Winged Sun Symbol Persepolis |
Afscme Local 444, Retired
Columnist Simon Jenkins writes in today's US edition of the Guardian, that Trump’s threats to bomb Iran’s cultural sites are grotesque. If one wants to judge events from some moralistic point of view he’s right. Great historic sites like Persepolis are no threat to America except in the mind of the demented he argues. But morality and insanity are not what is driving human society towards oblivion, Capitalism is; the so-called free-market system of production.
Columnist Simon Jenkins writes in today's US edition of the Guardian, that Trump’s threats to bomb Iran’s cultural sites are grotesque. If one wants to judge events from some moralistic point of view he’s right. Great historic sites like Persepolis are no threat to America except in the mind of the demented he argues. But morality and insanity are not what is driving human society towards oblivion, Capitalism is; the so-called free-market system of production.
Jenkins reminds the reader of Bomber Harris, the British
Royal Air Force commander who, like Trump and the most crazed representatives
of capital occupying the reins of power in the US, believed there should be no
restraint when it comes to wars between nations. But the two great world wars
were wars between capitalist nations in competition for resources and colonial
plunder. They were a direct result of capitalist development and its global
expansion, particularly the end of the colonial era.
Of course Iran’s cultural sites aren’t a threat to America,
but neither is Iran. The Iranian people certainly aren’t. Grenada was no threat
to America nor was the nation of Iraq as it was before the US invasions. Iraq
was created by British capitalism with its economic and global interests in
mind after the first great world war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
France installed the system of government in Lebanon with sectarian power
sharing and the US, after the invasions, set up a similar system of government in
Iraq that France set up in Lebanon despite its record of failure and tragedy
for the people of the region. Capitalism cannot move society forward, it will only human life as we know it if left to its own resources.
The dominant reason Israel arose as a Jewish nation state, a
European settler state, was as a foothold for western imperialism in the region
in the era of oil. It would be a counter
to the hundreds of millions of Arabs from Syria to Algeria who, with the same
language, similar culture and overwhelmingly the same religion had dreams of
nationhood. This revolutionary potential had to be undermined. It was not just
personal ambition that led the first British governor of Jerusalem to refer to
the creation of the Jewish state as our “loyal little Ulster in the Middle
East” with reference to the six northern counties of Ireland retained by the
British after the rest of the country gained home rule. The industry was in the
north. We can see how successful that has been in the past hundred years,
sectarian division purposely constructed by the British occupation. Colonialism installed its own preferred regimes in the nation states it created, those that refused to comply were dealt with.
Jenkins claims that “Bombing
Persepolis would not only be grotesque, it would be utterly counterproductive. It is grotesque if one looks
at it with some sort of moral compass and it is counterproductive in the sense
that it has strengthened the Mullah’s despotic rule as the Iranians and the
Iraqi’s, especially Shia Muslims, have rallied round the flag. I was just
talking to an Iranian friend who shared with me how she hated Suleimani as an
obstacle to reform in Iran and is dismayed that the US has raised him to iconic
status and given the Mullah's new life. She is now afraid to go home to visit relatives as the US might not
allow her back.
It
is productive for US imperialism on the other hand in that there have been massive demonstrations in Iraq in
the past period against the rotten government there as well as ongoing
protests and opposition to the Iranian regime. A similar situation has been ongoing
in Lebanon and in all these uprisings that have been met with brutal
repression, the working class and women have been prominent. Qassem Suleimani,
who was a hero of the US inspired Iran Iraq war and also the defeat of ISIS,
was not a popular individual among those wanting to change Iranian society and
expel the theocracy; and he was not popular with the resistance in Iraq. His
assassination has changed that.
Fallujah baby a product of US assault on that Iraqi city |
For Jenkins the capitalist system of production is the
height of human civilization. Trump is simply a “belligerent”, “demented” personality that is craving war like
Hitler.
This is not the issue. Jenkins never touches on the fact
that we that live in a system of production, that this system of production has
laws, and that, like it or not due to its very nature, we live in a world
economy, a capitalist world economy. We use commodities that come
from all over the world. We consume food and use products from every corner of
the world as the world economy is more integrated than ever before. The problem
is that within this world economy there are separate nation states, themselves
a product of revolutions that brought the capitalist class, the owners of the
means of producing the necessities of life, to political power. Each nation,
each national capitalist class strives to increase its political and economic
power with regard to its competitors in the world market place. That’s what war
is a product of. The Middle East has
oil, but even before that, British colonialism developed seaports and harbors
that it used as ports of call, stop off points in its journey to plunder the wealth of the Indian sub continent.
We are now at a stage where there are a few great powers
with US capitalism the most powerful and heavily armed of them. But the
collapse of Stalinism has undermined the global dominance of US capitalism and there
is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Trump is simply the most open
and barbaric expression of this process.
Modern weaponry has made a mockery of the “legality” and “ethics” of war. Writes Jenkins. He whines about “protocols” and “treaties” being broken and ignored. His refusal to confront the
capitalist economic system in which we live and embrace the view that the only
alternative is its demise and replacement with a global federation of
democratic socialist states based on a rational, planned and cooperative
production of humanities needs, leaves him irrelevant.
If Simon Jenkins wants to know a bit about treaties and laws
when it comes to capitalism he has his own British colonial history at hand but
better still, he might come over here to the US and visit a few reservations.
Here is Jenkins column in today's Guardian
Here is Jenkins column in today's Guardian
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