US murdered head of UN but culprits remain unpunished

Buried History CIA and MI5 linked to assassinations in the Congo in sixties With the recent scandal of ‘destroyed’ Foreign Office documents in connection with Britain’s bloody colonial past and more recent revelations of our secret services’ murky complicity with Gadafhi’s security services it is perhaps worth recalling Britain’s role in the nefarious conspiracy in the Congo after it gained independence from Belgium in June 1960. The Belgians had done nothing to prepare the country for independence, and it quickly degenerated into chaos, providing a motive for the Belgians to keep troops there. While the Belgians favoured Joseph Kasavubu to lead the new nation, the Congolese chose Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister. Lumumba asked the United Nations, then headed by Dag Hammarskjöld, to order the Belgians to withdraw, and the UN voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Impatient and untrusting of the UN, Lumumba threatened to ask the Soviets for help in expelling Belgian forces. He was no communist, but was interested in getting aid from wherever he could, including from the Soviet Union. He’d also sought and, for a time, obtained American aid. Civil war broke out four days after independence, and local leader Moise Tshombe announced copper-rich Katanga's secession in July. In 1959 Lumumba had visited businessmen in New York, and stated unequivocally, ‘The exploitation of the mineral riches of the Congo should be primarily for the profit of our own people and other Africans.’ The country had rich deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, and uranium. Asked whether the Americans would still have access to uranium, as they had during the Belgian occupation, Lumumba responded, ‘Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium; it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the US worked out their own agreements in the future.’ The US, though, didn’t trust Lumumba to protect their interests. Investors in copper and uranium in the Congo at that time included the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims and C. Douglas Dillon, who participated in a National Security Council meeting where the removal of Lumumba was discussed. In September, only twelve weeks after his election, his government was indeed overthrown in a western-backed coup by the military, and he was allegedly shot while escaping custody in January 1961. The CIA was not satisfied solely with the death of Lumumba. One of the barriers to completing the takeover of the Congo remained the United Nations, and more specifically, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld who was UN Secretary-General. Hammarskjöld was killed only nine months after Lumumba in September in a mysterious air crash. Allegations were immediately made of a link between the two and of Western involvement, but firm evidence was difficult to come by. His death was part of an attempt to prevent Katanga's mineral wealth falling under the control of a progressive government. He was flying aboard the Albertina to the Ndola airport at the border of the Congo in Northern Rhodesia, where he was to meet with Tshombe to broker a cease-fire. The pilot of the Albertina filed a fake flight plan in an attempt to keep Hammarskjöld’s ultimate destination hidden. Despite this and other measures taken to preserve secrecy, less than 15 minutes into the flight the press was reporting that Hammarskjöld was en route to Ndola. Hammarskjöld and 15 other people were killed when their aircraft crashed entering what was then Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where the UN head was due to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe to negotiate a truce in the Congolese civil war. Newspapers at the time alleged British involvement in a plot to kill Hammarskjöld to prevent UN support for Tshombe and his diamond-rich Katanga province. However, in 1998 Reuters reported that South Africa's Truth Commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu Wednesday had released documents which suggested a Western plot was behind the death of the head of the United Nations in 1961. Tutu said his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was investigating crimes committed during the apartheid era, had decided to release the documents although it could not verify their authenticity. Commission investigators stumbled across the documents by chance while researching an unrelated issue. They link South African agents to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. The papers also revealed that the project was plotted at the highest levels of the CIA and MI5. The alleged plot was revealed as the brainchild of at least two British security agencies - MI5 and the Special Operations Executive, together with the CIA - as these top-secret documents show. A series of messages between a ‘commodore’ and a ‘captain’ point to a plot hatched on South African soil by a group which had access to large sums of money and the ability to muster mercenary forces to protect Western investments in turbulent post-colonial Africa. The letters, with South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) letter-heads, include references to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI5 security service [SAIMR was a front company for the South African military]. In addition to outlining Operation Celeste - the plan to get rid of the ‘troublesome’ Hammarskjöld - the documents also implicate the SAIMR and international intelligence agencies in the death of Patrice Lumumba and they also implicate then CIA chief Allen Dulles. They claim that the explosives used for the bomb that downed the aircraft were supplied by the Belgian mining conglomerate, Union Minière. The company had extensive interests in copper-rich Katanga, and was known to have backed Tshombe's use of mercenaries, including the group led by South Africa's Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare. The most damning document, marked ‘Top Secret’, refers to a meeting between MI5, Special Operations Executive, the CIA and the SAIMR at which it was recorded that Dulles ‘agrees ... Dag is becoming troublesome and ... should be removed’ and ‘…I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice.’ These documents have predictably been dismissed as fakes by both MI5 and the CIA who still deny any involvement in Hammarskjöld's death. However, they bear a striking resemblance to others emanating from the SAIMR seven years before, when it was headed by ‘commodore’ Keith Maxwell-Annandale and had developed links with both South Africa's military intelligence and the National Intelligence Services. These documents also show that the SAIMR masterminded the abortive 1981 attempt to depose Seychelles president Albert René, and that it was also behind a successful 1990 coup in Somalia. The CIA later opened its files on Cold War assassinations and admitted it had ordered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, but it still denies any involvement with that of Hammarskjöld. The former UN Representative in Africa under Hammarskjöld, Conor Cruise O’Brien, said, ‘I do not think there was anyone there who believed that his death was as accident.’ He and another of Hammarskjöld’s close associates, Stuart Linner, had both been targets of assassination attempts. Interestingly, in 1976 a long-time CIA operative, Bud Culligan, a man with a grudge against his former employer, claimed he personally shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane. He had kept a detailed journal of every assignment he had performed for the CIA. He had dates, names, places - he was a professional assassin. He clearly worked for the CIA in Africa but the extent of his involvement is impossible to prove. We may never be able to uncover the real truth behind Hammarskjöld’s death, but there is certainly no shortage of precedents for CIA involvement in other successful and unsuccessful assassinations of progressive leaders, from Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, to Omar Torrijos and Bishop Romero. END

Cats are sociopaths!

Psychopaths in the garden It's almost like admitting publicly that you are a paedophile. But I'll admit it anyway: I hate cats! Cats are the world's greatest and most cunning opportunists. They are, in their essence, wild animals that have opted to accept human propinquity because it guarantees ready meals and a dry bed for the night. Cats are unlike any other domestic pet; they cannot be properly tamed or confined, so are free to wander anywhere they want, including into my garden. If my neighbours or even their dogs were continually trespassing on my property I could undertake measures to stop them, even resorting to the courts if necessary. But with cats I have no redress whatsoever - they are a law unto themselves. They can come and go as they please, bury their faeces in my vegetable patch, sunbathe on my patio and hide under the hedge, waiting to pounce on any bird foolhardy enough to hop within range of their vicious claws. In the UK we have 10.3 million cats - that's one for every six people! Just imagine the mountains of food and the tonnage of cans needed to package it. Our supermarkets dedicate metres of shelving to satisfy feline taste buds; cats are offered almost as much choice of food as we humans. Then there are the vet bills, the expensive catteries to park these creatures when their owners go on holiday. This is a multi-million pound industry supporting a vast army of killing machines – a feline-industrial-complex so to speak. Cats are serial killers and they are allowed to murder with impunity. The most recent figures from a British Mammal Society report (2012), estimates that the UK's cats catch up to 275 million prey items per year, of which 55 million are birds. This is the number of prey items that were known to have been caught; we don't know how many more the cats caught, but didn't bring home, or how many escaped injured and subsequently died. On a world scale the figures are even more mind-numbing. Jonathan Franzen in his novel Freedom also lays it on the line about cats through the words of the environmental activist Lalitha: ‘Kitty cats,’ she said. "C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It's just one cat - how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion song birds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It's one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat.’ I like most animals, but particularly birds. I relish their songs in spring, their animated activity in the nesting season; I like watching them bathe in the water bath and grub for worms on the lawn. But the omnipresence of my neighbours' cats means that their numbers are rapidly reduced and they are driven from my garden. It's even worse in the breeding season when the young hatch, as they have no experience of the wicked wide world outside the nest and no previous contact with those louring beasts of the urban killing fields. Last week a pigeon was pounced on as he strutted calmly around my lawn; only a pile of feathers drifting in the breeze was left behind as evidence. My neighbour’s children told me how their cat brings home dead frogs on a regular basis – culled from around my pond! Cats don't need to catch other animals for food; they do so merely out of instinct. Whereas most town dogs have had their hunter instinct largely bred out of them or can be suitably controlled by their owners, cats are averse to training of any kind. The enormous wastage in terms of the lives of birds and other small animals, due entirely to cats, is mind-boggling. The cat population, I would argue, needs to be seriously reduced if we are to save the remnants of our wildlife. We cull pigeons, foxes and other pests, so why not cats too? Cat-owners should be obliged to make their cats wear bells on their collars or contraptions to prevent their killing. Because they are always well nourished, cats can spend hours simply lounging, grooming themselves, just waiting for any bird, frog or mouse to appear within their vision, before pouncing, just for the sheer hell of it. In conclusion, I can find no better words than those of Franzen’s protagonist in Freedom: ‘Walter never had liked cats They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries...’ END 735 words John Green

The Last to Fall
(the life and letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigader in Spain)
by John L. Wainwright
Pubs Hatchet Green publishing
Pbck £10.99

This book’s cover displays a somewhat faded, sepia-coloured photograph of a sunburnt, handsome young man staring out at the onlooker with unflinching determination. Immediately you feel the urge to read about who he is and what he did.

The author had a long history of interest in the Spanish Civil War and had even written a film script about it. But the only facts he had to go on when he began researching this biography of Ivor Hickman was a small memorial plaque on a wooden bench outside Peter Symonds College school in Winchester with Hickman’s name engraved on it and a modest memorial to several International Brigaders in Southampton. He was determined to find out more about this enigmatic man. After a friend was able to establish contact with the two daughters of Hickman’s former wife and asking if they knew anything about him, they discovered a dusty parcel of faded letters in the attic of their old house. These turned out to be letters Hickman wrote to Juliet MacArthur, his girlfriend and later wife. Slowly Wainwright was able to piece together Ivor’s short life story.

It is a fascinating tale and a glowing symbol of the idealism and commitment which persuaded between 30-40,000 young men and women, among them over 2,300 from Britain, to volunteer to fight fascism in Spain. Wainwright writes about this key historical juncture with lucidity, imagination and insight.

Ivor Hickman was a bright student who went up to Cambridge, joining the Communist Party there, before going on to work in Manchester, in 1936, as a mathematical engineering apprentice at Metropolitan Vickers, a big engineering factory. At Cambridge his lecturers included C.P. Snow and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with both of whom he corresponded after finishing his degree. At university he also met the love of his life, Juliet MacArthur, who was studying psychology.

In that same year he married Juliet before immediately departing for Spain. His newly wedded wife was left behind, and although they both hoped she would be able to join him out there, it never happened. That, though, didn’t prevent her playing an active role in looking after refugee Basque children in Norfolk, who had been evacuated from the fighting.

His early letters to Juliet, while at university or from Manchester, are full of youthful passion and sexual desire, like those of any normal young man. His dispatches from Spain were, of course, censored, but provide a vivid picture of the harsh reality of that unequal struggle.

The cause of the Spanish Civil War captured the imagination of left wing youth throughout the world as hardly any other cause has done, before or since. They were prepared to sacrifice their lives for a cause the passionately believed in and, if the pusillanimous western powers had given sufficient support to the legitimate Spanish government, fascism would have experienced its first defeat and the Second World War in Europe may have been avoided.

All this is now ancient history, but it is does provide a vivid and salutary illustration of how some individuals time and time again can and will rise above their peers to fight selflessly for justice and a better life for their fellow human beings. Unlike today, ideological issues then were perceived as black and white: you were either anti-fascist or a reactionary; you were either a communist and supporter of the Soviet Union or an upholder of out-dated bourgeois values. It was a time when many realised that Europe was on the cusp of cataclysmic change and traditional values were being seriously challenged.

Wainwright cleverly interweaves the essential history of the Spanish Civil War around Hickman’s life. He includes interviews with other veterans of the International Brigades, including Sam Lesser (Sam Russell) the former Daily Worker/Morning Star reporter. These give added weight and colour to that war that took the lives of so many valiant comrades in the prime of their youth.
END

A Buddhist take on Marxism
I have often thought that while Marxism is a wonderful tool for analysing society and its various processes, but with its overemphasis on classes it largely ignores the question of individual morality and ethical behaviour as determining factors in the historical process. This ‘missing link’ in Marxism may partially explain why the communist project went badly wrong.

Professor Richard Winter readily admits that his suggestion of connecting Marxism and Buddhism could appear ‘surprising or even downright bizarre’ to many. When I realised that he is suggesting this as a way of countering the denigration of our humanity under capitalism, I too thought he must be a little ‘off-beam’. However, his lucidly and concisely argued case completely disabused me. Far from being an ‘odd ball’ he is a man with a deep comprehension of the ills of our present system and he has a thorough understanding and appreciation of the value of Marxism as an analytical tool. He has his feet firmly on the ground, based on his wide experience working in our educational system, and he sees education as a potential tool for change. His desire for radical change, together with his strong sense of compassion and justice led him to examine Buddhism as a means of individual self-enlightenment, and as an additional means of bringing about the sort of social change many of us desire: first by changing ourselves. Buddhism is often seen about being about ‘enlightenment’, but it is really more concerned in reshaping character and behaviour than mystical experience; younger Buddhists are more likely to be fired by social action.

I remain sceptical of those who suggest answers to our pressing problems can be found in ‘exotic’ cultures, whether Indian Hinduism, North American indigenous traditions or Chinese Confucianism, even if they can offer us new and valuable insights. But Winter is not suggesting this. He is attempting to address Marxism’s underplaying of the role of the individual by suggesting a combination of Marxist theory with a meditational approach derived from Buddhism.

However, while I can go a long way with him and even accept that aspects of Buddhist teachings have much to offer us in the West; I doubt such ideas could be easily adopted. Yes, it might be a good idea, but is it feasible or even imaginable that one could persuade a sizable proportion of people not steeped in a Buddhist tradition to adopt such a Buddhist approach to their lives? That is always the dilemma for those who want to change society without being able to obtain a majority electoral mandate: where can you effectively start?

Winter argues that one of the keys lies in education. ‘Without changes in our individual awareness and behaviour our attempts to make our institutions more just and more compassionate are doomed in the long run,’ he says.

His advocating meditation is basically suggesting a series of straightforward actions that anyone can engage in. Meditation is a method of personal change, he says, and he demonstrates how it can refine our personal and ethical responses to practical situations and how it could support the effectiveness of our attempts to change political and economic structures.

Meditation as ‘pure awareness’ can have merely the general and familiar meaning of sustained purposeful thought, he says.’ It involves a heightened state of concentration, derived from being a wholly absorbed awareness of the present. ‘This methodology,’ he argues, ‘helps us resist our spontaneous ego-orientation and thus our assimilation into the stress-filled responses of our exploitive culture, whose ramifications penetrate so deeply into our lives.’ Meditation practice is inseparable from ethical awareness.

Winter is not suggesting that we adopt Buddhism as the new religion or see it as a magic solution. But using Buddhist ideas, particularly that of meditation could help us understand ourselves and help us better comprehend and deal with our society in terms of its pressures, stresses and consumer demands. Buddhism places an emphasis on the present and on those things in life that are vital to a meaningful and happy existence, that represent enduring reality. In other words, all the ephemeral trappings of wealth and fame, of vanity and worries about the future or preoccupation with the past, only distract us from the real question of the here and now, and dissipate our creative energies. ‘For Buddhism in its origins and most of its contemporary versions meditation is the primary practice; its teachings are, above all, a rationale for the validity and power of meditation as an individual path of self-transformation,’ he writes. It also helps overcome self-doubt and encourages our creativity.

What is certainly true, and something few would deny, is that if we wish to change the world we have first to change ourselves; and in our own behaviour we have to encapsulate the type of society we aim to create.

Both Marxist and Buddhist perspectives also emphasise that ‘our spontaneous experiences are frequently based on misperceptions of reality; what Marx called ‘false consciousness’. That is why, Winter argues, that any education curriculum needs to go beyond simply involving students’ personal experience in the learning process: a ‘curriculum for transformation’ is needed to help students engage in a radical critique of their experience.’

He says, perceptively, that behaviour, which constitutes part of the ‘ethics’ of capitalism, is not really endorsed by the general population: rather it is seen as a regrettable compromise. He realises that simply putting forward yet another ‘vacuous plea’ for a ‘change of culture’ is pointless. He knows that such pleas avoid the crunch question: through what agency could the changes we desire be brought about? That’s why he argues forcibly that we are all potentially ‘agents for change’.

One might not agree with much of Winter’s argumentation, but his ideas are certainly thought-provoking and deserving of close attention.
(Prof Winter’s recent book: Power, Freedom, Compassion is published by Willow Tree Press £10)

Alfred Russel Wallace socialist and co-founder of evolutionary theory
Next year will see the centenary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace. Simultaneously with Darwin the discoverer of evolution due to natural selection, but history has obscured him under Darwin’s immense shadow.

Wallace came from a lower middle class background - his father was a provincial solicitor, at that time a lowly occupation. He left school at 14 to work as an apprentice surveyor with his brother William in order to supplement the family income. This itinerant job took him all over the country and engendered in him a love for the countryside, science and nature.

While carrying out this work, Wallace talks of being forced to travel in the ‘wretched third class’ carriages where passengers in open trucks were transported like cattle. After one such journey with his brother William, they took cheap lodgings in a damp room in Bristol, which led to his brother consequently dying of pneumonia.

Wallace’s mental development was grounded in the provincial, industrialising countryside, where he would mix with weavers, factory inspectors, railway workers and farm labourers. He was completely self-educated in the sciences and became an early socialist, greatly influenced by lectures he heard in the Hall of Science in Tottenham Court Road, given by Robert Owen. He said: ‘I have always looked upon Owen as my first teacher in the philosophy of human nature and my first guide through the labyrinth of social science.’ He, like Owen, took a prominently anti-Malthusian line (put crudely, Malthus argued that disease and early death were necessary among the working masses to keep the population down). Darwin, given his class background, was much more sympathetic to Malthus’s views than Wallace was.

During his wanderings throughout the country Wallace’s avid curiosity and thirst for knowledge led him to attend many lectures at the local Mechanics’ Institutes –in Victorian Times places where ordinary working men and women could listen to prominent and learned speakers on a whole range of subjects. He also made full use of the free libraries for his studies.

Although his family was ‘old fashioned Church of England’, Wallace very soon shed all shreds of religiosity, developing advanced secularist views on society and human nature. Like almost all Victorian naturalists, he also began his career by collecting - in his case beetles and butterflies. At one of the Institute lectures in Leicester he met hosiery apprentice, Henry Walter Bates, who’d also left school early, at 12, and also embarking on his own self-education. He, too, was an enthusiastic naturalist and the two began making excursions together. From this time on Wallace began reflecting on the origins of the human race and the idea of continuous change of species.

Ironically, because of his radical political views Wallace was, from the outset, a more likely candidate than the conservative Darwin to come up with such a radical hypothesis as evolution. 14 years younger than Darwin, he was a likeable, mild-mannered man full of visions for a reformed society. His friend E.B. Poulton (later to become a professor of zoology at Oxford) described Wallace as a man of great ‘personal magnetism’ and ‘lofty ideals’. But he undoubtedly lacked the self-confidence that comes with a public school education and affluence.

In 1847 Bates and Wallace discussed travelling abroad and earning their living collecting specimens along the River Amazon. Unlike Darwin who was easily able to organise and finance his own long voyage on the Beagle, Wallace and Bates had to beg money for their trip. The mania of Victorians for collecting natural history specimens gave them the opportunity. In the end, Stevens, a natural history agent, advanced them money for the trip. In 1848 they sailed for Brazil and spent several years there, enduring disease, hardship and catastrophe. Their experiences were physically as far removed from Darwin’s relaxed and comfortable Beagle voyage as could be imagined. Unfortunately Wallace’s return voyage ended in shipwreck and the loss of all his meticulously recorded notes and arduously collected specimens.

In 1853, despite vowing never again to return to sea, Wallace again set sail, but this time for Malaysia with the same aims as before in the Amazon. He also wished to investigate primitive tribes and pursue his ideas on human origins. His readings of the anonymously published book ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ had convinced him that humans were descended from apes, possible from an orang-utan like animal as found in Malaysia. This was a dangerous expedition for a lone adventurer, and he lived for some time among the Dyaks - the notorious head-hunters of European legend. Before he left Sarawak he dispatched a short theoretical paper that Darwin and his friends Edward Blyth and the renowned geologist, Charles Lyell read, in which he speculated about how varieties of species arise and how geography was key in determining origins. His ‘betters’, including his agent Stevens, felt he should not waste his time with such pointless speculation, but concentrate on obtaining specimens for their collections. However, Darwin wrote him a warm and encouraging letter complimenting him on his paper. In 1858, after a bad bout of Malaria Wallace wrote another paper setting out, for the first time, his basic idea of natural selection and evolutionary development. He was completely unaware that Darwin had been secretly working along similar lines. He sent it to Darwin and asked the latter to forward it to his friend Lyell. The way his seminal paper overlapped with Darwin’s thinking on the same issue was remarkable.

Darwin had also collected a mass of fascinating data during his trip on the Beagle and through diligent correspondence with other naturalists was leisurely developing his own draft ideas of evolution. He was, though, a naturally cautious man and also very aware of how his ideas, once in the open, would undoubtedly cause outrage among the deeply religious. Wallace’s paper, arriving out of the blue, hit him like a thunderbolt. He’d fleetingly met and then corresponded with Wallace, but the two men hardly knew each other. Darwin was aghast and shattered that someone had apparently beaten him to it. The idea of ‘losing’ the letter or ignoring it crossed his mind, but in the end he followed the honourable road and forwarded it to his friend, the renowned geologist Lyell as Wallace had requested.

Darwin was, in fact, about to write to Wallace congratulating him and had almost decided to throw in the towel on his own projected publication, but was dissuaded from doing so by his two close friends and Linnaean fellows, the botanist Joseph Hooker and Lyell. To give Darwin his due, he was in the genuine sense of the words an ‘honourable gentleman’ and felt he no longer had the right to publish his own views before Wallace’s now that he’d read his paper. He was, though, persuaded by his two friends not to give way and to publish a paper of his own alongside Wallace’s in the prestigious Journal of the Linnaean Society. His friends suggested this in the full knowledge that, as a renowned fellow, Darwin’s views would take precedence over the ‘mere collector’ who had no standing in scientific circles. Hooker and Lyell implied that Wallace should be grateful for being given publicity on Darwin’s coat tails. They did this without Wallace’s permission and in a manner unprecedented among scientific colleagues. But Wallace, far away in Malaysia, was in no position to protest.

Wallace, unlike Darwin, had no independent means, was not a member of the gentry nor was he university educated. Darwin and his colleagues viewed Wallace as a useful purveyor of information and specimens, but would not have considered him a philosopher or thinker on their own level. That’s also why Wallace’s paper hit them with such force.

Neither paper caused even a ripple of excitement or outrage at the time of publication, but Darwin, realising the danger to his own work if Wallace developed his ideas further, put his head down and worked like a man possessed to finish and publish his later world-renowned ‘On the Origin of Species, a year later in 1859. This was the book that shook the world. Priests began apoplectically raging from their pulpits, fine ladies had fainting fits at the idea of being related to monkeys, and the popular papers never tired of ridiculing the idea of evolution as if a new flat-earth theory were being propounded.

These historical events again, demonstrate how class invariably determined an individual’s fortune and later historical status. The strictly stratified Victorian society left Wallace little chance of entering the hallowed halls of the elite scientific community of which Charles Darwin was already a respected member. However, after his return from his travels and with selfless support from Darwin, he did eventually gain acceptance, becoming a revered member of those elite scientific circles. Unlike Wallace, Darwin came from a moneyed upper middle class family - his father was a wealthy doctor and financier - and he lived in ease and comfort in the Kent countryside with all the time in the world to pursue his research and write. After studying at Edinburgh and Cambridge, followed by his five-year voyage around the world on the Beagle, Darwin quickly established his credentials as a leading naturalist.

Wallace had to do it the hard way, but humble and modest as ever, he subsequently accepted Darwin’s pre-eminence and his own secondary role in developing the theory of evolution. Darwin actually told him: ‘…you would, if you’d had my leisure, done the work just as welll, perhaps better, than I have done it.’ Undoubtedly Wallace deserves more prominence than history has granted him.
END

2 March 2012 Letter to Guardian


Dear Sir
Simon Jenkins spells out what we on the left have always maintained, but mainstream historians have strenuously denied: the Soviet Union, even under Stalin’s tyranny had no aim of conquering the West by force. (‘An ignorance that started the cold war now targets Islam’; Guardian March 2 2012). However, Jenkins and the man he praises, Andrew Alexander, leave out the key factor in the equation. It is not only, or even primarily, ignorance of other countries that fuels such myopic and belligerent policies. As Eisenhower warned, just after the end of the Second World War, it is the military industrial complex that we have to beware of. The arms industries are the most profitable worldwide, but particularly so in the US. The need to conjuror up an enemy or a few wars at regular intervals, are essential if taxpayers are to continue footing the enormous and penurious bills. It is also a truism that without a globally dominant weapons arsenal and enormous army, the USA would not be able to play world policeman and ensure its economic interests are maintained. It’s time we realised that continuous rearming and international weapons trading are paving the way to the world’s destruction not to its security.
Yours faithfully

Leon Trotsky – a revolutionary’s life
By Joshua Rubenstein
Pubs. Yale University Press
Hdbck
Trotsky was a man much traduced, and his reputation has not been enhanced by the ideas and actions of many of his devoted followers. This new biography, in the series Jewish Lives, is written neither by an admirer and follower like Deutscher nor by a denigrator like Robert Service. It is a view very much coloured, as the series indicates, by the idea of ‘Jewishness’ and a Jewish self-understanding, but manages to give a fairly objective and useful, if very brief, portrait.

Trotsky was a tragic figure of mythical proportions. A dedicated – one could say fanatical – devotee of the ideas of Marx and the Russian revolution, which consumed his whole life. He was persecuted unmercifully by Stalin, who had all his immediate family killed, alongside his many associates and former comrades.

Once expelled from the Soviet Union, Trotsky’s intransigence and unremitting calls for world revolution left him marooned in a no-mans-land without safe refuge.

Alongside Lenin, he was indisputably the most capable and influential figure of the Bolshevik revolution. He was broadly educated, an eloquent writer and magnetic speaker. Ironically Stalin, after Lenin’s death, was able to outmanoeuvre and sideline him because of his lack of ambition and refusal to conspire or join in political intrigues. While he undoubtedly had serious flaws in his character and could be just as callous as Stalin if he felt it furthered the ends of the revolution, he was a selfless and dedicated revolutionary.

In retrospect it beggars belief that such a key figure could have been reduced to a pathetic and isolated renegade in such a short space of time and that Stalin’s clever propaganda machine was able to convince not only communist parties throughout the world, but also many leading liberals and left-wingers that Trotsky was a malevolent cancer in the international communist movement. As this book reveals, this denigration was facilitated by a virulent and entrenched anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe as well as by its more genteel form in the West.