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Friday, November 02, 2012
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Respectable Murderers: An Open Letter to Dan Ellsberg
Dear Dan,You and I are getting ready to tape a debate on the question of whether to vote for Obama (in "swing states"). It will air on Lila Garrett's "Connect the Dots" show on KPFK next Monday. I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason, because I think our public discourse lacks much serious debate between people who respect each other's intentions. I have nothing but respect for you and believe you mean nothing but the best in advocating votes for Obama. You honestly believe I was catastrophically wrong to vote for Jill Stein in Virginia, as I've done, and I honestly believe you are horrendously misguided to be expending your valuable energy trying to get others to vote for Obama. And yet we'll be friends through this and regardless of whether one or both of us ever change our minds.
An hour debate will also be a refreshing change from the usual sound byte simplification of the media, and yet not necessarily sufficient. So, let me tell you a couple of stories.
I wandered over to the Obama campaign office here in Charlottesville, Va., on Wednesday when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was scheduled to visit. She showed up, in fact, and told everyone how terrific Obama is.
I asked Albright whether she still believed that killing a half a million young Iraqi children was "worth it." She said that she very much regretted having made that remark. But did she regret having enacted the sanctions that killed those children? I asked if she opposed the current "crippling sanctions" on Iran, and she said that she did not.
Here's video: http://youtu.be/gdmix60ajmA
I'm not so much troubled by Albright's sanctioning of mass murder, as by the agreement with her on the part of the many people gathered to applaud her comments. Not a single person present expressed the slightest concern over Albright's having taken part in the murder of so many young lives and many more older ones. Not a single person expressed an interest in learning about a history they were perhaps ignorant of. Not a single person offered an argument for what the positive "it" was that could have made such slaughter "worth it." Not a single person offered a claim that George Bush Sr. or Bob Dole would have killed even more children.
I don't mean to give the impression that Albright's audience was comatose. On the contrary, numerous individuals began grabbing me, shouting at me, pushing me, grabbing my camera, twisting my arm, and spitting out the most vicious hatred. In theory they would all, no doubt, agree that in a system of self-governance people should be able to question their elected officials, former elected officials, and at-large mass-murdering former elected officials. But in this case, this official was playing for the Good Team. The proper role, they believed, therefore, was that of cheerleaders, the highest value deferential respect.
Do they believe the wholesale slaughter of human beings, whether by sanctions or bombs, is sometimes justified by some mysterious "national interest"? Do they believe I was a raving lunatic and that Albright would never have hurt a fly? Do they just believe it's most appropriate not to ask, because that would involve disrespect toward someone on the Good Team? No matter which way you slice it, you come back to a room full of well-dressed polite supporters of mass-murder. That's far more worrying to me than the individual sociopath speaking to them.
Now, present in that room were TV cameras and newspaper reporters. The purpose of the event was to generate positive news about the reasons to vote for Obama and the stature of the people supporting Obama's reelection. Clearly, from that point of view, the staffers in the office did the absolute right thing in chasing me out of the building and making sure that not another inconvenient question was posed. As I'm sure you realize, voting for Obama in a swing state as a single secretive individual can hardly be called rational. A single vote makes no difference. To be the rational strategic voter you envision, each person must also strive to recruit others.
On the other hand, you say that you agree with me that independent policy-driven activism is more valuable than elections. You agree that we don't have legitimate elections offering a wide range of choices, that we need a movement to demand changes we cannot vote for, changes to strip out the money, open up the debates and the media, undo the gerrymandering, do away with the electoral college, provide automatic registration, and on and on and on. You probably agree that women did not vote themselves the right to vote, that the labor movement grew when it struggled and sacrificed by striking and has shrunk while funding the Democratic Party asking nothing in return, that major changes for peace and justice and civilization have been driven primarily by independent movements and often movements that have mobilized third and fourth party campaigns before winning over the Big Two. You may agree with Howard Zinn that it's not so much who's sitting in the White House as who's doing the sitting in. You might even agree with Emma Goldman that if elections alone changed anything, they'd be banned. In any event, during certain non-election years, I see you doing as much useful activism for this country and the world as anyone I know.
Presumably you place some value on spreading awareness of what sanctions did to Iraq. Presumably you see what value there could be in halting the sanctions on Iran. But what would you have done in that Obama campaign office in this swing state on Wednesday? You are a remarkable person, but still only one person. Would you have ruined the entire publicity stunt by pressing Albright further on her record of genocide? Or would you have thrown her a softball about what sort of evil lawyer Mitt Romney might be expected to nominate to the Supreme Court? Let's accept that both would have been good questions. But you could not have asked both. There was not time, and asking the first would have negated the purpose of the second -- not to mention getting you thrown out of the event.
Even you cannot follow your advice, and you are Daniel Ellsberg. Imagine how hard following your advice is for other people. Most people, to one degree or another, identify with candidates and parties. They talk about "us" winning when their candidate wins. To various degrees they avoid becoming aware of their team's flaws. To various degrees, they censor their opposition to their party or politician, before, during, and after elections. What is your time calculation? Do you prioritize campaigning for a month, six months, a year? How much time out of each four-year period do you sacrifice from independent activism of the sort that has always changed the world? And how much time out of every two-year term of those legislators who Constitutionally are supposed to be running the country?
I'm convinced that you personally do an excellent job of avoiding lesser-evil team cheerleading in between elections. But, most people do not. Our RootsAction petition on "strategic voting" got a response several times lower than any other action we've ever sent to our list. Some people do hold their noses and vote, but they have no idea how tightly they should be holding their noses, and they do not act appropriately post-election. All the activists running around knocking on doors and making phone calls for candidates will not do so for peace or justice in December. They'd look at you like you were crazy if you suggested it. Their work is done. Their energy is drained. Their role as spectators is established. And the promise is contained in any activism that they, or even you, muster: We will attempt to inconvenience you, but we will never ever vote against you.
In between elections, as we move from having voted for the less evil party toward the inevitable contest four years hence between two parties that are both more evil than the time before, our activism is neutered by a system of unions, PACs, and nonprofit clicktivist and media complexes that seek their funding, power, and sense of importance from one half of the government. It has become routine for grassroots or astroturf activist leaders to head into the veal pen and ask the elected officials of the Good Party or of the "Progressive" wing of the good party what they should ask their members to demand. This is an inversion of representative government. You'll recall groups that favored single-payer healthcare forbidding their members from mentioning it, asking instead for a "public option" because so-called public servants had instructed the public to ask for that. The point is not that legislators should never compromise, but that we should leave it to the legislators, because when we pre-compromise, we end up with even less in the end.
When Obama was in Charlottesville, hundreds of people waited in line for hours for the chance to cheer anything he said. Some of us went to talk to the people waiting in line. We wanted to get a sense of how they felt about all the policies that had produced such outrage under Bush and been expanded under Obama. Under Obama, as you may know, wealth is concentrating faster, the environment is deteriorating faster, the military has spread further and cost more, the warrantless spying has spread and been firmly established as without criminal penalty, rendition and torture have become policy choices rather than crimes, imprisonment without charge or trial has been "legalized" (although Obama is still fighting for that power in court), an assassination program has been created and openly advertised, wars have been launched without the courtesy of lying to Congress, the CIA has been given major war powers, "special" forces are in 70 nations on any given day and raiding a dozen homes to kill on any given night, drones have raised to new heights the percentage of war victims who are civilians and the percentage of the people in certain nations who hate our government, secrecy has mushroomed, and retribution against whistleblowers has exploded. You are aware of all of this. We couldn't find a single person in that crowd who had ever heard of any of it. Major news stories that would have put people into the streets in outrage if the president were a Republican did not exist to this crowd.
Sure, you know the facts. But are you devoting every ounce of energy to spreading the word and building resistance? Of course not. You're investing your time in campaigning for Obama votes (in swing states). You may understand that there's been no step back from Bush's policies, that Obama has advanced them further. Yes, Romney could advance them even further even faster than Obama would in the next four years -- even in the face of the public opposition that would likely materialize for a President Romney. But we need a reversal of course, not a slightly slower death, not even a significantly slower death. The environment is collapsing. Weaponry and hostility are spreading. We're dealing with a need for survival, not a desire for utopia. What we need for survival is a credible independent movement.
When a labor union today says "Reform NAFTA and push for the Employee Free Choice Act, or else," the "or else" is empty and everyone knows it. When Bill McKibben says "The tar sands pipeline is your test," nobody believes that when Obama fails the test McKibben will oppose his reelection. Compare this battered-spouse relationship with that of Latinos who posed a credible threat to desert Obama and thereby won some modest immigration rights.
You know that we had a significant (pitiably weak but significant) peace movement in 2005 and 2006. Why? Because opponents of war and opponents of Republican presidents' wars were teamed up together. That fell apart as Democrats took power in Congress in 2007 and as 2008 turned out to be the year of one of those endlessly recurring "most important elections of our lifetime." The movement was temporarily shut down, never to be restored. We went from Mitch McConnell secretly warning Bush to get out of Iraq to Obama getting credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan even as the troops there were double the number deployed when Obama entered the White House.
How in the world can anyone have spent the last many years in the peace movement and not noticed this partisan-based electoral-based collapse? I'm sure you've seen and were likely surveyed during the study done by the University of Michigan's Michael Heaney and Indiana University's Fabio Rojas. They documented this collapse and its partisan basis.
Would I object to people voting for a less-evil but still evil candidate if they could continue organizing for justice? Of course not. I do not fail to understand the power of your argument. I'm sure you'll do me the courtesy of not simply repeating it. A more evil candidate is more evil than a less evil candidate. A greater warmonger and bigger destroyer of the environment is worse than a lesser warmonger and lesser destroyer of the environment. I think the case for Obama's superiority to Romney is vastly overblown. I think, in fact, that Obama has been able to get away with much that we would never have allowed McCain to achieve. We stood up against Bush's attack on Social Security. But China is to Nixon as humanitarian goods are to Obama. Let's grant, however, that Obama is better than Romney. Let's grant it because it is not the central argument and may very well be right. That is, if you compare their platforms as presented, guesstimate how much of each is outright lies, and factor in the likely public resistance to each, Obama may come out ahead. My argument is not that he doesn't. My argument is not that he doesn't do so meaningfully. My argument is not that this isn't a question of life and death. And my position involves complete awareness that I will not be the first to die, someone else will.
Here, in contrast, is my actual argument: It is vastly more important that we have an independent movement based on policy changes rather than personality changes. In theory we could have that with lesser-evil-swing-state voting. In reality, we cannot. We cannot build a national movement in the 38 states from which all candidates and journalists have fled, and on the condition that we avoid building it large enough to have any impact whatsoever (which would ruin the whole strategy by transforming a non-swing state into a swing state). We cannot keep a movement from shutting down for each election cycle as long as most people see their jobs as followers of politicians rather than as the true sovereigns of this land.
I don't care about my purity. If I wanted to be pure I would avoid thinking about these matters at all. I wouldn't subject myself to a room full of well-dressed polite backers of mass-murder at all if I wanted to be pure. And I would hold my nose and work with them shoulder-to-shoulder if I thought that would lead to the greater good. I would have voted for Captain Peace Prize if I believed it would save the most lives. I do not. I believe that building an activist movement that depends on rejecting support for a party of mass murderers will save the most lives, and will do so in the relative near term -- or we will all perish.
As
you know, I've spent months trying to avoid this discussion because I believe
that our so-called elections drain energy away from activism. They also serve to
divide us. We all want peace and justice. But we drop everything to debate or,
more often, quarrel with each other over electoral matters -- something the
powers in Washington must have great laughs over. But the election is this week,
and this debate must be had. I enter it with a great deal of respect for that
small group of people on the other side of it who understand the need for a real
mass movement and believe a mass movement is compatible with lesser-evilism. I'm
simply not persuaded.
 t is urgently important to
prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in
January 2013.
The election is now just weeks
away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine --
progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities
during this period.
An activist colleague recently said
to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."
I was startled, and took offense.
"Supporting Obama? Me?!"
"I lose no opportunity publicly," I
told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's
decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone
who's launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite
detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than
all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"
My friend said, "But on Democracy
Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him! How could you say that? I
don't live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under
any circumstances."
My answer was: a Romney/Ryan
administration would be no better -- no different -- on any of the serious
offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even
catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran,
Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health
coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.
I told him: "I don't 'support
Obama.' I oppose the current Republican Party. This is not a contest between
Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen
close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul
Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or
not."
As Noam Chomsky said recently, "The
Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country,
but to the world. It's worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to
power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives."
Following that logic, he's said to an interviewer what
my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I were a person in a swing state, I'd
vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other
choice."
The election is at this moment a
toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives
-- a small minority of the electorate -- could actually have a significant
influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the
other.
The only way for progressives and
Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough
people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone
else. And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned
liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a
third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just disappointed but
disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and
will probably keep doing).
They have to be persuaded to vote,
and to vote in a battleground state for Obama not anyone else, despite the
terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I
see it, that's precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending
right now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take
progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that effort of
persuasion effectively.
It will take someone these
disheartened progressives and liberals will listen to. Someone manifestly
without illusions about the Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they
look at the president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney
or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in
focus.
It's true that the differences
between the major parties are not nearly as large as they and their candidates
claim, let alone what we would want. It's even fair to use Gore Vidal's metaphor
that they form two wings ("two right wings," as some have put it) of a single
party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War
Party.
Still, the political reality is
that there are two distinguishable wings, and one is reliably even worse than
the other, currently much worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of
that reality serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory
of the worse.
The traditional third-party mantra,
"There's no significant difference between the major parties" amounts to saying:
"The Republicans are no worse, overall." And that's absurd. It constitutes
shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It's crazily
divorced from present reality.
And it's not at all harmless to be
propagating that absurd falsehood. It has the effect of encouraging progressives
even in battleground states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close
election for someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others
to act likewise. That's an effect that serves no one but the Republicans, and
ultimately the 1 percent.
It's not merely understandable,
it's entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often
acted outrageously, not merely timidly or "disappointingly." If impeachment were
politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it (like George W.
Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely human to want to punish him,
not to "reward" him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express
trust, hope or approval.
But rage is not generally conducive
to clear thinking. And it often gets worked out against innocent victims, as
would be the case here domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in
Romney's taking key battleground states that decide the outcome of this
election.
To punish Obama in this particular
way, on Election Day -- by depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of
office in favor of Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and
marginal in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the U.S.
but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could still
convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment and climate
change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama has been creditably
resisting, against pressure from within his own party). And it would spell, via
Supreme Court appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to
four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The reelection of Barack Obama, in
itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and
empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law. That's for us and the
rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our
lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.
In the eight to twelve close-fought
states -- especially Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa,
Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and
Wisconsin -- for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in
those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be
complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all its
consequences.
To think of that as urging people
in swing states to "vote their conscience" is, I believe, dangerously misleading
advice. I would say to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on
Election Day to vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you
need a second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.
I often quote a line by Thoreau
that had great impact for me: "Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper
merely, but your whole influence." He was referring, in that essay, to civil
disobedience, or as he titled it himself, "Resistance to Civil
Authority."
It still means that to me. But this
is a year when for people who think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in
battleground states -- casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your
whole influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even
more important.
That means for progressives in the
next couple of weeks -- in addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions,
lobbying (largely against policies or prospective policies of President Obama,
including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil
disobedience that are needed all year round and every year -- using one's voice
and one's e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage citizens in swing
states to vote against a Romney victory by voting for the only real alternative,
Barack Obama.
Daniel Ellsberg is a former
State and Defense Department official who has been arrested for acts of
non-violent civil disobedience over eighty times, initially for copying and
releasing the top secret Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in
prison. Living in a non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President
Obama.
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From The International Communist League Press
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Spartacist Canada No. 174
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Fall 2012
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Plus ça change...
1978 Quebec Student Strike Against PQ
Amid the social turmoil that has shaken Quebec this year, the
bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois has postured as a supporter of the
students and their demands. But as the following article recounts, the PQ’s
austerity attacks during its first term of office in the 1970s provoked an
earlier, massive student strike. This underscores the fact that when in power
the PQ is a brutal administrator of the capitalist profit system against
workers, students and the poor, and that the program of nationalism is
counterposed to the interests of the working class. Marxists advocate Quebec
independence, and simultaneously fight to break workers and youth from illusions
in the PQ as well as its left appendages like Québec Solidaire.
The article was originally published in SC No. 33
(February 1979) under the title “100,000 Students Strike Against PQ.”
In one of the most militant student strikes in North America since
the sixties, thousands of students from community colleges (CEGEP) across Quebec
walked out for six weeks during November and December to protest a Parti
Québécois (PQ) government white paper on college education. The PQ’s white paper
proposed a whole series of budget cuts which would establish more direct control
over the academic life of the CEGEPs and reduce the accessibility to higher
education in Quebec. In particular, the report advocated establishing more
restrictive enrollment quotas and tying bursary allocations to the needs of
business.
The strike began in Rimouski on November 7, but rapidly spread to
other CEGEPs across the province. By the end of November close to 100,000
students were out on the streets demanding free tuition and guaranteed bursaries
indexed to the cost of living for all students. While the strike was strongest
among French-speaking students it is significant that it was joined by students
at at least one English-language CEGEP (the Lennoxville campus of Champlain
College).
When he was hustling votes to boost the bourgeois nationalist PQ
into power, party leader René Lévesque wooed Quebec students with the promise of
free education. Now that the PQ is in office, Lévesque has dropped his populist
appeals to student voters in the name of the “economic stability” so necessary
to marketing the bonds of an “independent” capitalist Quebec on Wall Street.
When the CEGEP students struck in protest against the white paper, PQ Minister
of Education, Jacques-Yvan Morin castigated them for their “greed” and wailed
that if the students won their demands it would cost the government $204
million. So much for free education. Meanwhile 600 students from Rimouski
rallied on November 15 (the second anniversary of the PQ’s electoral victory)
and burned copies of the PQ’s program and its white paper on education.
The PQ hardlined it from the beginning. At least three student
occupations were brutally broken up by the police. On November 23, 1,000
students who had marched to the Ministry of Education offices in Montreal to
press their demands were forced to call off a brief occupation of the offices
under threat of a riot squad attack.
The following day Lévesque told 3,000 students at Laval University
that the government had no intention of knuckling under to the CEGEP students’
demands. Nevertheless, Lévesque would prefer not to alienate Quebec’s student
population which comprises an important part of the PQ’s popular base.
Therefore, early in December the government announced a few cosmetic “reforms”
in its student aid program—a promise to “take into account” high student
unemployment and a minimal reduction in the parental contribution to educational
costs. By mid-December the strike had fizzled out at most colleges.
Students by themselves lack the social weight to wring significant
concessions from the capitalists and their government. The PQ’s education
cutbacks are of a piece with its attacks on public sector unions and its record
of strikebreaking. The same cops that were sent in to break up the student
occupations have been repeatedly used by the PQ to herd scabs and break strikes.
Thus Marxists seek to link the fight against educational cutbacks on campus to
the struggle of the labor movement against the bosses’ across-the-board
austerity offensive.
Lévesque once held out the promise of “free education” to win
student support for the PQ’s program of bourgeois nationalism. Today however
this promise has been ripped up and Lévesque is making it perfectly clear that
it is the working class, the exploited and the oppressed that are supposed to
foot the bill for “sovereignty” for the Quebec bourgeoisie.
Despite the PQ’s willingness to make demagogic promises of “a
better life for all” in an independent Quebec the CEGEP strike demonstrates that
Lévesque and Co. are as committed to the maintenance of capitalist class
privilege as any other bourgeois politicians. Education will be the right of all
and will genuinely serve the interests of the masses of the population only when
the workers of Quebec and English-speaking North America unite to sweep away
capitalism through socialist revolution.
From The International Communist League Press
Workers Hammer No. 220
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Autumn 2012
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30 years after Falklands/Malvinas war
Britain and Argentina: between some rocks and losing face
This spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of the bizarre, dirty
little war between British imperialism and the Argentine junta over some
desolate rocks in the South Atlantic. Both Margaret Thatcher’s vicious Tory
government and General Leopoldo Galtieri’s bloody military dictatorship used the
conflict over the Falklands — known in Argentina as the Malvinas — as a
diversion to arouse patriotism, quell social struggle and boost their fortunes.
It was in the interest of the working class in each country for “their”
bourgeois rulers to be humiliated in defeat: Thatcher’s victory spelled bad news
for the British working class, while the Argentine defeat resulted in the fall
of Galtieri’s regime. This year, with austerity and repression on the agenda of
both governments, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had orchestrated
some kind of parody of the conflict as an anniversary commemoration.
Prime Minister David Cameron has made clear his government’s
intention to hang on to this archipelago in the South Atlantic, nearly 8000
miles from Britain’s coast. Britain dispatched its prized destroyer, HMS
Dauntless, and a submarine; to add some pomp the RAF sent Prince William to
the Falklands. For its part, the Argentine government aptly condemned Britain’s
behaviour as “colonial” and declared British oil exploration in the area to be
“illegal” and “clandestine”. The trading bloc Mercosur, which includes
Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, closed those countries’ ports to ships flying the
Falklands flag and Argentina turned away several British cruise ships.
After accusing the Argentine government of behaving in a colonial
manner, Cameron cynically lectured president Cristina Fernandez on the
islanders’ national rights: “We should believe in self determination and act as
democrats here”. Cameron flaunts his commitment to self-determination
against Argentina but it is not much in evidence when it comes to
Scotland, which his government insists should remain part of the “United
Kingdom”. And who in their right mind could imagine the British prime minister
invoking democratic rights for the people of Diego Garcia? The British
imperialist overlords expelled the island’s inhabitants in the 1960s to make way
for a US military base. In 2004, Tony Blair’s Labour government used the royal
prerogative to overturn a high court judgement which would have allowed the
islanders to return. As Richard Gifford, a lawyer representing the 4500
islanders and their descendants, remarked: “Not since the days of King John has
anyone tried to expel British citizens from the realm by executive order.” Now
there’s a lesson in how the British imperialists “believe in self determination
and act as democrats”! US/British imperialists out of Diego Garcia! For a
right of return and compensation!
The Tory-led government, which is deeply unpopular among the
working class at home for imposing punishing austerity measures, is shamelessly
trying to whip up a version of the “Falklands factor” to boost its ratings.
Before the 1982 conflict, British governments had been trying to unload the
Falklands for years, including handing over various administrative powers to
Argentina. “But once the Argentines had invaded, an enfeebled Britain saw a
chance to reassert the obscene traditions of the Empire, and Thatcher was not
about to let it pass”, as we wrote in Spartacist Britain (no 42, May
1982). The sinking of the Argentine General Belgrano battleship, upon
Thatcher’s orders, was a genuine war crime. Hundreds of conscripts were
slaughtered while the ship was outside Britain’s own declared war
zone. British naval officers made no effort to rescue the survivors huddled
together in lifeboats trying to avoid freezing to death.
The Argentine bourgeoisie’s claims to the Falklands are based on
the heritage of the Spanish crown. The British invaded in 1833, some two decades
after Argentine independence. The islands, 300 miles from the Argentine coast,
have since been inhabited by English-speaking settlers. According to the
Guardian (13 September) a recent census shows that of 2563 residents,
fewer than a third consider themselves British while 59 per cent regard
themselves as Falkland Islanders. In a rational world, there is no reason for
Britain, Argentina or any other country to have sovereignty over the Falkland/
Malvinas islands. The inhabitants should be left alone to fish, graze sheep,
host tourists and the occasional scientific expedition. To defend its bogus
claim to sovereignty over the Falklands, Britain maintains a military base at
Mount Pleasant Airfield, in addition to various stations in the South Atlantic.
All British military bases out of the South Atlantic!
The main enemy is at home!
During the Falklands war we put forward the perspective of
revolutionary defeatism on both sides, expressed in slogans such
as: “Sink Thatcher! Sink the Junta!” We wrote: “we think that as long as these
two viciously anti-working-class regimes go at one another, it’s a good thing if
they grind up their respective military machines. Marxists are revolutionary
defeatist on both sides in the present conflict. The potential for a massive
class upsurge in Argentina is obvious and Thatcher, too, is hated by Britain’s
workers” (Spartacist Britain no 42, May 1982). At the time, Britain and
Argentina were two of the staunchest allies in Washington’s Cold War II
anti-Soviet crusade which, as defenders of the Soviet Union, we Trotskyists
opposed. As our comrades in the US wrote at the time, “revolutionary socialists
can only look forward to the spectacle of these two hated right-wing regimes
sinking each other’s fleets on the high seas” (Workers Vanguard no 304,
30 April 1982).
For General Galtieri, “recovery” of the Falklands/Malvinas began as
a textbook case of a despotic regime trying to take the heat off at home by
launching a foreign invasion. The world’s highest inflation rate, industry
operating at 50 per cent capacity, and skyrocketing unemployment stoked popular
anger, already boiling over from the military’s “dirty war” of terror in which
more than 10,000 leftists and other opponents had been killed and 30,000
disappeared. On 30 March 1982, 15,000 workers were met with brutal repression
when they attempted to protest in front of the presidential palace. Three days
later Argentine commandos seized the Falklands. Galtieri was banking on
Washington’s support as a well-earned reward for backing the US’s war against
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and leftist insurgents in El Salvador. After all,
Galtieri had declared that the third world war had already begun in the
Americas, a war between the “free world”, led by the United States, and Soviet
Communism. But after failing to prevent Britain and Argentina from falling out,
an exasperated US imperialism backed Britain, deciding that its robust
anti-Soviet ally in Europe was strategically more important.
As the war got underway, the Thatcher government reached an
unprecedented peak in the opinion polls on a wave of jingoism, with the gutter
press screaming for “our boys” to get the “Argies” as Royal Navy recruitment
posters were pinned on factory noticeboards. The Labour Party leaders and trade
union bureaucracy embraced this patriotic fervour, supporting the formation of
the British Task Force. The victory of Her Majesty’s forces was a defeat for
British workers. The message couldn’t have been clearer, first to striking
railway workers, when returning troops unfurled a banner saying: “Call off the
rail strike, or we’ll call an air strike!”
The “Falklands factor” enabled Thatcher to triumph in a general
election in 1983. In her second term she pushed ahead with plans to smash the
power of the trade unions. The militant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM),
whose struggles had brought down the previous Tory government, was a particular
target. The coal miners fought heroically throughout the 1984-85 strike, against
an army of cops and the full might of the state. But thanks to the treachery of
the trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party politicians, the miners remained
isolated against Thatcher. Above all what was necessary to ensure a victory for
the miners was for workers in other industries to strike alongside the NUM. But
the trade union and Labour “lefts” mouthed words of solidarity, while the
right-wing leaders openly and viciously condemned the striking miners, just as
they contributed to the chauvinist patriotism around the Falklands war.
Labourite left: From Union Jack “socialists”…
The Labour “left”, led at the time by Tony Benn, opposed the war on
patriotic grounds. Benn warned that the Falklands were not worth risking the
British fleet over and that such a costly war could “end in tragedy for this
country”. The Spartacist League/Britain responded: “It would be a tragedy for
the British bosses! The only war worth fighting by the British workers is
the class war against their own bourgeoisie. THE MAIN ENEMY IS AT HOME!”
(Spartacist Britain no 42, May 1982). Some ostensible “Marxists” at the
time managed to stand to the right of Tony Benn. An article in the Socialist
Party’s magazine on the 25th anniversary of the war claimed: “We opposed both
British imperialism and the Argentinean military dictatorship” (Socialism
Today, April 2007). But in 1982 their forebears in the Militant tendency,
which subsequently split into what is today the Socialist Party and Socialist
Appeal, attacked the Bennite call to withdraw the fleet as a “pacifist blind
alley”. And they went foam-flecked against organisations who were for the defeat
of British imperialism, denouncing the “monstrous absurdity of the sectarians’
position”, of “calling for the defeat of the Task Force”. The ultimate solution
for these utter reformists, who are wedded to the idea that socialism can be
implemented beginning with an “Enabling Act” in parliament, was “to force a
general election to open the way for the return of a Labour government to
implement socialist policies at home and abroad”. For the Militant: “Using
socialist methods, a Labour government could rapidly defeat the [Argentine]
dictatorship” (Militant International Review, June 1982).
…to cheering the junta
Workers Power also has a sordid history of coming down on the side
of the imperialists, from championing the counterrevolutionary Polish
Solidarność in the 1980s to hailing the imperialist-backed Libyan rebels last
spring. However during the Falklands war Workers Power rallied to the
“anti-imperialist” cause…of the Argentine junta. In a 1982 leaflet, Workers
Power placed demands on the reactionary military dictatorship, supposedly in
order to “expose it”:
“The junta have tried to dress themselves up as real fighters of
imperialism. This is a hollow lie. But many believe it to be genuine. The task
of Argentinian socialists is to force the junta to take real anti-imperialist
measures. They should be forced to nationalise the many multinationals in
Argentina; the workers must seize control of those factories and must be armed
to mount a real defence against a possible attack.”
— “Victory to the Argentine”
Leftists in Argentina who held a similar position include the
pseudo-Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno’s Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST).
For the nationalist cause of the Malvinas, the PST declared that they “form part
of the military camp of the dictatorship in the fight against the British
imperialists”. As the Spartacist League/US wrote at the time: “It is
particularly grotesque for the PST to support this ploy by butchers who have
murdered more than a hundred of their comrades.” Our article
insisted:
“This ultra-reactionary junta will not undertake any
anti-imperialist action, however partial. What do they want the islands for? As
we have pointed out, they could well turn them into concentration camps for
‘dissidents,’ the luckiest of the desaparecidos — an Argentine Dawson
Island. And whom have they named as military governor of the Malvinas? Mario
BenjamÃn Menéndez, who was a principal architect of the junta’s war of
extermination against the Argentine left, as well as a notoriously brutal
concentration camp commandant.”
— Workers Vanguard no 307, 11 June 1982
A victory for the Argentine junta in this war would have been
contrary to the interests of the Argentine working masses,
heightening the chauvinist sentiments Galtieri had excited and manipulated in
order to defuse a burgeoning class struggle. Our perspective of revolutionary
defeatism was vindicated by the events in Argentina following the outcome of the
war. Within hours of the fall of Port Stanley to the British imperialists, the
chant “¡Se va a acabar, la dictadura militar!” (“The military
dictatorship is coming to an end!”) was heard through the streets of Buenos
Aires. The humiliating defeat of the Argentine bourgeoisie in the war led
directly to the overthrow of the military dictatorship, creating an opening for
the construction of a genuinely revolutionary party. But the removal of the
junta, in the absence of such a party, has been followed by a series of
capitalist crises. Populist nationalism is the major barrier to forging a
genuinely revolutionary party in Argentina.
The Spartacist League/Britain fights to build a party committed to
burying for good the heritage of British imperialism, its military and the Union
Jack. We are proud to have stated at the time:
“The Argentine proletariat must not be taken in by the nationalist
diversion over the Falklands, but must continue the struggle to smash Galtieri’s
bloody junta. It is the duty of British workers to fight against the Thatcher
government’s military adventure to regain a colony, and to fight for their own
class power, eradicating the last vestiges of Britain’s sordid and brutal
imperialist history. The main enemy is at home!”
— Spartacist Britain no 42, May 1982
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night-When Motown Mowed Them Down
Click on the headline to link to a YouTubefilm clip of Percy Sledge performing the classic R&B song, When A Man Loves A Woman.
CD
Review
Classic
Rock: 1966, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987
1966, ah, beautiful lost, lost in a haze
of bad booze and drugs, 1966. All kinds of music was busting out in the
post-Beatles, post vanilla music (Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton , etc. pretty boy
early 1960s music), and post Rolling Stones reverend R&B night. Just a hint
of psychedelic, just a hint of new frame rock with that frenetic guitar
replacing the piano or drums at the center of the action, maybe putting the
sexy saxes in back for while (although to now ears less than one thought), and
just a hint of a coming storming out of Motown (records and the city) that a
new sound was aborning’. And if I was pressed, hard pressed, no holds barred,
no on the one hand and then on the other, straight, up pressed that is the year
I would say black-centered music found its national (and maybe world-wide), its
big time crossover niche in the vast sea
of cultural gradient musical sounds that make up this immigrant-tinged
country.
No, not the old timey country blues stuff that
we craved early in the decade during our love affair folk minute when the world
and that the likes of primordial Son House, Skip James, Betsy Smith, Ida Smith
(and a bagful of female barrelhouse singers named Smith) 1920s, down the Delta,
up from hunger, no electricity make due juke joint Saturday night, hard sweat week
at the plantation, whiskey, women and cut blades stuff. Nor that post-World War
II mad monk Muddy Waters –Howlin’ Wolf all juiced up and city pretty electric
blues Saturday night after hard killing floor factory work week, whiskey, women,
and cut blades urban hell-hole glut stuff. And certainly not the 1950s Allen
Ginsberg Howl negro streets (before
Malcolm came and made black, black hear me, self-respecting and massive
hell-raising for justice on those mean black streets the order of the day)
be-bop doo-wop rock (jazz too) that exposed (not hipped, just exposed) white
kids like me to the heaven sent sound of black-originated music.
Then came an explosion, no self-pitying
from hunger stuff, no do lang, do lang, do do do, la,la, la stuff, no back porch, segregated back porch, studio but professional music
professionally done. Baby, baby, baby, and oh, yes, oh yes, music that made one
think of yes, sex, and other stuff not in a salacious way (well, maybe a
little) but as just ordinary okay human existence, warts and all. And no sound
put that whole schema together in 1966 better than Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Women. At the end of
the night, the dance club, bad booze night you could grab your gal, or grab a
gal, and slow dance to some Mason-Dixon and the Line cover, big sexy alto sax
playing, soft drums, a little organ, flashes of Gabriel’s trumpet for effect,
until the lights came on. And maybe, if the booze didn’t floor you by then, you
might just get lucky. Yah, that one was that kind of a song. Kind
of put innocent what is life about, what is sex all about, what are girls all
about songs (great 1950s songs, don’t get me wrong) like the Chiffons He’s So Fine and The Falcon’s You’re Fine in the shades.
Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Davis Square, Somerville –The Stand-Out Is Every Wednesday From 4:00-5:00 PM
Click on the headline
to link to the "Private Bradley Manning Petition" website page.
Markin comment:
The Private Bradley Manning
case is headed toward a mid- winter trial. Those of us who support his cause
should redouble our efforts to secure his freedom. For the past several months
there has been a weekly stand-out in Greater Boston across from the Davis
Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Bradley Manning Square for the stand-out’s
duration) in Somerville on Friday afternoons but we have since July 4, 2012
changed the time and day to 4:00-5:00 PM on Wednesdays. This stand-out has, to
say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more
supporters present. Please join us when you can. Or better yet if you can’t
join us start a Support Bradley Manning weekly stand-out in some location in
your town whether it is in the Boston area, Berkeley or Berlin. And please sign
the petition for his release either in person or through the "Bradley
Manning Support Network". We have placed links to the "Manning
Network"and "Pardon Private Manning Square" website below.
********
Bradley Manning Support
Network-http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Manning Square website-http://freemanz.com/2012/01/20/somerville_paper_photo-bradmanningsquare/bradleymanningsquare-2011_01_13/
Remarks Made By A
Speaker At The Pardon Bradley Manning Rally At Downtown Boston Obama
Headquarters-September 6, 2012
Welcome one and all and I am
glad you could be here for this important struggle.
The Smedley Butler Brigade of
Veterans for Peace proudly stands in solidarity with, and defense of, Private
Bradley Manning and his fight for freedom from his jailers, the American
military.
Now usually when I get before
a mic or am on a march I am shouting to high heaven about some injustice.
Recently I was called strident by someone and when it comes to the struggle
against this country’s wars, the struggle for social and economic equality, and
for freedom for our political prisoners I am indeed strident.
But I am looking for
something today something personally important to me and so I will try to lower
my temperature a bit- I want, like you, for President Obama to pardon Bradley
Manning so I will be nice, or try to be.
Bradley Manning is in a sense
the poster person for all of us who have struggled against the wars of the last
decade. He stands charged with allegedly leaking information about American war
crimes and other matters of public concern to Wikileaks. We, and we are not
alone on this, do not see whistleblowing on such activities as a crime but as
an elemental humanitarian act and public service.
Private Manning has paid the
price for his alleged acts with over 800 days of pre-trial confinement and is
now facing life imprisonment for simple acts of humanity. For letting the
American people know what they perhaps did not want to know but must know- when
soldiers, American soldiers, go to war some awful things can happen and do. He
has also suffered torture at the hands of the American government for his brave
stand. We have become somewhat inured to foreign national being tortured by the
American government at places like Guantanamo and other black hole locales. We
have even become somewhat inured to American citizens being tortured and killed
by the American government by drones and other methods. But we know, or should
know, that when the American government stands accused of torturing an American
soldier for not toeing the war line then we private citizens are in serious
trouble.
Why does Private Manning need
a pardon? Did he give away the order of battle or the table of organization for
American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? No. Did he give away the
design for drones and such weapons? No. He allegedly simply blew the whistle on
something that is a hard fact of war- war crimes by American soldiers through
release of the Collateral Murder tape and what have become known as the Iraq
and Afghan War logs. This is what the American government had tried with might
and main to cover up. And what needed to be exposed. All talk of bringing
democracy, or national building, or having a war to end all wars, and the
million other lame excuses for war pale before the hard fact that in the heat
of war the real strategy is to kill and burn and let god sort out the innocent
from the guilty.
That is what Private Manning
exposed. I, and I am sure many other veterans from previous wars who saw or
knew of such things and did nothing about it, are glad that such things were
exposed. If for no other reason Private First Class Bradley Manning deserves
presidential pardon for his service. To insure that event we urge everybody to
ramp up their efforts in behalf of Bradley by signing here or online at the
Bradley Manning Support Network site the petition to the Secretary of the Army
for his release and to call the White House, the telephone number is listed on
the flyer we are handing out, and demand that President Obama pardon Private
Manning.
Today’s event is the start of
our fall campaign of behalf of Private Manning who at this time is expected to
go to trial next February. We want to build toward that trial, assuming
President Obama (or President Romney) has not pardoned him by then. We have
been holding weekly stand-outs in Davis Square in Somerville outside the MBTA
Red Line stop Wednesdays from 4:00to 5:00 PM and urge you to join us. Or better
yet start a Free Bradley Manning stand-out in your own town square. Thank you.
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