The new ZZ Top acts in the leftist political circus, Zarah and Zack, are attracting attention but Sultana is intransigently one-dimensional and Polanski is, well, green on security.
Sultana is the worse of the pair. Despite Russian imperialism’s war to snuff out an independent Ukraine and menace its near neighbours Sultana identifies Nato as the villain – “an imperialist war machine” – and opposes arming the victim, Ukraine.
Paul Mason eviscerates the Coventry MP’s juvenile assertions that “There is always money for war, never for the poor. Every penny spent on bombs, tanks and missiles is stolen from our homes, schools and hospitals. We are not going to take it any more.”
He rebuts her claim: “Defence spending in the UK is currently 2.3% of GDP, about £60bn. Welfare spending…comes to about £303bn. If you add in £200bn of NHS spending, to provide free healthcare regardless of income, £94bn on education and £87bn on council services, the claim that defence is somehow “robbing” poor people is just factually incorrect.”
Sultana recently attended a Paris conference with hard-line tankies and a Ukrainian speaker from the innocent sounding “Post-Soviet Left.” Galina Rymbu, a Russian born poet, translator, feminist, and anarchist in Lviv, sent Sultana a moving and detailed open letter that tears this organisation and other speakers apart.
She says that “the speakers you met in Paris not only cannot represent or know the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, they do not even represent any significant leftist force in Russia, Ukraine, or the leftist diaspora” and their call for Ukraine and its allies to stop can only mean one thing: an invitation for Putin to go further — wherever he chooses.”
She concludes by telling Sultana that “I understand that the bitter reality is this: you will not fight alongside us. And we will fight – even without you.” The Rymbu riposte is a damning indictment but I won’t hold my breath for a reply from Sultana.
Zack is marginally better by comparison. He is not advocating immediate withdrawal from Nato, as he once did, but now thinks it should be eventually replaced by a non-nuclear European alliance. This ethereal proposal is improbable while Putin and any successor with revanchist ambitions rules Russia. A long time by any measure. Indeed, it’s more likely that some non-nuclear European states would build their own bomb in these circumstances.
A previous Green leader, Caroline Lucas wisely withdrew from its steering committee but the Greens back the stop the war coalition with its inane slogan of welfare not warfare and unjustified moral equivalence between Nato and Russia.
Zack’s Greens are currently polling well although that will ebb and flow in these intensely volatile times. But his party compares badly with the German Greens who junked the Fundis for the Realos – the fundamentalists versus the realists – in the 1990s and later joined governing coalitions with social democrats and Christian democrats.
Their march from the fringe owed much to their leader, Joshcka Fischer. His youth was devoted to militant anti-fascism and anti-imperialism and a photograph of him beating up a police officer in Frankfurt in 1973 soared to prominence when he became leader. But he had a wake-up call and rethought his politics after a leftist he knew well hijacked a plane in 1976. The hijackers diverted it to Entebbe where they lined up Israeli Jews for execution in a gross replay of Nazi death camps.
Other prominent 68ers who rethought their excesses included “Red Danny” Cohn-Bendit, a German activist who became a French MEP, Bernard Henri-Levi and Bernard Kouchner who founded Medicins sans Frontieres. Kouchner became French Foreign Minister and worked on Iraqi Kurdistan, as did the other Bernard where I met him as he followed the Peshmerga’s resistance to Isis. Their journey to anti-totalitarian politics is detailed in Paul Berman’s excellent book.
Fischer became German foreign minister and broke the taboo on German military intervention by joining Nato action in Kosovo. One of his successors, Annalena Baerbock promoted a feminist foreign policy and took a hawkish view of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Compared to this, Polanski’s unrealistic musings are largely irrelevant but Sultana’s approach is set in stone. Sultana’s views echo those of communist politics in the early 1930s and Polanski’s have the vibe of the short-lived peace dividend after the fall of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, which sadly turned out to be a holiday from reality.
Germany pioneered idealistic policies, Ostpolitik that assumed that hostile actors such as Russia could be tamed through trade and detente. But that also made us more reliant on its energy imports and gave it leverage in our politics. That reliance is being reduced and there’s now a growing consensus, Realpolitik, that massive rearmament is necessary.
After some delay, Germany is now ploughing billions into creating a huge military force to deter Russia. It’s arguable that Fischer helped create the conditions for this and showed that some radicals and greens can be trusted with national security imperatives. Polanski is nowhere near demonstrating that here.
Neither of the ZZ Tops’ zero-serious stances on security may bother those who gravitate to their parties but may reduce their appeal to mainstream voters many of whom sympathise strongly with Ukraine and Nato. In any case, social democrats who understand that dangerous times require strong deterrence and a robust alliance need to oppose their approaches and continue to win informed support in the Labour Party and more widely for Nato.
