Honest A. Blinken?

Despite the fact that George Washington is remembered for saying “Father, I cannot tell a lie”, and Abraham Lincoln was known as “Honest Abe”, bourgeois politics is relies on systematic lying. The concepts of “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” under which the bourgeoisie undertook its revolution against feudalism, were never intended by it to be extended, consistently to the working-class, and, no sooner had the bourgeoisie secured its own social dictatorship, with the assistance of that working-class, it sought to bring the revolution to a halt, and the abstract concepts, when applied to the workers, are either outright denied, or else, become a matter of form with no content.

But, even within the ranks of the bourgeoisie itself lying, cheating and corruption have always been commonplace, both in their dealings with the workers and with each other. It required the capitalist state, at a certain point, to impose some regulation, for the sake of the system as a whole.

“Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and, again, the commission agent who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer and his “hands.”

(Engels 1892 Preface To The Condition Of The Working Class)

But, this simply meant that the large capitals could more easily defeat and swallow up the smaller capitals, whilst formally operating on the basis of free and equal exchange, and when it came, and comes, to the relations between large and small capitalist states, in the era of imperialism, that also remains the case. The lie also requires that the majority of the masses, i.e. the workers, believe the lie that it is their elected representatives that exercise political power, even though that power actually resides in the permanent state apparatus, which is always ready to sweep aside that political power, in the unlikely event that it should seriously threaten the interests of the bourgeois ruling-class. It depends upon the lie that the state itself is neutral, acting on behalf of “the nation”, “society”, or “the people”, as against its true purpose and nature as a class state, there to protect the interests, solely, of the ruling-class.

Generally speaking, it is able to do this, in the background, because the whole of bourgeois society minimises the possibility that any revolutionary party would be able to secure a working majority in parliament. The capitalist state is able, therefore, to nudge, cajole, cavil, and delay the actions of governments that, even partially, act in ways not in keeping with the interests of that ruling class. And, again, this applies in the relations between states, too, as the rules are set by the dominant imperialist powers, primarily the United States, and its allies, and failure to comply with those rules, established to defend and extend the interests of the United States, results in sanctions and other actions against them, including, ultimately, military action against them, to remove their governments, and to install replacements who will comply.

The dominance of the US and its allies, for the last 80 years, has meant that it could act in this way, without challenge, and has covered its actions with thinly concealed lies about intervening against dictators, butchers and so on, despite the fact that, invariably, such excuses clashed with its installation of new, equally brutal dictators and butchers. In its less guarded moments it even admitted of its relation to such butchers, “He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard.” Yet, in order for this deception to work, it cannot be too explicit. It relies on a majority of the masses either accepting the lie, or being apathetic in their response to it. As the saying goes, “You can deceive all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot deceive all the people all of the time.” That becomes difficult for imperialism, when, as now, it is deeply committed to two wars, undertaken by its allies and proxies, and on the basis of two mutually exclusive lies, or system of lies, i.e. the wars in Ukraine/Russia, and in Palestine/Israel.

Even prima facie the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the invasion and occupation of Palestine/Gaza/West Bank by the Zionist state in Israel, places the US in a predicament, because, in the first case, it has openly proclaimed Russia's actions to be an illegal war, to constitute war crimes, and even genocide, and on the basis of which it has imposed sanctions on the Russian people, and has supplied vast amounts of arms to the Ukrainian state. In the second case, it has acted in the diametrically opposite manner. Rather than condemning the genocide being committed by the Zionist state in its war against the Palestinians, it has simply proclaimed those actions to be justified on the basis of a supposed right of the Zionist state to defend itself.

Whether any such right exists or not – socialists support no such right, and only the right of self-defence of workers against the capitalist state – is irrelevant, because the reality is that the Zionist state is quite capable of defending itself, and has always done so, and clearly will do so. It has no need to launch a genocidal war against the Palestinian people, let alone to invade and flatten Gaza, to effect such defence. Instead of demanding an end to the genocide being committed by the Zionist state, the US, has blatantly vetoed UN resolutions calling for such a ceasefire, has repeatedly stated that it continues to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the Zionist state, and has supplied it with more and more weapons of mass destruction, such as 2,000 pound bombs, whose use is specifically to destroy large areas indiscriminately, meaning large numbers of civilian deaths. The US and its allies are complicit in the genocide being committed by Zionism against the Palestinians.

The contradiction is obvious and blatant, and, so the US, and its allies, are forced to simply lie, as the Zionist state itself always does, in a more blatant and ridiculous manner, to square the circle, in the hope that even though it may not be able to fool all, or even a majority of the people, it can at least fool enough of them as to get away with it, on the basis of the majority, at least, remaining apathetic to the lie. So, we see, US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, justifying the Zionist genocide in Gaza, and its continued destruction of hospitals, on the grounds that Israel has a right to defend itself – which implicitly accepts that Gaza is part of Israel – and that the hospitals attacked were being used by Hamas as terrorist bases, and command centres. Yet, those claims by Israel, exposed by its own video, inside those hospitals, and fact that it had to manufacture even the flimsy evidence it could produce, have been systematically debunked months ago. So, why does Blinken simply echo them now? Honest A. Blinken he certainly is not.

Blinken's lies over the hospitals etc., are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. At every step, Blinken simply parrots the lies and line being put out by the Zionist state in Israel, repeating the claims, for example, about Israel reducing its activities in Gaza, even as it drops even more bombs, fires even more shells, and kills even more Palestinians, butchering an even greater disproportionate number of Palestinian infants and babies. Blinken knows that what the Zionists state is doing is not just a war crime, but constitutes genocide, but he cannot admit it without admitting that the US is, thereby, not only complicit in that genocide, but is positively engaged in it, by the provision of weaponry and support for its implementation, and the same applies to its allies in the UK and EU. Take the response of UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, when asked about the genocide, and whose attempt at evasion must lead us to the conclusion that he is either lying or incompetent or both.

The current case brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Criminal Court, makes life even harder for US imperialism. The proceedings, today, in which South Africa's legal team spent 3 hours setting out, in detail, the undeniable nature of the genocide being committed by the Zionist state, were carried live on Al Jazeera, but not on Sky News or the BBC, again illustrating, if any such illustration were needed, the biased nature of the western media, which acts as the propaganda arm of imperialism, and of its component capitalist states.

The case against the Zionist state is unassailable, and yet, experience tells us that there have been previous such unassailable cases in which the courts, as part of the capitalist state, have simply ruled in favour of the ruling class. It is one thing when the International Courts such as the ICJ, or the ICC have in front of them some African warlord, or Serbian General, or even defeated imperialism (as in the Nuremberg Trials), and quite another when it comes to arraigning the leaders of the current dominant powers, and their proxies. For the ICJ to not rule in favour of South Africa, and to demand an immediate ceasefire, would contradict its previous decisions, such as in relation to Myanmar, and would risk going just that bit too far, in maintaining the lie of equality and neutrality.

The likelihood is, therefore, that the ICJ will rule in South Africa's favour, but that the Zionist state will simply ignore its ruling, as it has ignored the previous decisions of the UN and UN Security Council with impunity. The Zionists are already indicating not only that, but are claiming that even to be held to account in the Hague, for their actions, amounts to “anti-Semitism”, the precedent for which has already been set by the Starmerites, and its entourage amongst the Left Zionists of the AWL et al. However, that puts US imperialism and its allies in something of a bind, because they will no longer be able to claim, however implausibly, that they do not know whether the Zionist state is committing genocide or not. It will expose them, too, for having been complicit in that genocide, at the very least making their further support and supply of weapons to the Zionists problematic.

It exposes them and their claims to be honest brokers, with their decades long charade of the Two States Solution, for the frauds they are.