What Is Jihad?

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

Jihad is a fact of life. What is called ‘effort' or ‘struggle' in English is called ‘jihad' in Arabic. Jihad is not some mysterious thing. Nor is it synonymous with violence. It simply means making great efforts or striving for a particular purpose.

The root word of jihad is juhd, which connotes making much effort for something. According to the famous Arabic dictionary Lisan al-Arab, the word juhd means utmost effort. Juhd and related words appear in different forms to indicate this meaning. For instance, the phrase jahada al-labn, which means, ‘Making efforts and taking out all the butter'. In Arabic, one says bazala juhdahu, that is, ‘He exerted his utmost power or ability'. Likewise, it is said,jahada ar-rajulu fi kaza ay jadda fihi wa balagha , which means, ‘The man made every effort and tried his best for the cause'. This is precisely what the terms jihad and mujahid (one who engages in jihad) mean.

Striving hard for a particular purpose is something that all human beings do. It is a human characteristic. There are words in every language to denote such effort, and the word for this in Arabic is ‘jihad'. This is the basic meaning of the word ‘jihad'.

There is one difference, though, that must be noted in this regard. The term ‘effort' or ‘struggle' ordinarily does not also connote Divine reward or worship. But when the term jihad is used in the Islamic context, these are implied. Thus, jihad refers to a particular sort of effort or struggle that is also a form of worship and that earns Divine reward for the person who engages in it. As the Quran says: Jahidu fillah haqqa jihadihi (22:78). It means: “Strive for the cause of God as it behoves you to strive for it.” (22:78)

In some situations, the act of jihad or struggle might take the form of facing one's opponents. On such occasions, in terms of usage, and not in the literal sense, jihad can also take on the sense of war. Hence, Imam al-Raghib al-Isfahani, an eleventh century Muslim scholar of Quranic exegesis and the Arabic language, mentions three types of jihad:

a. Fighting one's external enemies.

b. Fighting Satan.

c. Fighting one's own self

Jihad in the Quran

In the Quran, the word ‘jihad' or its derivatives have been used in the same sense as it is used in the Arabic lexicon—that is, in the sense of engaging in great efforts for some purpose. The word ‘jihad' appears four times in the Quran, and every time it is used in the sense of effort and struggle, and not directly as a synonym for war.

In this regard, the translation of the first relevant Quranic verse (9:24) is as follows:

Say, “If your fathers and your sons and your brothers and your spouses and your tribe, and the worldly goods which you have acquired, and the commerce which you fear will decline, and the homes you love are dearer to you than God and His Messenger and the struggle for His cause, then wait until God fulfills His decree. God does not guide the disobedient people.”

In this verse, followers of Islam are commanded to support the Prophet, at the level of sacrifice, in the in the Islamic mission of dawah, or inviting people to God. They must do this even if their personal interests are affected, if they suffer commercial loss, and if they are forced to undergo physical hardship. In every situation, they must be with the Prophet in this dawah mission. In this verse, the phrase ‘jihad in the path of God' has been used in reference to the Prophet's dawah mission, and not war.

The word jihad appears in the Quran for the second time (25:52) in this way:

…so do not yield to those who deny the truth, but strive with the utmost strenuousness by means of this [Quran, to convey its message to them].

In this verse, the term jihad very clearly refers to the jihad of dawah, because there can be no other meaning of engaging in jihad through the Quran.

The term jihad appears for the third time in the Quran in the following verse (60:1):

If you have left your homes to strive for My cause and out of a desire to seek My goodwill [...]

This verse was revealed a short time before the victory over Makkah.

The Prophet's journey from Madinah to Makkah in 630 CE was not for war. It was actually a peaceful march, engaged in order to obtain the peaceful results that followed from the Hudaybiyyah peace treaty. The treaty was signed between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh of Makkah in the year 628 CE. The Prophet, along with 1,400 companions, was journeying to Makkah from Madinah to perform the Umrah, or the minor pilgrimage. However, when they reached a place called Hudaybiyyah, ten miles from Makkah, the leaders of Quraysh stopped the Prophet from going forward. To resolve the deadlock, the Prophet entered into negotiations with the Quraysh and unilaterally accepted the conditions laid down by them. This resulted in a ten-year no-war pact, known as the Hudaybiyyah Treaty. Two years after the treaty, when the Prophet and his companions were peacefully marching towards Makkah, a Muslim remarked “This day is the day of war”, but the Prophet replied: “This day is the day of mercy.”

In the fourth verse (22:78), the word jihad appears in this way:

Strive for the cause of God as it behoves you to strive for it.

In this verse, by jihad is meant the jihad of dawah, as is clear from the context in which it appears.

What is Jihad?

To better understand what jihad is, the first thing one must know is that whatever Muslims are doing today in the name of jihad is not jihad. These are all wars unleashed by communal sentiments, and have been wrongly named as jihads.

Jihad actually means peaceful struggle. It is not synonymous with war. However, sometimes, the word jihad is used in an extended sense to refer to war. But in the literal sense, jihad and war, or what is called qital in Arabic, are not synonymous terms.

Consider the following Quranic verses and hadith reports, or sayings about or attributed to the Prophet of Islam, to appreciate some usages of the term ‘jihad':

1.    The Quran (29:69) says:

We will surely guide in Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause […]

In this verse, the search for the truth has been called jihad—that is to say, making efforts to discover God, to attain God-realisation and to search for ways to develop closeness with God. Clearly, this jihad has no relation with war or confrontation.

2.    In the same way, the Quran (49:15) speaks of true believers as those who strive with their wealth for the cause of God. It says:

The believers are only those who have faith in God and His Messenger and then doubt not, but strive, hard with their wealth and their persons for the cause of God. Such are the truthful ones.

According to this verse, to spend one's wealth in God's path is an act of jihad.

3. Likewise, the Quran (25:52) says:

[…] so do not yield to those who deny the truth, but strive with the utmost strenuousness by means of this [Quran, to convey its message to them].

In other words, this is an instruction to engage in peaceful struggle or efforts to spread the teachings of the Quran.

4.    Similarly, the Prophet is reported to have said: Al-mujahid man jahada nafsahu fi ta?atillah. It means that amujahid is one who strives against himself for the sake of obeying God.

From this we learn that to fight against the promptings of one's self and to persevere on the path of truth is a jihad. Obviously, this struggle takes place inside oneself, in the realm of one's psyche, and not on a battlefield in the external world.

5.    The Prophet is reported to have said: Al-hajj jihad. That is, “Haj is a jihad.” From this we learn that undertaking Haj pilgrimage is an act of jihad. In performing the Haj in the desirable way the haji or Haj pilgrim has to make great efforts.

6.    According to a tradition, the Prophet of Islam is reported to have said about serving one's parents: fafihima fajahid (Sahih al-Bukhari). It means, ‘Do jihad with regard to your parents.' From this we learn that serving one's parents is an act of jihad.

The Concept of Jihad in Islam

As noted earlier, the word ‘jihad' is derived from the root juhd, which means ‘to strive' or ‘to struggle'. It denotes the exertion of oneself to the utmost, to the limits of one's capacity, in some activity or for some purpose. Thus, the Quran says, “And strive for the cause of God as it behoves you to strive for it.” (22:78)

In the Arabic language, the word ‘jihad' actually denotes effort or all-out effort for something. Because fighting one's enemies is also one form of such effort or striving, it is also referred to as a jihad, in an extended sense. However, the actual Arabic word for this is qital, and not jihad.

Fighting with one's enemies is something that might happen by chance, and only occasionally. However, jihad is a continuous process, and one that animates every day and night of the life of the true believer. It never ceases. This continuous jihad is the ceaseless efforts a believer makes at every moment to abide by, and remain established in, God's will in every aspect of his life. Such a person does not let any obstructions affect his life, such as the desires of the self, the allure of gain and personal aggrandisement, the power of culture and the pressure of tradition, the promptings of opportunism, the lust for wealth, and so on. All such things are obstacles in leading a God-oriented life and doing good deeds. Overcoming all such obstacles and abiding by the commandments of God is the real jihad, and this is what jihad's basic meaning is.

There are many references to this jihad in the sayings attributed to the Prophet in the books of Hadith. For instance, in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, there are several traditions, such as:

1.    Al-mujahid man jahada nafsahu lillah  

That is, ‘A mujahid is one who struggles with his own self for the sake of God.' (6/20)

2.  Al-mujahid man jahada nafsahu fi sabilillah

That is, ‘A mujahid is he who exerts himself for the cause of God.' (6/22)

3.  Al-mujahid man jahada nafsahu fi ta?atillah

That is, ‘A mujahid is he who struggles with his own self in submission to the will of God.' (6/22)

This present world is a testing ground. It has been fashioned in such a way that human beings are constantly faced challenging situations that are tests for them. In the course of these tests, people have to face various hurdles. So, for instance, you might face a situation where you are confronted with something, but you feel that acknowledging it might lower your status. You might have in your possession something that actually belongs to someone else and you feel that returning it to its rightful owner would damage your interests. Or, you think that leading a modest life is tantamount to suppressing your desires and ego. At times, you might think that if you do not give vent to feelings of anger and revenge, you would negate yourself. You might hesitate to uphold justice, for fear of losing your popularity. You might feel that if you act in a principled manner, instead of selfishly, you might lose certain facilities. And so on.

In this way, on various occasions you have to repeatedly suppress or deny your desires. If you are willing to sacrifice your ego totally and surmount all hurdles and face all sorts of difficulties and losses but still remain firmly established on the Truth—this is the actual jihad, or the primary meaning of jihad. It is those who remain steadfast in this jihad who will be eligible for Paradise in the Hereafter.

Jihad is essentially a sort of peaceful struggle. One form of this peaceful struggle is dawah, inviting people to God. As mentioned earlier, the Quran (25:52) says:

[…] so do not yield to those who deny the truth, but strive with the utmost strenuousness by means of this [Quran, to convey its message to them].

The jihad that this Quranic verse refers to is not about military action. Rather, it refers to an entirely intellectual and ideological task. In short, it means refuting falsehood and affirming the truth.

In its primary sense, jihad in the form of qital or war, too, is another name for peaceful struggle. That is to say, if an enemy challenges one militarily, even then, one should initially strive, to the utmost extent possible, to respond to this challenge through peaceful means. Peaceful means can be abandoned only when it is no longer possible to use them, when war becomes the only possible option left to respond to war initiated by others.

In this regard, a statement recorded in the Sahih al-Bukhari, and attributed to Aisha, wife of the Prophet, serves as a guiding principle. According to this report, whenever the Prophet was faced with two alternatives, he would always opt for the easier one. This means that whenever he had to choose between two options, he would always leave the harder option and choose the easier one.

This practice, or sunnat, of the Prophet applies not only to the routine affairs of life but also to serious matters such as war, which by its very nature is a difficult option. A study of the life of the Prophet reveals that he never initiated war himself. Whenever his opponents sought to entangle him in fighting, he would always adopt some way to try to avoid it and stave off war. He engaged in war only when there was no other way left. Thus, going by the Prophet'smethod, wars of aggression are forbidden in Islam. Islam allows only for defensive war, and that, too, only when it becomes absolutely unavoidable.

In life, one is always faced with the problem of having to choose between two options: peaceful means, on the one hand, and violent means, on the other. The accounts of the Prophet's life tell us that always, and in every matter, he shunned violence and adopted peaceful methods. His whole life was a successful model of this principle.

Here are some instances that illustrate this point:

1.    Soon after being appointed as a prophet, the Prophet of Islam was faced with choosing between the above-mentioned two options—peaceful and violent methods. As a prophet, his mission was to end polytheism and establishtawhid, faith in and surrender to the one God. The Kaaba in Makkah had been established as a centre of tawhid, but at the time when the Prophet received his prophethood, 360 idols had been installed therein. Hence, one might think that the Prophet should first have been instructed in the Quran to purify the Kaaba of idols and remake it as a centre of tawhid, thus advancing his mission. But had this been the case and had he started his work in this way, it would have been tantamount to warring with the Quraysh of Makkah, who enjoyed leadership among the Arabs precisely because they had become the custodians of the Kaaba.

History tells us that at this stage, the Prophet completely abstained from practically purifying the Kaaba of idols, and limited himself only to the ideological dawah of tawhid.

This was, thus, an early example set by the Prophet of choosing a peaceful method over a violent one.

2.    Firmly abiding by this peaceful principle, the Prophet carried on his preaching work in Makkah for 13 years. Yet, despite this, the Quraysh turned into his fierce opponents, so much so that their leaders plotted to kill him. Accordingly, they armed themselves with swords and surrounded his house.

This was, in effect, an open challenge to war issued to the Prophet and his companions. However, following God's guidance, the Prophet decided to avoid armed confrontation. And so, in the silence of the night, he left Makkah and secretly travelled to Madinah. This incident is known in Islamic history as the Hijrah.

The Hijrah clearly exemplifies the choice of a peaceful method, as opposed to a violent one.

3. The ‘Battle of the Trench', also known as the Battle of Ahzab, is another illustration of this sunnat of the Prophet. On this occasion, a vast number of the Prophet's opponents from different tribes assembled and marched towards Madinah in order to attack it. This was an open challenge to war on their part. However, in order to avoid war, the Prophet arranged for a trench to be dug around the town. This served as a buffer against the attackers. And so, the Quraysh army, having spent just a few days on the other side of the trench, turned back in retreat.

Making this trench, too, was an example of the Prophet's choosing a peaceful option, as opposed to a violent one.

4. The Treaty of Hudaybiyyah is also an example of this policy of the Prophet. The Prophet and his companions wanted to enter Makkah and perform the Umrah or minor pilgrimage, but they were stopped by the leaders of Makkah at a place called Hudaybiyyah and were told to go back to Madinah. The Quraysh said that they would not allow them to enter Makkah at any cost.

This was, in other words, a challenge to war on the part of the Quraysh. Had the Prophet proceeded towards Makkah in accordance with his plan of performing the Umrah, it was certain that armed confrontation with the Quraysh would have broken out. However, he ended his journey at Hudaybiyyah. There, he entered into a peace treaty with the Quraysh by unilaterally accepting their conditions, and then he returned to Madinah.

This is yet another clear example of the Prophet choosing a peaceful method over a violent one.

5.    This same sunnat or practice of the Prophet was also exemplified in the victory over Makkah. On this occasion, he was accompanied by 10,000 devoted companions. They could certainly have successfully fought the Quraysh. However, instead of using force, the Prophet chose to give a demonstration of force. He did not set out with this 10,000-strong army by making an announcement and then set about fighting the Quraysh and capturing Makkah. Instead, what he did was that he made preparations for the journey in complete secrecy and travelled along with his companions to Makkah and silently entered the town. His entry into Makkah was so sudden that the Quraysh were unable to make any preparations against him, and so Makkah was won over without any bloody confrontation.

This, too, is an example of the Prophet's choice of a peaceful, over a violent, method.

These examples prove that not only in ordinary conditions, but also in extreme emergency situations, the Prophet adopted the principle of peace, as opposed to war. All his successes are practical examples of this very sunnat of peace.

As indicated above, in Islam peace is the general commandment, while war is only a rare exception, to be resorted to only when it becomes an absolutely unavoidable compulsion. Keep this principle in mind and survey the world today. You will find that the modern age is completely different from the world of ancient times in this regard. In the past, the use of violent methods was a common or general practice, while adopting peaceful methods was an extremely difficult thing to do. However, today the situation has completely changed. In today's world, violent methods have become completely undesirable and unacceptable. In contrast, peaceful methods are now the only acceptable option. Moreover, today, peaceful methods now enjoy very strong intellectual and practical supports, that have made them extremely powerful and effective.

These supports for peaceful methods are very many—for instance, the right to express one's views, the possibilities of widely disseminating one's views using modern means of communications, employing the power of the media in one's favour, and so on. These modern transformations have made peaceful methods both much more popular, and, at the same time, much more effective, options.

As mentioned earlier, the Prophet's sunnat or practice was that when peaceful methods are available in practice, these methods alone must be used for the Islamic movement, and violent struggle should be abandoned. In today's context, because of the vast transformations that have taken place, not only are peaceful methods now freely available, but also, on the basis of the supporting factors mentioned above, they have become much more effective. It can be safely said, without any fear of exaggeration, that today, violent methods have not only become difficult but that they are also completely useless in practical terms. In contrast, peaceful methods are far easier to adopt and also very effective.

No longer is the use of peaceful methods a question of choosing between two possible options—peaceful versus violent. Rather, the peaceful method is now the only possible and effective option. And so, it is absolutely correct to say that violent methods must now be abandoned in practice. They should be, in the language of the Shariah, regarded as mansukh, or abrogated. The followers of Islam are now left, at the practical level, with only one method to adopt—and that, without any doubt whatsoever, is the peaceful method, unless such changes take place in prevailing conditions that once again change the rules that apply in this regard.

It is true that in the past, violent methods were used on some occasions, but these were only a choice compelled by the conditions of the age in which the Prophet lived. But since, as a result of changes in the age, no longer does any such compulsion exist, the choice of violent methods must now be considered to be unnecessary and not in consonance with the Prophet's sunnat. In the changed conditions of today, only peaceful methods must be used.

An instructive example from recent times in this regard is the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Because of the changes our times have witnessed that are referred to here, it was possible for Mahatma Gandhi to engage in a full-fledged political struggle and succeed. And all of this happened by adhering, from start to finish, to non-violent methods and peaceful activism.

According to a well-known principle of fiqh or Muslim jurisprudence, certain rules can or should be modified to suit the change of time and place. This accepted principle of fiqh demands that when times have changed, one must, if need be, seek the re-application of relevant Shariah commandments in accordance with the prevailing conditions. This principle of fiqh applies as much to issues of war as it does to many other matters. It, too, demands that violent methods should now be abandoned and that peaceful methods alone be considered legitimate according to the Shariah.

Contemporary Self-Styled Jihadi Movements

Today, in many countries across the world, Muslims are engaged in violent movements in the name of jihad. But the fact is that no movement can become a jihad simply because its flag-bearers give it that name. An action can be considered an Islamic jihad only if and when it completely fulfills the conditions that Islam has established for jihad. Without these conditions of jihad being fulfilled, a movement cannot be a jihad in actual fact. Rather, it is what is condemned in the Quran as fasad, or corruption and chaos. Those who are engaged in such activities will not gain the rewards meant for those who participate in jihad. Instead, they will deserve only punishment.

I have discussed in considerable detail in several of my books the various conditions for jihad in the sense of qital or war. Here, I wish to clarify just one point. And that is that jihad in the sense of war does not have the same status as individual actions such as prayer and fasting. Instead, it is an action that has wholly to do with the state.
This status of jihad in the sense of war is very clearly explained in the Quran and Hadith. For instance, the Quran (4:83) ordains that if an atmosphere of fear is created because of an enemy, people should not launch action against it on their own. Instead, they should turn to those who are in authority—that is, people who are in-charge of the government, so that the latter can properly understand the situation and take appropriate and necessary steps.

This Quranic verse tells us that in the event of fear (a situation of war), it is not permissible for members of the general public to act on their own. The only thing they can do is to leave the matter with the rulers and assist the latter in the actions they may take.

According to a hadith report in the Sahih al-Bukhari, the Prophet is said to have declared that the leader is a shield; war is undertaken under his leadership; and protection is procured through him. From this we learn that military defence must always be conducted under the ruler's leadership. The general Muslim public must obey their rulers in this regard. Lending them their support, they must help them in their efforts.

This issue is one on which there is a consensus among the fuqaha or scholars of Muslim jurisprudence. Perhaps no noted scholar of Muslim jurisprudence has any objection to it. According to the unanimous consensus of the fuqaha, only an established government can declare war. Or, as it is said in Arabic, ar-raheelu lil-imam, that is to say, the declaration of war is the sole prerogative of the ruler. Non-governmental actors, including groups and individual members of the general public, do not have the right to make such a declaration. 

The fact of the matter is that war is something that requires great organisation. It is only an established state that can engage in such an organised action. This is why only states can engage in war. It is not at all legitimate for members of the public to initiate war.

In present times, in numerous countries Muslims are engaged in violent confrontation. But almost without exception, these are not Islamic jihads, but, rather, what is called fasad, or anarchy. This is because none of these so-called jihads has been launched by an established government. All of them have been launched and are being carried out by what in today's parlance are called non-governmental organisations. If some of their so-called jihadi activities enjoy the support of some Muslim government, this support is being provided in a clandestine and undeclared manner. According to the Shariah, a Muslim government has the right to engage in jihad only if it openly and explicitly announces this. According to Islam, it is unlawful for a Muslim government to engage in war without an open declaration of it.

The violent activities presently engaged in by Muslims in the name of jihad in various parts of the world are of two types: guerilla war and proxy war. Both of these are, without any doubt, wholly illegitimate in Islam. Guerilla war is illegitimate in Islam because it is conducted by non-governmental actors, and not an established government. And proxy war is illegitimate because it is engaged in by a government without making an open declaration of hostilities, which is not legitimate in Islam.

Three Types of Jihad

Islamic jihad, properly understood, is a constructive and continuous action or process. It continues uninterrupted throughout the life of a true believer. It has three aspects:

1. Jihad-e Nafs: This is the struggle against one's negative feelings and improper desires and persevering to remain steadfast on the path that is pleasing to God.

2. Jihad-e Dawah: This is the struggle to convey the message of God to all of humankind and to make utmost effort for this cause with feelings of compassion and well-wishing for all. This is an exalted task, and so it is called jihad-e kabir or ‘great jihad' in the Quran (25:52).

3. Jihad in the face of enmity: In the past, this jihad was actually a peaceful one, and so it remains now as well. 

In this sense, then, jihad is a peaceful struggle, and not a violent one.

There are numerous similar Quranic verses and hadith reports that clearly tell us that the act of jihad is basically a peaceful action. It is a form of struggle for a Divine task that is conducted within peaceful limits. The correct translation of jihad, then, would be ‘peaceful struggle'.

The Importance of Peace

The Quran (4:128) says:

          […] reconciliation is best.

What is reconciliation? It is but another name for the results of peace. Where there is reconciliation, there is peace. Where there is no reconciliation, there is no peace. In this sense, then, it can be said that in Islam peace is thesummum bonum, or the greatest good.

Generally, people think that justice is very important. But in fact justice is just a concept or notion. The real question is how this concept should be made a reality. There is only one way for this—and that is through peace. If peace is established, numerous opportunities can be opened up, which, when availed of, can lead to justice. An individual or group can secure justice only when it recognises available opportunities and wisely avails of them.

Across the world today, there are people who are engaged in violent conflicts in order to secure justice. Yet, all of them have failed to get the justice that they seek. There is only one reason for this—and that is because their methods are wrong. In this world, the question of the method you use to get what you want is of utmost importance. Even if your goal or purpose is good, you cannot achieve it if the means you adopt are wrong. This is a universal rule, and no individual or group is an exception as far as this is concerned.

A group or community that seeks justice must first establish peace among its own members. Peace is so important that it must be established at any cost. It can never be established on a bilateral basis. Rather, it is always on the basis of unilateral patience. There is simply no other way to establish peace.

The scheme of nature is based on opportunities. Nature provides us with plenty of opportunities. An atmosphere of hate and violence closes off these opportunities. Hate and violence act as trapdoors. To avail of the many opportunities that nature provides us, one needs to first put an end to hate and violence, to seal these trapdoors. And when this happens, one is deluged with a flood of all sorts of opportunities that one can avail of in order to achieve one's goals.

These opportunities can help you in both the secular and the religious spheres. They can enable you to engage in efforts to advance educationally and economically. You can also avail of these opportunities for religious purposes—to invite people to God. Engaging in this work of dawah, you can become eligible for Divine reward.

The ‘Beautification' of Violence

Violence is in every sense a destructive action. The whole of human history is a testimony to the fact that no individual or group has ever secured any positive success through violence. Whenever an individual or group has taken to violence, it has only met with destruction, and not with any real benefit or progress. Yet, despite this, why is it that some people routinely resort to violence? This is because of what is called ‘Satanic beautification'. The Quran (15:39) tells us that Satan has a special method—of portraying a wrong action in seemingly beautiful words. Satan gives strife the name of ‘reform'. In this way, he influences peoples' minds. He entangles them in the false belief that whatever they are doing is not violence, but, rather, a holy jihad. It is the path to martyrdom that will take them straight to heaven, he tells them.

Falling prey in this way to Satanic ‘beautification', people take to violence. They engage in wrong actions, and Satan deludes them into believing that what they are doing is good.

There is only one way to save oneself from this Satanic ‘beautification'—and that is, to judge one's actions in terms of their results. One should realise that violent actions that lead to destruction and that destroy available opportunities are a result of Satan's ‘beautification'. One must, therefore, implore God for His forgiveness and abandon this path.

Violence in itself is completely undesirable. It can never bring about any reform. It only works to inflict more damage. It always emerges from hate and enmity. One must cleanse one's mind of hate and enmity, and then Satan will not be able to exercise control over you.

No Reaction in Islam

If you ask people who are engaged in violence, whether as individuals or as members of groups, why they are involved in destructive activities, they will answer that their violence is a ‘natural reaction'. If an individual or group is oppressed or denied justice, they will say, there is bound to be a reaction. And in so reacting, they will explain, they might even go to the extent of taking to arms and even suicide-bombing. If their violence is to end, they will tell you, the oppression by, and injustice of, the other party must first cease. Otherwise, they will contend, their violence will continue. If this reaction of theirs is to stop, they will say, the action of the other party must stop first. There is no use, they will argue, preaching only to them to give up violence.

This philosophy of reaction is completely unnatural. The fundamental error people who argue like this make is that they have adopted a wrong yardstick for their actions. The proper yardstick to evaluate an action is to evaluate the results that emerge from it. A proper or appropriate action is one is that produces beneficial results for the one who engages in it. If it does not produce such results, it must definitely be given up.

Actions can either produce beneficial results or prove to be counter-productive for those who engage in them. There is no third alternative. The best form of action is one that produces positive results. An action that does not produce such results only further magnifies your problem. And magnifying one's problem is not something that a wise person would want to do.

To emotionally react to something, including someone else's actions, is, then, not the proper response to it. The proper response is to take stock of the prevailing situation, and, guided by a positive mindset, to plan one's course of action in a manner geared to producing positive results. Instead of reacting through confrontation and violence, one should respond in a constructive manner. This is the proper Islamic approach and method.

The Lesser and the Greater Jihad

According to a hadith, when the Prophet and his companions returned to Madinah from a battle, the Prophet said:raja?na min al-jihad il-asghar ila al-jihad il-akbar. (Kanz al-Ummal) That is, “We have returned from a lesser jihad towards a greater jihad.” In other words, it was an announcement that the believers had come back from temporary jihad to permanent jihad. By temporary jihad is meant defensive jihad, whose necessity might arise only occasionally. By permanent jihad is meant spiritual jihad, which continues non-stop in every person's life.

This point is narrated in another hadith report in this way: jahidu ahwa?akum kama tujahiduna a?da?akum. That is, “Do jihad with your desires as you do jihad with your opponents.”

In Islam, fighting against one's enemy is an extremely temporary act, whose need arises when someone has attacked a Muslim state. This is a defensive jihad, and only some trained people participate in it, not the entire Muslim community. In contrast to this, jihad against one's nafs or self is something that pertains to an individual, and goes on throughout the life of a true believer.

For instance, it is an act of merit that when a Muslim meets someone, he greets him with the phrase Assalamu Alaikum, which means ‘peace be upon you.' These words are so lofty that according to a hadith, one who greets another this way is given the good tidings of Paradise. But in this world, where we live along with many other people, we are repeatedly face bitter experiences. On account of this, every person develops complaints against, and negative feelings for, others, which he nurses in his heart. In such a situation, only a person who has already purified his heart of all negative emotions and is genuinely concerned for the well-being of others can genuinely wish Assalamu Alaikum to someone else. This task is very difficult. It requires the enormous efforts that are termed as ‘jihad'.

There is a tradition, recorded in the Sahih Muslim, according to which the Prophet said: Alhamdulillah tamla ul-mizan. This means, “The word Alhamdulillah (‘Thanks be to God') fills up the scale.”

On the Day of Judgment, one's good deeds and bad deeds will be weighed on the scale set up by God. According to the above-mentioned tradition, the scale will be filled up for a person who says the word Alhamdulillah. That is, his good deeds will outweigh his bad deeds.

This is no simple matter. To genuinely say Alhamdulillah requires a great intellectual effort. To say Alhamdulillah is to express gratitude for God's blessings. Man receives these blessings in various forms all the time. Every person receives them without any effort on his part. People generally become habituated to them, because of which they do not consciously recognise them as blessings.

In such a situation, to genuinely say Alhamdulillah requires one to engage in an intellectual jihad. One has to bring into action one's powers of thinking and bring what is in the subconscious into the conscious mind. One needs to give a new direction to one's feelings. One needs to struggle as a mujahid, or one who engages in jihad, to awaken one's intellectual powers. Only after this can he utter such words as can fill up the scale on the Day of Judgment.

Human beings have various kinds of desires and mental states, such as greed, superiority complex, scorn, impatience, anger, revenge, and so on. Often, people remain dominated by these negative states. In addition to this, they get deeply attached to certain things—for example, wealth, fame, their children, and so on.

People oscillate between negative and positive emotions, hate and love. Their thinking is shaped by these emotions. Consciously or otherwise, they mould their lives according to these emotions. Given this, it is undoubtedly an act of jihad for someone to continuously make God the focus of his or her attention and to not deviate from the straight path. This is the immensely difficult task that is called in the Hadith as jihad-e nafs, or jihad against one's self.

Summary

The Arabic word ‘jihad' means precisely what is called ‘peaceful struggle' in English. And what is meant by this peaceful struggle is basically the dawah effort, as the Quran (25:52) says:

[…] so do not yield to those who deny the truth, but strive with the utmost strenuousness by means of this [Quran, to convey its message to them].

This verse refers to communicating the message of the Quran to people through peaceful efforts.

Dawah is essentially an ideological struggle. It is a very wide-ranging effort. It has various demands. When efforts are made to engage in dawah together with all its necessary demands, it becomes a major struggle. This is why dawahwork is called ‘jihad'.

Jihad means precisely this. However, sometimes the word ‘jihad' is also used in an extended sense to denote war. But this is only an extended meaning. The commandments and etiquette of jihad and war are totally different. The actual aim of the jihad of dawah is to transform the other party's thinking, whereas, in contrast, war aims at the extermination of the other party.

A basic difference between jihad and war is that jihad in the sense of dawah is a general commandment. The dawahjihad has to be engaged in at all times and under all circumstances. The objective of the jihad of dawah is to convey the message of God to all people. Dawah is a constructive action, based on wishing well for others, and this must carry on at all times, in every generation. In contrast to this, jihad in the sense of war is a temporary action, engaged in only when another country militarily attacks a Muslim country. The responsibility for countering this attack does not lie with individuals. Rather, it is the sole responsibility of an established state that makes necessary arrangements for this purpose.

Most Islamic acts are governed by conditions. Jihad in the sense of war is also subject to certain conditions. Present-day Muslim movements that are fighting in the name of jihad do not fulfill these conditions. Merely labeling one's actions as jihad does not mean that they qualify as jihad. In this matter, it is important to refer to Islamic teachings about jihad, rather than form an opinion through the actions of certain Muslims. Muslims should be judged in the light of Islamic teachings, and not vice versa.

Urban Slums: A Death Trap For Poor Children

Valentina Ieri

It’s called the urban survival gap – fuelled by the growing inequality between rich and poor in both developing and developed countries – and it literally determines whether millions of infants will live or die before their fifth birthday. Save the Children’s annual report on the State of the World’s Mothers 2015 ranks 179 countries and concludes that that “for babies born in the big city, it’s the survival of the richest.”

Speaking from the launch at U.N. Headquarters, Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children, said that for the first time in history, more families are moving into cities to give their children a better life. But this shift from a rural to an urban society has increased disparities within cities.

“Our report reveals a devastating child survival divide between the haves and have-nots, telling a tale of two cities among urban communities around the world, including the United States,” Miles added.

The document estimates that 54 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and by 2050 the concentration of people in cities will increase to 66 percent, especially in Asia and Africa.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that nearly a billion people live in urban slums, shantytowns, on sidewalks, under bridges and along railroad tracks.

While women living in cities may have easier access to primary health care, including hospitals, many governments have been unable to keep up with this rapid urban growth. One-third of all urban residents – over 860 million people – live in slums where they face lack of clean water and sanitation, alongside rampant malnutrition.

Miles said that despite the progress made on reducing urban under-five mortality around the world, the survival divide between rich and poor children in cities is growing even faster than that of poor children in rural areas.

In most of the developing nations surveyed, children living at the bottom 20 percent of the socioeconomic ladder are twice as likely to die as children in the richest 20 percent, and in some cities, the disparity is much higher.

Robert Clay, vice president of the health and nutrition at Save the Children, explained that urban poor are more transient, as they tend to have unsteady jobs and living situations. In rural areas, many people at least have land and food, and a stronger support system within the community.
“In urban areas this doesn’t exist. Urban cities are overcrowded by many ethnic groups living side by side so it’s a bit harder to bond, communicate and build trust. It’s the hidden population that is more problematic to reach,” Clay told IPS.

He said lack of data makes it harder for charities like Save the Children, or national and municipal governments, to access these marginalized communities.

The 10 developing countries with the largest child survival divide are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, India, Madagascar, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda and Vietnam.

Among the 10 worst wealthy capital cities for child survival, out of the 25 studied, Washington D.C. (U.S.) was number one, followed by Vienna (Austria), Bern (Switzerland), Warsaw (Poland), and Athens (Greece).

By looking at the mother’s index rankings of 2015, based on five criteria – maternal health, children’s well-being, educational status, economic status and women political status, Save the Children says that conditions for mothers and their children in the 10 bottom-ranked countries – all but two of them in West and Central Africa – are dramatic, as nations struggle to provide the basic infrastructure for the health and wellness of their citizens.

“On average, in these countries one woman out of 30 dies from pregnancy-related causes, and one child out of eight dies before his or her fifth birthday,” Miles said.

Globally, under-five mortality rates have declined, from 90 to 46 deaths per 1,000 live births. However, these numbers, says the organisation, mask the fact that child survival is strictly linked to family wealth, and miss addressing the conditions of poverty and unhealthy life of slums.

Positively, the report has also uncovered some successful solutions found by governments to reduce maternal and infant mortality, and close the inequality gap between rich and poor children in their own countries. The most successful countries are Ethiopia (Addis Ababa), Egypt (Cairo), Guatemala (Guatemala City), Uganda (Kampala), Philippines (Manila) and Cambodia (Phnom Penh).

“Ethiopia, which recently had accelerated economic growth, managed to develop effective targeting policies, and provided accessible preventive and curative health care for poor mothers and children,” Clay said.

“[Ethiopia] should be a blueprint for other countries, which should bring access to communities in slums so that local people are not left behind,” he underlined, adding that hiring urban outreach workers who can go into the communities, speak the language of the people living there and understand their conditions and needs is vital.

Save the Children is calling on national governments worldwide to find new policies and plans to invest in a universal maternal and infant health care, develop cross-sectoral urban plans, and reduce urban disadvantages, and to increase the focus on the Sustainable Development Goals in the post-2015 development agenda, concluded Miles.

Suddenly, Baltimore

Ralph Nader

Suddenly, the mass media is writing about or televising the conditions in West Baltimore. Conditions that Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, summarized as decades long “suffocating poverty, dysfunction and despair.”

Suddenly, reporters and camera teams are discovering Baltimore’s inner city—crumbling or abandoned housing; mass unemployment; too many merchants gouging the locals (the poor pay more); too many drug dealers; schools, roads and sidewalks in serious disrepair; debris everywhere; lack of municipal services (which are provided to the wealthier areas of the city); and, as always, grinding poverty and its many vicious circle consequences.

Suddenly, media highlights a report by Harvard economists putting Baltimore County last among the worst counties in the U.S. for economic mobility.

Suddenly, The Atlantic pays attention to the reporting by the Baltimore Sun of police brutality in Baltimore against people and communities of color. “A grandmother’s bones were broken. A pregnant woman was violently thrown to the ground. Millions of dollars were paid out to numerous victims of police brutality.”

Suddenly, the Washington Post reports that life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where the innocent, young Freddie Gray lived (slain by the police for making eye contact and running) is shorter than in North Korea! The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health gets press for concluding that Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China and South Africa.

Suddenly, the aggressive arresting practices of the local police and their climate of constant fear are the subject of detailed media presentations. Interviews with grieving, frightened residents in the neighborhoods shock viewers who are unfamiliar with Baltimore. Suddenly, viewers and readers come to the realization that these people of color are all human beings who for too long have had their plight overlooked and ignored.

Baltimore is an example of the harsh conditions created by a combination of white flight and loss of economic opportunities due to a shift of manufacturing off our shores to those of other countries that will allow their citizens to work for a smattering of pennies (facilitated by trade agreements like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization). The gap between rich and poor, between visibility and invisibility, is one of the largest in the country—a recurrent tale of two cities in modern America.

Suddenly, we see major reporting on the thousands of lead-poisoned children in Baltimore. Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, says “a child who was poisoned with lead [from lead-based paint] is seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system.”

Our first black president laments the cycle of poverty, but calls protestors who destroyed property, not lives, “thugs.” This is the same president who has spent tens of billions of dollars illegally attacking communities with civilians (“collateral damage”) in foreign countries. Such monies could have rebuilt our devastated cities, promoted programs and employment to help those in need in these very cities, and enforced laws against the corrupt political officials, and commercial and street predators who profit from the powerless poor and exploit poverty programs.

West Baltimore received a visit from the new Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, who said “we’re here to hold your hands and provide support,” without specifying resources beyond helping the city improve its police department.

Hundreds of pages in newspapers and hundreds of hours of television time were devoted to cover what the Reverend Donte L. Hickman Sr. called “the deterioration, dilapidation and disinvestment.”

And what brought the media attention? A couple hundred young men smashing windows and burning some stores, buildings and cars. Young men like Freddie Gray die often at the hands of some violent police in America’s inner cities without any subsequent media coverage or remedial action, but it took protests, civil unrest and fires to finally illuminate the interest of the nation’s media. How shameful! And how predictable will be the inevitable official inaction by the ruling classes once the embers dim, leaving the neighborhoods in despair.

When the poor neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. erupted in 1968, the great FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson said: “a riot is somebody talking. A riot is a man crying out: listen to me, mister. There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you, and you are not listening.”

If the plutocrats of America do not wake up to the daily, acidic results of excessive greed coupled with excessive concentration of power over the people, they will be fomenting what they abhor the most—cascading instability and disruption. In their parlance—that’s bad for business.

Trinity: 70 Years Later

Janette D. Sherman

It was 70 years ago, on July 16, 1945, that the first atomic bomb, named Trinity, was exploded at the White Sands Proving Ground, the nuclear test site near Alamagordo, NM. It was an event that changed world history forever, and created new health and security threats that still plague all life on this planet.

Details of Trinity have been documented before, but merit a recap, since memories may fade with the passage of so many years. The collision of two forces – the discovery of atomic fission and the rise of Nazi Germany – resulted in the creation of the Manhattan Project in late 1942. Fearful that the Germans would develop and use

a nuclear weapon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the U.S. army to develop such a weapon first. Working furiously, scientists had developed enough nuclear material for a bomb in less than three years. Some were worried that Germany would develop a bomb, but historians have discounted that, and the country was defeated, but American forces were still engaged against Japan.

Before a bomb could be used, a test was needed. A 100-foot tower for the bomb and two trenches for observers were constructed.

The trenches were 10 and 17 miles away, as nobody really knew how powerful the blast would be.

At 5:29 local time, a deafening roar went up, and a blinding flash illuminated the desert, visible 200 miles away. A gaping crater 10 feet deep and 1100 feet in diameter was formed. The shock wave from the explosion could be felt for more than 100 miles. The yield of the plutonium-based bomb was estimated at 23,000 tons of TNT. To maintain secrecy, the Army issued a press release, stating that an “ammunition magazine” had exploded, without anyone being injured.

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the team that created the bomb, later remembered that the blast brought to mind a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita:

“If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once in the sky

That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. . .

I am become Death

The shatterer of Worlds”

The debris from Trinity quickly rose 35,000 feet into the air, and moved northeast with prevailing winds. Scientists didn’t track the fallout with much precision, but the cloud traveled an extensive distance. Seven decades later, the residual radiation at the site is still about 10 times higher than before.

A number of scientists argued to have international observers to witness the bomb text, but that view was essentially over-ruled by   Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, as it was called. Three weeks later, following through with the view that “if you’ve got it, use it”, Groves ordered nuclear bombs be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which devastated countless civilians on August 6^th, and 9^th.

Current public discussions that began with Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue. The test stands as the first Weapon of Mass Destruction in history, proving that large-scale casualties could occur in just seconds. It also was a prototype for subsequent atom bomb tests; the U.S. and former Soviet Union conducted 422 atmospheric tests – with the equivalent yield of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Not until the 1963 treaty signed by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev were all tests consigned to below-ground locations. Although virtually all tests worldwide ceased three decades ago, concern of a resurgence of nuclear tests and subsequent use in war is still prevalent, vis a vis North Korean, Pakistan and India and more recently, Iran.

Perhaps greater risk is that of the mining. processing, fabrication and disposal of nuclear materials. To produce material for a bomb, massive efforts to convert uranium to bomb-ready material took place at facilities in Oak Ridge Tennessee and Hanford Washington, the latter one of the most contaminated places in the US. These operations generated enormous amounts of over 100 radioactive chemicals, not found in nature, which served no purpose other than waste.

The critical need to produce the bomb as fast as possible for national security purposes relegated safety, health and public knowledge to a secondary role which continues today. So too did the program look for ways to use the radioactive materials it had assembled.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations spawned the drive to build nuclear power reactors. Promises such as: “too cheap to meter,” as stated by Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss created caused a rush of construction. President Richard Nixon predicted the U.S. would eventually have 1,000 reactors, but high costs of construction and operation, plus safety concerns epitomized by the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima meltdowns have led scientists and the public to question the ethics of those who support adding nuclear power plants to our already contaminated earth.

Today, 104 reactors in the U.S. produce just 19% of the nation’s electricity. No new reactors have been ordered since 1978.

Nuclear power reactors are another story. Capitalizing on environmental concerns caused by carbon emissions, nuclear industry leaders have spent the better part of a decade pushing to keep aging reactors operating and to build new ones. Finding little interest from Wall Street financiers for these projects long before the current economic downturn, these leaders turned to Washington instead, but so far with little support.

The same cocktail of 100-plus radioactive chemicals in the Trinity blast – Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Iodine-131, and Plutonium-239 – is produced by nuclear reactors. Each causes cancer, and is harmful to life, from plants, to insects, birds, mammals and humans. The average nuclear plant stores the equivalent of hundreds of Trinity bombs as nuclear waste, and this waste must be kept out of the environment for thousands of years. President Obama should be applauded for his efforts to reduce nuclear weapons proliferation, but he should not make a distinction between weapons and reactors. Both are a result of that tremendous blast in New Mexico 70 years ago, and both must be controlled in the name of life on this earth.

The Disease of Fear

Jason Neidleman

“Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was unfortunately wrong about the sources of bigotry and wrong about the antidote for it. Education is not the antidote for bigotry, because bigotry is not the disease of ignorance. Or, perhaps it is better to say, racism is not only the disease of ignorance. It is equally the disease of fear, and, fear, unlike ignorance, cannot be overcome by education alone.

Because it operates subconsciously, fear can persist long after the beliefs that inspired it have been disproven and discarded. As the current cover of Time magazine illustrates so vividly, the transformation of racial views in America has not produced a corresponding change in the lived experience of most African Americans. The practices and institutions that sustain racial privilege have outlasted the racist ideas that originally justified and sustained them.

There are many reasons for this, both psychological and institutional, but fear is one that stands out, particularly with respect to police brutality. It is one thing to understand intellectually that racism is morally repugnant and philosophically untenable. It is something else to act on that understanding when you are consumed by fear.

Even though the police officers involved in instances of violence typically describe their fears in great detail (for obvious reasons), our public discourse shies away from discussion of the subconscious dimensions of racism.

We are reluctant to think of racism as a problem that penetrates into the American psyche. We would much rather think of it as a lingering remnant of a historical injustice. We would rather focus on supposedly isolated incidents of cultural racism, which allow us to indulge ourselves in a ritual purification. The perpetrators apologize, attribute their behavior to ignorance, and allow us to return safely to a complacency that does not interrogate the deeper forces that structure racism in America. We are left with an immoral society but no moral culpability, just a few unfortunate scapegoats. We are left with what race scholars have taken to calling “racism without racists.”

It is understandable that, like Thomas Jefferson, we prefer to think of racism as a problem of ignorance. After all, if the problem is ignorance, then it can be solved by education. If, however, the problem operates at both a conscious and a subconscious level, then the problem cannot be solved by education alone. As James Baldwin said 50 years ago, “we are unconsciously controlled by history.” Four centuries of white supremacy leaves deposits in the subconscious as well as the conscious mind.

Fear of blackness was useful to the regime of white supremacy; it helped sustain and justify it. However, it is proving to be particularly stubborn and inconvenient now that we are engaged in the project of undoing the legacy of white supremacy. While we have made substantial progress toward intellectually dismantling the ideology of white supremacy, we are having a harder time purging ourselves of the fear that was used to justify it.

If Baldwin was right, then things are much worse than Jefferson believed, much worse than most of us believe. If Baldwin was right, then overcoming ignorance about race—already a seemingly unattainable proposition—will not be enough to eliminate racism. We must also go to work on the hard wiring of the psyche; we must address what Baldwin called the “ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology.” What Baldwin communicated so profoundly is that the problem of racism is more than the disease of ignorance. It is the disease of fear, inscribed fundamentally in our sense of self.

That racism operates subconsciously as well as consciously is perhaps most strikingly evidenced by the fact that racially disparate policing does not seem to vary much based on the racial composition of the police force. In Ferguson, the police force is overwhelmingly white. Indeed, police forces across the country are disproportionately white. And yet, racially disparate policing seems to persist regardless of the composition of the police force.

We are all—black and white alike—products of the history that Baldwin references. We all carry the legacy and burden of that history with us. And, yes, education will be an important part of our response to that history. But it won’t be enough. Only integration can overcome subconscious fears, and this means much more than integration of police forces. It means integration of all aspects of social life: schools, board rooms, city councils, and, most importantly, neighborhoods. As Clarissa Rile Hayward has shown, racism persists even after racial attitudes have shifted, unless societies change the physical spaces that keep racial injustice alive.

In writing about the legacy of white supremacy, bell hooks, like Baldwin, emphasizes the psychological dimensions of white supremacy. She writes about the urgency of love, first about the urgency of black people learning to “love blackness” and then about the aspiration for a broader “beloved community” that might finally overcome the both the cultural and the institutional aspects of white supremacy. Among the many lessons to be learned from the senseless deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray and so many others is that all of us—black and white alike—must first learn to stop fearing blackness. We cannot get to love until we get past fear.

Capitalism and the British Elections

Norman Pollack

The presumed Rightist electoral victory in Britain, Toryism embracing the Conservative and Labour parties alike, may well prove a blessing in disguise, specifically, for driving a wedge into the global Western counterrevolutionary posture headed by the United States in its confrontation with Russia and China. There is a logic to geopolitical Reaction, ever fearful of socialist and/or popular currents of dissent and social change. Hence, the Cold War, and now its renewal.

It doesn’t require a Trotskyite mental set to appreciate the potential threat to world capitalism found in Cameron’s semi-autarkic stance with respect to the European Union, ultimately disruptive of the unified response needed to carry out America’s paradigm of international military, financial, and commercial hegemony, Britain its trusted partner.

Britain’s Toryism, obviously complementary to US capitalist fundamentalism, has overreached its intended role as vital, yet subordinate, to Western (aka, American) structural-ideological dominance of the world system. Why? First, because its newly-energized opposition to EU monetary and trade policies, viewed as restrictive of British expansionist claims, undermines the Union’s political-economic status in dealing with rival power centers (the much-feared decline of Europe in the face of changing global patterns), a psychological loss not to be taken lightly which only compounds resentment at the hand Cameron and Britain are playing. But second, still more important, the British move away from its participation in the Union portends dire military consequences for the Grand Alliance, i.e., marshaling support for market forces in the face of increasing socialist, nationalist, and just autonomous aspirations struggling for expression in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—with China and Russia forming a congenial setting and background for these endeavors.

Why, therefore, dire military consequences? Simply because the EU, its economic importance notwithstanding, is a surrogate, cover, stand-in, all at once, for NATO, in sum, a military alliance system, anticommunist (as that term has evolved over the decades) in inspiration, the Praetorian Guard keeping America safe from heathenish enemies lurking in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, not to say all of the Usual Suspects. Under US intervention, NATO has been stretched to its limits, so that in keeping with Cameron’s vision even that strand of cooperation is breaking down or wearing thin.

Cameron, more effectively than the almost nonexistent American Left, is nibbling away at US global supremacy, for what is America without the seeming legitimacy of NATO (and Far Eastern alliance systems)? Its power may be undiminished, but it would stand for what it essentially is in any case, without the covering fig leaf of liberal rhetoric: an unrestrained bully incapable of mutuality in world affairs. Yes, Cameron is becoming the unwanted bull in the china shop, only America does not yet realize it.

Scotland may well be instrumental in unraveling the West’s power concentration, this because quite obviously forcing Britain either to reveal its own repressive side or further watch its declining world position. In either case, the EU will have to re-think its military dimensions and might even decide on a more constructive role in world citizenship. For autarkism, to whatever degree Cameron is able to carry it, has a dynamic all its own, giving urgency to the search for peace—or risk a state of nuclear war.

It is anybody’s guess what America would do with the weakening or disintegration of EU/NATO. My own sense is that of more spirited confrontation with Russia and China, having the effect of driving them closer together, and with them, a drastic realignment of the global structure, isolating America further, and possibly without a unified Western Europe to lean on. Obama’s current pressures on behalf of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at the encirclement and weakening of China, is done with one eye on developments in Europe. He can count on Cameron, East and West, but like most of American foreign policy, still working from self-aggrandizing assumptions no longer tenable on the world scene.

Nepal: Signs of Progress, If Not Hope

Barbara Nimri Aziz

Kathmandu, Nepal.

Our night skies are still battered by the sounds never heard over Nepal before—they are the monster cargo planes departing after disgorging millions of tones and tones of relief aid. This should be a welcome disturbance. But given our tenseness, it is one more sign of the crisis enveloping us. Tremors too continue. Some stop us in our tracks midday; others awaken us from sleep, setting off sustained bursts of barking feral dogs. Tremors immediately following the quake were really upsetting—menacing—and remain never less than threatening. Gradually, against instinct, we accept advice from scientists saying these waves of the earth will continue to decline and are not, as first supposed, a resumption of the great upheaval of 13 days ago.

As I move through the city, I note signs of progress, if not hope. Not far from my residence, at the corner of Dallu Bridge, there was a sleek, orange crane probing earth, lifting parts of homes in search of victims for 3 days. It’s gone now. Every time I pass there, I note people paused on the bridge to stare onto the scar –a quarter acre crater of rubble, twisted iron, concrete slabs. What most startles me is the clash of terror and calm:—a regular line of buildings, attached rows of shops and residences, then suddenly, inserted among them, either yawning space vomiting its gnarled mass of brick and rubble, or a building suspended at 60 degrees, with innards of people’s private lives spilling out of cleft kitchens and bedrooms. Like a mutilated corpse suspended among a cluster of office workers continuing their routine.

To me that’s more unsettling than a field of crushed houses. Maybe because it speaks to the utter irrationality and randomness of the quake’s fury. The bizarre and threatening imposes itself into the normal. Tornadoes have the same effect, I imagine.

Talking about normal, life’s far, far from routine. A fraction of customary activity pulses through Kathmandu city. After endless complaints and apprehension, we appreciate those trucks, small and large, heaped with sacks of food, stacks of tarpaulin and cases of water loading at depots across the city, then setting out on their missions. Nirvaya, a musician and student of English, tells me he’s about to depart with friends for nearby Godavari to assist victims there. Dr. Mingmar and his Belgian counterpart have departed by road with a field hospital; they will deal with hill slides and impassible roads as they proceed behind bulldozers, then set up medical centers in villages awaiting help. Kathmandu residents emerging intact from their daze and disorientation realize that fellow citizens in those places, most within 100 miles radius of the capital, are today’s priority; they may feel heartened that they in turn can offer succor to others.

Foreign rescuers are fewer, although I suppose overseas media are plentiful. Nepal’s journalists are doing a terrific job in TV and print. I heard that NYTimes declared “Nepal is flattened”. If so, it’s untrue, and irresponsible. Why exaggerate? It’s bad enough. Here, most talk is of government ineptness—officials demand that everything be channeled through the government while its ministries are largely incapable of coordinating supplies or setting priorities. (More about government and governance later.) Meanwhile, some basic facts (I’m still a social scientist) starting with population statistics:

Kathmandu has as many as 5 million (possibly 6) inhabitants, not the 2.5M reported by foreign press (probably taken from official sources, since true figures would expose the scandal that is Nepal’s administration). Over the past 15-20 years the city has exploded with rural migrants; they’ve settled here, living on remittances from mainly sons and brothers (making up the 3+ million who work as unskilled laborers in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi, etc.) (Source: Pitambar Sharma, “Some Aspects of Nepal’s Social Demography, Census 2011 Update”, 2014) These people left fields fallow to live as consumers, increasing Nepal’s dependence on imported food and everything else (from India and China). They live in poor conditions, but their presence increases property values and enhances the income of the original owners and retailers. Sound familiar? Kathmandu city is also home to hundreds of 1000s of Indian migrants, not really legal, but who nevertheless become an integral part of the economy.

As the capital’s population has quadrupled in the last 25 years, no new infrastructure has been built by the govt. We still live on a water-elect-waste disposal-road system build for a million or less. (Foreigners, including parasitic iNGOs, have their own fully supplied compounds. “Tamel”, the tourist business district serving the lower-strata foreign backpackers is a cluster of 1000s of curio, art and cloth shops, trekking suppliers, 2-star lodges, restaurants, etc. Those hundreds of cozy hotels drill private wells (illegal) to provide showers and western modern toilet facilities for oblivious clients.)

Foreign press may accept the 2.5 M figure since those internal migrants and Indians aren’t here at present. Many are Nepalese who, as noted, returned to their villages to care for families and inspect lands/houses. We’re told that almost all the Indian workers departed on busses and by planes provided by the Indian government. I don’t know if this exodus was encouraged by Nepali officials, ie: if it was a plan. But the result is, in the short term, favorable. During normal times the city is filthy, strewn with waste, choked by dirty air, clogged by traffic, etc. Electricity is normally cut half a day; (called “load shedding”, it switches from neighborhood to neighborhood for hours at a time in waves across the city with its schedule published in the dailies, and guess what—there’s a phone app for it!) Today’s depopulation greatly reduces stress on electric and water; so there’s less likelihood of disease (from accumulating garbage), less chance food shortages and resulting high prices, hoarding, and panic.

Municipal water supply is totally, totally inadequate anytime. One needs a Kathmandu guide book to identify and manage the categories of water—drinkable, teeth-gargling, bathing, cooking, dish-washing, clothes laundering, toilet flushing– and anticipate the weekly hour when municipal tap (non-drinkable?) arrives. That’s 60 minutes- a week: Wednesday at 5 am in our street. This isn’t an earthquake condition! It’s normal during the 8 non-monsoon months. (Foreign visitors including NGO-types never face this.)

Nepal has ~28M people. That means one in five resides in the capital—a heavy load for a city with shoddy infrastructure. Then an earthquake hits!

Today, by their absence, we’re feeling the critical place of these city migrants in our routine. Because young men who drive taxis left for their villages immediately after the quake, taxis are few. It’s difficult to get a haircut, I’m told, since it’s Indian migrants who do the barbering, and they’ve left. Indians are the scrap dealers, gatherings and sorting waste paper and plastics for recycling; so we expect to see a resulting accumulation of waste in the streets in coming weeks. Indian migrants are also the main vegetables and fruit vendors who sell door to door and at residential corners.

(Remember the night-watchmen who turned me away from Mandep and Northfield hotels? That was likely because most service staff, village boys, had left for home villages.)

How many NGOs (international and local) do you think Nepal hosts? 34,000 is the estimate given me by Professor Rai. (Small wonder the government doesn’t function.) With this quake, NGOs may increase — offering still more imported experts a handsome living, easy access to mountain trekking on their ample free time, and envy and admiration from folks back home. (Some of you have heard me rant about this scandal.)

There you are–basics to help evaluate international press reports. Meanwhile you can have a useful political sketch from my anthropology colleague David Gellner (I’m still listening and reading in search of a voice– is it called leadership?– that might emerge at a historical moment like this one. Where is our Nepali poet, our sports hero, our film star, celebrated author, lama or priest or shaman, our mountaineer, our professor or millionaire investor, whose words will echo off majestic peaks and roll through villages, down terraced valleys to offer these 28 million souls the vision, the strength, the unity and motivation they need? A decade ago, in an essentially bloodless coup, these people rid the nation of an incompetent despot king, and with a death toll of hardly more than 14,000 over 6 years, carried out a successful rural-based socialist rebellion to overturn a one-party royal dictatorship and launch democracy (without US interference—in fact the Americans and British supported the ruler). And, don’t forget: Nepal produces capable, honorable dependable young women and men who earn respect wherever they work across the globe.

Macedonia and the Virtues of Corruption

Binoy Kampmark

This will be something for the books of violent dispute. A series of gun battles over the weekend lasting over 16 hours have left eight police officers and fourteen gunmen dead in the town of Kumanovo in Macedonia. The slain police were members of the anti-terrorist Tigers unit. The Macedonian police authorities have since released a video of the captured gunmen, with a few sporting UCK insignia.

Where, then, with the various punters in this latest lethal spat? Officially, the European Union is urging calm between participants. Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary-General, has also expressed “great concern” while urging all sides to “exercise restraint and avoid any further escalation, in the interest of the country and the whole region.”

But only a few members of the EU refuse to acknowledge the legal status of a state that was given birth in similar circumstances, one waged with a narrative of bullets and ethnic politics. Neighbouring, Albanian-majority Kosovo, long deemed part of Serbia, provides the toxic model of rebellion in the broader context of Balkans politics. The recognition of Kosovo, broadly speaking, is Europe’s green light for secession.

For that reason, various organisations and states are keeping watch on the latest affair: will the argument by the Albanian separatists for a province along Kosovo lines be cleaved off the Macedonian state? In 2001, sparks flew between the security forces and Albanian insurgents, ending with the hastily cobbled Ohrid peace accord. “This Framework,”it reads, “will promote the peaceful and harmonious development of civil society while respecting the ethnic identity and interest of all Macedonian citizens.”

The air has been heavy with prospects of such a confrontation. On April 21, a police outpost in the village of Goschince, part of the predominantly Albanian municipality of Lipkovo 25 kilometres northeast of Skopje, was attacked by a group of 40 armed gunmen wearing the uniforms of the National Liberation Army (NLA). Hostages were taken, and threats issued.

According to the spokesman describing the attacks, “The leader of the group, speaking in Albanian… told the captured police officers the following: ‘We are from the NLA and tell everyone that nobody can save you, neither [Prime Minister] Nikola Gruevski, nor [head of the junior Albanian DUI party] Ali Ahmeti. We want our own state.”

The town of Kumanovo itself demonstrates that dreary repetitiveness of factions seeking advantage and reward, flavoured by a hint of conspiracy and not so grand design. There are the separatists themselves, operating in various guises. There are the corrupt government officials who align themselves with status quo corruption while extolling the virtues of stability. Then there are the indigent civilians who simply wish to continue living in an ethnically mixed city, desperate as it might be. As a resident told the Balkan Insight, “We all know each other, we would have seen if there were any terrorists. Everything seemed normal until yesterday.”

The formidable Albanian presence in Macedonia has led to its fair share of scuffles and grief. But the very basis of the framework agreement in 2001 was based on two neat, if unfortunate delusions: the existence of a nourished, extant civil society, and the “harmonious” existence of the ethnic setting. Neither has come to pass, one feeding the other noxious, undermining gruel. In such a vacuum, nature has done its best to fill it with considerable nastiness.

Such acts of instability also take place in a country run by a government well versed in wire-tapping and profligate misrule. They, it can be said, provide the pretext and the incitement for those who prefer action to empty salutations to constitutional rule. The accord itself notes how, “A modern democratic state in its natural course of development and maturation must continually ensure that its Constitution fully meets the needs of all of its citizens and comports with the highest international standards, which themselves continue to evolve.” There are even suggestions filling the rumour mill that the attacks over the weekend were staged as efforts on the part of the government to retain power. Crisis breeds reactive crisis.

Since 2006, Prime Minister Gruevski has been in charge, leading the VMRO-DPMNE party in a series of coalition governments. Drunk on megalomania and revisionism, Gruevski has drained the public purse for enormous cultural projects, notably around the city of Skopje, emphasising the poorly made point that Macedonia gave birth to western civilisation. This form of “antiquisation” insinuates Disneyland practices into ritualised worship. Heads have invariably swollen in the process.

Since February, opposition leader Zoran Zaev has been busy releasing recordings he claims were provided by the intelligence services concerned about the tilt towards authoritarianism. “After nine years of leading the country, they need to control everything.” Thousands have purportedly figured in the targets, including ambassadors, journalists and members of the opposition. In a twist of some perversion, it has been claimed that Gruevski has himself been a victim of such wiretapping, made more fascinating by the fact that the spy chief is his cousin. Such a climate a healthy civil society do not make.

This did not seem to concern Gruevski, who jumped on the opportunity to remind Macedonians about the role played by the police, who had, he hyperbolically suggested “prevented the murders of 8,000 people.” Internationalising the conflict, he suggested that the attacks were part of a broader trend, facilitated by “participants in several countries, some in the Middle East, which points out to their big experience in guerrilla fighting.” Gruevksi is, however, closer in pointing the finger to a Kosovo connection with the 40-strong group.

As with so much in the affairs of the Balkans, there are suggestions of other hands, powers lurking to alter the balance and move the pieces. “There is foreign intelligence in this scheme,” argues Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki. “There is no proof of who the foreign power is – but the people in the [wiretapping] affair have admitted that a foreign power is involved.”

All, it seems, is woe and shambles. The separatist fires will be well sustained with such figures as Gruevski in power. In turn, the incumbent government draws salvaging political profit, even as the state withers before the strain of spending and poverty. With such rulers in charge, insurrection receives its justifying inspiration.

2016 Electoral Guide

John Halle

Any discussion of U.S. elections needs to be based on the understanding that, at present, voting is carefully designed to, in Chomsky’s words “reduce the population to apathy and obedience”, putting us in a position where we are forced to demonstrate our fealty to the corporate state by actively endorsing one of its two anointed representatives.

It doesn’t have to be that way: Greek voters had an alternative to vote against neoliberal austerity and they exercised it putting Syriza in office. Same with the upcoming elections in Spain where Podemos will offer a similar alternative. And, of course, over the past two decades, voters in Latin America had real choices and made the right decision in electing Morales, Correa, Chavez, Kirchner and other populist left candidates, to the great displeasure of the U.S. State Department.

We are not at that point and so we need to be doing the on-the-ground work which is necessary to get us there. That work involves

1) strongly supporting mass protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Fight for 15, System Change Not Climate Change and the remnants of OWS the consolidation of which could eventually evolve into an electoral alternative at some point in the future.

and

2) strongly supporting viable local third party campaigns such as those of Kshama Sawant and the candidates from the Richmond Progressive Alliance helping these scale up to statewide and eventually national organizations.

In the meantime, it does no good to pretend that running marginal national candidates is a substitute for 1) and 2). Only once we have satisfied ourselves that we have done the work can we begin to play the rigged game which is the party primary system and the national “electoral extravaganza” in November 2016. We should do so, in my opinion, via one of the following four paths.

Path 1) Support Sanders in the Democratic primaries.

Caveat: Those exercising this option need to be fully aware of Sanders’s likely “sheepdog” role. They should make clear to others involved in the campaign that they plan to return to the fold of independent activists once Sanders is obliterated by Clinton, rejecting DP operatives and Sanders’s own efforts to herd left voters into the toxic Clinton campaign and the graveyard which is Democratic Party Politics.

Path 2) Support Jill Stein, the likely Green Party nominee.

Caveat: The Green Party lacks a sufficient level of organization where it can mount a credible campaign and even achieving ballot access will require a substantial investment of activist energy which (arguably) might be better channeled into option 1 or 2 above. A possible poor showing (Stein received less than 500,000 votes in 2012-down from Nader’s 2,882,995 in 2000) will marginalize rather than legitimate the politics we are trying to advance.

Path 3) Not voting.

Caveat: Lack of participation will be perceived as indicating that the public satisfied with both corporate options. We know otherwise, of course, but we will be unable to get that message out.  Staying uninvolved and uncommitted also prevents the development of organized networks of supporters which can become the nucleus of local campaigns and activist organizations, as happened in the wake of the Nader Green Party 2000 run.

Path 4) One of the above and then voting for the lesser evil in November.

Caveat: This option should only be exercised in a swing state and even then some leftists will regard voting for what may turn out to be not the lesser, but the more effective evil  as indefensible. What’s important is that we not allow the Sanders issue become yet another left circular firing squad of mutual recriminations and personal animosity-as the Democrats are strategizing that it will. We might not agree with lesser-evilism, but we shouldn’t demonize those who do. Nor should lesser evilist pragmatists condescend to those who refuse to be constrained by the worm’s eye, world weary pramatism of those who have resigned themselves to the Democratic Party as our only hope for change-a dangerous delusion as we should have learned in 2008 and 2012.

We need keep all that in mind to get the best possible results from the fatally compromised, corrupt and cynical electoral system in 2016.

The No More War Movement

David Swanson

Remarks at UNAC Conference, May 8, 2015.

This week I read an article by someone I have a lot of respect for and who I know to mean well, and who wrote about being a part of something called “the Less War Movement.”

Now, in my analysis, war murders, it injures, it traumatizes, and it harms huge numbers of people, fuels hostility, makes the aggressor less safe, drains away wealth for both victim and aggressor, wastes resources that could have saved many more lives than war kills, devastates the natural environment, erodes civil liberties, turns police officers into occupying armies, destroys the rule of law, and corrupts morality beyond recognition. So I consider myself part of something I call the No More War Movement.

If I wanted only less war but still some war, that would mean that I believed some wars were good. But, then, wouldn’t I want to make sure to keep the good wars and get rid of the bad ones? I mean, if I just demanded less war, and the wars were reduced or eliminated at random, we might get stuck with all the bad ones and none of the good ones. Wouldn’t it make more sense to start an Only The Good Wars Movement?

But then you’d have to find some good ones, a crusade that carries most of its participants back 70 years in search of their most recent example — an example that transforms into a nightmare monster once examined. An Only the Good Wars Movement ends up making as much sense as an Only the Good Rapes Movement or an Only the Good Child Abuse Movement. There are no good wars.

I suspect the reasoning behind proposing a so-called Less War Movement is actually that all wars are bad but it’s more strategic to pretend otherwise. Of course if this were so and it could get us fewer wars, who would complain? But, in reality, once you’ve proposed that some wars are good, you’re trapped inside the logic of the war machine. If even a single potential war is going to be good, why not make 110% sure — indeed, why not make 1,000% sure — of winning it? And that means weapons, and troops, and mercenaries, and flying killer robots, and personnel in 175 countries, and surveillance of the planet, and emergency authoritarian secrecy and power that generates more wars — all of which, incidentally, are lost, not won.

On this Mother’s Day weekend, recall Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870 which said, “From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.”

There’s logic. There’s passion. There’s something to build a movement around. You can’t build a movement around less war. You can’t create a coherent agenda around “Hey Hey LBJ Please kill somewhat less kids today.” Nobody’s moved by “No justice, no peace. U.S. partially out of the Middle East.”

It isn’t the bad wars, whichever ones they may be, that do the major damage. It’s the routine preparation in case of a future good war. The routine so-called non-war military spending is 10 times the war spending. It kills more by how it’s not spent than by how it’s spent. It’s not spent on food, water, medicine, agriculture, and clean energy.

Baltimore City Schools spends $5,336 per student, while Maryland spends $38,383 per prisoner, and every man, woman, and child in Maryland and in the rest of the United States on average each, EACH spends $4,063 per year on the U.S. military — except those who refuse to pay. That the prisons and military do harm, rather than good, compounds the damage.

The routine weapons business, buying by the U.S. government, and marketing to dictatorships abroad is what ends up providing local police with the equipment, training, conditioning, and attitude of war. You can’t sell all the weapons to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, with the latter blowing up the former’s. You have to unload some of them on police ($12 million worth to Maryland), who then figure out what to do with them when you explain that protesters are low-level terrorists, and terrorists are by definition protesters. Many of the police who rioted in Baltimore were trained in Israel, and as Medea just noted in U.S. wars.

This weekend in 1944, in El Salvador, a nonviolent movement overthrew a dictator. The victory did not last, but on average such nonviolent victories last far longer than violent ones, and nonviolent action is more likely to result in a victory to begin with. Notice that I said nonviolent ACTION, not nonviolent inaction, which we have way more than enough of.

Nonviolent action is the answer to the question “What do you replace war with?” You replace it with tools that work better: economic, legal, and political structures that facilitate peace and disarmament, actions of resistance and constructive replacement that disrupt business as usual.

You know, I have to confess that I feel bad for the Baltimore Police. The Pentagon would have immediately announced that it broke its victim’s spine for women’s rights and the spread of democracy. The Baltimore Police had to get the Washington Post to claim that Freddie Gray broke his own spine. It’s hard to have to claim something you yourself cannot believe. Like a drone pilot driving home for dinner, the Baltimore Police have been thrust from participation in a war on poor black people into trying to defend murder in a civilian world. In war you don’t have to defend murder.

What yanked those killers out of a war and into a society under the rule of law? People in Baltimore standing up and acting.

Young people in Baltimore are as trapped in poverty as almost anywhere on earth. Yet we’re told to look for the causes of anger in skin color or culture. In a parallel manner we’re told that Western Asia, the so-called Middle East, is violent because of a religion. Yet it is as heavily armed as anywhere on earth, and armed principally by the United States weapons industry.

We’re told to debate which type of violence to add to the mix, when the answer right in front of us is Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Stop arming people and beating people and denouncing them as violent.

When we push for disarmament with the logic of reality, that armaments bring wars, and wars bring enemies, and enemies bring the propaganda that brings more armaments, we break a vicious cycle. And perhaps we begin to get somewhere. Of course we won’t achieve an instant result of zero armaments. The government will at best give us less armaments. But that is no reason to pre-compromise. Our job is to speak truth to power, not because it makes us feel better, but because it is believable.

Don’t put your time, energy, or money into a less war movement, much less a less war candidate for president and for kill list decider in chief. Put it into disarmament, disarmament of Israel, disarmament of Egypt, disarmament of Saudi Arabia, of Bahrain, of Washington D.C., of police departments across this country, of secret agencies, of immigration patrols, disarmament of our households, disarmament of our minds.

We have more powerful tools. We just need to stand up and use them.

Peace.

Farewell to the United Kingdom

Tariq Ali

The British General election was dramatic. On the superficial level because three party leaders— Miliband (Labour), Nick Clegg (Liberal-Democrat) and Nigel Farage (UKIP—a racist, right-wing populist outfit)…resigned on the day following the Conservative victory. On a more fundamental level because the Scottish National Party took virtually all the Scottish seats (56 of 59) wiping out Labour as a political force in the region where it had dominated politics for over a century. Scotland was where the Labour Party was founded. Scotland it was that gave Labour its first leaders and Prime Minster (as well as the last one). Scottish working class culture was in most cases much more radical than its English equivalent.

It was Labour’s 1945 victory and social-democratic reforms that had made Home Rule, leave alone independence, an abstraction. It was Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1979 that was the first nail in the coffin of the United Kingdom, not because she stigmatized the Scots as some of her successors have done but because the majority of Scots loathed her and everything she stood for. She boasted of putting the ‘Great’ back into Britain, not realizing that the unintended consequences of her policies would be the ‘break-up of Britain’ as the title of the ultra-prescient Tom Nairn’s book had suggested even before her election triumph.

A large majority of Scots never voted for her. They reached breaking point under Tony Blair and New Labour. It was the proudly vaunted Thatcherite politics of Blair, Brown and their Scottish toadies that accelerated the rise of civic nationalism and fuelled desertions from Labour to the SNP that realized the only way to defeat Blairite Tories was by positioning themselves to the left of Labour on every major issue: the SNP opposed the Iraq war, defended the welfare state, demanded the removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil and slowly began to build up support. Labour remained in denial. The first tremors were ignored. The tectonic plates shifted last week and has destroyed them. It will take time but Scottish independence is now assured and a damn good thing too as it will weaken the neo-imperial and military pretensions of the UK state and could open a real debate (not the fakery witnessed on the BBC and other networks) in England leading to constitutional reform (including a written constitution and a democratic electoral system) and the emergence of a radical alliance in England, an insurgent force that breaks with the decaying Labourism that has crippled the Left for a century, first the official Communists and later their Trotskyist offspring. Remnants of both ended up in New Labour (the thuggish Stalinist John (now Lord) Reid and the creepy Alan Milburn who as Health Secretary opened the doors to privatization and is now a well-paid consultant of private health firms and a virtual Tory. There are others.

As I’ve argued at length in The Extreme Centre: A Warning, this is a Europe-wide phenomenon. There are NO fundamental differences between centre-right and centre-left parties anywhere. In parts of Catholic Europe (Spain and France) gay marriage proved divisive. Not so much in Britain. The notion that a Labour government at Westminster could have reversed the neo-liberal course of capitalism is nonsense. It might have made it more palatable through statistical chicanery and sweet talk. Nothing more. So those on the Left unable to break the Labourist addiction should be happy. Their illusions could not be betrayed.

The tasks facing radicals ands socialists in Scotland and England are very different. In Scotland the young people who dominated Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) played an exemplary role in the referendum and the recent elections. Broad-minded, non-sectarian, realizing what was at stake and focusing all their energies to defeat the common foe. The results have vindicated their approach. They now need to assemble the forces that want a radical Scotland to represent them in the Scottish parliament that will be elected in 2016. This means a constructive left opposition that carries on the tradition of RIC but this time in Parliament preparing the ground for a

Scotland that is both independent and different.

In England the third party in terms of number of votes cast is UKIP. It gained votes from both Labour and Conservatives, but its 4 million votes (12.6 percent) obtained just a single seat in Parliament. The Greens with over a million also have a single MP. The absurdity of an electoral system that gives the Conservatives an overall majority (331 seats) with 36.9 percent of the votes cast, Labour (232 seats) with 30.4 percent reducing the other English parties to nothingness is clearly long past its sell by date. A serious campaign for a proportional system is needed. The first-past-the-post, winner-takes all system is a malignant cancer that needs to be extracted from the body politic.

What of English radicalism? It’s not a pure accident that a right-wing party like UKIP has become the third force. The effective collaboration between the major trades unions and the Labour leadership meant that building social movements to challenge privatizations and demanding public ownership for utilities, more public housing, local democracy, and the renationalization of the railways fell by the wayside. No other force was capable of organizing an extra-parliamentary base for a rejection and reversal of extreme centre policies. This is the challenge that now confronts all those who want a strategic break with the Thatcher-Blair consensus in England. Not an easy task. Possibilities, however, exist but they require forces on the ground to help create a new movement that speaks for the oppressed and exploited.

The Labour leadership contest is a no-hoper for the Left. The names being touted are worse than useless. What would help a great deal is if early in the new parliament, the handful of left MPs effectively broke from Labour and established a new, radical caucus to link up with forces outside. I doubt that they will and here the Bennite tradition is, to put it at its mildest, unhelpful. Its attachment to Labour at a time when the party broke with its own social-democratic past and opted for a full-blown capitalism was wrong-headed and led to an impasse. Ken Livingstone, who defeated Blairism as an independent candidate for the Mayoralty of London then reneged, made his peace with Downing Street and returned to the fold, in the process defending the City of London and deregulated finance capitalism as well as Scotland Yard and its public execution of the Brazilian electrician Jean Menezes (mistaken for a Muslim). Livingstone was one of the few popular leaders produced by Labour who could have played a part now to build something new.

We need an alliance of all radical forces to build an anti-capitalist movement in England. A movement that is both new but also prepared to search the past for help: the Grand Remonstrance of the 17^th century, the Chartist rebellions of the 19^th century, the more recent developments in South America, Greece and Spain also offer a way forward. As for the Labour Party, I think we should let it bleed. Here the Scottish route offers hope.

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