ISR Issue 77, May–June 2011
Libya’s revolution, U.S. intervention, and the left
By Lance Selfa
IN THE heady days of February, as the Libyan government of Muammar el-Qaddafi teetered, the Arab revolution appeared to be on the verge of forcing out a third dictator. The Libyan revolution had burst onto the scene with the same energy and fighting spirit that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia had shown. Youth led the revolt, giving confidence to wider layers of the population to mobilize. For various historical reasons, opposition to Qaddafi was strongest in the country’s eastern oil-rich regions. Although protests spread throughout the country, they reached farthest in the eastern cities of Benghazi and Tobruk. The mobilization drove the police off the streets and turned many city administrations over to popular committees.
But Qaddafi determined that he wouldn’t follow in Ben Ali and Mubarak’s footsteps. The Qaddafi government, acting through its loyal security forces, launched savage repression against the movement. Pro-Qaddafi forces opened fire on crowds, killing hundreds, while attempting to regain control of the streets of the capital and other major cities. The repression (or the fear for their own skins if they ended up on the wrong side of a triumphant revolution) prompted dozens of high-level Libyan government figures to defect to the side of the anti-Qaddafi opposition. In the eastern part of the country, whole military units went over to the opposition. The Libyan uprising transitioned from mass mobilization into a civil war between Libyan army units and mercenaries loyal to Qaddafi and rebels composed of military defectors and volunteers.
By early March, two key poles started to emerge in the heterogeneous Libyan opposition: one, centered on the Youth of February 17, the popular committees, and other forces who had formed the core of the early mass demonstrations; and a second one, convening generals, ex-members of Qaddafi’s government, and other longtime elite opposition figures. This second group forms the core of the National Transitional Council (NTC), announced March 5. The thirty-one-member Council, chaired by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the Libyan justice minister until only a few months ago, has declared itself the “sole legitimate body representing the Libyan people and the Libyan state.” To date, France, Italy, Qatar, and the Maldives have recognized it as the legitimate Libyan government.
From its formation, the Council canvassed Western capitals for support against Qaddafi. Initially they met with skepticism. Italy’s foreign minister accused the opposition of harboring al-Qaeda elements. For its part, the U.S. appeared as a bystander. An internal debate inside the Obama administration tried to ascertain the direction of the revolution. If Qaddafi could succeed in rolling back the revolution, the U.S. would verbally castigate him while secretly thanking him for cutting short the Arab revolution before it spilled over into a place, like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, that really concerned the U.S.
But as the outcome in Libya appeared increasingly uncertain and the possibility of a protracted civil war looked increasingly likely, Western countries decided to move. The first out of the gate was France, which recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of Libya. France’s loathsome Islamaphobe president Nicholas Sarkozy began amplifying calls, emanating from the NTC, for a United Nations–sanctioned “no-fly zone” over Libya. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic began banging the drum for “humanitarian” military intervention to stop Qaddafi’s forces from massacring the opposition. Soon other former colonizers of Africa, including Britain and Italy, started clamoring for intervention.
Although late to arrive, the U.S.’s ultimate decision to support the UN “no-fly zone” shifted the balance in its favor. The White House spin portrayed President Barack Obama’s decision to go to war in Libya as a triumph for a triumvirate of liberals—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and Obama adviser Samantha Power—who have well-established records of advocating the use of U.S. military force for “humanitarian” purposes. But Pepe Escobar, the Asia Times correspondent, offered a more plausible accounting of the decision based on his reporting from the UN:
You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a “yes” vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya—the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.
Clinton’s meeting with NTC representatives in late March may also have helped to sew up U.S. support for intervention. The Council has already publicly stated that it will honor the Qaddafi government’s oil contracts and debts. We can only imagine what other assurances Clinton managed to extract from the Council.
To win its endorsement of the no-fly zone, the United States had held out for the support of the Arab League and the African Union (AU). It received the support of the Arab League with only 11 of its 22 members voting, and most of these were members of the Saudi-financed and dominated Gulf Cooperation Council of reactionary oil monarchies. In early March, the AU had issued a communiqué condemning Libya’s attacks on peaceful protesters, calling for a cease-fire and humanitarian assistance to Libyans, and urging its member states to open their borders to African migrant workers fleeing Libya. Although the AU did not endorse the no-fly zone, two of its members (Nigeria and South Africa) voted in the UN Security Council to enact it.
Supporters of the no-fly zone urged quick action to head off what they predicted was a Qaddafi-planned massacre of opposition forces in the unofficial rebel capital of Benghazi. We may never know what would have happened in Benghazi. But Phyllis Bennis, in a March 29 article published on ZNet challenging Middle East expert Juan Cole’s pro-intervention stance, offered a reasonable counter to much of the hysterical commentary that formed the core of the pro-intervention case:
Qaddafi’s tanks had already attacked Benghazi and had been driven out by the armed power of the opposition forces—that’s why the tanks were outside the city when they were destroyed by the French warplanes. Was there danger to Benghazi and other parts of the country? Of course. But it is far from certain that the opposition, albeit less well-armed than the government’s forces, lacks the power to fight back. We’ve heard a great deal about military forces who defected with their weapons—in the east apparently Qaddafi lost the ability to deploy any of his military forces very early on.
If anyone wondered what real-world “humanitarian” intervention looks like, NATO didn’t give them much time to wait. Its initial bombing in the first week of the no-fly zone went far beyond its supposed charge to protect Libyan civilians. NATO hit targets across Libya, including several in densely populated Tripoli. It has even managed to kill rebel columns by mistake. Behind the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, NATO is carrying out a war for regime change (Obama has said repeatedly that “Qaddafi must go”) in Libya. And if it can’t win the ouster of the dictator in Tripoli, it may be satisfied with hiving off a pro-Western state in the east, where Libya’s oil wealth resides.
For its own part, the Transitional Council has continued to push for Western support, having won a deal with Qatar to market Libyan oil under the control of the rebels to raise money to buy arms. The rebels, now under the command of Libya’s former interior minister Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis, continue to press NATO to carry out air operations on their behalf. McClatchy Newspapers reported that another former military officer, Khalifa Hifter, moved from Virginia to take his position as Younis’s number two in the opposition militia. Hifter, who once commanded the Libyan military’s 1980s intervention in Chad before moving into opposition to Qaddafi, had lived for decades in the United States, lending quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that he was a CIA asset. Whatever Hifter’s connections to the CIA, we know from a March 31 New York Times report that the CIA is on the ground to build ties with the rebels and helping them to spot targets for NATO.
At the time of writing, the war between Qaddafi and the opposition seems to be bogging down into a stalemate. In early April, Libya’s foreign minister defected to Britain. With each former Libyan official to declare for the opposition, the West adds a new person “we can do business with” to its list of preferred clients in Libya. The rebels and the government have already engaged in fruitless AU-sponsored negotiations for a cease-fire, with negotiations foundering on conditions for Qaddafi’s departure.
The left and Libya
Clearly, the mass opposition to Qaddafi received its initial inspiration from the revolutions that overthrew tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt. As it unfolded as the next phase of the Arab revolution, it demonstrated conclusively that there is nothing about the Qaddafi regime worth defending. The challenge for the left in the West is how to provide support and solidarity with the popular movement against the Qaddafi dictatorship while opposing Western imperialism’s attempts to misdirect or squelch it under the guise of intervening to support it.
Unfortunately, a small number of commentators on the left in the United States as varied as the editors of MRZine, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report have taken positions that show varying degrees of sympathy toward Qaddafi (as have state leaders such as Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro). This current also tends to be skeptical of, if not downright hostile to, the popular challenge to the Qaddafi regime that began with mass protests. Some leftists in the West may have mistaken Qaddafi’s past anti-imperialist and quasi-socialist rhetoric as evidence of his progressive credentials. But the victims of Qaddafi’s torture chambers know better.
His regime began implementing neoliberal economic measures in the late 1980s that temporarily stalled in the 1990s before resuming over the last decade. Foreign investment in the oil industry, from Italy, Britain, France, and China, was encouraged. Moreover, Qaddafi’s anti-imperialist credentials faded years ago and he has been a key (if unstable) ally to the West’s “war on terror.” As Vijay Prashad notes in a February 22 CounterPunch analysis,
After 9/11, Qaddafi hastily offered his support to the U.S. In October 2002, Foreign Minister Mohammed Abderrahman Chalgam admitted that his government closely consulted with the U.S. on counterterrorism, and a few months later, Qaddafi’s heir apparent Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi warmly spoke of Libya’s support for the Bush war on terror.
Qaddafi was considered a good enough ally that imperial powers France, Britain, and the U.S. were selling his government weapons only weeks before imposing the no-fly zone.
Far more significant than the small pro-Qaddafi current are those who have supported the U.S./NATO intervention. It’s no surprise that many of the most vocal supporters of a Democratic president’s military action would hail from the Democratic sector of the foreign policy establishment—people like Clinton and Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.). But support for one form or another of Western military intervention extends to important figures on the left and in the antiwar movement. Gilbert Achcar, the veteran socialist and respected scholar—who has published numerous articles, interviews, and books on the struggle in the Middle East, including in this magazine—contended in an interview and a subsequent article published on ZNet:
Can anyone claiming to belong to the left just ignore [the Libyan] popular movement’s plea for protection, even by means of imperialist bandit-cops, when the type of protection requested is not one through which control over their country could be exerted? Certainly not, by my understanding of the left.
Likewise, Juan Cole added his voice to the chorus in support of the UN-sponsored no-fly zone over Libya with an “Open Letter to the Left on Libya” on March 27, in which he chided anti-interventionists as being indifferent to the outcome of the Libyan struggle. Cole has gone so far as to write that “I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC [United Nations Security Council]–authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed.”
Achcar and Cole have made the case for Western intervention in Libya, however limited, for humanitarian aims, and they criticize those on the left who oppose it. But their arguments ignore the context in which the attack on Qaddafi’s forces took place—as well as the long and sordid record of such military actions in the past.
The United States and its European allies began the year with the Qaddafi regime as an ally in the “war on terror” and Libya a fertile ground for Western investment. Until recently, they were prepared to accept Qaddafi’s continued rule in Libya, even at the cost of the rebellion against him being crushed. Only when the threat to regional stability and oil supplies became alarming to the West did they act.
The excuse for intervention has been the call by Qaddafi’s opponents for a no-fly zone and other military action. Of course, Western intervention has many other motivations besides the humanitarian claims in support of Resolution 1973: preserving the flow of Libyan oil, preventing mass migrations of Libyans to Europe, getting rid of a “failed state” in Libya, and stopping the Arab revolution from overthrowing another dictator through its own efforts.
But even if the intervention plays some role in Qaddafi’s downfall—which is by no means certain—any regime that comes to power in Libya will be compromised from the start by its dependence on Western powers that aren’t concerned at all about democracy and justice, but about maintaining stability and reasserting their dominance in a region that has seen two victorious revolutions against U.S.-backed dictators and the possibility of more to come.
The history of U.S. and European “humanitarian” intervention has produced only greater violence and more injustice—in Somalia, in Haiti, in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo, and in Iraq. The seemingly progressive cover of opposition to dictators (all of whom the West once supported) can’t hide the fact that these operations produced disasters.
How should socialists respond?
As already argued, socialists support the popular uprising against the Qaddafi dictatorship, and we have no truck with defenders of Qaddafi. But we also oppose the imposition of the no-fly zone and other forms of Western intervention because, in strengthening the role of imperial intervention in the Libyan revolution, they undermine the prospect of genuine freedom and independence. Consider the fate of Kosovo, over which NATO fought a “humanitarian” war in 1999.
During the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s, NATO established a no-fly zone over the Bosnian town of Srebenica. That didn’t prevent the massacre of thousands of civilians at the hands of the Bosnian Serb military and fascist gangs associated with it. NATO used the tragedy of Srebenica as justification when it launched its 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. Ostensibly, the NATO war was aimed at protecting Kosovar civilians who faced massacre at the hands of Milosevic’s forces.
Yet it was apparent at the time—and has since been verified by the research of University of Arizona professor David Gibbs—that the bombing actually prompted Serb forces to step up their massacres. And this is not to mention the hundreds—or thousands, we may never know—of Serbian and Kosovar civilians killed by NATO bombs.
More than a decade later, Kosovo exists as a ward of NATO and is home to Camp Bondsteel, a huge U.S. base whose 7,000 soldiers support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, its real government is a combination of what remains of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. These have presided over a massive privatization campaign that sold off formerly state-run firms to European Union investors. Meanwhile, unemployment hovers around 40 percent while the International Monetary Fund and World Bank collect Kosovo’s share of the debt it contracted as a member of the former Yugoslavia.
This is the “success” that today’s liberal interventionists want NATO to replicate in Libya. Achcar and Cole and others who support the intervention in Libya are wrong to disregard that history by suggesting that a U.S.-led military intervention in Libya will produce a different result this time around.
Supporters of Western intervention proceed from the assumption that a Western no-fly zone was the only option available for the Libyan opposition. But they should recognize that the interplay between imperialism and the Arab revolution constrains what choices are on offer. Reportedly, European governments chose to ignore most of the NTC’s initial demands. But they accepted the NTC’s proposal for a no-fly zone. In other words, the notion that “there was no other choice” but a no-fly zone already accepts a compromise of the Libyan movement’s independence.
In the short space of a few weeks, it appears that the Libyan opposition—or at least the NTC members that the West has elevated as its interlocutors—are increasingly putting themselves in a position of providing cover for the Western attempt to roll back the Arab revolution and to maintain the flow of Libyan oil. The West is marginalizing other forces in the opposition, from youth to social and community organizations.
There is a long history of anti-imperialist movements making temporary alliances or marriages of convenience with various imperialist powers or their agents. The intervention of the French navy forced the surrender of British forces at Yorktown in the final battle for American independence. Agents of the Kaiser supplied weapons to Irish freedom fighters during the First World War. The Soviet Union provided military and political aid to scores of anti-imperialist movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War.
The key in each of these situations was that the liberation forces: 1) fought a historically progressive and just struggle for freedom, and 2) managed to retain an independent identity that made them authentic representatives of the oppressed rather than subordinates to their sponsors’ aims. In fact, in the post–Second World War era, the nonaligned movement of newly independent states often played the imperialist Cold War adversaries, the U.S. and USSR, against each other.
However, there are times in history where the representatives of a just struggle do transform their relationship with imperialism into one of dependence and political subordination. Such a process took place in Kosovo, where the Kosovar Albanian guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army, transformed itself from a guerrilla group that U.S. officials once denounced as “terrorists” into the ground spotters for NATO’s air strikes.
A similar development unfolded in the anti-USSR opposition in Afghanistan in the 1980s. What began as a mass popular uprising against the Soviet occupation became, under the tutelage of the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani security services, a proxy army in the U.S.’s Cold War against the USSR. Over the course of the 1980s, the Reagan administration and its allies in the region remolded the Afghan opposition into a vehicle for its most reactionary forces. The CIA/Saudi/Pakistani combine denied arms and support to all but the most reactionary fighters, many of whom now form the leadership of al-Qaeda.
In these cases, genuine anti-imperialists wanting to support just struggles against oppression had to expose the corruption of opposition forces at the hands of imperialism. Whether the official Libyan opposition has gone down the same road as the Kosovar and Afghani resistances remains to be seen. But as the British socialist Mike Marqusee in his essay “Thoughts on Libya and liberal interventionism” has argued, if the current intervention achieves its aims, it will ensure that if Qaddafi falls, his replacement will be chosen by the West. The new regime will be born dependent on the Western powers, which will direct its economic and foreign policies accordingly. The liberal interventionists will say that’s not what they want, but their policy makes it inevitable.
Libya in a regional context
Most of the arguments in favor of Western intervention put the pointed question to those who oppose intervention: “What would you do?” But answering that question according to the narrow confines in which it is posed—as a response to an immediate situation such as an assumed Libyan army attack on Benghazi—is the wrong way to address it. Our starting point is that the Libyan revolution is part of the revolutionary wave that is sweeping the Arab and North African world. The intervention of Western forces into that process amounts to the introduction of counterrevolution into the region. Not only is this true geographically (Libya lies between Tunisia and Egypt), it is true politically. The “deal” that Escobar described was the license the U.S. gave to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen to crush the revolutionary upheavals in their own countries. The supporters of intervention are asking us believe that the Libyan revolution can be advanced with the aid of the chief backer and funder of counterrevolution in the region!
As Bennis noted in a March 24 article on Al-Jazeera online,
Ironically, one of the reasons many people supported the call for a no-fly zone was the fear that if Qaddafi managed to crush the Libyan people’s uprising and remain in power, it would send a devastating message to other Arab dictators: Use enough military force and you will keep your job.
Instead, it turns out that just the opposite may be the result: It was after the UN passed its no-fly zone and use-of-force resolution, and just as U.S., British, French, and other warplanes and warships launched their attacks against Libya, that other Arab regimes escalated the crackdown on their own democratic movements.
U.S. and Western hypocrisy was clear to see. While Libyan attacks on unarmed civilians was a casus belli, the U.S. sanctioned the Saudi invasion of Bahrain to support the Bahraini monarchy’s attacks against its opposition. Seen in this way, the Western support for the no-fly zone is about derailing the Arab revolution while posing as its friend.
The counterrevolution works in mysterious ways. At first, the West held back, thinking Qaddafi could do the job of defeating the revolution himself. Later, they weren’t so sure. At first, they weren’t sure about the rebels. Now Western governments are trying to cultivate them. A March 20 statement by the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt put it well:
Modern imperialism uses various mechanisms to achieve its single goal, which is to ensure that the Arab regimes remain faithful to the obedience of the monopolies of global capitalism and the politics of colonialism. This is achieved in alliance with the classes which benefit from keeping the old regime alive, and which fear the spread of popular revolution.
Intervention takes many forms: through propaganda and the use of dubious sources of funding linked with the American administration and companies supportive of U.S.-Zionist imperialism as well as through military operations. The entry of the Peninsula Shield force into Bahrain, the announcement of military intervention in Libya, Hillary Clinton’s visit, the bags of dollars which appear under the under the pretext of “supporting democracy” and spreading “democratic awareness” are all part of the same scheme. This does not mean it is a “conspiracy,” but there is naturally a close interdependence of interests, between systems and governments, and international capitalist monopolies.
So we need to turn the “What would you do?” question around: In the face of this imperialist attempt to short-circuit the revolution, should we stand by and do nothing? Or, worse, cheer on the Empire’s intervention? No, we demand an end to NATO military operations. We demand the cutting off of aid to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Bahrain, and we support the deepening of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. And to the Western powers that shed crocodile tears about Libyan civilians facing down a brutal dictatorship, we say, “Lift your anti-immigrant laws and grant asylum to any Libyan who wants it!”
We recognize that the fate of the Libyan revolution is tied up with the fate of the Arab revolution. An advance by the Tunisian, Egyptian, Bahraini, or Syrian uprisings can help advance the struggle in Libya. And renewed mass action in Libya can shift the balance of forces inside the opposition from those willing to do deals with the West to those who want genuine freedom and independence. The future of the Arab revolution, in Libya and the rest of the region, is still being written. We join with the socialists in Egypt to say:
No to foreign interference. No to counterrevolution.
Long live the revolution of the peoples.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
*An Archaeological Dig? Remembrances Of Things Past-The Yearbook-For Carol C., Class Of 1964
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Dead Sea Scrolls a minor discovery compared to the one discussed below.
Markin, Class Of 1964, comment:
Quick, where is your North Adamsville High School yearbook, the Magnet? Ya, I knew I would catch some of you off-guard with that one. For some of you though it is merely a fast jump over from your easy chair to the bookshelf, a little dusting off of that treasure with a conveniently placed rag, and you are ready for duty, nostalgia duty. Or shuffle, creakily shuffle by the way if I am any judge of conditions these days, up to the old cobwebby attic, cursing the day (or night, for that matter) about how hard it is to get around and how it's not like it use to be, wondering, thoughtfully wondering, where in hell the box that you put that valued heirloom in is. Ya, I know that drill. Then, finally, finding the precious cargo under layers of later photo albums, albums showing your life’s work, your family outings, and your other righteous keepsake memories. And, yes, taking out the rag to wipe a half century’s dust off, although not memories. Or trudging out to the garage/storage area/dump the final resting place for all ephemera, exotica and just plain don’t know what to do with items (except, well, of course not, throw the damn stuff away since you have not used those gee-gaws since about 1972). Ya, I know that drill too. In all cases though, ready, as if you were waiting, waiting patiently, for someone, some old reprobate classmate on the Internet in the year 2011 to ask you that very question. Well, okay we all have our little quirks.
Others though will have to answer AWOL (absent without leave, for those who did not do that military service of unblessed memory) and confess that item got tossed out, mistakenly or not, long ago on some vagabond move, or some other now long forgotten excursion. It wasn’t like you didn’t treasure the thing, really, but times moved on, you moved on and maybe the euphoria of high school high pictures, of maybe five hundred plus people that you barely knew, or remembered, clubs you did not belong to, or sports that you did not participate in had passed by. Or, it wasn’t like you did not intent to keep the holy of holies but on those long ago hitchhike roads, those hitchhike roads west to start anew, maybe, just maybe, you had to leave it behind in some desolate motel room, or some godforsaken high mountain campsite. I understand your dilemma, believe me.
Or it was sold to the highest bidder at some flea market yard sale to pay off some untidy debt, some untidy small debt, I assume. The list of possibilities is endless, but at least those irresponsible renegade raider reds that simply lost or left theirs in some undisclosed place had enough spunk to leave the dust of high school traumas, dramas and bad karmas behind in some also now long forgotten way station.
As for myself, for those dying to know, or even those who are not because I have no story to tell otherwise, I know exactly where my previously uncoveted copy is, or at least where I threw it. Soon, very soon after graduation, in a fit of hubris, teen alienation, teen angst, teen rage against the dark I threw it, threw it unceremoniously into the Neponset River not far from the old school, and my family’s house. Beyond that I take no responsible for where it landed, although I hope that it landed in some far off island where they have never heard of yearbooks, photographs, and pictures of people doing strange activities and would be clueless on such questions as why guys are running around in white shorts, why boys and girls are on separate bowling teams, why certain Greek vestigial Tri-Hi-Y girls take the three purities vows, and why guys were wearing non-fashionista white socks when posing for group activities. Things frankly that I wonder at now, wonder at intensely, myself. And maybe, just maybe, that Magnet is now an item of veneration, high holy veneration by some cargo cult-worshipping peoples who had no other use for the thing.
But that is more a fit task for an anthropologist’s analysis. Today I wish to speak of, as the headline indicates, archeology, of the search for ancient treasures, not of their meaning, well, not seriously of their meaning. And along that line I have a question, no, I have 1000 questions. I have just been on a “treasure hunt.” Was it in search of the Dead Sea Scrolls? No, that's kid's stuff. Did I venture to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, to dig up ancient sculptures? Boring, for my purposes here. Did I go on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant? Mere child’s play. No, I bravely went to the wilds of Winchester, Massachusetts to the lovely home of Frankie Riley, Francis Xavier Riley, the king hell king corner boy of the North Adamsville schoolboy be-bop night, from our class. And what treasure did I dig out? A rather pristine copy of the Magnet for the Class of 1964. This, my friends, is the find of the age.
Okay, now I have you exactly where I want you. Forget Botox and Hair Club for Men, from now on, guys and gals, no more trying to pass for fifty-something just because sixty is the new fifty. That include you Chrissie McNamara (maiden name). I have proof of age. In black and white glossies. And I do believe that I could find a good enough lawyer to have it hold up in court. Frankie, though, is already talking about hiring “hit men” to do me in if I so much as harm a hair on any classmate's head. You know Frankie; he was always one for the wild talk.
But enough of that wild noise for now. A couple of comments are in order, after an initial quick run through, before I do a more thorough scientific examination of this artifact. First, in the interest of scientific veracity I must confess an error. At one time or another when talking about “back in the days” I told one and all that Frankie and I spent (or misspent) many a summer evening on the front steps of North Adamsville High discussing our dreams, mainly small dreams and other getting through the day things, not big, cosmic mortality dreams like we would now. In describing the steps I mentioned that there were either stone lions or gargoyles that flanked either side of the steps. Well, in many pictures in the yearbook, especially of group activities, the front steps frame the shot. The items on the side of the steps were actually stone columns and globes. I was close though, right? That error is definitely either a result of the "mist of time" misting up big time or creeping senility. Your choice.
And now for some observations (and a posing of some those 1000 questions) on a first run through of the class pictures, individually and collectively. For most of the guys I would not want to meet you in a dark alley, even now. Unless I was heavily armed, or had the 82nd Airborne at my back. Actually make that the 82nd Airborne and at least one regiment from the 101st Airborne. Especially looking at those football players. I won't even speak of basketball and baseball players because they were mainly football after the season was over anyway. Were they on steroids in those days? Or some less exotic tobacco-like drug down in the locker room after the coaches called it a day? Is that why all the girls gathered round? I thought it was athletic prowess, but now I wonder. And wonder also what they look like now, now after all those years of youthful punishment on those hips, knees, and ankles. Come to think of it I don't think I will need that extra 101st regiment after all.
While we are on the subject of girls, the eternal subject then (and let's face it now too) and who they were and were not hanging around with, it is totally understandable that they would flock to the gridiron goliaths who carried our hopes and dreams on their broad shoulders on those brisk, yellow-leafed, gathering ice grey clouds autumn afternoons. Fair is fair. What is not fair, after looking at the picture of the billiards team, is why all the girls flocked to them. Many an afternoon I would drift (nice word use, right?) over casually to Joe's Billiard Parlor (although everybody knew it was nothing but a glorified pool hall, and Joe was nothing but a "connected", connected meaning you know connected do I have to spell it out) bookie using the place as a front) to check out the girls, the very lively, interesting girls, that seemed to be hanging off the rafters watching the boys (and it was always boys in those days) "shoot pools." Fifty years later and I am still burned up about it. Christ those guys were nothing but rough-hewed corner boys (although that may have been the attraction for those bouncy, tight sweater-wearing frails).
And continuing on with the sports teams, the track guys, christ, they look like they just came out of the wheat fields of Kansas with those uniforms that were issued in about 1926. And those squinty eyes like this was the first time they had seen a camera. One guy definitely looked like he was posing to be some jut-jawed Old West guy, cowboy guy, that made me think of a poor man's version of the actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Maybe my cargo cult reference above applies here too, except for cameras not yearbooks. Although I don’t know much about what goes on in Kansas, except don’t bury me there. No wonder people honked horns, caroomed their cars close to them, and yelled profanities as they passed when those guys ran in the road, the mad-hatter running road.
The tennis guys and gymnasts looked okay, normal as far as I could see, no dopey look in their eyes, mercifully. I swear though thta I didn't know we had a tennis team but there it is in black and white so we must have. I know this for sure though some of those golf guys have that shifty look, you know, that look like they know the ball moved and they didn't take a penalty in that last match against Adamsville High. That's okay guys, it was only Adamsville. I won’t even speak about the treachery oozing out of the eyes of guys on the boys’ bowling team (or the girls’ for that matter). I thought bowling was a genteel sport. Why does everyone, male or female, look like, maybe, they cheated when adding up their scores. Strange, strange indeed.
And moving away from sports and clubs did we (guys) really wear our hair that way (and wear it that short, with those pseudo-sideburns)? And did we really wear those dweeby sports jackets with those white socks (with loafers it looks like) that seem to be sticking out endlessly of every sports team photograph?
For most of the gals, and call me a "dirty old man" but please, please do not tell my "significant other" I would not mind meeting you in the dark. No armed escorts necessary. Especially those gals on pages 78, 100, 106, 126, and 130. Ya, you know who you are. And I know you haven’t changed a bit since 1964, right?
Here is what I don’t get though. Well, maybe I better start off with what I do get. The cheerleaders did their cheer-leading thing and I swear no football game would have been the same without their rah, rah, rahs on those previously mentioned brisk, granite grey autumn days. The majorettes, well, the majorettes did their twirling, and especially one twirler that caught my eye, knew how to flip that thing. Be still my heart. And the band members played their tubas, trombones, and trumpets to perfection, although I heard some disturbing, if unsubstantiated, information about what went on in the band practice room, or really during the after practice hours. But I do not get this, and am desperately seeking enlightenment. Why did perfectly normal (at least from their photos they appear normal, 1960s beehive hair, cashmere sweater, whimsical smile normal) girls (a.k.a. young women, now) submit to the ridiculous three purities required, no demanded, for entry into Tri-Hi-Y. Something very unsettling was underfoot there, especially as we were on the threshold of the sexual revolution. I will investigate that matter further. Count on it.
Markin, Class Of 1964, comment:
Quick, where is your North Adamsville High School yearbook, the Magnet? Ya, I knew I would catch some of you off-guard with that one. For some of you though it is merely a fast jump over from your easy chair to the bookshelf, a little dusting off of that treasure with a conveniently placed rag, and you are ready for duty, nostalgia duty. Or shuffle, creakily shuffle by the way if I am any judge of conditions these days, up to the old cobwebby attic, cursing the day (or night, for that matter) about how hard it is to get around and how it's not like it use to be, wondering, thoughtfully wondering, where in hell the box that you put that valued heirloom in is. Ya, I know that drill. Then, finally, finding the precious cargo under layers of later photo albums, albums showing your life’s work, your family outings, and your other righteous keepsake memories. And, yes, taking out the rag to wipe a half century’s dust off, although not memories. Or trudging out to the garage/storage area/dump the final resting place for all ephemera, exotica and just plain don’t know what to do with items (except, well, of course not, throw the damn stuff away since you have not used those gee-gaws since about 1972). Ya, I know that drill too. In all cases though, ready, as if you were waiting, waiting patiently, for someone, some old reprobate classmate on the Internet in the year 2011 to ask you that very question. Well, okay we all have our little quirks.
Others though will have to answer AWOL (absent without leave, for those who did not do that military service of unblessed memory) and confess that item got tossed out, mistakenly or not, long ago on some vagabond move, or some other now long forgotten excursion. It wasn’t like you didn’t treasure the thing, really, but times moved on, you moved on and maybe the euphoria of high school high pictures, of maybe five hundred plus people that you barely knew, or remembered, clubs you did not belong to, or sports that you did not participate in had passed by. Or, it wasn’t like you did not intent to keep the holy of holies but on those long ago hitchhike roads, those hitchhike roads west to start anew, maybe, just maybe, you had to leave it behind in some desolate motel room, or some godforsaken high mountain campsite. I understand your dilemma, believe me.
Or it was sold to the highest bidder at some flea market yard sale to pay off some untidy debt, some untidy small debt, I assume. The list of possibilities is endless, but at least those irresponsible renegade raider reds that simply lost or left theirs in some undisclosed place had enough spunk to leave the dust of high school traumas, dramas and bad karmas behind in some also now long forgotten way station.
As for myself, for those dying to know, or even those who are not because I have no story to tell otherwise, I know exactly where my previously uncoveted copy is, or at least where I threw it. Soon, very soon after graduation, in a fit of hubris, teen alienation, teen angst, teen rage against the dark I threw it, threw it unceremoniously into the Neponset River not far from the old school, and my family’s house. Beyond that I take no responsible for where it landed, although I hope that it landed in some far off island where they have never heard of yearbooks, photographs, and pictures of people doing strange activities and would be clueless on such questions as why guys are running around in white shorts, why boys and girls are on separate bowling teams, why certain Greek vestigial Tri-Hi-Y girls take the three purities vows, and why guys were wearing non-fashionista white socks when posing for group activities. Things frankly that I wonder at now, wonder at intensely, myself. And maybe, just maybe, that Magnet is now an item of veneration, high holy veneration by some cargo cult-worshipping peoples who had no other use for the thing.
But that is more a fit task for an anthropologist’s analysis. Today I wish to speak of, as the headline indicates, archeology, of the search for ancient treasures, not of their meaning, well, not seriously of their meaning. And along that line I have a question, no, I have 1000 questions. I have just been on a “treasure hunt.” Was it in search of the Dead Sea Scrolls? No, that's kid's stuff. Did I venture to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, to dig up ancient sculptures? Boring, for my purposes here. Did I go on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in search of the lost Ark of the Covenant? Mere child’s play. No, I bravely went to the wilds of Winchester, Massachusetts to the lovely home of Frankie Riley, Francis Xavier Riley, the king hell king corner boy of the North Adamsville schoolboy be-bop night, from our class. And what treasure did I dig out? A rather pristine copy of the Magnet for the Class of 1964. This, my friends, is the find of the age.
Okay, now I have you exactly where I want you. Forget Botox and Hair Club for Men, from now on, guys and gals, no more trying to pass for fifty-something just because sixty is the new fifty. That include you Chrissie McNamara (maiden name). I have proof of age. In black and white glossies. And I do believe that I could find a good enough lawyer to have it hold up in court. Frankie, though, is already talking about hiring “hit men” to do me in if I so much as harm a hair on any classmate's head. You know Frankie; he was always one for the wild talk.
But enough of that wild noise for now. A couple of comments are in order, after an initial quick run through, before I do a more thorough scientific examination of this artifact. First, in the interest of scientific veracity I must confess an error. At one time or another when talking about “back in the days” I told one and all that Frankie and I spent (or misspent) many a summer evening on the front steps of North Adamsville High discussing our dreams, mainly small dreams and other getting through the day things, not big, cosmic mortality dreams like we would now. In describing the steps I mentioned that there were either stone lions or gargoyles that flanked either side of the steps. Well, in many pictures in the yearbook, especially of group activities, the front steps frame the shot. The items on the side of the steps were actually stone columns and globes. I was close though, right? That error is definitely either a result of the "mist of time" misting up big time or creeping senility. Your choice.
And now for some observations (and a posing of some those 1000 questions) on a first run through of the class pictures, individually and collectively. For most of the guys I would not want to meet you in a dark alley, even now. Unless I was heavily armed, or had the 82nd Airborne at my back. Actually make that the 82nd Airborne and at least one regiment from the 101st Airborne. Especially looking at those football players. I won't even speak of basketball and baseball players because they were mainly football after the season was over anyway. Were they on steroids in those days? Or some less exotic tobacco-like drug down in the locker room after the coaches called it a day? Is that why all the girls gathered round? I thought it was athletic prowess, but now I wonder. And wonder also what they look like now, now after all those years of youthful punishment on those hips, knees, and ankles. Come to think of it I don't think I will need that extra 101st regiment after all.
While we are on the subject of girls, the eternal subject then (and let's face it now too) and who they were and were not hanging around with, it is totally understandable that they would flock to the gridiron goliaths who carried our hopes and dreams on their broad shoulders on those brisk, yellow-leafed, gathering ice grey clouds autumn afternoons. Fair is fair. What is not fair, after looking at the picture of the billiards team, is why all the girls flocked to them. Many an afternoon I would drift (nice word use, right?) over casually to Joe's Billiard Parlor (although everybody knew it was nothing but a glorified pool hall, and Joe was nothing but a "connected", connected meaning you know connected do I have to spell it out) bookie using the place as a front) to check out the girls, the very lively, interesting girls, that seemed to be hanging off the rafters watching the boys (and it was always boys in those days) "shoot pools." Fifty years later and I am still burned up about it. Christ those guys were nothing but rough-hewed corner boys (although that may have been the attraction for those bouncy, tight sweater-wearing frails).
And continuing on with the sports teams, the track guys, christ, they look like they just came out of the wheat fields of Kansas with those uniforms that were issued in about 1926. And those squinty eyes like this was the first time they had seen a camera. One guy definitely looked like he was posing to be some jut-jawed Old West guy, cowboy guy, that made me think of a poor man's version of the actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Maybe my cargo cult reference above applies here too, except for cameras not yearbooks. Although I don’t know much about what goes on in Kansas, except don’t bury me there. No wonder people honked horns, caroomed their cars close to them, and yelled profanities as they passed when those guys ran in the road, the mad-hatter running road.
The tennis guys and gymnasts looked okay, normal as far as I could see, no dopey look in their eyes, mercifully. I swear though thta I didn't know we had a tennis team but there it is in black and white so we must have. I know this for sure though some of those golf guys have that shifty look, you know, that look like they know the ball moved and they didn't take a penalty in that last match against Adamsville High. That's okay guys, it was only Adamsville. I won’t even speak about the treachery oozing out of the eyes of guys on the boys’ bowling team (or the girls’ for that matter). I thought bowling was a genteel sport. Why does everyone, male or female, look like, maybe, they cheated when adding up their scores. Strange, strange indeed.
And moving away from sports and clubs did we (guys) really wear our hair that way (and wear it that short, with those pseudo-sideburns)? And did we really wear those dweeby sports jackets with those white socks (with loafers it looks like) that seem to be sticking out endlessly of every sports team photograph?
For most of the gals, and call me a "dirty old man" but please, please do not tell my "significant other" I would not mind meeting you in the dark. No armed escorts necessary. Especially those gals on pages 78, 100, 106, 126, and 130. Ya, you know who you are. And I know you haven’t changed a bit since 1964, right?
Here is what I don’t get though. Well, maybe I better start off with what I do get. The cheerleaders did their cheer-leading thing and I swear no football game would have been the same without their rah, rah, rahs on those previously mentioned brisk, granite grey autumn days. The majorettes, well, the majorettes did their twirling, and especially one twirler that caught my eye, knew how to flip that thing. Be still my heart. And the band members played their tubas, trombones, and trumpets to perfection, although I heard some disturbing, if unsubstantiated, information about what went on in the band practice room, or really during the after practice hours. But I do not get this, and am desperately seeking enlightenment. Why did perfectly normal (at least from their photos they appear normal, 1960s beehive hair, cashmere sweater, whimsical smile normal) girls (a.k.a. young women, now) submit to the ridiculous three purities required, no demanded, for entry into Tri-Hi-Y. Something very unsettling was underfoot there, especially as we were on the threshold of the sexual revolution. I will investigate that matter further. Count on it.
From The "LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA" Blog-"A Brief History of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party"
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
A Brief History of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party
The following was written for issue number 60 of Socialist Appeal.
Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party was the most successful labor party in United States history. Starting in 1918, it was a labor party in the true sense, not just a “pro-labor“ party. It was a political federation of labor unions. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association, a grouping of associated unions and farmers, provided the organic connection between labor and the party. Before the party merged with the Democrats in 1944, they had elected three governors, four U.S. Senators, and eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
1918 was a tumultuous year. The Bolshevik Revolution was being consolidated in Russia. The German Revolution had sprung across Deutschland. In November World War I formally ended. Here at home Woodrow Wilson had signed into law the Sedition Act and used it to throw Eugene Debs in jail. Across the Midwest, as well as the nation, the Socialist Party had influence. The weekly publication “Appeal to Reason” had a circulation of one million. During this era Wisconsin sent Socialist Party founding member Victor Berger to Congress. In Minneapolis a Socialist Party candidate was elected mayor. The Non-Partisan League, a political organization started by Socialists, had gained the governor’s office in North Dakota.
This was also a time of great industrial expansion. America was becoming an industrial superpower. The way of life many had grown accustomed to was changing. Small businesses were getting destroyed by big monopolies. Workers were being sent back to the lands they left to fight a war they had no interest in. Farmers were constantly fighting for a decent price for their crop. While State repression and internal conflict marginalized the influence of the Socialist Party, other class independent political formations arose. It is within this context we see the rise of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party.
As the name would suggest, the party was a merger of rural farmers and urban workers. Many small business owners found a home within the party as well. Nationally this was a time of many populist movements aimed at small business. There was Teddy Roosevelt and his independent run for President, the Populist Democrats, as well as various others. Due to their social existence, many of these farmers and small business owners had a different consciousness level than many of the workers. This created conflict from the beginning until the end of the party. The Republicans, the main bourgeois party in Minnesota, attempted to exploit this division. At this time the party who claimed to be a “friend of labor” was the Republicans. Many of the early supporters, from the Non-Partisan League to the Farmer-Labor party, were at one time Republicans. The Democrats would often come in a distant third in the polls. With no fundamental ties to any organized group other than the wealthy, the two parties of capital can, and often do, switch blocs of voters they lean on for support. Now, as we well know, Republicans court the far right and Democrats masquerade as being pro-labor.
In 1918, during the Minnesota State Federation of Labor convention, Socialists called for a state labor political convention. This was indeed a bold move as the Russian and German revolutions had left many within the American ruling class shaken to their foundation and not at all tolerant of political dissent. Nevertheless, the resolution passed. The formation was called the “Working People’s Political Non-Partisan League.” This was an obvious acknowledgement of the Non-Partisan league and their widening success, culminating in neighboring North Dakota. The name was later changed to the “Farmer-Labor Association” and each group, both farmer and labor, paid yearly dues.
In a wonderful analysis written in 1946, former Secretary of the Educational Bureau in the Farmer-Labor Association, Warren Creel, outlines the Association’s “Declaration of Principals:”
The Farmer-Labor movement seeks to unite into a political organization all persons engaged in agriculture and other useful industry, and those in sympathy with their interests, for the purpose of securing legislation that will protect and promote the economic welfare of the wealth producers.
He went on to say:
It aims to rescue the government from the control of the privileged few and make it function for the use and benefit of all by abolishing monopoly in every form, and to establish in place thereof a system of public ownership and operation of monopolized industries, which will afford every able and willing worker an opportunity to work and will guarantee the enjoyment of the proceeds thereof, thus increasing the amount of available wealth, eradicating unemployment and destitution, and abolishing industrial autocracy.
It became a proper political party when it started running independent candidates against the two parties of capital. The Farmer-Labor Party was not alone. There were several other similar political movements across the nation. But what separated Minnesota was the fact that they had official backing of the labor movement. The unions had, and have, the resources and structure to maintain an independent political presence. This is a huge lesson for us today and a main reason the current Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor calls for the unions to break their fickle ties with the Democrats.
It wasn’t long before the Farmer-Labor Party started gaining seats in the state legislature. With this brought all sorts of contradictions. Petty bourgeois politicians who came running to Farmer-Labor when they smelled a possible career boost constantly attempted to water down the program and, most of all, break the organic tie with labor and turn it into a typical bourgeois political party. Despite these internal battles, Farmer-Labor came in second in governor’s race every election cycle from 1918 until 1930. In 1930, in the context of the Great Depression, the first Farmer-Labor Administration was elected.
While the farmer and labor contingencies of the party worked well on immediate issues, there proved to be disagreements on the overall strategy of the party. Creel gives a first hand view of the problems:
…the genuine farmers as well as pseudo-farmers--small town bankers and lawyers--were an influence for retreat from a working class orientation. When the movement was taking shape there were sharp battles over opportunist steps, such as the nomination of Henrik Shipstead for U.S. Senator in 1922. The farmers, of course, considered themselves as holding the party on the correct middle of the road.
These “middle of the road” tactics ultimately lead to the demise of party. It was on the strength of the “Declaration of Principals” that Farmer-Labor candidates were elected and straying from that turned out to be a death blow. The main problem was the farmer section of the Association had far too much power. While it was founded with an equal farmer-labor alliance, many rural clubs had stopped paying dues and did not at all participate in the internal political process. Unfortunately, due to a poor provision in the Association’s constitution, so long as farmers would show up on election day and vote, they kept their regional delegates. This made the farmers’ influence far greater than their day to day participation.
As far as the labor section, Creel had this to say:
The labor section was basically a political federation of labor unions, a, genuine labor party organization. It had in operation the elementary machinery that is necessary for real working class politics. Political activity started in the affiliated labor union locals, where political discussion, reports of political delegates, and political campaign activity were part of the regular business of each meeting, and payment of per-capita to the labor political organization was a constant part of the budget. Delegates from the unions of each city met in monthly meetings or oftener, as the Farmer-Labor Association city central committee. This went on month after month and year after year.
This is another lesson to be learned. While today farmers don’t have the numbers they once did, they, in the same vein as small business owners, still hold formidable political power. Labor, from the bottom, must have the ultimate say in how their political presence is orchestrated. There must be measures to protect the party platform from being hijacked by coalitions or careerist bureaucrats from within.
The biggest challenge for the integrity of the Farmer-Labor Party came from Floyd B. Olsen. Olsen was a popular man across Minnesota. He was also controversial. From cries that he was a “socialist,” to alleged mob ties, to a well known muckraker nemesis being shot down in the streets of Minneapolis, Olsen captivated Minnesota and gained national attention. He was a wonderful showman and a shrewd politician. In exchange for him running on a Farmer-Labor ticket, he demanded complete control over appointees. With the possibility of a victory in 1930 humming in their ears, the Farmer-Labor Association gave him that power.
In 1930 Olsen was indeed elected. He immediately set up committees outside of the Association consisting of careerist politicians that were loyal to him. His strategy was “vote for me, I’m a good guy.” The program of the party be damned. For years Olsen's main goal was to limit labor’s influence within the party. As many state jobs as he could possibly give out, he gave out to supporters. Despite his attempted undermining of labor’s direct influence, he was forced to recognize its power. I suspect this was the reason Olsen went after the reforms he is known for, much more so than any sort of burning desire “to help the working man” he may have felt within.
Given Olsen’s maneuverings, it’s not at all surprising contradictions were everywhere. For example, it was Olsen who ordered the National Guard to Minneapolis during the famous 1934 Teamster Strike. Some unions, particularly and understandably in the Twin Cities, openly opposed him. The downward spiral of the party was heightened by Olsen’s unexpected death from stomach cancer in 1936.
From then on the party was in ruins. Despite still having a tremendous support based on their earlier program, the party was ousted from the Governor’s mansion by a great margin in 1938. By 1944 the party had officially merged into the Democratic Party. The Stalinists, who had been instrumental in bureaucratically shutting down any disagreeing voice from the unions, had now successfully merged the workers’ party into a bourgeois party. Stalin was on good terms with Roosevelt. Moscow, despite the rhetoric, had absolutely no interest in a true workers’ party, neither here nor there.
There are many lessons we can learn from the experience of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. Most of all, it shatters the myth that workers in the United States have no interest in political independence. In the final analysis, workers in the United States have the same needs, wants, and aspirations as workers in Venezuela, Egypt, Russia or Germany. This is why we are involved in the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor. We, the Marxists, know it would prove a costly mistake not to be part of that process. We must help build our political presence. When the mighty working class in the United States moves, the world will tremble.
A Brief History of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party
The following was written for issue number 60 of Socialist Appeal.
Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party was the most successful labor party in United States history. Starting in 1918, it was a labor party in the true sense, not just a “pro-labor“ party. It was a political federation of labor unions. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association, a grouping of associated unions and farmers, provided the organic connection between labor and the party. Before the party merged with the Democrats in 1944, they had elected three governors, four U.S. Senators, and eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
1918 was a tumultuous year. The Bolshevik Revolution was being consolidated in Russia. The German Revolution had sprung across Deutschland. In November World War I formally ended. Here at home Woodrow Wilson had signed into law the Sedition Act and used it to throw Eugene Debs in jail. Across the Midwest, as well as the nation, the Socialist Party had influence. The weekly publication “Appeal to Reason” had a circulation of one million. During this era Wisconsin sent Socialist Party founding member Victor Berger to Congress. In Minneapolis a Socialist Party candidate was elected mayor. The Non-Partisan League, a political organization started by Socialists, had gained the governor’s office in North Dakota.
This was also a time of great industrial expansion. America was becoming an industrial superpower. The way of life many had grown accustomed to was changing. Small businesses were getting destroyed by big monopolies. Workers were being sent back to the lands they left to fight a war they had no interest in. Farmers were constantly fighting for a decent price for their crop. While State repression and internal conflict marginalized the influence of the Socialist Party, other class independent political formations arose. It is within this context we see the rise of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party.
As the name would suggest, the party was a merger of rural farmers and urban workers. Many small business owners found a home within the party as well. Nationally this was a time of many populist movements aimed at small business. There was Teddy Roosevelt and his independent run for President, the Populist Democrats, as well as various others. Due to their social existence, many of these farmers and small business owners had a different consciousness level than many of the workers. This created conflict from the beginning until the end of the party. The Republicans, the main bourgeois party in Minnesota, attempted to exploit this division. At this time the party who claimed to be a “friend of labor” was the Republicans. Many of the early supporters, from the Non-Partisan League to the Farmer-Labor party, were at one time Republicans. The Democrats would often come in a distant third in the polls. With no fundamental ties to any organized group other than the wealthy, the two parties of capital can, and often do, switch blocs of voters they lean on for support. Now, as we well know, Republicans court the far right and Democrats masquerade as being pro-labor.
In 1918, during the Minnesota State Federation of Labor convention, Socialists called for a state labor political convention. This was indeed a bold move as the Russian and German revolutions had left many within the American ruling class shaken to their foundation and not at all tolerant of political dissent. Nevertheless, the resolution passed. The formation was called the “Working People’s Political Non-Partisan League.” This was an obvious acknowledgement of the Non-Partisan league and their widening success, culminating in neighboring North Dakota. The name was later changed to the “Farmer-Labor Association” and each group, both farmer and labor, paid yearly dues.
In a wonderful analysis written in 1946, former Secretary of the Educational Bureau in the Farmer-Labor Association, Warren Creel, outlines the Association’s “Declaration of Principals:”
The Farmer-Labor movement seeks to unite into a political organization all persons engaged in agriculture and other useful industry, and those in sympathy with their interests, for the purpose of securing legislation that will protect and promote the economic welfare of the wealth producers.
He went on to say:
It aims to rescue the government from the control of the privileged few and make it function for the use and benefit of all by abolishing monopoly in every form, and to establish in place thereof a system of public ownership and operation of monopolized industries, which will afford every able and willing worker an opportunity to work and will guarantee the enjoyment of the proceeds thereof, thus increasing the amount of available wealth, eradicating unemployment and destitution, and abolishing industrial autocracy.
It became a proper political party when it started running independent candidates against the two parties of capital. The Farmer-Labor Party was not alone. There were several other similar political movements across the nation. But what separated Minnesota was the fact that they had official backing of the labor movement. The unions had, and have, the resources and structure to maintain an independent political presence. This is a huge lesson for us today and a main reason the current Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor calls for the unions to break their fickle ties with the Democrats.
It wasn’t long before the Farmer-Labor Party started gaining seats in the state legislature. With this brought all sorts of contradictions. Petty bourgeois politicians who came running to Farmer-Labor when they smelled a possible career boost constantly attempted to water down the program and, most of all, break the organic tie with labor and turn it into a typical bourgeois political party. Despite these internal battles, Farmer-Labor came in second in governor’s race every election cycle from 1918 until 1930. In 1930, in the context of the Great Depression, the first Farmer-Labor Administration was elected.
While the farmer and labor contingencies of the party worked well on immediate issues, there proved to be disagreements on the overall strategy of the party. Creel gives a first hand view of the problems:
…the genuine farmers as well as pseudo-farmers--small town bankers and lawyers--were an influence for retreat from a working class orientation. When the movement was taking shape there were sharp battles over opportunist steps, such as the nomination of Henrik Shipstead for U.S. Senator in 1922. The farmers, of course, considered themselves as holding the party on the correct middle of the road.
These “middle of the road” tactics ultimately lead to the demise of party. It was on the strength of the “Declaration of Principals” that Farmer-Labor candidates were elected and straying from that turned out to be a death blow. The main problem was the farmer section of the Association had far too much power. While it was founded with an equal farmer-labor alliance, many rural clubs had stopped paying dues and did not at all participate in the internal political process. Unfortunately, due to a poor provision in the Association’s constitution, so long as farmers would show up on election day and vote, they kept their regional delegates. This made the farmers’ influence far greater than their day to day participation.
As far as the labor section, Creel had this to say:
The labor section was basically a political federation of labor unions, a, genuine labor party organization. It had in operation the elementary machinery that is necessary for real working class politics. Political activity started in the affiliated labor union locals, where political discussion, reports of political delegates, and political campaign activity were part of the regular business of each meeting, and payment of per-capita to the labor political organization was a constant part of the budget. Delegates from the unions of each city met in monthly meetings or oftener, as the Farmer-Labor Association city central committee. This went on month after month and year after year.
This is another lesson to be learned. While today farmers don’t have the numbers they once did, they, in the same vein as small business owners, still hold formidable political power. Labor, from the bottom, must have the ultimate say in how their political presence is orchestrated. There must be measures to protect the party platform from being hijacked by coalitions or careerist bureaucrats from within.
The biggest challenge for the integrity of the Farmer-Labor Party came from Floyd B. Olsen. Olsen was a popular man across Minnesota. He was also controversial. From cries that he was a “socialist,” to alleged mob ties, to a well known muckraker nemesis being shot down in the streets of Minneapolis, Olsen captivated Minnesota and gained national attention. He was a wonderful showman and a shrewd politician. In exchange for him running on a Farmer-Labor ticket, he demanded complete control over appointees. With the possibility of a victory in 1930 humming in their ears, the Farmer-Labor Association gave him that power.
In 1930 Olsen was indeed elected. He immediately set up committees outside of the Association consisting of careerist politicians that were loyal to him. His strategy was “vote for me, I’m a good guy.” The program of the party be damned. For years Olsen's main goal was to limit labor’s influence within the party. As many state jobs as he could possibly give out, he gave out to supporters. Despite his attempted undermining of labor’s direct influence, he was forced to recognize its power. I suspect this was the reason Olsen went after the reforms he is known for, much more so than any sort of burning desire “to help the working man” he may have felt within.
Given Olsen’s maneuverings, it’s not at all surprising contradictions were everywhere. For example, it was Olsen who ordered the National Guard to Minneapolis during the famous 1934 Teamster Strike. Some unions, particularly and understandably in the Twin Cities, openly opposed him. The downward spiral of the party was heightened by Olsen’s unexpected death from stomach cancer in 1936.
From then on the party was in ruins. Despite still having a tremendous support based on their earlier program, the party was ousted from the Governor’s mansion by a great margin in 1938. By 1944 the party had officially merged into the Democratic Party. The Stalinists, who had been instrumental in bureaucratically shutting down any disagreeing voice from the unions, had now successfully merged the workers’ party into a bourgeois party. Stalin was on good terms with Roosevelt. Moscow, despite the rhetoric, had absolutely no interest in a true workers’ party, neither here nor there.
There are many lessons we can learn from the experience of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. Most of all, it shatters the myth that workers in the United States have no interest in political independence. In the final analysis, workers in the United States have the same needs, wants, and aspirations as workers in Venezuela, Egypt, Russia or Germany. This is why we are involved in the Campaign for a Mass Party of Labor. We, the Marxists, know it would prove a costly mistake not to be part of that process. We must help build our political presence. When the mighty working class in the United States moves, the world will tremble.
From The "Internationalist Group" Website-Barack Obama’s 2012 Reelection Campaign Has Begun -U.S./NATO Murder, Inc.
May 2011
Barack Obama’s 2012 Reelection Campaign Has Begun
U.S./NATO Murder, Inc.
On May Day weekend, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization went on a killing spree in North Africa and South Asia. On Friday, the bells of Westminster Abbey pealed, crowds waved Union Jack flags and lords and ladies attended the wedding ball at Buckingham Palace for the odious royal marriage in London. Pomp and ceremony done with, the very next day, April 30, NATO warplanes struck Tripoli, bombing a residential compound where Muammar al-Qaddafi was present. As the U.S./NATO campaign of bombing the Libyan army forces which are battling pro-imperialist monarchist/Islamist rebels was going nowhere, this was a blatant attempt to murder the Libyan leader. But it was soon eclipsed when on Sunday evening, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden, in a raid by Navy SEAL commandos on his home in a suburb of Pakistan’s capital. This assassination succeeded, and the imperialist rulers launched into an orgy of self-congratulation, declaring a “victory” in the “war on terror,” while vowing that, of course, the war would go on.
Several hundred yahoos converged on Ground Zero at the site of the former World Trade Center, brought down in the 11 September 2001 (9-11) attack, to wave the Stars and Stripes. A crowd gathered in Times Square to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” all night. In Washington, drunken college students partied in front of the White House, swilling beer and waving cigars. Police and military were out in force around the country The bourgeois media sought to whip up a blood frenzy, with NYC tabloids leading the baying pack: “We got him” proclaimed the New York Post, followed by “Demon Killed,” “How We ‘SEALed’ Monster’s Fate,” and the like. The Daily News had “How We Nailed Him,” “Al Qaeda Treasure Trove in Den of Evil,” and so on. As the U.S.’s initial claim of Bin Laden dying in a firefight unraveled and it became undeniable that this was a cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man, the mainstream media got in on the act. Liberal pundits, sociologists and theologians assured queasy readers that revenge is oh-so-human and “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” (Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, 8 May).
Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Yemeni-Arabian clan who fashioned himself a mujahed (holy warrior), was the man that President George W. Bush sought “dead or alive” – but preferably dead. His face was on FBI “wanted” posters, along with the offer of a $25 million bounty. But above all, having learned that projecting a hateful figure like Hitler does wonders to build popular support for war, U.S. rulers adopted “UBL” (his acronym in Pentagon/CIA bureaucratese) as the “face of evil” for their terror war. Billed as the mastermind behind the 9-11 attack on the WTC, he is held responsible for the deaths of some 2,600 civilians in that act of indiscriminate terror. (Another 300+ died at the Pentagon, but that was indisputably a military “command and control center,” if ever there was one.) Yet the U.S. government has wantonly slaughtered far, far more innocent civilians in nearly a decade of war since then: over a million dead in the first three years of the Iraq war, according to a study by the British medical journal Lancet (11 October 2006). Only the U.S. styles its mass murder “collateral damage.”
The May Day weekend one-two punch – missing Qaddafi but knocking out bin Laden – underscores that the U.S. and its NATO imperialist allies are in the assassination business big time. Murdering heads of state is supposedly against international law, and ever since President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905 in 1976, U.S. government employees were not supposed to engage in “political assassination.” This was reiterated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 (EO 12333), but that didn’t stop him from seeking to murder Qaddafi five years later. By one 2006 count, since 1976 the U.S. engaged in at least a dozen major assassination attempts. And, of course, there are the innumerable attempts by the U.S. government to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro (Britain’s Channel 4 TV tallied these in a 2006 documentary, 638 Ways to Kill Castro). Assassination by the U.S. of its perceived enemies is, to paraphrase the remark by H. Rap Brown, “as American as apple pie.” But if a rival power did it, Washington would be railing against “state-sponsored terrorism.”
In the April 30 air strike in Tripoli, reportedly by a Danish warplane, British prime minister David Cameron justified this as targeting “command and control.” While the Libyan leader escaped harm, his son Saif al-Arab Qaddafi and three of his grandchildren were killed. This was murder, plain and simple, and the commanders who ordered the strike should, by rights, be prosecuted for war crimes – which, of course, will never happen. If the compound in an upscale Tripoli residential neighborhood was indeed a “known command and control building,” as a NATO spokesman claimed, Libyan military forces are directed in a truly novel way. When a reporter from the Washington Post (1 May) toured the gutted residence, the only thing remotely military in evidence was “a pile of Play Station games…, including Modern Warfare 2.” That this was a blatant attempt to “decapitate” the Libyan leadership is underscored by subsequent NATO air strikes against a parliamentary building and “the sprawling compound housing members of Colonel Gaddafi’s family” (London Evening Standard, 10 May).
It is because the U.S. is trying to claim the moral high ground in a “war” against “terrorism” that it ham-handedly tried to cover up the fact that its special forces were dispatched to murder Osama bin Laden. The initial account by a “senior administration official” claimed he “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle. This was then spun by White House “counterterrorism” chief John Brennan into a story of bin Laden supposedly using his wife, who was then killed, as a “human shield.” The idea was to portray him as a coward who hid behind women. But on May 3, the putz of a White House spokesman Jay Carey told reporters he had a new “narrative” to feed to them, admitting that Bin Laden was not armed, did not hide behind a woman and that the woman in question was not killed. The next day it came out that there was no “firefight” at all in the building where he resided. Bin Laden was shot twice, in the head and the chest, to make sure he was dead. The three other men in the building, one of them a son, were similarly executed.
The bottom line is that the last thing the U.S. wanted is to have Osama bin Laden alive in its possession. Islamists everywhere would have demonstrated for him to be freed. And Washington sure as hell didn’t want him in front of a court (as some liberals wished) – not even in a rigged show trial like they staged for Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic – where he could regale the world media about how he and the CIA and the Pakistani ISI worked hand-in-glove in their covert war against the Soviet “infidels” in Afghanistan during the 1980s. (Obituaries in the bourgeois press also skated gingerly around that chapter.) While piously claiming that they were ready for “all contingencies, including capture,” and had a legal team on call, top administration officials “acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing” (New York Times, 10 May). Other U.S. “national security officials” were a good deal franker when they bluntly told Reuters (7 May), “This was a kill mission.” The only real question was whether the U.S. would assault the building or just bomb it, like NATO did in its failed attempt to kill Qaddafi.
The media was filled with stories lauding the Navy SEAL Team 6 who executed bin Laden as the “best of the best.” This killer elite of U.S. special forces is portrayed as something out of a Tom Clancy spy novel. Described as “sort of like Murder, Incorporated” by a retired Special Forces officer quoted by Jeremy Scahill in his blog at The Nation (2 May), SEAL Team 6 is used for “black ops” which, if discovered, “never happened.” An assault group of the “storied” SEAL Team 6 took part in the 1983 U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, where it gunned down radio station workers but failed to hold the station. In Vietnam, a Navy SEAL death squad headed by Lt. Robert Kerrey – later a U.S. Senator, presidential hopeful and head of The New School university – became notorious years later for the massacre it carried out in the village of Thanh Phong. In the current U.S. war in Afghanistan, Navy Seals and Army Delta force operatives are part of Task Force 373, a secretive hit squad that goes around the country targeting individuals on a “kill or capture” list known as the JPEL. U.S. cables released by Wikileaks last year revealed that this force has also “killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path,” as the London Guardian (25 July 2010) reported.
Now we are treated to a seemingly endless stream of ridiculous war propaganda aimed at making bin Laden look weak and his U.S. killers compassionate. It was breathlessly revealed that he used a remote to channel surf TV (what a couch potato!), that he dyed his hair black to hide his age (how vain!), that he “had herbal ‘Viagra’ [Avena syrup] in his medicine cabinet” (“Droop Dead,” Daily News, 9 May). Then there was the story of how U.S. forces supposedly “follow[ed] Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours” by washing bin Laden’s dead body, wrapping it in a white sheet and placing it “inside a weighted bag,” whereupon it was “eased into the sea” (New York Times, 3 May). What crap! The U.S. disposed of the evidence just as Russian mobsters stuffed their victim’s remains into a bag and dumped them in the Hackensack River some years ago, or the death squads of the (U.S.-allied) Argentine junta used to toss their captives out of helicopters into the Atlantic Ocean (the only difference being that sometimes the Argentine military pushed the leftists out alive if they had survived the torture).
The spin doctors at the White House aren’t overly concerned that the successive stories they spun were hardly believable – they figure the tabloids will print just about any garbage they put out, and virtually the entire spectrum of U.S. (bourgeois) politics, including most liberals, would cheer killing bin Laden, while the few party-poopers would soon shut up out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic. They got that right. Obama could then go to Ground Zero (the World Trade Center) where he could have a “victory lap” that only the most right-wing teabaggers would begrudge him. His numbers would shoot up in the opinion polls, although whether that lasts through the 2012 elections is hard to predict: at least he would be relatively protected on the “wimp factor” front. The debate about whether torture (a/k/a “enhanced interrogation methods”) contributed to the successful “kill,” and Obama’s refusal to release photos of bin Laden to display as a hunting trophy, would be used to portray the Democratic president and assassin-in-chief as “tough but moderate.”
In fact, the present administration has gone on a binge of assassinations. If Bush II was the “collateral damage” president, Obama has been the “targeted killings” president. The Columbia Journalism Review (May/June 2011) reports, in an article on “Covering Obama’s Secret War,” that the Democratic president has authorized 193 drone strikes in Pakistan since taking office, “more than four times the number of attacks that President George W. Bush authorized” in eight years. When Democratic candidates said “we can do better” than Republican Bush at imposing U.S. imperialist world domination, this is what they meant. In the 7 October 2008 “town meeting” debate, Obama declared: “if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out … we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden.” He even declared this to be “our biggest national security priority.” So as we have written before, liberals who voted for Obama, and opportunist leftists who sidled up to him, thinking he was a “peace candidate,” can’t say they weren’t forewarned.
The U.S. murder of Osama bin Laden should be a reminder that imperialism is not a foreign policy but a system: tactics and even strategy may vary, but the basics do not change. The U.S. goal is not to spread “democracy,” as Bush claimed, or to “stand up for our values abroad” and “make the world a safer place,” as Obama said in pronouncing bin Laden dead, nor all of the poppycock about justice and peace spouted by American presidents. It’s about making the world safer for exploitation by the giant corporations and dominant capitalist powers. The U.S. isn’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to go after a shadowy network of a few hundred Islamist fighters nicknamed Al Qaeda. Its “war on terror” is a war to terrorize the world into submission to Washington’s dictates – and to make clear to its imperialist allies and rivals who is top dog. And in this epoch of capitalist decline, of endless wars and economic crisis, it is a war directed against poor, oppressed and working people here. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing Libya, executing bin Laden and destroying unions while rolling back the few remaining gains of the Civil Rights movement in the United States are all part of the same war.
Class-conscious workers and opponents of imperialism must seek to defeat this war by the oppressors against the oppressed, both abroad and “at home.”
As for “Al Qaeda” – a/k/a the World Islamic Front – the U.S. will move bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the top of its hit list, for the war must go on. U.S. rulers seem to have a peculiar notion that they can kill an ideological movement by killing a single leader, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But despite the ravings by right-wing ideologues on American hate radio, the U.S. government is not at war with Islamism. In fact, it designed constitutions for Iraq and Afghanistan that enshrine Islam as a state religion and sharia (Islamic religious code) as a source of civil law. Moreover, in Afghanistan Washington will now use the demise of bin Laden to step up its push for “reconciliation” with the Taliban (“U.S. Sees Chance to Accelerate Negotiations with Taliban,” Washington Post, 4 May). No one in Washington is demented enough to think the weak, corruption-riddled puppet government in Kabul can win the war. As we have noted: “The actual U.S. strategy is not to defeat the Taliban but to weaken it enough so that elements of the Islamists can be brought into a political deal” (“Defeat U.S. War on Afghanistan and Iraq,” The Internationalist No. 30, November-December 2009).
Since the onset of the anti-Soviet Cold War, U.S. rulers have sought to use religious reaction in the service of imperialist domination. In the 1980s the U.S. financed madrassas with Saudi Wahabist instructors in Pakistan where Afghan refugees were taught from Islamist textbooks prepared at the University of Nebraska (on a U.S. government contract). Taliban bomb-making manuals were derived from the ones prepared by the CIA for its Nicaraguan contra mercenaries. As for us, Trotskyist communists, we opposed the mujahedin who were funded, armed and trained by the U.S., and hailed the Soviet Army intervention to fight them in the ’80s. Today, we oppose the Islamist reactionaries when Washington is once again allying with them in Libya and seeking an alliance in Afghanistan. When Al Qaeda was set up in early 1989 as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Trotskyists proposed to the Afghan government to form an international brigade to fight against the CIA’s holy warriors. When that offer was turned down, we raised $40,000 for the heroic defenders of Jalalabad, under siege by bin Laden’s forces.
The assassination of bin Laden is no aberration. “Targeted killing” is only the latest U.S. euphemism: under Richard Nixon it was called “termination with extreme prejudice.” Remember the fate of Patrice Lumumba, Ernesto Che Guevara, Orlando Letelier and many others – and Washington’s puppets who became liabilities, like Ngo Dinh Diem and Rafael Trujillo. If today Obama wants to hold off on publishing photos of the dead body, it is doubtless because gory photos will show bin Laden was executed at point-blank range, and because the U.S. commander in chief wants to keep a lid on the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, which he suppressed after earlier pledging to release them. The fact that the operation gave its target the code name “Geronimo,” angering many who honor the heroic Chiricahua Apache fighter, harks back to the days of U.S. expansion to the West and its genocide against the Native American population, when General Philip Sheridan sneered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” So no tears for Osama bin Laden, but his undoubted crimes are far surpassed by those of the mass murderers who claim to have brought him to “justice.”
Meanwhile, as the head of the Pakistani armed forces (accused of harboring bin Laden) bitterly remarked, the U.S. will have material for “Hollywood movies for the next decade.”
Barack Obama’s 2012 Reelection Campaign Has Begun
U.S./NATO Murder, Inc.
On May Day weekend, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization went on a killing spree in North Africa and South Asia. On Friday, the bells of Westminster Abbey pealed, crowds waved Union Jack flags and lords and ladies attended the wedding ball at Buckingham Palace for the odious royal marriage in London. Pomp and ceremony done with, the very next day, April 30, NATO warplanes struck Tripoli, bombing a residential compound where Muammar al-Qaddafi was present. As the U.S./NATO campaign of bombing the Libyan army forces which are battling pro-imperialist monarchist/Islamist rebels was going nowhere, this was a blatant attempt to murder the Libyan leader. But it was soon eclipsed when on Sunday evening, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden, in a raid by Navy SEAL commandos on his home in a suburb of Pakistan’s capital. This assassination succeeded, and the imperialist rulers launched into an orgy of self-congratulation, declaring a “victory” in the “war on terror,” while vowing that, of course, the war would go on.
Several hundred yahoos converged on Ground Zero at the site of the former World Trade Center, brought down in the 11 September 2001 (9-11) attack, to wave the Stars and Stripes. A crowd gathered in Times Square to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.” all night. In Washington, drunken college students partied in front of the White House, swilling beer and waving cigars. Police and military were out in force around the country The bourgeois media sought to whip up a blood frenzy, with NYC tabloids leading the baying pack: “We got him” proclaimed the New York Post, followed by “Demon Killed,” “How We ‘SEALed’ Monster’s Fate,” and the like. The Daily News had “How We Nailed Him,” “Al Qaeda Treasure Trove in Den of Evil,” and so on. As the U.S.’s initial claim of Bin Laden dying in a firefight unraveled and it became undeniable that this was a cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man, the mainstream media got in on the act. Liberal pundits, sociologists and theologians assured queasy readers that revenge is oh-so-human and “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” (Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, 8 May).
Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Yemeni-Arabian clan who fashioned himself a mujahed (holy warrior), was the man that President George W. Bush sought “dead or alive” – but preferably dead. His face was on FBI “wanted” posters, along with the offer of a $25 million bounty. But above all, having learned that projecting a hateful figure like Hitler does wonders to build popular support for war, U.S. rulers adopted “UBL” (his acronym in Pentagon/CIA bureaucratese) as the “face of evil” for their terror war. Billed as the mastermind behind the 9-11 attack on the WTC, he is held responsible for the deaths of some 2,600 civilians in that act of indiscriminate terror. (Another 300+ died at the Pentagon, but that was indisputably a military “command and control center,” if ever there was one.) Yet the U.S. government has wantonly slaughtered far, far more innocent civilians in nearly a decade of war since then: over a million dead in the first three years of the Iraq war, according to a study by the British medical journal Lancet (11 October 2006). Only the U.S. styles its mass murder “collateral damage.”
The May Day weekend one-two punch – missing Qaddafi but knocking out bin Laden – underscores that the U.S. and its NATO imperialist allies are in the assassination business big time. Murdering heads of state is supposedly against international law, and ever since President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905 in 1976, U.S. government employees were not supposed to engage in “political assassination.” This was reiterated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 (EO 12333), but that didn’t stop him from seeking to murder Qaddafi five years later. By one 2006 count, since 1976 the U.S. engaged in at least a dozen major assassination attempts. And, of course, there are the innumerable attempts by the U.S. government to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro (Britain’s Channel 4 TV tallied these in a 2006 documentary, 638 Ways to Kill Castro). Assassination by the U.S. of its perceived enemies is, to paraphrase the remark by H. Rap Brown, “as American as apple pie.” But if a rival power did it, Washington would be railing against “state-sponsored terrorism.”
In the April 30 air strike in Tripoli, reportedly by a Danish warplane, British prime minister David Cameron justified this as targeting “command and control.” While the Libyan leader escaped harm, his son Saif al-Arab Qaddafi and three of his grandchildren were killed. This was murder, plain and simple, and the commanders who ordered the strike should, by rights, be prosecuted for war crimes – which, of course, will never happen. If the compound in an upscale Tripoli residential neighborhood was indeed a “known command and control building,” as a NATO spokesman claimed, Libyan military forces are directed in a truly novel way. When a reporter from the Washington Post (1 May) toured the gutted residence, the only thing remotely military in evidence was “a pile of Play Station games…, including Modern Warfare 2.” That this was a blatant attempt to “decapitate” the Libyan leadership is underscored by subsequent NATO air strikes against a parliamentary building and “the sprawling compound housing members of Colonel Gaddafi’s family” (London Evening Standard, 10 May).
It is because the U.S. is trying to claim the moral high ground in a “war” against “terrorism” that it ham-handedly tried to cover up the fact that its special forces were dispatched to murder Osama bin Laden. The initial account by a “senior administration official” claimed he “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle. This was then spun by White House “counterterrorism” chief John Brennan into a story of bin Laden supposedly using his wife, who was then killed, as a “human shield.” The idea was to portray him as a coward who hid behind women. But on May 3, the putz of a White House spokesman Jay Carey told reporters he had a new “narrative” to feed to them, admitting that Bin Laden was not armed, did not hide behind a woman and that the woman in question was not killed. The next day it came out that there was no “firefight” at all in the building where he resided. Bin Laden was shot twice, in the head and the chest, to make sure he was dead. The three other men in the building, one of them a son, were similarly executed.
The bottom line is that the last thing the U.S. wanted is to have Osama bin Laden alive in its possession. Islamists everywhere would have demonstrated for him to be freed. And Washington sure as hell didn’t want him in front of a court (as some liberals wished) – not even in a rigged show trial like they staged for Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic – where he could regale the world media about how he and the CIA and the Pakistani ISI worked hand-in-glove in their covert war against the Soviet “infidels” in Afghanistan during the 1980s. (Obituaries in the bourgeois press also skated gingerly around that chapter.) While piously claiming that they were ready for “all contingencies, including capture,” and had a legal team on call, top administration officials “acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing” (New York Times, 10 May). Other U.S. “national security officials” were a good deal franker when they bluntly told Reuters (7 May), “This was a kill mission.” The only real question was whether the U.S. would assault the building or just bomb it, like NATO did in its failed attempt to kill Qaddafi.
The media was filled with stories lauding the Navy SEAL Team 6 who executed bin Laden as the “best of the best.” This killer elite of U.S. special forces is portrayed as something out of a Tom Clancy spy novel. Described as “sort of like Murder, Incorporated” by a retired Special Forces officer quoted by Jeremy Scahill in his blog at The Nation (2 May), SEAL Team 6 is used for “black ops” which, if discovered, “never happened.” An assault group of the “storied” SEAL Team 6 took part in the 1983 U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, where it gunned down radio station workers but failed to hold the station. In Vietnam, a Navy SEAL death squad headed by Lt. Robert Kerrey – later a U.S. Senator, presidential hopeful and head of The New School university – became notorious years later for the massacre it carried out in the village of Thanh Phong. In the current U.S. war in Afghanistan, Navy Seals and Army Delta force operatives are part of Task Force 373, a secretive hit squad that goes around the country targeting individuals on a “kill or capture” list known as the JPEL. U.S. cables released by Wikileaks last year revealed that this force has also “killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path,” as the London Guardian (25 July 2010) reported.
Now we are treated to a seemingly endless stream of ridiculous war propaganda aimed at making bin Laden look weak and his U.S. killers compassionate. It was breathlessly revealed that he used a remote to channel surf TV (what a couch potato!), that he dyed his hair black to hide his age (how vain!), that he “had herbal ‘Viagra’ [Avena syrup] in his medicine cabinet” (“Droop Dead,” Daily News, 9 May). Then there was the story of how U.S. forces supposedly “follow[ed] Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours” by washing bin Laden’s dead body, wrapping it in a white sheet and placing it “inside a weighted bag,” whereupon it was “eased into the sea” (New York Times, 3 May). What crap! The U.S. disposed of the evidence just as Russian mobsters stuffed their victim’s remains into a bag and dumped them in the Hackensack River some years ago, or the death squads of the (U.S.-allied) Argentine junta used to toss their captives out of helicopters into the Atlantic Ocean (the only difference being that sometimes the Argentine military pushed the leftists out alive if they had survived the torture).
The spin doctors at the White House aren’t overly concerned that the successive stories they spun were hardly believable – they figure the tabloids will print just about any garbage they put out, and virtually the entire spectrum of U.S. (bourgeois) politics, including most liberals, would cheer killing bin Laden, while the few party-poopers would soon shut up out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic. They got that right. Obama could then go to Ground Zero (the World Trade Center) where he could have a “victory lap” that only the most right-wing teabaggers would begrudge him. His numbers would shoot up in the opinion polls, although whether that lasts through the 2012 elections is hard to predict: at least he would be relatively protected on the “wimp factor” front. The debate about whether torture (a/k/a “enhanced interrogation methods”) contributed to the successful “kill,” and Obama’s refusal to release photos of bin Laden to display as a hunting trophy, would be used to portray the Democratic president and assassin-in-chief as “tough but moderate.”
In fact, the present administration has gone on a binge of assassinations. If Bush II was the “collateral damage” president, Obama has been the “targeted killings” president. The Columbia Journalism Review (May/June 2011) reports, in an article on “Covering Obama’s Secret War,” that the Democratic president has authorized 193 drone strikes in Pakistan since taking office, “more than four times the number of attacks that President George W. Bush authorized” in eight years. When Democratic candidates said “we can do better” than Republican Bush at imposing U.S. imperialist world domination, this is what they meant. In the 7 October 2008 “town meeting” debate, Obama declared: “if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out … we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden.” He even declared this to be “our biggest national security priority.” So as we have written before, liberals who voted for Obama, and opportunist leftists who sidled up to him, thinking he was a “peace candidate,” can’t say they weren’t forewarned.
The U.S. murder of Osama bin Laden should be a reminder that imperialism is not a foreign policy but a system: tactics and even strategy may vary, but the basics do not change. The U.S. goal is not to spread “democracy,” as Bush claimed, or to “stand up for our values abroad” and “make the world a safer place,” as Obama said in pronouncing bin Laden dead, nor all of the poppycock about justice and peace spouted by American presidents. It’s about making the world safer for exploitation by the giant corporations and dominant capitalist powers. The U.S. isn’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to go after a shadowy network of a few hundred Islamist fighters nicknamed Al Qaeda. Its “war on terror” is a war to terrorize the world into submission to Washington’s dictates – and to make clear to its imperialist allies and rivals who is top dog. And in this epoch of capitalist decline, of endless wars and economic crisis, it is a war directed against poor, oppressed and working people here. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing Libya, executing bin Laden and destroying unions while rolling back the few remaining gains of the Civil Rights movement in the United States are all part of the same war.
Class-conscious workers and opponents of imperialism must seek to defeat this war by the oppressors against the oppressed, both abroad and “at home.”
As for “Al Qaeda” – a/k/a the World Islamic Front – the U.S. will move bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the top of its hit list, for the war must go on. U.S. rulers seem to have a peculiar notion that they can kill an ideological movement by killing a single leader, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But despite the ravings by right-wing ideologues on American hate radio, the U.S. government is not at war with Islamism. In fact, it designed constitutions for Iraq and Afghanistan that enshrine Islam as a state religion and sharia (Islamic religious code) as a source of civil law. Moreover, in Afghanistan Washington will now use the demise of bin Laden to step up its push for “reconciliation” with the Taliban (“U.S. Sees Chance to Accelerate Negotiations with Taliban,” Washington Post, 4 May). No one in Washington is demented enough to think the weak, corruption-riddled puppet government in Kabul can win the war. As we have noted: “The actual U.S. strategy is not to defeat the Taliban but to weaken it enough so that elements of the Islamists can be brought into a political deal” (“Defeat U.S. War on Afghanistan and Iraq,” The Internationalist No. 30, November-December 2009).
Since the onset of the anti-Soviet Cold War, U.S. rulers have sought to use religious reaction in the service of imperialist domination. In the 1980s the U.S. financed madrassas with Saudi Wahabist instructors in Pakistan where Afghan refugees were taught from Islamist textbooks prepared at the University of Nebraska (on a U.S. government contract). Taliban bomb-making manuals were derived from the ones prepared by the CIA for its Nicaraguan contra mercenaries. As for us, Trotskyist communists, we opposed the mujahedin who were funded, armed and trained by the U.S., and hailed the Soviet Army intervention to fight them in the ’80s. Today, we oppose the Islamist reactionaries when Washington is once again allying with them in Libya and seeking an alliance in Afghanistan. When Al Qaeda was set up in early 1989 as the Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Trotskyists proposed to the Afghan government to form an international brigade to fight against the CIA’s holy warriors. When that offer was turned down, we raised $40,000 for the heroic defenders of Jalalabad, under siege by bin Laden’s forces.
The assassination of bin Laden is no aberration. “Targeted killing” is only the latest U.S. euphemism: under Richard Nixon it was called “termination with extreme prejudice.” Remember the fate of Patrice Lumumba, Ernesto Che Guevara, Orlando Letelier and many others – and Washington’s puppets who became liabilities, like Ngo Dinh Diem and Rafael Trujillo. If today Obama wants to hold off on publishing photos of the dead body, it is doubtless because gory photos will show bin Laden was executed at point-blank range, and because the U.S. commander in chief wants to keep a lid on the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, which he suppressed after earlier pledging to release them. The fact that the operation gave its target the code name “Geronimo,” angering many who honor the heroic Chiricahua Apache fighter, harks back to the days of U.S. expansion to the West and its genocide against the Native American population, when General Philip Sheridan sneered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” So no tears for Osama bin Laden, but his undoubted crimes are far surpassed by those of the mass murderers who claim to have brought him to “justice.”
Meanwhile, as the head of the Pakistani armed forces (accused of harboring bin Laden) bitterly remarked, the U.S. will have material for “Hollywood movies for the next decade.”
From The "Internationalist Group" Website-Neo-McCarthyites Target Campus Leftists-Inquisitors Still Going After the Rosenbergs
Neo-McCarthyites Target Campus Leftists
Inquisitors Still Going After the Rosenbergs
Some have questioned what the furor over CUNY’s denial of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner has to do with academic freedom (see Stanley Fish’s May 8 blog posting “The Kushner Flap: Much Ado About Nothing” on the New York Times website). The answer is: plenty.
In Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s drama of AIDS in the reactionary Reagan era, the figure of Ethel Rosenberg appears to haunt the dying witch-hunter Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, who even on his deathbed symbolizes the cruelty and hypocrisy of official American society. Today’s McCarthy clones are still haunted by the spectre of the Rosenbergs. On the NewsRealBlog (10 May), one Phyllis Chesler wrote breathlessly, “Just Who Nominated Tony Kushner WON’T Surprise You.” This retired CUNY professor declared: “When I first described the City University of New York as the Communist University of New York, I had no idea how right I was. It seems that Dr. Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is one of two professors at John Jay College who nominated Tony Kushner for this honorary degree.” Right-wingers hailed Chesler for uncovering a nefarious plot by the son of “Communist spies.”
While the attack on Tony Kushner was spearheaded by one unhinged CUNY trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, it was the product of a whole apparatus of professional witch hunters. Wiesenfeld says he went to the website of Norman Finkelstein, whom he describes as “another discredited individual, that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this university,”[1] where he found quotes from Kushner. Actually, Wiesenfeld left out a step: the quotes he cited are all to be found on David Horowitz’s Internet site Frontpagemag.com, which has been going after Kushner and Finkelstein for years. Chesler, too, works closely with Horowitz, the megalomaniacal red-hunter whose on-line outlets include the “David Horowitz Freedom Center.” His self-appointed mission (for which he receives big bucks from nefarious sources) is “the defense of free societies … under attack by leftist and Islamist enemies at home and abroad.”
During the anti-Communist witch hunts at the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, American universities were systematically purged of “reds.” Senator Joe McCarthy’s bloodhounds roamed the land (as former New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab put it), looking for “subversive” faculty members to be pilloried. More than a dozen professors at City College of New York and Brooklyn College were fired after hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. These days, witch-hunting, like prisons and police, has been heavily privatized, outsourced to the likes of Fox News, the New York Post and professional inquisitors like Horowitz. Enlisting student snitches as junior G-men to turn in their professors, in addition to his web sites this modern-day Torquemada published a hit list, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006)
Horowitz is an extreme Zionist, as are Wiesenfeld and Chesler, of the sort that think Obama has “thrown Israel to the dogs.” They are closely tied to the Muslim bashers who tried to prevent the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque in Lower Manhattan last year (see “Mobilize Against Racist Attacks on Muslims and Immigrants,” The Internationalist No. 32, January-February 2011). One of the poisonous specialties of this crew is hounding people of Jewish ethnicity whom they regard as insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab. They go after the “crypto-communist” Tony Kushner with the same fervor that Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the witch hunters of their day (including many anti-communist liberals) orchestrated the legal lynching of the Rosenbergs, the firing of the “Hollywood Ten” and blacklisting of hundreds in the entertainment industry, and the hunt to ferret out “reds” supposedly hiding under the bushes on campus.
Michael Meeropol is a visiting professor of economics and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay College. His younger brother Robert, who directs a foundation to aid youths and children of parents targeted by state repression, detailed in a posting titled “Communist Coup?” (Director’s Blog, Rosenberg Fund for Children website, May 19) how the witch-hunters conjured up their Rosenberg-Kushner amalgam. For our part, we salute the Meeropol brothers, who have stood tall through decades of smears and anti-communist campaigns, which even now are being conducted against them by the vilest bigots in America, nearly 60 years after the state murder of their heroic parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Finkelstein, whose parents were survivors of the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, taught for nine years at Hunter College before he was forced out by the campus administration following publication of his book The Holocaust Industry (2000), which exposes how Zionists exploit the Nazi genocide as an ideological weapon to silence criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Subsequently, after teaching for six years at DePauw University in Chicago, Finkelstein was denied tenure due to a campaign of vilification against him led by Alan Dershowitz.
Inquisitors Still Going After the Rosenbergs
Some have questioned what the furor over CUNY’s denial of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner has to do with academic freedom (see Stanley Fish’s May 8 blog posting “The Kushner Flap: Much Ado About Nothing” on the New York Times website). The answer is: plenty.
In Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s drama of AIDS in the reactionary Reagan era, the figure of Ethel Rosenberg appears to haunt the dying witch-hunter Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, who even on his deathbed symbolizes the cruelty and hypocrisy of official American society. Today’s McCarthy clones are still haunted by the spectre of the Rosenbergs. On the NewsRealBlog (10 May), one Phyllis Chesler wrote breathlessly, “Just Who Nominated Tony Kushner WON’T Surprise You.” This retired CUNY professor declared: “When I first described the City University of New York as the Communist University of New York, I had no idea how right I was. It seems that Dr. Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is one of two professors at John Jay College who nominated Tony Kushner for this honorary degree.” Right-wingers hailed Chesler for uncovering a nefarious plot by the son of “Communist spies.”
While the attack on Tony Kushner was spearheaded by one unhinged CUNY trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, it was the product of a whole apparatus of professional witch hunters. Wiesenfeld says he went to the website of Norman Finkelstein, whom he describes as “another discredited individual, that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this university,”[1] where he found quotes from Kushner. Actually, Wiesenfeld left out a step: the quotes he cited are all to be found on David Horowitz’s Internet site Frontpagemag.com, which has been going after Kushner and Finkelstein for years. Chesler, too, works closely with Horowitz, the megalomaniacal red-hunter whose on-line outlets include the “David Horowitz Freedom Center.” His self-appointed mission (for which he receives big bucks from nefarious sources) is “the defense of free societies … under attack by leftist and Islamist enemies at home and abroad.”
During the anti-Communist witch hunts at the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, American universities were systematically purged of “reds.” Senator Joe McCarthy’s bloodhounds roamed the land (as former New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab put it), looking for “subversive” faculty members to be pilloried. More than a dozen professors at City College of New York and Brooklyn College were fired after hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. These days, witch-hunting, like prisons and police, has been heavily privatized, outsourced to the likes of Fox News, the New York Post and professional inquisitors like Horowitz. Enlisting student snitches as junior G-men to turn in their professors, in addition to his web sites this modern-day Torquemada published a hit list, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006)
Horowitz is an extreme Zionist, as are Wiesenfeld and Chesler, of the sort that think Obama has “thrown Israel to the dogs.” They are closely tied to the Muslim bashers who tried to prevent the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque in Lower Manhattan last year (see “Mobilize Against Racist Attacks on Muslims and Immigrants,” The Internationalist No. 32, January-February 2011). One of the poisonous specialties of this crew is hounding people of Jewish ethnicity whom they regard as insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab. They go after the “crypto-communist” Tony Kushner with the same fervor that Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the witch hunters of their day (including many anti-communist liberals) orchestrated the legal lynching of the Rosenbergs, the firing of the “Hollywood Ten” and blacklisting of hundreds in the entertainment industry, and the hunt to ferret out “reds” supposedly hiding under the bushes on campus.
Michael Meeropol is a visiting professor of economics and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay College. His younger brother Robert, who directs a foundation to aid youths and children of parents targeted by state repression, detailed in a posting titled “Communist Coup?” (Director’s Blog, Rosenberg Fund for Children website, May 19) how the witch-hunters conjured up their Rosenberg-Kushner amalgam. For our part, we salute the Meeropol brothers, who have stood tall through decades of smears and anti-communist campaigns, which even now are being conducted against them by the vilest bigots in America, nearly 60 years after the state murder of their heroic parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Finkelstein, whose parents were survivors of the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, taught for nine years at Hunter College before he was forced out by the campus administration following publication of his book The Holocaust Industry (2000), which exposes how Zionists exploit the Nazi genocide as an ideological weapon to silence criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Subsequently, after teaching for six years at DePauw University in Chicago, Finkelstein was denied tenure due to a campaign of vilification against him led by Alan Dershowitz.
From The "NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO FREE THE CUBAN FIVE-Comité Nacional por la Libertad de los Cinco Cubanos "-"Outrage in El Paso:Posada Acquitted!"
NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO FREE THE CUBAN FIVE-Comité Nacional por la Libertad de los Cinco Cubanos
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five-April 11, 2011
Outrage in El Paso:Posada Acquitted!
U.S. Government Terrorist Walks Free
In El Paso today, following a 13-week trial in which the evidence against him was overwhelming, notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was acquitted by a jury after a shockingly short three hours of deliberation.
The U.S. government has been at war against the Cuban people since they carried out a revolution in 1959. As a CIA employee and part of that war, Posada Carriles committed many acts of terrorism against the Cuban people and others.
Today Posada walks free in a mockery of justice, while the Cuban Five
anti-terrorists are still imprisoned for almost 13 years.
If the U.S. had really wanted a conviction of Luis Posada Carriles on his real crimes of terrorism, it would have been easily achieved. But the U.S. government chose to try Posada for the ridiculously minor charges of perjury and immigration fraud.
This is why the National Committee, along with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and local activists in El Paso held a "Peoples Tribunal" and protest before the start of the federal trial, to expose Posada's crimes of terrorism to the world.
Today's acquittal, together with the continued incarceration of the Cuban Five heroes who risked their lives to prevent acts of terrorism by Posada's allies, is a clear indication that the U.S. war against the Cuban people and Cuban revolution continues.
The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five is outraged by this travesty of "justice," as are all supporters of Cuba and the Cuban Five.
The verdict of "not guilty" in Luis Posada Carriles's trial in El Paso does not absolve him of his terrorist crimes. And the struggle to bring Posada and his accomplices to justice does not end with today's verdict.
Demand Posada's Extradition!
Act today to demand justice for the 73 plane bombing victims,
for Fabio di Celmo, and for all the victims of U.S.-backed
anti-Cuba terrorism!
We urge everyone to contact the U.S. State Department and demand the immediate extradition of Posada to Venezuela, where he is wanted for the murder of 73 people in the mid-air bombing of Cubana Flight 455.
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
202-647-4000
You can help in the campaign for justice!
Organize showings of the documentary, "Posada Carriles: Terrorism Made in the U.S.A" to educate the public;
To gain greater insight into the travesty of the El Paso trial, we recommend that you read the excellent daily reports of the process by José Pertierra, who attended every day of the trial. He is the attorney representing the Venezuelan government in the extradition order.
Watch the excellent speech by Brian Becker, director of A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, at the El Paso People's Tribunal, and the complete event.
Contact us today to find out how you can get involved in the campaign to free the Cuban Five anti-terrorist heroes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cuba Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Statement By The Ministry Of Foreign Affairs Of The Republic Of Cuba
In the afternoon of April 8, 2011, the farce that had begun thirteen weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, came to an end when terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was acquitted of all the charges pressed against him during a migration trial.
To all those who have been following the sinister history behind this terrorist and his links with the successive US governments, the FBI and the CIA in his dirty war against Cuba, this is an additional proof of the support and protection that the US authorities have traditionally granted to him.
Since the moment of his landing in Florida after traveling from Isla Mujeres in Mexico on board of the “Santrina” boat, as was timely denounced by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, Posada Carriles has been, as he always was, under the tutelage and protection of the US government.
His being tried for committing perjury during an immigration process and not for being a terrorist is an outrage against the people of Cuba and the families that were plunged into mourning by the actions committed by Posada.
The shameless verdict at El Paso is in full contradiction with the anti-terrorist policy that the US government is said to profess, which has even led to military interventions against other nations, taking a toll of thousands of human lives.
The US government is absolutely aware of Posada Carriles’ involvement in the blowing-up in mid-air of a Cubana de Aviación airliner off Barbados in 1976, the bombing spree against Cuban tourist facilities in 1997 and his plans to attempt against the life of our Commander in Chief in Panama in 2000, for which he was even convicted in that country.
The US government has all the evidence of the crimes committed by Posada, many of which were presented in court at El Paso.
We are still to see if the US government is capable of either filing a new claim against Posada Carriles on a charge of terrorism or accepting his extradition to Venezuela, as was requested more than five years ago by that country, taking into account its legal obligation derived from the international covenants it is party to and the UN Security Council Resolution 1373 of 2001, which was promoted by the US government itself.
As paradoxical as it may seem, while Posada Carriles is being acquitted, five Cuban anti-terrorists remain unjustly imprisoned in the United States for collecting information about the actions perpetrated by terrorists of Cuban origin who, like Posada Carriles, are walking free and with impunity down the streets of Miami.
Cuba reaffirms that the US government is the chief responsible for this outcome and challenges it to take on its obligations in the struggle against terrorism, without hypocrisy or double standards.
Havana, April 9, 2011.
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five-April 11, 2011
Outrage in El Paso:Posada Acquitted!
U.S. Government Terrorist Walks Free
In El Paso today, following a 13-week trial in which the evidence against him was overwhelming, notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was acquitted by a jury after a shockingly short three hours of deliberation.
The U.S. government has been at war against the Cuban people since they carried out a revolution in 1959. As a CIA employee and part of that war, Posada Carriles committed many acts of terrorism against the Cuban people and others.
Today Posada walks free in a mockery of justice, while the Cuban Five
anti-terrorists are still imprisoned for almost 13 years.
If the U.S. had really wanted a conviction of Luis Posada Carriles on his real crimes of terrorism, it would have been easily achieved. But the U.S. government chose to try Posada for the ridiculously minor charges of perjury and immigration fraud.
This is why the National Committee, along with the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and local activists in El Paso held a "Peoples Tribunal" and protest before the start of the federal trial, to expose Posada's crimes of terrorism to the world.
Today's acquittal, together with the continued incarceration of the Cuban Five heroes who risked their lives to prevent acts of terrorism by Posada's allies, is a clear indication that the U.S. war against the Cuban people and Cuban revolution continues.
The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five is outraged by this travesty of "justice," as are all supporters of Cuba and the Cuban Five.
The verdict of "not guilty" in Luis Posada Carriles's trial in El Paso does not absolve him of his terrorist crimes. And the struggle to bring Posada and his accomplices to justice does not end with today's verdict.
Demand Posada's Extradition!
Act today to demand justice for the 73 plane bombing victims,
for Fabio di Celmo, and for all the victims of U.S.-backed
anti-Cuba terrorism!
We urge everyone to contact the U.S. State Department and demand the immediate extradition of Posada to Venezuela, where he is wanted for the murder of 73 people in the mid-air bombing of Cubana Flight 455.
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
202-647-4000
You can help in the campaign for justice!
Organize showings of the documentary, "Posada Carriles: Terrorism Made in the U.S.A" to educate the public;
To gain greater insight into the travesty of the El Paso trial, we recommend that you read the excellent daily reports of the process by José Pertierra, who attended every day of the trial. He is the attorney representing the Venezuelan government in the extradition order.
Watch the excellent speech by Brian Becker, director of A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, at the El Paso People's Tribunal, and the complete event.
Contact us today to find out how you can get involved in the campaign to free the Cuban Five anti-terrorist heroes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cuba Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Statement By The Ministry Of Foreign Affairs Of The Republic Of Cuba
In the afternoon of April 8, 2011, the farce that had begun thirteen weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, came to an end when terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was acquitted of all the charges pressed against him during a migration trial.
To all those who have been following the sinister history behind this terrorist and his links with the successive US governments, the FBI and the CIA in his dirty war against Cuba, this is an additional proof of the support and protection that the US authorities have traditionally granted to him.
Since the moment of his landing in Florida after traveling from Isla Mujeres in Mexico on board of the “Santrina” boat, as was timely denounced by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, Posada Carriles has been, as he always was, under the tutelage and protection of the US government.
His being tried for committing perjury during an immigration process and not for being a terrorist is an outrage against the people of Cuba and the families that were plunged into mourning by the actions committed by Posada.
The shameless verdict at El Paso is in full contradiction with the anti-terrorist policy that the US government is said to profess, which has even led to military interventions against other nations, taking a toll of thousands of human lives.
The US government is absolutely aware of Posada Carriles’ involvement in the blowing-up in mid-air of a Cubana de Aviación airliner off Barbados in 1976, the bombing spree against Cuban tourist facilities in 1997 and his plans to attempt against the life of our Commander in Chief in Panama in 2000, for which he was even convicted in that country.
The US government has all the evidence of the crimes committed by Posada, many of which were presented in court at El Paso.
We are still to see if the US government is capable of either filing a new claim against Posada Carriles on a charge of terrorism or accepting his extradition to Venezuela, as was requested more than five years ago by that country, taking into account its legal obligation derived from the international covenants it is party to and the UN Security Council Resolution 1373 of 2001, which was promoted by the US government itself.
As paradoxical as it may seem, while Posada Carriles is being acquitted, five Cuban anti-terrorists remain unjustly imprisoned in the United States for collecting information about the actions perpetrated by terrorists of Cuban origin who, like Posada Carriles, are walking free and with impunity down the streets of Miami.
Cuba reaffirms that the US government is the chief responsible for this outcome and challenges it to take on its obligations in the struggle against terrorism, without hypocrisy or double standards.
Havana, April 9, 2011.
From The "Socialist Appeal"- Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism – Friends or Foes?
Religious Fundamentalism and Imperialism – Friends or Foes?
Written by Lal Khan
Thursday, 21 April 2011
As the last Russian soldier crossed the Oxus River going back from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union in 1989, the Japanese-American philosopher at St. James’s University, Maryland and a CIA operative, Francis Fukuyama, came out with his iniquitous thesis on the “end of history”. However, although the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had collapsed, this thesis was soon refuted by history itself as the first Gulf War broke out in 1991.
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, leader of the Mujahideen, friend of bin Laden, and later member of the Northern Alliance. Photo: Erwin FranzenThe orgy of euphoria about the “end of communism” soon turned into a hangover and as the capitalist economy headed for recession and the crisis worsened on a world scale, the imperialists needed a new theory and strategy to defuse and confuse the possibility of a renewed struggle on a class basis. What collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not socialism but its caricature, a totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy. The failure of the Maoist version of Stalinism too has led to the capitalist degeneration of the Chinese bureaucracy.
These monumental events have had a devastating effect on the consciousness of the working classes, especially in the ex-colonial world. Whenever there has been a retreat or lull in the class struggle, the ruling classes have always intensified the exploitation of labour by capital. This social crisis has led to social unrest and movements of the oppressed. In the wake of these upheavals the imperialists developed a false contradiction to confuse and distract the masses from their real struggle against exploitation and capitalist repression.
In this situation another US intellectual, Samuel P. Huntington, better known as the “Butcher of Vietnam” for his brutal role in that disastrous war, came to the fore with another ingenious thesis. He held the same post with the CIA and taught at the same university as Fukuyama. He named his theory as “The Clash of Civilisations”. This was invented to create a religious conflict, thus giving a new lease of life to Islamic fundamentalism and other religious fanaticisms.
But modern Islamic fundamentalism was created in the earlier epoch of the 1950’s. After the overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt in 1952 there was a wave of revolutions in Iran, Syria, Yemen, Indonesia, Iraq and other countries. The mass upheaval in Egypt led to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Nasser. This resulted in the Suez war when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt and were defeated. The victory of Nasser gave a boost to populism with socialist overtones and other left currents in the so-called Muslim world. Imperialist interests and hegemony were threatened.
Modern Islamic fundamentalism is in reality the brain child of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles in 1956State under President Eisenhower. An operation was launched by the CIA to sponsor, fund and prop up the Islamic groupings that could play the role of reactionary forces against the leftist regimes and currents that were leading anti-imperialist, and in some cases anti-capitalist struggles, in these countries. Akhwan ul Muslimeen in the Middle East, Jamaat e Islami in South Asia and Masjumi and Nahdlatul Ulema in Indonesia, were some of the organisations that were set up to safeguard capitalism in these countries. These forces of religious obscurantism were used by the pro-imperialist armies in the genocides carried out in Indonesia in 1965 and in East Bengal in 1971. Imperialism has always used religion to carry out its policy to divide and rule in different parts of the world.
In the Indian subcontinent the British introduced a column on religion in the census of 1872. In 1905, Lord Curzon carried out the division of Bengal on a religious basis with a similar intent. After the sailors’ revolt of 1946, which culminated in a massive general strike from Karachi to Madras, India was brought to a standstill. The British ruling class was terrified by the fact that the independence movement in the subcontinent might not stop at the level of national liberation but would move on to a social revolution that would put an end to the possibility of the post-colonial exploitation of the region. Even when Jinnah had accepted the cabinet mission plan of a confederated but united India, Churchill ensured through Edwina Mountbatten that the impulsive Nehru would provoke Jinnah and the leaders of the Muslim League to go back to their position of separation.
Hence partition took place on the basis of a sectarian religious divide in which 2.7million innocent souls perished. Those wounds of partition still haunt more than half a billion impoverished masses plunged into the abyss of misery, poverty and disease. These religious animosities are a source of imperialist exploitation and are also used to justify massive spending on weapons of destruction mainly from the military industrial complex of western corporate monopolies. Today, India has become the largest importer of weaponry followed by China, South Korea and Pakistan.
The war in Afghanistan did not start in 2001 after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. This is a thirty-two year old conflict. It started as a covert CIA operation in the summer of 1978 to overthrow the left-wing government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan led by Noor Mohammad Tarakai, which was installed by a revolutionary coup before the Russian intervention in December 1979. The influence of the ‘Saur’ or the Spring Revolution was an inspiration for the oppressed and threatened imperialist interests in the region. Here the modus operandi was again to foment Islamic fundamentalism.
Hamid Mir interviewing Osama bin Laden, 1998The CIA, operating through the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, trained indoctrinated, financed and armed religious fanatics from countries with Muslim populations. Osama Bin Laden was recruited by President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1978 to this “Islamic crusade” against the “Communist infidels”. One of the first actions of these imperialist dispatched jihadists was a raid on a mixed school, which was burned and the headmaster killed and disembowelled. The main resource created by the CIA to finance this notorious “Dollar Jihad”, as in most other counter-revolutionary insurgencies, was drugs smuggling, ransom from kidnappings and other crimes.
The Russian intervention was used by the west as a propaganda ploy to prop up this reactionary insurgency. Even after the Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan through the Geneva accord of 1988, the PDPA government remained in power until 1992. It was not defeated by the “Mujahedeen” as has been propagated by the bourgeois media. It fell due to its ideological mistakes and methodological blunders including treachery and betrayals by the Stalinists within the regime who went over to the enemy.
After the Americans left Afghanistan, fierce fighting erupted between the various factions of the Mujahedeen. Kabul, once known as the Paris of the East, was pulverised and decimated in this bestial orgy of religious bigotry. The jihad spilled over into Pakistan with its Kalashnikovs and drug culture, poisoning the whole of society. The neo-fascist military dictator, Zia ul Haq, took fanaticism to unforeseen extremes. He wreaked havoc, destroying culture and suffocating art, literature and society as a whole. Lashings in public and the introduction of draconian religious laws made life miserable.
The workers and the impoverished masses were to face the worst of all worlds. This harrowing tyranny was unleashed to perpetuate his rule in the name of piety and Islam with the full backing of his imperialist masters. Even after he was dumped by his bosses as he became a megalomaniac and seriously started to consider himself as Ameer ul Muslimeen who could even defy the Americans, religious fundamentalist organisations remained intact and prospered. The financial network of the reactionary insurgency, heroin production, drugs smuggling and other criminal activities with the jihad’s arsenal supplied by the imperialists, became a flourishing enterprise.
Massive amounts of the black money generated in this lucrative business have penetrated the state and society. It is used to build madrassas [Islamic religious schools] and sanctuaries for the religious fanatics whose top pious religious bosses have become billionaires in this process. This black economy now comprises more than two thirds of Pakistan’s total economy. The Islamic fundamentalists feed on this capital while this black economy uses the religious and other political mafias to protect its interests.
However, in spite of its social threat dangling like the sword of Damocles over society, its political mass support is minimal. Actually, it is the weakness of the Pakistani bourgeois elite that creates room for this fanaticism to prosper. Its base is in the middle classes. After the collapse of Stalinism was deceptively propagated as the “failure of socialism”, a political vacuum opened up. The religious fundamentalists tried to fill it, but with little success. They play on the uncertainties, economic stresses, social insecurities, deprivations and alienation of the middle classes and thus manage to get a temporary basis within this vacillating class that, however, withers away quickly. The middle layers of the army, judiciary and other state institutions are also infected with the religious mindset that is seen in the decisions of the lower judiciary and the fraternisation of sections of the army with the Islamists.
The huge migrations from the rural areas to the cities and the ugly expansion of suburban shanty towns lead to similar problems along with urban alienation that is also exploited by the religious groups. But amongst the workers and the poor peasants they do not have a significant base and their superficial presence within the unions and rural areas is due to the lack of a revolutionary and a socialist alternative at this present moment in time. Their anti-American rhetoric has not been able to gather wide support amongst the workers and the poor masses. This is in spite of a seething hatred against imperialist aggression amongst the vast majority of the masses. Most of the youth brought to their demonstrations are from the madrassas and they don’t know much about what is really going on.
Electorally they have been a dismal failure. Only in 2002 did they manage to get 11% of the vote. But that was mainly due to rigging by the state agencies who wanted to use them in their own bargaining with imperialism. Even some of the terrorist attacks have been allegedly orchestrated for the same purpose.
Just as in the formal and the informal economy, the liberal elite and the obscenely rich religious bosses are in constant conflict, feeding upon and sustaining each other as their wealth and power is based on the market economy. Although there is a great hue and cry about the menace and terror of fundamentalism amongst the liberal elite and the petty bourgeois “civil society”, they have always capitulated and allied themselves with the Islamic parties whenever the workers and oppressed masses have risen in revolutionary struggles.
Religious extremism only exists in society because the Pakistani bourgeoisie has failed to complete any of the historical tasks of the national democratic revolution, including the separation of religion from the state and secularism. In any case it was highly unlikely to produce a secular country that was created on the basis of religion.
The same is the case with imperialism. Both base themselves on the same economic system, i.e. capitalism. They have been partners in the past and they will close ranks once they are faced with a revolutionary challenge from the working classes. Without the elimination of poverty, deprivation, social and cultural alienation and misery, in all those periods where the class struggle ebbs, the prejudices of the past and forces of black reaction will come back to haunt and brutalize society.
It is an inevitable outcome of the deep and worsening crisis of the exploitative system in which society is strangled and its social fabric is in tatters. Its overthrow and socio-economic transformation will uproot the foundations of fundamentalist terror and destroy the crushing domination of imperialism. The task of completing the unfinished 1968-69 revolution, that brought revolutionary socialism so close, is today being posed by history before the new generation of the youth and workers of Pakistan.
Written by Lal Khan
Thursday, 21 April 2011
As the last Russian soldier crossed the Oxus River going back from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union in 1989, the Japanese-American philosopher at St. James’s University, Maryland and a CIA operative, Francis Fukuyama, came out with his iniquitous thesis on the “end of history”. However, although the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union had collapsed, this thesis was soon refuted by history itself as the first Gulf War broke out in 1991.
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, leader of the Mujahideen, friend of bin Laden, and later member of the Northern Alliance. Photo: Erwin FranzenThe orgy of euphoria about the “end of communism” soon turned into a hangover and as the capitalist economy headed for recession and the crisis worsened on a world scale, the imperialists needed a new theory and strategy to defuse and confuse the possibility of a renewed struggle on a class basis. What collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe was not socialism but its caricature, a totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy. The failure of the Maoist version of Stalinism too has led to the capitalist degeneration of the Chinese bureaucracy.
These monumental events have had a devastating effect on the consciousness of the working classes, especially in the ex-colonial world. Whenever there has been a retreat or lull in the class struggle, the ruling classes have always intensified the exploitation of labour by capital. This social crisis has led to social unrest and movements of the oppressed. In the wake of these upheavals the imperialists developed a false contradiction to confuse and distract the masses from their real struggle against exploitation and capitalist repression.
In this situation another US intellectual, Samuel P. Huntington, better known as the “Butcher of Vietnam” for his brutal role in that disastrous war, came to the fore with another ingenious thesis. He held the same post with the CIA and taught at the same university as Fukuyama. He named his theory as “The Clash of Civilisations”. This was invented to create a religious conflict, thus giving a new lease of life to Islamic fundamentalism and other religious fanaticisms.
But modern Islamic fundamentalism was created in the earlier epoch of the 1950’s. After the overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt in 1952 there was a wave of revolutions in Iran, Syria, Yemen, Indonesia, Iraq and other countries. The mass upheaval in Egypt led to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Nasser. This resulted in the Suez war when Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt and were defeated. The victory of Nasser gave a boost to populism with socialist overtones and other left currents in the so-called Muslim world. Imperialist interests and hegemony were threatened.
Modern Islamic fundamentalism is in reality the brain child of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles in 1956State under President Eisenhower. An operation was launched by the CIA to sponsor, fund and prop up the Islamic groupings that could play the role of reactionary forces against the leftist regimes and currents that were leading anti-imperialist, and in some cases anti-capitalist struggles, in these countries. Akhwan ul Muslimeen in the Middle East, Jamaat e Islami in South Asia and Masjumi and Nahdlatul Ulema in Indonesia, were some of the organisations that were set up to safeguard capitalism in these countries. These forces of religious obscurantism were used by the pro-imperialist armies in the genocides carried out in Indonesia in 1965 and in East Bengal in 1971. Imperialism has always used religion to carry out its policy to divide and rule in different parts of the world.
In the Indian subcontinent the British introduced a column on religion in the census of 1872. In 1905, Lord Curzon carried out the division of Bengal on a religious basis with a similar intent. After the sailors’ revolt of 1946, which culminated in a massive general strike from Karachi to Madras, India was brought to a standstill. The British ruling class was terrified by the fact that the independence movement in the subcontinent might not stop at the level of national liberation but would move on to a social revolution that would put an end to the possibility of the post-colonial exploitation of the region. Even when Jinnah had accepted the cabinet mission plan of a confederated but united India, Churchill ensured through Edwina Mountbatten that the impulsive Nehru would provoke Jinnah and the leaders of the Muslim League to go back to their position of separation.
Hence partition took place on the basis of a sectarian religious divide in which 2.7million innocent souls perished. Those wounds of partition still haunt more than half a billion impoverished masses plunged into the abyss of misery, poverty and disease. These religious animosities are a source of imperialist exploitation and are also used to justify massive spending on weapons of destruction mainly from the military industrial complex of western corporate monopolies. Today, India has become the largest importer of weaponry followed by China, South Korea and Pakistan.
The war in Afghanistan did not start in 2001 after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. This is a thirty-two year old conflict. It started as a covert CIA operation in the summer of 1978 to overthrow the left-wing government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan led by Noor Mohammad Tarakai, which was installed by a revolutionary coup before the Russian intervention in December 1979. The influence of the ‘Saur’ or the Spring Revolution was an inspiration for the oppressed and threatened imperialist interests in the region. Here the modus operandi was again to foment Islamic fundamentalism.
Hamid Mir interviewing Osama bin Laden, 1998The CIA, operating through the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, trained indoctrinated, financed and armed religious fanatics from countries with Muslim populations. Osama Bin Laden was recruited by President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1978 to this “Islamic crusade” against the “Communist infidels”. One of the first actions of these imperialist dispatched jihadists was a raid on a mixed school, which was burned and the headmaster killed and disembowelled. The main resource created by the CIA to finance this notorious “Dollar Jihad”, as in most other counter-revolutionary insurgencies, was drugs smuggling, ransom from kidnappings and other crimes.
The Russian intervention was used by the west as a propaganda ploy to prop up this reactionary insurgency. Even after the Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan through the Geneva accord of 1988, the PDPA government remained in power until 1992. It was not defeated by the “Mujahedeen” as has been propagated by the bourgeois media. It fell due to its ideological mistakes and methodological blunders including treachery and betrayals by the Stalinists within the regime who went over to the enemy.
After the Americans left Afghanistan, fierce fighting erupted between the various factions of the Mujahedeen. Kabul, once known as the Paris of the East, was pulverised and decimated in this bestial orgy of religious bigotry. The jihad spilled over into Pakistan with its Kalashnikovs and drug culture, poisoning the whole of society. The neo-fascist military dictator, Zia ul Haq, took fanaticism to unforeseen extremes. He wreaked havoc, destroying culture and suffocating art, literature and society as a whole. Lashings in public and the introduction of draconian religious laws made life miserable.
The workers and the impoverished masses were to face the worst of all worlds. This harrowing tyranny was unleashed to perpetuate his rule in the name of piety and Islam with the full backing of his imperialist masters. Even after he was dumped by his bosses as he became a megalomaniac and seriously started to consider himself as Ameer ul Muslimeen who could even defy the Americans, religious fundamentalist organisations remained intact and prospered. The financial network of the reactionary insurgency, heroin production, drugs smuggling and other criminal activities with the jihad’s arsenal supplied by the imperialists, became a flourishing enterprise.
Massive amounts of the black money generated in this lucrative business have penetrated the state and society. It is used to build madrassas [Islamic religious schools] and sanctuaries for the religious fanatics whose top pious religious bosses have become billionaires in this process. This black economy now comprises more than two thirds of Pakistan’s total economy. The Islamic fundamentalists feed on this capital while this black economy uses the religious and other political mafias to protect its interests.
However, in spite of its social threat dangling like the sword of Damocles over society, its political mass support is minimal. Actually, it is the weakness of the Pakistani bourgeois elite that creates room for this fanaticism to prosper. Its base is in the middle classes. After the collapse of Stalinism was deceptively propagated as the “failure of socialism”, a political vacuum opened up. The religious fundamentalists tried to fill it, but with little success. They play on the uncertainties, economic stresses, social insecurities, deprivations and alienation of the middle classes and thus manage to get a temporary basis within this vacillating class that, however, withers away quickly. The middle layers of the army, judiciary and other state institutions are also infected with the religious mindset that is seen in the decisions of the lower judiciary and the fraternisation of sections of the army with the Islamists.
The huge migrations from the rural areas to the cities and the ugly expansion of suburban shanty towns lead to similar problems along with urban alienation that is also exploited by the religious groups. But amongst the workers and the poor peasants they do not have a significant base and their superficial presence within the unions and rural areas is due to the lack of a revolutionary and a socialist alternative at this present moment in time. Their anti-American rhetoric has not been able to gather wide support amongst the workers and the poor masses. This is in spite of a seething hatred against imperialist aggression amongst the vast majority of the masses. Most of the youth brought to their demonstrations are from the madrassas and they don’t know much about what is really going on.
Electorally they have been a dismal failure. Only in 2002 did they manage to get 11% of the vote. But that was mainly due to rigging by the state agencies who wanted to use them in their own bargaining with imperialism. Even some of the terrorist attacks have been allegedly orchestrated for the same purpose.
Just as in the formal and the informal economy, the liberal elite and the obscenely rich religious bosses are in constant conflict, feeding upon and sustaining each other as their wealth and power is based on the market economy. Although there is a great hue and cry about the menace and terror of fundamentalism amongst the liberal elite and the petty bourgeois “civil society”, they have always capitulated and allied themselves with the Islamic parties whenever the workers and oppressed masses have risen in revolutionary struggles.
Religious extremism only exists in society because the Pakistani bourgeoisie has failed to complete any of the historical tasks of the national democratic revolution, including the separation of religion from the state and secularism. In any case it was highly unlikely to produce a secular country that was created on the basis of religion.
The same is the case with imperialism. Both base themselves on the same economic system, i.e. capitalism. They have been partners in the past and they will close ranks once they are faced with a revolutionary challenge from the working classes. Without the elimination of poverty, deprivation, social and cultural alienation and misery, in all those periods where the class struggle ebbs, the prejudices of the past and forces of black reaction will come back to haunt and brutalize society.
It is an inevitable outcome of the deep and worsening crisis of the exploitative system in which society is strangled and its social fabric is in tatters. Its overthrow and socio-economic transformation will uproot the foundations of fundamentalist terror and destroy the crushing domination of imperialism. The task of completing the unfinished 1968-69 revolution, that brought revolutionary socialism so close, is today being posed by history before the new generation of the youth and workers of Pakistan.
From The Renegade Eye Blog-"The fall of Strauss-Kahn"
The fall of Strauss-Kahn
Written by Greg Oxley in Paris
Thursday, 19 May 2011
How the mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies” inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
There is absolutely nothing “socialist” about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At the time of his arrest, he was on his way to Europe to finalise the austerity measures to be imposed on Portugal and also discuss plans with Sarkozy and Merkel for new attacks on pensions and public spending cuts throughout the “eurozone”. For Greece, he demanded a draconian policy of public spending cuts, wage cuts, sackings, attacks on pensions and benefits, and privatisations. The Papandreou government carried out the policy, but not fast enough for Strauss-Kahn. He sent his emissaries to Greece to insist on speeding up the privatisations and the attacks on workers’ living standards. This was the only way, he said, to restore the confidence of capitalist investors.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not only Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. If opinion polls are to be believed, he was also the “favourite” for the presidential elections next year in France. He was certainly a “favourite” of the capitalist class! No efforts have been spared to promote the image and build support for “DSK”. The intention behind this campaign was quite clear. The capitalists wanted to secure his nomination as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. Of all the “left” candidates, the media told us, he was in the best position to defeat Sarkozy. This was a classic case of manipulation of public opinion with a view to national elections. In 2007, the media industry promoted Ségolène Royal, one of the most blatantly pro-capitalist of the leading figures in the Socialist Party, and then, once she had won the nomination, turned against her and campaigned to ensure victory for Sarkozy. In the event that the SP had won the elections, the capitalists would have a reliable representative in power, whose policies were almost identical to those of Sarkozy himself. Now, after four years in power, Sarkozy is discredited, and a victory for the Socialist Party in the 2012 election is a real possibility. The capitalist class wanted to ensure that whatever the result of the elections, the government would be in the hands of proven defenders of their interests. They counted on Strauss-Kahn as a man who, at the head of a “socialist” government, would apply the same reactionary policies in France as he applied to Greece, and who would firmly resist pressure “from below” to carry out measures in the interests of the workers. Now Strauss-Kahn is out of the picture, and possibly for a long time. His downfall has delighted working class militants throughout France.
Written by Greg Oxley in Paris
Thursday, 19 May 2011
How the mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies” inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
There is absolutely nothing “socialist” about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At the time of his arrest, he was on his way to Europe to finalise the austerity measures to be imposed on Portugal and also discuss plans with Sarkozy and Merkel for new attacks on pensions and public spending cuts throughout the “eurozone”. For Greece, he demanded a draconian policy of public spending cuts, wage cuts, sackings, attacks on pensions and benefits, and privatisations. The Papandreou government carried out the policy, but not fast enough for Strauss-Kahn. He sent his emissaries to Greece to insist on speeding up the privatisations and the attacks on workers’ living standards. This was the only way, he said, to restore the confidence of capitalist investors.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not only Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. If opinion polls are to be believed, he was also the “favourite” for the presidential elections next year in France. He was certainly a “favourite” of the capitalist class! No efforts have been spared to promote the image and build support for “DSK”. The intention behind this campaign was quite clear. The capitalists wanted to secure his nomination as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. Of all the “left” candidates, the media told us, he was in the best position to defeat Sarkozy. This was a classic case of manipulation of public opinion with a view to national elections. In 2007, the media industry promoted Ségolène Royal, one of the most blatantly pro-capitalist of the leading figures in the Socialist Party, and then, once she had won the nomination, turned against her and campaigned to ensure victory for Sarkozy. In the event that the SP had won the elections, the capitalists would have a reliable representative in power, whose policies were almost identical to those of Sarkozy himself. Now, after four years in power, Sarkozy is discredited, and a victory for the Socialist Party in the 2012 election is a real possibility. The capitalist class wanted to ensure that whatever the result of the elections, the government would be in the hands of proven defenders of their interests. They counted on Strauss-Kahn as a man who, at the head of a “socialist” government, would apply the same reactionary policies in France as he applied to Greece, and who would firmly resist pressure “from below” to carry out measures in the interests of the workers. Now Strauss-Kahn is out of the picture, and possibly for a long time. His downfall has delighted working class militants throughout France.
From "The Histomat" Blog- (Yet More) Upcoming Marxist conferences in London
Markin comment:
From the description of these conferences, especially the second one on historical materialism, I now understand why we class struggle militants are rolling the rock up the hill these past many days and years. Karl Marx's aphorism, or a paraphrase of it , seems very appropriate (and irresistible) just now-philosophers had spent eons of time analyzing the world, the point is to change it. That means, maybe, fewer conferences and more getting out here and helping us roll that rock up the hill.
********
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Upcoming Marxist conferences in London
1. Marxism 2011
Ideas to change the world - A five day political festival from
30 June to 4 July in central London hosted by the SWP with eyewitnesses and revolutionaries from Egypt and Tunisia as well as Tariq Ali, Tony Benn, Terry Eagleton, Paul Gilroy, Laurie Penny, Nina Power, Alex Callinicos and many others - full timetable now available to download here
What is Marxism 2011?
Crisis and austerity have exposed the insanity of our global system.
Our rulers have handed trillions of pounds to banks while billions of people across the planet face hunger, poverty, climate catastrophes and war. Despite unprecedented wealth and technology we are told capitalism can provide even less for us than before.
But a world in crisis breeds an ideological crisis. Austerity has generated resistance. Revolution has shaken the Arab world. Students have shaken the Con-Dems. Millions are fighting back, questioning this crazy system and looking for alternatives.
Marxism 2011 will bring thousands of people together from every continent and every arena of struggle to discuss, debate and organise resistance. With over 200 workshops, panels, film showings and rallies it is the biggest event of its kind in Britain and one of the biggest in the world.
Don’t miss Marxism in the year of revolutions.
2. Eighth Annual Historical Materialism Conference
Central London
10–13 November 2011
Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle
The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of collective anticapitalist action in the present.
Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital. In philosophy and political theory, communism is no longer merely a term of condemnation. Likewise, artistic and cultural practices have also registered a notable upturn in the fortunes of activism, critical utopianism and the effort to capture aesthetically the workings of the capitalist system.
The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.
For such a critical theoretical, strategic and organisational reflection to have traction in the present, it must take stock of both the commonalities and the specificities of different struggles for emancipation, as they confront particular strategies of accumulation, political authorities and relations of force. Just as the crisis that began in 2008 is by no means a homogeneous affair, so we cannot simply posit a unity of purpose in contemporary revolutions, struggles around the commons and battles against austerity.
In consideration of the participation of David Harvey, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, at this year's conference, we would particularly wish to emphasise the historical and geographical dimensions of capital, class and struggle. We specifically encourage paper submissions and suggested panel-themes that tackle the global nature of capitalist accumulation, the significance of anticapitalist resistance in the South, and questions of race, migration and ecology as key components of both the contemporary crisis and the struggle to move beyond capitalism.
There will also be a strong presence of workshops on the historiography of the early communist movement, particularly focusing on the first four congresses of the Communist International.
The conference will aim to combine rigorous and grounded investigations of socio-economic realities with focused theoretical reflections on what emancipation means today, and to explore – in light of cultural, historical and ideological analyses – the forms taken by current and coming struggles.
Deadline for registration of abstracts: 1 June 2011
From the description of these conferences, especially the second one on historical materialism, I now understand why we class struggle militants are rolling the rock up the hill these past many days and years. Karl Marx's aphorism, or a paraphrase of it , seems very appropriate (and irresistible) just now-philosophers had spent eons of time analyzing the world, the point is to change it. That means, maybe, fewer conferences and more getting out here and helping us roll that rock up the hill.
********
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Upcoming Marxist conferences in London
1. Marxism 2011
Ideas to change the world - A five day political festival from
30 June to 4 July in central London hosted by the SWP with eyewitnesses and revolutionaries from Egypt and Tunisia as well as Tariq Ali, Tony Benn, Terry Eagleton, Paul Gilroy, Laurie Penny, Nina Power, Alex Callinicos and many others - full timetable now available to download here
What is Marxism 2011?
Crisis and austerity have exposed the insanity of our global system.
Our rulers have handed trillions of pounds to banks while billions of people across the planet face hunger, poverty, climate catastrophes and war. Despite unprecedented wealth and technology we are told capitalism can provide even less for us than before.
But a world in crisis breeds an ideological crisis. Austerity has generated resistance. Revolution has shaken the Arab world. Students have shaken the Con-Dems. Millions are fighting back, questioning this crazy system and looking for alternatives.
Marxism 2011 will bring thousands of people together from every continent and every arena of struggle to discuss, debate and organise resistance. With over 200 workshops, panels, film showings and rallies it is the biggest event of its kind in Britain and one of the biggest in the world.
Don’t miss Marxism in the year of revolutions.
2. Eighth Annual Historical Materialism Conference
Central London
10–13 November 2011
Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle
The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of collective anticapitalist action in the present.
Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital. In philosophy and political theory, communism is no longer merely a term of condemnation. Likewise, artistic and cultural practices have also registered a notable upturn in the fortunes of activism, critical utopianism and the effort to capture aesthetically the workings of the capitalist system.
The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.
For such a critical theoretical, strategic and organisational reflection to have traction in the present, it must take stock of both the commonalities and the specificities of different struggles for emancipation, as they confront particular strategies of accumulation, political authorities and relations of force. Just as the crisis that began in 2008 is by no means a homogeneous affair, so we cannot simply posit a unity of purpose in contemporary revolutions, struggles around the commons and battles against austerity.
In consideration of the participation of David Harvey, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, at this year's conference, we would particularly wish to emphasise the historical and geographical dimensions of capital, class and struggle. We specifically encourage paper submissions and suggested panel-themes that tackle the global nature of capitalist accumulation, the significance of anticapitalist resistance in the South, and questions of race, migration and ecology as key components of both the contemporary crisis and the struggle to move beyond capitalism.
There will also be a strong presence of workshops on the historiography of the early communist movement, particularly focusing on the first four congresses of the Communist International.
The conference will aim to combine rigorous and grounded investigations of socio-economic realities with focused theoretical reflections on what emancipation means today, and to explore – in light of cultural, historical and ideological analyses – the forms taken by current and coming struggles.
Deadline for registration of abstracts: 1 June 2011
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Website-Rally at Leavenworth June 4, 2011 for Bradley Manning! All Out To Defend Private Bradley Manning!
Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry, dated Sunday, March 20, 2011, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner.
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
Rally at Leavenworth for Bradley Manning!
Rally to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning.
Saturday, June 4
11:30am – 2:30pm
Leavenworth, Kansas
Contact: jim at indomitus dot net
More info forthcoming!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204793382876169
From The ANSWER Coaltion-Reality Check: The Profound Hypocrisy of President Obama’s Speech on the Middle East
May 19, 2011
Reality Check: The Profound Hypocrisy of President Obama’s Speech on the Middle East
By Brian Becker and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
President Obama took to the airwaves today to discuss the revolts and conflicts spreading throughout the Middle East. The U.S. dominance over this strategic and oil-rich region has been the pivot of U.S. foreign policy for decades. Utilizing a system of proxy and client regimes, in addition to its own vast military forces in the region, the United States has supported a network of brutal dictatorships and the Israeli regime for decades.
Now that this system of imperial control has been shaken by the popular risings that started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and elsewhere, President Obama spoke today at the U.S. State Department as part of an effort to reassert U.S. leadership over the swiftly changing region.
Using the rhetoric of democracy and freedom to mask the responsibility of U.S. imperialism in the enduring oppression and suffering of the peoples of the Middle East, President Obama’s speech was a demonstration of profound hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy: President Obama said that the “greatest untapped resource in the Middle East and North Africa is the talent of its people.”
Reality: The U.S. strategy is based on control of the Middle East’s most coveted resource: two-thirds of the world's known oil supply. The U.S. government has given billions of dollars and armed the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East for decades, a practice fully continued by the Obama administration. The U.S. government never cut funds to the Mubarak dictatorship even while the regime murdered more than 850 peaceful protestors. More than 5,000 civilians in Egypt have been convicted and jailed since Jan. 25 following trials conducted by the Egyptian military. The United States continues to provide massive funding to Egypt's military in spite of the ongoing repression against the people.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated, “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”
Reality: The only governments in the Middle East that have been targeted for invasion, economic sanctions and overthrow by the U.S. government are those that pursue policies that are independent of U.S. economic, political and military control. The U.S. never imposed economic sanctions on the Mubarak dictatorship and only came out publicly against Mubarak when the tide of revolution had become irresistible. Likewise, the U.S. supports the brutal Saudi monarchy.
Hypocrisy: President Obama championed for the people of the Middle East the “basic rights to speak your mind and access information,” stating, “the truth cannot be hidden; and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens.”
Reality: The Obama administration has gone out of its way to punish those who would inform the public by shedding light on the activities of the U.S. government. Bradley Manning remains jailed with the threat of life in prison, having been held in brutal conditions that caused the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture to seek an investigation. The Justice Department is working at full speed to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange of Wikileaks for disclosing government documents to the public, many of which expose the U.S. role in the Middle East. The Obama administration has undertaken a major campaign more aggressive than any prior administration to criminally prosecute whistleblowers who expose the truth of illegal government actions.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated: “The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region.”
Reality: The United States under Obama is involved in the invasion, occupation, and bombings of four predominantly Muslim countries simultaneously: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan. Moreover, the head of state who has been the single biggest violator of the basic human rights of Arab people and the perpetuator of violence in the region is George W. Bush, whose illegal invasion of Iraq cost the lives of more than one million people. The March 19, 2003, invasion was a war of aggression against a country that did not pose any threat to the United States or the people of the United States. The invasion and occupation of Iraq led to the deaths of more Arab people than have been killed by all the dictatorships in the region combined. President Obama today called Osama Bin Laden a mass murderer. September 11, 2001, was indeed a great crime that took the lives of thousands of innocent working people, but measured in order of the magnitude of victims killed, Bush’s crime of mass murder in Iraq is unmatched. George W. Bush has not been arrested for the mass killings of Iraqi people but is treated honorifically by the Obama administration.
Hypocrisy: In an effort to appease Arab public opinion, President Obama's speech made it appear as if the United States was insisting that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders. Obama stated, “precisely because of our friendship, it is important that we tell the truth: the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Reality: Israel’s war against the Palestinian people would be impossible without U.S. support, which continues unabated. The single biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid is the state of Israel, which uses the $3 billion it receives annually to lay siege to the people of Gaza, continue the illegal occupation of the West Bank and prevent the return of the families of the 750,000 Palestinians who were evicted from their homes and villages in historic Palestine in 1948. The United Nations in various resolutions has condemned the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Far from imposing economic sanctions, President Obama has promised Israel a minimum of $30 billion in military aid over the next 10 years, thus functioning as a partner in the occupation. Obama’s speech also made it clear that the United States would support Israel retaining vast swaths of the West Bank. This is what he meant by referring to “land swaps.” In the coming days, Obama will have private meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and will be a featured speaker at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. He will undoubtedly reinforce the strong U.S.-Israeli military ties and U.S. financial support.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated: “We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran…. [W]e will continue to insist that universal rights apply to women as well as men.”
Reality: While the U.S. government – along with Britain and France (the former colonizers of the Middle East and Africa) – are bombing Libya with the latest high-tech bombs and missiles in the name of “protecting civilians” and “promoting democracy,” the Obama administration offered the most tepid pro-forma criticism of the Bahrain monarchy as it and the Saudi monarchy kill and imprison peaceful protestors in Bahrain. No sanctions have even been hinted at for Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. The Saudi monarchy is the ultimate negation of democracy, depriving women of all rights, depriving workers of the right to form unions and depriving all sectors of the population of any right to free speech, assembly or press. There has never been an election in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi monarchy functions as a client of the U.S. government and, as such, is not targeted for economic sanctions or “regime change” as are the governments of Syria and Libya. The Bahrain monarchy likewise functions as a U.S. client and allows the U.S. Fifth Fleet to use Bahrain as its home port, which is why he referred to the monarchy as “a long-standing partner.”
Hypocrisy: President Obama denounced the Iranian government, stating that “we will continue to insist that the Iranian people deserve their universal rights,” and condemned what he called Iran’s “illicit nuclear program.”
Reality: He failed to mention that it was the CIA along with its British counterpart that staged the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and reinstated the Shah’s monarchy. They overthrew Iran’s democracy when Iran nationalized its own oil from AIOC/British Petroleum. The U.S. only broke relations with the Iranian government when the Shah’s dictatorship was overthrown by a populist national revolution. Regarding nuclear weapons, the Israeli government has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has accumulated 200 “illicit” nuclear weapons. Of course, the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Hypocrisy: President Obama told the world that the United States shares the goals of the Arab revolution, that “repression will fail, that tyrants will fall, and that every man and woman is endowed with certain inalienable rights.”
Reality: The U.S. government, whether it is led by Democrats or Republicans, views the oil-rich Middle East through the lens of empire. Operating through a network of proxy regimes including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, the Shah of Iran until his overthrow in 1979, and other regimes in the region – and supplemented by tens of thousands of U.S. troops positioned in U.S. bases throughout the region and on aircraft carriers – the United States aims to dominate and control a region that possesses two-thirds of the world’s known oil supply. It has and continues to finance a network of brutal client dictatorships, and it has funded the Israeli war machine and staged repeated invasions, bombing campaigns, and occupations against the people of the region.
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Reality Check: The Profound Hypocrisy of President Obama’s Speech on the Middle East
By Brian Becker and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
President Obama took to the airwaves today to discuss the revolts and conflicts spreading throughout the Middle East. The U.S. dominance over this strategic and oil-rich region has been the pivot of U.S. foreign policy for decades. Utilizing a system of proxy and client regimes, in addition to its own vast military forces in the region, the United States has supported a network of brutal dictatorships and the Israeli regime for decades.
Now that this system of imperial control has been shaken by the popular risings that started in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and elsewhere, President Obama spoke today at the U.S. State Department as part of an effort to reassert U.S. leadership over the swiftly changing region.
Using the rhetoric of democracy and freedom to mask the responsibility of U.S. imperialism in the enduring oppression and suffering of the peoples of the Middle East, President Obama’s speech was a demonstration of profound hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy: President Obama said that the “greatest untapped resource in the Middle East and North Africa is the talent of its people.”
Reality: The U.S. strategy is based on control of the Middle East’s most coveted resource: two-thirds of the world's known oil supply. The U.S. government has given billions of dollars and armed the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East for decades, a practice fully continued by the Obama administration. The U.S. government never cut funds to the Mubarak dictatorship even while the regime murdered more than 850 peaceful protestors. More than 5,000 civilians in Egypt have been convicted and jailed since Jan. 25 following trials conducted by the Egyptian military. The United States continues to provide massive funding to Egypt's military in spite of the ongoing repression against the people.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated, “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.”
Reality: The only governments in the Middle East that have been targeted for invasion, economic sanctions and overthrow by the U.S. government are those that pursue policies that are independent of U.S. economic, political and military control. The U.S. never imposed economic sanctions on the Mubarak dictatorship and only came out publicly against Mubarak when the tide of revolution had become irresistible. Likewise, the U.S. supports the brutal Saudi monarchy.
Hypocrisy: President Obama championed for the people of the Middle East the “basic rights to speak your mind and access information,” stating, “the truth cannot be hidden; and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens.”
Reality: The Obama administration has gone out of its way to punish those who would inform the public by shedding light on the activities of the U.S. government. Bradley Manning remains jailed with the threat of life in prison, having been held in brutal conditions that caused the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture to seek an investigation. The Justice Department is working at full speed to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange of Wikileaks for disclosing government documents to the public, many of which expose the U.S. role in the Middle East. The Obama administration has undertaken a major campaign more aggressive than any prior administration to criminally prosecute whistleblowers who expose the truth of illegal government actions.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated: “The United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region.”
Reality: The United States under Obama is involved in the invasion, occupation, and bombings of four predominantly Muslim countries simultaneously: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan. Moreover, the head of state who has been the single biggest violator of the basic human rights of Arab people and the perpetuator of violence in the region is George W. Bush, whose illegal invasion of Iraq cost the lives of more than one million people. The March 19, 2003, invasion was a war of aggression against a country that did not pose any threat to the United States or the people of the United States. The invasion and occupation of Iraq led to the deaths of more Arab people than have been killed by all the dictatorships in the region combined. President Obama today called Osama Bin Laden a mass murderer. September 11, 2001, was indeed a great crime that took the lives of thousands of innocent working people, but measured in order of the magnitude of victims killed, Bush’s crime of mass murder in Iraq is unmatched. George W. Bush has not been arrested for the mass killings of Iraqi people but is treated honorifically by the Obama administration.
Hypocrisy: In an effort to appease Arab public opinion, President Obama's speech made it appear as if the United States was insisting that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders. Obama stated, “precisely because of our friendship, it is important that we tell the truth: the status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.”
Reality: Israel’s war against the Palestinian people would be impossible without U.S. support, which continues unabated. The single biggest recipient of U.S. foreign aid is the state of Israel, which uses the $3 billion it receives annually to lay siege to the people of Gaza, continue the illegal occupation of the West Bank and prevent the return of the families of the 750,000 Palestinians who were evicted from their homes and villages in historic Palestine in 1948. The United Nations in various resolutions has condemned the 1967 Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Far from imposing economic sanctions, President Obama has promised Israel a minimum of $30 billion in military aid over the next 10 years, thus functioning as a partner in the occupation. Obama’s speech also made it clear that the United States would support Israel retaining vast swaths of the West Bank. This is what he meant by referring to “land swaps.” In the coming days, Obama will have private meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and will be a featured speaker at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. He will undoubtedly reinforce the strong U.S.-Israeli military ties and U.S. financial support.
Hypocrisy: President Obama stated: “We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran…. [W]e will continue to insist that universal rights apply to women as well as men.”
Reality: While the U.S. government – along with Britain and France (the former colonizers of the Middle East and Africa) – are bombing Libya with the latest high-tech bombs and missiles in the name of “protecting civilians” and “promoting democracy,” the Obama administration offered the most tepid pro-forma criticism of the Bahrain monarchy as it and the Saudi monarchy kill and imprison peaceful protestors in Bahrain. No sanctions have even been hinted at for Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. The Saudi monarchy is the ultimate negation of democracy, depriving women of all rights, depriving workers of the right to form unions and depriving all sectors of the population of any right to free speech, assembly or press. There has never been an election in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi monarchy functions as a client of the U.S. government and, as such, is not targeted for economic sanctions or “regime change” as are the governments of Syria and Libya. The Bahrain monarchy likewise functions as a U.S. client and allows the U.S. Fifth Fleet to use Bahrain as its home port, which is why he referred to the monarchy as “a long-standing partner.”
Hypocrisy: President Obama denounced the Iranian government, stating that “we will continue to insist that the Iranian people deserve their universal rights,” and condemned what he called Iran’s “illicit nuclear program.”
Reality: He failed to mention that it was the CIA along with its British counterpart that staged the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government in 1953 and reinstated the Shah’s monarchy. They overthrew Iran’s democracy when Iran nationalized its own oil from AIOC/British Petroleum. The U.S. only broke relations with the Iranian government when the Shah’s dictatorship was overthrown by a populist national revolution. Regarding nuclear weapons, the Israeli government has refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has accumulated 200 “illicit” nuclear weapons. Of course, the United States has thousands of nuclear weapons and remains the only country to have used nuclear weapons, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Hypocrisy: President Obama told the world that the United States shares the goals of the Arab revolution, that “repression will fail, that tyrants will fall, and that every man and woman is endowed with certain inalienable rights.”
Reality: The U.S. government, whether it is led by Democrats or Republicans, views the oil-rich Middle East through the lens of empire. Operating through a network of proxy regimes including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, the Shah of Iran until his overthrow in 1979, and other regimes in the region – and supplemented by tens of thousands of U.S. troops positioned in U.S. bases throughout the region and on aircraft carriers – the United States aims to dominate and control a region that possesses two-thirds of the world’s known oil supply. It has and continues to finance a network of brutal client dictatorships, and it has funded the Israeli war machine and staged repeated invasions, bombing campaigns, and occupations against the people of the region.
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Sunday, May 22, 2011
Reflections On Old Time (Old Times, 1960s Version) Methods Of Making Revolutionary Propaganda- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for mimeograph machines (and links there for other ancient propaganda agents, machine section). Kudos to Wikipedia on this one.
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era GI anti-war movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League) to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with that war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old-fashioned way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine (and other now exotic machines) and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called "good old days" when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that held true not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather without resolution no in our favor), was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time, the early liberal parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 as well).
One of the most poignant moments in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life for me was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. There he described a crude hectographic method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of 1960s work than today’s high-speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. Trotsky noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch! That provided an additional image, an image of something that also might have been used in the 1960s night if a machine broke down, or got cranky, that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
A picture, or rather pictures, come to mind just now very similar to the one Trotsky described in his memoir, all due technological advances between his time and ours considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971, Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building still findable in any medium or large-sized city, if you look hard enough. Long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce-work private detectives, penny-ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell, for the rent (discounted usually, depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses).
Or some clean, always clean, back room, down-stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s disdain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available, if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long-in-the-tooth old-time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t quite get him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels,” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time, or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, and to produce the latest newsletter to spread the word. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing,” that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-"spell check" days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about making sure it was only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused, media-icon-obsessed, Marshall McLuhan message age, couldn’t take more than one sheet. Right? Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris, take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning already before they were done, New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… But enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here, is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said in one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty [referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know," know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on your hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friends, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for that damn wall poster paste.
I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era GI anti-war movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League) to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with that war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).
That commentary centered on a comparison of the old-fashioned way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine (and other now exotic machines) and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called "good old days" when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that held true not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather without resolution no in our favor), was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time, the early liberal parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 as well).
One of the most poignant moments in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life for me was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. There he described a crude hectographic method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of 1960s work than today’s high-speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. Trotsky noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch! That provided an additional image, an image of something that also might have been used in the 1960s night if a machine broke down, or got cranky, that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.
A picture, or rather pictures, come to mind just now very similar to the one Trotsky described in his memoir, all due technological advances between his time and ours considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971, Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building still findable in any medium or large-sized city, if you look hard enough. Long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce-work private detectives, penny-ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell, for the rent (discounted usually, depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses).
Or some clean, always clean, back room, down-stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s disdain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available, if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long-in-the-tooth old-time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t quite get him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels,” but on the right side of the angels.
And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time, or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, and to produce the latest newsletter to spread the word. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing,” that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-"spell check" days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about making sure it was only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused, media-icon-obsessed, Marshall McLuhan message age, couldn’t take more than one sheet. Right? Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”
Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris, take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning already before they were done, New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… But enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here, is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.
Let me finish by reiterating something I said in one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty [referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know," know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on your hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friends, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for that damn wall poster paste.
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