Jeremy Corbyn. (photo: The Duran)
Jeremy
Corbyn's Honest Approach to Terrorism Gave Him the Edge - and the US Needs to
Learn From Him
By Eoinn Higgins, New York
Daily News
11 June 17
During
the run up to Thursday's snap election in the United Kingdom, two terror
attacks threatened to derail the narrative and throw the country into chaos.
On May
22, a suicide bomber killed 23 people at
an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. Then, on June 3, three attackers killed eight and
wounded 48 more in the heart of London.
As the
smoke cleared in Manchester and the chaos cooled in London, there was a feeling
about the UK that the governing Conservative Party would gain advantage from
the attacks. Yet by the end of the night on June 8, it was clear that Labour
had gained seats to the Conservatives'
losses.
In one
of the greatest own goals in modern electoral history, British Prime Minister
Theresa May's snap election ended up reducing her power and revitalizing the
flagging Labour Party. Labour, under the leadership of the left-wing Jeremy
Corbyn, managed to cut the Conservative Party's membership down past the point
of a majority — producing a hung Parliament and a greatly weakened May.
Cobyn's long history of adopting a less reactionary position toward
political violence from the corners of the British Empire, particularly
Northern Ireland, should have given May an advantage after the attack — at
least according to conventional wisdom.
Yet
Corbyn responded to the tragedies by taking a stand that a major western
politician should have taken a long time ago: telling hard but necessary truths
about the roots of terror in western foreign policy and how right wing domestic
policies have only made the problem worse.
By
speaking to the British public as if they were adults, Corbyn turned a horrific
event from a traditional right-wing advantage to the basis for a left-wing
critique of the status quo.
"An
informed understanding of the causes of terrorism is an essential part of an
effective response that will protect the security of our people, that fights
rather than fuels
terrorism," Corbyn said on May 26, in the aftermath of
the Manchester bombing.
The
Labour leader told the British people that they had to come to terms with the
fact that terrorism is the product of wars their government fights overseas —
and he pointed to well-established documentation of that fact from his
country's security services to back him up.
Further,
Corbyn said, the austerity politics of cutting security services left the
country more vulnerable to attack. When there's nobody to report a threat to
and no police presence in neighborhoods, getting to know communities, the
threat of terror slipping between the cracks is greater.
Corbyn
went on the offensive again after the London Bridge attacks, implying on Sunday
that at least some of the blame for the attack was on Tory shoulders for their
austerity cuts to security services. One of the attackers in London was known
to authorities but reporting from his peers that he was becoming radicalized
was ignored.
What
Corbyn did was to cut through the infantilization of the public that comes from
demagoguery and spoke to the people directly and seriously about the true
causes for terror in the west.
There's
a place in U.S. politics for this kind of straight talk. Americans understand
from the Snowden and Manning leaks that the government's behavior in the war on
terror has had at least as many unintended consequences as successes.
War
overseas and austerity at home lead to lost lives in concert arenas and cafes.
The people know this, and it's time for politicians to respect that
understanding and talk about this problem in a rational manner.
It
should not be controversial to say that the current approach to attacks in the
U.S. and the UK is counterproductive and will have the opposite effect from
what is presumably intended: reducing such attacks.
In
order to push back against this dangerous rhetoric and these disastrous
policies, the left in the U.S. — and around the world — must take a page from
Corbyn and refuse to defer to the authoritarian tendencies of the right when it
comes to acts of terror. Rather than taking the lead from the right, the left
must offer a different vision of how to confront these acts and the
radicalization that births such violence.
We
must reject the idea that the only way to protect the country from terror is to
pursue policies that ensure the perpetuation of the ouroboros cycle of hatred
and violence. On Thursday, Britain showed the world that there is a hunger for
another way.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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