When Democracy becomes Hypocrisy. The Reprise of McCarthyism in Britain

December 15th, 2015

Awake Goy

Featured image: Joseph McCarthy

The moral bankruptcy that underpins British political and cultural life today is such that if Jeremy Corbyn had attended a Start the War rather than a Stop the War fundraising dinner recently, many of his critics would today be hailing him as a future prime minister.

The hypocrisy of these people knows no bounds. Even worse is the sheer brass neck involved in the orchestrated media and political witch-hunt of an organisation you would think was behind the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya over the past fourteen years rather than one that opposed it.

The beast of McCarthyism has been unleashed and it has been ugly to behold, with representatives of the Stop the War Coalition dragged into TV news studios and onto the radio to be subjected to interrogation, as if opposing war and conflict is now some heinous crime. Their motives have been impugned as every article to ever appear on the organisation’s website is trawled over and scrutinised for evidence, however slight, of some wicked and treasonous conspiracy underway to subvert democracy and support tyranny.

The only tyranny involved here has been the tyranny of conformity to the received truth of Britain’s role in the world as a champion of democracy and justice within states, when in actual truth it has been a malign force intent on crushing democracy and justice between states.

Indeed the attachment to democracy of these people is such that in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party with a mandate that leaves no doubt of the wide support for his ideas and vision within the country, he’s been treated as the enemy within whose ideas are beyond the pale.

This is the real motivation behind the scrutiny of the Stop the War Coalition recently – the opening up of a new front in the on-going campaign to marginalise and demonise Jeremy Corbyn. The worst offenders are members of his own PLP and shadow cabinet, people who despite Corbyn’s mandate have declared open season on him and his leadership. It is the very antithesis of democracy, demonstrating contempt and disregard for the membership of their own party.

Now we hear that this right wing Blairite faction are calling for the recruitment of 100,000 new ‘moderate’ members of Labour in order to stem the pro-Corbyn tide, as if the tens of thousands who campaigned and voted for Corbyn’s leadership are swivel-eyed loons rather than engaged citizens who’ve had enough of the thin gruel that has defined our politics for far too long.

Indeed the word ‘moderate’ is currently all the rage. When it comes to the conflict in Syria we’ve been told there are 70,000 moderates waiting to march into Damascus and proclaim a democratic paradise. Perhaps they’re the same army of moderates that was meant to transform Iraq and Libya into liberal democracies in 2003 and 2011, before, that is, they were both turned into failed states as a direct consequence of Western military intervention.

The only place you will find moderates fighting in Syria today is in the ranks of the Syrian Arab Army, made up of Druze, Christians, Sunnis, Shia, and Alawites, people fighting for the survival of Syria as a non sectarian state in which the rights of minorities are respected and upheld. The alternative is the country being turned into a mass grave as a modern incarnation of the Khmer Rouge in the shape of ISIS/Daesh, combined with various permutations of al-Qaeda, drag it down into an abyss of carnage that will make the current conflict seem like child’s play by comparison.

The accusation that Stop the War is a pro-Assad front is both ludicrous and completely untrue. I myself have had arguments with its leaders and supporters over the organisation’s lack of support for the Syrian government, which inconveniently for its opponents still enjoys the support of the majority of the Syrian people and whose survival today is indistinguishable from the survival of the country, given the character of the forces arrayed against it.

This is my position it is not Stop the War’s, one I am prepared to debate and argue with anyone, including this chorus of Western ideologues who wield democracy as a club to bludgeon anyone at home or abroad who dares point out that destroying countries and societies in the name of freedom and civilisation renders both meaningless.

In truth that what they describe as democracy is nothing more than organised hypocrisy, dressed up like a mannequin in a store window and equally as fake. Jeremy Corbyn and Stop the War Coalition are not the enemies of democracy and decency depicted, and as such no one can stand by in the face of a concerted attempt to drive them out of political life. On the contrary, they find themselves under assault from those who are the enemies of democracy and decency, the kind of people Arthur Miller had in mind when he wrote The Crucible.

“It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.”