France in Mali: The longue durée of imperial blowback

The present intervention in Mali, however necessary and well-intentioned it is, may produce its own blowback [Reuters]

The current crisis in Mali is a product of French colonialism, and their intervention will sadly create more blowback.

The dispatching of French soldiers to beat back rapidly advancing Salafi militants in northern Mali represents the convergence of multiple circles of blowback from two centuries of French policies in Africa. Some date back to the beginning of the 19th century, others to policies put in place during the last few years. Together, they spell potential disaster for France and the United States (the two primary external Western actors in Mali today), and even more so for Mali and the surrounding countries.

Only two outcomes, together, can prevent the nightmare scenario of a huge failed state in the heart of Africa spreading violence across the continent. First, the French-led assault on the north must manage to force most of the Salafi fighters out of the populated areas presently under their control and install a viable African-led security force that can hold the population centres for several years. If that weren’t difficult enough, French and international diplomats must create space for the establishment of a much more representative and less corrupt Malian government, one which can and will negotiate an equitable resolution to the decades long conflict with the Touareg peoples of the North, whose latest attempt violently to carve out a quasi-independent zone in the north early last year helped create the political and security vacuum so expertly, if ruthlessly, exploited by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib (AQIM) and its allied radical groups.

The first and largest circle of blowback returns to French colonial policy in North and West Africa, which was responsible for the creation of most of the states that are involved in the present conflict. France began deliberately to colonise large swaths of West Africa at the start of the 19th century, gaining control of what today is Mauritania and Senegal by 1815, followed by the invasion of Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and the French Sudan (which would become Mali) – in the 1890s, Niger in 1903-4 and Morocco in 1912.

Carved from colonialism

It is impossible to know how the map of Africa would have evolved without European colonialism to shape it. What is sure, however, is that the European “scramble for Africa” that dominated the 19th century – and in which local rulers played a willing part whenever it served their interests – ensured that European powers would create the territorial foundation for modern nation-states whose borders bore little correspondence to the ethnic and religious geography of the continent. Mali in particular was composed of several distinct ethnic, linguistic and what today are considered “racial” groups. Its brief and ill-fated union with Senegal at the time of independence in 1960 highlights the artificial foundation of the region’s states and their borders.

The lack of consideration for local ethnic, religious and cultural dynamics and the colonial imperative to arrogate as much territory under one rule as possible created a situation in which states with areas over twice the size of France and population groups which had little historical or cultural reason to live under one sovereignty and had few natural resources of comparative advantages to support themselves, were nevertheless forced to do just that; first, under foreign rule, whose main goal – whatever the “civilising mission” proclaimed by Paris – was to extract as much wealth and resources as possible and enforce control by whatever means necessary, then under postcolonial indigenous governments whose policies towards their people often differed little on the ground from their colonial predecessors.

Indeed, even those countries which secured independence peacefully were structurally deformed by foreign rule and the establishment of states with borders that did not naturally correspond to the political and cultural ecologies of the regions in which they were created. As epitomised by the plight of the Mali’s Touareg communities (who are spread across the Sahel much like Kurds are spread across the countries of the Fertile Crescent), most states in West, North and Central Africa wound up including significant populations who were different from, and thus disadvantaged by, the group who assumed power. At the same time, post-independence governments were riven by corruption and narrow loyalties, with leaders who were most often unwilling to pursue or incapable of pursuing a truly national, democratic vision of development.

In such a situation, religion, which might have played a positive role in shaping morally grounded public spheres and economies, became marginalised from governance, while slowly taking hold in a toxic form among many of the region’s most marginalised peoples.

Supporting the wrong team

If France’s colonial history created the structures in which the present crisis inevitably has unfolded, a more recent set of policies constitutes the second circle of blowback; namely, France’s unreserved support for the Algerian government in its repression of the democratic transition that began in 1988 and was crushed in 1992. As is well known, rather than allow the Islamic Salvation Front – a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired group not that different in its roots and outlook than its Egyptian or Tunisian mainstream Islamist counterparts – to take power after its clear electoral victory in the first round of the 1991-92 parliamentary elections, the Algerian military cancelled the next round and began a crackdown that quickly exploded into a civil war between the military government and radical Islamist groups.

Faced with the choice of allowing a new, Islamist political actor take the reigns of power, France, joined by the US, chose to support the Algerian military, with whom it had retained close relations. In allying with an authoritarian, brutal and corrupt government the French, and the West more broadly, became party to a vicious conflict that saw the emergence of a dangerous terrorist group, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), quite possibly controlled at least in part by the military itself, and the subsequent bloody decade-long civil war that cost the lives of well over 100,000 civilians.

The GIA in turn was the kernel out of which another group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, and then al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghbrib, emerged. These groups focused their attention on North Africa for much of the last decade, but gradually moved more deeply into the Sahelian regions linking Algeria to Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Morocco.

Had France and the West not given unreserved support to the Algerian military, it is highly unlikely that these groups would have been created, never mind grown to their present position (a similar argument could of course be made about the main branch of al-Qaeda, which is so many ways was a direct product of unceasing US support for some of the most corrupt and brutal regimes in the world, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan).

As in so many other cases, France and its Western allies chose stability over democracy. In so doing it inevitably, if ironically, set the stage for the present chaos in which its troops are being forced to fight.

Supporting the wrong team… again

The third and most recent circle of blowback stems from France’s longstanding support for Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Specifically, French President Nicolas Sarkozy offered strong support for Ben Ali at the start of the crisis, specifically including, as foreign affairs minister Michèle Alliot-Marie described it, “the savoir-faire, recognised throughout the world of [French] security forces in order to settle security situations of this type”. The French president’s words embarrassed his government once the protests picked up steam to the point of creating a “crisis of credibility” that necessitated Sarkozy’s “admission of mistakes” in supporting Ben Ali against the revolutionaries.

So strong was Sarkozy’s embarrassment that when the Libyan crisis erupted, France took the lead in pressing for Western military intervention to force Gaddafi from power in order to absolve itself of its Tunisian sins. Yet it was precisely the launching of NATO’s air war and military support for the Libyan rebels that led to the exodus of well-trained fighters and significant weapons stocks from Libya into Niger, Mali and other parts of the Sahel in the wake of the crumbling of Gaddafi’s state. The chaos and spread of weapons generated by the Libya war put crucial numbers of men and arms into play in northern Mali at a particularly dangerous moment in the country’s history, when long oppressed Touaregs, who’d been recipients of Gaddafi’s largesse in the past (and some of whom in fact fought for Gaddafi), were once again primed to rebel against the central government.

This situation became even more ripe for chaos with the unexpected and apparently unintended military coup against the country’s soon to be retired president, Amadou Toumani Touré, in March, 2012, which created an even bigger power vacuum throughout the country.

The blowback’s blowback

Here we see decades, and indeed centuries, of French and broader European and American policies coming together to produce maximum chaos. This in turn was strengthened by the blowback from longstanding local conflicts, from the hostility of Mali’s military leadership to the extremely poor rank and file conscripts (which prompted the protests that sent the President to flight in March, 2012) to the inability of the broader Touareg rebel movement to set aside its tradition of violent resistance and embrace a younger generation of activists, who were advocating a revolutionary movement that was much closer to the soon to erupt Arab Spring than to the violent insurrection for which Touaregs had long been known. Almost a year later, the army has lost control over the majority of the country, while Touaregs have been largely sidelined from the revolt they started by Salafi groups aligned with al-Qaeda.

What is most interesting in this regard is that the present blowback had significant advance warning and should in fact have been anticipated by French and Western policymakers in the planning of the Libyan war. North Africa experts, such as Sciences Po political scientist Jean-Pierre Filiu, were pointing out already in 2010 that al-Qaeda in the Maghrib and other salafi fighting groups were moving away from their focus on Algeria and towards developing a strategic presence, and even “new theatre” in the Sahel, with the ultimate aim of destabilising those countries.

These jihadis “now represent a serious security threat in northern parts of Mali and Niger”, Filiu explained, because of numerous kidnappings, smuggling and other illicit activities the recruitment of a “new generation” of fighters from the many poor communities of the region. This reality of clearly increased operations by radical Islamist groups in northern Mali, coupled with the increase in Touareg agitation and Gaddafi’s well-known use of various nomadic groups as mercenaries, should have raised loud alarms among French and Western policymakers in the lead up to the decision to enter for Libyan civil war.

Indeed, on the US side, the American Ambassador to Mali warned already in 2004 that Mali is a “remote, tribal and barely governed swath of Africa… a potential new staging ground for religious extremism and terrorism similar to Afghanistan under the Taliban… If Mali goes, the rest goes”. This warning was made just as the US military was deepening its military presence across the continent, culminating in the creation of AFRICOM in 2008.

Given the clear attention being paid to the Sahel in the last decade by French and US policymakers, we can only assume that either they were utterly incompetent in failing to understand the inevitable results of Western military intervention in Libya, or saw that as a win-win situation, providing a new theatre in a strategically rising area of the world in which US, French and Western militaries could become increasingly engaged (and in so doing, keep rivals such as China further at bay).

Either way, just as previous African interventions generated the blowback that helped create the present Malian crisis, the present intervention in Mali, however necessary, well-intentioned and even wished for by the majority of Malians (to the extent the wishes of Malians can even be determined that clearly), will no doubt produce its own blowback, which will claim the lives of many more Africans, French, American and other Western citizens.

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On the deaths in Stalin’s USSR

In the West, when Stalin’s name is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the “millions of deaths” under his “ruthless regime”. For decades, fascist and capitalist propagandists alike perpetuated this vision of Stalin as a monster, employing the best World War 2 and Cold War propagandists to slander Stalin’s role as a statesman. What is the truth behind this claims? I hope to shed some light on the matter.

As has been now resolved, the varying numbers of deaths under the Stalin administration are a product of propaganda, and have hence been wildly exaggerated. The evidence found in Russian archives, opened up by the capitalist roader Yeltsin, put the total number of death sentences from 1923 to 1953, the post-Lenin Soviet Union, between 775,866 and 786,098^a. To this we must add up the 40,000 who may have been executed without trial and unofficially^b. If we add up the numbers, what we get achieve is 800,000 executions in a period of 36 years, less than the lives claimed by the dictatorship of the CIA-backed anti-communist Suharto in Indonesia in a time span of 2 years. This is not to say the deaths are to be condoned, but it raises an important question: if less lives have been claimed by the Soviet Union under Stalin than Suharto’s Indonesia, why is Stalin demonized to that extent when Suharto is rarely even known among pro-capitalists?

We shall answer this question in a future post about cultural hegemony, let’s now continue with our examination of Soviet deaths. Because the figure of 800,000 executions includes those persons sentenced to death but had, for instance, their sentences reduced^a, this too may be an overestimation. In fact, in a research by Vinton, evidence has been provided indicating that the number of executions was significantly below the number of civilian prisoners sentenced to death in the USSR, with only 7,305 executions in a sample of 11,000 prisoners authorized to be executed in 1940 (or around 60%)^c. In addition, 681,692 of the 780,000 or so death sentences were issued during the Great Purge (1937-1938 period)^a.

Initially, the NKVD, under Yezhov’s orders, set a cap of 186,500 imprisonments and 72,950 death penalties for a 1937 special operation to combat the threat of foreign and internal subversion. The operation was decided upon after the discovery of Bonapartist plots against the government, led by Tukhacevsky, whose links with opportunist factions within the Party caused total panic. The NKVD’s orders had to be carried out by troikas, 3-men tribunals^a. As the troikas passed sentences before the accused had even been arrested, local authorities requested increases in their own quotas, and there was an official request in 1938 for a doubling of the amount of prisoner transport that had been initially requisitioned to carry out the original campaign quotas of the tribunals^d.

However, even if there had been twice as many actual executions as originally planned, which I would doubt, the number would still be less than 150,000. Many, in fact, may have had their death sentence refused or revoked by authorities before arrest or execution could take place, especially since Stalin, Molotov and Beria later realized that excesses had been committed in the 1937-38 period (the Great Purge), had a number of convictions overturned, and had many of the responsible local leaders punished^e. Soviet records indicate only about 300,000 actual arrests for anti-Soviet activities or political crimes during this 1937-1938 interval. With a ratio of 1 execution for every 3 arrests as originally specified by the NKVD, that would imply about 100,000 executions. Since some of the people sentenced to death may have already been in confinement, and since there is some evidence of a 50,000 increase in the total number of deaths in labor camps over the 1937-38 interval that was probably caused by such executions, the total number executed by the troika campaign would probably be around 150,000^a. There were also 30,514 death sentences passed by military courts and 4,387 by regular courts during the 1937-38 period, but, even if all these death sentences were carried out, the total number remains under 200,000. Such a low number seems especially likely given the fact that aggregate death rates from all causes throughout the Soviet Union were actually lower in 1937-38 than in prior years^f, possibly a result of universal health care, vaccination and an improvement in living standards.

Assuming the remaining 100,000 or so death sentences passed in the other years of Stalin’s administration (1923-1936 and 1939-53) resulted in a 60% execution rate, as per the Vinton sample, the total number executed by the Soviet Union during the period would be about 250,000. Even with the thousands executed between 1917 and 1921, it is plausible that the number of unarmed civilians killed between 1917-1953 amounted to considerably less than a quarter million given that thousands of these victims may have been Soviet soldiers, given that many may have been armed bandits and guerrillas, and given that at least 14,000 of the actual executions were of foreign prisoners of war^c.

A USA former attache to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, has stated that the number executed was really only in the tens of thousands^g, and so it is very likely that the true number of people killed by the Soviet Union over its entire history (including the thousands killed in Afghanistan) is too small for the country to make it even in the top ten in mass murders (unlike the United States of America, but that’s for another day). There were no doubt many innocent victims during the 1937-38 Stalin purge, but it should also be mentioned that there is substantial evidence from the Soviet archives of Soviet citizens advocating treasonable offenses such as the violent overthrow of the Soviet government or foreign invasion of the Soviet Unionⁱ. In addition, the Soviet Union felt itself so threatened by subversion and imminent military invasions by Japan and Germany (which occurred in full force in 1938 and 1941, respectively) that it perceived a need to undertake a nationwide campaign to eliminate potential internal enemies. Moreover, these external threats were further fueled by the fact that the Russian nobility and czarists (over a million of whom had emigrated after the communist revolution in 1917) had given financial aid to the German Nazis in the 1930s for the purpose of using them (once they had successfully taken power in Germany) to help them overthrow the Soviet government^j. Forged documents and misinformation spread by Nazi Germany to incriminate innocent and patriotic Soviets also contributed to Soviet paranoia^k. It must also be remembered that Soviet fear of foreign-sponsored subversion in the 1930s existed within the context of guerrilla warfare fought against the Soviet Union by some of the same groups of people who had fought with the foreign invaders against the Soviet Union in the 1918-22 Foreign Interventionist Civil War. While the 1937-38 purges were very repressive and tragic by almost any measure, they may have helped prevent the fascists from inciting a successful rebellion or coup in the Soviet Union. Such a threat was a very real one given that the German Nazis did succeed in using political intrigues, threats, economic pressure, and offers of territorial gains to bring other Eastern European countries into their orbit, including Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, as well as Yugoslavia for a short period of time^h, given that the Soviet Union had been subjected to a brutal 1918-22 civil war which was launched by rebels who were supported by over a million foreign invading troops from over a dozen capitalist countries, given that there was a large amount of sabotage committed by Soviet citizens in the 1930s, and given that there were a significant number of Soviet dissidents who were in favor of overthrowing the Soviet government even if it required an invasion by Germany or some other foreign powerⁱ. In addition, many people may have worked independently to sabotage the Soviet Union in the hope that they would thereby contribute to a foreign overthrow of the Soviet Union, especially since Nazi Germany did make extensive efforts to incite uprisings, cause subversive actions, and create ethnic conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union’s success in defeating the subsequent invasions by fascist Japan (in 1938) and Germany (1941-44), the danger posed by the Nazi spies and saboteurs in Eastern Europe is illustrated by the fact that the CIA considered them so effective that it adopted virtually the entire Nazi network into its own system of terrorism in Eastern Europe after World War II^l.

Evidence from the Soviet archives indicates that the officials responsible for the political repression of the 1930s sincerely felt the victims were guilty of some crime such as sabotage, spying, or treason, and many of the executions of the Great Purge were reported in the local Soviet press at the time. Even when there was proven to be no direct connection between the accused and the fascist foreign powers, there was often a strong belief that the suspects were foreign sympathizers who were working on their own (without formal direction) to contribute to the overthrow of the Soviet Union. It should also be noted that much of the 1937-38 repression, often called the Great Purge, was actually directed against the widespread banditry and criminal activity (such as theft, smuggling, misuse of public office for personal gain, and swindles) that was occurring in the Soviet Union at the time^m. In addition to the executions, there were also many imprisoned, and hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from the Communist Party during the Great Purge for being incompetent, corrupt, and/or excessively bureaucratic, with such targeting of inept or dishonest Soviet bureaucrats being fairly popular among the average Soviet citizensⁱ. Like the myths of millions of executions, the fairy tales that Stalin had tens of millions of people arrested and permanently thrown into prison or labor camps to die in the 1930-53 interval are untrue. In particular, the Soviet archives indicate that the number of people in Soviet prisons, gulags, and labor camps in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s averaged about 2 million, of whom 20-40% were released each year^a. This average, which includes desperate World War II years, is similar to the number imprisoned in the USA in the 1990s and is only slightly higher as a percentage of the population. It should also be noted that the annual death rate for the Soviet interned population was about 4%, which incorporates the effect of prisoner executions^a. Excluding the desperate World War II years, the death rate in the Soviet prisons, gulags, and labor camps was only 2.5%^a, which is below that of the average citizen in Russia under the tsar in peacetime in 1913^f. This finding is not very surprising, given that about 1/3 of the confined people were not even required to workⁿ, and given that the maximum work week was 84 hours in even the harshest Soviet labor camps during the most desperate wartime years^o. The latter maximum (and unusual) work week actually compares favorably to the 100-hour work weeks that existed even for “free” 6-year old children during peacetime in the Gilded era and industrial revolution^p(shoutout to libertarians), although it may seem high compared to the 7-hour day worked by the typical Soviet citizen under Stalinⁱ.

In addition, it should also be mentioned that most of the arrests under Stalin were motivated by an attempt to stamp out crimes such as banditry, theft, misuse of public office for personal gain, smuggling, and swindles, with less than 10% of the arrests during Stalin’s rule being for political reasons or secret police matters^a. The Soviet archives reveal a great deal more political dissent permitted in Stalin’s Soviet Union (including a widespread amount of criticism of individual government policies and local leaders) than is normally perceived in the Westⁱ. Given that the regular police, the political or secret police, prison guards, some national guard troops, and fire fighters (who were in the same ministry as the police) comprised scarcely 0.2% of the Soviet population under Stalin^e, severe repression would have been impossible even if the Soviet Union had wanted to exercise it. In comparison, the USA today has many times more police as a percentage of the population (about 1%), not to mention prison guards, national guard troops, and fire fighters included in the numbers used to compute the far smaller 0.2% ratio for the Soviet Union. In any event, it is possible that the communist countries of Eastern Europe would have become politically less repressive and more democratic (especially over time), if there hadn’t been overt and covert efforts by capitalist powers to overthrow their governments, including subversion conducted in the USSR as late as the 1980s that the USA government admitted to in the 1990s. These efforts at violent subversion were initially carried out mostly by the British (before World War II) and then later more so by the USA through the CIA, which did succeed violently overthrowing a very democratic communist government in Chile in 1973. If the communists had truly been as evil and dictatorial as they are portrayed to be in the capitalist press, the peaceful revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe (with virtually no related deaths except in Romania) could never have occurred.

Sources:

a: Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence”

http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/GTY-Penal_System.pdf

b: Hellmut Andics, “Rule of Terror”

c: Louisa Vinton, “The Katyn Documents: Politics and History.”

d: Amy Knight, “Beria, Stalin’s First Lieutenant”

http://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1993-804-08-Knight.pdf

e: Robert Thurston, “Life and Terror in Stalin s Russia”

f: Stephen Wheatcroft, “More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s”

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511626012&cid=CBO9780511626012A025

g: J. W. Smith, “Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century”

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780765604682/Economic-Democracy-Political-Struggle-21st-076560468X/plp

h: Marshall Miller, “Bulgaria during the Second World War”

i: Sarah Davies, “Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia”

http://books.google.com/books/about/Popular_Opinion_in_Stalin_s_Russia.html?id=yTGgOwH_mwgC&redir_esc=y

j: Leslie Feinberg, “The Class Character of German Fascism”

<a href=”http://www.workers.org/ww/1999/fascism0304.php

k: Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky “KGB: The Inside Story”

l: Von Schnitzler, “Der Rote Kana”

m: John Arch Getty, “Origins of the Great Purges”

http://books.google.com/books/about/Origins_of_the_Great_Purges.html?id=R5zx54LB-A4C&redir_esc=y

n: Edwin Bacon, “The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives”

o: R. J. Rummel, “Lethal Politics”

p: Marx and Engels, “Das Kapital”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm

q: Numbers taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Soviet_Union, which in turn cites Andreev et al, “Naselenie Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1922-1991″

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Communist Party of the Workers of France: No to French military intervention in Mali, No to the “sacred union” to support the war!

Position of January 12

The French government has decided to send French troops to Mali.

After the Ivory Coast and Libya, now it is Mali. This is a decision that involves France in a war in a former French colony.

This option was the only one that has been used since northern Mali has been in the hands of armed Islamist groups.

Since the beginning, [French President] Francois Holland asked the UN to give the green light to an international military intervention, in which the French General Staff and diplomacy would organize the concrete arrangements.

Men like Ouattara, put in place in the Ivory Coast by military intervention in which France played the lead role, Compaore, the head of Burkina Faso, who has continued to serve the interests of French imperialism in the region, regardless of the government in Paris, or Yayi Boni, an autocrat in Benin, serve as an “African” screen for this military intervention. Who can believe that ECOWAS would be able to set up a military force independent of the French army? On the contrary, it is clear today that the whole of the French military deployed in Africa has been mobilized for this intervention.

The justification for this French military intervention is the fight against armed Islamist groups who control part of the territory of Mali. They threaten the integrity of Mali and carry out a reign of terror in the areas they control. But their presence and the ease with which they are deployed reflect the existence of profound social, economic and political problems that the ruling regimes in Mali have not resolved, when they are not aggravated by their management of the country. This means that a military solution, let alone a foreign military intervention, will not resolve any of these problems, quite the contrary.

The Malian forces have denounced this situation and have from the beginning rejected a foreign military intervention; they stated that the question of the territorial integrity of Mali should be the responsibility of the Malian army. They were not listened to.

The military operation is complicated and can take time to mobilize the greatest resources. The victims are mainly Malian civilians caught in the crossfire.

The reinforcement of the “Vigipirate” plan is part of the strategy of tension and conditioning to convince the people of our country that they may be the target of attacks, whose perpetrators are linked directly or indirectly to Islamist groups acting in Mali. It is part of the government’s desire to create a climate of national unity, while it is carrying out an aggressive policy of austerity that strikes the masses.

Behind this intervention is the control of an area rich in strategic raw materials, particularly uranium that [the French company] Areva is exploiting in neighboring Niger and is also found in the subsoil of Mali.

For all these reasons, and because the war in the Ivory Coast, Afghanistan and Libya have amply shown that their justification by the fight against terrorism and the defense of democracy is a big lie, we express our total disagreement with the military intervention of France in Mali.

We reaffirm the need to put an end to the policy known as the “French-Africa,” a policy of economic domination and political and military intervention.

We affirm that it is up to the people of Mali, its democratic and patriotic forces, to find ways for a political solution to the crisis in their country.

Paris, January 12, 2013
Communist Party of the Workers of France

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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

Video: Afghanistan, Prelude to Soviet Invasion

Expose Ryan Towne for the Racist Fascist That She Is

As some of you may know there is a young woman out there claiming to be a Marxist-Leninist of the Pro-Enver Hoxha tendency with a bombastic and abrasive attitude towards anything in contrast to her views. This young woman goes by the name of “Ryan Towne” and some of you may well be FB friends with her.

She has been expelled from Revleft and numerous FB Communist groups for racist and Islamophobic remarks. Ryan Towne is a pro-Rhodesian settlerist, Zionist Israel apologist psuedo-leftist, it is totally arrogant of her to claim her own individual ultra-leftist/reactionary views on Hezbollah, Israel, Zimbabwe etc. deserve more merit than the millions of Communists who spent years forging the lines we have today. If the collective has spent the time and effort to create a plan to solve a problem, it should be followed out and judged on its results. One should never have the arrogance to assume that their opinion is greater than that of the collective decision making of the people. This is a total objectivist/fascist position to assume one individual knows better than the decisions making power of all people affected by the decision. It assumes that the individuals actions have no effect on anyone else.

Ryan has also come out defending Nazism, “ethnic socialism” etc. on her blog, it was soon taken down after been exposed on the forum Revleft:

Many people talk of how communism is a “noble concept” but that it can’t work. We are told how people have suffered under communism – the intellectuals and artists who were allegedly targeted and killed in Mao’s cultural revolution for example, the tens of millions of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin, the aggressive expansionism, gulags, the ridiculous notions of lysenkoism and the idea of making everyone work for equal and very low wages, the extent of state control over every one’s lives. But communism, despite all this, is still a “noble concept” and that is because there is a nugget of pure gold at the centre of this ideology -and that is socialism – an ideal of treating people fairly.

Many of the positive things about communism as it has been practiced and realised in actuality are not known to the general public. For example, that a policy of full employment was accompanied by free housing. The poorest people in Russia had a happier and more secure existence under soviet rule than they do today when they can find themselves homeless, counting themselves lucky to work unreasonable hours for little pay for capitalists, and in a society where there is a lot of corruption, crime and sleaze, and the mafia is strong. If communism “did not work” it is nevertheless true that what it was replaced with is little better, and in a number of ways worse.

Communism does work as practiced today in various nations around the world. these now are all non-white nations, non-western nations. Because they reject the western capitalist way of life they are demonised. But the people living in these countries do benefit from communism – and the communism is special there in that it is no longer internationalist and has taken on a nationalist flavour. Even Soviet Russia had to resort to rousing feelings of nationalistic pride in ww2. So these communist regimes are nationalistic and also socialistic, and yet they are undoubtedly fascist as well in that the state requires that the people obey its laws and serve the state’s existence.

The communism practiced in various countries now is different in each one. To some extent capitalism has been allowed, including allowing western capitalists to relocate factories to China, for example, and exploit the Chinese people. not good. but the variant of communism they have in china still has benefits to the Chinese people in that it controls criminal activities far more effectively than would otherwise be the case and takes a strong stance against such things as drug dealing, prostitution and pornography.

These communist countries have to be heavily ruled by a totalitarian state (and are thus basically fascist ) because the people living in them lack the altruism that would be necessary for the state to ease off and allow a natural socialistic consensus to emerge. China is a vast and over populated nation, but there is a fairly high level of homogeneity, especially in localised areas. true socialism could work if the separate areas would work as autonomous regions.

National socialism as practiced in Germany in the 3rd Reich worked like a charm because there was a high level of homogeneity, a strong sense of nationhood, and simply because the northern European/Germanic temperament is ideally suited to socialist society. Even today’s anti-Nazi documentaries with emotive titles about “the rise of evil” and so on admit that national socialist Germany was a paradise – as long as you were not one of those being hauled away to a concentration camp.

National socialism is like communism with all the failings removed. It is strange indeed that it is thought of in any way as being the opposite of communism but that mistake can be explained by the fact that Germany fought a war against soviet Russia, and the soviets needed to give the impression that national socialism was nothing like their own variant of socialism. it was the soviets who first decided to label the Nazis as “fascists” in order to avoid the use of the term “socialism” to describe their enemy. Although Hitler allied with Mussolini and the Italian fascist regime, national socialist thinkers in the third Reich have always made it clear that national socialism is a rejection of fascism. National socialism is about putting the folk before the state while fascism is the opposite. Fascism in no way implies any kind of racial loyalty and in fact would only exploit racial or patriotic loyalty as far as it benefited the state to do so – always at times of war. At present the west is ruled by a fascism in which the ruling capitalists exploit the people and seek to prevent true socialism by bringing in millions of immigrants of various races, especially third worlders. This provides them with cheap labour, causes racial conflict to replace the class conflict that capitalists fear, and prevents the folk of a nation from maintaining their territory and identity.

Yes true communism, true socialism, depends upon human nature being altruistic, and looking around us at the world it seems that such a society would be impossible. But it is not. Altruism has been scientifically proven to be a genetic trait that is lost unless it is practiced very discriminating. Animals have evolved to be altruistic – but only towards others who are closely related to them. William Hamilton’s equation demonstrates the mathematical formula for this kin selection. Altruism and socialism are almost homonyms. Socialism requires altruism and this is why, when you bear in mind the facts regarding the necessity of close relation, the most potential for a socialist society exists amongst people who are of one ethnicity and one nation. The biggest mistake of communists is to forget this rule. there cannot be a global village that is socialist – in which every ethnicity and creed cooperates in a spirit of harmony and love. We can imagine such a world perhaps, but the reality is that it can never happen and that attempts to make this happen not only fail but in fact ruin the only real chance of socialism, which is ethnic based.

Those who favour capitalism like to point to the failings of communism and say that human nature is egoistic and selfish and that people never really work for the common good. Since the most successful capitalists and politicians today are clinically psychopaths, it is not possible for these people to empathise with altruistic urges anyway. These people could never feel loyalty to blood, only to their own bank accounts. It is horrific that such people have so much power over all our lives.

Capitalists suggest that people live only for shallow material reward and they have no conscience about exploiting workers. Proudhon’s famous phrase “property is theft” is most accurate when referring to the ill-gotten gains of capitalists. Capitalists point to the Darwinist fact that animals are genetically programmed to desire to prosper, reproduce and expand. They ignore the fact that this is achieved as a group – and thus socialistic – even if the animal is not gregarious. Success in nature is about spreading ones genes and these genes succeeding within a gene pool. The capitalists abuse and twist Darwinism and that is how the abomination which is called “social Darwinism” came into the language. To capitalists, “survival of the fittest”, is about selfish exploitation by an individual and about the individual getting as good a material existence for himself, even without having any offspring at all in many cases, as possible. When we have these people in our midst it is only bad for our gene pool and the anti-nature world view that capitalists spread is killing us and raping the planet. It is a big factor behind the plummeting birth rate in the west.

The capitalists have not only twisted Darwinism but they have twisted socialism too. Many associate socialism now with a policy of supporting the least deserving and most useless people in our society. Many associate socialism with being pro immigrant – when as i have explained immigration wrecks the basis of socialism and merely strengthens the position of capitalists. Not only those who dislike socialism have these misconceptions, but the multi-racialists who claim to be socialist or communist also have these ideas. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – none have ever advocated that third worlders should immigrate to the west and mix with whites. Trotsky made clear that he advocated black nationalism/separatism in the united states, even while the ku klux Klan at the time did not, preferring the capitalist/masonic stance that blacks be kept as slaves. (thankfully today’s KKK does appreciate the principle of ethno nationalism and has an ironically similar view to that of Trotsky in this regard).

Socialism is about contributing to society, while capitalism is about taking out of society – it is about making a private profit. when capitalists point to ways they feel they do contribute to society, from the “trickle down effect” to donations they make to third worlders, or creating jobs or adding to the economy, it is all cynical spiel with no grounds to justify it as being positive. All of these things result in pollution, unsustainable use of natural resources and surging populations in parts of the world where it is most harmful.

Capitalists have been behind all wars, including the last two world wars and the present “war on terror”. Selling arms is very lucrative, as is rebuilding destroyed infrastructure and of course war would have had to be declared on a national socialist state that had promised to hang bankers and capitalists and was printing its own currency.

Communism in the soviet states had a strange relationship with the western capitalists and that is why they did not see it as the same threat that national socialist Germany posed. as the Russian anarchist Mikhyl Bakunin pointed out :”i am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschild’s appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschild’s. this may seem strange. what could there be in common between communism and high finance? ho ho! the communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists there must inevitably exist a state central bank, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates upon the labor of the people, will always find the means for its existence…”

When it comes to a debate over which is the better, communism or capitalism, the argument always fails to realise the true biological basis for socialism and how it really could work to bring a utopia, if only the capitalist exploiters of the labour of the people would be stopped, and ethnic cohesion taken as the foundation for harmony and cooperation.

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Liberal Holocaust: Imperialism and the Democratic Party

This is a good article from a website that is now down. I disagree with several parts, particularly the labeling of North Korea as a “Stalinist dictatorship,” referring to the Soviet Union as an “empire,” saying that Titoite Yugoslavia was a “Leninist revolution” and denying the genocidal actions of the Milošević government. Regardless, this article makes a very important point about the Democratic Party, and exposes their true imperialist warmongering nature.

 – Espresso Stalinist 

Many people involved in US anti-war movement(s) have this naive belief that Democrats are not imperialists, that US imperialist policies, such as those pursued by the Bush administration, are just a recent deviation or limited to Republican administrations. In fact, the Democratic Party has a long and bloody history of imperialism. Democrats are imperialists and mass murderers. Nor is this limited to the more conservative democrats; left-liberals have done the same. Liberal governments have slaughtered millions.

Starting shortly before the end of World War Two, Democrats began recruiting many Nazi war criminals and using them to help expand the American Empire. Hitler’s intelligence chief in East Europe Reinhard Gehlen was used by the US, after the war, to build an intelligence network against the Soviets in East Europe. They also dropped supplies to remnants of Hitler’s armies operating in Eastern Europe, to harass the Soviet bloc. Other Nazi war criminals employed by the US included Klaus Barbie, Otto von Bolschwing and Otto Skorzeny. Some of these Nazis later made their way to Latin America, where they advised and assisted US-backed dictatorships in the area.

Harry Truman kicked up anti-communist hysteria, which lead to McCarthyism (which occurred during his administration) and helped start the Cold War. He supported numerous dictatorships, including Saudi Arabia. US involvement in Vietnam started under Truman with the US providing support for the French invaders and the CIA carrying out covert actions. In 1950 his administration issued the ultra-hawkish NSC 68. The subversion of Italian democracy was done by his administration – fearing electoral victory in 1948 by the Italian Communist party, the CIA funded various leftover Mussolinite Brownshirt thugs and other former Nazi collaborators, successfully manipulating the results to ensure pro-US candidates won. A secret paramilitary army was formed to overthrow the government just in case the Communists managed to win anyway.

In the years after World War Two a rebellion against the British puppet government in Greece broke out. This client state was largely staffed by former Nazi collaborators who the British had put back in power. The UK was unable to defeat the left-wing insurgency (which had previously fought an insurgency against the Nazi occupation during World War Two) and asked the US for help. In 1947 Truman invaded Greece and proceeded to crush the revolutionaries, keeping the former Nazi collaborators in power. Truman attempted to justify this by portraying the guerillas as mere pawns of Moscow and therefore a form of covert aggression, but he had no real proof of this. The claim is also based on a double standard: when the USSR (allegedly) covertly supports revolutionaries in another country it constitutes “aggression” and is wrong, but when the US (or UK) send actual military forces to another country in order to prop up unpopular dictatorships this is somehow perfectly just.

At the end of World War Two Japan withdrew its forces from Korea, resulting in a brief period of self-rule. A provisional government was set up in Seoul, but it had little power. Across Korea, workers took over their factories and peasants took over their land. Self-managed collectives were organized. This did not last long, as the US and USSR quickly partitioned the country into a North and a South, under the occupation of each power. In the south Truman installed a brutal military dictatorship, run mainly by former Japanese collaborators, complete with death squads, torture chambers and suppression of all opposition. The United States and its client state suppressed an insurgency, leveled whole villages and massacred thousands of innocent Koreans. The Soviets followed a similar policy in the north, where a Stalinist dictatorship was imposed. Forces from each empire repeatedly clashed until war broke out in 1950. Truman & his propagandists tried to portray the war as an attempt to defend South Korea from Soviet/Northern aggression, but the very existence of South & North Korea was the result of aggression by the US & USSR. The Korean War was an inter-imperialist war between rival empires fighting for territory, rather like a turf war between rival mafia dons, in which lots of ordinary people (who had no real stake in the war) were sent to die for their elite.

These policies of mass murder continued in both the subsequent Eisenhower administration and the next democratic administration, Kennedy. Like every other president since World War Two (and many prior to that) he supported numerous puppet dictatorships that slaughtered thousands – Mobutu, the Shah, etc. Kennedy backed a coup against the democratically elected government in the Dominican Republic because it was too independent. And lets not forget the Bay of Pigs and the many terrorist campaigns against Cuba.

Kennedy also escalated US involvement in Vietnam. During Eisenhower’s term the Vietnamese defeated US-backed French invaders and the war with France was brought to an end. The country was partitioned in two, with the Vietnamese nationalists/Communists taking over the north and the French puppet government temporarily ruling the south. Elections were to be held to reunite the two, but the US intervened to prevent this (because the Communists would have won free elections) and put in power a right-wing dictatorship headed by Ngo Dinh Diem which relied on a reign of terror in order to stay in power. In the late ’50s popular rebellions erupted against this dictatorship. By the time Kennedy came to power the survival of Diem’s dictatorship was increasingly precarious and so Kennedy escalated the situation from state terror to outright aggression. The US military, mainly the air force, was sent to crush the resistance. This failed to defeat the resistance, so Johnson fabricated a bogus attack on US destroyers by North Vietnamese forces and used this as an excuse to escalate the war, launching a full-fledged ground invasion of the south and began bombing the north. US forces set up concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”) and committed numerous atrocities during the war. Even John Kerry testified:

“Several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. … They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. … We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. … We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals. … We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater.”

Kerry has since claimed that Vietnam was an exception to the norm, but the evidence presented in this article shows otherwise. This testimony is corroborated by numerous other primary sources, including many Vietnam veterans. Colin Powell admitted these atrocities occurred and defended them, writing in his memoirs (My American Journey):

“If a helo [helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM [military-aged male], the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen, Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

In addition, Powell defends the torching of civilians’ huts in his memoirs. There are also many Vietnam veterans who strongly deny that the United States committed any kind of atrocities or wrongdoing in Vietnam at all, but they are not the first murderers to strongly deny murdering anyone. These are the kinds of atrocities the Democrat’s foreign policy leads to.

Democrats (and Republicans) tried to portray the war as a result of Chinese (or even Soviet) aggression that had to be stopped or else it would cause a “domino effect” leading to “Communist” conquest of the globe. This is shear fantasy.

Vietnam became independent in 1945 and for a brief period of time the whole country was united under the rule of Ho Chi Min and his fellow nationalists and Marxists. Then France invaded, with US support, leading to the creation of “South Vietnam,” which was a foreign puppet from day one. Attacks on it by Vietnamese were no more “aggression” than attacks on the Vichy government by the French resistance. Communists in China didn’t come to power until 1948, whereas Vietnam declared independence in 1945, so portraying the war as “Chinese aggression” is particularly absurd. Eventually, China did provide weapons, money and advisors to Vietnam (as did the USSR), but merely giving supplies to people fighting for independence hardly constitutes “aggression.” If China giving some weapons and supplies to a Vietnamese movement with substantial popular support constitutes “aggression” then what are we to make of the US, which went well beyond sending weapons and sent over 100,000 troops to keep in power a deeply unpopular puppet government? By this kind of logic, the American war for independence constituted French aggression because France gave the rebels support, just as China & Russia gave the Vietnamese support, except France went even further and sent warships to fight the British and help the US win the war. The Vietnam War was a brutal colonial war, started mainly by democrats, against a people struggling for national liberation.

Even if we ignore Vietnam, Johnson was still a murderous warmonger. In 1965 Johnson launched a secret war on Laos, which would eventually drop more bombs on it then were dropped during World War Two, in order to defeat the leftist Pathet Lao. When a popular rebellion erupted against the US-backed dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, LBJ invaded and defeated it, keeping a US puppet government in power. In Brazil LBJ supported and encouraged a fascist coup against the mildly reformist Goulart administration. Johnson also backed a right-wing coup in Indonesia. The previous ruler, Sukarno, committed the crime of trying to stay neutral in the cold war and desiring to build a strong Indonesia independent of foreign powers. So he was removed and general Suharto seized power. The US helped Suharto liquidate dissent and gave him lists of “subversives” to kill. Between 500,000 and a million people were massacred by Suharto in the period following the coup, with the covert help of the Johnson administration. When the Greek ambassador objected to the President’s plan for a resolving a dispute over Cyprus LBJ told him:

“Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good. … We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long.”

In 1965 the Greek king, aided by the CIA, removed Prime Minister George Papandreou (who’s foreign policy was too independent for Washington) from power. In 1967 the Greek government was forced to finally hold elections again, but when it looked like George Papandreou was going to win again a military coup prevented him from coming to power. George Papadopoulos, leader of the coup and head of the new military dictatorship, had been on the CIA payroll for 15 years and was a Nazi collaborator during World War Two.

Carter, the so-called “human rights” president, was also an imperialist warmonger. He continued US support for brutal tyrants in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. Carter supported Pol Pot’s forces after they were thrown out of power due to a war with Vietnam. Under Ford Indonesia invaded East Timor and proceeded to slaughter 200,000 people. Although this invasion occurred under Ford, the worst atrocities happened under Carter’s reign. As atrocities increased, he increased the flow of weapons to the Indonesian government, insuring they wouldn’t run out and could continue massacring Timorese. Carter also backed the massacre in Kwangju by the South Korean military dictatorship. Many of the things which liberals like to blame Reagan for were actually started under Carter. Deregulation began under Carter, as did US support for the Contras in Nicaragua. Six months before the Soviets invaded he also initiated US support for the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists/”freedom fighters” in Afghanistan which would later include Bin Laden.

Bill Clinton was a mass murderer and war criminal, too. He backed numerous dictatorships, continued the proxy war against Marxist guerillas in Columbia and bombed more countries than any other peacetime president, including Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Clinton laid siege to Iraq with sanctions, “no fly zones” and bombings, killing 1.5 to 3 million people. UN-approved sanctions on Iraq were originally imposed at the start of the Gulf War in response to the invasion of Kuwait, but continued after the end of the war at US (and UK) insistence. The United States used sanctions as a weapon against Iraq. One military intelligence document titled Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities noted:

“Iraq depends on importing-specialized equipment-and some chemicals to purify its water supply … With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions to import these vital commodities. … Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease and to certain pure-water-dependent industries becoming incapacitated, including petrochemicals, fertilizers, petroleum refining, electronics, pharmaceuticals, food processing, textiles, concrete construction, and thermal power plants. Iraq’s overall water treatment capability will suffer a slow decline, rather than a precipitous halt … Unless water treatment supplies are exempted from the UN sanctions for humanitarian reasons, no adequate solution exists for Iraq’s water purification dilemma, since no suitable alternatives … sufficiently meet Iraqi needs. … Unless the water is purified with chlorine epidemics of such diseases as Cholera, Hepatitis, and Typhoid could occur … Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for humanitarian reasons. It probably also is attempting to purchase supplies by using some sympathetic countries as fronts. If such attempts fail, Iraqi alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements. … Some affluent Iraqis could obtain their own minimally adequate supply of good quality water from northern Iraqi sources. If boiled, the water could be safely consumed. Poorer Iraqis and industries requiring large quantities of pure water would not be able to meet their needs. … Alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements.”

This and other documents show that the United States intentionally used sanctions to destroy Iraq’s water supply with full knowledge of the consequences. In addition to water problems, the sanctions also interfered with the importation of basic necessities like food and medicine. The UN itself, the organization that implemented the sanctions (due to US/UK insistence), reported that they resulted in mass death. UNICEF found that on average 5,000 children died every month as a result of sanctions. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported in 1995 that 567,000 children in Iraq had died as a result of the sanctions. Those sanctions continued until the invasion in 2003, killing even more. This began under the first Bush administration, but most of it occurred under Clinton’s administration.

In 1996, faced with mounting humanitarian concerns that threatened to end the sanctions, an “oil for food” program was implemented. Officially, this was supposed to allow Iraq to import a limited amount of food and supplies in exchange for limited amounts of oil but in practice it did little to alleviate the suffering of Iraqis caused by the sanctions. Everything imported by Iraq had to be approved by a UN sanctions committee that, due to US/UK influence, frequently stopped or delayed importation of needed supplies. All money Iraq made from the sale of oil was kept by the UN in an escrow account with the bank of Paris and was not at the discretion of the Iraqi government. Some of this was used to pay for administrative costs related to the sanctions and about a third were used to pay reparations to Kuwait, the remainder was inadequate for Iraq’s needs. In 1998 Dennis Halliday, the first head of the UN’s “oil for food” program resigned because the sanctions continued to result in a humanitarian catastrophe. In 2000 Hans Von Sponeck, the new head of the “oil for food” program, resigned for the same reason. On the May 12, 1996 edition of “60 minutes” journalist Lesly Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state,

“We have heard that a half million children have died [from sanctions on Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright’s response was, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Clinton attacked and dismembered Yugoslavia, using a “divide and conquer” strategy to install US/NATO puppet governments ruling over its corpse. During and after World War Two Yugoslavia underwent its own Leninist revolution, independent of Soviet tanks, and eventually evolved a market socialist economy based on a limited form of worker self-management. Most of the economy was run by enterprises that were officially worker owned, with elected managers, and sold their products on the market. Yugoslavia was a federation of different nationalities in southeastern Europe, with six different republics united under a federal government.

As the Soviet empire declined and fell western financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank began pressuring Yugoslavia to implement neoliberal capitalist reforms such as privatization, austerity measures and so on.

Yugoslavia implemented these on a limited basis. These programs lead to a declining economy that opened the door for opportunistic politicians to whip up nationalism for their own benefit, scapegoating other nationalities for economic problems. They also stressed relations between the federal government and the republics because money that would have gone to the republics instead went to servicing Yugoslavia’s debt. The United States and Western Europe took advantage of this to encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia into NATO protectorates.

In 1990 separatists won elections in Slovenia, Bosnia and Croatia. The new Croatian government began to persecute the Serb minority living in Croatia, even bringing back the flag and other symbols from when it had been a World War Two Axis puppet government (run by a fascist organization called the Ustase) that attempted to exterminate the Serbs (who were regarded as “subhuman”). Croatian President Franjo Trudjman refused to condemn the Ustase and claimed, “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews.” Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991. West Europe and then the US recognized Slovenia and Croatia as independent states despite warnings from the UN that this would encourage Bosnia to declare independence and bring about a civil war, which it did.

The Yugoslav federal government fought a small ten-day war with Slovenia, after which Slovenia was allowed to leave Yugoslavia. Croatia and Bosnia fought bloody civil wars with the Yugoslav government. In Bosnia the main forces fighting against the federal government were Croat fascists, supported by Croatia, and Islamic fundamentalists, led by Alija Izetbegovic, who aimed to turn Bosnia into a theocracy similar to Iran or the Taliban. Most of Bosnia’s Serb minority sided with the Yugoslav federal government. The US covertly backed the Islamists and fascists by secretly supplying them with weapons and even flying in Muslim ‘holy warriors’ from Afghanistan so they could join the Jihad. Initially the Islamists and fascists in Bosnia worked together against the Serbs and Yugoslav government. Later they started fighting each other, but US & West European pressure eventually put a stop to that. When the Yugoslav government started winning the war NATO sent in the air force to bomb them and support the separatists. Many atrocities were committed on both sides of the war, but Western governments and media emphasized and exaggerated Yugoslav and Serb atrocities while downplaying or ignoring atrocities committed by the separatists.

In 1995 the war came to an end, in a defeat for Yugoslavia. Under a UN fig leaf, NATO “peacekeeper” troops occupied much of the former Yugoslavia while Bosnia was made into a de-facto NATO colony, occupied by NATO troops and with a “high representative” responsible to foreign powers in charge of the country. Yugoslavia was dramatically shrunk, with only two out of six Republics, Serbia and Montenegro, remaining in the union (Macedonia had been allowed to peacefully leave the union in the early ’90s but at this time was still largely outside the Western sphere of influence).

The next phase of Clinton’s conquest of Yugoslavia began in the late ’90s when the CIA began covertly supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a terrorist organization that has been linked to Osama Bin Laden. The KLA launched a guerilla war in the Kosovo province of Serbia, advocating independence for Kosovo. In 1999, under the guise of “peace negotiations,” the US/NATO issued an ultimatum demanding Yugoslavia allow NATO troops to occupy the entire country. Yugoslavia obviously refused this unreasonable demand and Clinton used this refusal as an excuse to begin a major bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. After several months of bombing pulverized the country a peace deal was reached allowing NATO “peacekeeper” troops to occupy Kosovo (but not the rest of Yugoslavia), effectively turning the province into a NATO protectorate. A year later a revolt led by US-funded groups and politicians overthrew the Yugoslav government, putting pro-US/NATO leaders in charge. The new government abolished Yugoslavia and became a Western puppet. This conquest was completed shortly after Clinton left office, when KLA forces attacked Macedonia. Macedonia saw the writing on the wall and allowed NATO troops to occupy it. Clinton succeeded in not only ripping Yugoslavia apart, but in achieving US/NATO domination over the Balkans and in forcing an economic system favorable to Western investors on the region. A wave of privatization has swept over the former Yugoslavia, transforming it into a corporate capitalist economy colonized by Western capital.

The standard excuse Clinton used to justify the military interventions in Yugoslavia was that it was supposed to stop “ethnic cleansing”/”genocide” allegedly being perpetrated by the Serbs/Yugoslav government. This is obviously bogus because the US helped instigate the conflicts that lead to the various massacres in the war and also because Clinton largely turned a blind eye towards atrocities committed by separatist forces (like the massacres in Gospic and Krajina). It is also not credible because Clinton ignored other genocides (such as Rwanda) and even funded Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds, which occurred at roughly the same time and resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds.

The death toll of the democrats is quite large:

Greek Civil War: 160,000 (Truman)
Korean War: 3 million (Truman)
Assault on Indochina: 5 million (started under Truman, accelerated under Kennedy & LBJ)
Coup in Indonesia: 1 million (LBJ)
East Timor: 100,000 (Carter)
Kwangju Massacre: 2000 (Carter)
Argentine Dirty War: 30,000 (mostly Carter)
Iraq sanctions: 1.5 million (mostly Clinton)
Turkish Kurdistan: 40,000 (mostly Clinton)

That’s at least 10,8022,000 killed by democrats, 9,292,000 if one only counts the liberal governments (Clinton wasn’t really a liberal). For comparison, the Nazi holocaust killed roughly 6,000,000 Jews. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; these are only the most famous incidents over the last couple of decades. If you add up the total from periods preceding this and the less famous incidents the number get much, much higher. If you add in starvation (a direct result of capitalism) it gets even higher.

Democrats could have stopped the congressional authorization for the Iraq war (via filibustering) but instead lots of them defected to the warmongers’ side. They could have stopped many of the nasty things the Republicans are doing by filibuster but choose not to. Many democrats actively supported the war. Most of those who did oppose it offered little opposition, chickening out when the shooting started and either abstained or voted in favor of the pro-war “support our troops” resolution in March. Even Dennis Kucinich, leader of the “anti-war” opposition in the house, abstained from the vote instead of voting against it. It was only after Bush’s war started going sour that vocal criticism began to come from democrats, which is completely opportunistic. Bush’s lies and fabrications about the Niger Uranium had already been exposed prior to the war, but it wasn’t until after the invasion was completed and the democrats needed an issue to attack Bush with that they started whining about it.

The Democratic Party, the party of slavery, has a long history of mass murder and empire building. They are not an alternative to the American Empire. Especially on foreign policy, there is remarkable consistency between republican and democratic administrations. If the Nuremberg standards were applied every President since World War Two, both democrat and republican, would have to be hung. Both parties have the same basic goals; they just disagree on minor details. It would have been much harder for Bush to conquer Iraq (perhaps politically impossible) if Clinton hadn’t been waging war against it for his entire term. The policies implemented by the US government have more to do with the specific circumstances of the time period then with which particular individual happens to occupy the white house. If a democrat is elected he will inherit this Pax Americana and it is unlikely that he would dismantle it (or even be capable of dismantling it). A vote for the democrats is a vote for imperialism and war (as is a vote for the Republicans).

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)

Source

Handwritten letter from President Saddam Hussein to the American people

7 July 2006.

Saddam Hussein

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Mercy-giving.

“And among the Believers are men who are true to that which they pledged to God. Some of them have fulfilled their pledge by death and some of them still are waiting and they have not altered in the least. That God may reward the true men for their truth and punish the hypocrites if He will, or relent towards them, for God is forgiving, merciful. And God repulsed the infidels for their wrath. They gained no good. God averted their attack from the Believers. God is strong, mighty.” [Qur’an 33:23-25].

To the American people:

Peace upon those who believe in peace and desire it, and the mercy of God and His blessings.

I address you in this letter from the place of my confinement, as my attempt on the basis of my moral, human, and constitutional responsibility so that no one among you might say that no one came to us with a message of peace after the war began, refuting the arguments for it and desiring peace for you and for our upright, loyal, heroic people. And as I say this, I do no know whether my brothers and comrades who are leading the Resistance outside the prison have come to you with a letter before or not. That is because the “democracy” of your leaders has prevented me since my arrest and until now from getting newspapers and magazines or hearing radio and television and has isolated me from the world and has isolated the world from me so that I might not hear or see anything from outside my place of confinement.

Is this the true face of democracy and human rights that they advocate outside America!? Or have your rulers lied about it? This includes the killing of people in prisons and jails, some of them by means of the pistols of the American investigators. Or has all of this along with other details that would turn an attentive person’s hair white been concealed from you by your officials such that you do not know the truth!?

Anyway, I address you with this letter of mine in the hope that it will reach you and that you will hear it or read it. And on the basis of my responsibility to bring the facts before people, whatever their color or nationality, for that is our duty to them, just as they have a duty to us not to accept evil.

I address you today as my attorney the eminent lawyer and Professor Ramsey Clark has asked that I write this letter of mine to you. Professor Ramsey has presented an excellent example of a humanitarian in his person and in his colleague Professor Curtis Dobler, both of whom left a positive personal impression on me. On this occasion I wish to salute their courage as they have volunteered for the task although they know the dangers that surround them in carrying out their duty, in particular after criminals have killed four of the defense attorneys.

People of America, it still seems to me that the officials in your government are still lying to you and are not giving you true explanations of the reasons that led them to embark on their aggression against Iraq. In what they have said about the reasons they have deceived, from the starting point, not only the international community, and in particular the European Community but also the peoples of America themselves, knowing beforehand that the facts were contrary to what they were declaring. Untrue is what they said, after their lies were exposed, about having been deceived by their intelligence agencies and by the stooges that they brought along to serve as their puppets in Iraq, just as old imperialism and the old empires of the 19th and 20th centuries used to do. What we are saying is based on many facts, the major ones being as follows:

1. The inspection teams – that came to Iraq in the name of the United Nations and carried out searches even of some private houses as well as government departments, presidential palaces and government documents – those teams knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction because most of the leading members in those teams were Americans and British and in addition they had spies and volunteers of other nationalities. Those teams searched Iraq piece by piece from one end to the other and never found any information contrary to what they and others were told by Iraqi government representatives. The inspections lasted for more than seven years. And in addition to the teams that traveled by car and on foot, they used spy planes, helicopters, and satellites in space. The American and English officials thought that this was their historic chance to strike Iraq and destroy its legitimate aspirations and the lofty cultural and scientific achievements made in the course of 35 years, making use of the information gathered by their spies in the inspection teams and making use of the so-called war on terror after the 11 September incident that struck America. They shuffled the cards to bring up the goals that they had already decided upon earlier, and these were not the goals that they publicly announced at the starting line.

It was their assessment that the unjust embargo had not destroyed Iraq’s will nor halted its legitimate aspirations to develop economically, culturally, scientifically, and as a civilization in the conditions of a new independence. They believed that Iraq had come close at that time to breaking the economic embargo as the result of the cooperation of those who cooperated with Iraq on the basis of mutual benefit and fraternal national feelings as far as the Arabs were concerned. The officials in your country thought that this was their chance to impose their will on the world by means of their control of the Middle East’s oil and its production and marketing in new ways and for new goals – those about which we spoke in and before the year 2003 – in addition to attaining one of their Zionist goals and winning support in the election. Iran and its lackeys played a dirty role in making aggression appear attractive and in facilitating its implementation.

2. The American officials did not withdraw from Iraq after they became hard pressed, but declared that the facts were contrary to what they had claimed before the invasion that took place in March and April of the year 2003. If they had been truthful when they claimed that they had been deceived as a result of the information they had been given and which they used as the cover for their invasion, and which they declared at the time was sufficient justification for the invasion – declaring at the time that it involved things that they said affected the security of the United States – then they would have withdrawn from Iraq after discovering that that information had been false. They would have apologized to the heroic Iraqi people, to the American people and to the people of the world for what they had done.

None of the Americans asked their government before the war how Iraq, a country that had still not emerged from backwardness, could threaten the security of a country like America across the Atlantic. And for that matter why would Iraq want to threaten America, which at that time had not violated the territory of Iraq. If the American officials wanted to promote the claim that Iraq’s threat was precisely involved in the opposing stances taken by Iraq and America over the Zionist occupation of the land of Palestine and other Arab land, it could be said that Iraq is not the only state that takes an opposing stance to that of America in regards to the issue, whether that be Arab states or other states in the world. Furthermore, who has authorized America to make the countries of the world tailor their policies to America’s measurements, and if they don’t oblige, then war should be waged against them? How can one understand America’s call for democracy if it does not permit a difference of opinion even in issues of a regional character, to say nothing of international ones?

Another lie was the claim of American officials that Iraq had links to what they called terrorism, although British Prime Minister Blair declared that Iraq does not have any ties to so-called terrorism and had no internationally prohibited weapons, forcing Bush to declare the same thing. Despite that, none of the important American personalities asked President Bush on what sort of rational analysis or what sort of realistic information this claim rested. Do you know, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, why they didn’t ask? Because some of your prominent personalities are directed in what they do by hidden forces that distorted the image you received of Iraq’s positions. They had been laying the groundwork for years to facilitate aggression from the start. Therefore no one asked the American officials, for example, why no Iraqi took part in the events of 11 September!? And if the participation of individuals in the attack on American targets isn’t to be taken as proof of the involvement of any country in those events, then how do you accuse a state like Iraq, the features of whose political system are known, of so-called relations with terror? How can you consider this charge to be one of only two on the basis of which aggression was launched against the people of Iraq, destroying their property and achievements and bringing their lives under daily and direct threat?

Do you know, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, that I asked one of the American officials who talked with me perhaps two weeks after my arrest, just what was it that you based those false charges on? He said that as far as the weapons of mass destruction were concerned, “we didn’t have anything to confirm what you were saying.” And as for the links to terrorism, he said, because you, Saddam Hussein, did not send a letter of condolence to President Bush after the incident [of 11 September].

I smiled bitterly and told him: as regards your claim that you didn’t have confirmation of our statements, it seems that your officials lie and imagine that officials in countries around the world do not tell the truth, or that many of those who have relations with you in fact do not tell you the truth, neither when they oppose your policies nor when they agree with them. This is a dangerous matter, not only for the countries of the world but because they then pose a danger for America as well, if nobody in the world will tell America: ‘this is a mistake’ and ‘this is unacceptable’! And at that time when American planes were striking targets in Iraq and destroying public and private property, killing Iraqi citizens including women and children for no reason and imposing on Iraq their unjust embargo, prohibiting Iraq from importing even pencils for children to use in primary schools, what exactly is it that should obligate Saddam Hussein to send a telegram of condolences to the president of the state whose officials have committed all those crimes, unless it be out of hypocrisy and weakness? But because I am neither a hypocrite nor a weakling I didn’t send Bush a telegram of condolence. But I did agree on the telegram sent containing condolences in the name of the government of Iraq and sent by Comrade Tariq Aziz, the Deputy Prime Minister, to our friend Ramsey Clark and through him to the stricken families.

Are the great states so deluded as to imagine that whoever does not send a letter of condolence deserves that war should be waged against him, his country, and his people!? Here you see how the American officials used even your own blood to promote their reckless, aggressive policy. Is this the kind of morality that people should have? Or men? Or officials? There is nothing graver than for disasters to ravage people who have been stricken by delusions, committed wrongs, and wantonly despised the roles of others. The worst disease of the American officials who involved the Americans in war against Iraq is this.

3. After I was arrested they made vain attempts to use intimidation and threats against me. One of their generals conveyed that intimidation and host threats and tried to bargain with me, promising to let me live if I agreed to read in my own voice and sign a prepared announcement that was shown to me. That stupid announcement called on the people of Iraq and the courageous Resistance to lay down arms. They said that if I refused, my fate would be that I would be shot just like Mussolini, as my interlocutor put it. But, as you know me and would expect of me, I disdainfully refused, not even touching that dirty document with my hand and sullying myself with it. I told them if I were given the chance to address my people, I would call them to more resistance.

Seven days later, to reinforce themselves, they sent a group to talk with me. They said they were from an American University and that they wanted to engage me in a broad discussion. I agreed and I confirmed to them that Iraq didn’t have any of the things the American officials claimed and I advised them [the US] to leave Iraq quickly and apologize to the people, warning them that they were going to get what they now are facing and what they are now embroiled in – in fact, the fate I expect for them is worse than what they are facing now – and they will never have an adequate chance to pull their arms and equipment out of Iraq if the two halves of Iraq engulf them, and they will engulf them, God willing, because our people are deeply rooted and conscious. They know that our liberation can be clean and complete only with their unity, and that tolerance must be the basis for the orientations of our people within their ranks, and that wounds must be bound up, not ripped open.

I say, I told them all that at that time but they didn’t change their methods; they didn’t replace the keys of falsehood, and they are still knocking on the doors of wrong, failing to try the door of legitimacy, even though they now know. In this connection, attached to this letter are some verses from a long ode; a selection of 56 verses. [Not translated here.]

4. It is neither reasonable nor convincing that a country like America to which the doors of the intelligence agencies in the east and most of the countries of the west have been opened did not know the truth and could not know the truth. Although I am convinced and believe that many countries in the world have an interest in war or wars, she [the United States] does not have an interest in war even though she might believe she does. The contrary, in fact, is the case.

America is a big country on the other side of the Atlantic. It has developed a unique unparalleled power such that I think some people there imagine that it is on its way to attaining the crown of the world all for itself as a world empire. Have they not learned a lesson from their war in Viet Nam? The west used to promote the idea that world Communism and the Soviet bloc threatened their interests and also the security of the entire west. But despite that promotion, this was nothing but a flimsy cover. Nevertheless, America used it and wrapped itself in it until the heroic Vietnamese people expelled them by force.

As to their invasion of Iraq, it came in a situation that made the first step easy from the standpoint of the reaction of the international community because of the international balance of forces. But it came in a situation that might make it more costly that its war in Viet Nam. That is because when America was expelled from Viet Nam it did not lose its standing, or we might say it only lost a small part of its standing. But when it is expelled and routed from Iraq, which has no great power to support it directly, it will lose the fundamental basis of its standing.

In fact it has now already lost the foundation for that standing and its reputation has begun to decay. It is no longer able to wield the big stick that it formerly threatened to use. It used to accomplish more by threatening to use force than by really using force. I will go further and say that after its war in Iraq, that stick no longer frightens many people and America has come to need the silence of the smallest and simplest countries and tries to please them in order to get them to stay quiet about America’s crimes and reckless, deviant policies.

Before, many of the world’s countries used to court the United States and most countries in the world, all except a few, used to fear her threats or parried them with defensive arguments. But now Mao Zedong of fond memory is laughing in his grave because his prediction has been fulfilled and America is a paper tiger. This is by the will of the Living Eternal God, and by His agents on earth, the heroic Mujahideen in glorious, virtuous, militant, jihadist Iraq. So God bless the heroic people of Iraq and God bless the jihad and the mujahideen.

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the peoples of America, the time has come to an end in which greatest and best-equipped armies could scatter the organized formations of the opposing army and thereby bring a war to a close. Now you see our courageous army, our heroic people, and our Mujahideen replacing the system of organized formations with a new kind of warfare. And when the Americans on the ground become targets in the vicinity of the guns of the revolutionaries, who attack them as deadly human bombs with nothing more than their bodies filled with faith in God, American superiority is worn down over time. In fact in the near future that superiority will become a burden whose equipment will be difficult to withdraw. So, will America trust the voice of rationality and logic that calls for the preservation of what still remains, or will Satan the deceiver and the hate-filled supporters of Zionism keep pushing the Americans until the waves swallow them and they sink to the depths of the raging sea?

Who, after all, appointed the American government to be the world policeman, to form the world in the mold that it likes, giving national orders to the countries of the world?

Saddam Hussein, ladies and gentlemen, is an honorable patriot and an honest man. He is a statesman resolute in implementing the law, just, but benevolent. He loves his people and his nation. He is straightforward, doesn’t double-cross or deceive. He speaks the truth even against himself. Do tyrants like Bush like such characteristics? If he were a person like De Gaulle or even like Reagan, perhaps he would understand them, or at least would not abhor them. But I must say to you that your country will discover more, esteemed ladies and gentlemen. It has lost his reputation and his standing. Indeed the American who used to travel around the world respected and safe and welcomed wherever he went, is now no longer able to step outside America without a mine detector. And the State Department issues warnings for you constantly about what world regions are dangerous to American lives

It was American officials and their polices themselves that have created an atmosphere of anti-American hatred in the world by means of their arrogant behavior, their haughty aggressive attitude, their lack of respect for international law and the security of the world – including the security of my Arab Nation through their support for the Zionist entity in Palestine – and other world and human issues.

Today you are in a bad predicament with the world and nobody can rescue you but yourselves. If you reform, you will open for the world and for yourselves a new opportunity. But if you are heedless, that is your decision. What you need is free and fair competition and peace in order to have security.

The years that followed the 18th century had long gone when they came as invaders to the Middle East to bring back memories of things that awaken and arouse. The Middle East, and the Arab homeland in particular, was the cradle of prophets and messengers from God. Is the cradle of the prophets, where the prophets are buried in their tombs, also the home of devils and their mirror images – the malicious invaders?

We have believed, and our faith was suited to us,
Then came the Zionists with a devil for a guide.
They stormed in on us as invaders, unjust.
The did not stop their advance nor sit still,
Their diabolical patron has prepared their dilemma.
But as for us, we have the Merciful God as Patron.

People of America, despite the crimes your government inflicted on our people, our Arab Nation and humanity, the people of Iraq – and I mean by that the Iraqis, not those with split loyalties who prefer to serve foreigners rather than their own people – I say the free people of Iraq even in their present circumstances are not thinking about their destiny alone but about the destiny of others wherever it’s possible to create a solution that treats a painful problem.

On this basis I said to some Americans when I was in my prison, why don’t you come to an agreement with the Resistance to designate a country with a charter and power to which the Resistance can hand over those American soldiers whom they capture, rather than executing them as currently is said to be taking place. In fact the extent to which the Resistance is responsible for this is unknown, but people who are equitable know that America has not abided by international law in any of its activities in Iraq, including the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners and detainees. The Resistance has no secure place in Iraq where prisoners can be kept. So whether the Resistance is at all responsible, or whether the responsibility lies with some other parties that have no connection to the Resistance, the justification for it is that there is no secure place for prisoners to be kept.

Therefore in order to fulfill humanitarian needs and to eliminate the justification [for killing prisoners] I make this proposal to you and to the national Resistance and to anyone concerned, and I make this with the best of intentions. If you accept it and respect the Geneva Conventions then the argument of those who kill rather than detain prisoners will have vanished. But if your government does not accept it, then it will bear the responsibility for refusing and for whatever befalls our people and the heroic Resistance as a result of your government’s violation of international law. This will be particularly true if the number of American prisoners increases in the future, and we think that it will increase. Or is it that your government can’t see anything until it feels it?

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for your government to look at all people as equals before international law regardless of the size of the countries to which they belong. Whoever violates international law in his policies and the behavior of his army, he alone must bear the consequences for that policy. And if his policies are not in accordance with the letter of international law, he has no right to call others to protect his rights in accordance with that law.

Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, whoever missed his or her chance to take action to try to prevent the war still has a chance to act to end it and bring back peace and freedom to Iraq in accordance with the choice of its people without foreign interference by anyone whoever that may be.

People of America, I address you not from weakness nor as a supplicant. I, my people, my brothers, comrades, and my nation – we address you on the basis of our moral and human responsibility. I tell you that officials whom you know, and first among them your President, lied to you and deceived you and tricked you using the media that portrayed Iraq to you as incorrigible, and Saddam Hussein as a hateful dictator, and that his people hate him and that his people are just waiting for their chance to get at him. Some of them just wallowed in lying falsehood to the point that they openly declared that the Iraqis would meet the invading armies with roses and celebration.

I know that lots of people don’t do a lot of analysis; they don’t have the time or the ability or the desire to do careful assessments when presented with falsified news so as to uncover the truth. The American peoples had no chance to inquire, for example: why, if the people of Iraq hate Saddam Hussein, how he managed to defeat the Iran of Khomeini after eight years in the aggressive war that Iran sought to impose on us under the slogan of exporting the revolution beginning with Iraq? People of America, the victory over Khomeini’s Iran was not due to the short length of the war, but came only after eight years of grinding warfare in which tens of thousands fell and hundreds of thousands on the Iranian side.

Then if Saddam Hussein were a dictator, why did he establish a parliament with elections for the first time in the year 1980 during wartime, when there had been no parliament in Iraq since 1958? If he and his government were dictators, how could he visit schools, universities, towns, and villages and spend the night with the people wherever the sun went down? How could he travel around and lead at the battle front at night and during the day even in the trenches in the front lines on the battlefield among the Muslim soldiers!?

Yes, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, your government deceived you, and you, or rather most of you, had no chance to inquire of themselves or of others in order to discover the truth because the Zionists in the lobby who advocated the war together with some of the centers of power were deceiving you and tricking you, hiding from your eyes the real truth, exchanging the facts for falsified and slanted information. Last but not least in this regard, if Saddam Hussein were a dictator hated and despised by his people, how is it that his people endured him and why was he chosen President by referendum?

People of America, the misfortunes that have afflicted you and afflicted our Arab Nation and within it our heroic Iraqi people – including the breakdown of America’s standing and reputation – were only caused by the reckless behavior of your government and by pressure from Zionism and power centers that influenced the government to commit those crimes and scandalous actions for specific ends that have nothing to do with the interest of the American peoples. The massacres and blood that now flows in the streets and countryside of Iraq in torrents – the responsibility for that falls on America before all others. You know, or rather you have now come to learn, that neither the stooges whom the American forces brought in on board their aircraft or as shamefaced presents aboard their tanks, nor Iran, which pushed and still pushes forward those who support it and whom they support, would be able to cause the bloodshed, or the destruction of the honor, and property of our people and our state had not America undertaken the aggression and invasion and issued the orders. It is still issuing orders in the Green Zone. Therefore America bears the burden of all those crimes and outrages. So, will you put an end to what is going on by using the methods of direct truth without evasion and digression? Or will you invite the machine of death to continue to eat away at the flesh of Iraqis and the flesh of Americans without doing anything to resolve this?

It is your historical responsibility, esteemed ladies and gentlemen. If you reform, you could save what remains of the standing and reputation of America and its legitimate interests. If you do nothing, you will be keeping silent over something evil. “God grant us patient perseverance and let us die as Muslims.” [Qur’an, 7:126]

People of America, the wars that your government promotes in the world – one of them being the war in Iraq – with input from certain centers of power – which you know better than we – are not in the interests of the American people. You know better than many how you paid in blood so that you might liberate yourselves from British colonialism and after that how the United States of America was unified and what rivers of blood were shed in order for that to come about. So, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, how do you accept this interference that abases America before it abases Iraq? How can you accept not only the invasion but becoming mired in the internal affairs of Iraq? You know that Iraq is a land of prophets, messengers, and righteous figures. You know that Baghdad is the fourth holiest city in the Arab homeland – after Mecca, al-Madinah, and Jerusalem – in the sight of all of the Islamic world and all of our Arab Nation. How can one imagine that Iraq could reconcile itself to colonial rule, even if it comes, this time, under another name and with other slogans? Save your country, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, and leave Iraq.

Peace.

God is greatest. God is greatest.

[signed]

Saddam Hussein,
President of the Republic of Iraq and Commander in Chief of the Mujahid Armed Forces.

7 July 2006.

[Appended to the letter was a selection of poetry by Saddam Hussein dealing with the homeland, invasion and the struggle for liberation]

PCMLV: Editorial Revolutionary Steel No. 11, September 2011

Organ of the Central Committee PCMLV

Capitalism in its upper stage (imperialism) remains in the decomposition process, rules and laws are violated without regard for themselves, the superstructure “legal” mounted at the end of World War II no longer serves its purpose. Such is the effect of the crisis, that treaties, agreements and international organizations are becoming a nuisance to the need to implement measures “to end the crisis,” according to its logic operators.

In each country and the world government control, the structures of bourgeois democracy begin to hinder the real government, the monopoly of large corporations. These measures apply to take control directly, but trying to keep the discourse civil rights is nothing other than what happened in Spain with the constitutional amendment, or more bloody in Libya, where large corporations are distributing oil wells, refineries and contracts “reconstruction”, as they did in Eastern Europe, Iraq, Afghanistan and how they’re doing in the rest of the Maghreb and other regions will do so, this is just the beginning of the imperialist offensive to the real threats to their economic and political system of domination is in deep crisis.

These situations, typical of the general crisis of the general crisis of capitalism, they foreshadow the third stage of the same expressions with economic, political and social unconcealed, but also has serious consequences for workers and the people who are losing their rights to an immense bourgeois onslaught.

In the face of popular demonstrations in Europe and North Africa, advancing social and leftist projects in Latin America, the wave of protests by petty-bourgeois sectors and trade unions, the radicalization of youth and the greater activity of truly revolutionary organizations , especially proletarian character, acts imperialist direction before being wrapped by these expressions of discontent and strife, cause and accelerate the decomposition to try to impose their fascist-style authoritarian project, for which the terror, the drug, illicit enterprises, despair, religious sects play a role.

They create a climate of fear about the future, fear about the future, suitable for the implementation of fascist capitalist model, which can control the agitation of the masses by means of subjugation and violence to impose the adjustment measures.

We are on the verge of a more aggressive imperialist stage that will undoubtedly lead to popular mobilization and violence in a direct call to the attempt to impose unilateral bourgeois domination, leaving aside the hypocrisy of his “bourgeois democracy” to enter in a directly to fascism.

For revolutionaries, especially for the Marxist-Leninists, this is not something unknown, our classics and our theoretical and practical experience realize these phenomena during the first and the second stage of the general crisis of capitalism, but also give us indication of how face this period shall be of wars, and revolutions, where the most important is to strengthen the organizations of struggle of the proletariat. Supported by the action of the revolutionary masses in the worker-peasant discontent attract other layers and take urgent need of the conquest of political power to break with the capitalist relations of production.

The situations of violence promoted and encouraged by capitalism tell us that live in complex times, the repression against the revolutionary class act and will be on the agenda, no shortage of excuses for it, from the need to replace unions by other structures ” modern, “flexible” “to the need to” sacrifice for the fatherland “, operators have always devised ways of manipulation to try to deceive the workers, and when they no longer serve them, because workers have no conscience and we fall, then resort to outright violence.

Violence reactionary, fascist organization must be answered and proletarian revolution, only then can we truly overcome the crisis and build a world of happiness for the majority.

Communist Party of Mexico Marxist-Leninist (PCM-ML): Iran& the new source of imperialist war

These days it meets the security council of the United Nations Organization (UNO), consists of China, the United States, Russia, France, Britain plus Germany, who is a permanent member of this organization. Among the topics to be discussed is that of Iran, who asked to stop uranium enrichment, arguing that this is used to produce nuclear weapons.

At that, following the threat from the United States to make a military incursion “preventive”, now they call it a military invasion against Iran is preparing, under the pretext of stopping the threat, because it is speculated that the alleged weapons produced in Iran go into the hands of terrorists.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has sunk further into poverty as a result of the imperialist invasion of the Americans and their European allies, where hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands fleeing to other countries in the Middle East for no be victims of the war, now plans to do the same with Iran, the argument, the fight against terrorism. To “protect democracy and world peace”, are used to war.

Since Bush has not quite been able to convince the Americans to make a military attack on Iran, which tries to do at all costs, he can not ignore the fact that Iranian territory are large reserves of natural gas and oil plus it is committed to its tendency to monopolize nuclear power, set representing a large booty, especially for a country like the United States, which depends on the hydrocarbon reserves of other countries.

Because of this, Yankee imperialism makes use of all tools available, why resort to the UN, who has always been subordinated to the interests of imperialism and has not played more than a puppet role in conflicts between countries, always safeguarding the interests of the financial oligarchy.

The UN, on the one hand criticizes Iran, Lebanon and Syria are making weapons, countries that certainly have not aligned to the American policy, so they are considered part of the “axis of evil” and hotbeds of terrorist groups , but at the same time, it is unable to criticize the military-industrial complex the world’s largest, and the use of weapons of mass destruction that have used the Yankees and their allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the fact that progress in Israel As military technology.

Another argument against Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents, the Afghans, the Taliban and Al Qaeda, in addition to being accused of meddling in internal affairs of Iraq and Afghanistan, which threatens peace in the region, the fact is that for years, who has interfered in internal affairs of other countries and has been Yankee imperialism. One example was the assistance they provided the government and the American army to the Afghans against the Soviets, the nod to the Iraqi invasion of Iran during the Bush administration, these, just to name a few, and that Yankee imperialism has been characterized by meddling in internal affairs of several African and Latin American countries.

One way to pressure the Iranian government to stop enriching uranium, is the threat of an economic embargo already living higher than the cancellation of credit to Iranian companies. To put pressure on other countries to line up in favor of imperialism and their clearance to a higher pressure and economic sanctions prepared to countries whose companies to maintain investment with Iran.

It would be rare for U.S. imperialism and its allies use the political conflicts in Iran, which look like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan to help opponents of the current government to unleash major internal conflicts which may allow a ‘pre-emptive raid ” or “humanitarian aid” in the way of the facts would mean the presence of peacekeepers from the UN, better known as blue helmets, as already happens in other countries in the Middle East and the Middle East.

Faced with accusations of American imperialism and the members of the Security Council of the UN, arguing that Iran defends right to use uranium to make electricity, which did not use the uranium for nuclear weapons production, arguing that it are taken as valid before the judges, since Iran does not submit fully to the designs of imperialism, although it is not an anti-imperialist and democratic country.

The threat Iran becomes dormant when one considers that the geographic region in which it is, is surrounded by countries and places where troops or peacekeepers Yankees such as Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Turkey . For powerful countries with nuclear weapons, as is the case of Pakistan and countries in the region are staunch allies of American imperialism, as in the case of Israel.

PCMLE: “The real emancipation of the peoples is the revolution and socialism”

From En Marcha, #1545
Organ of the Central Committee of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador
August 19 to 25, 2011

As part of the work that the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations is carrying out, last July a meeting of the Latin American parties took place. At the meeting were the Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil, the Communist Party of Colombia (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of Labor of the Dominican Republic, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador, the Communist Party of Mexico (Marxist-Leninist) and the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela.

After evaluating the work that these parties are carrying out in each of the countries and discussing the most important events that are taking place in the region and the world, the meeting approved a Political Declaration that we reproduce below.

U.S. imperialism and its European allies: France, England, Spain, Italy, are trying to manipulate the just struggle of the Arab peoples, to channel the indignation of the working masses and the youth towards a change of names, maintaining the economic and social structures and the weight of dependency.

After reviewing the latest events in our countries, in Latin America and the world we declare:

1. The stories told by imperialism claiming that there is a recovery from the crisis are falling apart every day, with the increasing numbers of unemployed, the decrease in production, the worsening of the fiscal deficits and the increase in the foreign debt in most of the countries of Europe, in Japan and the U.S.A., which seriously affect the supposed stability of the capitalist system and sharpening its inherent contradictions. This prolonged crisis that is affecting all the countries of the world shows not only the failure of the recovery policies implemented by imperialism, but also the decay of the system, which is mortally wounded and incapable of guaranteeing the well-being and freedom for which humanity is struggling.

2. The struggle of the working class, the working people, the youth and the peoples is spreading all over the world. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Yemen and other countries of North Africa and Asia Minor are an example of the struggle against the reactionary dictatorships and governments, who with the applause of the bourgeoisies and the imperialist powers have sunk these peoples into the deepest crisis, hunger and the cruelest misery, despite the immense wealth generated by the exploitation of oil, gas and other natural resources. In addition, with the complicity of the UN they resort to military intervention, to the bombing of the civilian population in Libya, using the pretext of the fight against tyranny, all with the aim of guaranteeing the established order and the continuity of all its profits that are the product of colonization and exploitation of these peoples. We completely reject the foreign intervention in Libya. It is up to the Libyan people themselves to resolve the problems of their country. No more military aggression and intervention in Afghanistan and Palestine! We Communists raise the banner of self-determination, sovereignty, well-being and freedom!

3. Active and valiant opposition to imperialism and the reactionary governments is also alive in Europe. In Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Ireland, France, England and other countries of Europe there has been a general rejection of the reduction in wages, the pension reforms, the increase in taxes, privatizations and the reduction of the budgets for health care, education, housing and in general of all the legislative programs by which the crisis is being placed on the shoulders of the working masses. Numerous strikes and mobilizations are showing an important revival of the working class and youth that is again speaking out for unity and the political initiative to confront the recovery policies and to reject the reactionary governments. The great mobilizations of youths that are taking place in Spain and other European countries deserve particular mention, which show the exhaustion of bourgeois democracy and the search for roads to social liberation.

4. In Latin America the struggle continues, it is showing a greater advance and development. The structural adjustment policies implemented by most of the governments in the last years have not achieved their expected objectives, much less do they represent measures aimed at the well-being of the masses. The different struggles that are developing in our countries calling for higher wages, labor stability, respect for the right to association, negotiation, collective contracts and strikes, the rejection of outsourcing, the demands for health care and education, greater rights and liberties are arousing the ever greater participation of numerous organizations on the continent that do not kneel before the measures of the bourgeois governments and that struggle for political freedom for the people. The student youth in Chile together with the working masses and the Mapuche people are carrying out large mobilizations in defense of freedom, public education and democracy. The desire for change is breaking through in our various countries, large contingents of the masses are participating in the political struggle and are taking up the banner of working for the victory of democratic and progressive governments that really promote the defense of sovereignty, respect of human rights, well-being and political freedom. The democratic and anti-imperialist tendency in Latin America is an unquestionable fact that is opening the way, is growing and offering numerous possibilities for the advance of the revolution.

5. The rise through elections of several democratic and progressive governments in Latin America constitute important steps in that direction. Nevertheless today, the existence and continuity of these governments is threatened by the rightist offensive of imperialism and the local bourgeoisies that have not given up the privileges that they have enjoyed in our countries for centuries. The offensive of imperialism and the oligarchies has reversed the direction of several of those governments, which have been transformed into open defenders of the capitalist system, of foreign domination; into a form of the old ways of governing, into those who carry out repression against the working masses and the youth, into prettifiers of representative democracy and promoters of developmentalist and reformist measures. In fact, these governments and history show that real change, the social revolution and national liberation cannot be carried through to the end under the leadership of bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes and parties. That responsibility belongs to the working class, the working masses, the peoples and the youth, to the revolutionary party of the proletariat, to the genuinely revolutionary organizations and parties.

6. Imperialism, its allies and servants, the local bourgeoisies in all the countries are persisting in their reactionary policies of repressing the struggle of the working masses, of the indigenous peoples and the youth by fire and sword, at the time that they try to co-opt the social movement by means of social welfare policies and one reform or another. One expression of those policies is the presence of U.S. imperialist troops and those of their Latin American servants in Haiti. In the same way it is continuing the trade embargo against Cuba and actions aimed at subverting the Venezuelan process. The persecution, jailing and assassination of social fighters and revolutionaries are irrefutable testimony of the fact that the struggle continues and that repression, however harsh and bloodthirsty it may be, cannot do away with the ideals and the determination to fight for social and national liberation. We emphatically express our solidarity with the comrades who are suffering repression and torture in Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru. In particular we demand the freedom of the Ecuadorean student leader Marcelo Rivera, who remains in prison, accused and condemned as a terrorist by the Correa government, for defending university autonomy.

7. The betrayal by the government of Rafael Correa and the struggle of the Bolivian workers against “the gasolinazo” in Bolivia are making clear not only the real limitation of these governments, but also the need to make clear to the working class and the social and mass organizations what is the real road to social change. Experience shows that neither reformism nor class conciliation can lead to change. Real change, the genuine emancipation of our peoples is the revolution and socialism, which is only possible if there is a revolutionary political vanguard capable of pushing through a genuinely revolutionary program at the head of the struggles of the working class, the working masses and the peoples.

8. The continuity and development of the struggle of the workers, the peoples and the youth in the countries of Latin America is guaranteed by historical tradition and the present combats, the perspective is the developing along the road of the social revolution. Our Continent is and will be the scene of great liberating struggles and we Marxist-Leninist communists will fulfill and affirm our position as shock troops of the revolution and socialism.

9. The strengthening of the right-wing, corporatist and social welfare policies in most of the governments of Latin America will not make us back down from the search for true social and national emancipation. We Marxist-Leninist parties of Latin America reiterate our commitment to link ourselves boldly and decisively to the struggles that the working class, the working people, the peasantry, the youth, the women and the peoples in general are developing, as well as our irrevocable decision to advance in the unity and leadership of their struggles, winning them for the revolution and socialism.

10. We make the words of Lenin ours: “If in the course of the struggle we win the majority of the workers to our side – not only the majority of the exploited, but the majority of the exploited and oppressed – we will really win”.

July, 2011

Studies V: PCOT on Foreign Affairs (II)

This post is a part of a new series of posts which will consist of translations and excerpts from the communiques, statements, pamphlets and other literature from left-wing political parties in the Arab world, especially Tunisia (others as well, Egypt, Algeria and Mauritania in particular). The selections will focus on foreign policy, women’s issues, relations with other political factions (mainly Islamists and other leftist tendencies), ideology, rhetoric and general worldview. The purpose of this series is to put into English elements of the contemporary Arab political discourse which are generally neglected in western and English-language reportage and analysis while the of Islamist tendency receives extensive, if not excessive coverage. The translations in this series should not be taken as this blogger endorsing or promoting the content of particular materials: the objective is to increase access to and understanding of the contemporary Arab left by making its perspectives known, especially in areas of interest and relevance to English-speakers. This series will include both leftist and Arab nationalist [party] documents, statements, communiques, articles and so on. The series will attempt to touch on as many of the main (and interesting) leftist parties as possible.

Below are translations of communiques and articles from the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT) dealing with international and foreign issues. Two are articles dealing with macro-political/economic issues — the global financial crisis and global warming and its impact on poverty — from 2009 and 2010. One deals with the problem of anti-immigrant (and anti-Muslim) sentiment in Europe, mostly in relation to the economic down turn and the exploitative character of capitalism, as the party sees it. Another is a communique mourning the death of Pascale Fantodji, a Beninois communist leder, from 2010.

These documents were selected because: (1) they illustrate, in part, the party’s ideological and cultural posture at the international level; (2) they deal with relatively contemporary problems in global political economy and thus show how the party applies its political outlook to the world around it in relatively abstract terms as opposed to strictly concrete, practical or tactical terms; (3) these communiques help in understanding the party’s own self image as not just as an internationally-oriented revolutionary party and thus assist in informing readers about some of the frames and its motivation with respect to and approach to particular political questions inside Tunisia and the Arab countries. The authors of these documents, like many leftists, view the global financial crisis as evidence of a crisis of capitalism that confirms the outline of Marxist thought. They view increasing European hostility towards immigrants, Muslims especially, at least in part as a function of capitalist exploitation of the working class and calls for a ”progressive anti-racist front” to advocate for the rights of workers in Europe and elsewhere. (This communique is especially relevant given the terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July, carried out by an individual committed to the anti-immigrant/Muslim tendency in Europe and acting on what he saw as the logical conclusion of that movement, based on the “Eurabian thesis”.) The communique regarding Fantodji is included to show its links with other African communist movements. Other documents dealing with foreign affairs/international issues will follow in later posts.

1. Broad international trends

“The Crisis of the Capitalist System deepens”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article2561

DATE: 11 December, 2009

The repercussions of the capitalist economic crisis are still coming and affecting the productive sections as well as real estate and banking in the form of a statement from the government of Dubai, UAE on its inability to pay its debts owed to international banks and its request to postpone repayments for a period of at least six months surprising the various stock exchanges of the world and increasing the severity of the financial crisis ongoing for more than a year [now].

At the time the media began to talk about the beginning of an economic recovery and overcoming the crisis came the real estate crisis in Dubai at the end of November a bomb in the markets, especially since it had been considered a model for countries that were moving from the local to the global. It was also characterized by large projects in the area of real estate and investment in ports and global stock exchanges. Dubai was considered a Tiger that navigated world markets and imposed itself on the globalized economy and some went as far as to substitute it for the GCC’s dependence on oil and exaggerated its image with mega projects such as the floating islands in the shape of palm trees and called to the rich world boasting of the possessing the tallest skyscrapers in the world, etc. [. . .] But this surge crashed in the so-called financial bubble costing over $80 billion for several companies such as Dubai World and Nakheel. Owned by government princes in Dubai were forced to seek assistance and intervention from neighboring Abu Dhabi to pump in the necessary funds in the form of debt ($15 billion).

The reaction in the stock markets was quick and immediate, as shares of Gulf companies fell and savings of the oil countries in international banks and a major loss of confidence in the future of many companies and especially Dubai Ports which invested in the most important international ports (London, America, Asia, etc.). And then came Putin’s pessimistic comments and the IMF paradoxically in a short time (four months) confirming that the financial crisis was ongoing. The repercussions affected small investors and employees who deposited their money in Islamic banks in Dubai and the various Gulf countries and affected workers and employees who lost their jobs as well. Real estate prices have fallen by more than a half and land stocks to more than 10% impacted by the dollar and oil prices.

It can be concluded that the Marxist analysis is valid in regard to a crisis crisis of capitalism would affect all capitalism economies, without exception, and negatively impact people’s lives and will not be salvaged except for by getting rid of the capitalist mode of production and replacing it with the socialist pattern. Let us develop our own capabilities through the initiation of working class struggle and the formation of a global front against imperialism and against the impact of neoliberal globalization.

“The Poor — The favorite victims of climate change!”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article2748

DATE: 20 February, 2010

It is confirmed by many international organizations that changes seen in the Earth’s climate are due to increased human activity in industry and technology and that the resulting toxic gasses are damaging humans, animals and plants and will eventually lead to increased rates of hunger, especially in dependent [developing] countries.

It is well known that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing significantly and frighteningly from the capitalist countries’s manufacturing, especially from their participation in the arms race, which will affect the rate of food production such that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has confirmed that the distribution of food production by the year 2050 will witness dire consequences and may face a decline between 9% and 12% as a result of rising temperature as a result of damage to the ozone layer. At the time that capitalist countries involved in the contamination of the Earth did not agree on a protocol setting out the proportion of greenhouse gasses while the systems of agriculture and forestry will be affected and concentrate on carbon dioxide and change forms of rainfall patterns, along with increasing the spread of weeds, pests and diseases. It is expected that the deepening and spread of droughts, heat waves, floods and violent storms will continue for the foreseeable future.

It is natural, in such circumstances and a changing climate, there would be increases in fluctuations in agricultural production especially in poor parts of the world. At another level these fluctuations in climate will negatively affect food security and safety with a wide spread of diseases transmitted by water, air and even by food itself, which will generate a significant contraction in production and productivity. Naturally the working class will also be affected with increasing rates of poverty, hunger and death in their midst.

Many studies have not ruled out the idea that the African continent is one of the areas most affected by climate change due to its being one of the areas more vulnerable to the affects of drought, floods and hurricanes. Being the poorest in the world and least secure in the area of food, it [Africa] is assumed to see irreparable damage on this level. Our country Tunisia is not isolated from climactic fluctuation, as the impact of climate change on Tunisian fisheries and forestry cannot be resisted when its economy is shaky and its people’s incomes are limited. And the regime will no longer be able to reduce its negative impacts at a time that we do not see or hear serious voices calling for the defense of the environment or the ocean only through the official discourse of the wooden system or from some parties and organizations that were unable to express their views and the distortion of our country’s environmental policy because of the suppression of freedoms, especially freedom for the media and the freedom to organize and demonstrate [. . .]

A new strategy to reduce climate change and its impact on food security and for mankind is an immediate priority for humanity and the international community to put it forward strongly and to defend it and not be trapped by the capitalist powers who are active in emitting toxic gasses, pressuring them to at least reduce the calamity which would be disastrous to humankind in general and the poor in particular. And it must also be noted that these capitalist countries pay to wage war against and use chemicals to kill people in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan [. . .] In so doing they kill the Earth’s crust from which we eat and drink, leaving frightening effects for many years on the land, water and air. These poles of capitalism must be shamed, exposed and isolated for killing people not only because of their own greed and their stealing of riches but also because this contributes to the eradication of life on Earth.

2. Racism in Europe

“On the growing manifestations of racism in Europe”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article2560

DATE: 11 December, 2009

The capitalist system is adopting rightist governments in order to cope with its suffocating economic crisis and highlight the extreme fascist groups to leverage chauvinist and racist slogans against immigrants in order to turn the class struggle away from its course. Capitalists find an outlet in fascist propaganda that feeds them moral and material support and disposes of accountability for the real perpetrators of the crisis.

Many racist laws have been passed for some time against migrant workers against Arabs and Muslims. Racist laws have boomed in light of a lack of awareness and weakness on the part of the forces of the left and its fragmentation. The latest of these laws were voted in in Switzerland in a recent popular referendum preventing the construction of minarets in a country with a right wing government and nearly seven million people, including three hundred thousand Muslims with three minarets, one of which is in use. This law is not intended to target the building of minarets but to strike at the freedom of belief and toleration between religions and cultures.

These racist laws neutralize conflict and distract the toiling masses from the real cause of the crisis.

Numerous racist demonstrations and protests were organized against migrant workers in France on the border between France and Switzerland.

Generally, the variations of right-wing extremism is growing and expanding steadily in various parts of the world taking a number of forms such as media campaigns, the use of the arts (cinema, cartoons, songs) to take a sometime deadly character by targeting foreigners (Muslims and Arabs in particular) and their lives, honor and property.

Racist movements that divert attention from the reality of living conditions among the working class and nurture the extremest fundamentalist movements that thrive in such an environment then present themselves as victims and defenders of “identity.” They highlight the terrorist movements drowning the countries in blood and chaos and look for right-wing governments in order to export their crisis and place further restrictions on freedoms.

Confronting this racist tide is the task for of all revolutionary and progressive forces in all countries of the world. It cannot confront this force unless it unites its ranks in a progressive anti-racist front standing side by side with the movements of migrant workers to raise the slogan “We live here, we work here and we will stay here!” and to demand full equality between migrant and non-migrant workers in rights and obligations.

3. Solidarity with other communists

“A communique of condolences to the comrades in the Communist Party of Benin”

LINK: http://www.albadil.org/spip.php?article2843

DATE: 7 April, 2010

Gone from us forever on Monday, 5 April is comrade Pascale Fantodji, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Benin, we sent this cable of condolences to the comrades of Benin.

We have received with deep pain the news of the passing of comrade Pascale Fantodji, the First Secretary and founding member of the Communist Party of Benin.

The passing of Pascale Fantodji is not just a great loss for the communists, workers and people of Benin, but also a great loss for communists all over the world.

We believe that the Communists of Benin will remain steadfast despite this time of difficulty and will continue to struggle to achieve the revolutionary goal taunted Pascale Fantodji for all of his life.

– The Tunisian Communist Workers Party, 7 April, 2010

Source

CIA Doctors Face Human Experimentation Claims

Medical ethics group says physicians monitored ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ and studied their effectiveness

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.

PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret “torture programme”.

The American Medical Association, the largest body of physicians in the US, said it was in open dialogue with the Obama administration and other government agencies over the role of doctors. “The participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values,” it said.

The most incendiary accusation of PHR’s latest report, Aiding Torture, is that doctors actively monitored the CIA’s interrogation techniques with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subjects without their consent. The report concludes that such data gathering was “a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation”.

Human experimentation without consent has been prohibited in any setting since 1947, when the Nuremberg Code, which resulted from the prosecution of Nazi doctors, set down 10 sacrosanct principles. The code states that voluntary consent of subjects is essential and that all unnecessary physical and mental suffering should be avoided.

The Geneva conventions also ban medical experiments on prisoners and prisoners of war, which they describe as “grave breaches”. Under CIA guidelines, doctors and psychologists were required to be present during the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees.

In April, a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found that medical staff employed by the CIA had been present during waterboarding, and had even used what appeared to be a pulse oxymeter, placed on the prisoner’s finger to monitor his oxygen saturation during the procedure. The Red Cross condemned such activities as a “gross breach of medical ethics”. PHR has based its accusation of possible experimentation on the 2004 report of the CIA’s own inspector general into the agency’s interrogation methods, which was finally published two weeks ago after pressure from the courts.

An appendix to the report, marked “top secret”, provides guidelines to employees of the CIA’s internal Office of Medical Services “supporting the detention of terrorists turned over to the CIA for interrogation”.

Medical workers are given the task of “assessing and monitoring the health of all agency detainees” subjected to enhanced techniques. These techniques include facial slaps, sleep deprivation, walling – where their padded heads are banged against walls – confinement in boxes, and waterboarding or simulated drowning.

The guidelines instruct doctors to carry out regular medical checks of detainees. They must ensure that prisoners receive enough food, though diet “need not be palatable”, and monitor their body temperature when placed in “uncomfortably cool environments, ranging from hours to days”.

The most controversial guideline refers to waterboarding, the technique where prisoners are made to feel as though they are drowning by having water poured over a cloth across their face. The guidelines stress that the method carries physical risks, particularly “by days three to five of an aggressive programme”.

PHR is calling for an official investigation into the role of doctors in the CIA’s now widely discredited programme. It wants to know exactly how many doctors participated, what they did, what records they kept and the science that they applied.

Source

Communist Party of the Workers of France: For us, it is three times “no” to imperialist war

Afghanistan, Libya, Ivory Coast

This is the third front in the war in which French imperialism is engaged: after Afghanistan, Libya, and today, it is the Ivory Coast. The troops of the “Licorne” force are officially engaged in fighting against the forces of Gbagbo.

They are involved in a reactionary civil war that has ravaged that country for years, on one side, that of Ouattara, whose troops are responsible for mass killings. The officials of the UNOCI [United Nations Commission in the Ivory Coast], the military coalition which supports the French armed forces, have asked Ouattara’s supporters to “stop the massacres”! The fighting has already claimed hundreds of victims, mostly civilians.

We reaffirm our opposition to this reactionary war and the participation of the French army. This war may “bury” the Gbagbo regime, but it will only widen and exacerbate the divisions, and aggravate the situation of the popular masses.

With or without a UN mandate, the armies of the imperialist powers do not bring democracy, much less peace. This is true in all the countries where French imperialism is at war!

Together with many organizations, in France and in Africa, we demand that the French troops leave Africa.

Paris, April 5, 2011
Communist Party of the Workers of France

Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action): The Assassination of Gadhafi

Comrades and friends:

With the murder of Gadhafi, we Communists in Chile, that is, members of the Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action) PC(AP), have decided to make our own the declaration of the PCmlm of Bolivia, which to our understanding has the correct communist position in relation to the imperialist criminals.

Only the lost revisionists and their cousins, the Trotskyites, the pro-Trotskyites and in general all the agents of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, regardless of how they present themselves, can join in the fascist celebration of the murder of Gadhafi.

We communists, who are fighting for Popular Democracy, Socialism and Communism, will never celebrate a murder which the imperialists want to use to symbolize their rule, their re-colonization of a sovereign country, today of Libya. On the contrary we will always be together with the anti-imperialist struggle, the heroic combat of the nations and peoples for national salvation against imperialist aggression and subjection, everything that is part of the Marxist-Leninists today we must stress very energetically and not only for the imperialist propaganda and manipulation of information, but also for the shameful and repugnant role of the reactionary and imperialist bootlickers who dishonor the glorious name of COMMUNIST.

We of the PC(AP) were not only not “critical” observers of the massacre of the heroic Libyan people, nor did we put NATO and the Gadhafi government on the same level. On the contrary we denounced the so-called persistent Libyan “rebels” who put themselves under the infernal and criminal umbrella of the NATO bombings. Our party press, our speeches and the street demonstrations show our struggle in solidarity with the people of Libya, against the aggression for re-colonization by NATO.

As an example of the position of the COMMUNISTS in Chile, that is, of the PC (AP), see our declaration of Friday March 25 and a video made by Quilicura TV.

National Communications Commission of the
Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action)
PC (AP)

October 22, 2011

Communist Ghadar Party of India: On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by US imperialism

Anti-Imperialist forces resolve to throw imperialists out of Asia

Anti-imperialist forces organized a public meeting in New Delhi on October 9, 2011. The meeting was initiated by the Lok Raj Sangathan(LRS) and the Jamaat e Islami Hind(JIH). Below we give a report on this event from a correspondent of Mazdoor Ekta Lehar. It was organised to chart out a course of action for the anti-imperialist antiwar forces of our country.

All anti-imperialist forces in India must unite as one to throw the US imperialists and their allies out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and all over the world. We must develop a powerful anti-imperialist, antiwar movement in defense of the rights of peoples and nations, and of peace and security.

Our brothers and sisters by blood, the people of Afghanistan, are victims of the US led NATO occupation forces. Over 1.3 million people killed as a result of the NATO strikes. Over 5 million Afghans have died as a result of the invasion and occupation. Over three million people are in refugee camps in Iran, Pakistan as well as within Afghanistan.

We have ancient and positive relations with the Afghan people. They have helped us in our moment of need. We can never forget that it was the then ruler of Afghanistan who allowed the Hindostani Ghadar Party to set up in Kabul, the first free Hindostani government during the First World War. The heroic resistance struggles of Afghans to all occupiers — British, Russian, and now American, are folklore. We are proud that Indian soldiers of the British Army faced firing squads for refusing to fight the Afghani people during colonial rule.

We demand that the government of India should reverse its anti-Afghan, anti-Indian, pro-imperialist policy. We demand that it defends the rights of all peoples and nations to determine their own economic and political systems, free from foreign imperialist pressure.

We denounce the decision of the Manmohan Singh government to send the Indian Army to Afghanistan to “train” the puppet Afghan army, set up by the US imperialists, to attack the Afghan people’s anti-imperialist national liberation struggle. We consider this as an excuse to intervene in Afghanistan against our own brothers and sisters.

We believe that the fountainhead of terrorism worldwide is US imperialism.

The revolutionary struggle of the people of Afghanistan, against the occupation forces cannot be called terrorism. We support revolutionary liberation struggles.

The killing of innocent people in bomb blasts in Pakistan, India, and other countries – in trains and buses, masjids and mandirs, courts and market places – is terrorism. We condemn terrorism. We condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US.

This was the content of every speech in the meeting.

The President of LRS, Shri Raghavan spoke of how over the last ten years, the US imperialists and their allies have sought to overturn all established norms regarding the independence and sovereignty of nations and the right of each nation and its people to pursue the economic and political system of its choice. “Regime change” and installing their lackeys in power, through brutal military intervention, has become the way of advancing imperialist interests in whichever country that does not submit to the dictate of the US imperialists.

Md. Salim Engineer, Secretary, JIH, cited several facts to support his argument that the US state itself was the organiser of the terror attack on the US on September 11, 2001. This was used as justification for the aggression on Afghanistan. He highlighted the danger of allying with the US imperialists. He called on all to stand up in defence of the sovereign right of the Afghan people to decide their own future.

Prakash Rao elaborated on the main features of the present Anglo-American strategy for world domination. Aimed at establishing their imperialist control over the rich oil reserves of Central and West Asia, and check mating all potential rivals, this strategy includes wars of aggression and military intervention in the name of “regime change” for alleged “humanitarian” reasons, coupled with savage attack on the Muslim people all over the world, in the name of “war on terrorism”, and heightened state terrorism.

Tracing the development of events in the region beginning with the Iranian revolution and the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet social imperialists in the late seventies. He conclusively established that today US imperialism is the fountainhead of terrorism.

He pointed out that the people of the Islamic faith all over the world are specifically under attack because they have refused to submit to the Anglo-American prescriptions on what form of governance and way of life they choose for themselves.

Elaborating on why Pakistan is being targeted by the US imperialists at this time and what this means for us Indians, he pointed to the mass opposition in Pakistan to the US policy. The people of Pakistan do not want to assist the US imperialists in Afghanistan. Pakistan is also the gateway to China and India and Anglo-American strategy in this region is to block China, India, Russia and Iran.

Prakash Rao condemned the decision of the Manmohan Singh Government to send its army into Afghanistan to train the puppet afghan government’s army to fight the people of Afghanistan . He called on the people of our country to stand with Afghani and Pakistani peoples in these troubled times and to build the unity all the anti-imperialist forces to throw out the Anglo-American imperialists out of Asia.

Dr. Rakesh Rafeeq condemned the growing US imperialist interference in the affairs of India and called for a broad anti-imperialist movement against the designs of US imperialism in this region.

He pointed out that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, Indian state has been collaborating with the US imperialists from the beginning of the occupations and even earlier. India collaborated with the soviet imperialists during their occupation, he pointed out. The infrastructure being built in Afghanistan by the Indian state is to assist the occupation forces. They are not building schools and hospitals for the people.

Those who addressed the meeting included Md. Ahmed, Prof. Ananthnarayan, P.C.Hamzah, Com. Pratap Syamal, Prof. Bharat Seth, Md. Amin Bhat of the Jammu and Kashmir Peace Foundation, Prof. Sheomangal Siddhantkar, Intezar Nayeem. A moving Urdu poem was sung on the theme of the occupation of Iraq.

Manipuri student activists, Malem and Rojesh, denounced the imperialist policy of the Indian state towards the various nations and nationalities and the use of force to deny the peoples their national aspirations. They called for all anti-imperialist forces in our country to oppose the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Resolutions were unanimously adopted on demanding immediate expulsion of all foreign troops from Afghanistan, condemning the US led war on terror as the biggest threat to peace and well-being of peoples, in solidarity with the people of Pakistan, against the building of close ties between the US and India and for unity with all peace loving and democratic forces to build a strong anti-imperialist movement.

American Party of Labor Statement on the Killing of Muammar Gaddafi

No the Colonization of Libya!

With the victory of the NATO-backed rebels and the National Transitional Council, Libya has been colonized once again. Moammar Gaddafi, the leader of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, has been killed according to the country’s rebel government on October 20th, 2011. Gaddafi was murdered in his hometown of Sirte, a stronghold for his supporters.

From 1911 to 1943, Italy ruled Libya as a protectorate. Under the reign of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the colonialists ruthlessly crushed any national resistance to fascism that would threaten Italy’s imperial interests over this oil-rich country. Now, in 2011, the country is once again under the control of foreign powers. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has states that the war against Libya is “over,” declaring the domination of Libya complete. Libya’s rich natural resources and enormous oil wealth, estimated to be among the greatest on earth, is once again to be siphoned by imperialism.

Gaddafi was executed on the spot in a brutal and arbitrary way, which raises questions about what sort of regime the Libyan “rebels” are going to build, as if the ethnic cleansing of black Libyans and foreign migrants from cities under their control, as well as their cozy relationship with the Western powers and NATO didn’t raise enough already.

A convoy of Gaddafi loyalists' vehicles is pictured destroyed ny NATO bombs and littered with bodies near Sirte

Bodies of killed Gaddafi loyalists around the drain pipe where the Libyan leader was allegedly found

Gaddafi’s Execution

Gruesome images of Gaddafi’s bloody corpse have been telecast with glee by TV channels all over the world. The circumstances for his death are reprehensible – he had attempted to flee the bombing assault on Sirte in a military convoy when NATO hit two of the vehicles with a Hellfire missile. The rebel forces allegedly found him hiding in a drain pipe near Sirte. Badly wounded in both legs from the bombs, Gaddafi was captured and executed by rebels.

Photos and cell phone video footage of the event, released shortly after the story of the capture broke, show a wounded and injured Gaddafi with his face and shoulders awash in blood. He appeared to have a wound on his head.

The rebel forces that captured him then began their assault, dragging him from his hiding place and beating the former Libyan leader. Video footage clearly shows Gaddafi grimacing in pain, being humiliated, shoved, beaten and bludgeoned. A dazed Gaddafi is then paraded around in the streets of the city to the sound of the baying mob of rebels, shortly before being shot several times in the head and stomach. Some claim he was shouting, “Don’t shoot!” before he was killed, but no one has verified that claim.

Images from Al-Jazeera show his body being dragged on the ground and paraded through the streets before being taken to a morgue, where rebels flocked to take photographs of the body. Afterwards, his body was taken to Misrata, a rebel stronghold, to be displayed in a freezer. Most reports say he was shot in the head with a 9mm while helpless after being captured and severely beaten. News sources are now changing their story, saying Gaddafi was shot while trying to flee.

Gaddafi’s son Mutassim was given a similar treatment by the “freedom fighters” of Libya. The news is now claiming he was killed in a “firefight” in Sirte, but pictures and video have already emerged of Mutassim lying on a sofa, injured and bloodied after his capture but still alive. Pictures of his executed corpse emerged hours later. Gaddafi’s Defense Minister Abu Bakr Jaber Younes was also killed during the capture, as was Abdullah Senussi and about fifty others.

Mohammed el-Bibi, a 20-year-old rebel fighter who is reportedly the one who pulled the trigger, has been hailed as a “hero,” brandishing a gold-plated gun said to have been owned by Gaddafi. Fittingly, he also donned a baseball cap with the New York Yankees logo. After the shooting, he was hoisted up by rebels, who fired volleys of bullets into the air and loudly chanted, “Allah Akbar.”

Mohammed el-Bibi (right) and another rebel waving a golden pistol allegedly taken from Gaddafi

The barbaric condition of Gaddafi’s death is symbolic, showing the nature of the rebels and giving indications of what life for the Libyan people will be like under their regime. Widespread destruction, poverty, dependence and humiliation, not “freedom” or “democracy,” will be the result of this aggressive attack and occupation of Libya.

Rebels celebrating Gaddafi's death

Lies & Propaganda in the Attack on Libya

Much like other wars the United States and NATO have waged, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the war on Libya began with lies. Much like the media told us the war on Iraq was because Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and was going to attack the U.S., they have insisted this is a war to protect innocent civilians. In fact, recent events have shown that the Libyan rebels are not nonviolent, unarmed civilians, and many of the stories of Gaddafi’s atrocities were highly exaggerated.

To begin with, the media ceaselessly compared the Gaddafi government’s actions to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, where ethnic Hutu militia murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Since then they have accused Gaddafi of “genocide.” As if that was not enough, accusations of “war rape” and “mass rape” by troops loyal to Gaddafi were spread by mainstream news, backed up by frivolous stories of Gaddafi distributing Viagra to his soldiers to encourage them to rape women.

Months into the civil war and NATO’s campaign, no evidence of a governmentally-sanctioned campaign of genocide or mass rape has been found. In fact, Time Magazine printed a retraction of the Viagra story soon after, and many other news sources admitted there was no evidence of such an action – it was pure warmongering propaganda.

The imperialist coalition of NATO has violated all international laws by waging aggressive and destructive war for their own economic self-interests in the name of “humanitarianism,” as they did in Yugoslavia, as they did in Afghanistan and as they did in Iraq.

Libya and the Arab Spring

Western leaders have tried to say that the revolt in Libya is exactly like the ones happening across the Middle East, including the successful popular revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, seamlessly integrating the events in Libya into the “Arab Spring” of revolutions and uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The uprisings of the “Arab Spring” began in Tunisia, where protests led to the overthrow of pro-US dictator Ben Ali after twenty-four years in power. In neighboring Algeria, the people also flared up in resistance. Soon after, protests erupted in Egypt against the autocratic neo-liberal Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted from office by the revolution. After these events, the “Arab Spring” expanded in the region, and none of the ruling governments could stop them. In this context, Gaddafi took an opportunist position, claiming that the revolts in Egypt were led by Mossad, the Zionist secret service, and announcing that if he were in Tunisia at the time of the revolt, he would have supported Ben Ali. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen and many others have since been the scene of protests and riots by opposition groups.

In contrast to the various revolts however, it has become obvious since the NATO intervention that the revolt in Libya is not a popular revolution or progressive. It is primarily an attack by racist and reactionary elements of Libyan society against the government of the Libyan Jamahiriya. This uprising might have been legitimate at one point, but it has been hijacked by reactionary pro-imperialist factions.

The Gaddafi regime, before its destruction by the rebels, did promote such privatization and neo-liberal policies to the detriment of its people. However, the NTC has not arisen to combat this turn to the right, but to make Libya even more right-wing. Libya has one of the highest GDP per capita in Africa, as well as the highest Human Development Index. Libya under Gaddafi also had free education, as well as free studies abroad, free medical care, free water, almost free electricity and homes funded by the state. Libya under Gaddafi was the most developed nation in Africa and much of the Middle East.

The anti-Gaddafi forces formed a committee named the “National Transitional Council” on the 27th of February, consisting of defecting interior ministers, various neo-liberals and former justice minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who under the Gaddafi regime oversaw and promoted privatization and liberalization policies.

What really reveals the rebels as puppets of foreign powers however, is that they were completely unable to secure victory without the help of NATO. Up until March 7th of this year, the forces of Gaddafi held the rebellion at bay. On March 10th to March 19th, at the request of NTC leaders and with the approval of the Security Council of the United Nations, the imperialist powers imposed a “no-fly-zone” on Libya. As early as March 17th, the United Kingdom and France recognized the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya.

The events came to a head on March 22nd, when the United States, France and Britain deployed a major bombing force to attack pro-Gaddafi targets, afterwards involving all of NATO in the brutal bombing campaign. Since then, the Libyan “rebels” have shown themselves to be a dangerous, crazed hodgepodge of a mob at best, and a ruthless band of killers at worst. They have lynched black Libyans for their skin color and have ethnically cleansed entire cities, all the while waving monarchist flags. Recent reports have even suggested they are rounding up black Libyans and placing them in concentration camps, where widespread rape and executions have been reported.

Omar Mukhtar, led native resistance to Italian colonization of Libya for decades

History of Libya

Libya, a Saharan country located in the heart of North Africa which dared to defy the United States and the European powers, has a fascinating history that is not often reported in the media. The reason being that if they reported on Libya’s past, it would expose how Africa’s right to economic self-determination has continuously been taken away, politically and militarily.

The same NATO countries currently bombing Libya have a history of occupying the country. Libya was a colony of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. After its liberation from Ottoman forces, it became an Italian colony. By 1931, more than 750,000 Libyans had died fighting the Italian occupation. Ironically, both Turkey and Italy are NATO members participating in the attack against Libya.

During World War II, Winston Churchill sought rapprochement with Mussolini, whom he described as a “Roman genius,” claiming that he “rendered a service to the whole world,” calling him “the great law-giver among living men for his anti-Communist stand.”

King Idris the I of Libya

After the war, the Kingdom of Libya under King Idris the I proclaimed its independence on December 24, 1951. Libya became a pro-US and pro-British monarchy. During the reign of King Idris, the Allied powers of Britain, France and the United States (also current members of NATO) enjoyed de-facto control of Libya. The United States built its first air base in Africa, the Wheelus Air Base, on the outskirts of Tripoli for $100 million. The entire country was devastated by the Second World War, which had obliterated what little infrastructure there was in one of the poorest countries in the world. There was virtually no education system or medical care in the country, no stable government and no administrative services.

King Idris & Richard Nixon

In contrast, the West had unhindered access to Libya’s oil and resources. The Wheelus Air Base was used in the Korean War and became a strategic asset for the U.S. Libya was the only source of Middle Eastern oil that wasn’t shut down by the closure of the Suez Canal, and soon the country had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of foreign private investment.

Flag of the Kingdom of Libya under the King - the favorite flag of the rebels

The true nature of the rebellion is shown by the fact that they wave the flag of British and U.S. puppet King Idris the I. After years of poverty under the corrupt monarchy, which sapped the national wealth for the rulers of the Kingdom and not for the people, a bloodless coup was staged by the Free Unionist Officers on September 1, 1969, led by Muammar Gaddafi.

After the coup, the new government assumed full control over oil production and refused to renew licenses for foreign military bases in Libyan territory. 51% of foreign banks and 51% of all oil companies such as Shell, Exxon, Texaco, Socal and Mobil were nationalized by 1973. Oil prices were raised for crude oil when Libya insisted on setting its own prices, and soon agrarian reform and social programs funded by oil revenue helped Libya build itself into the most developed country in Africa. The Western powers have never forgiven the Gaddafi Jamahiriya government for overthrowing their puppet monarchy, and since then Libya has been labeled as one of the “bad Arab states,” with Gaddafi being the lead “bad Arab.”

Where is Libya Heading?

Despite criticisms one might have of the Gaddafi government, NATO has no concern for the Libyan people. Its only mission is the hunger for its world domination.United States Vice President Joe Biden told the press that this invasion will set the stage for future military attacks. “This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past,” he said. With this statement, the brutal power of NATO to violate the sovereignty of states anywhere they want, and to make the law everywhere in the world as they see fit, is put plainly for all to see.

Gaddafi loyalists fight with the green flag standard of the Libyan Jamahiriya

The foreign policy of U.S. imperialism for years to come will be shaped by bloody invasions which back reactionary puppet governments and suit the Western power’s economic interests. Powers like the United States use humanitarian justifications like “human rights” and “democracy” to support local rebellions and portray them as democrats even if they are little more than terrorists, thugs, drug traffickers or worse. Foreign imperialist powers do not intervene in oil-rich countries for “humanitarian” reasons, for but self-interest, for territorial conquests, and to gain new access to markets and resources.

The fighters against reaction and domination, who struggle still against leaders backed by imperialism’s ambition, must now keep in mind that NATO is watching and waiting to strike. Imperialism is out for blood, out to restore the hegemony it has built all over the globe that enforcers like Ben Ali and Mubarak pushed onto their people for decades. This is imperialism’s response to cries for liberation.

The death of Gaddafi will no doubt have the West proclaiming its “victory” over the resistance, but the Libyan people’s heroic resistance to imperialist war has not been in vain, because the world has been watching and all the peoples of the world have learned from their example.

Source

ICMLPO General Resolution

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations 17th Plenum

Madrid October 2011

The Plenary Session of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) was successfully held in Madrid with the participation of almost all the member parties and organizations from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

Throughout the sessions, and after reviewing the work of the parties in their respective countries, the Plenary took note of the inability of capital to resolve the general crisis with the various methods that it has used so far.

Unemployment and misery are affecting millions of workers, and particularly young people and women, both in the main imperialist economies as well as in the dependent countries. The neoliberal programs and policies have not resolved the great difficulties of the system much less the situation of the working class and the peoples.

New sectors of the workers and popular masses are joining the struggle for their rights: the youth, public employees, the unemployed, immigrants are defending the gains won through decades of combat and are trying out new forms of struggle and unity; they are learning precious lessons that raise the level of consciousness of the broad masses and are putting forward objectives of greater significance against capitalism; the advanced sectors are looking at the objectives of socialism.

The idea that the weight of the crisis should fall on the class that has caused it and not on its victims is already a widely shared objective, even an outcry. In Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, the workers are confronting the policies of privatization, cutbacks in social services and plundering; in sub-Sahara Africa, the peoples are resisting being made the battlefield of the imperialist looters; in Asia the workers are carrying out great strike movements and are heroically resisting the imperialist military occupation.

A Close Look at Shola-e Jawid; Afghanistan’s Communist Maoist Movement

by Habibullah Athaee

This piece discusses the initiations behind the establishment of the Shola-e Jawid, its emergence as Afghanistan’s most influential leftist party at a particular time and the reasons behind the movement’s success and finally it is downfall.

Taking a glance at the events that happened in 1960s around the globe, we can recall the ideological resurrection amongst the nations of the world that was initially rooted in the start ups of the cold war. In the 1960s, the majority of the world was divided into two ideological camps. While almost half of the nations of the world had already raised a red flag—signalizing their communist-based ideology led by the USSR and China, the other half were advocates of liberalism led by the United State and its ideological allies in Western Europe.

As a result of the existence of differing and contradictory ideologies, sentiments favoring revolutionary uprisings were ignited. Thus, China found itself politically struggling and witnessed social unrest from those groups who felt disfranchised. This was manifested in the cultural revolution of China led by Mao Tse-tung. The United States of America was also affected by daily demonstrations of African-Americans led my Martin Luther King demanding elimination of prejudice and discrimination against Blacks, equality and justice.

However, starting from early 1960s, Afghanistan too, though for the first time in its political history, found itself in an unintentional revolution of political thoughts and ideas which were imported through a complicated process. As mentioned above, while almost half of the nations of the world had already raised a Red Flag and gone communist, Afghanistan was just about to enter into a new phase of internal negotiations and dialogues between the advocates and opponents of the school of communism which has been also termed as the “leftist movement” in Afghanistan. These negotiations however, was not limited to dialogues, as there were daily demonstrations and street fighting between demonstrators who were representing university/high school students, workers and political activists with police and armed forces of King Zaher Shah. Having briefly discussed the events of the 1960s, it is quite essential to study the history and formation Afghanistan’s leftist parties who were the organizers of the mass movements against the King. Although hidden, but such initiations by the communists were highly supported by Daoud Khan as he was aiming to seize power.

The history of leftist movements can be traced back to years ago. Some historians claim that the main reason for the formation of a group called “Afghan Youth” during Amanullah Khan was the leftist ideologies and that characters like Abdul Rahman Loudin, Ghulam Mohayy-ul Din Erty and Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghubar who were advocates of Amanullah Khan were members of the Group, but for the first time, leftist ideologies became vivid in 1340s/1960s by Noor Muhammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Afghanistan’s famous historian, Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghubar. According to Basir Ahmad Hussain-Zadah, an Afghan researcher, one of the reasons behind execution of Abdul Rahman Loudin, Ghulam Mohayy-ul Din Erty and Taaj Mohammad Paghmani, Faiz Mohammad Baroot-Saaz during Nadir Shah’s throne was their relation with Moscow. He also claims that Nadir Shah was informed of such relations by his brother Mohammad Hashim who was Afghanistan’s ambassador to Moscow during the Amanullah’s throne.

Noor Muhammad Taraki, Babrk Karmal, and Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghubar founded Afghanistan’s first communist party called “Hezb-e Democratic-e Khalq” (Peoples’ Democratic Party) which is known as Afghanistan’s most successful and organized communist party. In 1344–1965, after the events of Sevom-e Aqrab—Oct. 25, another leftist party that is known as Afghanistan’s greatest leftist movement was established under the name of “Jameiat-e Democrati-e Nawin” (New Democratic Society) known as Shola-e Jawid. Unlike its major rival Khalq, Shola-e Jawid was comprised of different ethnic groups and its ideas were embraced by the urban and rural communities throughout the country. Akram and his brother, Sadiq Yari, Hadi and Rahim Mahmoodi, Shapoor, Engineer Osman, Moztareb Bakhtary, were the prominent figures of the movement. Apart from the other leftist parties, this paper will discuss the initiations behind the establishment of the Shola-e Jawid, its emergence as Afghanistan’s most influential leftist party at a particular time and the reasons behind the movement’s success and finally it is downfall. Although there have not been much academic resources available, this paper is written based on personal interviews with different political scholars some of whom are believed to be prominent figures of Shola-e Jawid but their membership with the mentioned party/movement has not been confirmed.

1. Initiations behind the Establishment
Stalin’s death in early 1950s marked a critical turning point in the way Soviet Union used to approach school of communism. Unlike his predecessor, Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, was an advocate of approaching power through parliament and a parliament based power. The newly established strategies and revised ideologies in the Kremlin resulted in divergence/discrepancies amongst the global advocates of the school of communism. Consequently, China under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung became resistant to the branch of Moscow-based communism. Narrowing it down to Afghanistan, the Kremlin eventually resorted to establishing Afghanistan’s first communist party which was called Peoples’ Democratic Party—locally famous as Khalq. According to Dad Noorani, an experienced journalist in Afghanistan, Shola-e Jawid—behind which was another political organization called Progressive Youth Organization (P.Y.O) under the leadership of Akram Yari—came into existence in the margins of the event of Sevvom-e Aqrab in 1344 (1965) and was in reaction to the establishment of Hezb-e Democratic-e Khalq (Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan) that was established in 1342 (1963). While Khalq was an advocate of Moscow-based communism, Shola-e Jawid adhered to Maoism. Prominent figures involved in the establishment of Shola-e Jawid were, Akram Yari, Sadiq Yari, Dr. Rahim Mahmudi, Dr. Hadi Mahmudi, and Wasef Bakhtary.

Shola-e Jawid followed Mao’s approach to communism and looked to China’s ideological/cultural revolution as its model. Unlike the other Soviet-backed communist party PDPA, Shola-e Jawid believed that the only way to approach power is through military rebellion and through surrounding the cities by rural rebellious people: this approach to achieving power, according to Mr. Qaseem Akhgar, was also taken from China’s Communistic Revolution, Cuba’s Che Guevara, and Vietnam’s Communist movement. As its first official reaction as a political movement in the country, Shola-e Jawid boycotted the 12th parliamentary elections and issued an article written by Akram Yari calling for people to boycott the fake election, “Let us boycott the mock election.” Shola-e Jawid’s leadership believed that having a parliamentary election is nothing but another deception by the King to legitimize his base of power. On the other side, unlike Shola-e Jawid, Khalq actively participated in the elections and succeeded to introduce four of its well-known members to the parliament.

As mentioned earlier, Maoist ideology, just the same as any other ideologies that have existed in Afghanistan so far, has been imported. Both of the Communist Parties, Khalq and Shola-e Jawid, were receiving the latest handouts that were based on the teachings of communism from their like-minded parties in Iran and to some extent Pakistan. Khalq was highly influenced by the translated works of Hezb-e Toude (The Mass Party), Iran’s communist party, while Shola-e Jawid was receiving Maoist ideas from Sazman-e Enqlabi-e Iran (The Iran’s Revolutionary Organization) through a publication called “Setar-e Sorkh” (Red Star). The handouts, however, were distributed by Akram Yari who, according to Noorani, was the most influential member of the board of leadership of Shola. In 1348(1969) the movement officially announced its existence after four years of underground activities. Along with its official activities, Shola also started a weekly publication called “Shola-e Jawid”(Eternal Flame).

PCMLE: Bin Laden’s Death & Ten Years of the Imperialist Invasion

From En Marcha newspaper

The killing of Bin Laden claimed by the U.S. President, Barack Obama, was just a few months short of the ten year anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. Just in October 2001 with the action called “Operation Enduring Freedom” by U.S. troops and “Operation Herrick” of the British, aided in the plot to act in “self defense” to promote, together, the invasion and occupation of this ravaged Arab country.

The death of bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda, came on the morning of May first, passed through U.S. commandos operating in the city of Abbotabad, north of Pakistan, a country believed to be sheltered from foreign invasion.

It is believed that the death of Bin Laden, no doubt, takes on symbolic power and attributes a supposed triumph for the U.S. government, however, much less yield means that the Taliban in their fight “against foreign forces and any other invader,” as said Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. Just now, as in previous years, have announced their traditional spring military campaign that involves an intensification of suicide attacks and the assault on bases of the invading troops.

NATO is a threat to liberties and national sovereignty

Revolusjon Norway

60 years with NATO are 60 years too many

The formation of NATO in 1949 was aimed directly at socialism, at the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies in Europe that had emerged victorious in the aftermath of the anti-fascist WW2. It was aimed at infringing the influence of the strengthened communist parties all over Europe, and simultaneously subduing all the European member countries and curtailing their sovereignty under the thumb of US imperialism. The Marshall plan was the main economic and financial instrument of US imperialism to subdue the «beneficiary» countries to US tutelage. In 1955, West Germany was included in the NATO alliance, thus breaching all agreements between the WW2 allies on never accepting the remilitarization of Germany.

The dominating Social Democratic party (Labour Party) in 1948 played the primary role in paving the road to Norwegian NATO membership through attacking and pursuing the Communist party (which had won great authority throughout the war of anti-fascist resistance and published the second largest newspaper immediately after the war). By ways of lies, intimidation and persecution, the protests and resistance from communists and democrats and a large section of opponents within the Labour party itself were silenced, and the way was paved for NATO and US.

For almost half a century Norway has been a potential battleground and manoeuvre area for thousands of NATO troops, and has been a hub of espionage. The North and Arctic Sea has been NATOs playground, with Norway playing an important role in surveillance and intelligence. Although Norway pretended to have official «objections» to the NATO nuclear strategy, supposedly not permitting nuclear weapons to be stationed on its territory, this was a hoax. In the 60′ies NATO had actual plans of devastating most of Northern Norway by use of nuclear mines as a measure of «defence»!

NATO is an instrument to suppress internal unrest and opposition in any member country. Years ago, it was revealed that NATO exercises in Norway were targeted at handling social unrest among workers and students. Tens of thousands of progressive citizens, including their children, have been under surveillance from the 1950′ies onwards. NATO is sure to give a helping hand to imperialist governments fearing the increasing rage of their own workers and peoples who are victimized by the consequences of the evolving grave economic crisis.

The «new concept» adopted by NATO in the 90′ies has corresponded to a grave and aggressive change in the foreign and military policy of Norway. As a small, but ambitious imperialist country, Norway is eager to defend its assets and investments in energy resources in the Caucasus and the Middle East. The war on Yugoslavia in 1999 was the first time Norwegian soldiers were involved in external military operations not sanctioned by the UN. Since 1999, Norway has been active in several illegitimate wars. Currently some 6-700 troops are taking part in the murderous occupation of Afghanistan. This is occurring under a government coaliton calling itself «red and green», consisting of the Labour party, a rural party and the Socialist Left Party (SV). The latter originated from and has been founded on opposition to; yes, NATO!

Nowadays there is much talk of a closer Nordic Defence Cooperation between Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. While the two first countries are not members of NATO, the two latter are not members of the EU. The main intention of this plan, presented as a positive bolstering of the traditional Nordic cooperation, is in effect quite different. The intention is to pave the way for Swedish and Finnish integration with the aggressive NATO alliance on the one hand, and Norwegian and Icelandic integration with the EU on the other. If the Danish prime minister Fogh Rasmussen becomes new general secretary for the NATO, this plan will be sustained.

NATO and EU both threaten the sovereignty and the freedoms of our own peoples and of other peoples and nations worldwide. Both of them must be rejected and defeated by the peoples and the working class.

Red Cross Described “Torture” at CIA Jails

The report graphically describes abuse of Abu Zubaida. (Associated Press)

By Joby Warrick, Peter Finn and Julie Tate

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials, who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

“The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture,” Danner quoted the report as saying.

Many of the details of alleged mistreatment at CIA prisons had been reported previously, but the ICRC report is the most authoritative account and the first to use the word “torture” in a legal context.

The CIA declined to comment. A U.S. official familiar with the report said, “It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves.”

Often using the detainee’s own words, the report offers a harrowing view of conditions at the secret prisons, where prisoners were told they were being taken “to the verge of death and back,” according to one excerpt. During interrogations, the captives were routinely beaten, doused with cold water and slammed head-first into walls. Between sessions, they were stripped of clothing, bombarded with loud music, exposed to cold temperatures, and deprived of sleep and solid food for days on end. Some detainees described being forced to stand for days, with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers.

“On a daily basis . . . a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room,” the report quotes detainee Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as Walid Muhammad bin Attash, as saying. Later, he said, he was wrapped in a plastic sheet while cold water was “poured onto my body with buckets.” He added: “I would be wrapped inside the sheet with cold water for several minutes. Then I would be taken for interrogation.”

ICRC officials did not dispute the authenticity of the excerpts, but a spokesman expressed dismay over the leak of the material. “We regret information attributed to the ICRC report was made public in this manner,” spokesman Bernard Barrett said.

“The ICRC has been visiting the detainees formerly held by the CIA,” he added, “at Guantanamo since 2006. Any concerns or observations the ICRC had when visiting the detainees are part of a confidential dialogue.”

President George W. Bush acknowledged the use of coercive interrogation tactics on senior al-Qaeda captives detained by the CIA in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but he insisted that the measures complied with U.S. and international law. Former CIA director Michael V. Hayden confirmed last year that the measures included the use of waterboarding on three captives before 2003.

The report gives a graphic account of the treatment of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, a Saudi-born Palestinian who was the first alleged senior al-Qaeda operative seized after Sept. 11 — a characterization of his role that is disputed by his attorneys, who describe him as having a different philosophy of jihad than bin Laden.

Abu Zubaida was severely wounded during a shootout in March 2002 at a safe house he ran in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and survived thanks to CIA-arranged medical care, including multiple surgeries. After he recovered, Abu Zubaida describes being shackled to a chair at the feet and hands for two to three weeks in a cold room with “loud, shouting type music” blaring constantly, according to the ICRC report. He said that he was questioned two to three hours a day and that water was sprayed in his face if he fell asleep.

At some point — the timing is unclear from the New York Review of Books report — Abu Zubaida’s treatment became harsher. In July 2002, administration lawyers approved more aggressive techniques.

Abu Zubaida said interrogators wrapped a towel around his neck and slammed him into a plywood wall mounted in his cell. He was also repeatedly slapped in the face, he said. After the beatings, he was placed in coffinlike wooden boxes in which he was forced to crouch, with no light and a restricted air supply, he said.

“The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in my leg and stomach became very painful,” he told the ICRC.

After he was removed from a small box, he said, he was strapped to what looked like a hospital bed and waterboarded. “A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe,” Abu Zubaida said.

After breaks to allow him to recover, the waterboarding continued.

“I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless,” he said. “I thought I was going to die.”

In a federal court filing, Abu Zubaida’s attorneys said he “has suffered approximately 175 seizures that appear to be directly related to his extensive torture — particularly damage to Petitioner’s head that was the result of beatings sustained at the hands of CIA interrogators and exacerbated by his lengthy isolation.”

Danner said the organization’s use of the word “torture” has important legal implications.

“It could not be more important that the ICRC explicitly uses the words ‘torture’ and ‘cruel and degrading,’ ” Danner said in a telephone interview. “The ICRC is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, and when it uses those words, they have the force of law.”

He discounted the possibility that the detainees fabricated or embellished their stories, noting that the accounts overlap “in minute detail,” even though the detainees were kept in isolation at different locations.

Human rights groups echoed his assessment.

“These reports are from an impeccable source,” said Geneve Mantri, a counterterrorism specialist at Amnesty International. “It’s clear that senior officials were warned from the very beginning that the treatment that detainees were subjected to amounted to torture. This story goes even further and deeper than many us of suspected. The more details we find out, the more shocking this becomes.”

Source

History of the Imperialist “Great Game”

Afghanistan has been the victim of conspiracy and contention between the imperialists for more than a century. The term “the Great Game” was first used to describe the sparring between the British imperialists and Tsarist Russia over control of Afghanistan in the early part of the nineteenth century. One side of Afghanistan is the gate to central Asia and the other opens towards the Indian peninsula and to the open seas long coveted by Russia. The first Western colonialists to invade Afghanistan, the British occupied Kabul in 1839 in their rivalry with Russia.

The Afghan people drove the British out in three successive British-Afghan wars. These heroic struggles of the people could not liberate the country from colonialism and exploitation, and each time tribal chiefs and feudal lords traded the future of the people for small concessions from the colonialist overlords. Following the First World War and the victory of the proletariat led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia, which exhilarated the oppressed masses of the world, the third of these anti-colonialist wars succeeded in establishing independence under the rule of Amanullah Khan, ushering in a new era characterised by semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism.

The British continued to pursue their influence in Afghanistan, even more wary now given the existence of a socialist country to the north. Yet the British Empire was beginning to decline, overshadowed by the rising strength of US imperialism, through the aftermath of the Second World War. In the mid-1950s the new revisionist rulers in the Soviet Union, who had overthrown socialism, pushed to extend their influence by entering the “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The appetite of Soviet social-imperialism grew geometrically in the 1970s as contention with the US imperialists and their Western allies for controlling greater parts of the world intensified.

America’s Laziest Fascist

May 20, 2004 | Michael Savage doesn’t get out much. The hardcore conservative radio host of “The Savage Nation” has always been a relatively reclusive figure. He doesn’t do book tours or publicity stunts. He’s not exactly approachable either: He claims to carry a gun with him at all times, and he doesn’t like nosy journalists asking for interviews.

Not that he’s the shy, retiring type. Lately, as the Iraq torture scandal has dominated the headlines, he has taken to calling Arabs “non-humans” and has called for the U.S. to kill “thousands” of Iraqi prisoners and nuke a random Arab capital. Deciding whether to pay attention to Savage has always been tricky, though. It’s never clear whether he really believes what he says in his tirades or if they are simply ploys for public outcry. His is currently the third-most-popular radio program in the nation. Nonetheless, it may be hard for Savage to sit by and watch the FCC’s crackdown against fellow jock Howard Stern effectively lift Stern’s profile even higher into the stratosphere. But Savage’s outbursts are often so unhinged, so vicious, that ignoring them seems irresponsible, especially when so many Americans apparently are nodding in agreement. So when I learned that Savage would be making his first public appearance in three years Saturday night, it seemed worth checking out, if only to see who was paying attention to him and why.

“Savage Uncensored,” as the event was called, marked the end of what’s been a crummy year for the once-hot Savage. Last March, MSNBC gave him a weekly program only to cancel it after four months when he labeled a caller a “sodomite” and told him to “get AIDS and die.” Then the San Francisco radio station that gave him his first big break dumped him and rubbed salt into the wound with billboards that depicted Savage morphing into Sean Hannity, beneath the slogan “Out With the Old, In with the New.” When a couple of anti-Savage Web sites started a boycott of his advertisers, his syndicator, Talk Radio Network, tried to revoke their domain names. When that failed, it tried to sue them for $1 million. That failed too.

Savage’s star may have faded, but it’s still too early to write him off, with “The Savage Nation” pulling in 6 million listeners a week. His latest screed against fifth columnists such as liberals, gays and atheists, “The Enemy Within,” debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times nonfiction list. But when it comes to the true measure of a talker’s cachet — buzz — Savage has slipped several notches in the past year. The anti-Savage sites are now dormant, their owners apparently satisfied that he would never make it back on TV. Fans and foes who once duked it out in Internet chat rooms appear to have moved on. These days, it seems the only people paying attention to Savage are diehard fans and perhaps a few incorrigible rubber-necking journalists.

Savage was scheduled to appear at the Concord Pavilion, an outdoor amphitheater in the suburban hills east of San Francisco. As a Metallica cover band called Creeping Death wailed, 5,000 or so people filed in to see him in the flesh. A quick look around made the demographics of the Savage Nation quickly apparent: Ninety percent were men and a good 95 percent were white. During the next three-and-a-half hours, there would be clear affirmation that they like gay jokes, Arab bashing and mass displays of patriotism. They will offer to share their freedom fries with a complete stranger. And when that stranger fails to boo liberals, holler the phrase “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance or show sufficient enthusiasm for torturing Iraqis, they are polite enough not to drag him out to the parking lot and pummel him.

The crowd at Concord had paid as much as $100 for an evening of rhetorical red meat for the right-wing faithful. At first, we weren’t disappointed. But by the end of the night, I wasn’t the only one checking my watch.

Savage’s son, Russ Weiner, kicked off the show. With his spiky, dyed-orange hair and calculated scruffiness, he was reminiscent of Dr. Evil’s son Scott from the Austin Powers movies. The resemblance was confirmed when Weiner proclaimed, “I’m proud to be the son of Savage!” The 30-something Weiner is the founder of RockStar, an energy drink that he developed with his dad, drawing on Savage’s previous career as a Marin County herbalist and ethnobotanist named Michael Weiner. RockStar’s herbal liver-cleansing formula is supposed to enable drinkers to “party like a rock star,” which presumably means drinking and doping. Generous free samples had been passed out to the crowd on the way in. It lived up to its hype: The antifreeze-colored, cough-syrup-flavored beverage can only be enjoyed if you’re taking drugs.

But while Weiner has cashed in on other people’s bad behavior, he made it clear that he’s a family-values kind of guy. “Who’s heterosexual and proud?” he asked, prompting manly cheers. “If you’re not, hopefully you will be soon!” Before handing the stage over to the man he called “our leader,” he advised the audience how to handle his hot-tempered dad: “Let him know you love him!”

Love — or an acceptably heterosexual version of it — filled the air as Savage drove onto the stage in a classic red Cadillac convertible. He warmed up the audience by riffing on the day’s news, joking that “Shiite” should be spelled with one “I” and calling Muqtada al-Sadr “a fat bastard in a burka.” Dressed in a calfskin jacket, slouch hat and blue jeans, Savage was at ease, swearing freely and peppering his speech with “Hey, mans” that evoked his days as a North Beach beatnik wannabe. Whatever was in his coffee cup was certainly helping. When it ran dry, he called out, “I need a drink!” and a young woman sauntered over and poured champagne into the mug.

Like everyone else these days, Savage was fixated on Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. He managed to combine the two dominant conservative takes: The first being Rush Limbaugh’s insistence that what happened in Abu Ghraib was a harmless prank; the other being Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe’s assertion that the prisoners got what they deserved.

“These are tough interrogations?” Savage asked. “My father put me through tougher interrogations when I was 16!” He portrayed now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England as a poster girl for the war on terrorism — an embodiment of the idea that kicking Muslim ass can be fun. “Let’s hear it for Laurie [sic] England!” he cheered. “The leash chick! Hey man, she had a great time over there!” He couldn’t understand why liberals were so outraged. After all, he said, the acts of sexual humiliation and degradation that took place in Abu Ghraib were no more perverted than typical homosexual behavior. Try to follow his tortured logic: Savage was saying he didn’t mind the Abu Ghraib abuses because they were good clean fun, like gay sex, which he openly abhors.

Savage moved on to another of his favorite topics: bombing the bejeezus out of Iraq. Just a few days before the Uncensored event, he’d been ranting on the radio about dropping fiery death on civilians throughout Iraq and the Middle East. “I don’t give a damn if they hide behind their women’s skirts,” he foamed. “Wipe the women out with them! Because it’s our women who got killed on 9/11! And it’s our women who are gonna get killed tomorrow unless we get rid of the bugs who are destroying us!” Tonight, Savage continued to elaborate on this disturbing vision of how to win the war in Iraq. He said he fantasized of being woken up by the sound of B-1 and B-52 bombers flying over his house on their way to the Middle East. Imagining bombers overhead at 4 a.m., he gushed about these nocturnal missions, “It’s better than an orgasm — it is an orgasm!”

Savage continued the psychological striptease, peeling off more layers of mainstream conservatism to expose his raging right-wing id. Though he has long billed himself as the original “compassionate conservative,” his brand of conservatism does not share George W. Bush’s pretense of caring about Muslim hearts and minds, much less lives. It appears that for Savage, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with spreading democracy or respecting human rights. It is about asserting American power by any means necessary, and screw what anyone else thinks. Predictably, and sadly, this notion went over well with the audience. When Savage blurted out, “Does anyone in this crowd give a shit about the Iraqis?” he was answered with a deafening “NO!”

But if the first half of the event showcased Savage’s ability to stir the faithful, the second half was an object lesson in how a performer can take his audience — and his talent — for granted. Basically, he bombed. He spent nearly 20 minutes sitting in a stuffed chair in front of a television set, free-associating as he channel surfed. Seeing footage of Jordan’s King Abdullah, he screamed, “Kiss my ass! Shut the hell up!” To a soccer match in Spanish, he quipped, “Reminds me of my gardener.” It was about as entertaining as watching a middle-aged man yelling at his living room TV. Savage eventually realized things weren’t going well. “You don’t like this shit,” he said. “It’s a bad act.“

Some fans — mostly older people and parents with small children — started to leave. If this were radio, they would probably already have changed stations. Most of the audience stuck around as Savage went into freefall, flailing wildly for something to catch his fans’ attention. He read from the Bible, played with his new puppy, moaned about his “mother issues” and asked for more booze. The evening’s low point came when he played the audiotape of Nicholas Berg’s beheading over the P.A. system. Berg’s pitiful, frenzied screaming filled the amphitheater. Having not heard or seen the gruesome tape before, I covered my ears in shock. I was not alone. If Savage was trying to incite the audience, it didn’t work. Playing the tape only revealed his desperation for a reaction, any reaction.

“What made you come out on this night?” he asked. “You see the vultures circling this great nation. We feel the vultures flying over the Concord Pavilion.” And perhaps they could smell Savage dying on the stage below.

In a last-ditch attempt to rouse the listless crowd, Savage tried to root out some closet liberals. “Is there any asshole here who hates me, who’s gonna try and rush the stage?” he asked. It was a long way between the cheap seats and the stage, but I was getting tired and bored. Rushing the stage might have prolonged the evening by a few more minutes, so I stayed put. Hurrying off stage, Savage promised, “Wait till you see the close.”

Luckily, the finale lasted all of 15 seconds. From the wings, Savage, obviously thinking he was off-mic, barked, “Play the Arab music!” A Middle Eastern tune blared as his red Cadillac lurched onto the stage. Savage was perched on the back seat, dressed in white robes and sunglasses, looking like a costume-party sheik. As the car disappeared off stage, he waved to the crowd, “Goodbye, infidels! I’ll see you in hell!” And with that, “Savage Uncensored” slouched to its perplexing though somehow fitting conclusion.

The house lights came on, revealing a few thousand blinking and bewildered fans — Savage had just resoundingly bombed on his home turf. “That’s it?” wondered one woman behind me, with real disappointment in her voice. “He said he was going to do Dr. UnSavage,” she said, referring to one of the jock’s longtime on-air characters. A couple of young guys shook their heads. “He misread his audience,” one said. His friend added, “He got into the champagne too much.” Maybe some RockStar would have helped.

His poor performance was not entirely surprising. Unlike his compatriots Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura, Savage often comes off as a remarkably amateurish and lazy showman. None of his colleagues — no matter how big their egos — would dare adlib their way through a two-hour live performance.

Savage’s unprofessionalism makes it easy for liberals to dismiss him as a crank. But that’s an easy way to overlook his ever-more xenophobic, homophobic and authoritarian political message. Ultimately, his invective may be what keeps his listeners coming back for more. Savage says what many mainstream conservatives can’t or won’t. As frustration with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq adventure and the war on terror grows, his message holds appeal for those who believe nothing but desperate measures will work against an increasingly hostile world. And so, Savage will keep calling for Iraqi prisoners to be sodomized with dynamite. If he’s lucky, such antics may score him a public showdown with the FCC. Or perhaps he will finally rant his way into oblivion. Considering the recent developments in Iraq, even if Savage waits another three years to emerge from his veil of heavily armed privacy, there may be no shortage of fodder for his bizarre stage spectacle and the audience it attracts.

Source

APK: May 1, 2011 – the Character of the Class Struggle

Stop the wars! Start the welfare!
Endorsed by APK

We have seen people stand up in the struggle against dictators and tyrants, against thieves who live like kings and parasites, living on our labor. Most of North Africa is in turmoil and the people are demanding freedom, justice and work. A revolutionary storm has arisen – but imperialism and reaction will try to crush it and stop it before it seriously threatens the deeply unjust ruling world order based on plunder and exploitation of the proletariat and peoples.

Wars and occupations under false pretexts are everyday life in the ‘new world order’ – in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – and more are under preparation.

In Denmark, as elsewhere in Europe, we are working under increasing pressure. Hard-won rights are undermined by terrorism legislation and the collective responsibility of caring for the weak through our welfare system is being dismantled piece by piece.

Extensive attacks on education, unions, retirement and wages are all coordinated from the neo-liberal Europe.

War criminals form the government, while we participate in an illegal war, the persecution and oppression of other countries is also pursued here. But the rift and mistrust between the oppressed only reinforces power.

VKO’s government deserves, after 10 years of casualties, to be sent off into the murk of history. But S / SF / R does not represent a real alternative to war policy and EU policy with its welfare slaughter. Only a comprehensive popular resistance from below – from workers, civil servants, the working people and student youth – can slow down the capitalist crisis policy and set a new agenda that begins with stopping the wars and starting welfare!

Neither cuts or longer hours!

Unite against welfare slaughter!
Let the rich pay for the crisis!

Denmark out of the EU!
Stop the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya!
Stop U.S. and NATO! Denmark out NOW!

Stop force and climate destruction, NOW!

Unity and solidarity across borders!

Socialism is the future!

27. April 2011

APK