Click on the headline to link to a Courage To Resist website entry for Conscientious Objectors and War Resisters Day, May 15, 2011.
********
On Bolshevik Work In The Military- A Short Note
In the last of a recent series of posts in this blog entitled From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs (see archives, dated May 11-18,2011) I noted that in late 1969 and early 1970 there was a desperate need for Bolsheviks in the American military, especially among the ground troops (“grunts” for those who know military terminology then, and now) in Vietnam who, according to estimates by grunt knowledgeable and un-ostrich-like sectors of the Army brass, were “unreliable”. Unreliable for the brass meaning that the troops could no longer automatically be counted on to pack up their gear at a minute’s notice, go out on patrol, blow away some forsaken village in conjunction with eight billion tons of airborne bombs raining down all around them, and then come back to barracks, or more usually, some ill-defined base camp, kick back, have a few beers (or a couple of joints, ya, it was like that at the end of the 1960s), and forget about it. Unreliable for a Bolshevik, of course, meaning something different, that the rebellious mass of troops who were sticking it to the brass in their own ill-defined way needed some political direction if the whole thing was not to just blow up in a huge increase of stockade numbers, or worst, just the endless quagmire of drink, drugs, and isolated officer fraggings.
Of course Bolsheviks were as scarce as hen’s teeth on the military ground in Vietnam, and here in America, for that matter. My point, and I included myself as a target of that 1969 point, was that there were real possibilities for serious Bolshevik inroads among the troops just then, and from there who knows. And that is where the real heart of my comment was directed. The mainline policy of the left, organized and unorganized, in regard to anti-war GIs was directed (to the extent that some elements even saw this movement as a fruitful area of work, except as the “vanguard” of the eight million “mass marches” in such front-line “hot spots” as New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C but certainly not Ho Chi Minh City (then Saigon), if anything, at providing, in essence, social services to get individual GIs out of the military anyway they could, or to provide a platform for free speech, free class-war prisoners-type legal defense efforts once the brass started to seriously pull down the hammer on GI anti-war activities (notably in places like Fort Hood Texas, and Fort Jackson, South Carolina).
Needless to say this comment evoked a certain degree of incomprehension and misunderstanding among some of the younger comrades that I work with in a local anti-imperialist, anti-war committee. The thrust of one comrade’s argument is what has prompted this short note. His argument/question was basically what was wrong with Bolsheviks (or leftists, in general, since the questioner does not consider himself a Bolshevik devotee), acting in their roles as “tribunes of the people” (my shorthand phrase for what he was getting at) in trying to get individuals soldiers out of the military, and out of harm’s way. Of course my short answer to that was “nothing, nothing at all.” In a mass struggle situation with a workers party representative in some bourgeois legislative body, or better, as a commissars in some incipient workers’ council of course such “constituency services” are part of the job. In the direct military context of a union for enlisted service personnel Bolsheviks would perform such tasks as part of their work, just like a trade union does for its members. Of course that begs the long answer.
The long answer really defines the different in approach and, frankly, outlook between those very large forces who were committed to a moral opposition to war, perhaps any war, and those who actually wanted to end an unjust war, an imperialist war, and Vietnam as an unjust and imperialist war qualified for that designation in triplicate. As I also noted in that last post in the series comment cited above when active duty GIs started to emerge looking for civilian support the bulk of the anti-war movement embraced that sector in the same way that it related to the military draft of that day-“hell no, we won’t go.”
And that slogan really gets to the crux of the matter. Since we live, for now at least, in a no military draft time I will quickly outline the Bolshevik position on military service. We did not then, nor do we now, volunteer for the imperial military services. But back then, if drafted, you went. No shilly-shallying about it. No conscientious objector status, no Canada, or other exile spots, and for that matter, no prisons. And if ordered to Vietnam (or wherever) you went, even if that means the possibility of shooting at comrades on the other side of the "front," and even if you wish to high heaven for the victory of the other side, like the DNV-NLF in Vietnam. Today, obviously, with a formally all-volunteer military service corps, some of the above does not apply but if we run into a radicalized soldier, and in turn recruit him or her, then they go to Iraq, Afghanistan, or whatever other hell-hole American imperialist has it eyes on. No shilly-shallying now either.
That said, most of the other points in that last post can be placed here to buttress my argument above:
“Individual action vs. collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if that is where the fates took them. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done, especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. That organization, however, was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and that of those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
And that last phrase, my friends, is what separates the Bolsheviks from everybody else, always.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The Latest From The "Coffee Strong" GI Coffeehouse At Fort Lewis, Washington
Click on the headline to link to the Coffee Strong Coffeehouse website at Fort Lewis Washington.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
From The ISO Website- "International Socialist Review"- Class struggle in Wisconsin
Class struggle in Wisconsin
Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper
A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:
The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.
What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.
What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)
The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.
Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.
The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.
The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.
Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.
The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.
Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”
Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.
Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.
Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.
Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.
“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”
Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.
Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.
Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.
The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.
This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.
The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.
After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.
The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.
But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.
The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.
Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.
While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.
Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.
But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
Weeks of mass demonstrations and solidarity show the U.S. working class is ready to fight, says Phil Gasper
A lot has happened since I wrote my last column for the ISR, about whether mass struggle would return to the United States in the foreseeable future. In response to the question “When will something happen here?” I wrote:
The simple answer is I don’t know when, but the long-term nature of the current economic crisis and the struggles we have seen in other parts of the world in recent months make me quite certain that significant struggles will reemerge in the U.S. sooner that than later.
What most readers probably don’t know is that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I wrote those words on the evening of February 11. That was the day that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was finally forced to resign after 18 days of mass demonstrations. It was also the day that Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker declared war on public sector unions in the state.
What followed was a spectacular demonstration of class struggle in Madison and across Wisconsin, with mass demonstrations reaching over 100,000 people, an occupation of the State Capitol for more than two weeks, sick outs by teachers around the state, and enormous solidarity from all sections of the labor movement, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers, and university, high-school and middle-school students. (Even my seven-year-old son spent days at the Capitol supporting his teachers, marching, and eventually leading chants.)
The protests went hand-in-hand with a remarkable shift in popular consciousness. Madison felt—and still feels—different. The solidarity and energy of the protests created a sense of community that had not existed before. Political conversations took place everywhere—in workplaces, in coffee shops, on buses, in the street. Strangers would stop and join in. At the height of the struggle, the feeling of confidence was palpable.
Why did this take place in Wisconsin? Certainly none of us expected it—me least of all. Although I argued, “objective circumstances will once again produce the potential for mass struggle in the U.S.,” I did not have in mind next Tuesday in my hometown when I wrote those words. All I knew was that after over thirty years of one-sided class war from above in the United States, we were getting closer to the point when there would be a response from below.
The economic boom that followed World War Two, and which sustained the idea of the “American Dream,” came to an end in the early 1970s. The ruling classes around the world went on the offensive, dismantling social programs, privatizing public assets, driving down working class living standards, busting unions, and deregulating the economy—the policies that came to be known as neo-liberalism.
The result was growing inequality and rising profits, but also a return to the boom-bust cycle of the pre-war years, with major global recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and finally the financial crash of 2008. Three decades of neo-liberalism has left workers in the US worse off than they were in the 1970s, and has created huge pools of bitterness and misery in other parts of the world. The world economic crisis, accentuated these problems.
Last year, the IMF issued a report warning that high levels of youth unemployment around the world were creating the conditions for political turmoil, uprisings and rebellions. It was predicting events that played out first in Tunisia—which started with a former student, Mohamed Bouazizi, burning himself to death on December 17 after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart—and then on a much larger scale in Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of hated dictators in both countries.
The protests in Madison erupted in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, and from the beginning the demonstrators drew parallels between the two, with numerous signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Even Walker’s Republican ally, U.S. Representative and House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (now busy trying to undermine Medicare and Social Security) told an interviewer, “It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” probably unaware that he was implicitly comparing the Governor to a hated dictator.
Of course Wisconsin was not on the verge of revolution, but the comparisons were nevertheless apt. The spirit of mass protest was in the air, and Wisconsin workers took inspiration from the success of their Egyptian counterparts. But beyond that, workers around the world are linked together in a single global economy, which affects us all when it goes into crisis. Soon after the demonstrations in Madison had begun, one activist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square held up a sign that read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers—One World, One Pain.”
Wisconsin voted for Obama in the 2008 election, but last November with unemployment still high and disillusionment with the White House’s pro-corporate policies widespread, many Democrats stayed home, allowing Walker to become governor with only about 28 percent of eligible voters supporting him. Republicans also took control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature.
Walker ran a low-key campaign, which was thin on specifics, but he nevertheless took his election victory to be a mandate for a radical right-wing agenda, no doubt fueled by his conviction that he is receiving daily instructions from God about what to do. In January he pushed through corporate tax cuts that would cost the state $140 million over the next two years. Then, in February, he used the excuse of a $137 million shortfall in the current budget, to unveil a ‘Budget Repair Bill” that was little more than thinly veiled union busting.
Walker’s bill would strip most public-sector workers of most of their collective bargaining rights, end automatic paycheck deduction to pay dues, force unions to be recertified every year with support not just of the majority who vote, but of the entire bargaining unit. (As many commentators pointed out, if Walker were held to the same standard, he would never have been elected.) In addition, workers would be required to pay significantly more for health care and pensions.
Walker’s attack came straight from a playbook put together by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks, and is part of a national strategy. Only 7.6 percent of U.S. workers in private industry are unionized, but in the public sector the proportion is almost 37 percent. So in the latest phase of their decades long war on the working-class, Republicans have taken aim at public-sector unions—an especially enticing target because these unions provide Democrats with much of their funding at the state and local level. Wisconsin just happened to be the first place where this strategy was unrolled.
“What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.”
Walker expected to steamroller his proposals through in less than a week, but instead, the frontal attack on unions touched a raw nerve of class anger. On the Tuesday following his announcement, thousands of workers descended on the State Capitol in the center of Madison, joined by thousands of students from the University of Wisconsin, led by unionized graduate teaching assistants.
Part of Walker’s plan was a strategy of divide and conquer, which deliberately exempted firefighters and police from the new rules. But firefighters joined the demonstrations immediately, marching in full uniform and playing bagpipes. Even more surprisingly, off duty police officers also joined the protests, displaying signs saying, “Cops for Labor.” Private sector unions were also involved from the beginning.
Sick outs by Madison teachers were initiated by the rank and file. By Tuesday evening, so many had called in to say that they would not be at work the next day, that the school district cancelled classes. The teachers stayed out for the rest of the week and the following Monday, with union leaders scrambling to catch up, and teachers from other districts around the state joining the action as the week progressed.
The occupation of the Capitol building began on Tuesday night, with hundreds of protesters staying inside demanding to testify before the Joint Finance Committee, which was required to hold hearings on the bill. The occupation was initiated by students, but soon had enthusiastic labor participation, with particular unions designating certain nights for their members to sleep over.
This huge and militant response led all 14 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate to leave the state on the third day of the protests, depriving Republicans of a quorum necessary to pass Walker’s bill. For nearly three weeks the legislature was gridlocked. In response to threats of layoffs, the South Central Federation of Labor passed a resolution saying that it would support a general strike. Others pointed out that the budget deficit would disappear if corporations and the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes.
The mood to escalate action was there, but union leaders were terrified of things going too far. From the beginning most said they would accept the economic concessions contained in Walker’s bill in exchange for the preservation of collective bargaining and other union rights, sacrificing their members’ paychecks to defend their own positions.
After the teachers returned to work, union officials were unwilling to call more job actions, and instead starting channeling resources into recall campaigns against eight GOP senators. This allowed Walker to wind down the occupation by slowly making access to the Capitol more difficult. Rallies continued outside, but on March 9, in a legislative maneuver, the Senate detached the anti-union sections from the rest of Walker’s bill and voted to pass them without the Democrats present.
The result was a huge and spontaneous outburst of anger around the city. Several thousand of us retook the State Capitol in the early evening, climbing through windows and pushing past cops, who eventually gave up trying to stop people from entering. The mood was electric, and the many teachers who had joined the occupation were waiting for word from their union to walk off the job again the next day. If that had happened, other workers might have joined them.
But instead of calling its members out, leaders of the teachers’ union urged them to go to work. As a result the battalions of organized labor were absent from the Capitol the next morning. The occupation succeeded in delaying the state Assembly from voting for several hours, but the cops eventually cleared people out, and the bill passed there too. Walker signed it the following day.
The passage of the bill represented a significant and unnecessary defeat. Even though, as I write this, it has not been enacted because of legal challenges, unions have rushed to sign new contracts or renegotiate existing ones, giving Walker what he wanted on health care and pensions. Once the focus had shifted from the state to the local level, the choice became one between concessions and layoffs. But the unions wanted to sign contracts covering the next few years, in the hope that Walker cannot void existing agreements.
Labor leaders hope that by the time existing contracts expire Democrats will once again be in control of state government. It is certainly possible that enough of the recalls will be successful to give Democrats a majority in the senate, and Walker himself may well be removed from office next year (Recall Walker bumper stickers are everywhere, and his poll ratings have dropped dramatically). But replacing Republicans with Democrats won’t be enough.
While the Democrats don’t want to destroy the unions, they want to co-opt them to push through their own austerity plans. Their defense of collective bargaining is that it is no barrier to forcing workers to accept concessions. What is needed is a mobilization from below to fight cutbacks proposed by either party.
Meanwhile, Walker and the Republicans are already planning further attacks. The two-year budget currently being debated will include massive cuts to education and health care, and Walker also hopes to copy legislation already passed in Michigan that would give him the power to dismiss local governments that are deemed to be insolvent, replace them with an appointed auditor, void union contracts, and impose more harsh cuts.
But the struggle that began in February has shifted consciousness dramatically. Wisconsin’s workers are still groping towards the kind of organizations that will be needed to respond to the continued attacks, but it is unlikely that they will take any of this sitting down. The same is true across the country. The next five or ten years in the United States is not going to look like the last twenty or thirty years, when class war from the top met little response from below. Instead, it’s going to look a lot more like the last few months in Wisconsin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
From The ISO Website-The "International Socialist Review"- "Libya’s revolution, U.S. intervention, and the left"
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.
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.
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.
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