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As expected, there’s been a decisive result in the Falklands referendum:

Despite near zero temperatures and flurries of snow and rain, the turnout was 92% from an electorate of 1,650. All but three people voted yes to the question posed on the ballots: “Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an overseas territory of the United Kingdom?”

Not decisive at all for the Argentine government, though. According to its spokespeeps, the will of an ‘implanted population’ doesn’t count. Implanted population?

Implanted population!!! Kirchner and Fernandez are names indigenous to the region, are they? I can’t argue about this any more. I am doubled over with hysterical laughter. I am helpless, helpless, helpless.

Writing about how much the Labour Party has changed since it was led by Tony Blair and led by him to war in Iraq, Mark Seddon says:

Ten years on, and only the weirdly messianic Blair still believes he was right…

Funny thing, though, he also says: ‘only columnist David Aaronovitch… still parades some of the old, moth-eaten arguments’. Perhaps Seddon hasn’t grasped the logic of the word ‘only’. Perhaps, too, he’s not acquainted with Dave Anderson, Labour MP for Blaydon. Anderson is unusual in having trodden an opposite path over Iraq to that taken by others. He opposed the war in 2003 but now thinks it was right (£):

Ten years ago I was utterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. At the time I was president of Unison and sat on the TUC General Council, so like a lot of others in the labour movement I did my bit to lobby against Western intervention, believing that the reasons given for invasion were not justified, that the argument about WMD was not proven and that inspections should have been given a chance to work.

But in the years since I have had to face new facts, having been to Iraq to see things for myself. I now see that the international community should have toppled Saddam Hussein much earlier than 2003.

One benefit of Saddam’s removal – one very close to my heart – was the re-emergence of a trade union movement that had been brutally suppressed by his regime. I was really proud when Unison established a training school for shop stewards in Kurdistan in 2006.

Early in that year I joined a Labour Friends of Iraq delegation to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. I was struck by the attitude of the trade unionists: comrades and friends keen to develop their skills so that they could better stand up for working people.

The first thing that they said was: “We need your help. We need your Government to start investing in this country, because if they do not invest we will not have work, and without work we do not have a trade union movement.” That was a very simple equation. What they also said, very clearly, was: “We thank you, as a nation, for what you did for us in 1991, and we thank you even more for what you did for us in 2003, when you liberated us.” That was a shock for me. I saw 2003 as an invasion by an unwanted occupying power.

However, it was all very well for me, sitting in the comfort of Blaydon, to say that it was really, really wrong for the allied forces to invade. It was not me being wiped off the face of the earth by Saddam’s thugs. It was not my parents being buried alive. It was not my village being flattened.

It did not change my view that we invaded Iraq for the wrong reasons, but what became ever clearer to me was that we should have liberated Iraq many years earlier. If we had, we could have stopped genocide being unleashed against the Iraqi people.

Anderson goes on to set out the horrible details of repression and genocide that contributed to changing his mind, and says ‘For people such as me who were against the war in Iraq, it was a wake-up call that could not be ignored.’ He doesn’t, though, speak of the huge costs of the war in lives lost. Just like Mark Seddon not mentioning, for his part, a single consideration in favour of the toppling of Saddam. It’s one of the more surprising ideological phenomena of our time: a major issue dividing world opinion and where there were obviously compelling reasons on both sides; and large numbers of people conducting themselves in argument as if there were nothing to be said against their own view.

A bit severe, surely? Not absolutely everything; not the whole time. But there or thereabouts.

Still I wouldn’t want a T Shirt with the Graun’s logo. (Thanks: DA.)

Laurie Penny explains why she thinks we should care about the current troubles of the Socialist Workers party – now, in her words, ‘on the brink of collapse’, ‘its reputation… in tatters’, ‘haemorrhaging members’. I don’t know about on the brink of collapse; we shall see. But the loss of reputation and the loss of members are both plain facts. And one reason why we should care, according to Penny, is that the SWP has been ‘a significant organising force on the British left‘.

Yes, it has, but I still don’t care. There are at least three reasons, in my view, for not caring; indeed for viewing the SWP’s debacle with unmixed satisfaction. First, there are the origins of the debacle itself – as Penny describes them, vile, and carrying the ‘self-justifying implication that little things like rape allegations against male leaders can be dismissed in the context of the “wider struggle”‘. An organization like that deserves to go down the tubes. Second, there are the SWP’s positions on a range of issues, representative of what I like to call the verkrappt section of the left.

But the most important reason is this. No member of the left who is also a genuine democrat should be pleased to see the left weakened by developments that detract from its democratic and pluralist breadth. But an exception should be made for sects whose commitment to genuine democracy is skin-deep at best and non-existent at worst. The SWP is still defending a concept of the vanguard party that entails a monopolistic attitude to both political representation and intellectual debate. The left not only doesn’t need this; it should now be entirely beyond it.

Penny says that socialism without feminism isn’t worth having. Socialism without democracy isn’t either.

Chris Priestley is a writer, illustrator and painter. Ever since he was a teenager he has loved unsettling and creepy stories, and he hopes his own books will haunt his readers in the way other writers from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury have haunted him. Chris’s most recent books are Mister Creecher and The Dead of Winter. Here he writes about Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Chris Priestley on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol was read to me, when I was about eight, by a teacher. It was the 1960s and my father was serving in the British Army and we were stationed in Gibraltar. We lived in an apartment with a balcony that looked out across the Mediterranean to the Atlas mountains of Morocco. It was far removed from the Victorian London setting of A Christmas Carol with its freezing fog and dark cobbled streets, but I think it struck me all the more powerfully there, separated as I was from the snowy olde worlde Christmas I imagined back in England. It was about this time that I remember telling my teacher that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Dickens certainly played his part in that wish.

It has one of the best opening lines in literature. ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’ Who would not want to carry on reading after that? It is full of wonderful descriptions: Scrooge’s house looked as though ‘it must have run there when it was a young house, playing hide and seek with the other houses, and forgotten the way out again.’ Dickens’s voice is there too – boldly, as though telling you the story personally. Scrooge is as close to the first spirit ‘as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.’ Yes, Dickens can be horribly sentimental and that tendency is much in evidence here, but it is also tempered by a fierce sense of injustice and a clear desire to put the frighteners on his audience.

Because A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. Or at least it is a story with ghosts. But is it scary?

Well, I remember being deliciously disturbed by Marley’s Ghost, rising up from the cellar with his clanking chains. When I heard the description of that scarf being untied my heart sank as swiftly and as surely as Marley’s jaw does when it drops to his chest, his mouth gaping open like a grave.

But A Christmas Carol reaches a new level of dread when it reaches the section with the silent, cowled figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He is often seen as Death, because he shows Scrooge his own grim and friendless end, and I am struggling to see where that black-hooded Death figure that so haunts our imagination ever appeared before A Christmas Carol.

The same can be said of the giant Ghost of Christmas Present who seems more Bacchus than Santa Claus and yet is clearly a stage on the route to the jolly, red-faced Father Christmas figure we know so well. Yet even he is not without threat, as the feral children Ignorance and Want emerge from under his robes. Children always relate to other children, and I remember finding them particularly disconcerting. I remember the spirit’s words – as true now as they were when Dickens wrote them – telling Scrooge to ‘beware them both’ but to beware Ignorance most of all.

Dickens alerted me to social injustice. When the charity men ask him for money, Scrooge asks if the workhouses are still in operation. When they say that they are but many would rather die than go there, Scrooge replies, ‘They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Scrooge is not just a grumpy old rogue, he is ‘hard and sharp as flint’. Dickens pulls no punches in making him bad before he redeems him. There is a lot of anger in that depiction. Scrooge still colours our vision of ‘greedy bankers’.

A Christmas Carol has shaped our view of what Christmas should be, but seldom is. If we ever catch ourselves feeling guilty as we survey the pile of presents under the tree or as we tuck into that seventh turkey sandwich, it is because of Charles Dickens. He brought guilt to the feast, because we are all too aware that few of us know how to ‘keep Christmas’ in the way that the reformed Scrooge did in later life.

Works of fiction are often described as ‘capturing the public’s imagination’. Very few really do. A Christmas Carol most definitely did. And still does.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Richard Norton-Taylor, a man with a rich past, writes in today’s Observer about that Falklands referendum. In his considered view the referendum is ‘all but meaningless’.

Examine the column of which this is the conclusion, however, and you might find it hard to detect from what Norton-Taylor obtains his meanings. He is aware of the principle of self-determination, but doesn’t attach any weight to it – on the grounds, it seems, that it isn’t always respected. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of things various people have said at various times, but with no fundamental principle enunciated by Norton-Taylor to explain what better basis there might be than self-determination for settling the issue of sovereignty.

And then, at the last minute, he discovers a source of compelling meaning. It is – steel yourself – what a visitor from Mars would think. Me, I don’t rightly know what a visitor from Mars would think – always assuming such a being was possessed of thinking intelligence. Maybe, like a lot of humans, Martians would also give moral weight to the right to self-determination. Maybe, like me, they wouldn’t consider geographical proximity decisive. We’ll never know.

Even as an admirer of Hugo Chavez’s accomplishments in Venezuela, Danny Postel is minded to rehearse the man’s record on the Middle East and North Africa. It isn’t a pretty one:

Chávez had been an enthusiast of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since the latter became Iran’s president in 2005. In 2006, while Ahmadinejad presided over a massive escalation of repression against dissidents, trade unionists, and human rights activists in Iran, Chávez awarded him the Order of the Liberator medal, the highest honor Venezuela bestows on foreign dignitaries. In June of 2009, as millions of Iranians took to the streets to ask Where Is My Vote? Chávez was among the first world leaders to congratulate his ally in Tehran on his reelection…
…..
This provoked widespread dismay and appeals to Chávez from Iranians, many of whom sympathized with the ideals of the Bolivarian Revolution, to stop supporting their reactionary president. Those appeals, alas, went ignored, further damaging the standing of the Venezuelan leader among progressive Iranians.

“In Egypt, the situation is complicated,” Chávez pronounced during the Tahrir Square protests that brought down Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. He remained conspicuously silent on the Battle of Cairo, one of the great democratic uprisings of recent times, remarking merely that “national sovereignty” should be respected.

But silent he was not as the Arab revolts spread to Libya and Syria; he spoke out emphatically in support of Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar Assad. Chávez had been chummy with the Libyan leader before the 2011 uprising against him; in 2009 he regaled Qaddafi with a replica of Simón Bolívar’s sword and awarded him the same Order of the Liberator medal he’d bestowed on Ahmadinejad. “What Símon Bolívar is to the Venezuelan people,” Chávez declared, “Qaddafi is to the Libyan people.” As the Libyan revolt grew and Qaddafi went on a rampage of slaughter, Chávez was one of a handful of world leaders who stood by him: “We do support the government of Libya.” That support, as one observer noted, was “politically costly and proved to be an embarrassment to many of Latin America’s erstwhile revolutionaries who now share a vision of a democratic future.”

“How can I not support Assad?” Chávez asked last year as the body count in Syria approached sixty thousand. While the regime bombed bread lines and hospitals, Chávez shipped upwards of 600,000 barrels of Venezuelan diesel to his ally in Damascus. Meanwhile, the Chávez-inspired Bolivarian Alliance for Latin America (ALBA) denounced a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution that condemned the Assad regime for the horrific massacre of over one hundred noncombatants, including forty-nine children. The UN resolution, ALBA protested, was an attempt to “interfere in Syria’s internal affairs.”

Chávez’s support for despotic and murderous regimes isn’t limited to the Middle East; he also hailed Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe, the late Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin, and Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive Belarusian leader known as “Europe’s last dictator.”

And there’s more. A grim profile, I think it fair to say. If you’re writing in praise of Chavez after his death, how do you handle these aspects of his record? One way of doing it is this: you acknowledge that he was sometimes at fault, but point out that others are similarly. Thus:

And then there is the matter of some of Chavez’s unpleasant foreign associations. Although his closest allies were his fellow democratically elected left-of-centre governments in Latin America – nearly all of whom passionately defended Chavez from foreign criticism – he also supported brutal dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria. It has certainly sullied his reputation. Of course, we in the West can hardly single out Chavez for unsavoury alliances. We support and arm dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia; Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair is paid $13 million a year to work for Kazakhstan’s dictatorship. But our own hypocrisy does not absolve Chavez of criticism.

Or here’s the Guardian’s version, focused on domestic affairs rather than foreign alliances:

In politics proper, Chávez was right to see that the old establishment he had displaced was ready to use unfair means, up to and including a coup attempt in which Washington may have been complicit. He was wrong to use unfair means to protect himself and his government, particularly as he almost certainly did not need them. His friend Lula has criticised the abolition of presidential term limits, others have singled out the closures of radio stations and restrictions on the print press, interference with and intimidation of the judiciary, and detentions of some opponents and critics. If this was bad, and it was, it is also true that it was not even remotely on the same scale as the abuses of rightwing military regimes which countries like Argentina are still pursuing in the courts.

All tickety boo, then, and wrapped in ribbons: not absolved, and what’s bad is bad; BUT there’s a lot of that sort of badness about.

Except, now, can you imagine the same thing in relation not to a figure like Chavez with less than robust democratic credentials, but rather in criticism from the left of a Western leader, or government of a pluralist democracy? Can you imagine it with the direction of the comparative exercise reversed, so that the faulting of that Western leader or government is contextualized by reference to the similar failings of which undemocratic leaders and regimes are guilty?

Try to conjure it up, a Guardian leader on, say, waterboarding or Guantanamo, where the wrongness involved is balanced by a sentiment like: ‘it is also true that it was not even remotely on the same scale as the abuses of rightwing military regimes in Chile and Argentina, or of Saddam’s Iraq’. You picture that? No, me neither. Or what about a leftwing critic of British support for dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia writing that this sullied Britain’s reputation, but people in Latin America or the Arab world could ‘hardly single this country out for unsavoury alliances’, given the alliances entered into by some of the governments in those regions? Nope, I can’t see it.

Apologetic tropes is what they are, disguised as they may also be by an arse-covering ‘Well, it wasn’t good’. That’s as in: wasn’t good, but… yououou knowww, it’s a wicked world, let’s not be too severe.

It begins tomorrow. The Falkland Islanders will vote on the question, ‘Do you wish the Falklands Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?’ My view on this is the same as that expressed by The Independent:

The Falkland Islands’ sovereignty must… be decided by those who live there.

The US, unfortunately, is sitting on the fence. At the Organization of American States Canada was ‘alone in arguing that the Falkland Islanders should be allowed to decide their own future’. There do, however, seem to be some few voices in Latin America supporting tomorrow’s referendum. (Thanks: LM.)

My good friend Jeff Weintraub has a post up about this, centred on a piece by Peter Bergen but also offering observations of his own. Jeff doesn’t deny that much has gone wrong, nor that things could get worse after the US and its allies depart. But, even so, his judgement is unambiguous: ‘every piece of available evidence indicates that for the great majority of Afghans conditions have improved dramatically, not only by comparison with the period of Taliban rule, but also by comparison with the decades of war and devastation that preceded it’. You can read the whole thing here.

I want to conduct a brief thought experiment, in pursuit of which I invite you to follow this short fiction of mine. Suppose I were to tell you I was about to show you a distribution of marks on the wall at the side of my house and challenge you to say whether the marks had been arranged there in a pattern by some higher being, in fact God, or whether on the other hand they were entirely random. And suppose that you were, even before seeing those marks, immediately to accept my challenge, preparing yourself to make the choice I was offering you. Would it not show you to have been too hasty, not to have thought carefully enough?

I’d say so – because there are other possibilities than the two I’d offered you: God or the merely random. Here’s one. Some leaks in the guttering at the edge of my roof had created an initial pattern of marks on the wall, and the neighbour’s Cocker Spaniel Lucky had added a few of his own by scratching at the bottom of the same wall. Noticing an interesting shape in the combination of rain marks and doggy additions, I had then put in a few dabs of paint to suggest the overall impression of something or other – something or other because that impression wouldn’t be entirely unambiguous to the eyes of a diverse audience.

So, not God and not pure randomness; but a combination of ‘natural’ processes, the activities of Lucky the dog and the deliberate intervention of me the human individual.

Giles Fraser, now styling himself the ‘loose canon’, seems to have fallen for John Gray’s claptrap about progress. This should be familiar enough to regular visitors here, but in summary Fraser’s version has ‘the inevitable march of progress towards liberty and enlightenment’ and the ‘arrow of time… inexorably pointing us on towards a new improved future’; and then ‘[w]hat is at work here is secularised theology, technically a form of eschatology – the belief that history is the expression of God’s purpose for humanity’. It’s ‘a hollowed-out version of Christian theology’.

The only alternative to secularised theology that Fraser offers us is contained in this: ‘to see history as simply one damn thing after another seems to rob it of that larger meaning that many want to read into it’.

Well, anyone whose belief in the inevitable march of progress has not been shaken by, among other things, the Nazi genocide, and the Armenian and Cambodian and Rwandan and Kurdish genocides, by the millions of victims of Stalinist tyranny and Maoist leaping-forward and other crimes and calamities too many to list, does need to think about the world again. However, it remains possible that there have been forms of human progress over the last two millennia that have nothing to do with a higher metaphysical purpose working itself out but are also not merely random, and that have led to more democratic societies in much of the world, the outlawing of slavery, advances in the status and situation of women, scientific advance, improvements in health, the dissemination of human rights norms, and so on and so on. Not just one damn thing after another, therefore, but general improvements – always provisional, always coexisting with dangers, threats and catastrophes – but morally important for what they nonetheless are, and worth continuing to fight for.