I did not intend to write a Twitter thread this morning, but it happened anyway:
We have a fight on our hands.
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It is sobering to think that above all of these events there is a narrative of Right wing /Left wing (Fascist) extremism linking the U.S., the UK and Europe to the Kremlin.
Very sobering indeed – with our Prime Minister with his and his party’s links to Russian money, window dressing over sanctions.
You are not overstating the situation by any stretch of the imagination in my view.
“The first casualty of war is truth”
Wall to wall commentaries about Ukraine on British media are there as the proverbial dead cat, to divert from monstrous economic hardship about to hit most of the population (not of cause the ruling class). It also has the added benefit of shoving Partygate off the headlines.
Wait for the new justification for austerity – the need to dramatically increase military spending. Witness the rise in BAE shares.
Can you for once stop trying to score political points!!
You mean in the face of political oppression I should hold my tongue?
What are you? A fascist?
What’s frightening is not just the casualties and the usual consequences of war but the rush to profit by both foreign and homegrown greed-obsessed rich investors, aided and abetted by our far-right government who you rightly predict Richard will burden the population with further totally unjustified austerity. They are a toxic, immoral but powerful breed who regard war purely as a wonderful financial opportunity.
My turn.: “score political points” stripping aside the invective – most of what follows is objective – the only ones scoring political points are the toryscum – own goal after own goal ad nauseum. & you will ask: why are they still in office? FPTP coupled to a media that much of the time grooms UK serfs.
Responding to the main thrust of the tweets, the current situation was enabled by past events. Two in fact. When Thatcher got in, smaller gov was on the menu & this has been a core toryscum policy ever since. And let’s not forget – Thatcher did not permit revenues from council house sales to be spent on new social housing – deary me no. Smaller gov was also a central theme for the Cam-moron/May years. Quite how much smaller gov can get (given its poor record on even collecting taxes) is anybody’s guess.
In parallel with the above, Thatcher/Parkinson did the “big bang” in the City which turbo-charged finance (in fairness – an important doner to the toryscum party). At that point (1987) there was no sign of what would happen in Russia. When the SovU fell, “the city” was “well positioned” to take advantage. The “taking advantage” aspect has been working its way through the body polit-sick since circa 1995. Liebore under B.Liar/Brown/Mandelson were quite happy with the filthy rich (& thus by extension oligarchs). They even said so.
With the mood music set, it was no surprise that Cam-moron and the toryscum in 2010 picked up where Liebore left off, it was all a case of let’s do business with the Russian oligarchs/mafia (& all donations gladly accepted) Gidiot (holiday on oligarch yacht) came up with austerity (make UK serfs suffer) which fitted nicely with “smaller government” (bye bye sure start – can’t have that – we must have less government, close public libraries – yup by the dozen). On a side note, a Labour MP was accused of being “Putins Whore” – after opposing war. Which is odd because I saw a photo of May, Trussed and a bunch of other toryscum at a party with an oligarch/Putin supporter who gave the toryscum circa £1.7million – begging the question – who are the real Putin whores?
The smaller gov agenda has a logical end point where, starting with Thatchers privatisation drive, one reaches the end point where everything is provided by the private sector – & if you can’t pay – tough.
The problem with toryscum, like Thatcher, is that they swallowed the Hayek crap (The Road to Smurfdom) hook line and sinker – uncritically. Toryscum cannot imagine the logical end point – and even when part the way down the track – they refuse to accept that it is all nonsense and going badly wrong. The privatisation of the railways (a mad idea from start to finish), ditto power networks, water & sewage etc etc. The latter 3 are monopolies and money extraction machines (6% return on monopoly assets ker-ching!). Toryscum regard UK people/serfs as cash machines – for their mates owning private service companies to extract money from. Covid response? A classic case of this.
Ominously, Liebore and Keef are silent on all this. Dead silent. Either this is tactical (why give toryscum an angle) or we are in B.Liar territory where superficial changes are made once in power but basically its sugar-coated Toryscum policies.
As for “plural respectful diverse representative democracy” – looking at current toryscum politices: no more demos (unless the plods say so), contraction of the citizen vote (no photo ID no vote), gov control of election monitoring. So no, I don’t respect toryscum because they scorn the entirety of the UK. Thus my views on them converge with the words Bevan used in a memorable speech.
“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It is seeing through the facade of pretence. It is the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” Adyashanti. The waking up process for UK serfs (if it ever happens) will be painful.
Indeed we do. You are so right to link all this ‘foreign affairs’ crisis to basic economic and social policies. Perhaps never have liberal democracy’s concepts of ‘negative’ and ‘positive liberty been so in need of mutual development.
A quartet of excellent articles in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland, Peter Beinart, Marina Hyde and Jason Stanley begin to mark out some of the terms and parameters of useful political debate. Plus that excellent Finnish twitter thread you alerted us to, which casts a pretty stark light on both Freedland’s telling coinage of this being “the age of impunity” and on Putin’s naked threats against Sweden and Finland. While he is so heavily engaged in making his huge – and deranged – error in attacking Ukraine, the time for Sweden and Finland to reach out to NATO has surely come – and, yet, I still want nuclear weapons banned, but for the first time in my life I have to say “not yet.” The words are wrenched from me in pain – but there cannot, surely, be a new peace era in Europe until Putin is defeated and for that some balance of immoral and heinous threat must, I fear, continue for the present to exist.
Finally, let it be clearly admitted that the ‘rule based system’ was hideously torn apart by Blair and Bush. That began with the bombing of Serbia (rightly denounced by Alex Salmond as “an act of unpardonable folly”) and then led on to the so-called ‘humanitarian intervetionism’ used to cloak the dreadful crime of the Iraq War. Those who flout the international legal gains of WW2, should not be surprised that the sworn enemies of their own values are prepared to do it too. We are in the world which many men, deluded by apparently supreme power, have made – but it remains one in which there is no ‘mending’ now without Putin’s defeat and his country’s liberation.
I think the outcome we want is Putin to realise he’s made a mistake, apologise, withdraw his army and navy, resign from his job, and for the Russian Parliament (Duma?) to elect a short term replacement.
Obviously not going to happen.
Best we might get is that one of his Generals or Inner Circle tells him he needs to do the above, or his balls get taxed and given to the treasury.
How we achieve that by being contrite about our own failings is a real difficulty with a rotten track record when deployed of delivering the outcome you want. At this point I don’t think it’s worth grouping Putin, Trump and Brexit together. To within a couple of % Trump and Brexit were voted for.
Get to Ukraine, and get the small arms into the hands of the public who care enough to lay down their lives for their friends.
I disagree
They are all far right populist movements
Looking at who and what was said at CPAC this weekend it can not be clearer. There are US mainstream politicians in the US that think America is best suited to being an ally of Putin’s Russia than EU countries. Are we going to ignore that only 2 years ago a US president was impeached because he denied military aid to a country for domestic political advantage. That country has now been invaded and peace in Europe is over.
Agreed, but how? They have an 80 seat majority and some ‘Lord’ said we will have to put up with it for the next 10 years of a Johnson administration.
Meanwhile, in the background, they’re making protest difficult (not that it ever changes anything), boundary changes, voter ID and so on.
All they need is a measly 30% or so of supporters to vote to stay in power with our FPTP system. We all know this, venting on Twitter/blogs etc will get us nowhere.
If you look at say the ‘trending’ on Twitter or popular youTube topics it is full of sport/celebrities and TV soaps chatter. Talking about existential facts is nowhere to be seen.
(Perhaps I do actually have ideas about how to fight back but not going to speak about it on. a public forum.)
Vote ABC
Anything but Conservative
I think protests can change things but only very slowly. You have to protest more or less continuously over a very long period of time and eventually what you are protesting about becomes part of what people think about. I can think of several examples but one that sticks out in my memory was a regular protest mainly by parents every Friday afternoon in term time outside a school protesting the lack of a zebra crossing. It went on for about five years during which time the local press kept going on about the possibility of fire engines and ambulances being held up, not that that ever happened, and people being unable to get to work on time.
Then the leader of the local council had a brainwave, he thought “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a crossing outside this school!” The local press then praised his idea not mentioning they had been against it for years, and the crossing appeared.
Protests can and do work, but they have to be peaceful, and they have to be very well orchestrated.
The trucker protest in Canada brought the capital to its knees in 14 days. When Trudeau tried to make life as difficult as possible for them by prosecuting anyone bringing them food or fuel, the masses ignored him and peacefully, in their thousands brought the truckers the supplies they needed.
Martial law allowed Trudeau the authority to confiscate the ‘go fund me’ donations, freeze the truckers bank accounts and threaten to freeze the bank accounts of all the supporters.
He had no choice than to back down after banks started screaming about massive withdrawals. As far as I’m aware, the MSM haven’t reported any of this. Maybe they don’t want to give us Brits ideas!
You do realise that the truckers were from, and were supported by, the far right?
@Jan Blackwell it is possible to learn from the tactics of the far right and if they are acceptable – often they are not – to employ them oneself. However I don’t think trying to use fund me to put pressure on the government in this way would work for the left. I see two reasons for this:
First: The far right, and often the not so far right, is very good at fusing together disparate groups who have different, often mutually contradictory, aims into one large whole for the purposes of protest. This includes both those who will physically protest and those who will only contribute funds. They seem to be able to be able to forget their differences for the sake of the immediate cause.
The left are often far more concerned about the ethics of the people they are associating with. For instance John McDonnell recently pulled out of addressing a group you might have thought would have had his wholehearted support when he found out that one of the speakers supported China’s policy towards the Uighurs. The rally he was going to address was about a totally different subject and he could have quite credibly claimed not to have known had this fact come to light later. Personally I will not support a cause if there is even a whiff of something rotten going on. It may mean that I am sometimes mistaken and a worthy cause misses out on my support.
With some notable exceptions, the right tends not to act like this. There are Tory MPs who seem quite happy to associate with known fascists even though there is reason to doubt that they, themselves, are extremists.
Second: For this to work you need to be able to raise a substantial sum using go fund me. There many very rich people who are quite happy to donate substantial sums to right wing causes so that, in addition to having more contributions a right wing cause is likely to have bigger contributions.
Still, it’s an interesting idea.
I still think even now it would be better to negotiate a withdrawal of Russian troops rather than try to fight it out with all the killing. The Ukranians are mentioning it.
Don’t agree 100% with Varoufakis –
https://twitter.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1496952362048671745
but I always thought Briden had a pretty frozen cold war mind set which could only say No No! to that Russian set of demands. You have to look as though you are offering something to talk about at least. There is security in Eastern Europe, there is the Minsk agreement guaranteed by France Germany, U.S. Russia – but not implemented which included some recognition of the semi independent status of Russian speaking sub regions. Just because you think you are dealing with a mafiosi doesnt mean you shouldnt try to be a bit subtle. The same applies to all the other threatening movements.
Very well said.
I may be a pessimist, but I agree with Fredrick Baden above that the only short term solution that I can see to Ukraine is an internal putsch by generals or “inner circle” quelling Putin’s delusions.
Longer term, if Ukraine’s population remain loyal to their country’s separate sovereign identity then the struggle to maintain control will probably sufficiently diminish Putin’s standing within the Russian population – despite his control of the media. One commentator today (can’t remember who) pointed out that is was the prolonged and ineffectual occupation of another neighbouring country (Afghanistan) which did for the Soviet Union.
What we need at the moment is strong leadership, not a strong smell around the leadership.
As Dominic Grieve point out in this morning’s Observer, the Government is entirely neutered, not just by it’s attitude to Russian money, but by it’s supine response to acts of aggression, including cyber attacks and attempts on the lives of its nationals in this country. Unfortunately, until moderate Tories like Grieve come out and say that they will not support the Tories in their present incarnation as an increasingly right-wing reactionary party driven by far right nutters like Baker then their opinions are nothing more than hang-wringing bullshit.
Johnson has taken the Russian money and run. He doesn’t give a damn about the geopolitical or domestic chaos that ensues as he is in thrall to the Steve Bannons and Steve Bakers of this world whose encouragement of this chaos under the guise of nationalism is seen as an easy vote-winner aided by supine following of the mass media that the billionaires control. War is a nice little earner for the arms dealers – more profits for the rich, the Stock Exchange loves it.
Richard, thank you for your exemplary leadership on this.
It seems to me inescapable that the west cannot talk in terms of the nation state which is needed to maintain democracy unless it acknowledges the need for fair and really effective taxation, which is where you came in.
John Maynard Keynes foresaw and described all this. Hayek is the madman being followed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and his book which apparently she carried in her handbag is merely and elaboration of his Road to Serfdom. The subsequent flight from the reality of taxation, only possible with the use of secrecy, cynicism and deception or self-deception should be plain enough to any honest onlooker By now. All you and we can do is to keep pointing that out with supporting evidence, and as Cooley as we can. More power to your elbow.
I admit, I follow Keynes on this
I think as the West unfreezes from the shock and processes what happens, a new reality will emerge about Ukraine and Russia.
Underlying all this is the prospect of a wider war that could suck other nations in. I don’t sense an appetite for that anywhere to be honest. I’m sure Putin is banking on that. It’s difficult isn’t it – a bit of morass?
I’m going to invoke Tim Snyder here from his 2010 book ‘Bloodlands’ because I want to reassure those in these delicate times that I am not a Putin apologist. If the ‘Road to Unfreedom’ and ‘Black Earth’ are dissections of Fascist techniques and how they can still be used today, then ‘Bloodlands’ is the able testament to the suffering of those subjected to those techniques in the 1930/40’s.
Snyder is philosophical about post second world war Europe and Eurasia and sets an example of what we should be thinking when confronted with evaluating the likes of Hitler and Stalin (and now, maybe Putin). He repudiates revenge and an eye for an eye. When describing that suffering imposed on people, Snyder says this (and would anyone accuse Snyder of defending Nazism with these words, let alone Putin?) (p. 400):
‘To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.’
So, with Snyder you get the whole works OK? His analysis does not offer a quick easy route to action in stopping Fascism. He is telling us not to adopt fascism to fight fascism. He is imploring us not to justify your fascism or your fanaticism in fighting fascism. Do you understand? Why? Well – work it out for yourself. Do we really want the Ukraine and even Poland and other surrounding states to be the new frontline between opposing ideas about nation states? An old graveyard for a new generation of victims to be mashed into the earth as we fight over ideas?
Snyder sees his role as a warning not to launch into war or counter aggression too readily. He’s asking us to consider how this happened? Do we have all the facts?
Or what about ‘What did we miss about Russia?’
‘What did we not understand about Putin?’
‘What did we take for granted?’
Surely these are the questions (and similar) Snyder is alluding to? And of course, the fact that we should be talking to Russia and keep talking.
In the introduction to Isabella M. Weber’s ‘How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate’ (Routledge, 2021, pp. 1- 14), the Russian experience of neo-liberal shock therapy is mentioned as the comparator to the emergent gradualist model of market liberalisation in China (this is as far as I have got yet). Russia’s Western advised shock therapy yielded:
1. A drop in world GDP from 3.7% in 1990 to 2% in 2017, low growth rates.
2. De-industrialisation (perhaps explains why gas and oil are now so dominant).
3. Average incomes lower in 2015 than in 1991 for 99% of its people.
4. A rise in mortality.
5. A deep and prolonged period of recession after shock therapy.
6. Most indicators of human well being – access to education, absence of poverty, public health – have deteriorated.
7. A long period of price inflation instead of a one off jump as promised as markets ‘normalised’ after price controls loosened.
‘Ring any bells? It should do. We spend a lot time talking about these issues here in the West.
Further, Weber zones in on the neo-liberal obsession with market pricing at a loss to wider interlinked factors that we know here are often ignored (such as the pricing out of people by markets). This shock therapy in Russia was an exercise in pure faith in the theory and nothing more – a race rather than gradualist as China seems to be. The loss of wealth by the masses due to inflation was seen as a justified sacrifice to kerb excess demand but only helped to redistribute from the bottom to the top of Russian society. Again – ‘ring any bells?
So – here is Putin’s Russia then: much diminished having done as it was told by its ‘betters’ in the West. Post communist Russia entered a world not of cooperation but one of naked, aggressive competition just how Randian America likes it. Russia is a carbon dependent economy – we know that this has got to end – but will we help Russia to change and adapt or will we let it die and suffer a total economic collapse? Do you think Putin trust us after all that? And if the latter, well, would you not expect Russia to fight back because there is no trust? None. We know here on this blog what the answers to these problems are: Money – lots of money (investment and economic co-operation as the EU intended with the central European post war peace dividend). And lots of cooperation. But the West’s collective blindness about money and its obsession with ‘competitive markets’ only creating it and moving it around does not help.
We also know that internationalised share markets and financial sectors are nothing more than shop windows for greedy rich raiders to go and snap up assets cheaply, strip them, enrich themselves and leave countries and communities with the consequences. So much for our wonderful (and ‘free’ apparently) Western capitalist system.
Are these the things ‘we’ failed to take into account whilst the West ‘counted the money’ as John Warren mentions? Oh I think so.
I would still implore the West to reach out and try to keep talking. What is Russia and Putin really scared of?
And the clue is this one size fits all version of capitalism that we insist on shoving down people’s throats. I’ve heard Ukraine described as a European country. Is it? I thought is was Eurasian? Labels aside, shouldn’t we bit a bit more interested in the complexities of our differences and how economies and societies actually work? Why is the West so un-self-aware about these issues when the problems are well known?
Otherwise what? Come on – we know what the alternatives are to talking, reasoning and understanding in these situations. I have a 16 year old son; and 18 year old daughter. Do you expect me to hand them over to bunch of idiots (politicians – mostly rich ones) who can’t keep the peace because they think that life is nothing more than fucking each over for a percentage income rise rather than sharing, and seeing my kids mashed into lands already full other people’s dead sons and daughters?
I will not surrender my children so lightly, so wastefully. Not on your nelly. I’d rather go myself.
That is why I (and I recommend to anyone also) will keep coming back to the simple question of ‘Why?’ and starting there.
If only.
The right question
I was unaware of Ms. Weber’s. I will have to get a copy. I have my own take on why China avoided neoliberal shock therapy. it may be nonsense or it may be consistent with Ms. Weber’s account.
When Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader China had been through two enormous shocks, and several smaller ones, since the revolution.
The first was the Great Leap Forward, which Deng had been partially responsible for organising and which was supposed to take China from an agrarian economy to a modern industrial economy in a space of 5 years but, in fact, resulted in, depending on whose estimate you accept, either greatest or second greatest famine in human history. Many of the people the Chinese state would later take credit for lifting out of poverty were only in poverty because of the Great Leap Forward.
The second was the Cultural Revolution in which Deng, who had began to challenge Mao’s economic theories, had been condemned as a “rightist” who was, among other things responsible for the failure of the Great Leap Forward and thoroughly humiliated. Mao would often prefer to humiliate his enemies rather than kill them, although he did do that as well.
I would speculate that when he became paramount leader Deng didn’t want his legacy to be that of the person responsible for the greatest economic disaster in Chinese history but was aware that shocks don’t have the desired effect and that great changes cannot be achieved over short times. Hence the commitment to a gradualist policy for development.
The book is a bit expensive Bernard (I got a second hand one) and it is very anti-neo-liberal from the offset (some here might find that a problem – but not me!) but Ms Weber seems to have mastered Chinese and used it when interviewing key people . As a writer I think she’s very good but I’ve only read the introduction thus far.
There is even an index of Chinese economists at the back of the book through which she charts the development of Chinese ‘gradualism’. Weber contends that had neo-lib shock therapy been used on China, it was less developed than Russia, and as a result the consequences would have been even worse. And what emerges is that they came close to adopting shock therapy but somehow pulled back.
The book concentrates only on economics – not the darker side of the Chinese state so you libertarians out there should calm down now before you think I’m apologising for all that. Gradualism seems to be the Chinese way and the interesting thing is what can the West learn from that and other aspects?
Well here’s one:
Weber (pp. 9-10) skillfully likens the Chinese approach to the game of ‘Jenga’ – where you have a tower of bricks and the idea is to remove bricks but keep the structure standing (the person who makes the structure topple loses the game).
She argues that China has skillfully removed certain bricks (aspects of the economy) and cast them out into the market, leaving those behind under more state control and influence. The result is an economic system (the metaphorical Jenga tower) that has not collapsed – a balance of market and State.
No doubt further chapters will enlighten me more.
Thanks.
I note the comments on the ideological history, but prefer to focus now on the practical issues. First, ‘This is Money’ (26th February, 2022) examines BP’s: “large-scale involvement in Russia took off in 2003, when it set up a joint venture, TNK-BP, with four billionaire oligarchs. When that partnership was dismantled in 2013, BP received $12billion in cash and acquired a near-20 per cent stake in Kremlin-backed oil company Rosneft, which is one of Russia’s largest producers of crude oil and a major supplier of its military. The company still has that holding in Rosneft. Looney sits on the board alongside former BP chief Bob Dudley and chairman Igor Sechin, who is a close ally of President Putin.” The Johnson Government has had little to say about BP, the PM crudely avoiding awkward questions at PMQs already.
I have always thought BP should be the ‘cutting-edge’ of Britain’s Green Energy technological revolution (they have the engineering know-how), the resources; and the Government has a long-standing special relationship with the business since it was founded in 1908 – as a Government creation (a public-private partnership; nothing to do with ‘free enterprise’).
Second, Sky News (26th February, 2022) report the Johnson Government “fast-tracking” measures to open up the dirty money used under Britain’s current rules to hide off-shore the beneficial ownership of Russian owned companies. All this does is remind us of the endless, hapless, scandalous failure of Conservtavie governments, in power for the last twelve years, to do anything at all. This is unforgivable. Scottish Limited Partnerships were founded in 1907 for agricultural businesses, but have been quite obviously misused in recent years; with Conservatives grotesquely doing nothing in spite of endless warnings.
Even worse, it is typical of the Conservative vacuous puff we have become used to: all sound-bite, no substance. Sky reports later in the article: “Officials in the Business Department had advised earlier this week that the measures were more than two years from being fully implemented, Sky News understands. New processes to verify the identities of the company owners – to be carried out by Companies House – were not expected to be introduced to parliament until the autumn, where they could then take months to pass.”
This could b law in a day if the political will existed
“This could b law in a day if the political will existed”.
It would be useful to see who would either wish to speak or vote against such a law in Parliament if a sufficiently ‘armed-to-the-teeth’ law was introduced in a day. Could it be, that is the reason it is not being introduced? Surely not …..
Whatever the ideology, some form of practical arrangements will be forged in its name and that is what you are describing here John.
The two work together. BP and indeed the Government are not interested in Russia because all they have in their eyes are pound signs and the money that can be made out of Russian resources. Sod any of Russia’s other problems.
The approach is avowedly neo-liberal – short term (which is why access to Russian resources has helped curb working on alternatives say at BP) and money centred as you’ve pointed out previously.
Steve Keen has often pointed out that money is money to the Neo-liberals and nothing more – they don’t care where it comes from (legit or criminal) nor what type it is (credit or cash).
That is why I (and I recommend to anyone also) will keep coming back to the simple question of ‘Why?’ and starting there.
Vladimir Pozner offers some insight into that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ&t=6079s
James Cleverly MP, Minister of State for Europe and North America has just delivered an appalling weasel-worded interview on C4 News on British undertakings to abandon Visa restrictions on people fleeing Ukraine. Asked the question on Britain’s willingness to take Ukrainian refugees without Visa restrictions, he appeals back to a typical Johnson sound-bite; gushing positive sentimets, but lacking any substance at all. We are back to the Brexit obsession with immigration: in the middle of the greatest crisis of war in Europe since 1945. The German Parliament have understood the transformation wrought on our world. The British Government simply cannot rise to the level of the challenge it faces. Leadership is quite beyond them.
I haven’t read the piece or comments, as yet, however if you want to know how serious the uk is with sanctions, ask;
Why are Chelsea playing in a Cup Final today?
Another dire outcome is of course that the Weapons Industry will be buoyant.
More and more sophisticated bombs and missiles with hardly ever a word from any political parties. The industry, almost preparing for the invasion, recently held a large convention at RU Twickenham. The rugby pitch one presumes was chosen to demonstrate these weapons.War has been fought because of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ while we have still made people rich by making them. Ironic that those who currently attack ‘Stop the War’ isn’t concerned about this.
You can not agree with Stop the War and not support the arms industry