Churchill's Colonial Karma

John Rees: Unmasking the Anti-Americanism of a British “Revolutionary Socialist”

One would be entirely forgiven for not being familiar with British left-wing fringe politics and understandably never have heard of a certain Mr. John Rees, a self-anointed “Revolutionary Socialist”, academic and importantly a co-founder of the British anti-war movement, “Stop-the-War Coalition” (StWC). There is every noble reason to be blissfully ignorant of him but unfortunately circumstance compels us to mildly scratch the surface of his posturing as a professed anti-imperialist. The Coalition he co-founded original purpose was to oppose United States and British wars on the Arab and the Muslim world during the War on Terror. This Coalition took the lead in organising anti-war demonstrations over the last two decades and recently is central to organising the anti-genocide demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Unfortunately, the latter demonstrations have proven to be completely ineffective in terms of influencing government policy but admittedly they have allowed hundreds of the thousands of people in Britain to vent their disapproval of the Gaza genocide. In the following I highlight three pillars of posturing by Rees and his “Revolutionary Socialist” ilk which exemplifies the utter poverty of British anti-imperialism in the hope a consequential anti-war organisation eventually emerges to effectively challenge American-British warmongering. 

Firstly, central to British alleged anti-imperialism, as exemplified by Rees, is a simple anti-Americanism rooted in historical illiteracy and eurocentrism. Whereas most of the world would rightly denounce the Americans for their imperialism, for a good proportion of Britons, whether left-wing or right-wing, it is denounced for not supporting the British establishment and its military. For example, Rees is right to argue that the so-called “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is “little understood” but totally wrong to say that “the US had been a reluctant – and late-arriving – ally in the two world wars of the 20th century.” This comment is not only ahistoricism, but also plain British propaganda. The fact is Britain and the United States were not close allies before World War One or before World War Two. Indeed, before the latter war, the relationship had been strained because Britain had defaulted on its World War One debts after the United States had financially and militarily bailed out them out in that war.

Needless to say, and contrary to British mythology, in the period 1939-1940 there was no World War Two. At that point it was a largely a war between the imperialist white supremacist west European nations which pitted Nazi Germany on one side and the Western European imperialists of Britain, France, Belgium and Holland on the other. In May 1940, the latter three countries collapsed in the face of the German onslaught, while the British Army deserted its white supremacist allies and fled to Dunkirk and back to England. So Rees’s notion of “reluctance” and “late-arriving” are historically deceptive because ultimately, they conceal real issues British commentators and historians refuse to face. Specifically, why was the British Army capable of occupying a good proportion of the Africa and Asia but incapable of fighting Germany in a land war to the extent that it chose to flee back to England? The British Army had also previously failed against German forces in Norway in April 1940. The same pattern emerged when Japan entered the war in the Far East in late 1941 and then easily trounced the British Empire forces in Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, Malaya. So, when Rees writes that during World War Two, “British imperial power waned and American imperial power waxed” he is clearly being mealy mouthed. Britain simply no longer had the military ability to fight back equally military equipped rivals. After the World War Two, it was theorised the only way Britain can secure its global interests is to endear itself and find security with the new United States global hegemon. As imperialist British Prime Minister Clement Atlee argued immediately after the war,

“the British Commonwealth and Empire is not a unit that can be defended by itself…The conditions which made it possible to defend a string of possessions scattered over five continents by means of a fleet based on island fortresses have gone.”

In other words, the British Empire could no longer militarily hold its own against other powers, specifically Germany and Japan. As such, Britain needed to endear itself to its former colony for security or as Atlee argued, Britain must now be considered “an easterly extension of a strategic arc the centre of which is the American continent [United States] more than as a power looking eastwards through the Mediterranean and the East.” For Britain’s global interests and possessions to be secured, the British elite had no existential choice other than to ally itself with the new military superpower the United States.

Furthermore, accusing the United States of “late-arriving” is also pure arrogant Eurocentrism because it misses the point and fudges one of the main reasons for World War Two. Specifically, the leader of the German Nazis, Adolf Hitler was hoping to emulate the British Empire. That is, Hitler wanted to establish his Empire, the Third Reich, in Europe specifically in an occupied eastern Europe and Russia (whereas Britain and France had established their Empires largely in Africa and Asia). Rees seems to lack the moral character to acknowledge this fact therefore it is more self-comforting to simply hide behind accusing the United States of “late-arriving”.

In his latest rant, Rees focuses on President Trump’s militarism and European leaders’ supposed “appeasement” of this militarism. He claims the Europeans appease Trump “because they cannot identify where the threats to the stability, internal coherence, and the democratic structures of their own states come from.” This is, of course, once again Eurocentric nonsense because the Europeans have shown, via two world wars, they are comprehensively incapable of keeping the peace among themselves by themselves. This is a bitter pill to swallow especially if you’re a proud European of culture, philosophy and arts to acknowledge that at the end of the day, the reason western Europe has experienced hitherto unprecedented decades of peace is because, inter alia, the United States has its military bases across the continent which prevents traditional foes from warring on one another. Therefore, Europeans supposedly “appease” Trump because obviously they don’t want to lose the United States guaranteeing the peace among themselves.    

Secondly, Rees’s anti-war movement, the Stop-the-War Coalition (StWC) has absurdly aligned itself with pro-war Islamist groups, specifically the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), long considered to be associated to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2011, one of the richest countries of Africa, Libya, with a relative amount of the political and economic independence was militarily obliterated by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) under the most spurious of pretexts. Yet the MAB, came out in support of the NATO military intervention in Libya! And the MAB continues to be part of the StWC. It doesn’t end here. When the West began their regime change in Syria to install the current pro-Zionist regime, Rees was at hand to help defend one of the British ISIS mercenaries who travelled to the country to kill Syrians. When the identity of the notorious ISIS head-chopper, “Jihadi John” was revealed to be a British-Kuwait,  Rees argued that it was partly the “War on Terror” and Western persecution of Muslims that leads individuals to join Islamist groups, when in fact the West, specifically Britain, has long co-opted Islamists groups and individuals to do their geo-political bidding. He conveniently by-passes the fact the during the decolonisation era in the post World War Two period, the West utilised groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine and destabilise countries that aspired to be independent of Western imperialism. This culminated in the late 1970s, when the US and Britain supported Islamists, the so-called “Mujahidden” (holy warriors) mercenaries to fight a left-wing pro-Soviet Union government in Afghanistan. Former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was a leading Western champion of these mercenaries and travelled to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to boost their morale. She informed the holy mercenaries that, “the hearts of the Free World are with you…”

Rees rightly states that Stop the War Coalition should form “lasting ties” with the British Muslim community to challenge Islamophobia. But is aligning with groups such as MAB or individuals like the former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Moazzam Begg the best way to accomplish this? Begg, a Director for the human rights organisation, Gage is a notorious regime change propagandists and a consummate liar. He has erroneously accused the former Libyan and Syrian governments of raping women “en masse”, when in fact it is people from his native Pakistan who are raping thousands of British working class girls “en masse”. Begg has also bemoaned the lack of weaponry supplied by the Americans to its pro-Zionist mercenaries in Syria. To top it off Begg literally comes from a family of multi-generational imperialist collaborators who served the British occupation of India against their fellow Indians. The perversity of sharing anti-war platforms with pro-war, pro-regime change organisations and individuals seems to be totally lost on Rees and the StWC. More so, while platforming pro-war organisations, during the Gaza genocide, StWC has denied a platform to stalwart anti-war, anti-Zionist voices such as the politician George Galloway and former British ambassador, Craig Murray. 

Thirdly, Rees’s criticism of the United States’s foreign policy is rooted in a strong British tradition of criticising any country’s imperialism other than Britain’s. This was an observation made long ago by scholar Dr. Stephen Howe in his book, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics. He had observed that Britons during the hey-day of the British Empire could celebrate an anti-imperialist movement or revolt in a place like Haiti but the same sentiments rarely extended to such movements or revolts “against British [imperial] rule.” As such since the 1960s, Britons have legitimised attacking American foreign policy on the basis that the British elite simply follows its orders and are beholden to it. The fact is, as we have already seen, the British elite chose to align itself with the United States. Rather than focusing the origins of this alignment, they chose to re-write and misinterpret the alignment as one of “subservience” or derogatively as “poodle” like behaviour.

Based on this misinterpretation it has been considered that to criticise American foreign policy is ipso facto to also actually criticise British foreign policy but this does not and never will explain why Britain was more gung-ho in wanting military intervention in Libya, Syria and currently in Ukraine. It doesn’t explain how the socialist Atlee government in 1951 initiated the call to the overthrow the Iranian democratic government of Mohammad Mossaddegh to be replaced by the Shah dictatorship.  

The British criticism of Israel and Zionism can also be seen within the context of Howe’s observation. Rees and other Britons have next to nothing to say about how during the British Empire’s occupation of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 laid the foundation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It was under Britain’s violent auspices that Zionist-colonialist migrated en masse to Palestine from Europe and became 400,000 by the 1940s. Britain complemented its occupation by militarily crushing the Palestinian uprising of the late 1930s while military training its Zionist colonial settlers. It was this military crushing that pre-emptively won the Zionist-colonialist war in 1947-48 and established “Israel”. Many of the British soldiers that crushed the Palestinian uprising when up against the German Nazis in May 1940 simply showed their backs and fled to Dunkirk. Yet this is all historically alien to Rees and his ilk because the Palestinian issue only begins when Britain left Palestine in May 1948, conveniently absolving the British Empire from criticism. To this day, in Britain the timeline for criticising “Israel”, whether from the left or right, begins upon the British Empire’s departure from Palestine in May 1948.

The unquestioned assumptive insistence that all wars solely flow from the interests of the United States is very flawed. Therefore, a new anti-war movement must include the following four initiatives. Firstly, possess a leadership that is historically literate, non-eurocentric and radically honest about the relationship between the United States and Britain. It needs to let go of false cliches masquerading as historical fact i.e “USA entered WW2 late”. Secondly, it must abjure any absurd alliance with pro-war groups and collaborators, Muslim or otherwise. After all, there must Muslim groups or individuals in Britain who are committed to both challenging Islamophobia and opposing Western led military intervention. Thirdly, this movement must emphasise that the migration flows from Africa and Asia over the last fifteen years are largely due to British warmongering for regime change operations in developing countries, specifically Libya and Syria. Fourthly, a new movement must acknowledge the British imperialist origins of many of the world’s current hot-spots, such as in Iran and especially in occupied Palestine. Obviously, there are global hotspots where the United States is totally to blame such as in Venezuela but when it comes to the Middle East is most likely to be the most eager for war. Ultimately, a new anti-war movement in Britain needs to stop behaving like the British elite’s first line of defence by virtue of (consciously or unconsciously) deflecting attention away from this elite’s global machinations.

The current, worn, decades old, anti-war strategy of erroneously blaming global warmongering on the United States’s imperialism with Britain meekly tagging along didn’t succeed in preventing war and human suffering in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine or the occupation and genocide in Palestine. It didn’t succeed in saving millions of lives or preventing the ruination and fracturing of developing countries so frankly there’s nothing to lose to try and find a different path and strategy to influence government policy and to peace.