Interview with ANDRE VLTCHEK by ALESSANDRO BIANCHI, Chief Editor of the Italian political magazine l'Anti-Diplomatico

1) AB: Self-determination of peoples and respect for the borders and sovereignty of a country. This is of the most complicated issue for international law. How can it be articulated for the case of Catalonia?

AV: Personally, I’m not very enthusiastic about smaller nations forming their own states, particularly those in the West, where they would, after gaining ‘independence’, remain in the alliances that are oppressing and plundering the entire world: like NATO or the European Union.

Clearly, the breaking of the great country of Yugoslavia into small pieces was a hostile, evil design by the West, and particularly of Germany and Austria. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia after the so-called “Velvet Revolution” was a total idiocy.

Bianchi

But Catalonia (or Basque Country), if it became independent, would become one of the richest parts of Europe. I don’t think it would have any great positive or negative impact on the rest of the world. As an internationalist, I don’t really care if they are separate from Spain or not, or whether they are even richer than they already are, as I care much more about what is happening in places such as Afghanistan, Venezuela or North Korea.

On the other hand, the way Spain has now behaved in Catalonia, after the referendum, is a total disgrace. They decided to treat the Catalan people in the same way as Indonesians have been treating Papuans for decades. If this continues, it will all reach the point of no return: reconciliation will become impossible. You cannot start sexually harassing women and then break their fingers, one by one, just because they want to have their own state. You cannot injure hundreds of innocent people, who simply don’t want to be governed from Madrid. That’s absurd and thoroughly sick! Of course Spain used to commit holocausts all over what is now called Latin America, so it is ‘in their blood’. But I don’t think Catalans will allow this to be done to them.

What about the constitution of Spain? Look, there should be nothing sacred about constitutions. In the West, they were written to protect the interests of the ruling classes. When they get outdated, they should be moderated, or totally rewritten. If Catalans or Basques want their independence, if they really want it, if it is so important for them, then why not - they should have it. Spain is not a ‘people’s country’. It is an oppressive Western bully. I would have a totally different position if some part of Bolivia or China were to try to secede.

2) AB: Different situation and different reality. Another issue of fundamental international concern in this period is the referendum of Iraqi Kurdistan, which is likely to become the new fuse ready to explode in that area. Would it be the new Israel in the Middle East as someone has affirmed?

AV: Well, that is really a very serious issue. I have worked in the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq already twice, even on the ‘border’ with Mosul, and what I saw there I did not like at all!

Vltchek

It is clearly a ‘client’ state of the West, of Turkey and to some extent, Israel. It is shamelessly capitalist, taking land from its own people, cheating them, just in order to pump and refine huge quantities of oil. It treats Syrian refugees like animals, forcing them to make anti-Assad statements. It is turning ancient Erbil into some bizarre shopping mall with nothing public in sight. Its military top brass is mainly US/UK-trained and indoctrinated. And it provokes Baghdad, day and night.

I really strongly disliked what I saw there. If Iraqi Kurds were allowed to have their ‘independence’, the impact on the region would be huge and certainly negative. Baghdad should not allow it, even at the cost of an armed confrontation.

3) AB: Coming to the question of the moment: the nuclear escalation in North Korean and a possible escalation of war on the Korean peninsula. What is your opinion about Kim’s strategy and what are the real risks?

AV: There is only one real ‘risk’ and danger: that the world is quickly accepting as inevitable the fact that the Western thuggish regimes can get away with absolutely anything. I see no other serious problem that the world today is facing.

What is Kim’s strategy? To defend his people by all means, against the brutal force that has already murdered millions of men, women and children of Korea. That brutal force is the West and its allies. It is all very simple, but only if one is willing to turn off the BBC and to use his or her own brain, it becomes ‘obvious’.

 4) AB: According to many, for Pyongyang the nuclear bomb is becoming more and more vital because it is increasingly feared that the country will end up like Iraq and Libya. Do you not believe that the sanctions of the United Nations are therefore totally ineffective and counterproductive because they fuel this escalation?

AV: Of course, but they [sanctions] are still imposed on the victim! It is because almost no one dares to laugh straight in the faces of Western demagogues and dictators. The world resembles the areas occupied by Nazi Germany and Italy and Japan during the WWII. There, nobody would dare to vote independently, defending victims of fascism.

5) AB: The US Federation of Science (FAS) estimates that in 2017 North Korea has "fissile material to potentially produce 10 to 20 nuclear warheads" even if it is strongly suspected that none can be considered ready for launch. The US possesses 6,800 nuclear heads. The French and British (respectively 300 and 215 respectively) included, NATO's nuclear forces have 7,315 nuclear warheads, of which 2,200 are ready to launch, compared to 7,000 held by the Russians, of which 1,950 are ready to launch. With Chinese (270), Pakistani (120-130), Indian (110-120) and Israeli (80), the total number of nuclear warheads is estimated to be around 15,000 by default. The West is a nuclear oligopoly that can only create an escalation with those who feel threatened, and so the threatened search to procure them. Is North Korea the only source of nuclear threat to the world, as it seems in the mainstream media?

Now, absolutely shameless British propaganda is ‘preparing’ the world public for the ‘inevitability’ of the war. You know, if someone in this day and age still believes that the United States is the only culprit, he or she is perhaps living in some deep isolated trench or a cave. Indoctrination and brainwashing is mainly designed, ‘Made in Europe’, most evidently in the UK, where most of the people have already lost all their ability to think rationally. The British colonialist propaganda apparatus is terribly sinister, but strategically it is simply brilliant! It was utilized for centuries, and it even succeeded in ‘programming’ the brains of the victims in the sub-Continent, Africa and elsewhere.

Of course, your numbers are correct and all that is happening is thoroughly absurd! But day and night people are told that North Korea represents a true danger to the world. The same was said about the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries. Most of these countries have already been destroyed.

North Korea’s sin is that it refuses to surrender, to fall on its knees, to sacrifice its people. It refuses to become a slave. For centuries, European and later US colonialism punished such defiance in the most brutal ways. Western culture is, after all, based and built on slavery. It demands absolute compliance, unconditional submission.

If North Korea is attacked, it should fight back! And it will.

6) AB: The United Nations adopted the important Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in July. The United Nations is often used (in alternate ways and countries): this Treaty is ignored by all nuclear powers, including by members of NATO with US nuclear weapons (including Italy). NATO has banned member states from ratifying it. Can the West have a moralist attitude to those who pursue a deterrent in order not to not end up like Saddam and Gaddafi?

AV: The West is like an army of brigands that has managed to overrun some city, to rape everything that moves, burn the center, loot houses and shops and then execute all leading thinkers and defenders. A few days later they see someone stealing a bunch of bananas from a fruit stall. And they catch him, and judge him, and feel totally morally righteous. It is all so comical! But that is not how you are supposed to see it!

7) AB: Russia and China (with Iran, Venezuela and many other countries) are intensifying de-dollarization in their mutual exchanges. Does it envisage a gradual weakening of the dollar capable of affecting international finance and what geopolitical repercussions?

AV: Yes, definitely! And you should talk about it to my friend, Peter Koenig, a true dissident, a former economist at the World Bank, who is now actually advising many countries on de-dollarization.

US dollars should not be used anymore. Western institutions should be ignored. Totally new structures should be, and are being erected. China and Russia are, of course, in the lead. All this is extremely important and can change the world, in the near future.

8) AB: Venezuela, with the convening of the Constituent Assembly, turned off the coup attempts of the opposition. In Brazil Lula is favored in polls, while in Argentina the former President Cristina Fernandez is back in the Senate with strong popular support. So it was not the end of the progressive cycle, as the mainstream has for years stated?

There were some serious setbacks – in Argentina and Brazil. And Venezuela is suffering immensely, battered by its own shameless elites sponsored from abroad. But the country is still standing.

In Brazil, Temer is immensely unpopular. His ‘constitutional coup’ will soon backfire. PT will be back, in its old form or in a new one. And it will be much stronger than before. The same goes for Argentina. You see, despite all the media manipulation, propaganda and shameless lies, people are already realizing that they were fooled. They want some decency back, they want socialism and pride and hope! They want true independence.

In two weeks from now I’m going back to South America. My book of essays is being published by LOM, soon, and LOM is a very important left-wing publishing house in Chile. These days I go back to South America often. It is one of the frontlines, battlegrounds, where people struggle against Western imperialism and its lackeys!

These are very important, fascinating times! I have just published my latest book, about “The Great October Socialist Revolution” of 1917, in Russia. Its legacy is now relevant, more than ever before in history. It gave birth to internationalism, and internationalism is the only movement, which can still save the world, and which can defeat Western nihilism and its barefaced, cynical pillage of the planet! 

BY WAYNE MADSEN } STRATEGIC-CULTURE.ORG

Felipe VI of Spain has entered the dispute between Catalonia and Madrid, on the side of "unity". His personal background, as that of many royals, despite all the pomp and circumstance, is shady to put it mildly.

It is difficult to believe that in the 21^st century there are still kings, queens, and other potentates, it is even harder to fathom such hereditary leeches on the taxpayers’ balance sheets calling any political shots.

King Farouk I, the last crowned king of Egypt, is famously known for saying, “In a few years there will be only five kings in the world — the King of England and the four kings in a pack of cards.” Farouk, who lost his throne after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, was slightly off in his prediction. Having died in 1965, Farouk would not live to see the abolishment of the monarchies of Iran, Libya, Greece, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Burundi, Laos, Sikkim, and Nepal. Nor would Farouk see the re-establishment of the Spanish monarchy after the death of Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.

King Farouk did have a valid prognostication. Although it is difficult to believe that in the 21^st century there are still kings, queens, and other potentates in the world, it is even harder to fathom such hereditary leeches on the taxpayers’ balance sheets calling any political shots. However, that is exactly what Spain experienced recently when King Felipe VI weighed in on the results of a popular referendum in Catalonia that overwhelmingly backed independence for the region.

"With their irresponsible behavior they [the Catalans] put their own region and all of Spain at risk."

The president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, denounced the King, declaring, "The king has adopted the (national) government's position and policies which have been disastrous with regard to Catalonia. He is deliberately ignoring millions of Catalans." In a televised address to the nation, Felipe railed, "With their irresponsible behavior they [the Catalans] put their own region and all of Spain at risk." However, Puigdemont countered the King by stating the Spanish monarchy refuses to even negotiate with Catalonia, "I will repeat it as many times as necessary: dialogue and agreement are part of the political culture of our people. However, the state has not given any positive answer to those offers."

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy totally rejected Catalonia's offer of dialogue. Rajoy even accused the Catalonian government of blackmail.

King Felipe bears a lot of family baggage in coming to the support of Rajoy in his confrontation with the Catalonian government and people. It was the ideological forefather of Rajoy's People's Party, Generalissimo Franco, who placed Felipe's father, Juan Carlos I, in the position of Spanish regent, or "Prince of Spain." Although Spain's monarchy had been abolished in 1931 by the Second Spanish Republic, Franco restored the kingdom after defeating the republic’s loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Franco could have not declared victory in 1939 had it not been for the assistance rendered by his two allies, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Franco made Juan Carlos his heir apparent in 1969 only after the "prince" swore allegiance to Franco's fascist Falange movement.

In choosing Juan Carlos as his heir, Franco skipped over the more legitimate Juan de Borbón -- the Count of Barcelona and son of King Alfonso XIII, the nation's last king before the republic was established in 1951. Juan de Borbón was seen by Franco as "too liberal," a euphemism for the Count having too much sympathy for Catalonia, the capital of which is Barcelona.

Juan Carlos was never very popular among the regions, particularly Catalonia and the Basque region, which suffered the most under Franco’s iron fist. There is a widely-held belief in Spain that in 1956 Juan Carlos shot to death on purpose his younger brother, Prince Alfonso, at the Borbón family's estate in Portugal, on purpose. Although Juan Carlos and royal aides claimed the shooting death was an accident, it was revealed that the revolver used by Juan Carlos was a personal gift from Franco. The only two people in the room when the shot was fired were Juan Carlos and Alfonso, the latter suffering a fatal gunshot wound in the forehead. The Spanish embassy in Lisbon crafted a press release that rivals any of the fake news seen today:

"Whilst His Highness Prince Alfonso was cleaning a revolver last evening with his brother, a shot was fired hitting his forehead and killing him in a few minutes. The accident took place at 20.30 hours, after the Infante's [Alfonso] return from the Maundy Thursday religious service, during which he had received holy communion."

The gunshot incident in 1956 was brought home to Spaniards in 2012, after a photograph surfaced of Juan Carlos standing in front of a dead elephant he shot in Botswana. The incident followed by a few days another in which Juan Carlos’s 13-year old grandson, Froilán Marichalar, shot himself in the foot while hunting in Spain. Catalans, as well as Basques, find the gun-wielding Borbóns as repulsive as the French revolutionaries found the Spanish royal family’s French ancestors, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, both of whom were separated at the neck by guillotines during the French Revolution.

Franco: A bloodthirsty dictator fully supported by the West and the Catholic Church.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring the Spanish Civil War, Franco's fascists committed horrific acts of genocide against the Catalans and Basques, punishment meted out for their support for the Second Republic. During the first decade of Franco's rule, Catalans and Basques were systematically massacred in the "White Terror," which saw as many as 400,000 opponents of the fascists fall victim to Franco's feared Guardia Civil. Franco proscribed the Catalan language, political parties, trade unions, and newspapers; abolished Catalonia's instruments of autonomy, including the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Catalonian regional government; and wiped out all vestiges of Catalan culture. It is with these historical underpinnings that Catalonia today seeks to part ways with a Spanish government steeped in fascist traditions and a blind eye toward the past genocide and national aspirations of the Catalan people.

As if to remind Catalans of the White Terror, Rajoy's government dispatched helmeted and armed Guardia Civil members to forcibly shut down independence referendum polling places across Catalonia, beat voters and protesters, arrest Catalonian government officials, and clash with Catalonian firefighters trying to protect Catalans attempting to vote. The Rajoy regime has threatened to charge with sedition Major Josep Lluis Trapero, the chief of the Catalonian police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, for failing to take the side of the Guardia Civil and other Spanish state security forces against his own people. Trapero faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

Meanwhile King Felipe, anxious to protect his “realm,” has served as a symbol for the stamping out of Catalonian nationhood. The Spanish royal family stands as a testament to the nepotistic corruption that shadows many monarchies. In 2016, Felipe’s sister, Princess Cristina, stood trial for business fraud. Although the princess was found not guilty, her businessman husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, was found guilty and sentenced to over six years in prison. In July, Prime Minister Rajoy, who has ranted and raved about the “illegality” of Catalonia’s independence referendum, became the first sitting Spanish head of government to take the witness stand in a criminal trial involving slush fund payments to his People’s Party.

European integrationist supporters of monarchies in the European Parliament, including the sell-out Greens, as well as Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian chairman of the "liberal" ALDE European parliamentary group, insisted that Catalonia must remain, at all costs, a part of Spain. These so-called "liberal" and "centrist" parties made common cause with the proto-fascist Rajoy, as well as the fascist-inclined Donald Trump, who recently insisted on Spain remaining united while standing next to Rajoy at a White House press conference.

The arrogant and impetuous Verhofstadt, a major opponent of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, is also a fierce opponent of the secession from Belgium of Flanders as an independent republic. Verhofstadt served as Belgian prime minister from 1999 to 2008, during a time when Belgian King Albert II was embroiled in the “Dutroux Affair” -- a festering scandal involving pedophiles at the highest levels of the government, church, and business. In 2013, Albert suddenly abdicated the throne in favor of his son Philippe.

Philippe has demonstrated that he, like his father, will do anything to save his throne and two constituent parts of his realm – the Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia --that wish to leave Belgium altogether. Neither region wants to have anything to do with the Belgian monarchy, with many Wallonians wishing to join the French Republic.

With his monarchy under constant criticism, Philippe has found time to criticize an online advertisement by the American fast food restaurant chain Burger King that coincides with the restaurant’s entrance into the Belgian market. The advertisement asks Belgians, “Two Kings. One crown. Who will rule? Vote now... “For those clicking on the image of King Philippe, they are then asked, “Are you sure..? He won’t cook you fries.” The royal palace demanded Burger King pull down the advertisement, claiming the King’s image is not to be used for commercial purposes. However, that restriction apparently does not apply to the King’s brother, Prince Laurent, who has been conducting private business meetings with foreign leaders, including officers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo – a former Belgian colony -- without the government’s permission. The Flemish republican nationalists have as much antipathy toward the Belgian royal grifters as do the Catalonian republican separatists for the Spanish royals.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth represents the strongest example of royal privilege around, thanks to the Brits' innate conservatism.

Felipe of Spain, Philippe of Belgium, Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands -- who insists on retaining as his personal fiefdoms Dutch colonies in Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, St. Maarten, St. Eustatius, and Saba; Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom -- who quietly campaigned against independence for Scotland and republic status for Jamaica and Barbados; Mohammed VI of Morocco -- who brutally oversees the repression of the stolen nation of Western Sahara; and the jihadist-supporting monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi have seen their era come and go.

Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon was discovered in 2016 to be renting out apartments on his royal estate that were deemed unsafe for residents. His wife, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has had past associations with drug dealers. In 2010, it was revealed that Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf’s youthful past included nights at strip clubs owned by notorious gangsters and wild orgies with models. Denmark’s Prince Consort, Henrik, recently said he does not want to be buried next to his wife, Queen Margrethe II, because he wanted to be named “King Consort.” Henrik, another disgustingly pampered royal parasite, complained, “My wife does not give me the respect a normal wife must give her spouse.” This writer’s grandmother, a Danish wartime Resistance fighter, journalist, and Danish Communist Party (DKP) executive, is fondly remembered by her colleagues as calling the Danish King the “highest paid unemployed person in Denmark.” The same can be said for most of the world’s royals, not just those in Denmark.

Apart for his prediction that the British monarchy would continue, King Farouk was correct: the only kings, queens, and knaves in the world today should be those found in every deck of playing cards. 

The UK's ruling class in action: How quickly all those pretensions to being the "Cradle of Democracy and Freedom," dissolve in the urge to bolster their fraying rule. Further proof that capitalist democracy is an oxymoron.

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or years, civil libertarians have warned that Great Britain has been in a free fall from the criminalization of speech to the expansion of the surveillance state. Now the government is pursuing a law that would make the repeated viewing of extremist Internet sites a crime punishable to up to 15 years in prison. It appears that the government is not satiated by their ever-expanding criminalization of speech. They now want to criminalize even viewing sites on the Internet. As always, officials are basically telling the public to “trust us, we’re the government.” UK home secretary Amber Rudd is pushing the criminalization of reading as part of her anti-radicalization campaign . . . which turns out to be an anti-civil liberties campaign.

We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Even the Home Secretary has been accused of hate speech for criticizing immigrant workers.

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May: Loyal servant of the reigning oligarchy.

Prime Minister Theresa May has previously called for greater government control of the Internet. Now, the government not only would make reading material on the Internet a crime, but would not necessarily tell you what sites will be deemed the ultimate click bait. Rudd told a Conservative Party conference that she wants to crackdown on people “who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions.” So sites deemed “far-right propaganda” (but not far-left propaganda) could lead to your arrest — leaving the government with a sweeping and ambiguous mandate.

The law would move from criminalizing the downloading of information to simply reading it. The move confirms the long criticism of civil libertarians that the earlier criminalization would just be the start of an ever-expanding government regulation of sites and speech. Rudd admits that she wants to arrest those who just read material but do not actually download the material.

In the past, the government assumed near total discretion in determining who had a “reasonable excuse” for downloading information.

Britain has long relied on the presumed benevolence of the government in giving its sweeping authority in the surveillance and regulation of speech, including the media. This move however is a quantum shift in government controls over speech and information. Indeed, this comes the closest to criminalization not just speech but thought. It is a dangerous concept and should be viewed as disqualifying for anyone who want to hold (or retain) high office.

What is particularly striking is that this new law seeks to create a new normal in a society already desensitized to government controls and speech crimes. Thee is no pretense left in this campaign —  just a smiling face rallying people to the cause of thought control.

Sound familiar?

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

George Orwell, 1984

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org. 

Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance.  The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.

It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics.

Corbyn: principled, but beware the company he keeps.

Addressing the conference, the campaigner Naomi Klein described the rise of Corbyn as “part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.”

In fact, at the end of the US primary elections last year, Sanders led his followers into the arms of Hillary Clinton, a liberal warmonger from a long tradition in the Democratic Party.

As President Obama’s Secretary of State, Clinton presided over the invasion of Libya in 2011, which led to a stampede of refugees to Europe. She gloated at the gruesome murder of Libya’s president. Two years earlier, Clinton signed off on a coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. That she has been invited to Wales on 14 October to be given an honorary doctorate by the University of Swansea because she is “synonymous with human rights” is unfathomable.

Fealty to false or vacillating champions can cost humanity dearly. Sanders, a slippery demagog, has risen to prominence on the basis of a progressive sounding platform which he betrays at every opportunity. In a nation as politically confused, conservative and ignorant as America, Sanders can indeed strike an "anti-establishment" pose while remaining absolutely loyal to the status quo.

Like Clinton, Sanders is a cold-warrior and “anti-communist” obsessive with a proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He supported Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s illegal assault on Yugoslavia in 1998 and the invasions of Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, as well as Barack Obama's campaign of terrorism by drone. He backs the provocation of Russia and agrees that the whistleblower Edward Snowden should stand trial. He has called the late Hugo Chavez – a social democrat who won multiple elections - "a dead communist dictator".

While Sanders is a familiar American liberal politician, Corbyn may be a phenomenon, with his indefatigable support for the victims of American and British imperial adventures and for popular resistance movements.

For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the Chagos islanders were expelled from their homeland, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, by a Labour government. An entire population was kidnapped. The aim was to make way for a US military base on the main island of Diego Garcia: a secret deal for which the British were “compensated” with a discount of $14 million off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine.

I have had much to do with the Chagos islanders and have filmed them in exile in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they suffered and some of them “died from sadness”, as I was told. They found a political champion in a Labour Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn.

So did the Palestinians. So did Iraqis terrorised by a Labour prime minister’s invasion of their country in 2003. So did others struggling to break free from the web of western power. Corbyn supported the likes of Hugo Chavez, who brought more than hope to societies subverted by the US behemoth.

And yet, now [that] Corbyn is closer to power than he might have ever imagined, his foreign policy remains a secret.

By secret, I mean there has been rhetoric and little else. “We must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy,” he said at the Labour conference.  But what are these “values”?

Since 1945, like the Tories, British Labour has been an imperial party, obsequious to Washington: a record exemplified by the crime in the Chagos islands.

What has changed? Is Corbyn saying Labour will uncouple itself from the US war machine, and the US spying apparatus and US economic blockades that scar humanity?

His shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, says a Corbyn government “will put human rights back at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy”. But human rights have never been at the heart of British foreign policy -- only “interests”, as Lord Palmerston declared in the 19^th century: the interests of those at the apex of British society.

Thornberry quoted the late Robin Cook who, as Tony Blair’s first Foreign Secretary in 1997, pledged an “ethical foreign policy” that would “make Britain once again a force for good in the world”.

History is not kind to imperial nostalgia. The recently commemorated division of India by a Labour government in 1947 – with a border hurriedly drawn up by a London barrister, Gordon Radcliffe, who had never been to India and never returned – led to blood-letting on a genocidal scale.

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

—W.H. Auden, ‘Partition’.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t was the same Labour government (1945-51), led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee – “radical” by today’s standards -- that dispatched General Douglas Gracey’s British imperial army to Saigon with orders to re-arm the defeated Japanese in order to prevent Vietnamese nationalists from liberating their own country. Thus, the longest war of the century was ignited.

British army officer accepting Japanese surrender in Vietnam. The British proceeded to cynically use the Japanese to repress the Vietnamese struggle against the French colonial yoke.

It was a Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose policy of “mutuality” and “partnership” with some of the world’s most vicious despots, especially in the Middle East, forged relationships that endure today, often sidelining and crushing the human rights of whole communities and societies. The cause was British “interests” – oil, power and wealth.

In the “radical” 1960s, Labour’s Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, set up the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) specifically to boost the arms trade and make money from selling lethal weapons to the world. Healey told Parliament, “While we attach the highest importance to making progress in the field of arms control and disarmament, we must also take what practical steps we can to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable market.”

The doublethink was quintessentially Labour. When I later asked Healey about this “valuable market”, he claimed his decision made no difference to the volume of military exports. In fact, it led to an almost doubling of Britain’s share of the arms market. Today, Britain is the second biggest arms dealer on earth, selling arms and fighter planes, machine guns and “riot control” vehicles, to 22 of the 30 countries on the British Government’s own list of human rights violators.

Will this stop under a Corbyn government? The preferred model - Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” – is revealing.  Like Jeremy Corbyn, Cook made his name as a backbencher and critic of the arms trade. “Wherever weapons are sold,” wrote Cook, “there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war” and “it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries”.

Cook (right) singled out the sale of British Hawk fighters to Indonesia as “particularly disturbing”. Indonesia “is not only repressive but actually at war on two fronts: in East Timor, where perhaps a sixth of the population has been slaughtered … and in West Papua, where it confronts an indigenous liberation movement”.

As Foreign Secretary, Cook promised “a thorough review of arms sales”. The then Nobel Peace Laureate, Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, appealed directly to Cook: “Please, I beg you, do not sustain any longer a conflict which without these arms sales could never have been pursued in the first place and not for so very long.”

He was referring to Indonesia’s bombing of East Timor with British Hawks and the slaughter of his people with British machine guns. He received no reply.

The following week Cook called journalists to the Foreign Office to announce his “mission statement” for “human rights in a new century”. This PR event included the usual private briefings for selected journalists, including the BBC, in which Foreign Office officials lied that there was “no evidence” that British Hawk aircraft were deployed in East Timor.

A few days later, the Foreign Office issued the results of Cook’s “thorough review” of arms sales policy. “It was not realistic or practical,” wrote Cook, “to revoke licences which were valid and in force at the time of Labour’s election victory”. Suharto’s Minister for Defence, Edi Sudradjat, said that talks were already under way with Britain for the purchase of 18 more Hawk fighters. “The political change in Britain will not affect our negotiations,” he said. He was right.

Today, replace Indonesia with Saudi Arabia and East Timor with Yemen. British military aircraft – sold with the approval of both Tory and Labour governments and built by the firm whose promotional video had pride of place at Labour’s 2017 party conference – are bombing the life out of Yemen, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, where half the children are malnourished and there is the greatest cholera epidemic in modern times.

Hospitals and schools, weddings and funerals have been attacked. In Ryadh, British military personnel are reported to be training the Saudis in selecting targets.

In Labour’s current manifesto, Jeremy Corbyn and his party colleagues promised that “Labour will demand a comprehensive, independent, UN-led investigation into alleged violations … in Yemen, including air strikes on civilians by the Saudi-led coalition. We will immediately suspend any further arms sales for use in the conflict until that investigation is concluded.”

But the evidence of Saudi Arabia’s crimes in Yemen is already documented by Amnesty and others, notably by the courageous reporting of the British journalist Iona Craig. The dossier is voluminous.

"As Jeremy Corbyn knows, dealing with the US is not about merely “disagreeing”. The US is a rapacious, rogue power that ought not to be regarded as a natural ally of any state championing human rights, irrespective of whether Trump or anyone else is President..."

Labour does not promise to stop arms exports to Saudi Arabia. It does not say Britain will withdraw its support for governments responsible for the export of Islamist jihadism. There is no commitment to dismantle the arms trade.

The manifesto describes a “special relationship [with the US] based on shared values … When the current Trump administration chooses to ignore them … we will not be afraid to disagree”.

As Jeremy Corbyn knows, dealing with the US is not about merely “disagreeing”. The US is a rapacious, rogue power that ought not to be regarded as a natural ally of any state championing human rights, irrespective of whether Trump or anyone else is President.

When Emily Thornberry , in her conference speech, linked Venezuela with the Philippines as “increasingly autocratic regimes” – slogans bereft of facts and ignoring the subversive US role in Venezuela -- she was consciously playing to the enemy: a tactic with which Jeremy Corbyn will be familiar.

A Corbyn government will allow the Chagos islanders the right of return. But Labour says nothing about renegotiating the 50-year renewal agreement that Britain has just signed with the US allowing it to use the base on Diego Garcia from which it has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq.

A Corbyn government will “immediately recognise the state of Palestine”. There is silence on whether Britain will continue to arm Israel, continue to acquiesce in the illegal trade in Israel’s illegal “settlements” and treat Israel merely as a warring party, rather than as an historic oppressor given immunity by Washington and London.

On Britain’s support for Nato’s current war preparations, Labour boasts that the “last Labour government spent above the benchmark of 2 per cent of GDP” on Nato. It says, “Conservative spending cuts have put Britain’s security at risk” and promises to boost Britain’s military “obligations”.

In fact, most of the £40 billion Britain currently spends on the military is not for territorial defence of the UK but for offensive purposes to enhance British “interests” as defined by those who have tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn as unpatriotic.

If the polls are reliable, most Britons are well ahead of their politicians, Tory and Labour. They would accept higher taxes to pay for public services; they want the National Health Service restored to full health. They want decent jobs and wages and housing and schools; they do not hate foreigners but resent exploitative labour. They have no fond memory of an empire on which the sun never set.

They oppose the invasion of other countries and regard Blair as a liar.  The rise of Donald Trump has reminded them what a menace the United States can be, especially with their own country in tow.

The Labour Party is the beneficiary of this mood, but many of its pledges – certainly in foreign policy – are qualified and compromised, suggesting, for many Britons, more of the same.

Jeremy Corbyn is widely and properly recognised for his integrity; he opposes the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons; the Labour Party supports it. But he has given shadow cabinet positions to pro-war MPs who support Blairism, tried to get rid of him and abused him as “unelectable”.

“We are the political mainstream now,” says Corbyn.  Yes, but at what price?

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