The Reprehensible George Galloway on Russia Today

There has been a lot written recently of the emergence of the Alt-Right both online and in the public domain. The Alt-Right has become the umbrella term for a coalition of reactionary forces, who espouse fringe libertarianism and proto-fascist views whilst peddling conspiracy theories and ultra-right memes online. The movements’ alignment with the Kremlin’s troll army has been well documented, if you’ve missed it, Buzzfeed’s Ryan Broderick provides a comprehensive analysis.

However much less has been written about the emergence of a similarly conspiratorial and dangerous movement on the left sphere of politics. Like the Alt-Right, the Alt-Left shares a penchant for conspiracy theory, an obsessive distrust of the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media), and suffers under an ultra-reductionist delusion. The Alt-Left have moved so far along the political compass that they no-longer see any meaningful difference between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump, or Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. They have come to see world through a form of accelerationism, wishing nihilistically for the destruction of the liberal-era in the genuinely held belief that from the ashes of modernity will rise a glorious eco-Socialist state. However no matter how batty or ridiculous this Alt-Left is, its danger is not to be under estimated.

The origins of the Alt-Left stem from the of the end of the Cold War. Many on the left were permanently scarred by Western foreign policy during the Cold War-Era. The cynical politics of supporting Fascists coup d’etats in South America, or ultra-violent military Juntas in Indonesia all in the name of ‘Anti-Communism’ were rightly reviled by Left-Wing Intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky. But unlike Hitchens, Chomsky, who I believe is the intellectual godfather of the Alt-Left, came to the view that when considering the sufferings of those poor and in the third world, that not only was the West as morally culpable as the Soviet Union, but was now the root of all suffering and evil. Chomsky adopted a form of politics I would call ‘Anti-Westernism’.

Chomsky; the godfather of Anti-Westernism

The first signs of the ‘Anti-Western’ delusion that Chomsky suffered came to light during the Anglo-American intervention in the Yugoslav Wars. NATO’s intervention in the Balkans undeniably saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Bosnian Muslims from the genocidal terror of the Milosevic regime. But if you read the writings of Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein or Michael Moore, the West’s intervention in the Yugoslavia was an act of ‘Imperialism’, the doings of the Military Industrial Complex, an illegitimate war waged on behalf of the IMF and Neo-Liberalism against the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Forgive me if I think that’s bullshit.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq brought the politics of Anti-Westernism into the mainstream of left politics, particularly in Britain, under the umbrella of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). The Neo-Conservatives and Blairite Neo-Liberals were disastrously naive about Iraq, and the balance of power between the Sunni and Shiite worlds. The Coalition of the Willing deliberately overplayed the connection between Hussein’s Ba’athist Regime and Islamic Terrorists to win mainstream support for what was really a project of nation building. But the Chomskyite left was in the right for all the wrong reasons. Those like Michael Moore, in his film Fahrenheit 9/11, projected the war in Afghanistan as a covert operation for American oil interests, instead of a humanitarian intervention to rid the region and indeed the world of a chauvinistic extremist sect. In the same film, Moore projected Hussein’s Iraq almost as a bastion of social-democracy, free and secular, with universal health care to boot, whilst making no mention of a regime that had hundreds of thousands tortured to death and had used chemical weapons against its ethnic enemies. In equally distasteful fashion, Chomsky, a man who could never quite come to blame Pol Pot for the deaths of millions of Cambodians, accused the United States of “perpetrating a holocaust in Afghanistan”.

The most nefarious of the Chomskyite Alt-Left has to be that of George Galloway and his friends in the STWC. Galloway, a self professed admirer of the Soviet Union, recently endorsed Trump for President. Galloway left the Labour Party because of the Iraq War, or perhaps more accurately because of his unwavering support of Saddam Hussein’s gangsterite regime. Just like Chomsky in Bosnia, Galloway defended his support of Hussein through the lens of ‘anti-imperialism’. Strangely, Galloway demonstrated no such anti-imperialist tendencies when Hussein invaded the sovereign state of Kuwait. It was later revealed that Galloway, and many other anti-war anti-imperialists, had been in the pocket of Saddam Hussein’s crime family.

Corbyn at a Stop the War Coalition demostration

But Galloway wasn’t the only one, Jeremy Corbyn, now leader of the UK Labour Party, was too an ‘anti-imperialist’ member of the STWC, as was the Labour Party’s now Executive Director of Strategy and Communications; Seamus Milne. Journalist Nick Cohen wonderfully dissects Corbyn and Milne’s faux anti-imperialism, writing “Corbyn’s far left is not anti-war. Pacifism may not be a moral position in all circumstances but, in my view at least, it remains an honourable belief, rooted in Christian teaching. Corbyn does not share it. He does not oppose violence wherever it comes from…When anti-western regimes and movements go to war, his language turns slippery. Corbyn never quite has the guts to support the violence of others, but he excuses it like a gangster’s lawyer trying to get a crime boss off on a technicality.” Cohen goes on to out Milne, Corbyn’s spin doctor, as an enthusiastic attendant at Putin’s anti-western propaganda summits.

As the tragedy in the middle-east has spilled on from Iraq into Syria, the STWC’s connections with the fascist Assad regime and Putin’s Russian Kleptocracy has come to light. In rejecting mainstream journalism, and embracing Chomskyite Anti-Westernism the Alt-Left fell easily into the sphere of Putinist and Assadist propaganda outlets and Putinist and Assadist entryism. Corbyn has on several occasions refused to name the Assad regime as the perpetrator of civilians gas attacks, putting himself at odds with the rest of the Labour Party. Ultimately, the blackhole that was left after Blair’s disastrous handling of Iraq allowed elements of the nihilistic Alt-Left and their calculating Russian backers to take control of the Labour Party.

Similarly, the American left, which was radicalised by the Bush years, have become victim to an Alt-Left take over. No longer satisfied with simple truths or hard answers, the American Alt-Left opted for conspiracy. Popular left wing radio station and news site Democracy Now! flirted with 9/11 truthers, whilst once celebrated journalists such as Katrina vanden Heuvel of the Nation Magazine and her historian husband Stephen Cohen have become willing agents of Putin’s Anti-Western propaganda machine. Slate’s Cathy Young articulately explains Cohen’s transformation from Left-Wing intellectual to Pro-Putin apparatchik;

“Some of Cohen’s critics have assumed that he is a lifelong leftist hack who simply transferred his allegiance from the Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia. The truth is more complex….In the late 1980s, Cohen was an ardent enthusiast of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms; he and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, now editor in chief of The Nation, co-authored Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s Reformers, whose subjects — officials, journalists, and intellectuals — were all proponents of top-down change to bring about a kinder, gentler Soviet socialism. Those dreams ended in a rude awakening in 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union….His antipathy to Yeltsin led him to sympathize with the views of those Russians who saw their country during the 1990s as “semi-occupied by foreigners — from shock-therapy economists to human-rights advocates,” and who credited Putin with taking it back. In Newsweek’s February 2008 roundup of expert opinions on Putin and his legacy, Cohen’s contribution — entitled “The Savior” — asserted Putin was the man who “ended Russia’s collapse at home and re-asserted its independence abroad.”

The co-opting of the American left by Putin via the Anti-Western intellectual class and propaganda outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik has also had a profound effect on the political left. Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party Presidential Candidate, who also suffers from the same ultra-reductionism when it comes to Clinton v Trump, travelled to Moscow in 2015 to celebrate the Russian state propaganda station; Russia Today. In Moscow Stein criticised American “militarism”, but strangely enough, the anti-imperialist Stein has been rather quiet on the Russian invasion of Crimea. Democratic Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has become the the resident mouthpiece for the Ba’athist Assad regime following a sponsored trip to meet the great dictator himself in 2016. Gabbard is now one of the most vocal supporters of the Assad Regime, and glibly parrots the Russia Today/Assad line that all Syrian Opposition forces are in fact CIA funded al-Qaeda terrorists, and welcomes the Russian bombing of civilian centres. With the Democratic party shaken to its core post the 2016 election, I fear the American Alt-Left could stage a similar take over of the Democratic Party as it did the Labour Party.

US Congresswoman Tusi Gabbard

The Alt-Left’s shallow Anti-Imperialism is clear for all to see. Those like Corbyn and Gabbard have no opposition to Russian imperialism in Crimea, no qualms with Iranian imperialism in Iraq, no opposition to Assad’s bombing and torture of civilians, and no opposition to Russian interference in democratic elections. They justify these calamitous events through ‘whataboutisms’ and cheap deflections such as ‘America deserved Russian interferences because of American interferences in Latin America in the 1970’s and 80’s. Alt-Left hero Oliver Stone expressed similarly delusional reductionist views recently in Variety Fair. The crux of their argument is that for the West to be saved, it must be punished for its sins, and Aleppo is collateral damage. The Alt-Left has no rejection of Imperialism, but is inherently Anti-Western. Ultimately, the Alt-Left’s embrace of post-truth politics and isolationism is inherently pro-Fascist.

I was raised in what I call the post Rwanda Consensus. Bosnia showed us what was possible if internationalists, liberals, and social-democrats stood up for the rights of those threatened by authoritarianism. Rwanda showed us what would happen if we failed. How sad it is that we have forgotten so soon.