Solidarity 137, 21 August 2008

"Draft" John McDonnell!

An initiative has been launched to “draft” John McDonnell, the left-wing Labour MP who sought to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership after Tony Blair’s retirement, to contest the leadership again. McDonnell himself has so far been reluctant to put his name forward, but there seems a real chance that he will go for it as momentum builds up to the TUC and Labour Party conferences. In 2007, McDonnell did not get on the official ballot paper, because union Executives where the majority said they backed McDonnell would not deliver official union nominations or press union-sponsored MPs...

Iran and Israel: debating the issues. A selection.

In Solidarity 3/136 we published a back-page article on Iran, Israel, and nuclear weapons, and an inside-page “discussion article” by Sean Matgamna on the same question. The article said that “an [Israeli] attack on Iran will most likely lead to great carnage… strengthen the Iranian regime… throw Iraq back into the worst chaos”. “Socialists should not want and cannot support… Israel [making] a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity”. It also posed questions: in the name of what alternative should we condemn Israel? Not, it argued, “the inalienable right of every state to have nuclear...

Weekly Worker Group ("CPGB") and Its Fatuous Gossip Sheet

Song of the Weekly Worker I'm so small! But I'm poisonous too; What I say is at best but half-true: I spread gossip thin, So they'll think I'm well in; But I'm useful, torn up in the loo! The lying cover of the fatuous gossip-sheet Weekly Worker [showing a nuclear-bomb mushroom-cloud, with the headline: "AWL's Sean Matgamna: excusing a nuclear attack on Iran"!] is only the tip of a small iceberg of hysterical lying about Sean Matgamna, a writer for Solidarity, that they have set afloat over the last two weeks. Craziest is the lie that he "excuses" an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran. Lying about...

Israel-Iran: For Reason in Politics! 2

The issues involved here are to-be-or-not-to-be for rational politics. The downright irrationality of the outcry is clear from the fact that the assessment that Israel has "good reason" to bomb Iranian nuclear installations, was preceded by a paragraph warning of the region-wide evil consequences of an Israeli attack and by the political judgement: "We do not advocate an Israeli attack on Iran, nor will we endorse it or take political responsibility for it." It was immediately followed, in the next sentence, by the political judgement: "Socialists should not want that and can not support it...

No to the "mullahs' bomb"! (The article that sparked the debate.)

Nuclear bombs are not weapons of “defence”. They are weapons of mass murder, of the threat of mass murder. If they are used it will not be in defence but in murderous “retaliation” against cities and those who live in them — against the civilian population. Their effectiveness rests entirely on that threat. No socialist can support nuclear weapons, still less, support their use. The drive by the Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons is a drive to achieve the power to inflict mass murder. Any socialist who wants them to acquire that power abandons the ground of socialism entirely and...

Israel-Iran: For Reason in Politics!

The discussion piece in the last Solidarity (3/136), "What if Israel bombs Iran?" provoked an explosion of website hysteria from a coalition of self-righteous people who, most of them, themselves support the Iranian mullahs having nuclear bombs, and who deny Israel's right to exist. The mind of the "Left" on the Middle East is typically the confused mix we have had on the AWL web-site: selective, one-sided, pacifism, deep hostility to Israel and an absolute "anti-imperialism" that leads them to back some of the most regressive political forces on the planet. In the event of an Israeli strike...

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