of dissent.
It was a movement of anger at the pride and arrogance of the State and of the elite behind it, an anger that grew with the contempt shown for its views by Government, with the treatment of Dr David Kelly and with the sleazy contempt for the facts over WMD.
This movement expresses the best of Britain - it is tolerant of difference, it is co-operative, it is enterprising, it is internationalist.
The so-called war on terrorism is indicative of the elite's strategy of creating tension between communities but not in an obvious way. It is to the credit of the Government that it has not and almost certainly will not use the sort of cheap anti-Muslim populism that is common in Europe.
State terrorism
Instead, it seeks to impose authoritarian and deeply suspect laws to control dissent, freedom of movement and the right to free expression - the war is against the thinking political community, whether Muslim, socialist, libertarian, patriotic, radical or liberal.
These controls on liberty which have been put in place in a time of economic plenty can be used to disturbing effect in a time of economic scarcity.
But let me be clear about this, I condemn terrorism as an instrument of policy.
But with this caveat that, for me, terrorism is the use of force, violence and subversion against civilians and political activists by whoever is wielding the weaponry. State terrorism, including illegal war, puts the terrorism of such organised ideological criminals as al-Qaida into context, as two sides of the same evil coin.
I will not condemn the just war of populations of occupied territories when they resist, in any way that they can, uninvited invaders on to their sovereign soil - the moral rights of the Sioux, the heroes of Warsaw and the Russian Partisan were and are inviolate in this respect. It is a right we have not had to invoke on our own soil for some considerable time.
Arrogant war leader
Arguments about bringing progress to benighted savages did not wash in the nineteenth century and they do not wash now.
I am motivated by two other important beliefs not always accentuated because those who joined me in this antiwar, anti-occupation movement against an arrogant War Leader need not have shared my Leftist ideology. However, these two beliefs will always guide my political action:
* that working people create their own society through collective action from below; and
* that exploitation of labour will always exist and needs community action to correct it through active redistribution of wealth and power.
This was at the root of my throwing in my lot with the Labour Party more than thirty years ago and of my distress at its departure from those ideals. I have fought a losing battle to stay a democratic socialist inside Labour and it is on record that it expelled me and I did not leave it.
But I am not going to hang around outside Labour's door waiting to be let in. History will not wait. Times have changed. Bevan and Foot were expelled in serious debates on policy which they could fight again another day.
Bloody revolutionists
I was expelled as a result of a manoeuvre by a faction that had captured the Party in a coup and then fixed the rules so that serious policy debate was impossible unless personal permission came from the Wolf's Lair. I now see that traditional British socialism is not dead but is in danger, being poisoned by stealth.
My socialism is the same socialism that inherited the radical democratic triumphs of the nineteenth century and, working alongside the great Liberal politicians of the turn of the last century, created the welfare state and a national economic infrastructure that was intended to be in the service of the people.
My socialism is not that of " bloody revolutionists " or foreign ideological importations. It is rooted in this land and in its traditions of liberty, dissent, co-operativism and trades union action and it is open to every freeborn British person , every faith, all men and women on equal terms.
Politics is about schools, hospitals, roads and jobs as well as about grand theories of democracy, rights, foreign affairs and free trade.
In the drive for the latter on a global stage, New Labour has lost its bearings on national service provision and has turned a vigorous tradition of national democracy into a pale pink ersatz global version for the consumption of foreign elites. In short, we are in danger of losing our freedoms and rights to help foreign elites join an increasingly exclusive international club.
This is not good enough.
Bloodless war
The national politicisation of the anti-war movement is now a necessary next stage in our own bloodless war of national liberation. The reality of the movement means that what we create must operate at two levels.
The first level requires steps towards a mass unifying movement of grassroots radicals to hobble the State, bring it under popular control and complete an unfinished radical democratic revolution. This level will unite Muslims, Christians and Jews, socialists, liberal and conservatives, men, women and the disadvantaged of all types in one movement of democratic liberation.
This is the movement launched in the Quaker's Friends House in London's Euston Road on October 29th 2003 and which will fight New Labour in the European elections and the elections to the Greater London Assembly next June.
The second tier is where the battle for ideas and souls will take place in a People's Britain.
In that battle, I will remain what I have always been - a radical democratic socialist in the Labour tradition - but until power is decentralised and returned to the people, I will work with anyone who shares those first tier values because we need nothing less than a revolution in our national political life.
­ GEORGE GALLOWAY MP

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception

By Jim Lobe

AlterNetPosted on May 19, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/

What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
Rule One: Deception
It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999).
Second Principle: Power of Religion
According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.
At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.
Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."
Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."
"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."
As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his – and student Allen Bloom's – many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."
The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States' relationship with the rest of the world – as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," Drury says.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/