Life In Interesting Times
Posted on November 9, 2008
This week has been a week of anniversaries — the Bolshevik Revolution (91 years), Leon Trotsky (129 years), and the proclamation of the Freie Sozialistische Republik (90 years), the defeat of which by the reactionary forces of industrial and banking capital, set Germany on the course which unleashed unparallelled barbarism in Europe.
The latest desperate crisis of capitalism, with Scotland having an economic shortfall greater than its annual budget, has shattered the Scottish National Party’s mirage of an ‘independent’ Scotland built on the proceeds of oil and banking, and exposed Alex Salmond as nothing but a sleazy HBOS economist on the make. Salmond loves his country so much he is desperate to sell chunks of it to the property developers like Donald Trump to build billionaire’s playgrounds, where the people he claims to love so much will be employed as servants to the wealthy, many of whom earn as much — or more — in a day as the employees at new ‘world’s best golf course’ will earn in a year. ‘Independence’ in the SNP context, is freedom for the SNP’s friends and supporters like George Matheson and Brian Souter to carve up the nation’s assets. The SNP is a party of the bosses which works for the advantage of the bosses.
Another unsavoury aspect of the SNP was seen recently at their party conference, with the stage dwarfed by a massive screen on which was projected the Saltire, and again just before the Glenrothes byelection, when Salmond and others appeared with a giant Saltire, a stunt which, if it had been done south of the border by an English nationalist party using the flag of St George, would have caused a political storm. Through nationalist veneration, and its sheer ubiquitousness, the Saltire is becoming the Scots Hakenkreuz.
The SNP co-opted US President Elect Barack Obama’s Yes We Can slogan for Glenrothes, sneakily attempting to link the SNP cause and their version of Scottish history to the long struggle of the descendants of African slaves for emancipation and equality. A most cynical move from the lowest, most opportunist and degenerate scum, when Glasgow is built on the profits of the African Slave Trade, with Scottish mercantile families owning and operating plantations in Jamaica and the American Colonies. After the American Revolution Scots migrants and their families continued to make their fortunes in the ‘planting trade’, figuring prominently in the Slave State Confederacy — their beloved Saltire forming the basis of the Confederate ‘battleflag’, a symbol of racists and white supremacists to this day. Historically, the relationship of Scots to Africans has been that of oppressor and oppressed, but the SNP, who will do whatever it takes to get their hands in the piggybank, has no shame.
It was gratifying to see Salmond’s rabble defeated in Glenrothes — No We Can’t — by a comfortable, although reduced, margin. The two nominally ’socialist’ nationalist parties, the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity managed a combined 0.83% of the vote, marking the further decline of the SSP and its offshoot since Tommy Sheridan sacrificed his party to the false gods of his own vanity and the cause of Scottish nationalism. The microsectoids have been bickering about the dangers of splitting the ‘left’ vote, but between the SSP and Solidarity, it hardly matters. Are we supposed to believe the preposterous implication that all of the 35,896 (99.17%) voters in Glenrothes who did not vote for either party is ‘right’? Following the Revolution tomorrow afternoon at 15.45, what is to be done with them, comrades?
The Republican Christian Zionist right and their racist Jabotinskyite allies worked themselves into a foaming frenzy of red-baiting and racist hysteria in the months before the US Presidential Election, variously charging that Barack Obama is a ‘Marxist’, a Muslim (as if either of those should disqualify a person from office), a terrorist and friend of terrorists, an antisemite, a man dedicated to the destruction of Israel, a drug addict, and even that he has AIDS. Of course, none of the attempted smears are true, they are merely lies employed to shore up their particular sinecures by keeping their preferred party of capital in power. Commentators on the right, and also self-described ‘leftists’, have taken upon themselves the task of deciding who is ‘Black’¹ — and found Obama wanting. Toby Young of the Spectator, seemingly in thrall to nineteenth century ‘racial theory’, sneers that Obama is only ‘half Black’, while the equally disgusting John Pilger called him an ‘Uncle Tom’ in the New Statesman. There has also been some truly demented chatter, which if it came from any other quarter would be condemned as racist, comparing Obama to serial killer Howard Shipman, or calling for his murder by socialists — or white supremacists if none will step forward.
Barack Obama is not a socialist and it remains to be seen what, if any, changes in US foreign policy are implemented by his administration and newly elected legislators. However is it ridiculous to talk about him having ‘hands dripping with blood’ even before inauguration, especially as the edifice of US government is not built upon a single individual. By focussing almost exclusively on US foreign policy, critics ignore the domestic conditions which affect that country’s external relations — as if they happen in a vaccuum. US imperialism will not end until the ’shining city on a hill’ rhetoric of Manifest Destiny is consigned to the dustbin of history.
¹ ‘I will decide who is a Jew!’ is a statement often attributed to the nazi Hermann Göring, although the no less antisemitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger is probably its source.
