NICK ANNING 1942-2003

The radical journalist Nick Anning has died at the age of 61. He was one of a vanishing breed, an inveterate freelance who did only what he wanted. He was one of the key figures on The Leveller, the libertarian left news magazine of the late 1970s, and subsequently researched and wrote on an extraordinary range of stories, among them the sinking of the Hull trawler Gaul, the Russian mafia, the porn industry and the moral panic about child abuse. Here's to you, mate. Duncan Campbell's obit in the Guardian is here.

NEO-CONS AND THE LEFT - 2

Arthur Lipow has emailed me on the subject of the left backgrounds of the American neo-cons, and he confirms that the idea that the current neo-con mob came out of Trotskyism is very crude intellectual history. There is, however, a germ of truth in it. Several of the today's neo-cons started out in the late-1960s/early-1970s cold-warrior Social Democrats USA gang around George Meany, the hardline anti-communist boss of the AFL-CIO, and senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who challenged unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and 1976 on a cold warrior populist ticket. And the eminence grise of the SDUSA scene was Max Shachtman (1904-72) - who in the 1930s had been America's most charismatic Trotskyist and in the 1940s and 1950s had been the leader of an important "Third Camp" ("Neither Washington nor Moscow") current in far-left politics that went under various organisational guises.

Of the first generation of neo-cons, Irving Kristol was briefly an early-1940s member of Shachtman's Workers' Party, but drifted away; and during the late 1940s and 1950s Shachtman's group remained influential among the New York intellectuals: people like Nathan Glazer were, says Lipow, "part of the milieu". But the Shachtman connection with today's neo-cons (and indeed those of the 1980s) really dates from the period after Shachtman himself had broken with most of his old comrades by backing the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and then throwing in his lot with the cold warrior liberal wing of the Democratic party over Vietnam. Several key figures in the current neo-con firmament - among them Richard Perle and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom campaigned for Jackson - got into politics through the Jackson-Meany-Shachtman-SDUSA milieu. But as Lipow puts it, "Take all of this as a course in intellectual history not as an organised conspiracy." A Brit connection to this cold-warrior Democrat scene is the noted historian Robert Conquest, who wrote speeches for Jackson. A brief account of Shachtman's later years is in Peter Drucker's Max Shachtman and his Left, published in 1994 by Humanities Press.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, John Kampfner produced an extraorinarily barmy piece in the New Statesman a couple of weeks ago claiming to identify a British neo-con movement in the making. One of the people he identified as a leading figure was David Aaronovitch, who has responded, very amusingly, in the Guardian, for which click here.

SADDAM'S ADMIRERS ON THE BRITISH LEFT -3

It seems that the Daily Telegraph has not received a writ from Galloway over its allegations - but Gorgeous George has got the support of the Guardian's media columnist, Roy Greenslade, who sees the allegations against the Glasgow Kelvin MP as being of a piece with the claims that miners' leader Arthur Scargill took money from the Libyans to pay his mortgage (click here). (Greenslade was badly burned by this story, which he ran at length in the Daily Mirror, which he edited at the time. He has subsequently apologised.)

The Scargill case is a fascinating one, and there is a wealth of evidence that he was fitted up on the Libyan cash charge, most comprehensively collected in Seumas Milne's The Enemy Within.

But Scargill still has a case to answer on money during the 1984-85 miners' strike. The Libyan-cash-for-mortgage-payments story is almost certainly untrue, and it seems very likely that the spooks had a lot to do with it. But large quantities of cash for the NUM were provided by Soviet-bloc "trade unions", to whose international affiliates Scargill had quixotically attached the NUM. Their members had no say over the payments - the decisions were made by party-state officials - yet I don't recall anyone on the British left ever publicly questioning the legitimacy of the NUM's fundraising in this manner. Of course, we were in solidarity with workers in struggle, any port in a storm and so on - but it's strange all the same.

ORWELL AND THE STALINISTS - 2

I have to admit that the name of David Crook, the Soviet agent who spied on George Orwell and other ILPers in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war, rang a bell with me – but I couldn’t quite place it. After a conversation with Gordon Bowker, whose biography of Orwell has spilled the beans, I realise why the bell rang: in later years, Crook was one of the foremost British intellectual enthusiasts for Maoist China.

After Spain, the Comintern sent Crook briefly to China on anti-Trotskyist work before he returned to Britain, marrying his wife Isabel (the daughter of Canadian missionaries in China) and joining the RAF. He served in various parts of Asia during the second world war. He returned to China, travelling to the communist controlled areas, in 1947, and remained there for the rest of his life as a fervent admirer of Mao’s totalitarian regime.

With Isabel, he wrote three books on the impact of the revolution in a Chinese, village, Revolution in a Chinese Village (1959), The First Years of the Yangyi Commune (1966) and Mass Movement in a Chinese Village (1979). Crook and his wife had long careers as English teachers at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (later the Foreign Studies University). In 1967, he was arrested and charged with spying and spent more than five years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. Upon his release in 1973, he joined an editorial team that produced a Chinese-English dictionary.

There's an obituary of Crook, who died 18 months ago in Beijing at the age of 90, on the Columbia College website (click here) - he studied there in the 1930s.For an interview with the Crooks about their experiences iin China, click here. For interviews with their son Michael on the web (click here and here.

Meanwhile, Rob Evans asked me to put his piece from the Guardian on the weblog. So here it is.

BRITON SPIED ON ORWELL IN SPAIN
Rob Evans, Guardian, May 5, 2003

George Orwell, the writer who savagely attacked the Big Brother powers of Russian totalitarianism, was spied on for the Soviet Union by a fellow British volunteer during the Spanish civil war, a new book reveals.

Soviet spymasters snooped on the English writer as he became involved in rivalry between communists and Trotskyists. The communists pried into his private life to record that Orwell's wife was probably having an affair with one of his comrades. Orwell's attacks on the corruption of the Russian revolution inflicted much damage on the reputation of the Soviet leaders.

The surveillance of Orwell during the Spanish civil war is revealed in a new biography of the author by Gordon Bowker, published on Thursday. It was during this war that Orwell began to loathe communism, which he satirised in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bowker writes that Orwell's experience in Spain "ultimately gave birth to his last two great novels".

In Barcelona, Orwell saw how the communists suppressed their Trotskyist allies to take control of the war against the fascists in what he called "a reign of terror". He was forced to flee Spain as the communists imprisoned their former comrades, branding them traitors.

As a relatively unknown writer, he had volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in 1937 and had joined the forces controlled by the POUM, a revolutionary socialist, anti-Stalinist party affiliated to the Independent Labour party (ILP) in Britain.

It was by chance that Orwell chose the POUM, as he did not fully understand the different political groupings in Spain. But the communists - directed by Stalin - had begun to suppress the Trotskyists and infiltrate spies into the ranks of their opponents. David Crook, a young communist from London, was ordered to spy and report on Orwell, his wife and other members of the ILP contingent. He had been taught the techniques of surveillance by Ramon Mercader, a communist who later murdered Trotsky in Mexico with an ice-pick. According to the book, Crook admits that he took his orders from the Soviet espionage agency, then known as the NKVD and later renamed the KGB, and that Orwell and the other ILP members were "of special interest to me".

He insinuated himself into the ILP office in Barcelona. Soon he had the freedom of the office and, during lunch breaks, stole files and had them photographed in the Russian embassy. He was proud that within a short time, copies of all the files in the office were in the hands of his Russian handlers. Details of his activities are held in the KGB archives, although Orwell's KGB file is still under wraps.

Among his reports was an observation that he was "95% certain" that Eileen Blair, who married Orwell in 1936, was having an affair with George Kopp, another ILP member, whom Bowker describes as "a strange Belgian adventurer". Bowker adds that Crook had been instructed by the Soviets to seek out the existence of affairs, as such information could enable the communists to blackmail vulnerable targets. In a reference to the ruling powers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bowker writes that Crook, who subsequently helped to kidnap opponents in Spain, was like a character "straight from the Ingsoc world of spying, intrigue, dissemblance and cold elimination".

Crook passed his reports to Hugh O'Donnell, another communist from London, whose codename was O'Brien. Bowker writes that, although Orwell was oblivious to this, "the fact that the character in Nineteen Eighty-Four who first wins the confidence of Winston Smith and then betrays him is given the name O'Brien must be one of the strangest coincidences in literature".

Orwell appears not to have twigged that the communists were spying on him. However in Homage to Catalonia, his account of his time in Spain, he wrote: "You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police."

Crook and another English soldier were responsible for briefing the Soviet espionage service about Orwell and his wife. Both were subsequently accused of treason and of being "rabid Trotskyites" by the communists.

Orwell wrote to a friend on his return to England: "Though we ourselves got out all right, nearly all our friends and acquaintances are in jail and likely to be there indefinitely, not exactly charged with anything but suspected of Trotskyism.

"The most terrible things were happening even when I left, wholesale arrests, wounded men dragged out of hospitals and thrown into jail, people crammed together in filthy dens where they have hardly room to lie down, prisoners beaten and half starved."

LETTER FROM WOODSTOCK

STATES OF DISARRAY
John Mason, Tribune column, May 10 2003

Last week, our “Top Gun”, George W Bush, landed a navy bomber on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off Long Beach, California, and swaggered across the flight deck to the cheers of assembled ship’s company.

A glorious photo op, this moment will no doubt come back to haunt us in countless campaign adverts in the year to come. Appealing to our patriotism, Karl Rove and the Bush political conseilleri will seek to anoint a “commander-in-chief” rather than to elect a mere President – the sort of domestic-policy-focused “super-governor” that former President Bill Clinton was and that many of this year’s crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls appear to be.

The same evening the President made his victory speech where he justified “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as payback for the loss of the Twin Towers. “The battle of Iraq,” he said, “is one victory in the war on terror that began on September 11.” that removes “an ally of al-Qaida” and guarantees “no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because that regime is no more”.

He might have just admitted that they “will gain none, because we haven’t found any”, but choose instead to recycle the tired claim that Saddam, the tyrant, was somehow a party to the 9/11 attacks. Looking towards the future, the President promised “America will finish what it began” - a declaration that sounds like a formula for endless wars fought by the modern equivalents of gunboats and gurkhas.

Later in the week, the President seemed to downplay his martial rhetoric by talking up tax cuts and “jobs, jobs, jobs”, but did so against the backdrop of two Abrams tanks in Ohio and the huge hulk of a Bradley fighting vehicle in California.

Clearly wars abroad and terror alerts at home will be central to Bush’s “permanent campaign” to win the popular majority that eluded him in 2000. But the question remains: “Can this formula work in 2004?”

One answer can be gleaned whilst driving down route 375 towards Kingston, New York, where there’s a parade of hand-lettered signs that read “BOE -Save our Schools”. They refer to the decision by the local Onetora School Board to close its budgetary gap by closing one of our three elementary schools and transferring its students and staff to the other two.

But since the economies in heating, light and staff salaries will not cover the anticipated funding gap; this cut in education has been married to a hefty increase in property taxes. Down in New York City, a $3.8bn deficit translates into the loss of some forty fire stations; cuts in teachers and librarians; layoffs of police and the closing of two out of five city zoos. With a New York State deficit of close to $12.9bn and Republican governor Pataki’s refusal to consider increases in state income taxes, local townships and school districts are left with only bad choices in coming years.

In neighbouring New Jersey the deficit is running around $4bn-5bn, and Democratic governor McGrivey called in the State University presidents to announce a 5 per cent cut in their budgets for this year and 10% cut for next year. In Oregon, the fiscal squeeze has lead to the dismantling of one of the nation’s finest public schools systems, which will close one month early for lack of funds. In Missouri the governor has proposed to save on electricity by turning out every third light bulb in state offices.

Everywhere, we’re facing the closing of state psychiatric facilities and major cuts in funding for the health care of the poor and elderly.

In short, there's a slow motion fiscal wreck that’s spreading across the country with some 39 out of 50 states in bankruptcy. In California, the deficit is $34bn. In Texas, the figure is $ 9.9bn. Taken altogether the state governments are in hole for some $ 80bn, or more or less the same amount that the Bush has promised for the reconstruction of Iraq.

But this year’s federal budget promises no aid for the struggling state governments other than some reimbursements for homeland security, and tax cuts for the wealthy that will only depress the states’ ability to collect revenue in the future.

The Bush administration has decided to cure the American economy by precipitating a depression in public sector employment, and with a sort of impeccable social Darwinian logic, to pass the costs onto the States who pass them in turn onto local cities and towns. Libertarian policy wonks relish this opportunity to shrink government services and rid us of the deadhead civil servants that drag on private growth, but I doubt that few people outside of Washington rejoice in these sacrifices to the market gods.

Recent polls suggest that one half of the American population now feels that they’re worse off under the Bush than under Clinton. Most of these will vote Democrat. The fires in Baghdad may be out, but the home fires are still burning.

ORWELL AND THE STALINISTS - 1

There's a fascinating piece by Rob Evans in today's Guardian (click here) reporting that a new book by Gordon Bowker reveals the identity of a young British communist, one David Crook, who spied on George Orwell and other members of the Independent Labour Party contingent in Spain during the civil war. There's also an excellent piece on Orwell by Thomas Pynchon in Saturday's Guardian, for which click here.
More to come on this

JULIUS JACOBSON 1921-2003

I've just heard that Julius Jacobson, longstanding advocate of "third camp" socialism and co-founder (with his wife Phyllis in 1961) and editor of New Politics magazine in the US, died last month just short of his 82nd birthday. He will be missed. Here is the notice form the New Politics website.

BEWARE DICTATORS BEARING GIFTS

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, May 2 2003

The fuss seems to have died down a little over the discovery in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph journalist of documents that appear to show that George Galloway, the maverick Labour MP, received large sums of money from Saddam Hussein. And it’s not surprising that the story has gone quiet. Mr Galloway is promising to sue for libel, and that has made not only the Telegraph but every other newspaper very wary. Recent changes in Britain’s libel law might make it possible for newspapers to mount a succesful defence that falls short of proving that the documents are genuine and that Mr Galloway took the cash, but this is by no means guaranteed. Once the writs start flying, any sensible editor takes cover.

In time, perhaps, we will get to know the truth about this murky business. Mr Galloway says he did not receive funding from Iraq, and it is indeed possible that he is an unwitting victim of some vile scam. Some of the more lurid scenarios that have been advanced by his supporters are, however, rather implausible.

In particular, the idea that the Telegraph forged the documents or published them in the knowledge that they are forgeries almost beggars belief. The Telegraph is certainly politically hostile to Mr Galloway and everything he stands for. But its reporters and editors are not crazy. They know that their reputations would be destroyed if they were discovered to have been complicit in faking evidence of this kind. They simply wouldn’t risk it.

It is slightly more believable that the documents were forged and planted for the Telegraph to discover by some spook or other. As several Galloway supporters have remarked, including the editor of Tribune, there is a history of this sort of thing.

The most notorious example, of course, was the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Purportedly a missive from the head of the Communist International demanding that British communists prepare to subvert Britain’s armed forces, it was published by the Daily Mail in the run-up to the 1924 general election as a means of discrediting Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government, which had negotiated trade treaties with Soviet Russia. In fact, it was almost certainly forged, probably by White Russian emigres with the connivance of British intelligence agents hostile to Labour.

There are also more recent cases of intelligence service dirty tricks to undermine Labour, most notoriously in the 1970s, when various spooks spent an inordinate amount of time and energy attempting to smear Harold Wilson as a Soviet stooge. And who can forget the Sunday Times’s preposterous claims in the early 1990s that Michael Foot was the KGB’s “Agent Boot”?

But is Mr Galloway the victim of this sort of sting? Maybe, but I doubt it. He just isn’t an important enough player to warrant the effort that would be involved in setting it up.

If he didn’t receive the money from Iraq, the most plausible scenario is that the payments were authorised somewhere in the upper echelons of Saddam’s regime — and then siphoned off by someone feathering his or her own nest.

This would fit not only with what we know about the enthusiasm of the Iraqi Ba’ath leadership for self-enrichment but also with its record of paying its supporters and propagandists abroad.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, its chosen vehicle in Britain was the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, the paranoid Trotskyist sect led by the late and unlamented Gerry Healy, which, in return for money to subsidise its daily newspaper News Line and the weekly Labour Herald, informed on Iraqi exiles in London and printed encomiums to Saddam — “a man of firm action in home affairs, insisting on the highest standards of dedication and integrity of Government officials”, as News Line had it in 1980.

Some time after the WRP imploded in the mid-1980s, the Iraqis appear to have decided that the Labour left and the peace movement was a better pond to fish in than the revolutionary Left. I remember as a journalist on Tribune in the late 1980s and early 1990s being offered by an intermediary free trips to Iraq at the regime’s expense, which I turned down. Plenty of others did not.

This is not to impugn their motives: often the only way to visit a totalitarian regime and meet its people is on an official trip. Nor is it to claim that every benefiary of Saddam’s hospitality turned into a propagandist for his vicious rule. But that was what he wanted — and from some people at least, all of whom should have known better, that was what he got.

EUROPE IS NOW THE KEY FOR BLAIR

Paul Anderson, Chartist column, May-June 2003

If there is one thing that is clear about Britain’s Europe policy today, it is that it is in a right mess.

Most spectacularly, the Blair government’s policy on Iraq – first loudly backing the Bush administration as it prepared for a military strike, then attempting and failing to secure United Nations backing for an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, then playing a major supporting role in the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam – did serious damage to Britain’s relationship with the two most important countries of the European Union, France and Germany, both of which opposed the war.

How lasting that damage will be is another matter, however. The French and German governments were opposed to military action against Iraq for different reasons – the French out of Gaullist hostility to American unilateralism, the Germans out of social democratic respect for international law and a tendency towards pacifism – and neither has any long-term interest in stoking up antipathy to Britain.

Unless George Bush decides to extend the treatment given to Iraq to, say, Syria or North Korea, and unless Tony Blair backs him again, Britain’s relationship with the big hitters in the EU will return to normal. Already, it’s back to business as usual in the Convention on the Future of Europe, where Britain and France are pushing hard (and together) for an intergovernmentalist settlement, against the federalism of Germany and the smaller EU countries.

The unlesses of the UK-US relationship are important, but at present the signs are that the US military will be tied up in Iraq for some time to come (as Martin Woollacott argued in an excellent piece in the Guardian - click here) and that the British government is not keen on more military adventures for a while.

Jack Straw’s denials that any other invasions are planned are of course worth taking with a pinch of salt. But the recent revelations that he and Blair would have resigned if the backbench Labour revolt on Iraq in the Commons in March had been only a little bigger suggests that they might have learned a little in the past few weeks about the extent of opposition to their uncritically pro-American policy. I have a sneaking suspicion that their doubts about joining a madcap neo-con crusade will from now on prove decisive.

But we shall see. The end of the war in Iraq – which was a remarkable military success, whatever its political ramifications – turns the spotlight on other aspects of Britain’s European policy, in particular the euro.

And here the picture is anything but optimistic. Disagreements at the highest level on the euro, most notably between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, appear to have come close to paralysing the government – and as yet there is little sign of any resolution.

In early April, nearly all the broadsheet newspapers carried reports, inspired by briefings from sources close to Brown, that the chancellor would soon declare that his famous five tests for British entry into the single European currency had not been met, thereby effectively (though not explicitly) ruling out a referendum on the euro for the rest of this parliament (see for example the Guardian report here).

At the end of April, however, a seemingly authoritative piece by Will Hutton in the Observer (click here) claimed that Blair had decided to shift Brown from the Treasury to the Foreign Office in order to clear the way for a euro referendum next year.

That would be a massive gamble for Blair. Brown is a big figure in the government, the architect of its overall strategy and for many years the favourite to succeed Blair as Labour leader (and prime minister) if Blair decided to go. It is not implausible to suggest that Brown could send the government into terminal crisis if he decided to resist Blair over-ruling or moving him.

Then again, it is difficult to see how Blair can regain credibility in Europe unless he overcomes Brown’s opposition to joining the euro – and, given the apparent strength of Brown’s opposition, it is hard to see how Brown could remain as chancellor after being forced to eat humble pie.

So Hutton’s interpretation has a certain credibility to it. Nevertheless, there is a simple way out for Brown that has been given scant consideration by the commentators – which is that some time in the next month or so he announces that the five tests have been passed.

Such a scenario is also just about feasible. Although Brown has been quite happy for his political allies to tell journalists that his line on the euro is “not yet”, he has not committed himself publicly to this position. He still has the option of endorsing British membership now. The anti-euro lobby would feel horribly let down – but the political impact would be extraordinary.

Once again, we shall see. But if there is a euro referendum soon, under any circumstances, it will be a tough battle for the government to win.

The pro-euro camp has spent the past few years waiting for the go-ahead from Blair, and is not in good shape: if the referendum isn’t announced soon, Britain in Europe, the umbrella group that will be the basis of any “yes” campaign, will collapse.

To make matters worse, there has been a serious decline in support for the euro among trade unions, which will be one of the crucial elements in any “yes” campaign. Anti-European leftists have won key positions in several major unions in the past couple of years, and John Monks, the most articulate of the pro-euro trade union leaders, is leaving the TUC. Labour movement support for Britain joining the single currency will be in rather shorter supply than five years ago.

Yet joining the euro remains the best bet for a social democratic future for Britain. It is true, as Gordon Brown argues, that the EU’s system of economic management needs to be reformed, particularly when it comes down to the idiotic growth and stability pact, which effectively rules out counter-cyclical state spending. But here we are pushing at an open door: the rest of Europe, social democratic, Christian democratic and neo-liberal alike, realises that the regime of enforced austerity imposed by the Bundesbank and subsequently endorsed by the governments of Europe as the price of monetary union was a big mistake. Faced with low growth and rising unemployment, the governments of Europe recognise that John Maynard Keynes had some bright ideas after all.

If Blair does not go for a euro referendum this parliament, he will have missed the best opportunity any British government has ever had to define Britain’s place as a European social capitalist country. The next few weeks will be absolutely critical.

SADDAM'S ADMIRERS ON THE BRITISH LEFT - 1

The story of George Galloway and his relationship with Saddam Hussein looks likely to be with us for some time. If Galloway is serious about suing the Telegraph (click here) and the Christian Science Monitor (click here) over their stories that he was the beneficiary of significant Iraqi funds, the case will not be heard for some months.

Whether or not "Gorgeous George" took Saddam's shilling, it's worth bearing in mind that the Iraqi regime had a policy of buying support in the UK

Back in the 1980s, when Galloway was denouncing Saddam as a tool of US imperialism, Saddam’s chosen vehicle was the Workers Revolutionary Party. The Trotskyist WRP, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy and supported by Vanessa Redgrave and a bunch of third-rate actors, was desperate for cash to subsidise its daily newspaper, News Line, and various other projects - including Labour Herald, a weekly set up in order to eclipse Tribune as the voice of the Labour left (it failed).

The key figures in the Herald were Ted Knight, an old associate of Healy who was at that point leader of Lambeth council in London, and Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council and now mayor of London, who was an old associate of Knight. (Livingstone has long had a strange, some would say exploitative relationship with Trotskyists, although his chosen partner has long since ceased to be the WRP: it’s now Socialist Action, the pro-Cuba bit of the old International Marxist Group, on which see below and this rather ancient piece from the Guardian.)

Libya was a bigger source of WRP funds than Iraq - but the WRP did some vile stuff for Saddam, including informing on Iraqi dissidents in London.

At some point in the late 1980s, after the WRP imploded, the regime in Baghdad appears to have realised that bankrolling a crazy revolutionary sect made no sense. Certainly after 1991 it targeted respectable Labourite leftists as its best hope. I had several offers of freebie trips to Iraq (none mediated by Galloway) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a journalist on Tribune. I did not take up the offers: others did.

For Galloway's side of the story, see the Sunday Herald's interview here.

More to come on this

CUBA SOLIDARITY - 3

The comrades from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy would like you to sign the following, which seems a good idea. To sign online, click here.

ANTI-WAR, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES OPPOSE REPRESSION IN CUBA

We, the undersigned, strongly protest the current wave of repression in Cuba. We condemn the arrests of scores of opponents of the Cuban government for their nonviolent political activities, and the shockingly long prison sentences some as high as 28 years -- imposed after unfair trials. According to Amnesty International, the arrestees include journalists, owners of private libraries and members of illegal opposition parties. We condemn as well the trial and execution of three alleged hijackers in a week's time, both for the lack of due process and because we oppose capital punishment on principle.

As anti-war, social justice and human rights advocates, we condemned the brutal Saddam Hussein regime, and we oppose the United States occupation of Iraq. We support civil liberties and democratic rights everywhere, regardless of the country’s economic, political or social system. We believe it is imperative to be consistent in opposing repression wherever it takes place, whether in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, Israel or Cuba, Turkey or the United States.

Democratic change in Cuba needs to be achieved by the Cuban people themselves. The Cuban government’s violations of democratic rights do not justify sanctions or any other form of intervention by the United States in Cuba. The government of the United States -- which employs the rhetoric of human rights when doing so promotes its imperial goals, but maintains a discreet silence or makes only token protests when U.S. allies are involved, and which fully supports the barbaric practice of capital punishment, routinely inflicted in the U.S. -- is hardly in a position to preach democracy and human rights.

And we recall too the long, criminal record of U.S. interventions in Latin America. This record has included six decades of exploitation and imperial control of Cuba, followed by an attempted invasion and a campaign of international terrorism and economic warfare, that is by now well-documented. Only a government that repudiated this record, renounced any intention of restoring its economic or political domination over Cuba, either directly or through rightwing Cuban-American proxies, and promised to respect the democratic will of the Cuban people themselves would have the moral legitimacy to call for democratic change in Cuba.

As the Bush administration, further emboldened by its military victory in Iraq, threatens to wage “preemptive” wars around the globe we reaffirm our support for the right of self-determination in Cuba and our strong opposition to the U.S. policy of economic sanctions that has brought such suffering to the Cuban people.

At the same time, we support democracy in Cuba. The imprisonment of people for attempting to exercise their rights of free expression is outrageous and unacceptable. We call on the Castro government to release all political prisoners and let the Cuban people speak, write and organize freely.

NEO-CONS AND THE LEFT – 1

State Department socialist writes:

There’s a lot of garbage doing the rounds on this. Michael Lind, in a peculiarly daft piece in the New Statesman (click here), got it going in the UK, claiming that the neo-cons of today are, er, their dads.

"They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history."

This is very poor intellectual history. It's true that some of the key neo-con intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s - notably Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol - were Trots in the 1930s or 1940s: see any history of the New York Intellectuals for that. (For what it's worth, my recommended reading list is Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals, Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals and Hugh Wilford's The New York Intellectuals.) It's true that some of the neo-cons of that period - notably Kristol - are still alive. It's even true that Wiliam Kristol is the son of Irving - a "product" maybe.

But the idea that most of the neo-cons of the 1970s and 1980s were former Trotskyists is bunkum, and the idea that the current Dubya adviser mob was schooled in Trotskyism in the 1950s is bollocks. A couple of them might have been youthful adherents of Max Shatchtman at some point late in his career - and very early in theirs. So what. Rather more of the current neo-con intellectual crew used to be Stalinists of the old school, third worldist New Leftists, cold war liberals or never associated with any current that could be considered remotely on the left.
More to come on this

UBA SOLIDARITY - 2

This comes from AP: again more to come on this:

Anita Snow, Associated Press writer
HAVANA - Human rights groups and the U.S. government condemned Cuba for sentencing critics of the regime to long prison terms in a crackdown that showed communist leaders were more worried about internal control than international contempt.

Fidel Castro's government on Monday sentenced activists, journalists and an economist to up to 27 years in prison for allegedly collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state.

"We are witnessing the harshest political trials of the past decade," said veteran human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez, one of the few leading opponents of the regime not arrested last month.
U.S. officials also criticized the sentences.

"The Castro government is persecuting journalists for acting like journalists," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said. "They're persecuting economists for acting like economists, and peaceful activists for seeking a solution to Cuba's growing political and economic crisis."

Sanchez's non-governmental Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation said prosecutors originally sought life sentences for a dozen of the dissidents, among 80 facing closed trials that began Thursday.

It was unclear how many dissidents have been sentenced so far, but Sanchez said he and other activists have been unable to confirm any life sentences. The shortest was 15 years.

The longest sentence confirmed as of late Monday was 27 years for independent journalist Omar Rodriguez Saludes. With his camera hanging from a strap around his neck, Rodriguez Saludes arrived on his bicycle to cover former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's meeting with dissidents during his visit to Cuba last May.

Opposition political party leader Hector Palacios, among those originally recommended for a life sentence, received 25 years, said his wife, Gisela Delgado.

Palacios is a leading organizer of the Varela Project, which gathered more than 11,000 signatures supporting a referendum on new laws to guarantee civil liberties such as freedom of speech and private business ownership. The island's parliament shelved the request.

Palacios was among dissidents who met with Carter, who used a live speech to the Cuban people to bluntly describe the country as undemocratic and to publicize the Varela project.

"This is an injustice," Delgado said after learning her husband's sentence Monday morning. "We are as Cuban as members of the Communist Party."

The communist government accuses the dissidents of being on Washington's payroll and collaborating with U.S. diplomats to harm Cuba and its economy. Jose Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch, urged the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva to condemn Cuba the sentences.

In Stockholm, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh warned that the crackdown could Cuba's prospects for increased cooperation with members of the European Union.

"I view the developments in Cuba with great concern," Lindh said. "The mass arrests of dissidents that have taken place lately are one more example of the human rights violations being committed in Cuba."

The crackdown, which ended several years of relative tolerance, began when Cuban officials criticized the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, for actively supporting the island's opposition.

"This is an attempt for them to squash down and put the policemen back in the person's head that many of the Cubans were getting out of their head," Cason said Monday in a speech at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

Cason said journalists were being punished for having such books as "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson, and others written by Groucho Marx and Stephen King.

Cason denied accusations that the U.S. mission had local dissidents on its payroll, saying the mission operates no differently than embassies in other countries.

"Change will come to Cuba. In fact, it is already under way," Cason said. "Cubans will decide how the Cuba of tomorrow takes shape, and more importantly, the role that each and every Cuban will have in it."

The last trials reportedly wrapped up Monday, with all sentences expected by week's end.

Among those tried Monday was Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a physician jailed since he was arrested during a December protest. Prosecutors reportedly sought a 25-year sentence.

Biscet in October completed three years in prison for displaying national flags upside down in an act of civil disobedience.

Also sentenced Monday was independent journalist Raul Rivero, who received the full 20 years prosecutors sought, said his wife, Blanca Reyes. "This is a crime for a man who has only written the truth," Reyes said.

Dissident economist Marta Beatriz Roque and independent journalist Oscar Espinosa Chepe each received 20-year sentences, their relatives said.

CUBA SOLIDARITY - 1

While the world is looking elsewhere, Comrade Fidel's idyllic socialist utopia has gaoled the core of its critical democratic intelligentsia. Here's Reuters' report today: there's more to come on this.

Cuba sentences dissidents to 15 to 25 years
By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA, April 7 (Reuters) - Communist Cuba sentenced seven dissidents charged with opposing President Fidel Castro to 15 to 25 years in prison in the toughest political crackdown in decades.

In a clear message to the Bush administration that Cuba will not tolerate its efforts to build up a dissident movement on the island, a court convicted seven people of "working with a foreign power to undermined the government" and gave them prison sentences that ranged from 15 to 25 years.

Seventy-one other people are also charged but their trials are not yet complete.

Despite the tough sentences, the Havana Province Tribunal rejected prosecutors' requests for life sentences for leading dissident Hector Palacios and Ricardo Gonzalez, editor of Cuba's only dissident magazine, their wives said. Palacios was sentenced to 25 years and Gonzalez to 20 years.

Cuba's best known opposition writer, poet and journalist, 57-year-old Raul Rivero, was sentenced to 20 years in jail.

"This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks," his wife Blanca Reyes told reporters after the sentence was given behind closed doors. "What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade."

In other sentences on Monday, economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe got 20 years,Hector Maseda 20 years, Osvaldo Alfonso 18 years and Marcelo Lopez 15 years.

The crackdown began on March 18 with arrests and house searches. That was followed last week by one-day trials in court rooms filled with Communist Party members and security agents while only three close relatives of the prisoners could attend, the wives said.

Government informants who had infiltrated dissident groups testified against the prisoners.

"The trial was unfair. He met his lawyer five minutes before it started and had no time to study the charges," said Claudia Marquez, wife of Osvaldo Alfonso. She said the court reduced Alfonso's sentence from a life term sought by prosecutors because he accepted the charges and said in court that he had been manipulated by U.S. diplomats.

The wives have three days to appeal, but said they were not hopeful the sentences could be shortened.

"These terms were dictated by President Castro. In Cuba there is only one voice," said Reyes.

WORLD CRITICISM OF TRIALS

Western diplomats and foreign journalists were barred from the trials, which were criticized in Europe. The U.S. State Department said the dissidents were being tried in "kangaroo courts."

International human rights organizations accused Castro of trying to knock out his political opponents while world attention was focused on Baghdad.

Half of the 78 dissidents on trial had organized a signature drive to petition for reforms to Cuba's one-party socialist state. The effort was known as the Varela Project, which united Cuba's small, divided dissident movement into the first major internal challenge to Castro's rule in four decades.

The Bush administration stepped up active support for the dissidents, who would meet in the residence of the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason.

Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution, denounced Cason last month for turning the American mission into an "incubator of counterrevolution" and threatened to close the U.S. Interests Section. Havana and Washington do not have formal diplomatic relations.

U.S. diplomats were surprised to learn that Manuel David Orrio, who had led a meeting of opposition journalists at Cason's house last month, testified against Rivero and said in court testimony that he was a state security agent.

Prosecutors have asked for life sentences for dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque; opposition labor activist Pedro Pablo Alvarez; and civil disobedience advocate Oscar Elias Biscet. Those sentences are expected on Tuesday.

The trials went virtually unnoticed in Cuba. There was no mention in Cuba's state-run media and few Cubans were aware of the dissident round-up.

"The social and economic decay in Cuba is so great and the government knows there is widespread discontent," said Miriam Leiva, a former diplomat who lost her job and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1992 for not divorcing her dissident husband Espinosa Chepe.

"That is why the sentences are so harsh, to repress people calling for change and intimidate others," she said.

UNITED FOR PEACE - 4

The British Socialist Workers' Party has come out this week as revolutionary defeatist: yes, they really want Saddam Hussein to win the war. Click here for the party line in a Socialist Worker leader and here for a signed piece by Socialist Worker editor Chris Harman. Meanwhile, the chair of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray, has been forced to defend his politics in the Daily Telegraph (click here) by a letter from Julian Lewis (click here: funny how the same old names keep cropping up); and Nick Cohen has taken up the role of the Lenininists in the anti-war movement in a piece in the New Statesman (click here: unfortunately you have to pay to read the whole thing).

MIKE KIDRON 1931-2003

Michael Kidron, the most prominent of the many leading lights of the British International Socialists who left them in the few years before they became the Socialist Workers' Party, has died at the age of 72. Click here for Richard Kuper's obituary in the Guardian. Kidron was the brains behind the IS, the editor of International Socialism for many years and the author of several of the key texts that marked the group's break from orthodox Trotskyism, in particular from the idea that capitalism had entered a phase of terminal crisis.

From the early 1960s, Kidron emphasised how spending by the advanced western capitalist economies on arms had created a level of bouyant demand that postponed crisis perhaps indefinitely - the "permanent arms economy", as he called it - and as such was one of the first British Marxists to recognise just how far Keynesian economics had transformed the prospects of capitalism. IS and Kidron never went a far as Cornelius Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie in France in challenging the tenets of left orthodoxy (for which see here), but they played an honourable part in creating a vibrant British libertarian Marxism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kidron played a key role in Pluto Press, the radical publisher that was for a dozen or more years the jewel in the British intellectual left's crown. He is best known for putting together The State of the World Atlas, a pioneering reference work that (together with various spin-offs) has been a massively important reference work for several generations of students, researchers and journalists.

A few of Kidron’s key articles from his IS and immediately post-IS days are online. Click here for "Imperialism - highest stage but one" (1962), here for "A permanent arms economy" (1967) and here for "Two insights don't make a theory" (1977).

EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE WAR - 1

The following interview with German foreign minister Joschka Fischer on Sunday March 23 by Der Spiegel was not reported in the UK press. So here are the key quotes, courtesy of Reuters:

BERLIN, March 23 (Reuters) - German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer criticised the United States on Sunday for starting a war framed by its national interests and said the same standards should apply for all nations regardless of their size or might.

"A world order will not work if the national interests of the most powerful nation define the criteria for the use of the military potency of this country," Fischer said in an interview with Der Spiegel news magazine.

"At the end of the day the same rules have to apply for the big, medium-sized and small countries," said Fischer, whose government has long opposed the U.S.-led military buildup in the Gulf and war against Iraq.

"The United States was always the strongest when it linked its might to the power of forming coalitions and international rules that were accepted by everyone."

Fischer also said he could not accept a vision, as he said was sketched out to him in late September 2001 by U.S. deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in which the United States would use force to eliminate "terrorist governments" in a number of countries.

"I cannot and will not accept the idea we are on the verge of a series of disarmament wars," he said. "It's not acceptable that we are faced with the alternative: either to allow a terrible danger to exist or be forced into a disarmament war."

He said the United Nations should be the place to resolve conflicts.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was the first Western leader to speak out against war in Iraq, saying last year Germany would not participate in any "military adventure" in Iraq, even though Berlin is one of the biggest contributors to the US-led "Enduring Freedom" anti-terror campaign with close to 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, Kuwait and the Horn of Africa.

"There is nothing cowardly if you pursue the aim of resolving conflicts peacefully," Fischer said. Addressing US criticism of Germany, he said being able to accept that an ally had a different view was "a sign of maturity in a democracy".

A similar position has been taken by the Swedish Social Democrats. Click here for prime minister Goran Persson's reaction to the outbreak of war and here for the official Swedish government statement.

VICTOR ALBA 1916-2003

Victor Alba, journalist, militant and historian of the Catalan POUM in the Spanish civil war, novelist, political scientist and all-round awkward-squad member, is dead at 86. See Stephen Schwarz's obituary in Reforma here and Michael Mullan's in the Guardian here.

UNITED FOR PEACE - 3

Henry Worthington's piece on the 1990-91 movement against the Gulf war in Britain (see below) does, as he says, make some still salient points. The current anti-war coalition - at least at the level of the formal national organisation - is if anything even more reliant on various Leninist parties, micro-parties and sects, and it's even more tolerant of pro-Saddam and revolutionary defeatist opinion. The Stop the War Coalition has a member of the executive committee of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, Andrew Murray, as its chair, and the quasi-Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party (home page here) is today playing pretty much the role that Socialist Action did in 1990-91, though it is of course a much bigger outfit.

But there are big differences as well. In 1990-91, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, although much reduced in membership from the height of the campaign against deployment of cruise missiles during the 1980s, was the most important ingredient in the brew. It was still a real mass organisation, with some 65,000 members: it even had a monthly magazine available in WH Smith throughout the country, Sanity, edited by the late Ben Webb.

In line with this, CND was also engaged with the political mainstream, although again it was a pale shadow of itself in the mid-1980s, when its reach embraced most of the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. CND's national organisation in 1990-91 was run by a coalition of Labour leftists (mostly soft rather than hard left), Liberal Democrats, Greens, feminists, non-aligned activists and anarcho-pacifists.

It's worth noting that the Labour hard left - with the exception of Labour CND, run by the Trots from Socialist Action, and the ageing diehard Stalinists and pacifists in Labour Action for Peace - never really bothered itself with CND after the mid-1980s and had very little influence on CND nationally. And the Communist Party presence in the organisation, significant until only a couple of years before, had dwindled with the collapse of the CP in internal feuding in the late 1980s.

Nevertheless, one old CP stalwart, Gary Lefley, an enthusiast (like today's Stop the War Coalition chair Andrew Murray) for the CP's tiny hardline pro-Soviet Straight Left faction, had somehow been appointed CND's general secretary. (Lefley's politics were gleefully exposed at the time by Julian Lewis, now Tory MP for New Forest East but then a Conservative central office appartchik after several years of running the anti-CND Coalition for Peace Through Security, in an article for Freedom Today - for which click here.)

Apart from Lefley - who was treated as an embarassment by most of his colleagues - Leninists were notable by their absence at CND's core until the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf got off the ground. That they got a foothold was down at least in part to the flaky political judgment of Marjorie Thompson, the chair of CND.

Whatever, CND's failure to deal with the Trot manipulation Worthington describes was notable because it was surprising, though in retrospect it did show how far it had lost the plot. Today, CND (home page here) is nothing like the force it was in 1990-91. It's still there - but its membership has withered and it is utterly marginalised when it comes to mainstream politics. It's not entirely CND's fault: the collapse of the democratic left in the Labour Party and more widely in the recent past has rather a lot to do with it. But in the national organisation of the current anti-war movement, CND carries less weight than the SWP.

Another big difference from 1990-91 is the role of political Islam in the current movement. The big London demos against the current war - unlike those in 1990-91 - have been notable for the turnout by (mainly young) Islamists, who have been embraced by the SWP and the rest of the Leninist left. An unsavoury alliance if ever there was one, in my view.

UNITED FOR PEACE - 2

Henry Worthington writes:
The politics of the current movement against war is reminiscent of that during the 1990-91 war in the Gulf. Here's a piece I did for the long-defunct libertarian socialist magazine Solidarity looking back on the anti-war campaign in the UK for its autumn 1991 issue, which I think makes some still salient points.

Henry Worthington: Ruthless cuckoos in the dovecot
From Solidarity, autumn 1991

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2 last year, the British left was as surprised as everyone else. Kuwait was a faraway country of which the left knew little, the invasion a spectacular interruption to the holiday season. To be sure, the crisis in the Gulf provoked a vague unease, but after the first few days, when it seemed that Saddam might sweep south into Saudi Arabia, the prospects of all-out war seemed to recede. Once the American forces were in place in Saudi Arabia and the United Nations had imposed sanctions on Iraq, the most likely scenario seemed a lengthy process of economic attrition which Saddam could not win. It did not seem too much of a priority to set up an anti-war organisation.

Not everyone was quite so complacent. For Socialist Action, a small Trotskyist group, the time was ripe for seizing. By acting fast it could set the agenda for an antiwar movement. In mid-August, taking advantage of the inactivity of the rest of the left, it took the lead in setting up an anti-war coalition, the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf, doing its best to ensure that it was effectively under its control but did not appear so.

Socialist Action is a remnant of one of the pro-Cuba factions in the erstwhile International Marxist Group and is no more than fifty strong. It is nevertheless well entrenched in the Labour hard left with significant influence in the part of it that is sceptical about the idea of eventually setting up a "pure" socialist party to Labour's left. Indeed, among Trot groups it is notable for the depth of its commitment to the Labour Party and its horror of appearing "ultra-left": it works more with non-Trots than with other Trots, whom it despises for raising "maximalist" demands.

The group is influential in the Labour Left Liaison umbrella group, which includes the Labour Women's Action Committee, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Labour CND, and it has a major input into Campaign Group News, the organ of the Campaign Group of hard-Left Labour MPs. Unsurprisingly, the platform on which the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf was set up was a minimalist one - "Stop war!" - and hard-left MPs and the groups in Labour Left Liaison were among the first affiliates.

National CND, for the most part innocent of Socialist Action's existence, let alone its methods, was bounced into joining the committee by Labour CND, whose secretary, Carol Turner, a Socialist Action veteran, was also secretary of the committee; the Green Party, whose international committee at the time was under the influence of another Trot faction, the tiny Pabloite group Socialists for Self-Management, was brought in at the same time. The Eurocommunist Communist Party of Great Britain and the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, both desperate for credibility, saw a bandwagon and jumped on board, and by early September the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf looked like an impressive coalition of anti-war groups.

The reality was rather different. Socialist Action made sure that it controlled the key positions on the committee (Turner remained secretary of the committee throughout its existence), and it blocked attempts by CND and the Greens to get the committee to endorse sanctions against Iraq, on the grounds that such a move would be divisive — even though the only groups that would have been excluded by such a move were "revolutionary defeatists" committed to backing Saddam if fighting broke out. (The idea behind this position, first formulated by Lenin during the first world war, is that in an imperialist war revolutionaries should work for the defeat of their own side, with the intention of turning it into revolutionary civil war).

For a few weeks, such people didn't bother with the committee, seeing it as far too reformist: the Socialist Workers Party and other Trot groups put their efforts into setting up a rival to the committee, the Campaign Against War in the Gulf, on a troops out position. But the CAW soon floundered, and the SWP and the rest of the revolutionary defeatists drifted into the committee. The result was predictable. The committee's meetings turned into interminable political wrangling.

Not surprisingly, as the Gulf crisis dragged on through the autumn, the committee proved incapable of exercising any purchase on public opinion or on the political mainstream. Just about the only thing it seemed to know how to do was call a demonstration in London - and even then it didn't have the resources to provide stewards or the wit to present interesting speakers.

The committee's efforts at the Labour Party conference in early October were particularly disastrous. Faced with a conference opposed to war but not prepared to undermine the leadership (which was anyway rather less than bloodthirsty at this point), the committee made the extraordinary decision to put up a conference-floor fight on an anti-war resolution it knew would be badly defeated. In result, opposition to the war became identified in the Labour Party with the hard left, a kiss of death for any cause these days. With a few days hard work, the committee managed to throw away any possibility of ever having influence over the mainstream of the Labour Party.

Its attempts to woo Liberal Democrats and Tories were virtually non-existent. To the media the committee, despite constant damage-limitation by CND, came across as a bunch of unfriendly, paranoid, hectoring and above all incompetent extremists. Whereas elsewhere in Europe large swathes of centre and even right opinion opposed war before it started, in Britain the anti-war movement got stuck at an early stage in the left ghetto. By mid-November, it was quite apparent to the British government that it would face only token domestic opposition if it backed George Bush's plans to evict Saddam from Kuwait by force.

By the end of the year, it was clear even to its own supporters that the anti-war movement had failed, and that the only thing that could stop war was a climbdown by Saddam. The committee stepped up its activity when the air war began in January (and in February at last threw out the revolutionary defeatists, who had by now become a serious embarrassment), but the number of demonstrators on marches dwindled rapidly as a sense of total impotence set in. By the time the land war started, the anti-war movement was on the slide. Perhaps, as the committee leaders tastelessly put it, support would have grown again if the body-bags had started coming home; luckily we shall never know.

The point of all this is not that the war should not have been opposed. Despite the small number of allied casualties, the war was a human and environmental disaster. But the peace movement, such as it is, should not now be sitting back and saying that it was right all along: there are lessons it has to learn from the Gulf war.

In particular, it should be absolutely clear to everyone who had anything to do with the national movement against war in the Gulf that not wanting a particular crisis to turn into war is no basis on which to organise a credible opposition: it is essential that the movement from the start excludes those who, in the event of war, will support either side. In the run-up to the Gulf war Leninist advocates of revolutionary defeatism did immense harm to the cause of those opposed to slaughter on humanitarian grounds, and the peace movement should have had no truck with them.

It should also be extremely wary of allowing itself to be manipulated by small groups with their own hidden political priorities. Without CND, with its 65,000 members, the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf would have been a mere husk; outside the committee, CND could have used its resources and skills to promote its clear position of using sanctions to get Saddam out of Kuwait rather than wasting its time and energy on a coalition that could not even agree to condemn Saddam's invasion. If there is a next time, it would be unfortunate to make the same mistakes.