The government couldn’t move him. In the end only cancer could. A symbol of peace and freedom, an icon of the anti-war movement and a picture of stalwart self-sacrifice for the cause of right.

Regardless of what anyone on the left thought of his tactics, I don’t think anyone could argue that he gave anything less than all of himself to ideals so many of us share. For all of us who struggle to find time to give a Saturday afternoon to protest, Brian Haw, who spent ten years camped outside the seat of power of a bankrupt ex-empire still bent on playing policeman to the world showing them the visceral evidence in bloody still-frames of all they were doing wrong, should stand as an inspiration.

While the evangelical Christian beliefs of some turned them into neo-conservative warmongers, Haw’s told him to stand up for peace and human life.

He fought a good fight, he finished his course, he kept the faith.

Ok, false alarm, it’s not quite breaking news. People have known this for years. But I think, following today’s little outburst in The Independent, it’s worth reiterating. Julie Burchill is an idiot. Quite why a paper which is, by and large, aimed at intelligent, liberal minded progressives, chooses to print the journalistic equivalent of an explosive wet fart after a dodgy vindaloo from the mind (or lack thereof) of an idiotic Iraq war apologist who once declared Israel the only country she would “fucking die for”, is beyond me. So what brainless, sputum-laced drivel did she have to offer us today? Three short pieces, each wetter and fartier than the last. Thusly summarised, they go like this:

1) People who oppose the war in Afghanistan are Taliban appeasers and there’s absolutely no chance they could have any genuine moral or political objections to the war, like the deaths of Afghan civilians, or a principled opposition to imperialism. People who criticise the war without ever having fought in it are cowards, don’t deserve to have an opinion and should just shut up. Anti-war activists would be cheering Chamberlain if he were around today because it’s absolutely impossible that two completely different wars could be fought for two completely different reasons and that one might be slightly more defensible than the other. It’s much better to be an armchair warmonger than an armchair peacenik.

2) Julie belittles the plight of millions of Pakistanis whose lives have been ruined by the floods. She then admits she doesn’t know much about Islam (does she know much about anything?) before bringing up the fact that a Saudi billionaire was profligate enough so spend millions on a number plate as evidence that Muslims are probably hypocrites if they’re not sending aid to Pakistan. I’d suggest that Ms. Burchill is rather tenuously conflating two separate issues – one of extreme importance, the other of large irrelevance – because she’s running out of things to write about. This, I think, is evidenced by wet fart number three.

3) Naomi Campbell is pretty, but miserable. Kate Moss is pretty, clever and full of the joys of life. Well, Julie, if either of them had had their brain extracted and replaced by a monkey’s anus, they could have come up with a more interesting piece than this. You cretin.

A few highly representative (quite honestly) comments on Burchill’s article from the Independent’s website:

Tony: The Indy’s bosses could save themselves a few bob by just getting a random cabbie to rant incoherently about the problems of the day, and transcribing the results thereof. At least that might be entertaining.

Giordano Bruno: Islamophobia infiltrating the Independent! Funny how one can feel Burchill’s contempt if not hatred towards Islamic “umma”. Usual suspects like JB always come back with same rusty and dusty arguments. I’ve just wasted 5 minutes of my precious time.

Christopher: Being a columnist is just a little more than your IQ can manage. I suggest you switch to covering horse shows, which I expect you could do well.

Meles: Wow! Three items, all poorly-judged, offensive and ill-informed. I have learned to treat JB’s writing with… well, let’s call it scepticism… but this has to be an all time low.

Ian1: I was doing a spot of gardening this morning when I accidentally put my hand in a turd left in one of my borders by a neighbour’s cat. Unpleasant as that experience was, it pales into insignificance alongside the trauma associated with reading yet another ill-considered, poorly-constructed column by the worthless sack of crap that is Julie Burchill.

R. Broxted: Julie, couldn’t Lebedev afford Rod Liddle?

There’s an excellent piece by Andy Newman on Socialist Unity about why Afghanistan could prove to be a bigger defeat for America than Vietnam.

The key point is his identification of Iraq and Afghanistan as being part of the same conflict. It’s easy to forget about Iraq with the media’s eye so focussed on Afghanistan. Remember five years ago when Afghanistan was barely mentioned and violence in Iraq was in the news every day? Now the focus has shifted, it’s not hard to buy into the idea that Iraq has been an eventual success (if you can call over a million civillians dead a success) and Afghanistan is a failure. But part of the reason Afghanistan is failing now is because of the Iraq war. Any successes in the latter have to be weighed against the failings in the former.

No one should cheer the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But these failures are a necessary lesson for America. The Afghan insurgents may not be about to topple their second superpower. But they may have given the US pause for thought about its role in the world. And America has long been due a good period of reflection.

I have just got back from a 40-strong demonstration outside Colchester Barracks at the trial of Joe Glenton, the soldier who spoke out against the war in Afghanistan and refused to return. Joe was sentenced to nine months in a military prison for going AWOL. This is clearly an attempt to send a message to soldiers that such things will not be tolerated. Joe apparently left the court with his fist raised in salute. This is only the beginning of the campaign. Pictures and reports to follow.

See: BBC, Guardian, Times, Socialist Worker.

US President Barack Obama (right) holds his Nobel Peace Prize next to Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjoern Jagland Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Barack Obama received his much debated Nobel Peace Prize in Norway today. One has to wonder exactly what part of sending 30,000 additional troops into a destitute nation, which has been occupied by the world’s greatest superpower for the last eight years, constitutes peace. Obama himself recognised the irony of receiving the prize whilst his country is engaged in two major conflicts. It’s fair to say that he was not the one who took his country to war, but for all the A grade essays I wrote at school, I can’t remember ever earning a gold star by rubbing out someone else’s mistakes. Or, for that matter, copying them. No one can doubt that Obama is a better president than Bush. But he has an awful lot left to prove if he’s to retroactively earn the award that was repeatedly denied Gandhi.

Michael Moore says absolutely everything that needs to be said on Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Hat tip here goes to Leon on Pickled Politics. Sunny, writing on the same website, makes some good points, but I continue to believe his support for the war and for the additional troops is misguided. Time will tell which of us is right (and I sincerely hope he is), but I have an eight year head start.

First of all an apology. Orwellian terminology is definitely overused within the blogosphere. Yet yesterday President Obama offered us a master class in  presenting something as its opposite. He billed his latest plans as a means of achieving a ‘responsible transition out of afghanistan’. He called on America’s allies to ‘come together’ for ‘the end of the war’. Yet what was he announcing? Increased efforts at negotiation with America’s enemies? Beginning a phased removal of troops?

No. Barack Obama, in his true rhetorical brilliance, has managed to describe the sending of 30,000 additional troop as though it were a plan for withdrawal. Under the circumstances his talk about “coming to the end of the war” appears rather odd. Though he referred to plans to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, one of his top commanders has said that the withdrawal will not begin in earnest until 2014. We are talking, then, about a World War 2 length commitment on top of the 8 years that the Afghan war has already lasted.

The logic behind this appears to be that a beefed up American presence will allow NATO to really get the job done, to ‘make their eyes bleed’ as one advisor put it, thus establishing a situation in which NATO troops are no longer needed to reinforce the Afghan state. From this perspective we need to get in to get out.

It’s a line of reasoning which I must admit I find unconvincing. Most obviously I am not convinced that the ability of the US/UK to get the result they want – an Afghan state that can survive their exit – is primarily a question of military firepower. The point is that for the past 8 years America and Britain have already been waging war on the basis of massive military superiority. Yes there have been more troops in Iraq. Yet the two best equipped armies in the world (not withstanding Switzerland, whose knives are indeed well cool) have faced a guerilla army. Are we really to believe that massive, massive military superiority as opposed to just massive military superiority will turn the tide and, as Obama seems to suggest, facilitate a quicker exit.

The reason that I am unconvinced lies partly in the nature of Anglo-American objectives. Their aim is not simply to cripple an army. Rather it is to ensure that Afghanistan’s newly created state can be a stand alone state. It is a political and not simply a military outcome. And here I must apologise again, for having already used an Orwellian concept I am going to engage in another cliche. I am going to mention Vietnam.

In the final 5 years of the Vietnam war the position of American troops relative to the Viet Minh was, in military terms, improving. This has given rise to the ‘stab in the back thesis’, the idea that the US could have won but were forced out by domestic protest. This, in fact, is incorrect. By the beginning of the 1970s the US, regardless of its military position,  was no closer to victory. This is because victory, like in Afghanistan, meant ensuring that the ‘South Vietnamese’ state had the ablity to rule alone, and to independently make real its monopoly on physical force. It couldn’t for it utterly lacked the legitimacy and ability to govern that was necessary, and the longer American troops stayed the more its legitimacy ebbed.

And Vietnam is perhaps important for another reason. Lyndon B Johnson was no Roosevelt, but upon coming to power he looked as though he could have been a very substantial reforming president. Contrary to the cult of Kennedy, it was in fact under Johnson that the key pieces of civil rights legislation were passed. Moreover he planned to engage is serious public spending to create what he termed the  ’great society’. Yet the engagement in Vietnam sucked away both the political and the financial capital that he needed. Will history repeat itself once again?

These are strange times in which we live. Not for a generation have governments had so many important political decisions pressed upon them by world events. Yet rarely has political discourse been so focused upon the personal behaviour of those in power. For the past few days, the serious issues surrounding Afghanistan – the fact that we have been fighting for 8 years in war that we can ill afford, and for which we have no plausible exit strategy – have given way to a national debate on an apparent spelling mistake made by the PM. It seems, sometimes, that as a nation we are practicing displacement, worrying excessively about smaller things  to avoid worrying about the bigger things. Hence we are far happier talking about excessive parliamentary expenses – which for all their moral implications represent a drop in the fiscal ocean – than the systemic crisis that looks set to ravage our public services.

Yesterday Jacqui Janes repeated the now well established line that we need more damn helicopters. The now ubiquitous complaints that “our boys” are underequipped are arguably more a reflection of the politics surrounding the war than the actual situation on the ground. Compared with the grand sweep of even modern history, British soldiers today are incredibly well protected. Indeed it is worth considering that fewer British soldiers have been killed in this 8 year conflict than were killed during the falklands war. By definition the government cannot pour unlimited resources into making things safe for those who sign up to kill and be killed, but as things stand they are pouring in a hell of a lot.

What then is causing this near constant anguish and recrimination as to whether our troops need more stuff? It is perhaps instructive to ask why such concerns were more muted over Iraq. The answer, in my opinion, lies in the options available to those who are sick of seeing young men coming back in body bags.  The war against Iraq split the poltical nation, and indeed the political establishment.  Numerous newspapers rallied against it and it became normal to be anti-war. Where people  were anguished by the sight troops returning without life and limb they could turn around and demand that the troops withdrew. The perception of Iraq as a war into which the big bad Americans had dragooned us decent brits made this easier. Getting out of there – rather than staying and trying to win – could be patriotic.

By contrast there was no serious opposition to Afghan war, whose declaration in fact gained support from across the political and media landscape. As such expressing discontent with its bloody consequences is a more difficult matter. Thus ill feeling at the sight of dead bodies is expressed in technical terms. Rather than blame the war itself – which surely makes these unnecessary deaths inevitable – many commentators cling to the idea that British hegemony can be maintained without British blood – if only the war were better fought.

In a sense then, the whole discussion about how many helicopters we have represents a war weariness that dare not speak it’s name. It reflects a desire to reconcile support for the war with an understandable distaste for it’s bloody consequences. The leader writers in the Standard and the Sun would like to believe that enough military equipment can square this circle. Bitter experience will prove them wrong.

Interview by Dan Swain and Lorna Finlayson

"Revolution isn't rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be"

Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of Mind and Logic at University College London. Since 9/11 he has written several books on the subject of terrorism and war, most recently Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, and has become a vocal advocate of the right of the Palestinians to a state, and to the means of achieving that state. We interviewed Honderich following his paper at Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club – their anachronistically named answer to a departmental seminar – where he laid out his views on Zionism, neo-Zionism, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that support for the Palestinians includes acknowledging their right to terrorism. The discussion was mostly cordial, though it was clear that most of the philosophers and students present were sceptical.

Honderich is, in fact, very critical of the institution of academic philosophy and its role in politics: “The contribution of the overt and the more common covert conservative political philosophy is the same. It is to pretend that the political tradition of conservatism, as in the case of New Labour as much as the Conservative Party past and present, does actually have an arguable principle of what is right and wrong to support the self-interest of an economic and social class. In this, the tradition of conservatism in general is different from the tradition of the Left and of old Labour. Liberal political philosophy, as in the case of John Rawls, escapes the viciousness of conservatism, but lacks resolution in thought, feeling and action, and seemingly always will.” His interests haven’t always been in this area – and he continues to work, for example, on the philosophy of consciousness – but he sees a connection between a wider commitment to philosophy and his recent focus on politics: “These interests arose more or less accidentally, but maybe less accidentally than I have supposed. I take it that all decent philosophy is a concentration on — not sole ownership of — the logic of ordinary intelligence. That comes down to clarity, usually in the form of analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. What goes with that has to be generality, and truth as against convention. Any philosopher aspires or pretends to aspire to that logic, whatever his or her area.”

“I wouldn’t come now.”

The observation that New Labour is now firmly within the tradition of conservatism is clearly a saddening one for him. He calls the old Labour party “the great party of humanity and civilization in British history”, and the reason he came to Britain from Canada: “I wouldn’t come now.” But what about the hope over the Atlantic, Obama? “Chomsky, the great reality-judge of our age, is not hopeful. I myself think we can still expect more from Obama than from anybody else you could have dreamed would be president. Certainly I haven’t given up. The plain fact is that he is the president of the most powerful of the hierarchic democracies. Its national strength, it seems, is or contributes greatly to the power of the economic and social classes near and at the top. Surely it is also clear that as an astute and morally decent politician, so appallingly superior to our criminals against humanity Blair and Brown, he is judging what is possible and going forward in that rationality.”

For Honderich the modern democracies presided over by Obama and Brown are profoundly hierarchic. We ask what he sees as the alternative: “The alternative is real or realer democracy, of course, where not only two heads are better than one and more heads better than two, but the heads are equally free in expressing their judgements and wants. The question brings back to mind Colonel Rainborough’s moral truth in the Putney Debates in the time of the English civil war. ‘Really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he….’ Are there tanks in those army barracks somewhere around Pimlico? I think some successor to Rainborough should think on him, and on our society, where not only the poorest but at least the six bottom economic deciles are being cheated of fuller lives. He should arrange for his tank to break down in Parliament Square for a while, only long enough for our political class and the telly to become aware of it, and then take himself back to the barracks, and also take his punishment for his civil and other disobedience. Revolution isn’t rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be. It might have a little effect on our coming election . Maybe remind some of our low politicians that the response to a question isn’t an answer, that selling isn’t their proper line of life, that the House of Commons isn’t the Student Union in Oxford, and that our elections shouldn’t be Afghanistan with drapery.”

Turning to the questions of terrorism. Words like terrorism, radicalism and extremism have developed a strange currency in recent years. As we are learning, one can be a domestic extremist merely for attending a demonstration or going to the wrong meeting. Honderich is struck by the speed of this development: “It has surprised me that transparent terminological means, such as persuasive or loaded definitions, or indeed the pretence of actual definition, have been so successful in the forming and manipulating of public feeling and opinion. This has something to do, presumably, with a new and larger role of the media in society. The effect is more pervasive than supposed, far wider than the effect of such organs as The Daily Mail.”

Precision in terminological definitions is crucial here. ‘Zionism’, defined as the project of establishing a Jewish state in 1948 and within those borders, is a project Honderich defends. It was justified in part by the horrors of the holocaust, he says, and the reality of that state now requires the defence of it. He is an implacable enemy of what he calls ‘Neo-Zionism’ – “the taking from the Palestinians of at least their liberty in the last 5th of their homeland”, and is critical also of ‘semitism’ – “the prejudice in favour of Jewish people right or wrong.” Whilst justifying the creation of the Israel, and therefore a commitment to what is commonly called a two-state solution, is a common (though far from universal) opinion amongst the Palestine solidarity movement, one of his reasons for it seems odd. In Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War… he attaches considerable significance to the question of whether the Palestinians were ‘fully a people’ in 1948, arguing that they were, but that it was reasonable to believe otherwise on the basis of the best information available at the time. Why is this so important? “I have the feeling that you have hit on the weakest point in that book, as some others have. But I still stick to it. The Principle of Humanity, in short, is that we should take rational steps to get and keep people out of bad lives — with bad lives defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, these being length of conscious life, bodily well-being, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, the goods of relationship, and the goods of culture. A people not organized into a state and society, I take it, not well-defined as a group, are not open to a kind of insult, a kind of disrespect. They are also less likely to have already achieved the other great goods. That is a beginning of a reply.”

"As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them"

Over the past few years the question of Palestine has played a controversial role in universities. There is anger over the government’s requests for lecturers to spy on students, the way in which Islamic societies are being monitored and clamped down on, and controversy over strategies for delivering solidarity. There has been much concern over the desire of the government to channel funding towards such ‘key issues’, with terrorism being a primary one. Honderich puts this in perspective: “In a society as morally stupid as ours, nearly always a stupidity owed to ignorance and the success of keeping people in that ignorance, I am tempted to have the feeling that research funding should not be at the forefront of our concern. The cosmeticism of New Labour comes higher. So does not forgetting about the estate agents and the private schools along with the bankers. So does Noam Chomsky not having a Nobel Prize.” What about two of the most controversial solidarity strategies on campuses? “I have not myself joined the academic boycott of Israel, which so to speak has left me with a bad conscience as well as a good one. The main difficulty, as always, is a factual one. Same as with terrorism. Will a boycott serve the end of the Principle of Humanity and more particularly the cause of the Palestinians? There are arguments both ways, but maybe I am moving towards the boycott. As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them. They don’t come to much, incidentally, against the neo-Zionist and semitic activities in the universities.”

“I suspect my view is easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about expressing it”

This year we mourned the death of Marek Edelman, the heroic resistance leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. The widespread respect for him surely shows that the notion of legitimate armed resistance is something people are, at least historically, happy to assent to. Why, then has Honderich’s position made him such a controversial figure? “I wonder if the explanation has partly to do with a perception of philosophy, not only a popular one. It is a perception, even in this degraded society, that carries with it respect, even in the midst of our monstrous plague of the celebrities. That a member of a respected profession and line of life, not gone over entirely to journalism, holds particular views, gets him or her attention. The explanation also has to do, of course, with the convention that we leave such judgements to governments, and in particular our hierarchic democracies. I suspect my view, on Zionism and neo-Zionism and Palestinian resistance to or self-defence against neo-Zionism, is in fact easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about it, however reluctant to express it.”

The Moral Sciences Club meets Tuesdays during term time in St. John’s College Cambridge.

Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War is published by Continuum. Ted Honderich’s personal website is here.

The Government has a problem. It is obsessed with integration, yet seeks to deligitimise one of the greatest examples of genuine intregration of recent  decades. I was reminded of this fact when I came across the above photo  from the recent Troops Out demonstration in London. This picture shows a number of things, the least important of which is that I’m getting a bit old for this sort of thing. It shows students from Essex University, of a range of ages and from diverse backgrounds, united in  their rage at what is happening in Afghanistan. The reality is we would not have known each other had we not been collectively involved in anti-war campaigning. I would not have discovered that one of the people pictured is an incredible political organiser, who half-filled a coach to the demonstration on his own. The fact is that over the past 7 years the anti-war movement has given me the opportunity for genuine engagement with the muslim community.

But the Government wants to suggest that what is happening here is the very opposite of integration. Rather, me and the other white people in the photo are ‘domestic extremists’, and the others are ‘radicalised’. For them the anger against injustice which unites us is something to mistrust. Obsession with defending their wars has meant Labour has sought to delegitimise the movements that have brought young Muslims and non-Muslims closest together. This is very sad.