SYRIA: LABOUR’S SHAME
Jeremy Corbyn happily ignores barrel bombs and poison gas
“An individual, a group, a party, or a class that ‘objectively’ picks its nose while it watches men drunk with blood massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.”
When the young war correspondent Lev Davidovich Bronstein wrote those words in 1912, the individual he had in mind was the historian and prominent Russian intellectual Pavel Nikolayevich Miliukov, leader of Russia’s liberal-left Constitutional Democratic Party. It was Miliukov’s custom to publicly and explicitly excuse the atrocities being visited upon defenceless Turks at the time by the Bulgarian partisans who were serving as Russia’s proxies during the Balkan wars. Bronstein was covering those bloodlettings for the liberal Ukrainian daily Kievskaya Mysl, under the pseudonym Antid Oto.
What Bronstein had to say about Miliukov and his party and his class can also well be said, with the adhesion of several rich ironies, about the British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn in the matter of the bloody convulsions that have destroyed Syria over the past seven years.
To deal with the first of these many ironies: Bronstein would go on to take another name, Leon Trotsky, and a different career trajectory as a Bolshevik revolutionary. It was the Bolsheviks’ surprise victory in the October Revolution of 1917 that placed Trotsky in the command of the Soviet Red Army, only to be purged and exiled and eventually liquidated, by means of an ice pick to the back of the head, by a Stalinist assassin in Mexico City on Aug. 21, 1940.
It just so happens that it was from out of the leadership of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, with its distinctively degenerate fusion of Trotskyism and unreconstructed Stalinism, that Corbyn was propelled from his post as the coalition’s chairman directly into the office of the leader of the British Labour Party in September 2015.
You would be hard pressed to discover anything Corbyn has ever said or done that contradicts or contends against the lie that Syrian mass-murderer Bashar Assad and his Western apologists have so successfully circulated and sustained all these years, to the effect that the struggle in Syria always came down a choice between Assad and al- Qaida or some similarly jihadist version thereof.
Corbyn has been reliably depended upon to claim that arming the pro-democracy Syrian rebels would be to repeat the error of arming the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s, if “error” that genuinely was. It has also been Corbyn’s custom to find cause for a bit of praise for Moammar Gadhafi here, an encomium to Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez there, a casual reference to his “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah and so on.
For further elucidations you could always look up any of Corbyn’s many broadcasts on the Iran regime’s propaganda channel Press TV, for which Corbyn was paid by his own estimation an amount of roughly 20,000 pounds while he was still just an annoying Labour backbencher. And just this week, another atrocity, the poisongas barrel bomb massacre of more than 40 Syrians in the besieged district of Douma, has obliged Corbyn to return to his excuses and prevarications about Iran’s bloodthirsty satrapy in Damascus.
Mustn’t rush to judgment about what happened last weekend, Corbyn has insisted. Can’t be blaming Assad for that. Evidence, old chap. Which is exactly what Corbyn said when Assad’s bombers dropped sarin gas on the town of Khan Shaykhun last April. In that incident, more than 70 people were suffocated to death, according to the judgment of the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. But no, again, we mustn’t rush to judgment, says Corbyn.
A proper independent investigation is needed, Corbyn again insists, strangely overlooking the dozen UN Security Council resolutions on Syria vetoed by Russia, most recently on Tuesday, the latest one being a quashed resolution that would have cleared the way for just such an investigation. Here’s another irony for you. You’d think the UN Human Rights Council, that opulent parlour for terrorstate emissaries in Geneva, would be the last place you’d hear anything honest about Assad’s barbaric conduct.
And yet on Monday, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, had sterner words for Assad’s enablers in Moscow and Tehran and for his own UN bosses than you will have ever heard from Corbyn.
“A number of very powerful states are directly involved in the conflict in Syria and yet they have completely failed to halt this ominous regression towards a chemical weapons free-for-all,” Al Hussein said. “And the world’s response? Empty words, feeble condemnations and a Security Council paralyzed by the use of the veto.”
After former U.S. president Barack Obama first allowed Assad to cross his chemical weapons “red line” by deploying sarin gas to murder more than 1,000 civilians in Ghouta in 2013, Assad went on to commit scores of chemical weapons atrocities, all under the supervision of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has managed to properly investigate and document only a fraction of these mass murders. Of the 34 investigated by the commission, all but six were conclusively proved to have been committed by Assad’s forces.
The World Health Organization, the Syria Violations Documentation Centre, the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations and several other agencies have painted a clear and precise picture of what happened in Douma on Saturday. Barrel bombs were dropped at two locations, within blocks of one another. Within hours, more than 500 people were suffering unmistakable signs of poison gas suffocation. At least 42 of them have died.
The barrel bombs were dropped from helicopters. There are no rebel forces with helicopters in Syria. This was no “false flag,” no matter what the Kremlin says. No “paid actors” were involved, no matter what the American alt-right says or the “anti-imperialist” left says, and there are no “peace talks” to join, no matter what Corbyn says.
In the middle of everything this week there is an ongoing uproar among Corbyn’s nomenklatura about the impudence of quite a few decent Labour MPs and activists who attended a couple of demonstrations calling on Corbyn to finally get around to rooting out the anti- Semitic toxins that have flowed so freely and fatally through the party since his election.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Labour Party announced that it was severing relations with Corbyn altogether, owing to his hostility to Britain’s Jewish community and the anti- Semitic rhetoric that he has been content to permit within the party. The letter was composed on the eve of Yom Hashoah, the Jews’ commemoration of the Holocaust. Final irony: the letter arrived just as Nick Griffin, the happily fascist former leader of the British National Party, was praising Corbyn on Twitter for “resisting the psychotic rush” to name Assad as the culprit behind the Douma atrocity.
And so long as the oncegreat British Labour Party “picks its nose while it watches men drunk with blood massacring defenceless people,” it inevitably becomes “worm-eaten while it is still alive.” It’s what inevitably happens. It can’t turn out any other way.
Trotsky was right about that.
A number of very powerful states are directly involved in the conflict in Syria and yet they have completely failed to halt this ominous regression towards a chemical weapons free-for-all.