Guest essay by Craig Murray, The Multiplural World, May 25, 2024
(Craig Murray is a former British diplomat and is the candidate for the Workers Party of Britain for the seat of Blackburn in the national election to take place in the UK on July 4. This essay was originally published on his website, May 18, 2023 (and reprinted on Consortium News, May 22, 2024). See further below for suggested readings on the national election campaign now underway in Britain, to take place on July 4.)
In the West, any deviation from any point in the architecture of neoliberal beliefs is considered an unwarranted challenge to the entire system and must be eradicated
The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling. Can you imagine the outrage and emotion that would have been expressed by Western powers if not Fico but a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian leader within the EU had been attacked? The new orders for weapons that would have been presented to the arms manufacturers, the troops that would have been deployed, the sabres that would have been rattled?
Instead, we have the media telling us that Fico opposed sending arms to Ukraine and opposed threatening Russia. We are told he did not accept the mainstream narrative on Covid vaccinations. The media do not quite say he deserved to be shot, but they come very, very close.
Fellow EU leaders followed correct form in making statements of shock and disgust at the attack on Fico, but they were formal and perfunctory. The ‘he’s not actually one of us’ message was very clear.
There are now an ordered set of neoliberal beliefs to which anybody in a Western nation participating in public affairs must subscribe, or they are beyond the pale. Not to subscribe to all of these beliefs makes you a “populist”, a “conspiracy theorist”, a “Putin puppet” or a “useful idiot”. Here are the principle ‘key beliefs’:
1. Wealth is only created by a small number of ultra-wealthy capitalists on whom the employment of everybody else ultimately depends.
2. The laws governing financial structures must therefore tend to concentrate wealth to these individuals, so that they may deploy it as they choose.
3. State-created currency must only be concentrated in and distributed to private financial institutions.
4. Public spending is always less efficient than private spending.
5. Russia, China and Iran pose an existential threat to the West. That comprises both an economic threat and a physical, military threat.
6. Colonialism was a boon to the world, bringing economic development, trade and education to people of inferior cultures.
7. Islam is a threat to Western values and to world development.
8. Israel is a necessary project for spreading Western values to the uncivilised Middle East.
9. Security necessitates devoting very substantial resources to arms production and the waging of continual war.
10. Nothing must threaten the military and arms industry interest. No battle against corruption or crime can override the need for the security military industrial complex to be completely unchallenged and internally supreme.
Dependent orthodoxies
Within this architecture of belief, other orthodoxies hang dependent, such as the correct way to respond to a complex pandemic, or support for NATO and impunity for the security services. (Support for Israel is probably better portrayed as a dependent point, but with the subject of Gaza so prominent at the moment I have figuratively moved it into the main structure). Any deviation on any point of belief is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated.
You will note that within this architecture of thought, there is no room whatsoever for values like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. They simply do not fit. Nor is it possible within this architecture to incorporate actual democracy, which would give people a choice of what to believe.
If you accept this architecture of thought, then you must argue that the genocide in Gaza is a good thing, and it threatens the entire structure if you state that it is not a good thing. That is why we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians defying and then repressing their own people, willing to place all of their political capital at the service of genocidal Zionism.
Words struggle to convey the horrors we have all seen from Gaza, and in no way does it lessen the terrible suffering nor the extent of the crime to observe that it has caused a major rift in the neoliberal belief system which cannot be hidden from the people.
Gaza has ramifications leading to questioning throughout the system. Why is Tik Tok being banned, to stop people getting information on Gaza? Why is it a problem that the platform is owned by China? What has China done that makes it an enemy? China has no military designs on the West. Of recent purchases most of us have made of physical goods, a high proportion have come from China. Why is an important trade partner an “enemy”?
Why is Russia our enemy? The notion that the Russian army is going to land on the Wash [bay on the coast of east central England] is utterly implausible. The Russian state, over centuries and wildly differing regimes under various governments, has never had the slightest desire to invade the British Isles. For almost three centuries, charlatans have been claiming a threat of Russian invasion to justify higher defence expenditure.
Why the need to have “enemies” at all?
One designated ‘enemy’ of the collective West is Australian military lawyer David McBride. He is the latest whistleblower to be jailed for serving humanity by blowing the whistle on war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan. There is no dispute that the war crimes were real and there is no dispute that they were being covered up. There is no dispute that McBride released true information that was being hidden from the public.
But that does not matter. McBride was sentenced to five and a half years for leaking documents. As is the case in the U.S. and UK, there was no public interest defence allowed in the Australian court that convicted McBride for whistleblowing.
The case is slightly complicated by the fact that McBride claimed he did not leak the documents to expose the war crimes, but rather the opposite; to prevent the heavy-handed investigation of individual soldiers. Whatever the motive, nobody has in fact faced any punishment for the war crimes revealed by McBride, while McBride is in jail for exposing them.
The slavish worship of ‘national security’ is similarly at play in the case of Julian Assange, who has just won the right to appeal a threatened extradition into the industrial/ court-prison nexus of the United States. Assange has already served five years in a dreadful maximum security jail in London, after seven years detained in the Ecuadorean Embassy in the city for his exposure of extensive war crimes for which nobody has been punished. Again, no public interest defence is permitted.
I am for once hopeful that we shall see Julian free very soon. Asked to give an assurance to the court that Julian Assange will not be barred from claiming First Amendment freedom of speech rights on the grounds of his nationality, the U.S. government merely replies that he will be able to argue in court that he should not be so barred. That is, of course, not the same thing.
The ‘rules-based international order’ that has replaced international law in the neoliberal mind depends on ad-hoc rules designed to enforce the neoliberal thought construct outlined above. In the International Court of Justice case of South Africa vs Israel, we witness whether the established legal system retains enough self-respect to uphold actual law against these ‘rules’.
At the High Court in London, we shall witness the High Court of England and Wales face the same test. In the face of the blatant refusal by the United States to comply with the stipulated assurances that Assange’s rights will be respected, will the High Court maintain its intellectual self-respect? Or will it bow down to the dictates of the neoliberal world order?
It is a key moment. I believe the neoliberal structure is cracking. Who can be saved?
Related readings:
* Declaration by Craig Murray, candidate of the Workers Party for the seat of Blackburn in the July 4 Britain election, published on Craig Murray’s website, May 22, 2023 This is it; the election is called for July 4 and I am standing in Blackburn to offer voters there a viable alternative to the Keir Starmer Genocide Party [Labour Party]. I cannot do it without your financial support and practical campaigning help… I have cried bitter tears every single day for eight months over the children slaughtered in Gaza. I have also done everything one man can to stop it. I was in the courtroom at the International Court of Justice for the South Africa vs Israel genocide hearing. My articles on the use of the Genocide Convention were read by key members of South Africa’s cabinet before they took the decision to go ahead…
* Hundreds of candidates are standing for the Workers Party of Britain in the July 4 UK election. Website of The Workers Party, including program and list of candidates
* Green Party surges in Britain as election call issued, report in The New Statesman, May 10, 2024 …The Green Party made history on May 2 by electing its highest ever number of municipal councillors across Britain. The New Statesman’s tracker has the Greens hovering around 5-6 per cent for the July 4 general election. The Green Party’s unwavering stance against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza threatens Labour in some places…
* Plan by Conservative Party gov’t in Britian to deport migrants to Rwanada may never see the light of day, after hundreds of millions of pounds spent so far, report by Reuters, May 23, 2024
* [Jeremy Corbyn is part of a loose collective of six or so Labour Party MPs who are standing for re-election as independents in the July 4 UK national election. They all favor a ‘ceasefire’ in Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people. That puts them squarely at odds with the imperialist politics of the Labour Party leadership, even if it is unclear from them where a ceasefire should lead. Should apartheid Israel be placed under the same kind of international sanctions which played a key role in ending apartheid in South Africa? Who knows. Corbyn favors the failed and discredited goal of ‘two states’ in histroic Palestine, one of those being the nuclear-armed, Apartheid Israel. Those MPs who are standing for election as independents have been expelled form the Labour Party, starting with Corbyn. ]
