Like, Socialism

"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing," Todd
Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally
outside St. Louis. "It's a referendum on socialism." "With all due
respect," Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, "the man
is a socialist." At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a
well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned
against Obama's tax proposals. "Friends," she said, "now is no time to
experiment with socialism." And McCain, discussing those proposals,
agreed that they sounded "a lot like socialism." There hasn't been so
much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene
Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for
President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he
was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War.
(Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new
Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him
to the White House for a friendly visit.)

As a buzzword, "socialism" had mostly good connotations in most of the
world for most of the twentieth century. That's why the Nazis called
themselves national socialists. That's why the Bolsheviks called their
regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist
and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was
worth) to make rescuing the "good name" of socialism one of their
central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell,
Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism's most passionate
and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books
on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement
here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which
conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the
aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid
would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct
for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs
its old punch. "At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so
admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," McCain said
the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not
some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle
social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher
taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy
themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and
decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference
between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between
a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal
income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under
Obama's proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that
matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush's tax cuts expire
on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break
to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million
dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be
somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that
renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama "will raise your
taxes."
. . . .
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama
"Barack the Wealth Spreader," seems to be something of a suspect
character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of
what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that
she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge
levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds
finance the government's activities and enable it to issue a
four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state.
One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added
an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year's check, bringing the
per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for
Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of
this magazine—that "we're set up, unlike other states in the union,
where it's collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the
wealth when the development of these resources occurs." Perhaps there
is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and
sharing it ("collectively," no less), but finding it would require the
analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦

The forthcoming vote on Trident renewal

The following is the text of a letter sent to our MP, David Tredinnick, with our views on the renewal of the Trident missile programme.

I would just like to remind you (and through you, the party) that the last time you supported the government on a serious matter related to the “defence” of this nation, it was a grave mistake. Albeit under different leadership, the result was an ungodly mess, the price of which is still being paid with the body parts and lives of hundreds of our soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

It is a disgrace that there has been so little public debate about the issue of renewal (the limited debate there has been has been more about this slippery process than the substantive issue at hand). Parliament – with the supine lobby-fodder on both sides of the house being whipped into doing the bidding of an ill-informed leadership – has shown that it cannot be entrusted with decisions of this magnitude. To have the Conservative party support and prop up this dishonoured Prime Minister when members of his own party are prepared to defy him is really a tragic indictment of the spinelessness of the Conservative party in confronting and dealing with ‘real’ issues: green issues are so much softer and easier, are they not?

I would deplore Conservative support for renewal of Trident in this coming week for the main reason that the decision does not have to be taken this week, this year or this parliament. At the very least, the decision should wait for the current and discredited Prime Minister to leave office, and ideally it would form part of a manifesto commitment in the next general election, thereby giving the British people the opportunity to have say in matters in which, as I say, parliament has a dreadfully meek and compliant record. A referendum would be the ideal solution, since I imagine the average MP to be at least as clueless about the real substantive issues as the average citizen.

Although my main objection to the vote is that it is needless at this time, before you – and other MPs – take a position I hope you have answered the following questions and are prepared to publish your answers after the vote:

At whom are we likely to launch these weapons? What state/quasi-state or geographic area? a) I assume that Europe (including Russia), the Americas, Japan, China and the antipodes are not and are never likely to be viable targets, either because they are always likely to remain allies or are simply too powerful for us to drop a nuclear weapon inside their borders. So that leaves territory in the wider Middle East, Africa or parts of Asia as viable targets for our nuclear weapons because they are too weak to hit back. Surely the world is sick and tired of having the American Bully strutting the globe: do we want really want to have a weapon we can only deploy against the weak and defenceless (when the Americans let us)? Shame on us if we do.

Under what circumstances and to secure what objective are we likely to use these weapons when their use will cause considerable immediate and long-term civilian deaths, mutilations, illness and disablement?

What actual number of innocent civilian casualties (immediate and through the generations) are we prepared to inflict on the targeted region and its neighbours? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? What number of deaths would you, personally, consider acceptable to achieve a far-away objective, Mr Tredinnick?

Are there, in fact, any targets at which it would be practical to launch a nuclear weapon – considering the impact of radiation (airborne, or waterborne – along rivers which might provide the sole source of drinking water for friendly innocent communities in neighbouring countries) and the ensuing refugee crisis on neighbouring countries? Could these few targets actually not anyway much better be ‘neutralised’ by conventional weapons?

Will the Americans – perhaps 40 years in the future – ever allow us to launch their hardware, using their flight and targeting software against targets they may not wish to be assaulted? If – as it seems to be the case – the USA holds the key to every part of Trident’s capability except the ‘big red button’ itself, then perhaps we could allow the Americans to do their own dirty work rather than contaminating our hands, thousands of square miles and hundreds of thousands of innocent people with “our” bomb.

If there are valid answers to the above questions, I would give my support to Trident renewal. I recognise its effectiveness as a deterrent during the Cold War when both sides had so much to lose. Suicide bombers, however, Mr. Tredinnick, do not recognise their death, or the deaths of their fellow citizens as a deterrent.

£24bn - or indeed any amount - is too great a price to pay to allow our Prime Ministers to strut the globe because of our military strength: much better they walk the world with head held high because of their high moral stand.

When considering what circumstances could allow the moral use of a nuclear weapon, I am reminded of a disgusting quote from an American Lt. Colonel (from the Guardian) in Iraq who said: “Those two insurgents who just shot at us didn’t understand what they were doing when they took refuge amongst civilians”. The disgusting part is that the Lt Colonel understood exactly what he was doing when he targeted the compound and its buildings with sufficient high explosive to kill and dismember scores of Iraqi civilians including three generations of one family. He never knew whether he had or had not killed his targets: I don’t think he much cared.

Are you that Lt. Colonel, Mr. Tredinnick? I assume your vote will reflect your answer to that question.

Yours very sincerely indeed

Ramage L