Monday, December 27, 2004
Democracy in action. posted by Richard Seymour
I leave off the blogging for a couple of days, and the world becomes even more stupid. First of all, I note that the Tories have pledged to cut the number of MPs in Westminster by one fifth. Well, they've made a good start on their own over the last two elections.Iraq has no such piffling concerns. With one party pulling out of the anxiously awaited elections, and Iraq's "Foreign Minister" announcing that these may have to be delayed in some areas after all, it seems unlikely that it will win anything better than a coalition of puppets, pinnochios and pushovers: Allawi, Chalabi and Sistani. Fallujah, of course, is in such a pitiful state that there can be no chance of its remaining live residents being able to recover the bricks in their houses never mind attend a polling booth. So far from the olive branch, they will be left with nothing but the gun and the same can be said for Mosul and many other areas.
And in Palestine, the first local elections for some years in the occupied West Bank have produced some bad news for Israel :
Hamas declared itself a significant political force after West Bank local election results were announced yesterday. It was the first time the Islamic movement, branded a terrorist organisation by Britain and other Western governments, had contested any local or national election.
Both Hamas and the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party claimed victory. Hanan Yousef, a West Bank Hamas leader, said: "This election has proved that we have a strong presence here. This means the Hamas programme of resistance has many supporters."
The 'Hamas programme of resistance' amounts to precisely this: resisting. That's all they do that is different from Fatah. There is no social programme to speak of, and Hamas do not even have the 'virtue' of being able to impose religious strictures on the every day life of Palestine. Reactionary Islamism has never had a great deal of support in the occupied territories, contrary to what is sometimes reported. All Hamas have is the fact that they are not prepared to capitulate entirely to Israel; and this suggests that Marwan Barghouti would have fared well in the Presidential elections (which Hamas have boycotted). True, he's banged up in Israel right now, but so are approximately 8,000 Palestinian political leaders.
Finally, a belated link to a fine article about the emergence of a "Republican proletariat" in America. The US working class, it seems, have to swing right before anyone will acknowledge that they exist. In this, a lesson that the social-democratic centre-left will not - because they cannot - learn: the votes of the poor, the exploited and the oppressed are not to be taken for granted. It isn't the case that there is 'nowhere else for them to go'.