6-17-08, 9:41 am

Original source: Morning Star

Art of the Brown nose

The intensity of the physical assault by police on the anti-war demonstrators in London on Sunday evening should not really have surprised anybody, although it has shocked a considerable number.

The freedom with which the police laid about them with their telescopic batons and the more traditional solid truncheons and the fury on their faces as they did so simply reflected the attitude of their political masters.

There was no way that new Labour's leader would allow anybody to interfere with George W Bush's swansong visit to Britain and, if that meant battering a few members of the public till they bled, so be it.

But no-one should be under any illusion that this was simply a matter of courtesy from one national leader to another or that it was just a case of the police overreacting in the cause of public order to what was, after all, only a few thousand demonstrators.

It was, quite simply, the reaction of a Prime Minister who, along with ex-prime minister Tony Blair, Bush himself and several of the US president's senior cronies, shares the guilt for the most massive war crime committed so far this century, compounded with Mr Brown's absolute commitment to the US free market model which, even among capitalist economists, is now becoming discredited, and his dedication to US-dominated globalisation, which, with the rapid emergence of the giant Eastern economies, is likely to be as foolish and serious a mistake as the war.

In short, Mr Brown has put all his eggs into the Atlanticist neoliberal basket and cannot afford to see it discredited or opposed in any way.

He has left himself and his new Labour colleagues no options and no ways out of this position and will, should an impartial war crimes court ever get its hands on him, pay, with them and their US allies, for the obscenity that was and is the Iraq war.

Having left himself so stranded, all that this sorry excuse for a Labour Prime Minister can do is pile on more of the same, in the faint hope that something will turn up to bail him out of the mess that Bush and Blair created and that he has so willingly perpetuated.

Thus, we see the statement, almost the eulogy, on Mr Bush and his visit.

Mr Brown's version of George W Bush is not a politically subliterate tool of the oil companies, indeed not. His version, which raises brown-nosing to a new level, has this bullying, religious fundamentalist bigot as 'steadfast and resolute in rooting out terrorism in all parts of the world,' ignoring the fact that terrorism has grown, not shrunk, as a result of Bush fanaticism.

It has Mr Bush 'working for a free-trade world where, in spite of current difficulties with oil and food prices, there is and should be a wider and deeper prosperity in future for all,' this time ignoring the fact that Bush and his country's activities are aggravating the fuel crisis, wrecking the oilfields of Iraq and thus driving up oil prices.

Even his puppet Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki has rejected Bush's overtures on the future of the country as an attemped US takeover.

If Labour is ever to find itself again - and the chances of it doing so are slipping away daily - it will not be under the leadership of war criminals and political front-men for transnational capitalism.

And by his mixture of increasing state repression, the demolition of ancient freedoms and the eulogising of the warmonger Bush, Mr Brown has hitched his wagon to a dark and waning star.

From Morning Star