Triumph of the "Tankies"

Well it’s been tankies* week with a vengeance at the old Grauniad.

*tankies is the slang referring to members of the Socialist Workers Party.

Next week s exclusive : David Duke and the KKK give us their views on Iraq (identical with the tankies actually – funny that!)

First we had Neil Clark who has set aside his usual brief as an equal opportunity genocide denier – and used this high moral platform to instruct us that leftists who supported the war should be indicted for thought crimes (aah Stalin dontcha just miss the big guy Neil).

Then we had Seumus Milne telling us that every dead American was a good American because otherwise the war will not be won by the “resistance”. Not so much stop the war then – more a plea for the victory of the Caliphate/ Baathist rape room operatives/ Shia end of timers – or of anybody else who’ll just kill lots and lots of Americans (& Brits).

Back came Neil with this charmer – Iraqi translators are quislings who deserve to die at the hands of the mosque bombing, market bombing, children butchering “resistance”. Very classy that one - it even had some of the “hard core” gagging up their breakfast and had to have comments stopped after only three hours. Truly Neil is the one man Reeperbahn of political pornography.

Now the “nice” tankie Andrew Murray comes among us to shed some obligatory tears over British casualties and tells us that resistance to the resistance is futile.

But who can deny this freak show their moment of glory – after all they conned the entire praline left into supporting their campaigns. They founded and ran the “stop the war” movement. They founded the respect party as a coalition of unreconstructed soviet nostalgics and unreconstructed religious absolutists. The “religion is the opium of the people” crowd marching arm in arm with the “God is great” brigade would still be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it was this reactionary coalition of genocide deniers who formed the command structure of the Stop the War coalition. They provided the parameters of the anti war argument and they were its spokespeople. For progressives this was farce replayed as tragedy.

They set the terms of the discourse that every useful idiot from Maddy Bunting to the Archbishop of Canterbury has faithfully parroted. The broad complacent hinterlands of the left have lazily volunteered to be the “useful idiots” of two of the most anti progressive forces in British politics.

The complacent left have happily repeated as both argument and slogan doctrines which completely cannibalise the whole progressive project.

A global apartheid of rights is now proclaimed under the grotesquely inappropriate rubric of “respect” so that now feminism and gay rights are only to be defended in the west (and even there not amongst citizens of non western origin). They are to be abandoned elsewhere as “culturally incompatable” & “western artifacts”. The preposterous claims made by a gaggle of reactionary, bearded patriarchs to a monopoly of cultural authority in these lands of the “other” are also completely unchallenged by progressives.

As for the war the surreal swiftly succumbed to the downright sick as mainstream feminists declared Saddam’s Iraq to have been a middle eastern haven for women’s rights thereby awarding the author of “rape rooms” an accolade which ( to even that megalomaniac) must have been somewhat unexpected.

Environmentalists legitimately denounced Bush over Kyoto but found no room to denounce the Saddam’s destruction of the Iraqi marshes or his ignition of the Kuwaiti oilfields.

As for Human rights NGO brigade Abu Ghraib was only spoken of as the site of American abuses not the industrial scale torture and death centre that it was for decades under Saddam. It is also self evident to many right thinking progressives that Guantanamo is directly comparable to Stalins gulag.

For realists Saddam was the guarantor of Iraqi unity so recklessly destroyed by culturally ignorant imperialist Americans – the troubling fact that Saddam maintained Iraqi integrity by copiously digging and filling mass graves was not as large a source of concern to them as it might have been.

And nearly everyone embraces the lopsided accounting that places all Iraqi victims of both Baathist and Jihadist bombs against the account of “American imperialism”. Thus those who intentionally blow up mosque and market are awarded a free pass in the greater cause of demonising America. After all, everyone knows that the “other” has no moral autonomy whatsoever and all his atrocities are only “blowback” - a predetermined and programmed response to the “root cause” (not plural) of American imperialism.

This intellectual and moral slurry is not confined to the wilder reaches of the “respect” coalition but is the text and subtext of mainstream left of centre commentary.

So as the helicopters airlift the last personnel from the “green zone” the headline in the Socialist worker will be –

“IT WAS US WOT WON IT”

And who could argue with that?