The post-war Labour leadership of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin was instrumental in the founding of NATO - seeing, quite rightly, the threat to Western European democracy from Soviet Communism. A cross-party consensus has existed ever since, supporting an American-led NATO as a vital force for the protection of Western Europe from totalitarian threats.
But not for Jeremy Corbyn. Daniel Finkelstein in the Times today (£) - How Lenin inspired Jeremy Corbyn’s world view:
The Attlee choice before the Second World War became Labour’s choice after it. Nato was one of the results. Labour believed the alliance with the United States protected Britain’s security and the liberty of western Europe. And it provided resistance to the ambitions of the Soviet Union and a beacon to countries subjugated by Stalin.
Not everyone, however, sees Attlee’s choice in the same way.
For one Labour dissident, the creation of Nato involved “the military re-occupation of Europe”. Accompanying this was “an attempt to create an empire of the mind. The hard power of their [American] weaponry, the malign influence of the CIA, and its creation of pliant and friendly governments actively suppressed and subjugated peoples in the poorest countries of the world”.
Yes, “the influence of the Soviet Union around the world was huge” but it was “tempered by an inadequate industrial base”. And in any case, “the Soviet influence was always different, and its allies often acted quite independently”.
This striking view, which might not be widely shared in, say, Poland, was expressed by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. It’s also remarkably consistent. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Mr Corbyn told a Morning Star conference that his big concern about the fall of communism was that there would no longer be anyone to protect countries such as Cuba. His political adviser Andrew Murray has been even more forthright. In 1995 he described the fall of communism as “the counter-revolutions . . . which swept away most of the working-class states”. He called the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall a “historic setback for human progress”. Only a few months ago he used the term “cataclysmic” to describe it.
In other words, while every Labour leader since Attlee — even Michael Foot — has agreed with the choice he and Bevin made, the present Labour leader and his team dissent.
What is the intellectual origin of the foreign policy views of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle? It is Lenin’s theory of imperialism.
In the early 20th century, building on the work of liberals such as John Hobson, Lenin argued that capitalism was being sustained only by the profits from colonial exploitation. These excess profits allowed domestic workers to be paid enough to prevent them from rising up against their capitalist employers. Imperialism was made possible by the power of capitalists to make the state provide military and political protection for their foreign investments.
From this two things follow. All foreign policy by capitalist countries is about creating empires, conquering property and exploiting resources. Kosovo as much as Iraq, Sierra Leone as much as Afghanistan, troops in West Germany as much as in Vietnam. Hence Mr Corbyn’s jaundiced view of Nato and any institutions connected with it, such as the European Union.
So Mr Corbyn argues, as he did in 2011, that “since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.”
The second thing that follows is that the troops on the front line of the movement to overthrow capitalism are national resistance movements. These are the heroes of socialist advance, even if sometimes they aren’t purely socialist.
So Mr Corbyn has given encouragement and support to the Iranian government, the Irish republicans, Hamas and Hezbollah, and Fidel Castro. He saw Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela as lights to the world, developing a new economic model worth emulating....
The Labour leader ignores or dismisses the idea that any of these groups or countries, such as Iran, might be imperialist powers because all that matters is that they resist western capitalist imperialism. So their imperialism, like that of the Soviet Union, is, he put it, “different”. Where resistance movements have turned to violence or fundamentalism Mr Corbyn says he disapproves but that the root cause is not their behaviour but ours....
There will be some who read this and will think I’m being unfair because I mentioned Lenin and Hezbollah and there is an election coming. But this article is unfair only if it’s an inaccurate description of Mr Corbyn’s views, and given that it is based on things he and his close advisers have written and said, it can’t be. If Mr Corbyn becomes prime minister he and his advisers will control foreign policy. Given that he departs so far from the postwar consensus and the traditional Labour position, it’s as well to understand what he thinks.
Tangentially, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, NATO does in response to this: https://m.jpost.com/Middle-East/Turkey-is-trying-to-take-over-the-Mediterranean-through-Libya-609622
Posted by: Graham | December 04, 2019 at 01:20 PM