When Gaza Burns

by Charlie Mann

Gaza burns tonight.
It burns alone by the sea,
And it burns in the minds
of the masses,
Tears in their eyes with news of
dead children,
Explosions that reverberate
In the ears of those
Across the globe.
Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons,
Brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts
Feel the loss and pain
of dead relatives.

And tonight,
When Gaza burns,
It burns around the world.

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FSA Field Commander Tells Israeli TV in Syria that Sharon is his Friend if he’s against Bashar

Israeli Channel 2 snuck into Syria from Turkey with the aid of some Syrians. The channel’s reporter, Itay Engel, got to interview some field leaders in the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA). One field leader told Engel that anyone against Bashar Assad is his friend, even if it is Ariel Sharon himself.

Sources: Lebanese al-Mayadeen TV, Israeli Channel 2

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China & Neocolonialism: Let’s Be Clear About the Facts

Yesterday and today I noticed many people passing around an article from China Daily which attempts to defend China’s relations with Africa and defend it against the accusation of neocolonialism. This is my response.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Africa IS dominated by neocolonialism. All of the so-called “leaders” of Africa in fact preside over neocolonial governments ruling territories whose borders are the direct result of European imperialism. They are representatives of the African petty bourgeoisie and their class interests are directly opposed to those of African workers and poor peasants. And yes, I include such people as Robert Mugabe in this description.

These are the governments with whom China is now making deals. For example, China made deals with the so-called “Congo” – a neocolonial entity. They also have had extensive dealings with the neocolonial government of Sudan – this in fact was on the primary motivations behind American, Israeli and other efforts to detach South Sudan, further fracturing the continent.

Outside of Africa China has various deals with the Zionist State of Israel, an outright white power, settler-colonial entity whose existence is entirely at the expense of the colonially dominated Palestinian and Arab peoples. China even provides arms and funding to the Sinhalese government of Sri Lanka, yet another neocolonial entity, that has long attempted to violently put down the aspirations for national liberation of the Tamil people.

And that’s China today. Let’s not even start on “Maoist” China’s support for Mobuto in “Zaire” and Pinochet in Chile. The latter was a betrayal so great that many Maoists in Chile actually chose to take their own lives rather than face facts and join up with the nascent armed resistance lead by the MIR and FPMR.

Yes, certainly Chairman Mao was a great revolutionary, but Mao did not equal China or the Chinese Communist Party. If you are to believe the historical analysis of modern Maoists’ then by 1971-73 Mao had already lost control of China’s foreign policy to the rightists around Deng Xiaoping with the beginning of the collapse of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Regardless of whether you accept what the modern Maoists have to say or not (and I am by no means sold of their analysis), what this teaches us, or at least should teach us, is that China’s involvement in neocolonialism isn’t even a new phenomena, or even a phenomena of the era marked by the political collapse of the USSR.

In fact, we must be clear that what this all boils down to on the part of leftists outside of China who defend its modern policies is a line that is objectively anti-African (and anti-other colonized peoples) in its orientation and practice. It covers over the lack of self-determination for Africans and other colonized peoples.

So to echo comrade Jesse Alexander Nevel of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and Uhuru Solidarity Movement, how the fuck can anyone defend this?

However, all of this about China being said it must also be added that while we must be clear about the role of China and all foreign powers in Africa at this juncture, we must never lose sight of the fact that the #1 enemy of Africans and other colonized peoples is US imperialism. The destruction of imperialism’s domination over Africa can only be achieved by the complete liberation and unification of Africa and Africans worldwide under an all African socialist government (which is exactly what the African Socialist International is struggling towards).

When African workers and peasants control their own resources and economies then the stage will be set for the possibility of mutual cooperation between sovereign nations. The key thing for the African Revolution is that the African working class is the only social force capable of leading Africa out of the colonially imposed poverty and oppression — not the US, not Europe, not China, not India, etc, but AFRICANS.

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International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations: Resolution on the Situation in Syria

The plenary of the ICMLPO, held for the first time in Africa, reaffirms its support for the right of the Syrian people to live under a democratic regime: a regime that guarantees freedom, equality, social justice and dignity, as well as assures the unity and total independence of the country, including the recovery of the Golan Heights occupied by Zionism since 1967.

The ICMLPO:

1. Denounces the dangerous development of events in Syria. The popular movement of protest has been transformed into a destructive civil war. The bloodthirsty repression is striking the people, and since the beginning, the Assad regime has rejected any democratic reform that would satisfy the aspirations of the Syrian people. This situation is the consequence of the foreign reactionary, imperialist and Zionist intervention, through Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which masked by the so-called “Free Syrian Army” and under the pretext of “saving the Syria people”

2. We reaffirm that this war has nothing to do with the interests of the Syrian people and their aspirations. On the contrary, it serves the reactionary forces of the country, the region and internationally. Syria is at the moment the place of confrontation between, on the one side the U.S., France and Israel and Arab and Turkish reaction that are trying to subject Syria to Western rule and make it break its ties with Iran and Hezbollah. On the other side, Russia and China are supporting the regime to preserve their strategic interests in Syria and the region, after having lost their influence in Libya.

3. We reject all intervention by NATO in Syria under any pretext, given the dangers that this represents for the Syrian people, the peoples of the region and world peace in general. The Conference calls on the Turkish people to oppose Turkey’s intervention in Syria. It sends a call to the workers and peoples of the Western countries, in the first place of the United States, Great Britain and France, whose leaders are threatening military intervention in Syria, to pressure their governments to stop them from carrying out their criminal strategy that caused disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, etc. in the past

4. It is up to the Syrian people, in all cases, to determine their own future. The ICMLPO calls on the Syrian patriotic and democratic forces to unite to save their country from the claws of the Assad regime and the armed gangs and to prevent the foreign powers from mortgaging their future and making use of a part of their minorities to undermine their unity. The ICMLPO calls on those forces to strive to build a new, democratic, secular, independent and united Syria in which the different religions and nationalities live together in freedom and equality.

5. Calls on the patriotic, democratic and progressive forces of the region to urgently mobilize and to undertake the necessary measures of solidarity to support the patriotic and democratic forces of Syria, forces that must act to end the slaughters perpetrated against the Syrian people, to stop the destruction of the country and prevent the foreign intervention, to facilitate dialogue among its inhabitants to achieve their aspirations and break with the tyranny and foreign domination.

Organisation pour la construction d’un parti communiste ouvrier d’Allemagne

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers du Danemark – APK

Parti Communiste d’Espagne (marxiste – léniniste) – PCE(ml)

Plateforme Communiste d’Italie

Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de France – PCOF

Organisation Marxiste Léniniste Révolution de Norvège – Revolusjon !

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Turquie – TDKP

Parti des Travailleurs de Tunisie – PT

Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire de Côte d’Ivoire – PCRCI

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Marxism & Bourgeois Nationalism

As always, a re-posting of articles does not necessarily imply an absolute endorsement of the entirety of its content. However, this well-written article does make a good point about the duality of the bourgeois class, particularly in the Third World and oppressed countries.

– Espresso Stalinist.

Tripoli is burning. Thousands of black Libyans and African immigrants are rounded up by the NATO-backed rebels and thrown into prisons. Supporters of the ousted nationalist government wait with baited breath for the inevitable and bloody purge by the new rebel government. Libyan oil gushes out of Benghazi into the pipelines of Western energy companies. And militia groups, deputized by Interpol and the now-victorious National Transitional Council (NTC) government, hunt for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his family across the Libyan desert.

Now that NATO has won this asymmetrical imperialist war, at least in the short term, no one can reasonably say that the Libyan people are better off with the rebel government in power. For all of the flaws of Qaddafi’s government – and other nationalist governments like his – the Libyan people enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent, rising from the lowest standard of living in the world as of 1951. (1) The national and tribal governments had an amicable working relationship that allowed for decentralized planning and local decision-making. Moreover, Libya’s natural resources were controlled by a national government at-odds with Western energy corporations, and the wealth they generated was publicly owned and shared. (1) In other words, the Libyan nation exercised its inherent right to self-determination.

Qaddafi’s government wasn’t socialist; it was nationalist. The relations of production in Libya were capitalist in nature, but to deny that Qaddafi’s government was more progressive and objectively anti-imperialist ignores the brutal material reality that millions of Libyans are facing because of the NTC government.

As the West begins to re-calibrate its war machine and set its crosshairs on President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, Marxist-Leninists need to understand their relationship with nationalist bourgeois states, like Qaddafi’s Libya. History has objectively proven those “leftists” who were cheerleaders for the fall of Qaddafi’s government in Libya or Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq wrong.

At the same time, every bourgeois state operates fundamentally in the interest of some sector of the capitalist ruling class, whether national or international, and in time the proletariat will replace that old machinery with socialism through revolution.

I posit these theses:

Because of their relation to imperialism after the fall of the socialist bloc, the objective historical position of nationalist states in the Third World is progressive.

Marxist-Leninists must uphold the right of nations to self-determination, which in the present is principally characterized by freedom from imperialist subjugation.

Where it arises, Marxist-Leninists must support genuine revolutionary proletarian struggles for socialism against bourgeois nationalist governments.

Josef Stalin, author of Marxism & the National Question

What is nationalism?

To understand when and why Marxist-Leninists should support nationalism, it’s important to examine the material conditions from which nationalism arises.

As a starting point, it’s important to distinguish a nation from other units of social or geographical organization, like a tribe or country. Historically speaking, national identity is a relatively recent development in class society. In his seminal 1913 work, Marxism and the National Question, Josef Stalin outlines the characteristics of a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (2)

Two important characteristics to note about Stalin’s definition. First, while territory and geography is a defining feature of a nation, it is not its sole determining characteristic, meaning that within the existential boundaries of a country–itself a recent social development–many nations may exist. Second, while a common economic life is also a defining characteristic, nations are not formed on the basis of class unity. In other words, there is no proletarian nation or bourgeois nation, but rather these two classes are both part and parcel of their respective nations.

In its inception, nationalism arises as an ideology of the bourgeoisie. From Marxism and the National Question:

The chief problem for the young bourgeoisie is the problem of the market. Its aim is to sell its goods and to emerge victorious from competition with the bourgeoisie of another nationality. Hence its desire to secure its “own,” its “home” market. The market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns its nationalism. (2)

Though all classes in a given nation are capable of embracing nationalism, Stalin argues that its historical basis lies in the bourgeoisie and its need for capital accumulation as a class. While other classes can appropriate and have transformed this concept, the demand for national self-determination begins as a bourgeois demand for exclusive access and control of its own national markets and resources.

European and American nationalism, for instance, arose from the break-up of feudal empires and the fledgling bourgeoisie’s struggle to establish itself as a class via primitive accumulation. American merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and speculators, denied full access to the readily available land and resources in North America by British mercantilism, led revolution of 1776 on the basis of American national unity. Though the American revolution of 1776 was waged in the interests of the fledgling bourgeoisie, the working masses rallied to the banner of American nationalism and led a successful struggle against British colonialism. Stalin notes that the “strength of the national movement is determined by the degree to which the wide strata of the nation, the proletariat and peasantry, participate in it.” (2)

Though the role of American nationalism in 1776 was historically progressive, the triumph of the American national movement was fueled by and resulted in the further subjugation of the African masses kidnapped and violently lashed into slave labor, along with the indigenous tribes ruthlessly slaughtered in the expansion of the American empire. Dialectically, American nationalism’s progressive features became the basis for the rise of the most oppressive imperialist power in the history of the world.

Without the subjugation of the African masses as a slave labor force, the Western bourgeoisie could never have established itself as an independent ruling class. Indeed, the same American nationalism that united the colonists against British mercantilism would unite the country in waging genocidal wars for land against indigenous people and Mexicans. After the series of successful European bourgeois revolutions, all ideologically fueled through nationalism, colonialism in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific Islands became central to acquiring the cheap labor and resources necessary to generating extreme national wealth.

Because of the cheap labor and resources acquired through ruthless expansion, American capitalism transformed into imperialism, in which developed countries use force and comparative advantages in trade to violently extract resources and exploit the labor force of other colonies. Central to maintaining the colonial apparatus was the denial of equal rights and the cultivation of racist myths about colonized people, which materially manifested itself in slave labor, apartheid, and denial of access to the liberal democratic institutions established by the colonial bourgeoisie in imperialist countries.

Inevitably, the placement of capital in colonial countries allowed some small fraction of the colonized population to gain access to limited amounts of their own capital, albeit usually dependent on the colonial power. In other words, this small class of propertied yet colonized people constituted a bourgeoisie. Of this bourgeoisie, Stalin writes:

The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, repressed on every hand, is naturally stirred into movement. It appeals to its “native folk” and begins to shout about the “fatherland,” claiming that its own cause is the cause of the nation as a whole. It recruits itself an army from among its “countrymen” in the interests of… the “fatherland.” Nor do the “folk” always remain unresponsive to its appeals, they rally around its banner: the repression from above affects them too and provokes their discontent. (2)

The bourgeoisie of oppressed nations has the same basic features as the American and European bourgeoisie, in that both classes sought greater access to their own markets, resources, and labor. However, the conditions around the oppressed national bourgeoisie are qualitatively different than those around the Western bourgeoisie; they cannot seize control of their own national resources because of the fetters of colonialism.

Unquestionably the type of colonial oppression faced by the oppressed national bourgeoisie was different than that felt by the colonized proletariat and peasantry, who faced more brutal repression from the state and worse terms of labor. However, these colonized classes all had something to gain by overthrowing colonial and imperialist rule and achieving self-determination for their nation.

Nationalism becomes vital to the colonized bourgeoisie because it unites themselves and the colonized laboring masses in the struggle for national liberation. At the point where the laboring masses embrace nationalism, “the national movement begins.” (2)

National liberation struggles are not exclusively led by the nationalist bourgeoisie, and historically the bourgeoisie in colonial or semi-colonial nations is often too weak or too connected to the colonizing nation to exert itself independently as a class. Numerous examples of successful revolutionary proletarian national liberation movements exist, including the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). These successful communist movements, like the MPLA, also made use of nationalism to unite the country around the central task of expelling the colonizers. In essence, although nationalism is originally a bourgeois ideology, other revolutionary classes can appropriate it during the national liberation struggle phase.

Saddam Hussein, with an AK-47

Bourgeois nationalist states in the Third World

Because the nationalist bourgeoisie finds itself opposed to imperialism in the Third World, they can function as a tactical ally for the proletariat and peasantry in these same oppressed nations. Marxist-Leninists should never accept this alliance as permanent, however, and must carefully evaluate the place of the national bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism and the vast laboring masses.

Iraq provides one of the most potent examples of the fickle and unreliable nature of the nationalist bourgeoisie. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, for instance, was primarily bourgeois in its orientation and leadership, but it also attracted a mass following in the wake of the Iraq’s independence from British colonialism in 1958. (3)

Ba’ath was not committed to socialist revolution in Iraq, but they did preside over an aggressive nationalization program in 1972, which seized oil refineries from British and American companies and allowed them to diversify Iraq’s economy. Though these nationalizations were motivated by the access considerations of the national bourgeoisie, they also allowed the Ba’ath state to redirect revenues into public works projects that lifted nearly half the country out of poverty. In a 2006 profile piece on Saddam, PBS News writes of Ba’ath’s accomplishments:

As vice chairman, he oversaw the nationalization of the oil industry and advocated a national infrastructure campaign that built roads, schools and hospitals. The once illiterate Saddam, ordered a mandatory literacy program. Those who did not participate risked three years in jail, but hundreds of thousands learned to read. Iraq, at this time, created one of the best public-health systems in the Middle East — a feat that earned Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (4)

True to form, Saddam and Ba’ath rose to power in direct response to British colonialism. Acting in the interests of the Iraqi national bourgeoisie, they ‘took back’ the resources monopolized by the West’s colonial subjugation and used the revenues to rapidly construct a modern Iraq, which required an educated populace, secular government, a functional road system, and social infrastructure like hospitals. One can question the sincerity of Ba’ath’s actions towards the masses, but one cannot dispute the profoundly positive effect these nationalist policies had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

However, the social accomplishments of bourgeois nationalist regimes should never obscure their reactionary character. With both Ba’ath and the Communist Party of Iraq (ICP) vying for supremacy after the 1958 revolution, hostile confrontations between the parties continued until 1963, when Ba’ath launched a coup d’etat against Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim. (5) During the coup, communists organized massive militant resistance to Ba’ath, and over the course of the three days in Baghdad, “5,000 Iraqi citizens were apparently killed, including 80 Ba’th Party activists and 340 Iraqi communist activists.” (6)

Following the consolidation of Ba’ath rule in Iraq, the ICP experienced two separate waves of repression: one in 1963 following the coup and the subsequent unrest, and the other in 1977, led by Saddam. (5) Historian Bob Feldman writes in a February 2006 piece on Iraq that “By March 1963, an estimated 10,000 Communist Party of Iraq members had been arrested by the Ba’th regime and many imprisoned Iraqi leftist activists were not treated gently.” (6) Quoting Said Aburish’s book, “A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite”, Feldman continues:

The number of people eliminated remains confused and estimates range from 700 to 30,000. Putting various statements by Iraqi exiles together, in all likelihood the figure was nearer five thousand…. There were many ordinary people who were eliminated because they continued to resist after the coup became an accomplished fact, but there were also senior army officers, lawyers, professors, teachers, doctors and others. (6)

The CPI was correct to resist the 1963 Ba’ath coup and oppose the consolidation of a bourgeois nationalist regime. Iraq’s independence in 1958 had shifted their primary adversary from British colonialism to the Iraqi bourgeoisie, seeing as no colonial entity to struggle against still existed. Saddam’s case reminds Marxist-Leninists that it’s strategic to enter into a popular front with bourgeois nationalists against imperialism, but after the national liberation struggle is complete, they constitute a vicious and dangerous foe.

Palestinian women wave PFLP flags

Nationalist governments support revolutionary people’s struggles in the Third World.

Failure to conform to imperialist foreign policy is the most common wedge issue between bourgeois nationalists and the West. Often driven by pan-national ideological unity, bourgeois nationalist countries objectively support revolutionary people’s struggles and national liberation movements abroad, placing them at odds with imperialism.

Finding common ground with the Shi’a-led Iraqi resistance to US occupation, Iran has provided weapons to Iraqi insurgents, as well as training for assembling their own weapons. (7) While many allegations about Iranian aid to the Iraqi resistance are exaggerated by Western capitalist media to ratchet up tensions, journalist Michael Perry describes Iran’s rationale in a February 2007 article:

But let’s go even further and say, for the sake of argument, that the Iraqi insurgents are receiving officially authorized aid from the Iranian state. It is true that having a neighboring nation in chaos does not generally benefit any country, but the Iranians have been under the gun from the U.S. for a very long time –decades in fact. The recent threats and provocations from the Bush administration make it clear that Iran is an imminent target. I’m quite sure the Iranians realize that the quagmire in Iraq is the primary impediment to an American invasion of Iran. Troubles for U.S. forces in Iraq may buy the Iranians more time. Could the Iranians be so blind to their own self-interests? (8)

At odds with Saddam’s secular Sunni government for decades, the Iranian bourgeoisie would relish the opportunity to have an oil-rich Shi’a-dominated Iraq to its west. More pressing, however, is the collective national fear of having another US-client state in the region. There’s a reason that Tehran, and not Qatar, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, is actively subverting US occupation by materially supporting the Iraqi resistance. That reason, of course, is because the Iran’s ruling nationalist bourgeoisie has a material class interest in anti-imperialism.

The best evidence for the progressive quality of the Iranian nationalist bourgeoisie, embodied in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the attempted color revolution in 2009 by the US-backed Mir-Hossein Mousavi. This so-called ‘Green revolution’ was financially supported by both the West and the wealthy neo-liberal bourgeoisie, represented by multi-millionaire former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. (9) In the 2005 Presidential elections, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani largely on the basis of the latter’s gaudy neo-liberal orientation. A 2005 article in GreenLeft by Doug Lorimer highlights the divergent class interests represented by Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. While both accept the fundamental tenents of the Iranian capitalist state:

In the same TV interview [Ahmadinejad] claimed the country’s vast oil wealth was controlled by one powerful family — a reference to Rafsanjani, who is alleged to have enriched himself through his son’s management of the country’s nationalised oil industry. The Rafsanjanis also have investments worth US1 billion in pistachio farming, real estate, automobile manufacture and a private airline.

“The whole Iranian economy is set up to benefit the privileged few”, Ray Takeyh, a professor and director of studies at the US National Defense University’s Near East and South Asia Center in Washington, told the Bloomberg news agency last December. “Rafsanjani is the most adept, the most notorious and the most privileged.” (10)

Rafsanjani, and his running dog Mousavi, hoped to rise to power via a US-supported color revolution and open Iran to Western markets; in other words, they represent the comprador Iranian bourgeoisie. Despite the best efforts of the imperialist powers to oust Ahmadinejad–who by every objective measure legitimately won the 2009 election–the Iranian people resisted these attacks on their national sovereignty. (11) Even as he nears the end of his two terms as President, Ahmadinejad remains popular with the Iranian masses because of his consistent anti-imperialism on the world stage, along with the social programs he has championed at home despite Western sanctions.

Pivoting to another nationalist state, Syria has consistently functioned as the most progressive of the multitude of Middle Eastern countries by substantially supporting the major national liberation movements in the region. Trinity University professor of history David Lesch writes in his fantastic book, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria that:

Syria does not deny claims of support for Hizbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, viewing that such operations constitute legitimate resistance and not terrorism; indeed, Damascus often views Israeli activities vis-a-vis the Palestinians and its actions in Lebanon as terrorism. (12)

Since the Syrian Ba’ath party took power in 1963, the state has always supported the Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles and sought to keep Israeli imperialism in-check. (13) Sharing the common trait of secularism, Syria allows the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the largest Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement in Palestine, to operate comfortably out of Damascus and materially supports their struggle with supplies and resources. (14) Because of the Syrian bourgeoisie’s desire for regional secular pan-Arab unity–rooted in the Alawi faith of President Bashar al-Assad and others–and the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, Assad’s government is objectively anti-imperialist.

Similarly, Saddam’s Ba’ath state in Iraq financially supported and championed the cause of Palestinian national liberation, which was played up by the West in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion. On March 13, 2003–just six days before the invasion–the BBC reported, “Saddam Hussein has paid out thousands of dollars to families of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel. Relatives of at least one suicide attacker as well as other militants and civilians gathered in a hall in Gaza City to receive cheques.” (15) Later, the same article estimates that the Iraqi government had paid out nearly $35 million to Palestinian families since 2000.

In hindsight, the timing and purpose of this BBC article is obvious, but that Saddam’s support for ‘terrorist groups’ was one of the reasons for the 2003 invasion demonstrates the extreme degree to which his support for the Palestinians offended and scared the West. Startlingly few people remember that Israel invaded Syrian airspace and bombed a peaceful nuclear power plant in September 2007 for many of the same reasons. When a bourgeois state in the Third World becomes nationalist in its orientation, as opposed to comprador bourgeois states, it demands a response from the West.

Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

Never confuse your primary and secondary contradictions!

Although a multitude of contradictions exist in class societies, at any given time, one of these contradictions is principal in comparison to the others. If a person goes for a walk, decides s/he wants a cigarette, and then gets bitten by a rattlesnake, the order of the day is to call a doctor and receive medical attention immediately for the venom. As much as that person might have wanted–or even needed–a cigarette, only a great fool would tell this person that s/he should prioritize smoking over seeking medical attention.

Primary and secondary contradictions seem like common sense, but a multitude of so-called ‘leftists’ and revolutionaries confuse them when analyzing imperialism. Ultimately, the approach that Marxist-Leninists ought to take to bourgeois nationalist governments is tied up in correctly identifying and acting on primary and secondary contradictions.

Though largely ignored in Marxist-Leninist writings, the experience of the Ethiopian revolution offers valuable insight as to how communists ought to struggle against bourgeois nationalist governments. Having played an instrumental role in repelling the Italian fascist occupation of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I began as an archetype bourgeois nationalist. He encouraged pan-African unity, promoted decolonization, and began an aggressive process of modernizing Ethiopia.

That said, Selassie’s government became firmly aligned with the West after World War II and opened the country up to an influx of foreign capital. Presiding over and encouraging severely unequal land distribution, Selassie’s government was also responsible for a series of famines and foot shortages, the worst of which claimed an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 victims. (16) Ahmed Khan of the Communist Workers and Peasants Party in Pakistan writes this of Selassie’s government:

During the monarchical period, life expectancy was a mere 38 years and 90% of the people were illiterate. Only a tiny handful of feudal landowners and royal sycophants controlled the entire wealth of the country.

…

Severe drought and famine engulfed Ethiopia which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and led to widespread hunger and food crises in the urban areas. (16)

Even bourgeois sources regard these famines as the product of Selassie’s destructive policies. A 1997 report by Human Rights Watch called “Rebellion and Famine in the North under Haile Selassie” indicted the nationalist government for its culpability in this famine, saying:

The Wollo famine was popularly blamed on drought, a backward and impoverishedsocial system, and the cover-up attempted by the imperial government. These factors were all-important — though it must be remembered that specific actions by the government, especiallyafter the Ras Gugsa and Weyane revolts, were instrumental in creating the absence of development. (17)

By 1974, Selassie’s bourgeois government lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. Because of the widespread crises brought on by Selassie’s selective industrial development and close trade relations with the West, Ethiopian workers and peasants began to mobilize against the government. Khan writes, “The inability of the monarchy to deal with the crisis and the propensity of the feudalists to bleed the peasantry dry led to increasing hatred for the monarchy on part of the oppressed peasants, workers and a section of the emergent urban middle class.” (16)

Although no Marxist-Leninist vanguard party existed in Ethiopia at this time, a communist council of military officers known as the Derg organized alongside labor leaders in the urban centers and peasant communities in the countryside to produce the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. (18)

The revolutionary experience of the Ethiopian people in overthrowing Selassie’s government and establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia–firmly committed to socialist construction–has tremendous lessons for Marxist-Leninists about their relation to bourgeois nationalists. Objectively, Selassie’s government was essential to the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle waged against fascist Italy in 1935. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) went so far as to launch a “Hands off Ethiopia” campaign in the same year, which included substantial demonstrations supporting Ethiopia’s right to self-determination (19).

However, classes do not exist in a vacuum. While one class may play a historically progressive role at one time, a change in the material conditions–like increased trade relations with the West following World War II–may render that same class reactionary. For as important as nationalism was to Ethiopia repelling fascist Italy in 1941, the same nationalist government’s reactionary policies reached a boiling point in 1974, resulting in a popular socialist revolution.

The lesson from Ethiopia is clear: Marxist-Leninists in nationalist states must organize with a keen awareness of primary and secondary contradictions. For a moment, let’s assume that an organization like the Derg existed in Ethiopia circa-1935. Said organization would commit a grave error in throwing in with the fascists in hopes of toppling an admittedly reactionary monarchy. First, the organization would undeniably alienate the Ethiopian masses, who despite their poverty and poor military training, flocked to defend their homeland, the only African state never colonized by the West, from fascist occupation. (20) Second, although Selassie’s bourgeois government was at-odds with the interests of Ethiopian workers and peasants, that contradiction receded into the background the moment that fascist Italy began poison gassing entire villages of Ethiopians.

When Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia in 1935, there was only one organized military force capable of mounting a resistance: Selassie’s nationalist government. Unsuccessful at first, Ethiopian patriots of all classes, albeit predominantly workers and peasants, struggled onward to victory and liberation in 1941. That this liberation struggle took place across class lines on a nationalist basis is no small detail. It’s paramount that Marxist-Leninists, in light of Iraq, Libya, and increasing aggression towards Syria, comfortably identify anti-imperialism as the primary contradiction facing the international proletarian revolution today.

Proletarian internationalism is superior in every way to bourgeois nationalism, but so long as neo-colonialism and imperialism exist, communists must unite all who can be united in the anti-imperialist struggle. Simultaneously, though, communists must remember the other side of the dialectic: When bourgeois nationalists become complicit partners in Western imperialism and alienate themselves from the masses, communists must never hesitate to overthrow that state with extreme prejudice and on its ruins erect revolutionary socialism.

The irrelevance and obscurity of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) following the toppling of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime demonstrates the devastating effects of incorrectly identifying primary and secondary contradictions.

Saddam was by no means a consistent anti-imperialist throughout his reign. Though Ba’athist Iraq established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China, it still retained casual relations with the West; relations that were strengthened following Saddam’s condemnation of Soviet intervention in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, as well as the Iranian Revolution in 1979. (21) Between the overthrow of the US-backed Shah, the establishment of a militant Islamic republic, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq began to work closely with the West to curb Tehran’s influence in the Middle East. Though the Reagan Administration would notoriously fund the Iranians also, the US comfortably placed their initial bets behind Saddam in the devastating Iran-Iraq war of 1983-1988.

Even though the imperialists used Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war to sow chaos in the Middle East, the Ba’ath state remained largely at odds with Western interests because of its nationalist orientation. Refusing to privatize its oil industry and allow Western capital to fully penetrate its national markets, the West increasingly saw Saddam as a danger to imperialist interests in the Middle East. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait over territorial disputes, the subsequent Gulf War, and Saddam’s unabashed support for the Palestinian liberation struggle cemented Iraq’s status as a pariah state in the eyes of the West by the early 1990s.

In an effort to eliminate an unfriendly pro-Palestinian government perched atop massive oil reserves, the US and UK fabricated the now-infamous falsehood that Saddam’s government had weapons of mass destruction. While communists around the world uniformly condemned the imperialist invasion of Iraq, “the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) welcomed Saddam Hussein’s removal and is happy that the ousted president is to be put on trial.” (22) Exhausted and furious from decades of repression by Ba’ath, the ICP’s position is understandable on a purely visceral and emotional level. However, Marxist-Leninists must remain level-headed during periods of crisis and correctly identify primary and secondary contradictions; a task at which the ICP uniformally failed.

In the coming years, the ICP would come to participate in the puppet state erected by the West–most recently in the liberalizing ‘Political Reconciliation’ movement–and integrate themselves into this comprador government imposed from without. (23) Despite comprising the strongest opposition to the Ba’ath government during the 1960s, the ICP has descended into relative obscurity, having lost any credibility with the masses for their blunder. Instead, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other religious sects comprised the mass base of resistance after Saddam was captured, though their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class character has led them to also participate in Maliki’s bogus government.

One would think that the international ‘left’ would have learned about correctly handling primary and secondary contradictions after witnessing the failure of the ICP to lead a mass revolutionary resistance to imperialist occupation. Instead, the same ‘leftists’ who witnessed the invasion of Iraq cheerled a racist, imperialist-backed ‘rebel movement’ in Libya, and many made the full leap into supporting NATO’s invasion to oust Qaddafi.

When a nation achieves self-determination, the secondary contradiction between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie will ascend to the forefront as the new primary contradiction. Before that time, however, the primary contradiction facing the masses in oppressed nations is between imperialism and national liberation. In bourgeois nationalist states, this contradiction can and must draw in all who can be united to strike a blow against imperialism.

Countries want independence.

Nations want liberation.

People want revolution.

—-

(1) Gerald A. Perreira, “Libya Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective,” March 4, 2011, Dissent Voice, http://bit.ly/mQT4iz

(2) Josef Stalin, Marxism & the National Question, March-May 1913, http://bit.ly/cwOCSQ

(3) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 41-42

(4) Jessica Moore, “Saddam Hussein’s Rise to Power,” 2003, PBS News, http://to.pbs.org/65tro

(5) Turi Munthe (Editor), The Saddam Hussein Reader, 2002, pg. xv-xviii

(6) Bob Feldman, “A People’s History of Iraq: 1950 to November 1963,” February 2, 2006, Toward Freedom, http://bit.ly/qwCar2

(7) CNN, “Iraqi insurgents being trained in Iran, US says,” April 11, 2007, http://bit.ly/nHra0S

(8) Michael Perry, “So what if Iran is Interfering in Iraq?,” February 21, 2007, AntiWar.com, http://bit.ly/ogwqxd

(9) Paul Craig Roberts, “Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?,” June 20-21, 2009, CounterPunch, http://bit.ly/pmXj7w

(10) Doug Lorimer, “IRAN: A vote against neoliberalism,” July 6, 2005, Green Left, http://bit.ly/nYcOll

(11) Terror Free America, New America Foundation, “Ahmadinejad Front Runner in Upcoming Elections,” June 12, 2009, http://bit.ly/k8x0w

(12) David W. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria, 2005, pg. 102

(13) Reuters, “Syrian President Vows to Keep Supporting Hezbollah, Hamas,” August 2, 2007, http://bit.ly/qex219

(14) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, “PFLP condemns attack on Syria,” November 3, 2008, Fight Back! News, http://bit.ly/qWDlmo

(15) BBC News, “Palestinians get Saddam funds,” March 13, 2008, http://bbc.in/9BWsXr

(16) Ahmed Khan, “Defend Comrade Mengistu! On the struggle of our Ethiopian brothers,” November 19, 2008, Red Diary, http://bit.ly/jbYhks

(17) Human Rights Watch, “3. Rebellion and Famine in the North Under Haile Selassie,” 1997, http://bit.ly/pzy53w

(18) Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia, 1988, Cambridge University Press.

(19) Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, 1990, pg. 123.

(20) A.J. Barker, The Rape of Ethiopia, 1936, 1971.

(21) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 44

(22) Shaheen Chughtai, “Iraqi communists celebrate change,” June 1, 2004, http://aje.me/qp5rVW

(23) Talal Alrubaie, “The Iraqi Communist Party and Hegel’s Owl of Minerva,” February 2, 2010, http://bit.ly/rqF6fr

Source

The Costs of Counterrevolution: Must We Ignore Imperialism?

excerpted from the book

The Sword and the Dollar

Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race

by Michael Parenti

St. Martin’s Press, 1989

The Costs of Counterrevolution

p 117

Throughout the 1980s, the counterrevolutionary mercenaries who have waged war against such countries as Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique, were described as “guerrillas.” In fact, they won little support from the people of those countries, which explains why they remained so utterly dependent upon aid from the United States and South Africa. In an attempt to destroy the revolutionary economy and thus increase popular distress and discontent, these counterrevolutionaries attacked farms, health workers, technicians, schools, and civilians. Unlike a guerrilla army that works with and draws support from the people, the counterrevolutionary mercenaries kidnap, rape, kill and in other ways terrorize the civilian population. These tactics have been termed “self-defeating,” but they have a logic symptomatic of the underlying class politics. Since the intent of the counterrevolutionaries is to destroy the revolution, and since the bulk of the people support the revolution, then the mercenaries target the people.

In Mozambique, for example, over a period of eight years the South African-financed rebels laid waste to croplands, reducing the nation’s cereal production enough to put almost 4 million people in danger of starvation. The rebels destroyed factories, rail and road links, and marketing posts, causing a sharp drop in Mozambique’s production and exports. They destroyed 40 percent of the rural schools and over 500 of the 1,222 rural health clinics built by the Marxist government. And they killed hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children. But they set up no “liberated” areas and introduced no program for the country; nor did they purport to have any ideology or social goals.

Likewise, the mercenary rebel force in Angola, financially supported throughout the 1980s by the apartheid regime in South Africa and looked favorably upon by the Reagan administration, devastated much of the Angolan economy, kidnapping and killing innocent civilians, displacing about 600,000 persons and causing widespread hunger and malnutrition. Assisted by White South African troops, the rebels destroyed at least half of Angola’s hospitals and clinics. White South African military forces, aided by jet fighters, engaged in direct combat on the side of the counterrevolutionaries. The rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, offered no social program for Angola but was lavish in his praise of the apartheid rulers in Pretoria and critical of Black South African leaders.

So with the contra forces that repeatedly attacked Nicaragua from Honduras for some seven years. In all that time they were unable to secure a “liberated” zone nor any substantial support from the people. They represented a mercenary army that amounted to nothing much without US money-and nothing much with it, having failed to launch a significant military offensive for years at a time. Like other counterrevolutionary “guerrillas” they were quite good at trying to destabilize the existing system by hitting soft targets like schools and farm cooperatives and killing large numbers of civilians, including children. (While the US news media unfailingly reported that the Nicaraguans or Cubans had “Soviet-made weapons,” they said nothing about the American, British, and Israeli arms used by counterrevolutionaries to kill Angolans, Namibians, Black South Africans, Western Saharans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans.)

Like counterrevolutionaries in other countries, the Nicaraguan contras put forth no economic innovations or social programs other than some vague slogans. As the New York Times reported, when asked about “the importance of political action in the insurgency” the contra leaders “did not seem to assign this element of revolutionary warfare a high priority.” They did not because they were not waging a “revolution” but a counterrevolution. What kind of a program can counterrevolutionaries present? If they publicize their real agenda, which is to open the country once more to the domination of foreign investors and rich owners, they would reveal their imperialist hand.

p 120

Like most of the Third World, Nicaragua during the Somoza dictatorship was one of imperialism’s ecological disasters, with its unrestricted industrial and agribusiness pollution and deforestation. Upon coming to power, the Sandinistas initiated rain forest and wildlife conservation measures and alternative energy programs. The new government also adopted methods of cutting pesticides to a minimum, prohibiting the use of the deadlier organochlorides commonly applied in other countries. Nicaragua’s environmental efforts stand in marked contrast to its neighboring states. But throughout the 1980s, the program was severely hampered by contra attacks that killed more than thirty employees of Nicaragua’s environmental and state forestry agencies, and destroyed agricultural centers and reclamation projects.

p 121

The US government is ready to accept just about anyone who emigrates from a Communist country. In contrast, the hundreds of millions of Third World refugees from capitalism, who would like to come to this country because the conditions of their lives are so hopeless, are not allowed to come in …

*

Must We Ignore Imperialism?

p 128

Woodrow Wilson, 1907

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

p 129

Ronald Reagan
What I want to see above all else is that this country remains a country where someone can always be rich. That’s the thing we have that must be preserved.

p 129

Jeff McMahan

U.S. reasons for wanting to control the third world are to some extent circular. Thus third world resources are required in part to guarantee military production, and increased military production is required in part to maintain and expand U.S. control over third world resources …. Instrumental goals eventually come to be seen as ends in themselves. Initially the pursuit of overseas bases is justified by the need to maintain stability, defend friendly countries from communist aggression, and so on-in other words, to subjugate and control the third world; but eventually the need to establish and maintain overseas bases becomes one of the reasons for wanting to subjugate and control the third world.

p 131

Henry Kissinger, June 27, 1970 about Chile

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.

*  *  *  *

p 196

The people who make US foreign policy are known to us-and they are well known to each other. Top policymakers and advisors are drawn predominantly from the major corporations and from policy groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee for Economic Development, the Trilateral Commission, the Business Roundtable, and the Business Council. Membership in these groups consists of financiers, business executives, and corporate lawyers. Some also have a sprinkling of foundation directors, news editors, university presidents, and academicians.

Most prominent is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Incorporated in 1921, the CFR numbered among its founders big financiers such as John D. Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich, and J. P. Morgan. Since World War II, CFR members have included David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (and erstwhile CFR president); Allen Dulles, Wall Street lawyer and longtime director of the CIA; and, in the 1970s, all the directors of Morgan Guaranty Trust; nine directors of Banker’s Trust; five directors of Tri-Continental holding company; eight directors of Chase Manhattan; and directors from each of the following: Mellon National Bank, Bank of America, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, General Dynamics, Union Carbide, IBM, AT&T, ITT, and the New York Times (a partial listing).

One member of the Kennedy administration, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described the decision-making establishment as “an arsenal of talent which had so long furnished a steady supply of always orthodox and often able people to Democratic as well as Republican administrations. 115 President Kennedy’s secretary of state was Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and member of the CFR; his secretary of defense was Robert McNamara, president of Ford Motor Company; his secretary of the treasury was C. Douglas Dillon, head of a prominent Wall Street banking firm and member of the CFR. Nixon’s secretary of state was Henry Kissinger, a Nelson Rockefeller protégé who also served as President Ford’s secretary of state. Ford appointed fourteen CFR members to his administration. Seventeen top members of Carter’s administration were participants of the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission, including Carter himself and Vice President Walter Mondale. Carter’s secretary of state was Cyrus Vance, Wall Street lawyer, director of several corporations, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and member of the CFR.

Reagan’s first secretary of state was Alexander Haig, former general and aide to President Nixon, president of United Technologies, director of several corporations including Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, and member of the CFR. Reagan’s next secretary of state was George Shultz, president of Bechtel Corporation, director of Morgan Guaranty Trust, director of the CFR, and advisor of the Committee for Economic Development (CED). Reagan’s secretary of defense was Caspar Weinberger, vice president of Bechtel, director of other large corporations, and member of the Trilateral Commission. The secretary of treasury and later chief of staff was Donald Regan, chief executive officer of Merrill, Lynch, trustee of the CED, member of the CFR and of the Business Roundtable. Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, was director of the ExportImport Bank, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Nixon, and partner in a prominent Wall Street law firm. At least a dozen of Reagan’s top administrators and some thirty advisors were CFR members.

Members of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission have served in just about every top executive position, including most cabinet and subcabinet slots, and have at times virtually monopolized the membership of the National Security Council, the nation’s highest official policymaking body.’ The reader can decide whether they compose (1) a conspiratorial elite, (2) the politically active members of a ruling class, or (3) a selection of policy experts and specialists in the service of pluralistic democracy.

These policymakers are drawn from overlapping corporate circles and policy groups that have a capacity unmatched by any other interest groups in the United States to fill top government posts with persons from their ranks. While supposedly selected to serve in government because they are experts and specialists, they really are usually amateurs and “generalists.” Being president of a giant construction firm and director of a bank did not qualify George Shultz to be Nixon’s secretary of labor nor his secretary of the treasury. Nor did Shultz bring years of expert experience in foreign affairs to his subsequent position as Reagan’s secretary of state. But he did bring a proven capacity to serve well the common interests of corporate America.

Rather than acting as special-interest lobbies for particular firms, policy groups look after the class-wide concerns of the capitalist system. This is in keeping with the function of the capitalist state itself. While not indifferent to the fate of the overseas operations of particular US firms, the state’s primary task is to protect capitalism as a system, bolstering client states and opposing revolutionary or radically reformist ones.

p 200

Far from being powerless, the pressure of democratic opinion in this country and abroad has been about the only thing that has restrained US leaders from using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and intervening with US forces in Angola, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. How best to pursue policies that lack popular support is a constant preoccupation of White House policymakers. President Reagan’s refusal to negotiate with the Soviets in the early 1980s provoked the largest peace demonstrations in the history of the United States. Eventually he had to offer an appearance of peace by agreeing to negotiate. To give this appearance credibility, he actually had to negotiate and even reluctantly arrive at unavoidable agreement on some issues, including the 1987 INF treaty.

Evidence of the importance of mass democratic opinion is found in the remarkable fact that the United States has not invaded Nicaragua. Even though the US had a firepower and striking force many times more powerful than the ones used in the previous eleven invasions of Nicaragua, and a president (Reagan) more eager than any previous president to invade, the invasion did not happen. Not because it would have been too costly in lives but because it would have been politically too costly. President Reagan would not have balked at killing tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and losing say 5,000 Americans to smash the Red Menace in Central America. When 241 Marines were blown away in one afternoon in Lebanon, Reagan was ready to escalate his involvement in that country. Only the pressure of democratic forces in the USA and elsewhere caused him to leave Lebanon and refrain from invading Nicaragua. He did not have the political support to do otherwise. Invasion was politically too costly because it was militarily too costly even though logistically possible. It would have caused too much of an uproar at home and throughout Latin America and would have lost him, his party, and his policies too much support.

p 203

The policies pursued by US leaders have delivered misfortune upon countless innocents, generating wrongs more horrendous than any they allegedly combat. The people of this country and other nations are becoming increasingly aware of this. The people know that nuclear weapons bring no security to anyone and that interventions on the side of privileged autocracies and reactionary governments bring no justice. They also seem to know that they pay most of the costs of the arms race and many of the costs of imperialism. From South Korea to South Africa, from Central America to the Western Sahara, from Europe to North America, people are fighting back, some because they have no choice, others because they would choose no other course but the one that leads to peace and justice.

Source

30 Years since Sabra and Shatila

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was carried out on September 16, 1982, in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and lasted for three days at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Lebanese Phalange Party and the South Lebanon Army (SLA). The death toll in the massacres is not clearly defined. Estimates range between 3,500 and 5,000 dead, men and children, women and elderly unarmed civilians, the majority of whom were Palestinians, but also including Lebanese.

In that time, the camp was surrounded entirely by the South Lebanon Army and the Israel Defense Forces, which was under the command of Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan. The leadership of the occupying forces were under the command of the influential Falangist administrator named Elie Hobeika. The forces entered the camp and began the cold-blooded implementation of the massacre that shook the world without mercy, and away from the media, which later reported they had used knives and other methods in the liquidation of the camp’s residents.

The Massacre at Sabra and Shatila, Thirty Years Later

A Never-Ending Horror Story

by SONJA KARKAR

It happened thirty years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]

People Tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the power shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their hearts gave out – the electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs

People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable with the gaping holes that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully ended.

Women raped. Not once – but two, three, four times – horribly violated, their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.

Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from their tiny torsos, so hard to know to whom they belonged – just mounds of bloodied limbs amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.

Families executed. Blood, blood and more blood sprayed on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.

There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.

Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2] The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women. [3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7] Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat – young boys all shot at point-blank range. [8]

And most numbing of all are the recollections of the survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad Srour, 35 said:

“I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling “Mama! Mama!” then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead.”[9]

The statistics of those killed vary, but even according to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11] Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what are clear crimes against humanity.

Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said:

“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”[12]

Thirty years later it is no different.

The political developments

What happened must be set against the background of a Lebanon that had been invaded by the Israeli army only months earlier, supposedly in ‘retaliation’ for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London on 4 June 1982. Israel attributed the attempt to Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) then resident in Beirut. In reality, it was a rival militant group headed by Abu Nidal. Israel wanted to oust the PLO from Lebanon altogether and on 6 June 1982, Israel began its devastating assault on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population in the southern part of Lebanon. Lebanese government casualty figures numbered the dead at around 19,000 with some 30,000 wounded, but these numbers are hardly accurate because of the mass graves and other bodies lost in the rubble. [13]

By 1 September, a cease-fire had been mediated by United States envoy Philip Habib, and Arafat and his men surrendered their weapons and were evacuated from Beirut with guarantees by the US that the civilians left behind in the camps would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force. That guarantee was not kept and the vacuum then created, paved the way for the atrocities that followed.

As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some “2,000 terrorists” he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September leaving the “mopping-up” of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia, known as the Phalangists. The next day, the Phalangists – armed and trained by the Israeli army – entered the camps and proceeded to massacre the unarmed civilians while Israel’s General Yaron and his men watched the entire operations. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.

Inquiries, charges and off scot-free

Although Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not find any Israeli directly responsible, it did find that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for “not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre” before sending the Phalangists into the camps. It, therefore, lamely recommended that the Israeli prime minister consider removing him from office. [14] Sharon resigned but remained as Minister without portfolio and joined two parliamentary commissions on defence and Lebanese affairs. There is no doubt, as Chomsky points out “that the inquiry was not intended for people who have a prejudice in favour of truth and honesty”, but it certainly gained support for Israel in the US Congress and among the public. [15] It took an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous operation as a “criminal massacre” and declaring it an act of genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.

It was not until 2001 that a law suit was filed in Belgium by the survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims against Sharon alleging his personal responsibility. However, the court did not allow for “universal jurisdiction” – a principle which was intended to remove safe havens for war criminals and allow their prosecution across states. The case was won on appeal and the trial allowed to proceed, but without Sharon who by then was prime minister of Israel and had immunity. US interference led to the Belgian Parliament gutting the universal jurisdiction law and by the time the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague the following year, the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre could no longer be tried because its terms of reference did not allow it to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide pre-dating 1 July 2002. Neither Sharon nor those who carried out the massacres have ever been punished for their horrendous crimes.

The bigger picture

The length of time since these acts were carried out should be no impediment to exposing the truth. More than 60 years after the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe, the world still mourns and remembers and erects monuments and museums to that violent holocaust. How they are done, to whom they are done and to how many does not make the crimes any more or less heinous. They can never be justified even on the strength of one state’s rationale that another people ought to be punished, or worse still, are simply inferior or worthless beings. It should lead all of us to question on whose judgment are such decisions made and how can we possibly justify such crimes at all?

The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing continues today. The most recent being the 2008-2009 Gaza massacre – that 3 week merciless onslaught, a festering sore without relief as the people are further punished by an impossible siege that denies them their most basic rights.

Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded – a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.

This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, thirty years on.

Sonja Karkar is the founder of Women for Palestine (WFP), a Melbourne-based human rights group and co-founder of Australians for Palestine (AFP), an advocacy group that provides a voice for Palestine at all levels of Australian society. She is the editor of the website http://www.australiansforpalestine.com. Her email address is sonjakarkar@womenforpalestine.org

Footnotes:

[1] Dr Ang Swee Chai, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, Grafton Books, London, 1989

[2] James MacManus, Guardian, 20 September 1982

[3] Loren Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 September 1982

[4] Elaine Carey, Daily Mail, 20 September 1982

[5] Robert Fisk, “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War”, London: Oxford University Press, 1990 [6] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[7] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[8] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[9] Lebanese Daily Star, 16 September 1998

[10] Amnon Kapeliouk, “Sabra & Chatila – Inquiry into a Massacre”, November 1982

[11] Schiff and Ya’ari,, Israel’s Lebanon War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984,

[12] Robert Fisk, Fifteen Years After the Bloodbath, The World turns its Back, shaml.org, 1997 [13] Noam Chomsky, “The Fatal Triangle” South End Press, Cambridge MA, p.221

[14] The Complete Kahan Commission Report, Princeton, Karz Cohl, 1983, p. 125 (Hereafter, the Kahan Commission Report). [15] Chomsky, ibid. p.406

[16] The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon, Sean MacBride, 1983 (referred to as the International Commission of Inquiry or MacBride report)

[17] United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 16 December 1982

[18] MacBride report, ibid. p.179

Source

Fighting the Bigger Oppressor First

A Syrian detainee, who was arrested over participation in the protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, is seen in a prison vehicle at Damascus police leadership building to sign his release papers 11 July 2012. (Photo: Reuters – Khaled al- Hariri)

By: Amal Saad-Ghorayeb

In March 2011, a commentator for al-Jazeera wrote: “Events in Egypt and Tunisia have revealed that Arab unity against internal repression is stronger than that against foreign threat.” While this may have been an over-generalization at the time, events in Syria have borne out this assumption. This is due to the deep polarization between Arabs who place primacy on opposition to the Syria regime’s authoritarianism and Arabs who view such opposition as secondary to Assad’s struggle against imperialism and Zionism.

In this essay, I will outline the main moral and intellectual considerations informing the resistance or anti-imperialist camp’s (known as mumanaists in Arabic) prioritization of confronting imperialism over other forms of domination.

The Violence in Syria is Misrepresented

Although supporters of the Syrian opposition often accuse this camp of being ready to countenance any type of violence, no matter how heinous, in the interests of the resistance priority, this accusation ignores the fact that the seeming consensus on the nature and scope of the violence in Syria is a purely manufactured one. Mumanaists do not view the current violence engulfing Syria as a dictatorial regime’s one-sided brutal suppression of peaceful protesters, as is commonly misrepresented in mainstream media, but rather, as a civil war by proxy that the Syrian army was dragged into as it sought to stamp out a US-NATO-GCC-backed armed insurrection.

While supporters of the Syrian uprising contend that this perception of the conflict is designed to reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by the regime’s brutality, few mumanaists harbor the illusion that the regime is not repressive. What they do believe, however, is that the extent of this repression has been grossly distorted by mainstream media. To bolster their argument, they point to a growing number of mainstream media reports which have admitted to the existence a singular master-narrative that is widely used to frame the conflict.

As acknowledged by the BBC in its recent self-study on its coverage of the “Arab Spring”, “journalism is not an exercise in simply relaying raw and untreated facts to the audience…This cannot be done without some sort of framework – if you will, a “narrative” – and therefore the construction of such a narrative by journalists should not be treated as if it were a sin in itself.”

Writing on Syria in the Sunday Times, Peter McKay contends that “It’s not simply uprisings by ground-down peasants against tyrants who repress them. It’s about a transfer of power to rival clans and/or religious groups. About a continuation of the old US-Russia Cold War stand-off.” In a similar vein, the BBC’s world news editor, Jon Williams, has recently admitted in a blog post on Syria that “stories are never black and white – often shades of grey.”

But such admissions are the exception rather than the norm in a psych-ops campaign that is stage-managed by US-NATO-GCC information warlords to bring about a military victory for proxy forces. At the helm of this campaign are politically embedded journalists, political activists and human rights representatives who work in concert to ensure that all coverage of the Syrian crisis remains confined within a carefully guarded body of self-referential “evidence.”

The effectiveness of this information warfare in enlisting public opinion in support of military intervention is substantiated by the aforementioned BBC report: “No doubt these reports…helped stimulate empathy for the [Libyan] rebel cause among the British public, and thereby to facilitate, if not actually bring about the NATO intervention – as similar reports had done in northern Iraq as long ago as 1991.”

Imperialism Cannot Be Equated with Authoritarianism

The second premise guiding the resistance camp’s position on Syria is that imperialism cannot be equated either morally or politically with authoritarianism, let alone demoted to a secondary rank. By contrast, the liberal democratic impulse driving the “Arab Spring” has led some to declare the obsolescence of anti-imperialism as a unifying force in the region. Al-Jazeera commentator Lamis Andoni epitomizes this view with her assertion that “The old ‘wisdom’ of past revolutionaries that liberation from foreign domination precedes the struggle for democracy has fallen.” In the new Arab Spring vernacular, revolutionary struggle is no longer synonymous with resisting US-NATO interventions and Israeli aggression, but has come to mean confronting internal repression even when that confrontation benefits the Empire and its colonial outpost, Israel.

Furthermore, this new liberal political discourse and the preeminent status accorded to securing internal freedoms has served to effectively remove Palestine from the forefront of Arab concerns. In effect, Palestine has been relegated to just another Arab nation which is responsible for freeing itself from its own domestic, i.e. intra-Palestinian, authoritarian rulers, over and above its Israeli oppressors. The mumanaists’ response to this logic is multi-pronged.

As a matter of principle, neither Palestine nor questions of national self-determination in general are viewed as fashions; justice doesn’t go out of style for truly conscientized and committed intellectuals and activists for whom Palestine remains the cornerstone of Arab political identity. What is more, the resistance camp sees this new trend of reducing Palestine to a national cause that belongs exclusively to the Palestinians as a very dangerous development that requires Arabs to unlearn generations of political socialization in order to expunge Palestine from their political consciousness.

Some supporters of the Syrian opposition have argued that the insistence on maintaining the primacy of the Palestinian cause over the concern with authoritarianism, and the concomitant precedence given to Israeli violence over the Assad regime’s repression, is tantamount to claiming that Syrian blood is cheaper than Palestinian blood. But this charge misunderstands the extent of Israel’s iniquity by locating it solely in Zionist aggression, human rights violations or in the circumstances of the occupation. The resistance camp conceives of Israel as the greatest injustice because of its very existence and the unprecedented nature of its oppression, which renders it not merely a human rights cause, but humanity’s cause.

As detailed by the Never Before Campaign for Palestine: “What happened in Palestine since 1947 has never happened before, in terms of the combination of the elements: brutality and racism of the occupier, the injustice of granting one peoples land to others, duration of this injustice, complicity and apathy of the civilized world as well as Palestinian people’s will to resist all that against all odds.”

Even on the level of violence alone, Israel’s violence by far exceeds any domestic repression in so far as it is systematic and genocidal violence that is deeply embedded in its military ethos and strategic culture. Indeed, the celebration of violence is part of its collective consciousness as illustrated by a number of recent examples on social media where many Israelis celebrated the killing of Palestinian children. More importantly for mumanaists, any parallels drawn with Israel are Zionist-enabling in so far as comparing Israel’s violence with that practiced by repressive Arab regimes, legitimizes Israel’s existence as just another authoritarian regime in the region.

Not only are such comparisons with Israel morally and ideologically indefensible, but the very equivalence between imperialism and authoritarianism is an intellectually flawed one that is rooted in a liberal-leftist tradition that conceives of all deployments of power as being equally coercive and oppressive, irrespective of the global hierarchy of power.

In the mumanaists’ conceptual hierarchy of oppression, imperialism and authoritarianism are situated in two entirely different levels of domination. This rank-ordering is not based on an ideological abstraction that is divorced from political reality or on the rhetorical value of anti-imperialist sentiment, but on immediate, practical concerns. Imperialism is not evil because it is practiced by the West, but because it harms people’s lives and interests. Empire kills; it kills vast amounts of people, whether it occupies countries directly or intervenes militarily, economically or politically, it is responsible for innumerable deaths, destruction and impoverishment of all those in its wake.

Thus, viewed from a purely utilitarian perspective, or according to a basic cost-benefit calculus, there is no comparison between the type of violence autocratic regimes exercise when they repress dissent and the death and devastation wreaked by Empire. This moral logic would still hold even if we were to set aside the Assad regime’s anti-imperialist and resistance credentials and assume it was neutral on Palestine; when faced with a choice between the Assad regime’s repression on the one hand and the threat of NATO invasion, coupled with the externally-instigated sectarian civil war and terrorism on the other, anti-imperialists and the majority of Syrians alike will choose the former, especially when they don’t have the luxury of rejecting both.

Resisting Regimes Safeguard Collective Rights and Freedom

If anti-imperialists place far greater political and moral value on resisting the Empire than on unseating autocratic regimes, then surely that is even more so the case when those regimes themselves resist imperialism. As in the case of Syria, anti-imperialist leaders are identified with a set of rights and a concept of freedom that is considered far more conducive to democracy, justice and dignity than the western liberal discourse of “human rights” which is informed by the “negative freedom” from authority.

While not rejecting liberal freedoms outright, anti-imperialists view liberal freedoms that stress the individual’s right to be free from government interference and coercion as being secondary to positive and liberationist conceptions of freedom which affirm human agency and self-determination. As critiqued by political theorist, Anthony Bogues, “when freedom morphs only into rights, then the very question of freedom itself is delinked from other forms of domination other than political authority.” Indeed, it could be argued that the universalization of the Euro-American-centric human rights doctrine that has come to dominate the Arab Spring freedom discourses, serves to obscure imperialism and foreign domination.

The great anti-colonialist thinker, Franz Fanon, anticipated this intellectual colonization by liberal rights discourses when he wrote: “History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.”

Clearly cognizant of their deviation from the anti-imperialist struggle, Arab Spring intellectuals attempt to reconcile this disconnect between liberal freedoms and liberationist freedom by arguing that liberation from western hegemony and Israeli occupation can only be achieved once freedom from internal tyranny is won. Andoni contends that “combating internal injustice – whether practiced by Fatah or Hamas – is a prerequisite for the struggle to end Israeli occupation and not something to be endured for the sake of that struggle.”

But this logic operates in a geo-political intellectual void which elides any kind of world systems analysis’ recognition of the hegemony exercised by core nations over peripheral ones. In a world order characterized by an uneven division of labour, the notion of achieving any kind of comprehensive and far-reaching internal change without a commensurate change in the global balance of power, is futile.

If there cannot be genuine revolutionary change from within, given prevailing power disparities on the international level, then the expectation that domestic change will inevitably balance out global power asymmetries is nothing short of liberal self-delusion. It is precisely this reasoning which undergirds mumanaists’ claim that liberation from foreign domination is a prerequisite to genuine democratic change.

Furthermore, resistance intellectuals and activists maintain that there can be no progress or democracy in the Arab world so long as a colonial implant like Israel continues to exist in our midst, perpetually threatening our security. Viewed from this lens, liberating Palestine is the prerequisite for the democratization of the region.

As such, mumanaists prioritize a collectivist notion of rights that emphasizes people’s rights as opposed to human rights. In this collectivist understanding of the term, freedom is conceived as liberation from foreign domination and oppression and the pursuit of self-determination. In effect, to be free is not to be left alone, unencumbered by external constraints and hindrances, but to struggle for justice. Seyyid Hassan Nasrallah provides the clearest definition of what this freedom entails: “[it is] not just the blood of a man, the fate of a woman, the crushed bones of a child, or a piece of bread stolen from the mouth of a poor or hungry person. It is the issue of a people, a nation, a fate, holy places, history, and the future.”

In other words, the ultimate purpose of freedom for Arab mumanaists is not merely the protection of various civil and political rights of the individual, but the trans-historical collective right of the umma in its past, present and future manifestations. In this dispensation, freedom and democracy are not reduced to procedural aspects like elections and political reforms as they are in western liberal thought, but more substantially, the ability of peoples enjoying popular sovereignty to shape their own political identity, control their national resources and participate in determining their national destiny.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb is a Lebanese academic and political analyst. She is author of the book, “Hizbullah: Politics and Religion”, and blogger at ASG’s Counter-Hegemony Unit.

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Who Killed Yasser Arafat?

Now we know he was poisoned – but by whom?

by Justin Raimondo

Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004, of a mysterious ailment. His enemies spread the rumor he had AIDS: David Frum, with typical classiness, claimed he had contracted AIDS as a consequence of having sex with his bodyguards. Now, however, it has been revealed Arafat was poisoned: the cause of his death was exposure to very high levels of polonium-210 [pdf], a rare radioactive substance. An investigation conducted by Al Jazeera showed Arafat’s personal items, released to the media organization by his widow, contained several times the normal level of polonium that would normally be detected on such items. The Palestinian leader’s terminal symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of polonium poisoning: the substance targets the gastrointestinal tract and the subject wastes away.

Arafat’s Ramallah compound had been bombed several times by the Israelis, and they had the place surrounded – yet still he persisted. They couldn’t get him out. Worse, his plight was becoming a metaphor for the condition of his people, who were – and still are – prisoners in their own land. A former adviser claimed he was poisoned by the Israelis, who detained the Palestinian ambulance used to deliver Arafat’s medications to the Ramallah compound. At the time, one tended to write this off as a purely polemical exercise: in light of the new evidence, however, the question has to be asked.

Simply by continuing to exist in the face of such a sustained assault, Arafat was defeating the Israelis every day. They had to get rid of him. Did they? We’ll never know for sure, but it is worth noting that Israeli threats to kill him preceded his untimely death by less than a year. As is well-known, Israeli intelligence has carried out numerous assassinations: it is simply another tool in their international operations, one they have never hesitated to utilize. A passport-falsification scheme involving New Zealand, Britain, France, Spain, and a number of other countries was widely believed to have been meant to equip the Mossad’s crack team of assassins, who could slip into – and out of – target areas at will.

The Israelis hated Arafat with a particular passion, for two reasons:

1) His longevity – The Palestinian movement is thick [pdf] with factions, but thin when it comes to recognizable leaders. Arafat was the principal leader, and no one since his death has achieved his stature. He was a political survivor, having lived through numerous assassination attempts, and deflected the schemes of internal enemies to displace him. Simply by sticking around for so long, he became a living symbol of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination – and that is one big reason why the Israelis got rid of him.

2) His secularism – The Israelis encouraged the growth of groups such as Hamas in the beginning, in order to split away the more religious elements from the decidedly secular Palestine Liberation Organization/Fatah, which Arafat headed. It is easy to sell the Palestinians as crazed jihadists when a group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad is the most visible champion of their cause: the secular PLO presented the Israelis with a public relations problem. There’s another reason for the Israelis to have knocked him off.

One aspect of this case is extremely odd: polonium-210 is the same poison Alexander Litvinenko was dosed with. Litvinenko, a former KGB official, converted to Islam, joined the Chechen rebels, and became an associate of Boris Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch wanted on charges of embezzlement in his home country. Litvinenko and Berezovsky are the Russian version of 9/11 Truthers: they believe practically every terrorist attack on Russian cities has been “staged” by Vladimir Putin in order to keep him in power. When he became ill, Litvinenko charged the Russian spy agency with poisoning him – although that seems highly unlikely.

Polonium-210 isn’t something you can buy off the shelf at your local Walmart. It isn’t even something a mad scientist might cook up in his home lab. About 100 grams are produced each year for specialized technical uses. The only entities with access to this sort of thing are state actors, or, at least, a private organization with very substantial resources at its disposal.

What’s interesting is that a diplomatic cable, dated Dec. 26, 2006 and published by WikiLeaks, details the conversation of a US diplomat with Russian spook Anatoly Safonov in which Safonov claims the Russians told the British about the importation of “nuclear materials” into London during the Litvinenko affair – and were told that the whole thing was “under control before the poisoning took place.” In the course of the same conversation, Safonov – Putin’s chief representative on terrorism-related matters – went on to describe a number of threats and their possible sources:

“Safonov noted the daunting number of countries that posed particular terrorism threats, mentioning North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, Libya, Iran, India, and Israel (sic?). He described a range of dangers, stressing the more immediate threats posed by nuclear and biological terrorism, but also acknowledging the risks of chemical terrorism.”

While the use of “sic” is meant to indicate our diplomat’s incredulity at the inclusion of Israel in this list, what we now know about how Arafat died should tear away the blinders from several sets of eyes – yes, even at the US State Department.

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Video: Idi Amin Dada Documentary – Uganda Discovery

A fascinating documentary about Ugandan dictator, anti-communist and Third Positionist Idi Amin.

— Espresso Stalinist

Video: Lowkey – “Long Live Palestine”

Hath not a Palestinian eyes?

I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Video: Israel uses White Phosphorus & Attacks U.N. School in Beit Lahiya

Party of Labor of Iran (Toufan): The Criminal, Inhumane, Warmongering, and Illegal Sanctions on Iran

On Monday January 23, 2012, the foreign ministers of the imperialist European Union countries decided in Brussels to extend the economic sanctions on Iran by putting sanctions on Central Bank of Iran and by freezing the assets of the Iranian people in Europe. In order to inflict a heavy damage on the economy of Iran, they decided to place an embargo on the export of the Iranian oil to Europe.

To impose economic blockades on and to cause hunger in Iran are acts that are internationally illegal and are crimes against humanity. Imperialists want to impose their sinister, plundering, and domineering intentions on Iran and on their “axis of evils” by creating another Iraq and a second Gaza Strip. By punishing Iran, the imperialist countries want to teach a lesson to Non-Allied countries and to those who do not submit to their dictates.

In the past, the imperialists try to justify their crimes by passing illegal resolutions in the UN Security Council. But they imposed sanctions against Iran today without any UN authorization. The sanctions are plots by a gang of international plunderer against a UN-member state and are against the UN Charter. The US and EU sanctions against Iran lack any legal basis on the international arena. The US imposes on countries of the world the decisions made in the US Congress and pretends that the decisions are made by the international community. The illegal and bullying actions against Iran show the hegemonic and despotic nature of the US imperialism.

While the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lawrow, stated that the “unilateral actions are useless”, he added that there was no reason to make any decision in addition to collective decision by the UN Security Council. The deputy foreign minister of the racist government of Israel, Danny Ajalon, claimed in a press interview that “These sanctions have reduced the threat of war”. Coming out of the meeting that made warmongering and threatening decisions on Iran, Ms. Catherine Ashton who is in charge of the EU international relations and the foreign minister of Sweden Mr. Carl Bidlt claimed that the basis of their work was to appeal to diplomacy and negotiation!

The imperialist powers clearly lie when they claim that they recognize the legal and indisputable right of Iran to enrich uranium. The fact is that they have monopoly in producing nuclear energy. The recognition of Iran’s right to produce nuclear energy is to break the imperialist monopoly. In a deceptive psychological war, the major powers warn the world about Iran’s nuclear bomb, but they have not disclosed any document to show the existence of this bomb. German foreign minister Guido Weserwelle shamelessly said that “We cannot accept Iran developing nuclear weapons” and that “This is not a security problem for region only but it will disrupt the world security”. Wow! The non-existence Iranian nuclear bomb disrupts the security of the entire globe but many hundred known or secret warheads in the hands of American, British, French, and Israeli warmongers are nor dangerous for the world security! Apparently, there are good and bad atomic bombs! The arguments given by the representatives of the imperialist powers are fierce, threatening, and sickening.

The history of economic sanctions shows that the ordinary people of the countries on which the sanction were imposed suffered the most by the sanctions. In Iran, the inflation is rapidly rising, shortage of medicine and medical equipments is already felt, and particularly the patients with heart problems are under attack because the companies making the equipments are under the US sanctions and cannot export their products to Iran. This is not a concern for the imperialist powers. It is not important to the US President Obama and his Iranian allies if millions of people are slaughtered in the war. Also, the sanctions on Iran give an excuse to the authority of the Islamic Republic to increase the suppression of the anti-imperialist and democratic forces in Iran.

The imperialist powers think that if their sanctions cause widespread hunger in Iran, then the people will rise up and install a Western puppet regime. This is a miscalculation because the history of the Iran shows that Iranian people have always rejected submission to any forces allied to foreign imperialist powers. The Iranian masses have no feeling except disgust and hate towards sellout, spies, and for those who carry out terrorist operations in Iran.

The fact is that the imperialists’ actions against Iran are not for eliminating the Iranian nuclear bomb. Such a bomb does not exist. Iran holds a key geo-political position in the Middle East region and is the center of entangled world contradictions. To control Iran is to control an entire strategic region with enormous energy resources that the US desire to plunder for decades. Strait of Hormuz is a valve for export of oil to four corners of the globe. The US imperialists wish to have control over this oil valve. The presence of the US forces in the region is a danger for the world security and is a threat particularly to the security of the Middle East. The propaganda about Iranian atomic bomb, the bomb that does not exist, is justification for aggression on Iran and for domination of the region, and Islamic Republic’s capitulation to imperialists’ demands will not change the imperialists’ nature of following their domineering goals.

The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan) believes that the economic sanctions on Iran act against the masses and are inhumane. We take the imperialists, particularly the US imperialists, responsible for the suffering and misery these sanctions will cause. The sanctions on Iran are illegal, warmongering, and unjustifiable. Our Party strongly condemns the imperialist sanctions, embargoes, and threats against the Iranian masses. We believe that every progressive, human-loving, and patriotic Iranian must take stand against the sanctions and against the imperialist-Zionist warmongering threats, and must draw a sharp line to separate enemies from the people.

The regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a reactionary and Mafia-style capitalist regime. The regime of Iran has lost all its legitimacy, and the overwhelming majority of the Iranian masses are disgusted by the regime. The task of overthrowing this criminal regime is on the shoulders of the Iranian masses. The regime change by the imperialist invading forces will be for the purpose of colonizing the country and looting the resources of the nation. The imperialist powers have never supported and will never support the freedom-loving and democratic forces anywhere in the world. Their talks about freedom and human rights are nothing but smokescreens for their criminal actions, and Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan … are testimonies to this. Hypocrisy is written on their foreheads.

The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan)

January 23, 2012.

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Enver Hoxha: On Palestine, Zionism and Arab Liberation

WEDNESDAY
JULY 29, 1970

We Have Sympathy & Respect for the Arab People of Palestine

A delegation of «Al-Fatah», Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, is coming to our country these days for an official visit. Yasser Arafat personally asked our embassy in Cairo for permission to send a delegation.

We have sympathy and respect for the Arab people of Palestine, because they are a brave people who are suffering. At the moment they are the only Arab people who are fighting all round the borders of Israel, while some Arab leaders, from those of Egypt to those of Lebanon, are merely talking, holding conferences, preparing… for compromises, etc.

The Palestinians, expelled from their land by the British colonialist government and from UNO in favour of Israel, are living in tents, in great hardship, in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. The latest Israeli aggression increased the number of Palestinian refugees, so the only road of salvation left to them was that of the partisan war. And they began it, attacking the Israeli aggressors from outside, from Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and from inside, in the territory occupied by Israel.

Thus, thanks to the struggle of the Palestinians, the Palestinian question has become an important national and international issue, which both the friends and the enemies of the Palestinian people are compelled to bear in mind and cannot fail to take into account.

Despite its nationalist tendencies, the «Al-Fatah» organization is progressive and democratic and the biggest and most powerful organization which, at the moment, has a correct line of struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the defeat of the anti-Arab, annexationist policy of the state of Israel, concocted by international Zionism and supported by the imperialists. This organization is not against the masses of the Jewish population whom, in its program, it accepts as citizens of the new Arab state of Palestine.

However, although the representatives of the feudal bourgeois cliques ruling in some Arab countries pose as pro the Palestinians’ struggle, they do not look kindly on this movement of resistance and, since they are unable to liquidate it, want to have it under control.

The resistance of the Palestinians has become a serious political and military obstacle, which these cliques are obliged to take into account. The King of Jordan, an agent of the British and the Americans, has made two or three attempts to liquidate the Palestinian partisans, who are stronger than this sold-out king. At these dangerous moments for the Palestinian guerrillas they ought to fight him to the end, to unite with the people of Jordan, in order to continue the war against Israel and American imperialism.

The Soviets and the Americans are making the law in the Middle East. The Egyptian leadership has fallen completely under the influence of the Soviets. Hussein of Jordan is a dyed-in-the-wool traitor, the Syrians are posing as somewhat «concerned», while the Lebanese trim their sails to the wind.

Nasser agreed in general to discuss the «Rogers Plan», which means to enter into negotiations and compromises and, in the end, «to make the peace» so greatly desired by Israel, in favour of that country and its American patron and in disfavour of the Arab peoples, especially the Palestinian people, against whom the savage attacks of the gendarmes of the ruling cliques sold out to foreigners, will commence later. With the signing of the «peace» the Soviets will turn this into a «colossal victory» for themselves. They will try to remain in Egypt and to dominate it. There is the danger that the Egyptian ports may become the ports of the Soviet Mediterranean fleet which emerged from the Black Sea. From the Mediterranean the Soviet revisionists intend to extend their colonies in Africa «in peaceful ways», in order to cross the seas and reach India. This is how they dream of achieving the empire of Alexander the Great, by conquering the peoples through the threat of arms from land and sea, through rubles and through their demagogy of a falsified socialism.

The «Soviet-American peace» in the Middle East will be a defeat for all the Arab peoples and an especially great obstacle for the Palestinian people. This kind of «peace» is a victory for the Soviet-American imperialists in general and for Israel in particular.

What will happen with the Palestinian people will be what happened with the Albanian people before the First World War. As is known, at that time large parts of Albania were divided by the imperialists of Europe among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. And after they had thoroughly dismembered our Homeland at the Conference of London and through secret treaties, the Tzar’s Minister, Sazonov, in order to satisfy the appetite of Prince Nikola of Montenegro demanded that the city of Shkodra be handed over to the latter. On this occasion, one of the other wolves, the representative of French imperialism, said something which went down in history: «Sazonov wants to set fire to Europe to fry an omelette for Montenegro».

The enemies of the Arab peoples, the American imperialists and Soviet revisionists, will act and speak in a similar way when it comes to the question of the territorial rights of the heroic Palestinian people.

Only the armed struggle through to victory settles accounts with the wolves who attack peoples.

From “Reflections on the Middle East”

1986: The Iran-Contra Affair

Oliver North mugshot

Nicaraguan Contras being trained by U.S. troops at a Honduran base

Chomsky’s brief account of the US selling arms to Iran via Israel in order to fund far-right paramilitary contras in Nicaragua.

The major elements of the Iran/contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal contra war run out of Colonel Oliver North’s White House office were connected.

The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran – you could read it on the front page of the New York Times.

In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/contra hearings appeared on BBC television and described how they had helped organise an arms flow to the new Ayatollah Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime “with the cooperation of the United States… at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah — standard operating procedure.

As for the contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way.

So what finally generated the Iran/contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged.

From What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky.

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PCMLE: Iran in the crosshairs of the U.S.

En Marcha, January 10, 2012

In the current world situation, U.S. imperialism is by all means of aggravating the conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran, under the pretext of avoiding the use of enriched uranium nuclear military purposes.

The U.S. tactical retreat, once lowered his flag of Iraq, popular military pressure, claims to be settled by a military adventure in Central Asia that allows it to extend its hegemony against Iran in the Persian Gulf. Geographical position favored for centuries and abuse of pirates raids and since the mid-twentieth century, major geopolitical point for transporting 40% of global oil production.

The focus of these new imperialist tensions has to do with actions of Israel, U.S. and NATO military installation Iranian long-range ballistic missiles and criminal attacks on the lives of Iranian nuclear scientists, the operation of the Iranian military defense, which in December shot down a U.S. spy plane that took off from Afghanistan imperialist possible approval at the request of Obama, new economic sanctions against Iran, the imminent adoption by Congress of a new Act defense spending, including economic sanctions on U.S. financial institutions to conduct transactions with Iran.

Iran’s response greater and blocking the threat to navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, at the end of military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran test-ground missiles, land-sea and sea -sea in a naval demonstration of the potential and the ability to affect navigation through the strait. Important measure of pressure on the U.S. and its allies intended to counter the application of U.S. sanctions and the European Union.

Given the possible closure of the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. imperialism responds with the transfer of the Fifth Fleet to the Persian Gulf to prevent it. It is assumed that in the course of the conflict the Russian Federation and the Republic of China was put on the side of Iran to protect their interests against the geopolitical consequences of a possible U.S. greater control in the area.

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Joint Statement on the situation in the Middle East

January 16, 2012

Support the people who have risen up for their rights and their freedom! We condemn the imperialist conspiracies against Syria and Iran!

During 2011 the Arab people in North Africa and the Middle East stood up, one after the other. They did not want to be exposed to the consequences of monopolistic capitalist hegemony, as unemployment and poverty. They said no to oppression from the autocratic dictatorships that have watched this hegemony. But the 30-40 year-old despot regimes has been the main cause of the disorganization of the oppressed masses and has also prevented them from developing their awareness. The people who stood up have won some victories, but could not reap the real fruits of their struggle, to be able to form their own political power. At the same time, these bourgeois reactionary forces, supported by Western imperialists, preserved or try to preserve its hegemony by strengthening the power base with its new partners, although this hegemony has encountered certain difficulties.

The Arab people who stood up realizing their potential and tasted victory, and their struggle has not yet been turned down in any country, except in Libya. Despite the low consciousness and organization continues their people revolt and tries to overcome their weaknesses. They insist on resisting the reactionary forces that have reorganized themselves, especially through the advent of political Islam, which has been moderate and pro-American in almost every country.

“We oppose all imperialist interventions, whatever pretext”

We, the undersigned revolutionary communist and working parties that meet the Turkish Labor Party 6 Congress, expressing our pride and solidarity with the peoples’ mass struggles, not only in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East, but also in Europe, from Spain to Greece, and in Latin America, from Venezuela to Ecuador, who are fighting for their national and social rights and freedoms, and we declare our support for the Palestinian people’s just struggle against imperialism and Israeli Zionism.

However, we are also aware of the fact that our biggest weakness is the inadequate consciousness and organization level of the world’s people, whether to rebel or other fields. And the imperialists and their collaborators exploit this weakness in attempts to renew the decaying basis of its hegemony and suppress the fighting by infiltrating the ranks of the people they claim to support, by manipulating these games in their own interest and remove them from their popular content.

The western imperialists, who have world domination in their hands and trying to strengthen its positions in competition with the rising imperialist powers, has not only aims to strengthen its domination in the countries that traditionally have been under their influence by suppressing the people’s struggles but they are also trying to establish its hegemony by influencing people and their struggles and use them as lifting rods in countries like Syria and Iran, as they have not been able to force the knee.

We support either Assad or Khamenei regime. But we also underlines the fact that when Western imperialists intervene with support from the reactionary forces in the region, the Turkish and Saudi reactionary forces, under the pretext of “democracy” and “dictator’s repression” has such a policy has nothing to do with people’s right to self or with people’s social and democratic aspirations.

We oppose all imperialist interventions – economic, political and military – whatever pretext, whether they are invited by the cooperative lackeys or not, and we condemn such a policy, which only brings war, blood and tears.

We ask all people of the world, and particularly the peoples of Syria and Iran, to be on guard against the imperialist interventions and traps in the style of the Libyan example, to show solidarity with the struggles of the peoples of the region and to continue the struggle against imperialism and the reactionary forces .

Ankara, 20.12.2011

Albania’s communist party
Benin Communist Party
Belgium’s Labour
Cyprus’ new communist party
Ecuador’s Marxist-Leninist Communist Party
Spanish Communist Party (Marxist-Leninists)
Organization for the reconstruction of Greece’s Communist Party (Anasintaxi)
Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party (PCOT)
Turkey’s Workers’ Party (Emek Partisi)

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Turkey: Sixth Congress of the Labour Party (EMEP) Resolution

We support people who have rebelled for their rights and freedoms, condemn the imperialist conspiracies against Syria and Iran.

During 2011, the Arab peoples of North Africa and the Middle East have raised a after another. They did not want to be reported to the consequences of the hegemony of monopoly capitalism, nor voted on unemployment and poverty, and have rejected the repression of autocratic dictatorships that preserved this hegemony. The regimes despotic that lasted for 30 or 40 years have been the main reason for disorganization of the oppressed masses and have served as obstacles to the realization. The people who have raised have won some victories, but failed to collect the real fruits of their struggle, such as risucire to conquer their own political power. Therefore, the bourgeois reactionary forces backed by Western imperialism have maintained or are trying to maintain their hegemony, which has been questioned, strengthening their bases with new workers.

The Arab peoples that have been raised, have realized their potential and have tasted some victories, their struggles have not yet been crushed in any part, except Libya. Despite the low level of consciousness and organization, people have brought continue their uprising with an effort that aims to overcome the weaknesses, and continue to against the attacks of the reactionary forces that have reorganized especially through of political support, which has become a force moderate and pro-U.S. based in almost all countries.

We, the communist and workers parties and organizations have signed this document, meeting in VI Congress of the Workers’ Party of Turkey, we express our pride and solidarity with the mass struggles of the peoples, not only of the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East, but also of Europe, from Greece to Spain, Latin America, Venezuela and Ecuador, for the rights and social freedoms and national, as we proclaim our support for the Palestinian people’s just struggle against imperialism and Zionism in Israel.

Nevertheless, we are aware of the fact that our main weakness is the inadequate level of consciousness and organization of the peoples of the world, both during the uprisings in other processes. The imperialists and their accomplices take advantage of this weakness in their efforts to restore the decaying bases of their sovereignty and punish these struggles by ideological penetration and infiltration into the ranks of the people who claim to want to support, exploiting the struggle for their interests and by eliminating popular features.

The Western imperialism, which keeps the global hegemony in his hands and tries to strengthen its position in competition with the imperialist powers on the rise, not only aims to strengthen its hegemony in countries traditionally under its influence of suppressing popular struggles, but also attempts to establish its hegemony influencing people and their struggles, using them as levers to countries like Syria and Iran, which have not yet been subdued.

We do not support schemes and Assad | Ahmadinejad. However, we stress the fact that when the imperialist powers involved with the support of the reactionary forces of region such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, in the name dell’apoggio the so-called “opposition” Syria and Iran under the pretext of fighting for “democracy” and “suppression of dictators, “these policies have nothing to do with rights to self-determination and their democratic aspirations and social. We oppose all actions imperialist – both economic and political and military – whatever their reason, they are desired by their accommodating staff or not, and condemn these policies only bring war, bloodshed and suffering.

We appeal to the peoples of the world, especially the peoples of Syria and Iran, to be in guard against the traps and imperialist interventions like those that occurred in Libya, show solidarity with the struggles of the peoples of the region and to support the fight against imperialism and the reactionary forces.

Ankara, December 2011

Communist Party of Albania
Communist Party of Benin
Workers’ Party of Belgium
New Cyprus Party
Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador
Spanish Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)
Movement for the Reorganization of the Communist Party of Greece (1918-55)
Communist Party of Workers of Tunisia
Turkish Labour Party

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Freedom Rider: Christopher Hitchens, White Man

by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

There was nothing witty, cute, or endearing about the late Christopher Hitchens, a racist to the core whose association with the Left served only to discredit it. “Beneath his mutterings against ‘Islamofascism’ he was nothing more than an angry white guy who wanted brown people to be conquered or dead.” A man of many prejudices but no real loyalties or principles, he flowed with the money. “Why toil away as a left winger known only within that smaller group, when more money and media attention awaited a cheer leader for pax Americana and white supremacy?”

“In the end all his words amounted to nothing more than fighting for the rights of white people to control everyone else in the world.”

The British born writer Christopher Hitchens died of cancer last week. The outpouring of grief and praise for a man who can only be called a propagandist for barbaric ideologies may seem curious at first glance, but there is an ugly and logical explanation for the reaction.

Mr. Hitchens was for many years known as a leftist, a self-described Trotskyite. He wrote a column in The Nation magazine during that time, and was known for excoriating the likes of Henry Kissinger for the carnage he carried out in Vietnam and Southeast Asia that killed millions of people.

In more recent years Hitchens took a sharp turn in his writings and public statements and in the process became far more famous, and no doubt a lot richer. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Hitchens came out of the closet and presented himself to the world as a full blown neo-con, an unconditional supporter of the Bush administration’s aggressions. So great was his love for the Bushites that he took the citizenship oath in a naturalization ceremony presided over by Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.

Hitchens became a favorite of pundits, and with a body of prolific work and glib statements in the media, he was rarely out of the spotlight. Yet in the end all his words amounted to nothing more than fighting for the rights of white people to control everyone else in the world.

“Hitchens came out of the closet and presented himself to the world as a full blown neo-con, an unconditional supporter of the Bush administration’s aggressions.”

Hitchens’ descent into support for western imperialism was, as George Galloway put it, a metamorphosis “from butterfly back into slug,” but it wasn’t as sudden as it seemed. Like most criminals, Hitchens showed his true side earlier on. In 1992 he was invited to attend a protest opposing the quincentenary celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the western hemisphere. Hitchens made it clear that he was not at all put off by the genocide of Indians and enslavement of Africans. As he put it, “1492 was a very good year and deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto.” According to him, the coming of the European and the barbarity which ensued is just the way things happen, and in fact all for the betterment of humankind.

“But those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway . . . But it does happen to be the way that history is made, and to complain about it is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic shift.”

In other words, it is part of the natural order of the universe for the world and its people to be under the rule of whites, with people of color preferably under their control whenever possible.

The political ascension of George W. Bush and the beginning of the war on terror was all the opening that Hitchens, a leftist poseur, needed. Why toil away as a left winger known only within that smaller group, when more money and media attention awaited a cheer leader for pax Americana and white supremacy?

“Once again we see that the endless aggression is not really opposed by most Americans, and they prove it by lionizing the likes of the late Hitchens.”

His fans may argue with the assessment, calling his unqualified support of the Iraq occupation a “mistake,” when it was no such thing. Hitchens decided to make a living, a very good one, as a professional white man. Beneath his mutterings against “Islamofascism” he was nothing more than an angry white guy who wanted brown people to be conquered or dead.

The liberals who swooned over his British accent and his media savvy may not want to admit it, but they also admired his openly imperialist and indeed racist point of view. He claimed to be sickened by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but what he really wanted was for the Arabs to be subservient, in no position to question or to oppose the powerful white-run nations of the west. As for tyranny, if people who looked like him were carrying it out, it wasn’t so bad after all.

The bizarre levels of admiration on display for this man are symptomatic of a much larger problem. Once again we see that the endless aggression is not really opposed by most Americans, and they prove it by lionizing the likes of the late Hitchens. They too think that powerful white people have the right to lay waste to entire regions of the world and to the human beings within them. In fact, they don’t think that non-white people are really human beings with the rights they assume for themselves.

Hitchens may have been in the minority in publicly proclaiming the rightness of mass murder but that doesn’t mean he was alone. Now that he has passed away, it is clear that his ideas were loved by many people, who also hearken back to a time when white was openly declared right, and with ample doses of “vim and gusto” too.

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‘This is like apartheid’: ANC veterans visit West Bank

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a member of the South African delegation, in the West Bank city of Hebron

By Donald Macintyre in Hebron

Friday, 11 July 2008

Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle said last night that the restrictions endured by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories was in some respects worse than that imposed on the black majority under white rule in South Africa.

Members of a 23-strong human-rights team of prominent South Africans cited the impact of the Israeli military’s separation barrier, checkpoints, the permit system for Palestinian travel, and the extent to which Palestinians are barred from using roads in the West Bank.

After a five-day visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, some delegates expressed shock and dismay at conditions in the Israeli-controlled heart of Hebron. Uniquely among West Bank cities, 800 settlers now live there and segregation has seen the closure of nearly 3,000 Palestinian businesses and housing units. Palestinian cars (and in some sections pedestrians) are prohibited from using the once busy streets.

“Even with the system of permits, even with the limits of movement to South Africa, we never had as much restriction on movement as I see for the people here,” said an ANC parliamentarian, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge of the West Bank. “There are areas in which people would live their whole lifetime without visiting because it’s impossible.”

Mrs Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy health minister in President Thabo Mbeki’s government, added: “While I want to be careful not to characterise everything that I see here as apartheid, I just do find comparisons in a number of places. I also find differences.”

Comparisons with apartheid have long been anathema to majority Israeli opinion, though they have been somewhat less taboo since the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last year warned that without an early two-state agreement Israel could face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.

Fatima Hassan, a leading South African human rights lawyer, said: “The issue of separate roads, [different registration] of cars driven by different nationalities, the indignity of producing a permit any time a soldier asks for it, and of waiting in long queues in the boiling sun at checkpoints just to enter your own city, I think is worse than what we experienced during apartheid.” She was speaking after the tour, which included a visit to the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem and a meeting with Israel’s Chief Justice, Dorit Beinisch.

One prominent member of the delegation, who declined to be named, said South Africa had been “much poorer” both during and after apartheid than the Palestinian territories. But he added: “The daily indignity to which the Palestinian population is subjected far outstrips the apartheid regime. And the effectiveness with which the bureaucracy implements the repressive measures far exceed that of the apartheid regime.”

Members of the delegation – the first of its kind – visited Nablus as well as towns and villages bordering the separation barrier, including Na’alin where a temporary curfew was imposed after joint Israeli-Palestinian demonstrations against the barrier.

The visit was organised by Israeli human rights groups which co-operate with Palestinians committed to non-violent campaigns against Israeli occupation.

In Hebron’s main Shuhada Street, the South African delegation was plunged into a confrontation after one of the local settlers’ leaders disrupted the tour by unleashing a barrage of abuse through a megaphone at one of the Israeli guides. Amid angry arguments, police arrested three of the Israeli guides.

Mrs Madlala Routledge exclaimed: “This is ridiculous. Why are they arresting our guides and leaving the man with the megaphone?”

Dennis Davis, a high court judge and one of the South African delegation’s several Jewish members, told the extreme right-wing Hebron settlers’ leader Baruch Marzel: “These provocations didn’t come from us. I’m Jewish and I look at this and I say to myself, how can I feel fear from other Jews?”

Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC parliament member, said that the visit to Yad Vashem had been “extremely moving” because his mother had been a Holocaust survivor who lost many members of her family. “As you walk into Yad Vashem you see a quote that says in effect you should know a country not only by what it does but what it tolerates,” he said. “So I found it very shocking to then come and here and see footage of teenagers heaping abuse on Palestinian children as they come out of school, and throwing stones at them. And that this should be done in the name of Judaism I find totally reprehensible.

“What the Holocaust teaches us more than anything else is that we must never turn our heads away in the face of injustice.”

The delegation’s final formal statement made no mention of comparisons with apartheid and Judge Davis said he thought the use of the term in the Middle East context was “very unhelpful”.

He added: “The level of social control I’ve seen here, separate roads, different number plates [between Palestinian and Israeli cars] may well be more cynically pernicious than what we have ever had. But this is a country that is really about how there is going to be divorce and we were always a marriage.” Ms Hassan herself said she thought the apartheid comparison was a potential “red herring”.

Israelis point out there are no South-African-style laws segregating Israeli and East Jerusalem Arabs from Israeli Jews in public spaces.

The delegation yesterday urged international support for the “new and small movement of Palestinian-Israeli joint non-violent struggle”. And its members stressed their understanding of Israeli security needs. Mr Feinstein said: “I completely understand the fears of Israelis … but at the same time we have seen for ourselves and been told about all sorts of measures that don’t seem to be in terms of security and in some instances could if anything undermine security of state.”

The delegation also visited the Parents’ Circle – a joint organisation of Israeli and Palestinian families bereaved by the conflict. Ms Hassan said this had been at once the most “depressing and inspiring” visit of the trip.

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U.S. Ally Saudi Arabia executed a citizen accused of “witchcraft”

December 17, 2011

The dictatorial and corrupt feudal regime of Saudi Arabia has executed 73 people since January. The last execution is by beheading in public and has suffered a saber citizen Amina Nasser Ben Abdelhalim Jawf province accused of practicing “witchcraft”. The “apostasy” is also subject to capital punishment.

This regime criminal assaults today Syria, Libya destroyed, participated in the invasion of Iraq and controlling the reactionary movement of the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to impose on the Arab masses their tyranny under the boot of Israel and NATO.

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Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR) of Brazil: In Defense of the Palestinian Homeland

In recent years, Israel intensified its offensive against the militant Palestinian people, trying by all means, economic, political and military subject him or destroy him, if possible and appropriate to control the rich oil and mineral resources of the entire region the Middle East.

The military aggression, by continually bombing Palestinian people, border control, the genocidal blockade of Gaza as the advance in the direct occupation of the territory with Israeli settlements, attacks to prevent the war from other international solidarity for the just struggle of peoples Palestinian brothers, has deepened with the international economic crisis of capitalism-imperialism.

Israel as the spearhead of imperialism, strengthens and prepares militarily to attack other peoples of the region who oppose its policies, such as Iran with the intent to provoke a war of very dangerous to serve as a output to the general crisis of capitalism and to extend its dominance and hegemony over other imperialist powers who also compete.

Faced with this, highlight and reaffirm our solidarity with the role that keeps fighting the Palestinian people to resist and confront imperialism and its lackey Israel, to fight for their inalienable right to independence, freedom and national sovereignty and support their just demands, supporting on the UN resolutions (all being boycotted by Israel and its mentor, the U.S.) to return to the borders of 1965.

Long live the struggle of the Palestinian People!

FOR A FREE AND INDEPENDENT PALESTINE

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML)

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Enver Hoxha on Israel & Arab Liberation: “The Anti-Imperialist Struggle of the Arab Peoples is Just”

THURSDAY
MAY 25, 1967

Israel, a state spawned by imperialism and reactionary Zionism in the Near East, is like a pistol amidst the Arab peoples and states, in this zone of economic and military importance. This region has been a centre of clashes between British, French, American and various other imperialists.

While oppressing the Arab peoples, trampling their freedom, independence, rights and sovereignty underfoot, all these wolves have mercilessly exploited the wealth of the countries which make up this region, and in order to perpetuate this exploitation they have built up a broad network of agents, some of whom they placed at the head of these peoples and defended with their colonial armies and their gun-boat diplomacy. However, with the passage of time, through the struggle of the Arab peoples themselves, which is part of the general struggle against nazi-fascism yesterday and against imperialism today, these peoples won their freedom and independence, created and consolidated their sovereign states. Some of them, however, are headed by cliques of capitalists and mediaeval feudal lords, who not only keep their peoples under savage oppression, but are blind tools, sold out to the British and American imperialists.

The king of Jordan, from a family traditionally agents of Britain, the former monarch and Imam of Yemen, the king of Saudi Arabia and others, are of this type. Today Israel and Jordan are two allegedly independent states, but in reality they are two hotbeds of danger created by American and British imperialism, which hinder the Arab peoples in the development and strengthening of their independence. Israel has continually provoked the Arab countries, has continually created armed border incidents, has attacked Egypt and Syria and has the tendency to expansion and domination. Recently it has provoked Syria and is preparing for war.

There is a smell of oil and gunpowder. Whenever the interests of the imperialist monopolies in this zone are threatened, the provocateur Israel launches military actions. This is what occurred when the Suez Canal was nationalized by Egypt, this is what is occurring now when the interests of the Anglo-American monopolies and the routes to their oil concessions are threatened.

Herein, in the efforts of the big monopoliesto plunder the wealth, especially the oil, of the Arab countries of the Middle East, lies the essence of the conflict between the imperialist powers and the Arab countries and peoples. Therefore, the struggle of the Arab peoples to throw off the savage political-economic yoke of imperialism as quickly as possible is just.

Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Algeria have risen against Israel and also against its allies. Will they come to grips? For known reasons this cannot be answered, but in any case, Egypt expelled the UNO troops, those international gendarmes who defended the Americans and Israeli’s interests, from Sinai. It is threatening to blockade the Strait of Tiran which would leave Israel only one entry open, that on the Mediterranean. The American and British imperialists and the revisionist traitors are in diplomatic movement. All of them are waving the olive branch, all «wailing» about the defence of the freedom and independence of the peoples, all of them writing and sending telegrams and messages to this address or that, but all of them hide the truth that with all this deafening clamour, the American, British and French imperialists, the Soviet revisionists, the Titoites and the others, are defending nothing but their own dirty interests to the detriment of the Arab peoples. Openly or behind the scenes, all of them are exerting and will go on exerting a thousand forms of pressure on the Arab countries, so that the latter retreat from the defence of their rightsand capitulate! We shall see how this blackmail will end.

UNO and U Thant, Tito and Brezhnev continue to play their diabolical two-faced role, because they are afraid they are being exposed. Apparently, Tito has lost all credit in Nasser’s eyes, since he is not making much noise on the basis of their former «friendship». Nasser has understood what Tito really is.

The Soviet revisionists, sometimes as allies of the Americans, sometimes as their rivals, will try to play the role of the two-faced intermediary, the role of arbiter between the Arabs and the Anglo-Americans, adjudicating on the proportions to which American and British interests should prevail. The vile role they are playing is obvious. Their main and only aim is to divide the spheres of influence, and to hinder the just  national liberation and anti-imperialist wars of the Arab peoples.

We have defended and will continue to defend the just anti-imperialist cause of the Arab peoples who have seen, are seeing, and will see that small socialist Albania is not afraid of imperialists and revisionists and that it will always be a sincere and loyal friend of the Arab countries, in good times or bad.

From “Reflections on the Middle East”

Statement of The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan) about the USA’s Plans on the Middle East

Stop the War!
No Sanctions, No Bombs Against Iran!
March 17, 2007

The US has, directly after its occupation of Iraq, been building up several military bases close to the Iranian border.

The US has made repeated demands on the Iranian government to accommodate to US policies concerning the “new American order”.

Replacement of the regimes in Iraq, North Korea and Iran is, and has been, part of the Bush doctrine. Right now, as the US has failed in Iraq, its war-mongering against Iran is on the increase. The US has now dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Gulf of Persia and placed 50 warships just off the Iranian coast. The US accuses Iran of possessing nuclear arms or of aiming at producing them. This is the hysterical US propaganda against Iran, in spite of the fact that all inspectors have declared that Iran has got no nuclear arms; those statements, however, doesn’t suffice for G.W. Bush.

According to what the US dictates, independent nations have no right to develop peaceful nuclear power for civil use. The US dictate does not concern Israel, which is a nuclear power in the Middle East. Nor does it apply to Pakistan, or India, et al. What is being said,is that the Tehran regime must obey the US on the Palestine/Israel conflict; must not oppose US policies in the Persian Gulf on matters concerning oil; must accommodate entirely to the IMF and the World Bank, etc. In short, Iran must unconditionally align itself with the US in the rivalry of the latter with the EU, Japan, and China. Can this be realized without any military intervention? Yes, that alternative might be possible. The capitalist clergy regime in Tehran has the character of selling out to the US for the sake of power. All factions within the Tehran regime have shown marked tendencies of compromise with the US. Examples of this are that the Islamic regime, during bombardments of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been collaborating with “the alliance Britain-US” and, according to its own statement, “the US wouldn’t succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan without help from Iran”.

Iran was one of the first states to recognize the stooge regime in Baghdad. The Tehran regime has from the very beginning been acting against the resistance movement in Iraq, and has been close to the US line, while yet being accused of responsibility for the US failure in Iraq.

An invasion of Iran is, given the situation of huge US problems in Iraq and internationally, unlikely to occur. Nevertheless, the war-mongering is dangerously similar to the war-mongering that preceded the invasion of Iraq. If it is not possible, in the end, to change the Iranian regime in favour of US desires, it might finally lead to a military action against Iran. The US doesn’t care about the form or medieval character of the Iranian regime. History has shown that the US may collaborate with any kind of Satan to realize its aims and goals. Decisive to the Bush administration is that Iran chooses a pro-US line like Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Qatar et al. The possible intrusion of US imperialism into Iran is of the same nature as its intrusion into Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and other countries, and must be condemned. The US has its imperialist political, economical and strategic interests, and no thinking person should believe that US meddling into Iranian affairs has anything to do with democracy, freedom or justice. That is nothing but sheer imperialist propaganda. The people of Iran can, by its own might, overthrow the reactionary theocratic regime and build a free and democratic society without the “aid” of imperialism. Iranians are never going to forget the 1953 event, when Prime Minister Mosadegh was overthrown by a joint US-British action following his nationalization of the oil industry. The Shah was reinstated, oppression and terror became everyday features, and the democracy movement was drowned in blood. One should not be blinded by the terror regime in Iran to forget about the colonial and barbaric aims of US imperialism.

US Out of Iraq Immediately and Unconditionally!
No Sanctions, No Bombs Against Iran!

The Party of Labour of Iran (Toufan)

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US Ambassador Echoes Cecil Rhodes

By Stephen Gowans
September 24, 2011 – http://gowans.wordpress.com

When in 1916 Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin expounded what historian V.G. Kiernan would later call virtually the only serious theory of imperialism, despite its shortcomings (1), Lenin cited Cecil Rhodes as among the “leading British bourgeois politicians (who) fully appreciated the connection between what might be called the purely economic and the political-social roots of modern imperialism.” (2)

Rhodes, founder of the diamond company De Beers and of the eponymous Rhodesia, had made the following remarks, which Lenin quoted at length in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread,’ ‘bread,’ ‘bread,’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. (3)

Skip ahead 95 years. Here’s US ambassador to Libya, Gene A. Cretz:

We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources, but even in Qaddafi’s time they were starting from A to Z in terms of building infrastructure and other things. If we can get American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs. (4)

New York Times’ reporter David D. Kirkpatrick noted that “Libya’s provisional government has already said it is eager to welcome Western businesses (and)…would even give its Western backers some ‘priority’ in access to Libyan business.” (5)

A bread and butter question. Also a profit-making one.

What Ahmadinejad really said at the UN

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address to the 66th UN General Assembly meeting provided the Iranian president with the usual occasion to make the usual points and the Western media the usual occasion to misrepresent them.

Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon wrote that Ahmadinejad “sought to stoke controversy by again questioning the Holocaust,” (6) reminding readers that Ahmadinejad had once called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, a distortion that will live on in history through its mere retelling. (What the Iranian president really said was that Israel would dissolve as the Soviet Union had.)

I read the transcript of Ahmadinejad’s address, but found no questioning of the Nazi-engineered holocaust.

Here are his remarks on Zionism and the Holocaust.

They view Zionism as a sacred notion and ideology. Any question of its very foundation and history is condemned by them as an unforgivable sin.

…

Who imposed, through deceits and hypocrisy, the Zionism and over sixty years of war, homelessness, terror and mass murder on the Palestinian people and countries of the region?

…

If some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fine or ransom to the Zionists, should it not be an obligation upon the slave masters or colonial powers to pay reparations to the affected nations?

…

By using their imperialistic media network which is under the influence of colonialism they threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 events with sanctions and military action. (7)

It would have been more accurate for Solomon to have written that Ahmadinejad sought to stoke controversy by again questioning the legitimacy of Zionism and the manipulative use of the Nazi-perpetrated holocaust to justify it.

But these themes are unmentionable in the Western corporate media.

It is common practice to capitalize the Nazi-engineered effort to exterminate the Jews as the ‘Holocaust’, as if there had never been any other holocaust—or any at rate, any other worth mentioning. Even the transcript of Ahmadinjad’s address refers to ‘the Holocaust’ rather than ‘a holocaust.’

The Justice Process

It seems that the only argument US president Barak Obama could muster for why Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas shouldn’t seek recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN is that the ‘peace process’ would be derailed.

Let’s lay aside the obvious difficulty of Barak the Bomber caring about peace, and that the ‘peace process’ has been off the rails for some time. His objection missed the point. Recognition of a Palestinian state isn’t a question of the peace process but of the justice process, and hardly a very satisfying one at that. What justice is there in Palestinians settling for one fifth of their country? Which is what, in any practical sense, UN recognition of the Palestinian territories as a state would amount to.

But it’s better than the status quo and a starting point.

For Zionists, the peace process is a little more appealing, but is the opposite of the justice process. It means getting Palestinians to settle for even less than one-fifth of their country, and to acknowledge the theft of it as legitimate.

An aside: Over 30 countries do not recognize Israel, among them Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran and Syria.

Rational Ignoramuses?

Do those who promote what Keynes called the fallacy of thrift (or fallacy of austerity, to give it a contemporary spin) really believe what they preach: that cutting pensions, laying off public servants, raising taxes on the poor, and closing government programs, is the way to avert a deeper economic crisis for the bulk of us?

Do they even care about the bulk of us?

Or is austerity simply a way of bailing out bankers and bondholders by bleeding the rest of us dry?

British prime minister David Cameron, on a trip to Canada to compare notes with fellow deficit-hawk Stephen Harper, the Canadian PM, remarked that “Highly indebted households and governments simply cannot spend their way out of a debt crisis. The more they spend, the more debts will rise and the fundamental problem will grow.” (8)

This was reported with tacit nods of approval in Canada’s corporate press, as if Cameron’s utterings were incontrovertible, rather than the ravings of an economic illiterate (in the view of economists), or the words of a political con artist (in the view of class struggle literates.)

Highly indebted governments simply cannot cut their way out of an economic crisis. The more they cut, the more aggregate demand weakens and the worse it gets. Greece’s continued slide into economic ruin underscores the point. The United States’ inability to drag itself out of the depths of the Great Depression, until arms orders brought the economy back to life, strikes an historical cautionary note.

But recessions are not without benefits for corporate plutocrats. It’s easier to cut wages, salaries and benefits during downturns, and to enjoy bigger profits as a result. Small competitors can be driven out of business. Unions can be weakened. And governments have an excuse to slash social programs that have pushed the balance of power a little too far in labor’s direction. Indeed, all manner of sacrifices can be extracted from most of us if we’re persuaded that debt is the cause of the problem and that belt-tightening is the physic that will cure it.

My bet is that Cameron and his fellow water carriers for moneyed interests are no dummies — but they’re hoping the rest of us are.

Knowing Who Your Friends Are

Here is the widely reviled (by Western governments) Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, at the 66th session of the UN General Assembly.

After over twenty thousand NATO bombing sorties that targeted Libyan towns, including Tripoli, there is now unbelievable and most disgraceful scramble by some NATO countries for Libyan oil, indicating thereby that the real motive for their aggression against Libya was to control and own its abundant fuel resources. What a shame!

…

Yesterday, it was Iraq and Bush and Blair were the liars and aggressors as they made unfounded allegations of possessions of weapons of mass destruction. This time it is the NATO countries the liars and aggressors as they make similarly unfounded allegations of destruction of civilian lives by Gaddafi.

…

We in Africa are also duly concerned about the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which seems to exist only for alleged offenders of the developing world, the majority of them Africans. The leaders of the powerful Western States guilty of international crime, like Bush and Blair, are routinely given the blind eye. Such selective justice has eroded the credibility of the ICC on the African continent.

…

My country fully supports the right of the gallant people of Palestine to statehood and membership of this U.N. Organisation. The U.N. must become credible by welcoming into its bosom all those whose right to attain sovereign independence and freedom from occupation and colonialism is legitimate. (9)

It’s clear why he’s reviled by imperialists, but also by leftists?

If the Movement for Democratic Change’s Morgan Tsvangirai, favorite of the West, ever becomes president, expect a very different kind of address at future General Assembly meetings.

NOTES:

1. V.G. Kiernan, Marxism and imperialism, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1974.

2. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, International Publishers, New York. 1939. p 78.

3. Ibid. p 79.

4. David D. Kirkpatrick, “U.S. reopens its embassy in Libya”, The New York Times, September 22, 2011.

5. Ibid.

6. Jay Solomon, “Iran adds Palestine statehood wrinkle”, The Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2011.

7. www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=30573

8. Campbell Clark, “Cameron, Harper preach restraint in teeth of global ‘debt crisis’”, The Globe and Mail, September 22, 2011

9. http://nehandaradio.com/2011/09/24/full-text-of-robert-mugabe-speech-at-un-assembly/

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Democratic Way – European Region (Morocco) : Press Release

Democratic Way Morocco

The international context is marred by the crisis of the world capitalist system. Nevertheless, the February 20 Movement (le mouvement du 20 février) continues to grow. It is in this background, the Democratic Way (European Region) held its meeting on October 29th, 2011 in Saint Denis (France), in the presence of comrades Abdellah El Harif and Moumen Chabri, Secretary General and Head of Foreign Affairs, respectively.

The meeting took place with frank, fraternal and enriching discussions. Democratic Way (European Region) issued the following statement to the national and international public.

The meeting:

• Denounced the dictatorship of the financial markets response to the crisis of global capitalism. Condemned the measures taken by the neo-liberal regimes, which further aggravate the social situation of very poor people.
• Note that this context of unprecedented crisis in the capitalist system is fertile ground for growth of the far right and fascism, which can drag humanity into dangerous situations for peace in the world.
• Express solidarity with the people fighting in the world against the dictatorship of stock exchanges and financial speculators. These struggles manifest essentially the refusal to pay an exhausted crisis of capitalist system that has loaded onto the workers and other strata of the people, the bill for the crisis and impose generally unbearable austerity measures.|
• Calls the Moroccan political organisations and associations abroad, and all their supporters to actively engage in the struggle, with democratic and progressive forces. The resistance in their home countries and combating liberal and ultra-liberal policies are the highest priority today.
• Wholeheartedly support the Palestinian people’s resistance for their independence and their legitimate rights and in their struggle for international recognition as an independent state in the occupied territories, the right of refugees to return and release of all detainees in Zionist prisons.
• Congratulates people who have managed to overthrow dictatorships in their countries. The Democratic Way (Europe Region) believes that the fall of dictators offers promising prospects for the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa to achieve the liberation from the despotic and dictatorial regimes that are still ruling.
• Denounces the armed intervention and policy of imperialism and its lackeys in the region and its moves to install new reactionary regimes and to prevent people to establish democratic regimes.

At the national level:

- Democratic Way (Europe Region) salutes the heroic struggle of the Moroccan people for freedom, democracy, dignity and social justice and against despotism.

It offers its condolences to the families of martyrs, in times when the last martyr of the people, Kamal Hassani, was killed brutally by repressive forces parallel (Baltajias groups). Democratic Way (European Region) strongly condemns the repressive regime of Moroccan and demands the immediate cessation of the repression and killings of our people.

The Democratic Way (Europe Region) called:

- To further expand and develop the strength and struggle of our people against the despotic power and Majzen existing in our country. Our slogan today should be the final and complete break with despotism and absolutism

- To support and engage even more in the Moroccan February 20 Movement, to achieve the legitimate claims on the basis of the independent platform February 17, 2011.

- To strengthen the dynamic launched by the Moroccan Movement February 20.

The commitment must be:

1 – To ensure the independence and, above all, the unity of this movement.

2 – Firm against the attacks of the regime and its propaganda machinery.

3 – vigilant against attempts to divide, to draw down its demands and impose a status quo or drag an obscurantist and gloomy future.

To mobilize, all free men and women, in Europe to boycott the sham election of November 25, 2011. We particularly call on the political forces who take this position to actively assume their political responsibility.

Finally, we welcome all initiatives and policy decisions of our National Secretariat starting with the demand for a constituent assembly. We declare our willingness to commit firmly for the success of our National Congress, scheduled for 13, 14 and July 15, 2012.

Democratic Way (European Region)

October 29, 2011

Annahj Addimocrati

http://www.annahjaddimocrati.org

Note:

This is a translation from French and Spanish Communication taken from the site of Communist Party of Spain (ML) the link to original article is here. For the English speakers we have attempted to translate the communique using the Google Translation software. We are not responsible for any omission and commission, if any reader/comrade want to help in improving the text, then please contact us at marxistfront[@]yahoo.co.in

Israel is an Apartheid State

Global Research, March 4, 2010 

Before Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) even began members of the Ontario Legislature and the Canadian Parliament are falling all over each other to denounce it. I can’t remember another time when elected legislators formally denounced a student activity like this. Perhaps during the 1950s when McCarthyism was rampant but that was before my time.

Last week the Ontario Legislature unanimously passed a resolution denouncing Israel Apartheid Week submitted by PC Peter Shure who said calling Israel an apartheid state was “close to hate speech.” While there were only 30 MPPs in the Legislature at the time, NDP MPP Cheri di Novo was one of them and spoke in favour of the resolution. This week a Conservative MP is introducing a resolution calling IAW anti-Semitic.

Before I deal with why these unprecedented attacks are taking place, I’d like to share with you a great talk I heard last night at Ryerson from Na’eem Jeena (view video below), a leading activist and academic from South Africa who works for Palestinian solidarity. He told us that South African apartheid had three pillars of apartheid and Israel shares all three.

1. Different rights for different races. In the case of Israel, it is different rights for Jews and for non-Jews. For example the law of return of 1950 says Jews can return to Israel and be given citizenship even if they have no links to the country other than mythical biblical ones; whereas Palestinians cannot return even if their parents or grandparents lived there.

2. Separation of so-called racial groups into different geographical areas. Even within the borders of Israel, 93 percent of land is reserved as a national land trust or Jewish National Fund land is for the exclusive use of Jews. The 20 percent of the population that is Palestinians living in Israel have to share access to the 7 percent of private land that is left. The Israeli Supreme Court has made a number of decisions that Palestinians cannot live on Jewish lands. There are not only residential areas that are banned to Palestinians but there are separate roads for Jews and Palestinians. That was never true in South Africa even in times of crisis. Moreover Palestinians have less access to water than Jews living nearby.

Finally the movement of Palestinians is severely restricted much more so than were blacks in South Africa. The famous pass laws in South Africa meant that blacks had to show government issued passes to move around but Palestinians are even more restricted by walls and checkpoints and if they live in the Gaza Strip can’t leave at all.

3. Security and Repression Matrix of Laws and Security. There was serious repression in the black townships but there were never tanks or planes buzzing overhead like there is in West Bank. Israeli military violence against Palestinian communities, says Jeena, is far worse than anything suffered by blacks in South Africa during apartheid.

If Israel is becoming a pariah in the world it is not because of anti-Semitism, it is because they are practicing a form of apartheid even more egregious than that practiced in South Africa. Others have compiled comments from some of the most respected leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa who see what Israel is doing as apartheid. There is a reason why the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is strongest in South Africa. People there recognize apartheid when they see it.

Finally the UN Convention on Apartheid condemns the crime of apartheid that refers to a series of inhuman acts – including murder, torture, arbitrary arrest, illegal imprisonment, exploitation, marginalization, and persecution – committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining the domination of one racial group by another. If the shoe fits.

So why are politicians including some from the NDP setting a student activity like IAW in their sites? An all party coalition of parliamentarians has been holding hearings on what they call the “new anti-Semitism,” by which they mean criticism of Israel. They heard from every University President who appeared before them that there is no rise of anti-Semitism on their campuses and yet the false rumours of such a rise persist because of the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Israel is beginning to see that the non-violent anti-apartheid and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement is a greater threat to their power than the any military threat. In Israel and Palestine, they are moving to arrest non-violent activists who are leading the movement there. And they are using all their economic and political power to push friendly governments to move against these protests. But there is a problem. It’s called democracy and freedom of speech. However much you might disagree that Israel practices apartheid, you cannot shut down a discussion of the issue or a demonstration or disinvestment campaign against Israel because freedom of speech is a fundamental democratic right in most Western countries. In Canada, the only way to shut down the movement is to vilify it as hateful or anti-Semitic. That is what our parliamentarians are now trying to do.

I am Jewish and have been working on and off for Palestinian rights for many years, as have many other Jews who feel a special responsibility to speak out against injustices committed by Israel. During that time, I have rarely experienced any anti-Semitism. In the IAW organizing, I have experienced none. If Israel is losing legitimacy in the world, it is because of what their government is doing to the Palestinians, not because of anti-Semitism. This attempt to shut down criticism of Israel is the most frightening assault on freedom of speech I have ever seen in this country. Whether or not you think Israeli Apartheid Week is the best name for this week of discussion supporting Palestinian rights, please write your MP and your MPP and tell them you think it is wrong for Parliamentarians to denounce this kind of educational activity.

Judy Rebick is the CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy and maintains a blog at transformingpower.ca where this article first appeared.

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Studies IX: The PCOT and Electoral Performance

Below are translations of two communiques (originally in Arabic) from the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT). The first is a campaign statement in advance of the Constituent Assembly election in October, the second is a post-election statement explaining the party’s view of the elections and its performance. This is a ‘far left’ party which won three seats in the Constituent Assembly.

The PCOT was certainly in the ‘secular’ column insofar as the polarization between religious and secular parties was concerned and the party probably suffered, as has been noted, from its atheism/secularism and generally unabashed communism. Its rhetoric on religious issues has been laid out on this blog previously.

The party has historically had a hardline on religious matters and one can see this even in the translations below where campaign tactics involving houses of worship used by its opponents are compared to the behavior of the old Ben Ali regime. Its ideological tracts include harsh invectives against Rachid Ghannouchi and Islamist political philosophy and personalities in general. Some of these are rather nuanced, for instance its stance on the hijab (it ran candidates for the constituent assembly who themselves wore hijab). It also made an effort to appeal to religious voters by distancing itself from a stance against religious practice and religious people during this past summer. Being a communist party of the Enver Hoxha variety calls up certain connotations for many Tunisians and others. (they ran candidates under the name al-badil ath-thawri or Revolutionary Alternative, leaving out ‘communist’).

A party that declares itself committed to democracy and human rights but also has to explain its view of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its opinion of Marx or atheism is bound to face challenges in a country where many people are observant Muslims (it is worth mentioning that the PCOT was relatively less hostile toward the religious set during the campaign than the PDP, for example).

But there is a constituency for such a party in Tunisia and its members have gained some credibility from non-communists for having been rather harshly treated and detained under Ben Ali. Hard secularism proved less advantageous in October’s election and the overall results do not point to an Islamist take over and it is likely Nahdha and the center left and left wing parties in the new Constituent Assembly will have to compromise rather than impose narrowness on one another.

“Statement of the electoral list of the Revolutionary Alternative”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article3875

AUTHOR: PCOT

DATE: 1 October, 2011

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

Facing the 23 October polls to elect the National Constituent Assembly which was called for by the people’s rebellion and imposed by the transitional authorities in order to make a final break with dictatorship and lay the foundations for a democratic republic to be achieve the goals of the revolution and launch a new phase in Tunisian history, enriched with the blood of the martyrs.

The founding team of the National Council will be the sole legitimate authority in the country after 23 October and its first task will be the drafting of a new constitution for Tunisia and secondly the appointment of a new government for the conduct of the affairs of the county until the election of new governing institutions and accordance with the provisions of the new constitution, terminating after the transitional period and should not in any case go beyond that.

Your voices will be crucial in this election to the NAtional Constituent Assembly and its members must be in the service of the revolution and work to meet the expectations of the Tunisian people and so that enemies of the revolution, from the leftovers of Ben Ali and his “mafia” to the reactionary parties and forces hanging around the authorities, will not be able to control the Council and use it to circumvent the revolution.

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

The Workers Party, which has struggled since its inception in 1986 for the people to have a free and democratic Tunisia and participated in the overthrow of Ben Ali and continues to struggle to complete the tasks of the revolution, leads you in this carrying along with this name the name of ‘The Revolutionary Alternative’ and as its logo the hammer (the symbol of Worker) and sickle (the symbol of the Farmer).

The Workers Party promises you if you choose from its lists it will act as custodians of the blood of the martyrs and steadfast defenders of your interests in the Constituent Assembly and will work to translate into the new constitution your hopes and ambitions and to speed up the Council’s appointment of a new government to take the necessary actions to response to your urgent demands.

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

The Workers Party wants to bring you a democratic republic based on:

• The principle of citizenship and equality among members of society;
• Full and effective equality between the sexes in the family, society and public life;
• Ensuring individual and public liberties and protection from abuse, whether from the State or any other group;
• Respect for the inviolability of the human self from the inviolability of his home and his private life and the criminalization of any violation of it;
• The principle of elections to set up all governing institutions;
• The referendum as an instrument of direct democracy;
• Respect for Islam as the faith of the major of the people and all other beliefs and convictions and ensuring the appropriate conditions for their free exercise and peace of mind without the intervention of the police and administration and without the use of the State by any party or group to justify oppression, exploitation or segregation between citizens and to undermine the unity of the people;
• A civil state in the State and its legislation and authority;
• The political system best suited to our country, at this stage, is the parliamentary system, the adoption of proportional representation, blocking the door to control by an individual or party yet again, where the community has a regime of “governors” and “authorized” and “deliberate” should end up with tyranny being replaced by regionalized councils and village assemblies subject to accounting and control;
• Justice and the independence of the judiciary can be achieved only if the conditions are set according to international standards, and that management cannot work unless it is eased in by the community and subject to the control of citizens and elected officials assure its neutrality from the parties;
• Security and stability rely not on repression but on respect for people’s freedom, rights and dignity and the security forces must work in service of the citizenry and the soldiers in service of the country and the people, not in service to the rulers;
• A Constitutional Court is necessary to monitor the law and respond to abuse;
• The foreign policy of the Tunisian revolution should be based on: resistance to colonialism, Zionism and reaction and should support the just cause of the Arab peoples and of the peoples of the world as a whole and the criminalization of normalization with the Zionist Entity by the National Constituent Council;

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

Political democracy is meaningless without social democracy as the Tunisian people revolted against poverty, unemployment, marginalization, exploitation, corruption and regional inequality while raising the banner of social justice. And the Workers Party does not see a way to achieve this justice without out a radical economic change toward an economy in the service of the people and not in the service of local and foreign minorities whose only objective is the accumulation of profits.

The essential goods of the country should be, under the constitution, the property of the people with investments in improving training methods and individuals, hand-in-hand, without discrimination and the land of Tunisia should not be relinquished to any foreign company and that private property should have a social function.

The right to employment and education and fair and human treatment for the children of the working class and the poor free of charge and the right to adequate housing and transportation and culture and sports in a healthy environment and to social security should be constitutional rights. Care for those with special needs (disabilities) and for the needy and the elderly should be a made a constitutional duty of the state and society in order to avoid discrimination.

The strength of youth should take pride in their community and provide it with all the material and moral conditions to achieve this.

The family is the fundamental nucleus of society and the state should work to release it from physical burdens and change it into a morality based on love and mutual respect.

The Tunisian emigres are a part of Tunisia and should refrain from dealing with them as a source for the provision of hard currency and the state should pick up their cases and defend their moral and material interests and strengthen their ties to their country of origin.

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

The founding National Council will appoint a new government to handle the affairs of the country until the election of the governing institutions. The Workers Party will, if it wins your trust and its candidates are elected, push the government to proceed with the processing of files in all seriousness on the political and social emergency:

• To establish transitional justice and accountability for the former regime and killers of the martyrs;
• Purge the security services, judiciary, administration and media and re-organize it on a democratic basis;
• Take urgent action for the benefit of disadvantaged areas;
• Activate a general amnesty and accelerate the compensation of families of the martyrs and victims of repression;
• Take concrete actions for the benefit of the people, bring down prices on basic consumer goods, increase private-sector wages and raise the minimum wage;
• Adopt the granting of unemployment benefits and the free movement of labor and the bringing the idle to work and removing …
• Retrieve money smuggled by Ben Ali and his gangs during the fascist era;

Oh Voters! Oh Voters!

The revolution proceeds towards completing its tasks and putting an end to decades — even centuries — of oppression and humiliation. Take your future in your hands and do not give an opportunity to the enemies of the revolution and know that the Workers Party and its comrades are with you on your journey until the final victory!

“Statement on the Constituent Assembly Elections”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article3882

AUTHOR: PCOT National Leadership

DATE: 29 October, 2011

This evening, Thursday 27 October, 2011 the “Election Commission” announced the preliminary results of the National Constituent Assembly elections. The Nahdah Movement came in first place, followed by the Congress for the Republic, Ettakatol, and al-Aridha . . . and the Tunisian Communist Workers Party received only three seats in Sfax, Kairouan and Siliana.

The Workers Party has gone to the door to participate in these elections, the first of their kind after the revolution that is open to all parties, intellectual and political currents, but it cannot on the on hand record that this election despite being marked by several impurities should stand defended by the truth and move away from the wooden language inherited from the era of Ben Ali and know only the glorification of ‘standing’ while hiding the facts from the people.

1. The turnout did not exceed, according to official figures provided by the Supreme Body for Elections, 48.9 per cent, which means that the majority of voters (3,867,197 of 7,569,824 voters) did not participate, which represents a major weakness and the causes of this should be sought for in the political and social climate during the year of the elections.
2. Money played a dangerous and dirty role in these elections, starting with the work the all too familiar “publicity policy” and acts of bribery, which was widespread in the form of “gifts” and “charitable and social services” which continued until the day of voting without an effort to put a stop to it by the Supreme Body.
3. Because media, including the public media, has remained in the hands of agents of the former regime, the disposal of bias for the benefit of some parties at the expense of the others did not help the general public understand the stakes raised by the Constituent Assembly election and sometimes marginalized or blocked off issues in an ideological maze.
4. The recruitment in mosques and public places made the election not free, for example, most of the speeches on Friday 21 October, 2011, only two days before election day led to tacit or open calls to vote for certain parties over others which it was claimed represented “religion” or that its followers “prayed” . . . which reminds us of the same methods used by Ben Ali.
5. The tactics associated with some campaigns led to excessive distortions — despicable and backward — against the forces of revolutionary democracy, including our party, using accusations of blasphemy, swearing and cursing, and the various reactionary, anti-revolutionary forces participated against the interests of the Tunisian people, for the the bases of these campaigns was the goal of distracting attention from the real axes of political, economic, social and cultural conflict, tearing at the unity of the people on the basis of ideological fabrications.
6. The many violations committed against the ballot, including by many workers at polling stations, included violations in the use of cars and buses to transport voters, especially those not “registered voluntarily”, the continuation of the campaign on polling day in front of stations in various ways, and incitement of voters toward one party or another, and [parties] providing voters with food and drinks at poling stations . . . These violations violated the principles of an electoral democracy, a certification of several monitoring bodies, observers and independent reports, affecting the integrity of the Constituent Assembly election and its transparency and they influenced the results in one way or another. The attempt by the Supreme Body to minimize their importance is not at all convincing in hiding the deficiency of this body in addressing these violations and abuses.
7. The lack of an announcement of the results on time and the postponement of this more than once raises more questions about the transparency of these elections. Over the next few days we need to be shown some of the reasons for these delays.
8. The Tunisian Communist Workers Party contributed to the election and was the first to advocate the election of a Constituent Assembly to break with the regime of tyranny. The Workers Party ran a clean campaign financially, morally and politically by focusing on programs and proposals and relied on the dependability of the energy of its activists who were faced with smear campaigns on a large scale in the media and brushed it off. The results the party obtained are weak, and do not reflect its influence and presence in the field and its history of struggle and its contribution to the sites of progress in the Tunisian people’s revolution against tyranny and dictatorship. While these results are important due to the climate of the year in which the elections took place, which we discussed, and the organs of the party will assess the reasons related to this [performance] and ways to overcome.
9. The Workers Party, regardless of these results will continue to fight relentlessly for the workers and the working class and for other classes of people in order to complete the tasks of the revolution and bring about national, democratic and popular change. The Workers Party gained supporters and convinced them of its program, positions and credibility, which will be a solid base for launching a new and winning bets in the future.

The Workers Party salutes all those who stood by its side on the occasion of this election and who voted for the party, the people and their children, and promises them that its representatives in the Constituent Assembly will defend them will all its strength and the message they carry with them!

– The Tunisian Communist Workers Party National Leadership, Tunis 29 October, 2011

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