In These New Times

“Imagine there’s no countries 

It isn’t hard to do” 

John Lennon

Cailean Bochanan

2nd September, 2011

What is new about the attack on Libya is the combination of NATO air strikes with what are termed “rebel” forces on the ground.( The language is new too: since when did Tory prime ministers support “rebels”?:They do now). All this recalls the attack on Serbia. There we also saw the combination of NATO bombing with ground insurgency supported of course by special forces. But the KLA sought to break away from Serbia: regime change in Serbia itself was left to “orange revolutionary forces”, supported by CIA regime change specialists but not by NATO bombing. In Libya the media present the situation as a popular revolt supported by the West’s freedom loving bombers. Since the same game is clearly at play in Syria we seem to be facing a new template for regime change which combines “orange revolution” techniques with terror bombing, with shock and awe.

There is a certain cognitive dissonance between NATO bombing and revolution and Britian’s Stop the War group needs to summon up all its reserves of sophistry to sell this “revolution” coming out of the barrel of a NATO helicopter gunship, witness the efforts of STW spokesman Chris Nineham to deal with the fact that the TNC putsch which they supported is now selling out the country to  western military, intelligence and corporate interests. But these agonised, mental antics are perhaps only the birth pangs of a left which is morphing into neo-conservatism, a transformation accomplished long since by many of the American comrades. For it is they who provided the blueprint for this new shift in US thinking. Back in 2003 Michael Ledeen was already thinking ahead to today’s events:

“a vast democratic revolution to liberate the peoples of the Middle East from their tyrannical rulers. That is our real mission, the essence of the war in which we are engaged, and the proper subject of our national debate.”

Already war and ” democratic revolution” are spoken in the same breath. In the same article Ledeen praises the US support provided for  opposition forces in Poland, Yugoslavia and the Philipines stressing that support for “democratic movements” reduces the need for military force. Here is the revolutionary talking:

“Our most potent weapon against the terror masters is revolution, yet we are oddly feckless about supporting pro-democracy forces in either country. Nor is there any sign of support for the Iranian workers, who just last month staged a brief national strike. Workers need a strike fund to walk off the job and stay at home, a lesson mastered by Ayatollah Khomeini, who sent sacks of rice all over the country in the weeks leading up to massive strikes against the shah in 1979. The opposition groups need good communications tools, from cell and satellite phones to laptops and servers. It wouldn’t be very difficult to organize this sort of support; it wasn’t that hard in the eighties, when we did the same for Solidarity and other democratic forces in the Soviet Empire.”

As one commentator put it:

“Ledeen refers to the exporting of revolution as one would think an old Trot die-hard would exhort”

Given the antecedents of the neocons in Trotskyism this should come as no surprise. But Ledeen also did a PhD on Bakunin who now doubt fitted in with the the marked nihilism within contemporary Anglo-American culture. According to Ledeen:

“[W]e are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name.”

I’m not so sure about the “creative” side of it but after Iraq, Afghanistan and.now, Libya, I think I know what he’s getting at.

Ledeen and his neocon friends are mainly associated with the Bush wars and are, therefore, considered to be on the right. However, they also supported Bill Clinton’s Balkan wars: you can see a lot of them listed as members of the Balkan Action Commitee. They are also onboard with these new Obama wars which is no surprise given that they provided the theoretical basis for them. Obviously the terms left and right are becoming more deceptive and like the farmer and the pigs at the end of Orwells’ Animal Farm left and right are coming to resemble each other. As I suggested above the British left are somewhat Johnny-come-latelys still having “hang ups” about NATO terror and being reluctant to recognise its absolutely decisive role, both in the air and on the ground, in the recent “rebel” advances in Libya. There is also, in Britain, a considerable residual sympathy with socialist countries like Libya and Venzuela, which endless academic seminars on how they aren’t socialist countries at all hasn’t yet completely dispelled. These are hard times for the British comrades as they try to transform themselves into yet another wing of the Obamawars team, arrayed , alongside, the military, the intelligence services and the media. But if left and right, in the West, are moving together what is the basis of their unity.

If we look at the reaction of the various politcal groupings in Britain to the NATO attack on Libya we get some significant clues. The British National Party, generally considered a xenophobic if not fascist outfit, has come out strongly against the war in terms which I find difficult to fault. Similarly the Communist Party of Great Britain(Marxist-Leninist) have correctly described Britain’s actions in Libya as “shameful and cowardly”. Both groups are strongly committed to notions of a British national interest and are markedly anti-globalist. The neocons and most of the rest of the British left deplore nationalism above all else, equating it with stalinism and tyranny. Ledeen’s fairly open fascism or support for a global oligarchy is of the universal fascist or synarchist variety and he is a critic of Mussolini’s narrowly-based nationalist fascism. The British left baulks at the socialism of developing nations aimed,as it certainly is, at defending national sovereignty against imperial domination. “Patria o muerte” is not for them and they mobilise the worker’s control critique of Cuba, Venezuela et al at every opportunity. This is the left’s variation on Ledeen’s “freedom” mantra. Like the neocons, mention nationalism or sovereignty and they reach for their  helicopter gunship. I find it interesting that I am consistently abused as a fascist for such things as pointing out that the Benghazi crowd are CIA : the ultimate term of abuse of both the “universal fascist” or “proletarian internationalist” perhaps

What we are seeing of course is nothing other than the drive to create a global empire or New World Order but the ideological hue, as well as some of the methods employed, is changing. Gone are the associations with the loathesome Bush family. Gone also, by the look, of it are the associations with wars for Israel. Admittedly Al Qaeda don’t quite fit the new model PC imperialism, but you’d expect loose ends. The brightest and best are now venturing forth behind the empire’s final project displaying the West’s true ideological face. The  facade of competing ideologies has crumbled reminding us that all we need to oppose them is our humanity.