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French Communist leader speaks on Paris attacks

Pierre Laurent — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 20:44:00 +0000

Press release from Pierre Laurent, national secretary of the French Communist Party.

Our country has just experienced one of the worst events in its history. Last night's simultaneous terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, for which Daesh [short for Dawlat al-Islamiyah f'al-Iraq wa al-Sham] claims responsibility, and which, at this moment, have resulted in 127 deaths and 200 casualties, were horrifying. France is in mourning.

The day after the carnage, our first thoughts go out to the victims, their families, to those close to them, to the witnesses and to all those whose lives were threatened. For all, the pain is immense. Each and every one of us in France feels deeply wounded.

We salute the work of law enforcement, the emergency services, the Accident and Emergency doctors, healthcare workers and public service personnel, whose response to the situation has been exemplary, as has the people's solidarity, which was felt straight away.

Less than a year after the attacks in January [on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7], the Republic has been struck at its heart.
Even as a state of emergency has now been declared by the government, reinforcement of the police and of the justice system's resources is an imperative. The state must find suitable ways to guarantee the people's safety in the long term.

I ask our people not to give in to fear, and to stand together for freedom, equality, fraternity, and for peace. We must make careful distinctions between issues, and avoid stigmatization. Together, we must firmly reject hatred and racism.

France is affected by the war and the destabilization that is plaguing the Middle-East. The fight against terrorism calls for increased engagement and international solutions.
It can only be won by coming together to create a united society that places, at the heart of all its decisions, human emancipation, the values of the Republic and peace.

The French Communist Party, its representatives and its elected officials, will support all initiatives that, in the days to come, will allow our fellow citizens to take on together this challenge and to open up a path of hope for our people.

In this tragic time, the French Communist Party has put all election-campaign activities on hold.

Translated Sunday 15 November 2015, by Ciaran Edwards

Reposted from l'Humanité in English

Original French article: Pierre Laurent: "Face aux attentats, rassemblons-nous pour la liberté, l'égalité, la fraternité, et la paix."

Photo: in front of restaurants Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge on 16 November, three days after the attacks Wikipedia

On the 98th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

Norman Markowitz — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 15:19:00 +0000

November 7th was the 98th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, establishing what was then called Soviet Russia, the first revolutionary socialist state in history .

That state and its successor, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, went out of existence in 1991. The dominant capitalist propaganda prefers to say that it "imploded" which after forty four years of cold war and an estimated ten trillion dollars in U.S. cold war related military spending alone is a great example of the old Yiddish term of chutzpah, or overweening arrogance. I prefer the term counter-revolution, which was what the Soviets feared in 1917 but we will get back to that.

Today, capitalist propaganda, outside of those brave people who navigate through the Internet to search for truth, remains supreme in official commercial and corporate media, even though the underlying capitalist system itself is becoming very shaky. There are even some Communists in many countries today who use terms like "Stalinism" and "totalitarianism" to disassociate themselves from the Soviet past believing that this will enable them to move closer to the masses of people in their countries, as "twenty-first century" Communists.

So far, it hasn't worked too well. In reality, it has led them to move closer to the very capitalists who hailed the downfall of the U.S.S.R., as some combination of a failed experiment and the "death of Communism" and continue to move ahead with their grand design to turn the 21st century into a high tech version of the 19th century. Perhaps this is an appropriate time to take stock of the Soviet Revolution in terms of its experience and achievement. I will try to do that in a short sketch.

First, the Soviet Union was not an experiment, failed or otherwise. Experiments take place in laboratories, under controlled conditions, not in real life. Nor was the Soviet Revolution, "storming heaven," a doomed effort, as Marx wrote about the Paris Commune and anti-Communists have written about every socialist revolution. The Soviet Revolution took place in a huge empire covering 1/6 of the earth's surface, which as its enemies discovered could not be encircled and destroyed as were the Paris Commune or the Hungarian Soviet of 1919.

The Bolshevik Revolution was not a "coup" as both old anti-Soviet defenders of capitalism and "new Russian" capitalists smugly assert. It was a political revolution which continued a revolutionary process that began in March (on the calendar in use in the advanced countries) and moved forward, as the Czarist autocracy was overthrown, Soviets developed, and a provisional government sought desperately both to keep Russia in the war and thwart the anti-capitalist, anti -landlord upsurge of the masses. The masses of people in motion determined that process, and the Bolsheviks, against great odds, by representing their desires and interests to end the war and the suffering, poverty and inequality of Czarist society, led them to victory and to establish both a government of the Soviets and a government committed to constructing socialism.

In the aftermath of November 7, the Soviet government actually proved what Socialists through the world had been proclaiming since 1914-that the war was an imperialist war among rival capitalist states. It proved that by publishing the Czar's secret treaties with its allies. To save the revolution, it signed an onerous peace with Imperial Germany.

Then the revolution was attacked by all, from the defeated Central Powers to the victorious allies. With working class movements and socialist parties as its only friends it then fought a devastating Civil War and became the center of a new revolutionary socialist world movement, a movement which, after 1919, revived the 1848 term "Communist". In the process, it looked to Marxist Socialism, which as theory had identified itself with the industrial and industrializing countries of Western Europe and North America, and in practice, had built parties and trade union movements primarily in those regions, and made it fully a world movement.

The Soviet Union became the first state in modern history to make anti-imperialism the foundation of its foreign policy. As such, through the 3rd or Communist International (Comintern), it helped to develop commissions to aid in the construction of both revolutionary socialist (Communist) parties, anti-imperialist, national liberation movements, trade union federations, peasant organizations, organizations to defend the rights of national minorities and the foreign born, and organizations of youth and students. The Comintern was never really the pawn of the Soviet Union, except in anti-Communist propaganda, but the Soviets played an essential role in its establishment and development

The Soviet Revolution directly influenced the anti-imperialist movement in China, the formation of a Communist Party of China, and the eventual triumph of the Chinese people over Japanese Imperialism and the Chinese Socialist Revolution, with the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China on October 1, 1949. It influenced positively the rise of the Indian national independence movement and the establishment of a non-Communist, non-aligned India after WWII, under the leadership of Nehru, whose commitment to a mixed economy form of socialism was influenced directly by the planning achievements of the Soviet five year plans.

Of course, the Soviet revolution did produce its antithesis, fascism, an open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class. But if Lenin was correct, and I think he was, the development of finance capital which had produced global imperialism was militarizing societies and liquidating liberal democratic institutions through the world.

Had the Soviet revolution not taken place, imperialism would not only have assumed its fascist form, in all probability, but would have created the hellish world that Jack London foresaw in the Iron Heel at the turn of the century and the great science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, saw in his fictional history, The Man in the High Castle, which looked at what the U.S. and the world would have been if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won WWII, divided up the U.S., restored slavery in Africa, and carried out racist mass murder through much of the world. In the process of playing the leading role in the defeat of the fascist Axis, the Soviet Union also played the leading role in ending the colonial empires which had committed monstrous crimes over generations through Africa and Asia.

Before the Second World War, the Soviet Union not only became the center of anti-imperialism through the world but it also served as the center for global anti-fascism in the 1930s. The Soviets aided anti-fascist people's front movements through the world; advocated in the League of Nations a policy of anti-fascist collective security against aggressor nations; and was the only major nation to provide arms and aid to the Spanish Republic when it was attacked by Hitler and Mussolini supported fascist forces.

The Soviets did sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939 after their hopes to stop Hitler over Czechoslovakia were dashed when Britain's Neville Chamberlain gave Hitler everything he wanted in Central Europe hoping to avoid a new World War (that he feared would unleash new socialist revolutions) and also to point Hitler toward attacking the Soviets.

Through most of their history, the Soviets were playing for time against powerful states and alliance systems which sought to destroy them. They were also building the first socialist state in history under the worst possible conditions, economic backwardness in terms of machinery and skilled workers to begin with, the devastations of war and revolution, and constant serious threats from abroad. Their size was both their strength and their weakness. It made it difficult for enemies to destroy them but at the same time it made overall socialist development through a planned economy extremely difficult under any circumstance, given the ethno cultural diversity, the geographical barriers, and of course the lack of access to capital for development. Under those circumstances, what the Soviets did achieve under such conditions, although their myriad of enemies would never admit it, far surpassed their failures and defeats in real life.

One cannot rewrite history, however one might wish to. Certainly one would have wanted, as Lenin did, a collective leadership to emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, not the factional struggle which lead to the triumph of Joseph Stalin and the establishment of a personality cult around him. One would want the Stalin leadership, faced with opposition in the countryside to the collectivization under the first five year plan, to have pulled back, acted to isolate the Kulak opposition, instead of using massive force in the form of the Red Army, which led to disastrous conflicts, many peasants caught in the middle, disruptions of agricultural production which produced famine, the spread of disease, and huge loss of life. And one would want the Stalin leadership not to have initiated the mass purges in the CPSU after 1934 which took the form of mass hysteria and assumed a life of their own, undermining Soviet society and at the same time offering all of the Soviets' enemies from Nazi Germany to the Hearst Press in the U.S. ammunition to attack the Soviet Union.

But one would also have wanted Winston Churchill to have acknowledged the famine in Bengal and accepted U.S. and Canadian aid during WWII, instead of refusing to do so and permitting three million Bengalis to starve to death in the hope that this would defeat Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. One would also have wanted Churchill and the British General Staff not to create as a contingency plan ("operation unthinkable") in May, 1945, to launch WWIII in a surprise attack against the Soviet forces on July 1, 1945, with 47 divisions of British and American troops, and former German Wehrmacht troops. One would have wished that this part of the hidden history of the early cold war, had never been contemplated by anyone. Fortunately for the world (perhaps), Churchill had been voted out of office by the summer of 1945. Fortunately this madness straight out of Dr. Strangelove was never anything more than a crackpot contingency plan of a collapsing British Empire, but it has done little to damage Churchill's reputation, unlike Joseph Stalin, who remains capitalism ecumenical devil of Communism, joined in recent years by the late Mao Tse-tung.

Nor has it prevented both academic and journalistic advocates of the "totalitarian theory" to compare Stalin and Hitler even though Churchill, who fought Hitler to save the British Empire, was ready and willing to continue Hitler's war against the Soviets, even if it meant that they would win in Europe and threaten Britain, to save the British Empire.

And one would wish that Franklin Roosevelt had lived out his fourth term, maintained Big Three Cooperation, worked to build the United Nations and used U.S. economic power to internationalize the New Deal, which would have made the U.S. the leading nation in the industrialized world in regard to its labor and social welfare policies by the 1960s, not a nation where the very concept of a welfare state did not exist. Of course that didn't happen.

At the very least, one would have hoped that Harry Truman would not have used the atomic bomb against the Japanese by refusing their request to end the war with the proviso that the emperor be kept and then not only keep the emperor but give him and the royal family amnesty from all war crimes trials; and that he would not use the Japanese armies in China as a police force to try to prevent the Chinese Communist party from triumphing while the U.S. government armed Chiang Kai-shek's forces to the tune of three billion dollars and aided Chiang in looting China as he and his supporters retreated to Taiwan after their defeat.

There are many other examples one might come up with, from Ronald Reagan's winning an Oscar for "Bed Time for Bonzo" so that he could have continued his acting career for the rest of his life to Lyndon Johnson restoring the Geneva Convention and reuniting Vietnam short of war in 1964. One can't make any of that happen. But one can and must understand--and refuse to accept--the double standard that is applied as a matter of course when dealing with socialist countries and revolutionary movements.

Let me conclude by saying that humanity owes the Soviet people a debt that it can never repay. Even many who denounce "Stalinism" today would not be alive or even have been born had the Soviet people and the Stalin leadership of the CPSU not beaten back the largest invasion in history and literally made the largest contribution to the defeat of the fascist Axis in WWII. And of course, those who continue to use the simplistic idealist concept of mass politics, the "totalitarian" equation, especially those on any section of the left, should stop and think where the world would have been if that concept had prevailed in 1941 to prevent the U.S.--Soviet alliance against the Axis powers from taking shape.

As for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union constituting the "death of Communism," that death was proclaimed many times in the past-first after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, then after the suppression and massacre of the Paris Commune in 1871, then of course with Hitler's proclamation of a "New Order" and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and finally with Gorbachev's outlawing the CPSU and turning power over to Boris Yeltsin in 1991. But somehow the people keep on fighting back, and socialism lives on as the only viable alternative to and solution for a capitalist system that produces more poverty and more inequality with its every "victory."

Two years from now, it will be the 100^th anniversary of the Soviet revolution. Hopefully we will celebrate it in any America in which the people, the broad left, and the CPUSA are all advancing toward "Bill of Rights Socialism," socialism with American characteristics.

Image: Soviet stamp issued in 1976 for the 106th anniversary of Lenin's birth by Soviet artist Pyotr Vasiliev. Wikimedia Commons

People's Poetry: Two poems for Veterans' Day

Stewart Acuff — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 20:35:00 +0000

Peace to you

And you and you and you

May the Holy Dove descend on your being

Delivering the believing and the seeing

That we are all one

United in a patchwork quilt of sun

And moon and all those around us

Knowing that all must

Acknowledge our own peace

Depends on the peace of everyone

When We Stand for Us All

when we stand for us all

determined not to let each other fall

we are not delivered from pain or fear

but we refuse to bow to the sear

of a boss just as determined to hold us down

just as determined to drown

our hope, our struggle, our dreams

that life is more than what it sometimes seems

when we stand we say

life is precious, struggle tho hard is our way

to win life for us all and joy and peace

we will not cease

our work together for one another

struggle begets winning for ourselves and the other

Photo: War and Peace by Jayel Aheram October 2006 Creative Commons 2.0

Book Review: Waging counterinsurgency war in the Puerto Rican Colony

W.T.Whitney Jr. — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 21:57:00 +0000

War Against All Puerto Ricans - revolution and terror in America's colony, Nelson A. Denis, Nation Books, New York, 2015, ISBN 978-1-56858-501-7, $28.99

U.S. media coverage of Puerto Rico focuses these days on unpayable debt. Reports on declining social services, uniquely unfair Medicaid and Medicare rules, and Puerto Rico's almost 50- percent poverty rate appear, but only seldom. Author Nelson A. Denis' new book talks about what's almost never discussed: Puerto Rico as colony. Really, as the book's title indicates, the subject is more specific. Island police chief E. Francis Riggs Words spoke those words by way of explaining what his police were up to in 1935 when they murdered three university students and an elderly bystander in Río Piedras.

Denis' book could well stimulate interest in Puerto Rico's long struggle for independence. It's also good medicine for North Americans who overlook a neighboring colonial possession while professing to be anti-imperialist. Denis communicates urgency through a colorful writing style and an eye-catching way of organizing material. Describing events, trends, and personalities, he is more storyteller than historian. His narrative captures the emotional intensity of the independence struggle and its high stakes.

The author is involved. He was eight years old in 1962 when FBI operatives entered at night and absconded with his Cuban-born father, who was deported. Denis and his Puerto Rican - born mother never saw him again. The trauma caused the author to become a lawyer. For 40 years he listened to independence - movement activists to learn more. Enabled by the Freedom of Information Act, he looked at U.S. government's intelligence files. Denis says the immensity of that collection persuaded him to write the book.

The colonialists themselves, arrogant and belittling, supplied verbal backdrop for what they were doing. According to Denis, the New York Times passed off Puerto Ricans in 1899 as "an uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people." Major General Nelson A. Miles in 1898 explained why his troops were in Puerto Rico: "We have not come to make war upon a people, [but] to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government." For President Calvin Coolidge 30 years later, Puerto Ricans were still "poor and distressed, without hope for the future, ignorant, poverty stricken and diseased, not knowing what constitutes a free and democratic government."

In 1950 Puerto Rican nationalists launched armed rebellion; U. S. military mobilization was in high gear. President Harry Truman dismissed the turmoil as "an incident between Puerto Ricans," thus once more trivializing the island's people.

For Denis, "the story of Albizu Campos is the story of Puerto Rico. It is also the story of empire." This was Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos, whom he portrays as heroic and tragic. Poor and orphaned at age four, the first Puerto Rican to study at Harvard, valedictorian of his 1921 Harvard Law School class, and master of six languages, Albizu Campos dedicated his life to Puerto Rican independence. He would serve 25 years in prison. The book presents convincing evidence that radiation torture in prison hastened his death in 1965.

Sugar cane production dominated the island's economy. Four U.S. conglomerates owned half the arable land. Nationalist agitation provoked surveillance, gathering of intelligence data, harassment at rallies, and attacks. Albizu's leadership of an island - wide sugar - workers strike in 1934 prompted, General Blanton Winship, the appointed governor, to intensify repression; the FBI collaborated. Massacres, murders, and disappearances ensued. Convicted in 1937 of conspiracy to overthrow the U. S. government, Albizu spent seven years in the Atlanta Federal prison. He returned to Puerto Rico in late 1947after being paroled.

The situation was changed: U. S. militarization, fear, and economic distress prevailed. Nationalist Party recruitment was down. The island police, FBI, and Army intelligence shared secret police dossiers on 100,000 Puerto Ricans; almost 75,000 were under surveillance. A "gag law" even criminalized possession of a Puerto Rican flag.

"For the past fifty years, the United States has been at war with Puerto Rico," Albizu Campos told an audience in June 1948. "They steal our land, sterilize our women, inject us with cancer and tuberculosis, they find traitors to rule over us, parasites who live by robbing their own people." A month later he proclaimed that, "Our country is past speeches. Puerto Ricans have to fight for their liberty with all arms at their disposal ... [T]he only reality anymore is the one we create for ourselves."

Paradoxically, Denis gained access to Albizu's speeches courtesy of FBI transcriptions of recordings made by agents.

Looking to promote international awareness of their cause, the Nationalists launched island - wide armed revolt on October 28, 1950. By then informers had infiltrated rebel units at every level. Denis describes thousands of U.S. troops overwhelming cities, air assaults on two of them, and a rebel suicide attack on the governor's residence. Arrested, the Nationalists' leader entered the grim La Princesa prison where, except for a six-month release in 1953, he would spend the rest of his life, subjected to terrible abuse.

As befits the literature of war, Denis occasionally puts action aside to highlight bizarre goings-on, thus adding entertainment value to the book. Readers encounter Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected governor, in thrall to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who possessed a one-page report on Muñoz' opium addiction. They discover Puerto Rican filmmaker Juan Emilio Viguié, who surreptitiously documented the Nationalists' struggle. There is Vidal Santiago Díaz, the "most famous barber in Puerto Rico," who supplied Nationalists with arms and used his arms cache to hold off 40 security forces for three hours. Ex- Princeton football player Waller Booth is unforgettable. CIA head Allen Dulles enlisted Booth to watch over the island, and he did so by eavesdropping on talk in his CIA-funded bar.

The author concludes with a brief survey of "50 years of chaos," mainly economic and social. He leaves no optimistic message as to eventual national independence. Dim prospects for Puerto Rico, if that's the case, invite comparison with Cuba's very different historical course.

Everyone agrees the two peoples' fates are intertwined. Cuba and Puerto Rico were "two wings of the same bird," wrote Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tío in 1867. The independence movements in both countries took a hit when the United States in 1898 commandeered remnants of Spain's colonial empire. But the Cubans had already fielded two armies in two wars for independence. On the second occasion, Cubans schooled by José Martí and friends fought for social justice and actually defeated the Spanish army. Their tolerance for U. S. ownership of Cuba and long-term U.S. military occupation was nil. In Puerto Rico, by contrast, the door remained open.

The inverted world of Niall Ferguson: on the real Obama Doctrine

Thomas Riggins — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 13:49:00 +0000

Niall Ferguson has taught history at Harvard for the last decade. We have just learned that he plans to move to Stanford soon. He served as an advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008 and supported Mitt Romney in 2012. Ferguson is also well known as a biographer of Henry Kissinger. He has a very conservative world outlook which, when applied to the analysis of current social reality, has a tendency to so warp his perceptions that the situation he writes about becomes an imaginary inverted world where truth becomes falsity and falsity truth. But don't take my word for it. Just look at his article in the Wall Street Journal for 10/10-11/2015: "The Real Obama Doctrine." Ferguson's take on Obama can only be the result a profound ignorance of the historical reality he professes to understand.

He opens his article by referring to ideas expressed by the revered, but morally reprehensible, Henry Kissinger in 1968. Kissinger expressed the opinion America didn't really have a foreign policy. He might have noted the U.S. was too busy butchering Vietnamese peasants to pay attention to much else.

Be that as it may, there was no real coherent strategic thinking going on and this for two reasons according to Kissinger. First, the president was not selected for his strategic thinking but his "will" to get elected, and second, there are just too many lawyers working for the government. Now lawyers are clever but they don't know enough about history and this deficiency has led to the adoption of a "minimum risk" attitude when it comes to policy. Well, Ferguson teaches history at Harvard; what better guide could we have to lead us to understand Obama's plans for the U.S. of A.

Seeing that Obama was elected due to his will to win, has a passel of lawyers at work in his administration, and doesn't support a "maximum risk" policy, he seems to exemplify just what Henry K was complaining about to a tee. Ferguson tells us, in fact, that he himself has "spent much of the last seven years trying to work out" just what strategy Obama was following. Here is what he found out.

He read Obama's 2009 Cairo Speech but wasn't clear on how it would result in practical actions. The speech was full of good intentions and was met positively by those friendly to the U.S. and either negatively or skeptically by those hostile to it. The criticisms basically were that actions speak louder than words and that upbeat speeches were no substitute for a change in policies. Ferguson doesn't go into much detail on the speech, but needless to say he should have known that Obama would not be able to quickly reverse fifty years of cold war policies and the fact that the Bush administration had left the entire Middle East entirely in flames or on the verge irrupting into chaos.

Obama's attempt to disengage U.S. ground forces in Iraq and strengthen Iraqi security forces is called by Ferguson "precipitate withdrawal." The fact is that the damage done to Iraq by the Bush policies are almost irreversible and the sectarian Shia government the U.S. created is both corrupt and unwilling, or unable, to reconcile with the Sunni minority. Obama must either try to wind down American involvement or hunker down and prepare for an open ended American occupation. The American people definitely want to get out of Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, and they don't want to get involved in Syria either. Obama cannot, no president could, put the Middle East back together again after the Bush folks so thoroughly smashed it up. The best he can do is respond to the will of the American people and try and limit the damage caused by the Bush gang.

Besides not having a clue to the complexities in Afghanistan, Ferguson thinks Obama has become "indifferent" to Europe as a result of the attempted "reset" with Russia. It's true the reset failed but only because it was predicated on Russia following American dictates against its own interests and there is no evidence that Obama has become indifferent to Europe.

But Ferguson also discovered something more troubling than Obama's failure to clean up the mess left behind by Bush. It is one thing to reject Bush's policies, but the 2012 debate with Mitt Romney revealed, horror of horrors, that Obama was also "turning away from Ronald Reagan." Romney held that enemy numero uno to our world wide hegemony was Russia and Obama dismissed this. And what happened? In March 2014 [as a result of U.S. and E.U. intervention in the internal affairs of Ukraine] Russia annexed Crimea returning it to Russian administration after it had been assigned by the Soviet Union to Ukraine in the 1950s. Historian that he is, Ferguson thinks Romney "prescient" in spotting that, in his words, Russia is "our number one geopolitical foe." We had better move the Seventh Fleet to the Bering Strait in case Putin decides to reverse the Alaska Purchase.

Ferguson also discovered, by reading articles and interviews given by Obama in the popular press, that it was his intention to "create a new balance of power in the Middle East." Obama said that he wanted to end the conflicts between the Shia and Sunni by trying to get Iran to abandon its (in his opinion) negative polices and to work with the mostly Sunni Gulf states in a common effort to build a positive future in the region.

Obama hopes an international coalition, which could include Iran, might work together to solve the problems of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Unmentioned is the fact that the crises in all these countries are the results of Saudi and American actions and interference. It would be the U.S. and not Iran that would have to abandon its negative policies. It is unlikely to do since it profits from arms sales to the region.

Ferguson, however, has other reasons for objecting to Obama's Middle East policies which he says are based on the president's "fuzzy thinking." In his recent U.N. speech Obama indicated he was willing to work with other nations "under the mantle of international norms and principles" and with both Russia and Iran (as long they agreed to eventually dump Assad) in solving the Syrian problem. Obama is "fuzzy" because, Ferguson says, neither Russia nor Iran are "famed" for operating under the "mantle of international norms and principles."

One would expect a Harvard history professor to be aware of the fact that the U.S. is also not "famed" for operating under this mantle. In fact, even a slight acquaintance with modern history would show U.S. behavior is more egregious in this respect than that of either Russia or Iran. In fact, almost every crisis in world diplomacy since (and most of them before) the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the result of the U.S. flouting international norms. To blame Obama for trying to improve this dismal record doesn't say much in favor of Ferguson's bona fid

Ferguson thinks Obama's policies are failing because, since 2010, terrorism and violence in the Middle East from North Africa (Libya) to Pakistan and Afghanistan have dramatically increased and we can expect even more violence to come "as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post American hegemon."

It's true that American policies are not working out if peace is the goal. If, however, the goal is to sell billions of dollars worth of new weapons systems to the governments in the area as well as to ramp up military spending at home, these policies at least make some sense.

After Bush/Cheney destroyed Iraq in the east and the Obama/ U.S. supported NATO intervention in Libya (pushed by Secretary of State Clinton) effectively destroyed that country in the west the growth of terrorism was bound to increase as outside governments and their proxies moved in to take advantage of the chaos the U.S. created.

It was the Sunni governments that moved to take advantage of the situation. The U.S. destroyed two major secular governments and both the Saudi Arabians, and Gulf Sunni states, representing the most backward "Islamic" radical ideology, funded Sunni terrorist groups, as well as Pakistan's covert support of the Taliban, that has led to the impotence of U.S. policy on the ground. The U.S. still sends billions of dollars in military aid (much of it actually spent at home to support the military industrial complex behind our domestic deep state) to countries who pass some of it along to the very terrorist groups the U.S. is fighting.

The truth is that Iran is not trying to become a hegemon. It was the Shah, installed as a result of a CIA coup against a democratically elected government and backed by the U.S., who was moving to both develop nuclear weapons and establish hegemony, as a U.S. client state, in the region until he was overthrown in 1979. The U.S. has been trying to get rid of the new Iranian government ever since.

Iran's actions have been purely defensive in nature. It supports its Shia allies in Iraq against the Sunni Islamic State, it supports its ally Assad in Syria against the Islamic state and the Sunni jihadists supported by the Saudis and indirectly by the U.S. under the covering myth of supporting "moderates." All this puts the lie to Ferguson's pseudo-historical analysis of "Obama's failures." Obama's problem, such as it is, has been his inability to reverse the movement of Middle Eastern disintegration initiated by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But he has succeeded in preventing the implosion of half the Mediterranean world by keeping boots off the ground in Libya and Syria, and thus not compounding the Bush/Cheney Iraq folly. Nevertheless his interventionist actions in these two countries threaten to create a wider area of war and destabilization which the next president will have to defuse unless he takes actions towards withdrawal and cooperation with the Iranians and Russians to limit Saudi and Pakistani sponsored jihadists.

Finally, Ferguson concludes there are three major problems facing U.S. foreign policy; the Middle East, Russia's meddling, and China's ambitions. Obama, he says, is failing to properly address these problems. The reason for this failure is that he does not have advisors of the caliber of Zbigniew Brzezinski (whose Afghan policies gave us both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban) and Henry Kissinger (whose war crimes against humanity gave us fascism in Chile and Pol Pot in Cambodia, among achievements of similar note). Both of these stalwarts, Ferguson says, have made intellectual contributions to strategic doctrine far greater than the advisors surrounding Obama. Perhaps, but more people around the world have died meaningless deaths and suffered injuries and loss of loved ones due to the strategic doctrines of Brzezinski and Kissinger than due to the policies of Obama (but he is running a close second with his Syrian policies).

U.S. policy does have problems. In the Middle East it supports dictators and tyrants and its blanket support of Israel and Israel's truly barbaric treatment of the Palestinians prevents it from having a policy that the majority of Middle Eastern people can live with. We create the very terrorists we seek to fight. Russian meddling is nothing more that its advancing policies that protect its interests and are usually just reactions to overt or covert U.S. provocations. There will be no reset of relations with Russia as long as the U.S. acts in bad faith. China's ambitions are perfectly normal. They want to play a role in their part of the world commensurate with their growing economic and political strength. As long as the U.S. seeks to challenge them in this respect (such as U.S. air and naval provocations in the South China Sea) there will be neither real cooperation possible nor any incentive for Chinese to trust the U.S.

The above comments are just a reflection of the current Zeitgeist and it appears that the role of the U.S. is contrary to the movement that spirit is taking - a movement that is pointing us towards a world of better cooperation and understanding and is not subject to the negative destructive will of one rogue superpower. This, and not the views of Henry Kissinger, is what the next president must keep in mind.

Photo: Niall Ferguson speaking at Chatham House in London May 2011. Creative Commons 2.0

Pulling down "the flag": New possibilities for progress!

Bruce Bostick — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 09:29:00 +0000

The wide-spread revulsion that swept our nation after the racist murders of worshipers in South Carolina created one of those historic, watershed moments. The Confederate flag, thought by many a permanent fixture at courthouses across the south, came down. More importantly, that flag is being seen, finally, for what it really has always been, an icon of slavery, oppression, reaction and white supremacy.

Some commentators, seeking to belittle this historic development, have stated that "it's only a flag; it doesn't solve our real problems." However, the removal of that symbol of the racist Confederacy from public sites has created one of those moments in history when our entire nation shifts ideologically, and in a dramatic way. The speech by Nicki Halley, the conservative right-wing Governor of South Carolina, the state where the Confederacy was born, stating that she "always knew that flag was wrong, and it was offensive," touched millions. It is one of those historic moments that Marxists identify dialectically when the old contradictions in society have clashed, resulting in the creation of an entirely new situation, irrevocably shifting the political ground we now stand on.

In this new political situation, it becomes possible to begin to rediscover our people's rich history of multiracial struggles against slavery and racism, for economic and social progress.

To understand the potential significance of this shift, it's important to realize that our nation was built by slave labor and that questions of race and racism have been a central precept of our nation's ideological and material development since before its founding. The first Africans came ashore at Jamestown in the Virginia colony in 1619. Since the 1600s slavery, racism and racial division have been an essential component of our nation's ideological and legislative core. Literally every decision made since that time regarding organization of workers and development has had to have within it discussion of race. Oppression of African peoples, as well as the creation and maintenance of the "color-line," keeping whites and Blacks divided, has been a part of every step our nation has taken since that time. When put in this context, we begin to see how important the shifts in our understanding of "the flag" can actually be.

This context also helps us to begin to understand the huge importance of our nation's Civil War and the tremendous influence that massive struggle continues to have on our people. That war cost our nation over 600,000 lives. It was a revolution that freed four million people who had previously been chattel, with no rights, but who were worth more than all other property in our nation.

The maintenance of the color line, and its resulting societal/labor control, is why the ideological dominance of the false historic narrative of "Lost Cause" mythology, with its worship of the racist Confederacy and its symbols, has been so important to the ruling class. Discrediting these repugnant symbols and the ideas behind them can open our nation, and especially the south, to more progressive ideas, new levels of multiracial unity, growth of unionization and economic and social progress by all peoples in this area. The flag's removal is a major body blow to the domination of the south by right wing oligarchs and to the ideology of white supremacy in our nation.

How we got here

Contrary to the false narrative of the "solid south" and of a revered Confederate "Lost Cause" where outnumbered, outgunned white southerners fought heroically for independence and state's rights, alone except for the solid support of all white southerners (especially their embattled women), our Civil War was marked by wide levels of multiracial cooperation and struggle in the south as well as the north. Learning this truly heroic history will help our nation's people break with concepts that the south was always racist and that to be southern and white is to be inherently racist, backward and conservative. This can be an extremely powerful unifying influence.

It wasn't always this way, and it didn't get this way due to any democratic process. At the end of our Civil War with the economy of the south in ruins, the feudal plantation based system had been destroyed. Throughout that region, newly freed people found common interests with poor whites during the period of Reconstruction. This period has been especially despised and consequently a topic of lies and vilification by former slave-owners, ex-Confederates and their modern representatives. The period from 1866 to 1877, saw the establishment of the first public schools and the opening of education to African Americans, the building of hospitals, roads and infrastructure, including railroads across the south. Most importantly, it marked a revolution in what US citizenship meant, including the former slaves who'd previously been denied all rights of citizenship. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 guaranteed Blacks full rights and the 14^th amendment to the Constitution guaranteed equal protection under to law to all citizens, including the formerly enslaved peoples. These rights were assured by the continued occupation of that area by US troops, as well as the building of multiracial alliances, previously outlawed in the south. The federal Freedman's Bureau was set up to provide material support to former slaves. The Black family was legalized. Blacks were able to vote and were elected to office across the south by multiracial coalitions.

Those steps enraged the former slave-masters. The fact that these steps were taken not only by Black folks, but were marked by wide levels of cooperation with poor whites, was even more threatening. If allowed to continue, they could put in place an entirely new, more equitable economic system, wiping out entirely the power of the ruling oligarchs. The former plantation owners financed the creation of the Ku Klux Klan and a variety of other terrorist organizations that murdered and terrorized former enslaved people, as well as whites who cooperated with them.

Threatened by these revolutionary possibilities, ruling Republicans and Democrats came together with the "Compromise of 1877." This great betrayal put the former Confederates back in charge, agreed to "Black Codes" disenfranchising the formerly enslaved peoples and putting in place severe penalties for racial cooperation. The ruling class compromise installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had actually lost the popular vote, in the White House while federal troops were withdrawn from the south, and power was returned to the former slave masters. This marked the death of Reconstruction and the introduction of Jim Crow rule throughout the south. It was the beginning of a century of racist terror for African Americans.

There was nothing democratic about this seizure of political and economic power by racist oligarchs. It was a violent counterrevolution that took power from a positively functioning multiracial majority.

The false narrative of Confederate "Lost Cause" mythology was created as ideological under-pinning for this period of right-wing terrorist rule. It has been used since by the ruling class to develop a powerful culture of racism, racial disunity, ignorance and violence. The Civil Rights Movement shook it to its roots, but it has remained a strong cultural influence. A new national wave of racial unity and revulsion with racist violence is now smashing against that old wall of reaction.

The shifts begin

Matthew McConaughey is starring in a film, "Free State of Jones,' set for release in May about the truly heroic struggle of Newton and Racheal Knight, who opposed, organized and fought against the Confederacy from their home of Jones County, Mississippi. Newton Knight deserted the Confederate Army, married (although it wasn't legal in Mississippi) Racheal, a former slave. Together, they organized an independent militia that successfully fought off all attempts to subdue them (including by Confederate cavalry commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest), and supported the union. A book by the same name, (Victoria Bynum, 2001, University of North Carolina Press) traces their multiracial family from those days, through Reconstruction, up to struggles during the civil rights era.

This is but one example of the shifting ideological terrain. Civil War magazines, long the domain of Neo-Confederates & Civil War 'buffs,' now are filled with real articles on real history, including the role of African Americans, women, as well as commentaries on slavery as the cause of the war and the role of Black troops in the destruction of slavery. Historians such as Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson, Eric Foner, and Gary Gallagher, continuing the ground breaking work of DuBois, Ida Wells, Eric Allen and others, have played a key role in bringing these and other long buried stories into the historical mainstream.

State legislators in North Carolina and Tennessee have raised, but not yet been able to pass, proposals to put up public monuments to citizens of their states who fought for the Union in the Civil War. In New Orleans, Nashville and Richmond Black and white citizens have publicly questioned the role of the Confederate monuments in those areas. People have called for tearing them down, moving them, putting up new monuments to African Americans and unionists, changing the language on those statues and/or opening community discussions on the issue.

Before the civil rights era, opinions of African Americans were generally ignored by people in power. This is no longer possible to do without political blow-back, especially in southern cities with substantial Black populations. What has not been seen publicly since Reconstruction, however, is that while African Americans may take the lead on many of these issues, in the new political atmosphere they aren't alone. They now openly have a great many allies who are white.

Recovering our lost history

In this new period, people are hungry to learn our nation's true history, one that is entirely different from the racist lies that have been central to our "official" history since reconstruction.

In West Virginia, it is not unusual to see regular working folks displaying Confederate flags, but it should be. West Virginia only became a state when the lowland region of Virginia voted to secede from the union and join the slaveholding Confederacy. In western Virginia, as in the highland areas across the south where slavery wasn't entrenched, strong majorities opposed secession. Western Virginia did more than vote. They armed themselves, organized pro-union militia units and called a separate constitutional convention in Parkersburg. Just months after Virginia had seceded, the armed people of western Virginia defeated the Confederate army, led by Robert E Lee, that was sent against them & won its independence from the old state. The new state of West Virginia was born and immediately joined the union.

While other highland areas didn't go as far, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and northern Alabama saw strong opposition to secession. While their home states joined the Confederacy, these areas were strongly pro-union throughout the war. These areas, where slavery wasn't as strong, were particularly angered by the passage by the Confederate government of a "20 Negro Law," which exempted the wealthiest slave-owners, who owned 20 or more African descended people, from military service.

Eastern Tennessee also had strong pro-union groups that attempted a similar breakaway from their state. This area was controlled throughout the war by guerrilla groups, fighting against Confederate forces. Scott County, at the heart of this area, voted 95% against secession and became the major part of the US 7^th Tennessee Infantry. As well, Scott County citizens voted to set up an official 'Free and Independent State of Scott,' not officially returning to the state of Tennessee until 1986.

Western North Carolina also saw extensive small scale warfare between competing guerilla groups. This area holds the distinction of having had the largest number of desertions from the Confederate army.

Winston County, Alabama saw similar struggles by pro-union citizens of that state. They rose up and organized militia forces that fought under the banner of the 'Free State of Winston.'

Searcy County, Arkansas, also in the highlands area, voted overwhelmingly against joining the Confederacy. People there organized the Arkansas Peace Society and actively opposed the government and the war. Arrested as "traitors" by Confederate authorities, they were impressed into the military. The largest majority of those folks deserted Confederate service and joined the Union army.

Even Texas, the settler state stolen from Mexico, organized around support for slavery and saw organized opposition to the Confederacy. Texas was also home to many German immigrants, largely supporters of the failed revolution of 1848. They strongly opposed slavery and actively organized opposition to the Confederacy. In 1862, a large group of German born Texans were fleeing to Mexico (where slavery had long been illegal), when they were confronted and 65 of their number were massacred by Confederate authorities. At Matamoras, there is today the only memorial in the former Confederate states to southern unionists.

It is little known today that over 100,000 southerners joined the Union army. Coming from every southern state, they fought the entire war against the Confederacy. 85 Regiments of the Union army were officially organized, recruited entirely from southerners. It is in the southern Confederacy that the narrative of "brother fighting brother" actually evolved.

The 'border states' of Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland, all also slave states, sent even more folks to the union army. These states supplied over 200,000 troops to the Union vs. only 90,000 to Confederate forces.

The slave state of Missouri organized both pro-Union and Confederate opposing governments. Unionist Missourians organized militias and routed pro-slave forces in the war's first year, keeping that state from seceding.

Role of Blacks central to defeating slavery

The role of African Americans, the enslaved peoples that the war was actually being fought over, was a special one. While Harriet Tubman is well known, the heroic work of helping enslaved people flee to freedom, was replicated thousands of times by other African Americans during the war. Rather than waiting for the "Lincoln to free the slaves," narrative put forward by our nation's official history books, Black people, both free and enslaved, played a central role fighting for their own freedom.

The enslaved people flooded union army lines early in the war, forcing reluctant union officers to take them in, feed, free them and use them in the fight. This was during the period of the war prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, when the illusion of fighting a war only by white men, only to reunite the union, was official policy. While only half a million of the 4.5 million African Americans in the US were free, they played an extremely important role, organizing support for the war and pushing Lincoln to begin to recruit Black soldiers. Fredrick Douglass and other African American leaders in the north pushed the union to "stop fighting a war with one arm tied behind their back," and to arm Blacks.

180,000 African Americans, organized into 163 units, fought as part of the US Colored Troops, playing a far more important role than has been previously recognized. These were largely former slaves fighting for their own liberation.

African American people knew immediately that a fight between slave and free sections of the nation was a fight over their status, and they worked to fight for their freedom. Denied any type of organization, even the ability to learn to read or write, they had extensive underground communications. African Americans played an indispensable role, supplying intelligence to the Union armies in hostile areas. Slaves were the most important spies for Union forces, playing roles that no white person could play in the deep South. Whenever Union armies came near plantations, underground networks went to work and slaves freed themselves by running, in mass to the union lines. This began, early on, to cripple the slave-based economy of the Confederacy.

There are myriad examples, generally unknown today, of really heroic struggles of African Americans during that conflict. Not only did enslaved African Americans transform that massive conflict from one over territory into a war of liberation. They faced racist discrimination in the very army they risked their lives to join. They faced daily indignities, were paid less than white troops, supplied inferior goods and weapons, had inferior food, health care and were subject to being slaughtered by racist Confederate troops if they tried to surrender.

In early 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved African American in Charleston, South Carolina, absconded with a large Confederate freighter and was able, because he knew the correct signals/passwords, to pilot the ship through the heavily armored harbor, turning it over to Union authorities. Smalls later joined and fought with union forces. He was elected to Congress, serving during the period of Reconstruction.

William Tillman was a cook aboard one of the union vessels captured by the Confederate privateer, Jeff Davis, in 1861. Told that he was to be sold into slavery by crew members, Tillman used a hatchet to kill many of the officers and crew of that vessel, then piloted it to New York, turning it over to the Union.

Wm. Jackson was a slave on Jefferson Davis' plantation. As such, he was able to hear many high level discussions among Confederate leaders, which he turned over to Union authorities. He was credited with being one of the keys to union victory at Vicksburg by US Grant. Not only a spy, Jackson organized and led Davis' entire company of slaves to freedom.

Through all this, these truly heroic fighters, played not just a role, but the most important role. They were literally indispensable to union victory!

While our "official" history, from Reconstruction until the 1960's, completely ignored the role of African Americans, the Civil Rights Movement began to bring forward knowledge that Black troops fought for the Union. For the last half century, their role, while grudgingly recognized, has been presented as peripheral, an historical "Black only" footnote. In truth, the Union would not have been restored and slavery wouldn't have ended, if not for the central and critical role of Black Union troops!

In 1864, when African Americans were finally recruited as Union soldiers, the Union was in deep crisis. The north was war-weary. Draft riots had broken out in New York. Across the north, draft resistance was wide-spread. Anti-war, pro-southern Copperheads were actively attacking the war effort and Democrats were running the conservative Union general McClellan for President. Lincoln, on numerous occasions, stated that he "expected to lose, and lose big," in the November election. Recruitment in north was drying up!

This was the situation when 180,000 new and enthusiastic African American union soldiers entered the fray. They fought heroically in every theatre, providing the needed muscle to finally defeat the slave-owning Confederacy.

Neo-Confederates try to retrench

Before leaving this point, however, we should take note of attempts being made by right-wing neo-Confederates to retrench their ideology by "discovering" Black Confederates.

This is an easy one-they didn't exist!

While these right-wing elements come up with some pictures of Confederate soldiers with Black companions, it was illegal for Blacks to be armed or serve in the Confederate military. Some soldiers did bring Black enslaved companions, but that was their role. It is true that while the Confederate government did "legalize" recruitment of Blacks, it was only after a bitter political fight and not until March, 1865. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army less than a month later and, while a mere handful were "recruited," none of them served or fought in the Confederate army.

Here some have cited the 1^st Louisiana Guards, a unit organized in 1861 by free Blacks in New Orleans with the expressed goal of "serving with their Confederate brethren, protecting the southern way of life." That unit never was accepted into Confederate service. Furthermore, when the Union Navy liberated New Orleans a year later, the 1^st Louisiana Guards immediately switched sides and joined the Union army, where they did later see action.

It's worth noting here that the Union Navy that liberated New Orleans had long accepted African Americans, who served without racist discrimination and that the commander of the union forces was Rear Admiral Farragut, a Virginian who stayed with the Union.

The neo-Confederates have long tried to assert that the Confederacy fought for some obscure reasons other than the protection of slavery. That lie is easily put to bed by anyone googling the various declarations of secession by the states that did secede. I'll not reprint their vile language, but will leave readers with the words of 'one of their own,' Confederate fighter John C. Mosby.

We should take them at their own words on this one!

Writing to a friend in 1894, three decades after the war, Mosby stated;

"I've always understood that we went to war on account of the one thing we always quarreled with the north about. I never heard of any other cause for it than slavery!"

Conclusion

This piece is by no means conclusive. It is meant to, hopefully, inspire others to begin to look into our own forgotten and buried history. Our nation's struggle against slavery is filled with examples of real heroism, of examples again and again of multiracial unity, of regular folks joining together to fight for justice. The hope here is that readers may find their way to join today's multiracial struggles, and help others find inspiration in the newly rediscovered history of our past fights.

Photo: Company E, 4th US Colored Infantry at Fort Lincoln, Washington D.C. Library of Congress, Wikipedia

An open letter from the US Peace Council

US Peace Council — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 10:04:00 +0000

To All Our Friends and Comrades in the Peace Movement:

Dear Friends and Comrades in Peace,

As you are well aware, our world is at a critically dangerous juncture: the possibility of a military, potentially a nuclear, confrontation between NATO, led by the United States, and Russia. The militaries of the two nuclear superpowers are once again facing each other, this time in Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine, and in Syria. And tensions are increasing each passing day.

In a sense, we can say that a world war is already taking place. Currently, the governments of 15 countries are bombing Syria. They include seven allied NATO countries: US, UK, France, Turkey, Canada, Belgium, and Netherlands. They also include non-NATO allies of the United States: Israel, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, and Australia; and most recently, Russia.

On the western borders of Russia, another dangerous war is going on. NATO is expanding its forces into countries bordering Russia. All the borderland governments are now allowing NATO and US military forces on their territory, where threatening NATO military exercises are taking place only a few miles from major Russian cities. This is certainly causing a great deal of tension for the Russian government, as it would naturally do the same for the US government if Russian forces were stationed on the US-Mexico and US-Canada borders, carrying out military exercises a few miles from major American cities.

Either, or both, of these situations can easily lead to a direct confrontation between US and its NATO allies on the one hand, and Russia on the other; a confrontation that has the potential of escalating into a nuclear war with disastrous consequences.

It is in light of this dangerous situation that we are addressing our friends and comrades in the peace and anti-nuclear movement. It seems to us that many of our allies in the movement are paying scant attention to the dangers that threaten the whole existence of humanity on a global scale today, and are limiting their reactions to just protesting this or that action on the part of this or that side. At best, they are saying to the US and Russia "a plague on both your houses," criticizing both sides for equally increasing the tensions. This, in our view, is a passive, ahistorical, and more importantly ineffective, response that ignores the urgency of the existing threat. Moreover, by bestowing blame in equal measure, it masks its real causes.

But the roots of the current crisis are much deeper than the recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. It all goes back to the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the desire of the US, as the sole remaining superpower, to unilaterally dominate the whole world. This fact is very bluntly stated in the document published by the neo-cons in September 2000, titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," upon which the current US policy is based (forgive us for this lengthy reminder):

"At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation and eager to change it...."

"Today its [the military's] task is to ... deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence.... Today, that same security can only be acquired at the "retail" level, by deterring or, when needed, by compelling regional foes to act in ways that protect American interests and principles...."

"It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies ... are creating a dynamic that may threaten America's ability to exercise its dominant military power. Potential rivals such as China are anxious to exploit these transformational technologies broadly, while adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to dominate.... If an American peace is to be maintained, and expanded, it must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence...."

"[T]he reality of the today's world is that there is no magic wand with which to eliminate [nuclear] weapons ... and that deterring their use requires a reliable and dominant U.S. nuclear capability.... Nuclear weapons remain a critical component of American military power....

"In addition, there may be a need to develop a new family of nuclear weapons designed to address new sets of military requirements, such as would be required in targeting the very deep underground, hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries.... U.S. nuclear superiority is nothing to be ashamed of; rather, it will be an essential element in preserving American leadership...."

"Maintaining or restoring a favorable order in vital regions in the world such as Europe, the Middle East and East Asia places a unique responsibility on U.S. armed forces...."

"For one, they demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations.... Nor can the United States assume a UN-like stance of neutrality; the preponderance of American power is so great and its global interests so wide that it cannot pretend to be indifferent to the political outcome in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf or even when it deploys forces in Africa.... American forces must remain deployed abroad, in large numbers.... Neglect or withdrawal from constabulary missions will ... encourage petty tyrants to defy American interests and ideals. And the failure to prepare for tomorrow's challenges will ensure that the current Pax Americana comes to an early end...."

"[I]t is important that NATO not be replaced by the European Union, leaving the United States without a voice in European security affairs...."

"Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region...."

"[T]he value of land power continues to appeal to a global superpower, whose security interests rest upon ... the ability to win wars. While maintaining its combat role, the U.S. Army has acquired new missions in the past decade - most immediately ... defending American interests in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. These new missions will require the continued stationing of U.S. Army units abroad.... [E]lements of U.S. Army Europe should be redeployed to Southeast Europe, while a permanent unit should be based in the Persian Gulf region...."

"When their missiles are tipped with warheads carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, even weak regional powers have a credible deterrent, regardless of the balance of conventional forces. That is why, according to the CIA, a number of regimes deeply hostile to America - North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria - "already have or are developing ballistic missiles" that could threaten U.S allies and forces abroad.... Such capabilities pose a grave challenge to the American peace and the military power that preserves that peace. "The ability to control this emerging threat through traditional nonproliferation treaties is limited...."

"The current American peace will be short-lived if the United States becomes vulnerable to rogue powers with small, inexpensive arsenals of ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction. We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership...."

And, most importantly, none of these can be achieved "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor...." (all emphases added)

And this document has been the guiding principle of US policy ever since, for both Bush and Obama administrations. Every aspect of US policy today is in line with the letter of this document, from the Middle East, to Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, bypassing the UN as global peacekeeper and replacing it with NATO's military power as the global enforcer, as recommended in this document. Any leader or government that resists the planned US domination of the world must go, by use of military force if necessary!

The "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" that they needed was handed to them on a silver platter on September 11, 2001 and the whole plan was put into motion. A new "enemy," Islamic Terrorism, took the place of the old "enemy," Communism. The "global war on terrorism" thus began. First came Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, and now Syria, with Iran waiting for its turn (all of them listed in the document as targets of regime change by force). Similarly, based on the same strategy, Russia, and later China, as "global rivals" and "deterrents" to the US global domination, must also be weakened and contained. Hence, also, the amassing of NATO forces on Russian borders and the dispatch of US Navy carriers and warships to East Asia to encircle China.

Unfortunately, it seems, this overall strategic picture is being missed by a significant part of our peace movement. Many forget that the demonization of foreign leaders, and slogans like "Saddam Hussein must go," "Gadhafi must go," "Assad must go," "Chavez must go," "Maduro must go," "Yanukovych must go," and now, "Putin must go," (all clearly in violation of international law and the UN Charter) are all part and parcel of the same global domination strategy that is threatening peace and security of the whole world, and even the very existence of humanity as a whole.

The question, here, is not about defending this or that leader or government, or disregarding their violation of their citizens' rights. The issue is that we cannot look at each one of these cases in isolation from the others and deal with them piecemeal without seeing the root cause of all of them, i.e., the US drive for global domination. We cannot hope to eliminate nuclear weapons when the two most powerful nuclear states are on the verge of a military confrontation. We cannot protect innocent civilians by funding and arming extremists, directly or through allies. We cannot expect peace and cooperation with Russia while amassing NATO forces and carrying out military exercises on its borders. We cannot have security if we do not respect the sovereignty and security of other nations and peoples.

Being fair and objective does not mean being even-handed between the aggressor and its victims. We need to stop aggression before we can deal with the victims' responses to the aggression. We ought not blame the victim of aggression instead of the actions of the aggressor. And looking at the whole picture, there should be no doubt about who the aggressors are.

It is in light of these facts that we believe we cannot avoid the impending catastrophe without joining forces, with the needed sense of urgency, to demand the following in both words and action:

1. NATO forces must be immediately withdrawn from the countries bordering Russia;

2. All foreign forces must leave Syria immediately, and Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity must be guaranteed.

3. Syrian conflict must be dealt with only through political processes and diplomatic negotiations. The US must withdraw its policy of "Assad must go" as a precondition, and stop blocking diplomatic talks.

4. Negotiations must include the government of Syria especially, as well as all regional and global parties that are affected by the conflict.

5. The future of the Syrian government must be decided by the Syrian people alone, free of all external interferences.

6. The US strategy for global domination must be abandoned in favor of peaceful coexistence of all countries and respect for every nation's right to self-determination and sovereignty.

7. The process of dismantling NATO must begin immediately.

We call upon all of our friends and comrades in the peace and anti-nuclear movement to join hands with us in a democratic coalition to end all wars of aggression. We wholeheartedly welcome all cooperative responses by our friends and comrades in the movement.

U.S. Peace Council

October 10, 2015

Photo: demonstration in support of Occupy Philly October 2011. Ben Sears/PA

Iran and post World War II history: Independence thwarted

Heather Gray — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 21:17:00 +0000

Editors' introduction: Below we present a slightly edited version of the author's original article which was posted on the "Justice Initiative". The piece makes an important contribution to the current discussion/debate regarding US-Iranian relations and US relations with the broader Middle East. We would like to add a couple of points. 1) As the author mentions, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq's economic proposals and policies could be seen as progressive for his time, but they were not radical. He was considered a threat by the western powers during the 1950s because he aimed to break the British and American hold on his nation's valuable oil resources. The fact that he apparently turned to the Soviet Union for support at some point during the crisis of the early 1950s, as the British were blockading his country, was simply one more strike against him as far as "the West" was concerned. 2) Any account of post World War II Iranian politics would be strengthened by including mention of the role of the Tudeh (Communist) Party of Iran. The Tudeh played a role in building mass support for demands to nationalize Iran's oil resources before being driven underground after the return of the Shah to power in 1953. Twenty-six years later it played a role in bringing down the Shah's US backed regime. PA editorial collective.

The current dialogue with the Iranians is a positive move on the part of the Obama administration, especially since the U.S. Senate overcame opposition and presented the White House with a victory on this agreement. This is encouraging, though it is still being debated in the House of Representatives and elsewhere at the time of this writing. However, relatively little history of the U.S. and its historic relationship with Iran is being shared. This is unfortunate as the consequences overall of U.S. foreign policy have been profound for the Iranian people and the Middle East since the end of WWII.

World War II, the Atlantic Charter and Iran
To understand some of this we need to look again at the Atlantic Charter issued by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941.

The Charter was formulated by Roosevelt and Churchill when they came together aboard a naval ship near Newfoundland. It was largely based on Roosevelt's State of the Union address to Congress in January 1941 in which he said " ....we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms" (1) freedom of speech and expression; (2) freedom of every person to worship God in their own way; (3) freedom from want; and (4) freedom from fear. Churchill was anxious for U.S. assistance in the war against Germany so agreed to the Charter.

The eight principal points of the Charter were:

1 no territorial gains were to be sought by the United States or the United Kingdom;

2 territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned;

3 all people had a right to self-determination;

4 trade barriers were to be lowered;

5 there was to be global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare;

6 the participants would work for a world free of want and fear;

7 the participants would work for freedom of the seas;

8 there was to be disarmament of aggressor nations, and a post-war common disarmament.

Sounds good doesn't it? One of the more controversial of the principles was the third one, as in "All people had a right to self-determination". Almost immediately, countries suffering from colonial oppression in various parts of the world confronted Churchill about this. Churchill refused to accept the universality of the Charter, and inferred it was meant for Britain threatened by Nazi control and not for those under Britain's colonial rule. Churchill's response led to major accusations of hypocrisy of Churchill himself and European imperialists/colonialists overall in the West. Roosevelt, on the other hand, implied that "Principle Three" of self-determination applied universally, but, he was not overt about it, as he worked to maintain the alliance with Britain.

In the long run, however, the responsibility for failing to adhere to the principles of the Atlantic Charter rests with both the U.S. and British governments in subsequent years.

At the time, many throughout the colonial world compared Nazism to colonialism. Europeans, it was pointed out, were alarmed at oppressive forced labor and dictatorial behavior by the Germans being utilized on them yet they employed similar tactics and oppression in their colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Some stated that the Germans learned their techniques of oppressive tactics from their own colonies and from that of other Europeans. As one researcher has argued:

Hypocrisy of this type formed the basis for many postwar anticolonial theorists' rejection of making arguments based on Western pronouncements and values. (Franz) Fanon observed with disgust that Western discourse is "never done talking of Man" and yet bases itself on raw violence directed against humans. Likewise, Aimé Césaire condemned European humanistic idealism, which he dubbed "pseudo-humanism," since it "has diminished the rights of man"....

Hence, Césaire showed that Europeans' outrage directed itself not toward Nazism itself, but rather "the fact that [Hitler] applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively" for the "darker peoples" of the world. Europeans applied the rule of colonial difference to their moral and legal condemnation of Nazism, by approving of its application in the non-Western world but rejecting its application in Europe.... Césaire saw similar inconsistency in Europe's vocal condemnation of Hitler's violence against European victims, but silence on Nazi-like methods applied to "Algiers, Morocco, and other places" of contemporary colonial violence. (Mark Reeves, The Broad Toiling Masses in all the Continent: anticolonial activists and the Atlantic Charter, Western Kentucky University 2014.)

Recent historians have also referred to the Churchill hypocrisy when comparing British colonialism to Nazism. For example, Indian historian M.S. Venkataramani noted "Winston Churchill governed more alien millions the world over than Adolf Hitler did at the zenith of his power." (Reeves)

Iran was caught in the middle of the struggles in the Middle East regarding the major protagonists during WWII. The Shah, Reza Khan, who had seized the throne during the 1920s, had developed relations with Nazi Germany in an effort to counter the influence of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the Soviets and the British acted to depose the Shah and replace him with his young son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Iran, then, had ultimately assisted the allies in offering a route for resources to the Soviets and was acknowledged for this at the conference in Tehran. In fact, the Tehran Conference took place in 1943. Russia's Joseph Stalin, Britain's Winston Churchill, and the U.S. Franklin Roosevelt were in attendance. The following document was signed by the three leaders and in which is stated at the end "in accordance with the principles of the Atlantic Charter":

The President of the United States, the Premier of the U. S. S. R. and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, having consulted with each other and with the Prime Minister of Iran, desire to declare the mutual agreement of their three Governments regarding their relations with Iran.

The Governments of the United States, the U. S. S. R., and the United Kingdom recognize the assistance which Iran has given in the prosecution of the war against the common enemy, particularly by facilitating the transportation of supplies from overseas to the Soviet Union.

The Three Governments realize that the war has caused special economic difficulties for Iran, and they are agreed that they will continue to make available to the Government of Iran such economic assistance as may be possible, having regard to the heavy demands made upon them by their world-wide military operations, and to the world-wide shortage of transport, raw materials, and supplies for civilian consumption.

With respect to the post-war period, the Governments of the United States, the U. S. S. R., and the United Kingdom are in accord with the Government of Iran that any economic problems confronting Iran at the close of hostilities should receive full consideration, along with those of other members of the United Nations, by conferences or international agencies held or created to deal with international economic matters.

The Governments of the United States, the U. S. S. R., and the United Kingdom are at one with the Government of Iran in their desire for the maintenance of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iran They count upon the participation of Iran, together with all other peace-loving nations, in the establishment of international peace, security and prosperity after the war, in accordance with the principles of the Atlantic Charter, to which all four Governments have subscribed.

[signed]

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

J. STALIN

FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT

The Post War Period

After World War II, the continued insistence of the British on dominating the Iranian economy and appropriating the oil profits brought forward a surge of nationalist sentiment and the election of the country's first democratically elected leader. Mohammad Mosaddeq was elected Prime Minister in 1951, prior to which he had presented the idea of Iranian oil nationalization to the Iranian people. Mosaddeq desired opportunities and reforms for his country outside western influence, which he realized could not be achieved without "economic" independence. Britain at the time, however, largely controlled the Iranian economy through its dominance of the Iranian oil industry. ( International Man)

Within 10 years of this historic Tehran Conference, Mosaddeq was ousted by the CIA. As the first Iranian to receive a Doctorate of Law (acquired in 1913 from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland), he has been described as a secular liberal. He was not a Marxist, a Communist or a radical Islamist. Emulating Roosevelt's policies, he had plans for a "New Deal" type government to benefit the Iranian masses, and sought ways to fund his program through economic independence, including Iranian control of its oil resources.

Mosaddeq may have mistakenly believed that he could make Iran a sovereign nation. Objectively, he was attempting to adhere to Principal Three of the Atlantic Charter regarding self-determination, much to the chagrin of the British and the United States. Ultimately, the issue was Iranian "oil" and the British were not about to give up on the valuable resource they had controlled since 1908.

In 1908, a sizable deposit of oil was found in Masjed Soleiman, Iran and the British company the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was created. In 1935 it became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Importantly, Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror, notes that this company was the largest in the British Empire (Democracy Now ). He says further that " the Iranian oil is actually what maintained Britain at its level of prosperity and its level of military preparedness all throughout the '30s, the '40s, and the '50s". ( Democracy Now)

However, Iran only received 25% of the proceeds of the oil industry. In fact, politically conscious Iranians were aware, however, that the British government derived more revenue from taxing the concessionaire, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, than the Iranian government derived from royalties. ( Iran Chamber)

When Prime Minister Mosaddeq proposed an audit of the oil company, the British refused. In the early 1950's, the Iranians also discovered that Americans had established a 50/50 deal with the Saudi oil entities known as the Saudi-Aramco agreement. The Iranians also attempted this 50/50 concept with the British but were rebuffed. Finally in 1951, the Iranians nationalized the oil industry altogether.

Britain was outraged by the Iranian nationalization of the oil industry and wanted to overturn the Iranian government. U.S. President Truman was, apparently, somewhat sympathetic to Mosaddeq's demands or vacillated on the issue and would not agree to the British invasion of Iran. Yet according to Stephen Kinzer, Truman also thought he could talk Mosaddeq out of the nationalization scheme. That didn't work. By 1953 a more conservative and Republican administration under Dwight Eisenhower approved the ousting by the CIA of the Mosaddeq government. It was known as "Operation Ajax" and it marked the first time the CIA had overturned a government. In the words of one author:

MI6, the UK's foreign spy agency, and the CIA would organize the coup. Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of former US President Teddy Roosevelt, was the CIA officer in charge.

The goal was to return the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (also known as "the Shah") to power. (In Farsi, the Persian language, "shah" means "king.")

The CIA and MI6 used classic methods of subterfuge. They paid Iranian goons to pose as communists and wreak havoc in Tehran, the Iranian capital, and vandalize its business district. The police couldn't restrain them, and the violence grew. (Nick Giambruno in International Man )

Mosaddeq was arrested and tried for treason. He was not killed but ultimately placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The British and Americans placed the young Shah (who had fled the country at one point during the August 1953 crisis) on the throne as ruler of Iran. The British hoped to go back to the previous arrangement of controlling the oil industry altogether, but public sentiment in Iran at this point was so strongly opposed that the British had to capitulate. As a result, also under pressure from the U.S., a consortium holding company was incorporated in London in 1954 called the Iranian Oil Participants Ltd (IOP). It was composed of British, American, Dutch and French oil interests. Iran was to receive 50% of the oil profit (emulating the Saudi-Aramco arrangement) but Iran was not allowed to audit the industry nor could Iranians serve on the board of directors.

In 2013, the 60th anniversary of the ousting of Mosaddeq, the CIA released documents affirming its involvement in the coup. ( RT Question More, 19 August 2013) The British papers about the coup remain secret even though, according to the Guardian, Iranian school children know all the details of the coup. In 2009 the former foreign secretary Jack Straw publicly referred to many British "interferences" in 20th-century Iranian affairs. (Following the CIA release of U/S. involvement, the British) Foreign Office said it could neither confirm nor deny Britain's involvement in the coup. ( Guardian)

The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of "The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations", said in a recent interview that the coup was designed "to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalized. Unlike other nationalist leaders, including Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mosaddeq epitomised a unique "anti-colonial" figure who was also committed to democratic values and human rights...." (Guardian)

In Iran, the IOP continued to operate until the Islamic Revolution in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini confiscated all of the company's assets in Iran... and annulled the 1954 agreement and all regulations pertaining to it. ( Wikipedia)

Summary
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, there has been a wide range of sanctions against Iran imposed by the United States, the United Nations and the European Union. Click here for a summary of the sanctions.

Both the Shah and the Ayatollah Khomeini were not democratically elected as was Mosaddeq. It is rather mind boggling to speculate as to what might have happened had the U.S. not overturned the Iranian government in 1953 and instead had assisted the Iranians in having control over their own oil resource and respected the democratic process in Iran by adhering to the Atlantic Charter and Principle Three's concept of "self-determination". Nevertheless, the Iranians have suffered from isolation and economic sanctions from the west largely because some sectors decided to take the situation into their own hands rather than serving the dictates of the United States or the West overall. As Noam Chomsky notes:

Why the assault against Iran? ....In 1979, Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders. That conflicts with the Mafia doctrine, by which the world is pretty much ruled. Credibility must be maintained. The godfather cannot permit independence and successful defiance, as in the case of Cuba. So, Iran has to be punished for that. (Democracy Now)

Hopefully with the recent acceptance of the agreement with the Iranians in the U.S. Senate and the possible projected lifting of the sanctions against Iran, opportunities for the Iranians might again be in the offing. It is an exciting prospect.

Conclusion

The unfortunate lesson of it all was that the United States sent a message to the Middle East and to the world at large, that the United States was not interested in democratic systems and processes. As Stephen Kinzer noted:

When we overthrew a democratic government in Iran, ....we sent a message, not only to Iran, but throughout the entire Middle East. That message was that the United States does not support democratic governments and the United States prefers strong-man rule that will guarantee us access to oil. And that pushed an entire generation of leaders in the Middle East away from democracy. We sent the opposite message that we should have sent. Instead of sending the message that we wanted democracy, we sent a message that we wanted dictatorship in the Middle East, and a lot of people in the Middle East got that message very clearly and that helped to lead to the political trouble we face there today. (Democracy Now)

Further, it appears that the principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter are not something the United States and Europe are willing to adhere to particularly if it regards threats of access to capital, control of labor and control of raw materials, such as oil and/or access to seeds and control of seeds in the agricultural sector and many other examples.

The disruptive Republican members of the House of Representatives in their opposition to the Iranian agreement are yet again arrogantly displaying their disdain for a semblance of justice and respect for the other. Nor are they adhering to Roosevelt's directive of "what we could do by an unselfish foreign policy" and/or the possibility of dialogue and negotiation. As they say in southern Africa, " A luta continua" - the struggle continues!

Heather Gray is the producer of "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta 89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international news. She has been involved in agriculture advocacy and communications for 25 years in the United States and internationally. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia and can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net

Photo: President Nixon with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Tehran May 1972. US arms sales to Iran increased sharply after Nixon's visit. The Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies; www.iichs.org;www.iranreview.org

Chile and the arc of the moral universe

Emile Schepers — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 11:50:00 +0000

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. liked to quote an old abolitionist saying: "The Arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice".

Both the victims and the perpetrators of the coup d'etat in Chile, carried out with U.S. support on September 11 1973, are finding out the truth of this.

On October 5, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered previously classified documents to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet that show that former Chilean diplomat and Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were murdered on September 21, 1976, on the direct orders of the dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. The Institute for Policy Studies, for whom Letelier and Moffitt worked at the time, issued a statement lauding the release of this information. http://www.ips-dc.org/ips-applauds-declassification-of-letelier-moffitt-assassination-case-documents/

Letelier had been captured during the September 11, 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende, and tortured. Later he was able to get to the United States. He was one of thousands who suffered such a fate; at least 3,000 people-union, student, indigenous and political activists-were murdered or "disappeared" while hundreds of thousands had to flee into exile. Several other exiles were also murdered in countries where they had sought refuge. The killings were carried out under the aegis of "Operation Condor", a secret assassination program organized by the South American right with the connivance of U.S. officials. These included the former head of the Chilean army, General Carlos Prats Gonzalez, who was murdered along with his wife in Argentina in 1974. Former Brazilian president João Goulart, also a leftist, was poisoned by operatives of Operation Condor in December 1976 while in exile in Argentina. Former Bolivian President Juan José Torres Gonzalez, another leftist who had been overthrown by a coup in June 1976 was also murdered in Buenos Aires. There were many more.

Pinochet's chief hit man, DINA (National Intelligence Direction) head General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, who died on August 7 of this year while serving a 529 year prison sentence, arranged these and many other murderous attacks. He was first convicted for the Letelier - Moffitt murder in 1993, shortly after the end of the dictatorship. There followed other indictments.

In 2005, Contreras claimed that he had carried out these murders on the direct order of Pinochet, with the support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and using the services of right-wing Cuban exiles in the United States. Contreras was also a notorious liar, but the newly declassified materials prove that in this case, he was telling the truth. The new information suggests that Pinochet, who died in 2006 without ever having been brought to book, was even willing to have Contreras Sepulveda killed to cover his own tracks. http://elpais.com/elpais/2015/10/09/inenglish/1444386627_683591.html

This has been a bad year for Chile's military murderers. During the summer, the government of President Bachelet initiated prosecution of military personnel accused of the 1986 burning death of Rodrigo Rojas, a photojournalist who had been born in Chile but had moved to Washington D.C. with his family. Rojas had returned to Chile and had been photographing an anti-Pinochet demonstration when he was captured, doused with gasoline and then burned to death, allegedly on the orders of army Lieutenant Julio Castañer, who is now on trial. http://peoplesworld.org/shielded-for-decades-pinochet-thugs-now-face-justice/

And and in July of this year prosecution also advanced for the murderers of singer-songwriter Victor Jara, killed in the days immediately following the 1973 coup. The killing of Jara, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, was exceptionally sadistic. His tormentors smashed his hands, sneering that he would not be able to play his guitar again, before riddling him with bullets. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/23/chile-military-officers-victor-jara-killing Judge Miguel Velazquez formally charged three former army officers-Hernan Chancon Soto, Patricio Vazquez Donoso and Ramon Melo Silva-in the Jara murder case, with more to come. However, Jara's family is trying to go after another former army officer, Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, a U.S. citizen who lives in the United States, via a civil suit in U.S. courts. So far efforts to get him extradited to Chile have not succeeded.

So the arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice, but needs to bend a lot more. The Chilean government has been trying to get parliament to pass a law abolishing an amnesty that Pinochet got approved in 1978 to shield his henchmen and himself from prosecution. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/chile-amnesty-law-keeps-pinochet-s-legacy-alive/

What did certain U.S. leaders know, and when did they know it? That former Secretary of State George Schulz and President Ronald Reagan knew as early as 1982 that Pinochet had ordered the killing of Letelier, is revealed by the new documents. But Letelier and Moffitt and many others were murdered during the Nixon administration, which had an obvious hand in the Pinochet coup and Operation Condor.

Dr. Henry Kissinger, who had been Nixon's National Security Advisor at the time of the 1973 coup, was Secretary of State from 1972-1977, the two roles overlapping for a while. According to a 2015 book by Greg Grandin, professor of History at New York University, Kissinger had known about Operation Condor and had been warned by Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlauderman that murders of exiled Chilean leaders were being planned. Kissinger then drafted a warning to the Pinochet government against such murders. But then, writes Grandin, Kissinger withdrew the memorandum before it could be delivered lest it "offend" the dictator. Five days later Letelier and Moffitt were murdered in the middle of Embassy Row in Washington D.C. (Grandin, Greg, 2015: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. New York, Henry Holt, pp. 151 - 152).

U.S. citizen Michael Townley, who had hired the team of Cuban exile assassins who actually planted the bomb under Letelier's car, was allowed to go into a federal witness protection program after serving 62 months in prison. According to some reports, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban exile leaders and former C.I.A. operatives with known terroristic backgrounds, were in on the planning. Bosch died in 2011 but Posada lives openly in Miami Florida.

Chile's murderers and terrorists are belatedly being made accountable. How about our own?

Photo: Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger 1976 Creative Commons 2.0 Chile

Peace talks in Colombia: What about the political prisoners?

Liliany Obando — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 20:24:00 +0000

The English translation of the article presented here is by W.T.Whitney Jr. Following the English version we are posting the article as it was originally written in Spanish.

Political prisoners do exist in Colombia. In the current context of peace negotiations between the government and the FARC-EP guerrillas, and prior to the eventual beginning of talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), recognition of such is absolutely necessary. It would be incomprehensible if an agreement to end the conflict does take place while thousands of political prisoners still remain behind bars, not to speak of those who were convicted unjustly - the convicted innocent - and who did not have the possibility of their cases being reviewed and, in this way, to be remedied, late though it may be.

Data on the extreme violence of Colombia's long, internal armed conflict suggest that the condition of those imprisoned today as political prisoners is becoming more and more complex. It's not a matter exclusively of those men and women who joined the insurgencies as combatants and who are defined as prisoners of war under international law, but rather of the great majority of Colombian political prisoners who are drawn from the non-combatant majority population. They are political prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in connection with the internal armed conflict. The latter belong to the unarmed political opposition. They are defenders of human rights, critical thinkers, or take part in social movements, labor unions, the student movement, small farmer organizations, and groups representing indigenous or African- descended Colombians.

This tragic reality, among others, is quite understandable as the result of a politics that distorts the idea of political crime and converts the universal right of rebellion into a crime. And the latter is used as a weapon for persecuting those in the opposition, whether they are under arms or are legal. In this way thousands of political prisoners are not even being tried or sentenced for political crimes as strictly defined like rebellion, sedition, rioting, and crimes related to these as established by the Colombian criminal justice system. Instead they face charges that are beyond the realm of political crime and quite separate. We are speaking of common crimes like terrorism, kidnapping, forced displacement, forced recruitment of minors, and narco-trafficking etc. Additionally, through false allegations of this last crime, that of narco-trafficking, some political prisoners have ended up being extradited to the United States, although the Colombian Constitution prohibits extradition for political crimes.

This goes to show that we are looking upon a panorama in which students and academicians are seriously portrayed as being terrorists, labor union leaders as financiers of terrorism, and innumerable rural people and social justice activists as narco-traffickers. But also there are hundreds of political prisoners, prisoners of war actually, who, many of them, are suffering from severe mutilations incurred at the time they were captured, or terminal illnesses that clearly deserve treatment in accordance with international humanitarian law. Others of them are facing lengthy judicial processes and sentences while existing under inhuman conditions. Many of the female political prisoners are mothers, some having been armed combatants, others not. Furthermore, several are single - mother heads of families, a situation carrying special requirements that are almost always ignored. And many of them have children with them in prison who are less than three years old. For them, the penitentiary and incarceration system and the judicial apparatus operate in favor of men. Justice is differentiated by gender and despite various laws gained for women by women, justice in practice is non-existent.

Not all political prisoners find themselves deprived of freedom inside prison walls. Some, a few, live under detention in their own homes and others in prison homes, and although their conditions are substantially improved compared with those living under degrading prison conditions, deficiencies and perversions of the judicial system do remain.

But also there are the former political prisoners who are at partial liberty: those free having completed their terms, free provisionally, and free on various conditions. The ones in this situation suffer harassment, stigmatization, persecution, denial of judicial benefits they've earned, and lack of opportunities to rebuild their lives.

However, it's necessary to understand also that, especially in the case of political prisoners, sentences aren't limited to being physically deprived of freedom. Accessory penalties are imposed also, like removal from public office, or administratively being declared unfit to fill this type of office, or being required to pay onerous fines. A "victims' unit" usually imposes such fines, and thus victims are converted into victimizers.

All of this is backed up by a judicial apparatus that applies criminal law to political opponents as if to an enemy and a prison society that is one of the results of manipulation by the official mass media. Each one ends up serving to legislators who, on the one hand, approve more punitive laws and new penal standards and who, on the other, justify the de facto denial of basic principles in the implementation of justice, among them due process, presumption of innocence, and technical defense etc. Taken together, they make the situation of thousands of Colombian political prisoners more onerous.

As if this overview did not suggest enough difficulties, even now - and as a result of such difficulties - a really accurate census of how many political prisoners there are, prisoners of conscience and prisoners of war alike, does not exist. The institutions base their census almost exclusively on who is being processed for the crime of rebellion. Among the organizations defending political prisoners, and among the political prisoners themselves, there is no consensus in regard to how many there really are. Some partial counts do exist - They vary according to the type of political or social organization - but there is no unified national census of all political prisoners. Some organizations speak of 4,500 political prisoners drawn from both armed combatants and civilians, and others mention around 9500. The FARC-EP spokesperson Iván Márquez holds that of the total number of political prisoners, around 90 percent are people who are non-combatants or prisoners of conscience. In other words, political prisoners of war add only 10 percent to the grand total.

That's why it's so important that a census or a sufficiently rigorous report on the situation of political prisoners exists within the framework of any agreement on justice for the situation of political prisoners. And such a tally must be sufficiently inclusive so that none of the political prisoners or ex-political prisoners who are convinced they were unjustly convicted can be excluded from alternatives being considered in an agreement between the parties on justice. They may be called pardons, amnesties, revision, or whatever may end up being approved. That is an urgent task and requires a great effort of collective formulation.

A favorable end of the conflict requires not only that political prisoners, combatants, and collaborators of the insurgencies regain their freedom, but also - and especially - that thousands of political prisoners of conscience and prisoners for reasons related to the conflict are freed also. The entire society must furthermore be prepared to receive them in constructive and positives ways as part of a scenario where construction of a Colombia in peace is taking place. Opening up discussion and tolerating differences are part of that.

*For the purposes of this article, we speak of political prisoners as representing the full gamut of persons who, as the result of political motivation, have been deprived of their liberty due to their thinking, their legal political actions, or their resort to arms.

*Liliany Obando is a sociologist, a defender of human rights and former political prisoner.

Source of original version in Spanish: http://www.inspp.org/news/political-prisoners/quines-son-los/as-prisioneros-polticos-colombianos

English language version: http://prensarural.org/spip/spip.php?article17784

Map of Colombia with neighboring countries. en.wikipedia.org

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Quiénes son los/as prisioneros* políticos colombianos?

-Una aproximación en el contexto de las conversaciones de paz

Por Liliany Obando**

Septiembre 16 de 2015

En Colombia sí existen prisioneros/as políticos. En el actual contexto de conversaciones de paz del gobierno con la guerrilla de las FARC - EP y ante el eventual inicio de conversaciones con el Ejército de Liberación Nacional - ELN, su reconocimiento es una necesidad imperiosa, pues no se entendería que se llegara a un acuerdo de cierre del conflicto y los miles de prisioneros/as políticos quedaran tras las rejas y menos que quienes fueron injustamente condenados -los condenados inocentes- no tuvieran la posibilidad de la revisión de sus casos y de esta forma, de una reparación, así sea tardía.

La cruenta y larga data del conflicto interno armado colombiano ha hecho que la naturaleza de quiénes se encuentran hoy en las cárceles como prisioneros/as políticos sea cada vez más compleja. No se trata exclusivamente de aquellos hombres y mujeres combatientes miembros de las insurgencias a quienes el derecho internacional define como prisioneros de guerra, sino que hoy la gran mayoría de los prisioneros/as políticos colombianos son población no combatiente, presos/as políticos de conciencia y presos/as políticos en razón del conflicto interno armado. Estos últimos pertenecen a la oposición política no armada, son defensoras y defensores de derechos humanos, pensadores/as críticos, o hacen parte de los movimientos sociales, de los sindicatos, del movimiento estudiantil, de las organizaciones campesinas, indígenas, de las negritudes, etc.

Esta es una trágica realidad que entre otras se explica claramente por una política de desnaturalizar el delito político y convertir el universal derecho a la rebelión en un delito, el cual es usado como arma para perseguir a quienes se encuentran en la oposición, bien sea armada o legal. Por esta vía, miles de prisioneros/as políticos ni siquiera están siendo judicializados o condenados por delitos políticos propiamente dichos, como la rebelión, sedición y asonada y sus delitos conexos, tal como establece el sistema penal colombiano, sino que les son imputados cargos que se salen de la órbita del delito político, de manera independiente, hablamos de delitos comunes graves como el terrorismo, el secuestro, el desplazamiento forzado, el reclutamiento forzado de menores, el narcotráfico, etc. Incluso, por la fraudulenta imputación de éste último delito, el del narcotráfico, algunos prisioneros/as políticos han terminado extraditados hacia Estados Unidos, aunque que la Constitución Política colombiana prohíbe la extradición por delitos políticos.

De esta forma, asistimos a un panorama en el que gravemente estudiantes y académicos son mostrados como terroristas; líderes sindicales como financiadores del terrorismo y un sinnúmero de campesinos/as y luchadores sociales como narcotraficantes. Pero también están los cientos de prisioneros políticos de guerra, muchos de ellos con graves mutilaciones sufridas en el momento de su captura en combate, o enfermos terminales, que bien merecerían un trato acorde al Derecho Internacional Humanitario. Unos /as y otros/as afrontando larguísimos procesos y condenas en condiciones inhumanas. De las mujeres presas políticas varias son madres, hayan sido combatientes o no combatientes, varias además son madres cabeza de familia, lo que tiene una especial implicación casi siempre ignorada, y muchas comparten el presidio con sus menores de 3 años. Para ellas, el sistema penitenciario y carcelario y el aparato judicial funcionan en masculino, pues una justicia diferencial y de género, pese a las varias leyes conquistadas por mujeres para las mujeres, es en la práctica inexistente.

No todos los prisioneros/as políticos se encuentran en privación de la libertad intramural, algunos/as pocos se encuentran en detención domiciliaria u otros en o prisión domiciliaria, y aunque sustancialmente se mejoran sus condiciones comparadas a las que se viven de las degradantes prisiones colombianas, las deficiencias y perversiones del sistema judicial permanecen.

Pero también están los ex prisioneros/as políticos que se encuentran en libertades parciales: libertades por vencimiento de términos, libertades provisionales, y libertades condicionales, quienes en esta condición sufren el acoso, la estigmatización, la persecución, la obstaculización de beneficios judiciales adquiridos y falta de oportunidades para reconstruir sus vidas.

Pero también es necesario entender que, especialmente en el caso de los prisioneros/as políticos, las condenas no se limitan a la privación física de la libertad, sino que se les imponen penas accesorias, como la destitución de cargos públicos o inhabilidades para ejercer este tipo de cargos, por vía administrativa y la exigencia de pagos de onerosas multas fiscales, que usualmente son cobradas por una "unidad de víctimas", que los/as convierte así, en victimarios.

Todo esto soportado por un aparato judicial que aplica el derecho penal del enemigo para sus opositores y una sociedad carcelera como resultado, entre otras, de la manipulación de los grandes los medios oficiales. Resultan de esta manera siendo funcionales a unos legisladores que sancionan leyes más punitivas y nuevos tipos penales, por una parte, y que justifican la negación de facto de principios básicos en el ejercicio de la justicia como el debido proceso, la presunción de inocencia, la defensa técnica, etc., por la otra. Todo esto en su conjunto hace más gravosa la situación de los miles de prisioneros/as políticos colombianos.

Como si este panorama no fuera lo suficientemente difícil, y como consecuencia de todo lo anterior, no existe hasta el momento, un censo, lo suficientemente veraz, de cuántos son los prisioneros/as políticos -de conciencia y de guerra-. Las instituciones basan sus censos casi que únicamente en quienes están siendo procesados por el delito de rebelión. Entre las organizaciones defensoras de prisioneros/as políticos y los mismos prisioneros/as políticos tampoco hay un consenso en torno a cuántos son realmente. Existen algunos censos parciales, por tipo de organización política o social, pero no existe un censo unificado nacional de todos/as los prisioneros/as políticos. Algunas organizaciones hablan de unos 4.500 prisioneros/as políticos, entre combatientes y población civil, y otros de alrededor de unos 9.500. Las FARC - EP, en la vocería de Iván Márquez, han sostenido que del total de prisioneros/as políticos, aproximadamente un 90% son población no combatiente o presos/as de conciencia, es decir, que los/as prisioneros/as políticos de guerra sumarían un 10% del gran total.

Es por esto tan importante, que en el marco de un acuerdo de justicia en lo relativo a la situación de los prisioneros/as políticos, exista un censo e informe de la situación de los prisioneros/as políticos lo suficientemente riguroso, lo suficientemente incluyente, como para ningún prisionero/a político y/o ex prisioneros/a político que se considere injustamente condenado, quede por fuera de las alternativas planteadas en un acuerdo de justicia entre las partes, llámense indultos, amnistías, revisión o las que llegaren a aprobarse. Esa es una tarea urgente y requiere de un gran esfuerzo de construcción colectiva.

Un buen cierre del conflicto exige no sólo que los prisioneros/as políticos que han sido combatientes y los colaboradores de las insurgencias puedan recuperar su libertad, sino que, y especialmente, los miles de prisioneros/as políticos de conciencia y por razón del conflicto también puedan hacerlo. La sociedad en su conjunto debe además disponerse para recibirlos/as de manera constructiva y positiva en un escenario que se plantea la construcción de una Colombia en paz, incluyente y abierta al debate y la diferencia.

______

*Para efectos de este artículo hablamos de prisioneros/as políticos para definir toda la amplia gama de personas privadas de la libertad por motivaciones políticas por su pensamiento o acción legal o alzada en armas, bien sean procesados o condenados.

**Socióloga, defensora de derechos humanos, ex prisionera política.

Xi Jinping's state visit to the US: an objective analysis

Duncan McFarland — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 14:29:00 +0000

Many people would say that US-China government relations is the most important bilateral relationship in the first part of the 21st century. Consequently, Chinese President Xi Jinping's first state visit to the US (September 22-28) and summit meeting with President Obama is one of the most important diplomatic events in 2015. The expected publicity and hoopla was drowned out to some extent by the Pope's visit at the same time, understandably. However, while Xi's visit was overall productive, he got a decidedly mixed reception on the US side. For example, the US Office of Personnel Management released a statement one day before before Xi's arrival in Seattle that 5.6 million sets of fingerprints had been stolen from the US agency by hackers. The culprit, while unnamed, was clearly implied to be Chinese. The original announcement of the theft happened in April and so the timing of the followup story indicated a US effort to apply pressure on a sensitive issue just before Xi's arrival.

On a productive note, Xi Jinping and President Obama announced an agreement that the two governments will not spy in cyberspace to steal intellectual property or corporate secrets. China and the US will create guidelines and enforcement measures to restrict this new form of 21st century theft, a historic first. The two leaders also released a statement with their common vision to address climate change with substantive measures at the global conference in Paris this December. This was a good followup to the agreement a year ago on a timetable to cap and reduce carbon emissions.

These agreements were a bright spot. President Xi and the Chinese press maintained a very positive tone on the visit and summit meeting, repeatedly stressing "win/win" diplomacy and the benefits of dialogue and cooperation. However, President Obama and the US press, in contrast, raised constant criticisms of China's policies in the South China Sea, supposed human rights violations, alleged restrictions on freedom of speech, new regulations on US business operations and the implicit accusation of massive Chinese hacking attacks. Republican presidential candidates vied with one another in China-bashing. The difference in tone of the press coverage in the US and China was remarkable. Apparently, friendship with China will not win any votes in the 2016 presidential election.

Why has the US mainstream attitude towards China turned mostly sour? In the 1980s, when friendly US relations with China blossomed, US capitalism/imperialism saw China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union and a rapidly growing opportunity for corporate profit with the expansion of the private market. Today, however, China along with Russia are seen as the principal obstacles to the US goal of global hegemony. And China's shift to domestic drivers of economic development has led to an atmosphere less comfortable for Western capital. The stronger left in Chinese politics has led to a foreign policy with greater focus on building relationships with the developing world and renewing ties to working class organizations around the world. China shows a greater willingness to assert its national interests and is less conciliatory towards Western countries with big export markets.

In understanding China and current events, it is necessary to consult both Western and Chinese media. The US press usually presents information that is one-sided and out of context, with a negative tone. For example, US mainstream politicians and press condemn China's increasing presence in the South and East China Seas, depicted as aggressive big-power moves. It is seldom mentioned that China was dominant in these regions for hundreds of years before suffering military defeats during the Opium War, Japanese invasions, and the US Seventh Fleet moving into the Taiwan straits in 1949. China feels it is simply reasserting its historical position. It is seldom mentioned that the US today is supporting the remilitarization of Japan and is engaged in a new military buildup in South Korea, Philippines and Australia. While other Asian countries may have also have legitimate claims in the South China Sea, China is in part resisting the encroachment and pressure of US imperialism.

Another example of biased US press coverage concerns the "slowdown" in China's economy. It is not clearly explained that the reduction of GDP growth rate from 10% to 7% is part of the central government's plan to change China's economic model to slower paced, better balanced growth. This is necessary to address the serious problems of environmental damage, income inequality, exploitation of migrant labor and corruption. Were there no reduction in GDP growth rate, it would show ineffectiveness in the planning mechanism. China's growth will be increasingly driven by the service sector, consumer spending, expansion of social programs, environmental protection and value-added, high tech industry. The shift away from reliance on heavy industry and exports is not yet in balance with these rising production forces. That this huge transition to a "new normal" has met with some difficulties is not surprising, the question is whether the government will learn to deal with the problems. Watching the economic statistics in the coming period will be fascinating.

China's new economic model is part of a "left" shift in politics which is placing greater emphasis on socialist values and has less tolerance for the spread of bourgeois culture and influences in the nonpublic sector. China is strengthening the role of the State Owned Enterprises and de-emphasizing reliance on foreign direct investment. These are reasons that US capitalism/imperialism portrays China's new policies in a negative manner.

However, sectors of US capital still do emphasize cooperation and a soft-power approach to influencing Beijing's policies. For example, when Xi was visiting Seattle, a deal was announced where China will buy 300 civilian aircraft from Boeing valued at $38 billion. Apple sells more iphones in China than anywhere else and Microsoft is maneuvering to increase business in China. Many US corporations are still eager to do business in China and thus want normal relations, not confrontation. They say that the spread of Western ideas about democracy and human rights will bring about political change. Thus Obama's ambivalence, on the one hand granting Xi the highest level state visit, while on the other hand raising numerous criticisms and points of difference.

In conclusion, there is both friction and cooperation in the US-China relationship. Regrettably, the US is increasingly seeing China as a growing obstacle to the continued US imperialist goal of preeminence and hegemony in world affairs. With the trend now towards greater friction, will there eventually be military conflict? China definitely does not want a war with the US or any proxy conflict on its borders,such as with Japan or Philippines. However, China is also determined to maintain its sovereign rights and will not bullied.

It is the job of the peace and solidarity movement in the US to work to increase understanding, reduce friction, and strengthen ties with the Chinese people and working class. Defeating the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is an effort to isolate China economically, is one practical task. Supporting the Japanese people's powerful movement to stop Prime Minister Abe's militaristic policies is another. Keeping the peace in the Western Pacific and East Asia is an important part of working towards a multi-polar, more democratic world in our times.

Duncan McFarland is a teacher and scholar activist at the Center for Marxist Studies in Cambridge, MA. He is an active member of the US-China Friendship Association who has traveled widely in China and is conversant with the Chinese press and other Chinese sources.

Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry with China's President Xi Jinping July 2014. US Department of State/Public domain

People's poetry: "Northeast corridor"

Stewart Acuff — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 13:10:00 +0000

The detritus of post industrial America lost

The leavings of civilization most

Of us, if not all, know the cost

Is too much for us and our kids to bear

Flies by in this train's windows

Along the Northeast corridor shows

It matters deeply when we refuse

To notice or calculate the result of what we use

And to appreciate Gods beauty

Over our waste and what we abuse

Leaves us with a duty

To return our people and our world to a wonder

Of what God and nature have wrought

So much greater than what we have sought

Photo: abandoned factory along the Bushwick Branch, Long Island RR, Queens, NYC. wikipedia.org

What Obama's Presidency has to tell us

Leon Wofsy — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 06:17:00 +0000

Controversial posting, by a long-time peace and social justice activist - Obama is the best occupant of the office since the end of World War II. We're unlikely to elect anyone of his quality in 2016. Like all presidents post-World War II, he has presided over the world's most (super) powerful empire.

Not long ago, a couple of writers in the left magazine, Jacobin, opined that Barack Obama was the worst President since Warren Harding. Rightist bigots attack him as the worst of all time.

I think Obama is the best occupant of the office since the end of the Second World War. We're unlikely to elect anyone of his quality in 2016.

Like all presidents post World War II, Obama has presided over the world's most (super) powerful empire. Boasting "American exceptionalism" and flouting superior military and economic might, the empire systematically generates negative consequences for peace and the human condition at home and worldwide.

Disappointments in the 'State of the Union', about domestic and foreign affairs, are many and profound. I'm not about to argue that Obama should be absolved of responsibility for an interventionist foreign policy, for widespread acts of war, for commitment to the vast surveillance program and the "security state", or for the influence of his Wall Street advisors over economic policy.

How then can one view Obama favorably? What should one make of the obvious contradictions in Obama and his presidency? And why does it matter?

The simple observation by Fidel Castro when Obama was first elected turns out to be spot on: 'he's a good guy, but the system is stronger than he is'. However, the fuller truth is much more complicated. Certainly the system can't be overcome by an individual no matter how high his office. But it's a deeply stressed system, unable to control events, far from immune to resistance and change.

There is much to learn from Obama's two terms now almost over - about the man and, most important, about our society.

About Obama, there is another side to the coin of his limitations and loyalty to the basic character of an oppressive system. There is no mistaking that he holds dear many humane and democratic values that are actually in conflict with the essential nature of the system, values that are connected to the historic struggle to expand freedom in our country. Nor should one underestimate his achievement in winning majority support twice as the first African-American president - this despite a terrible history of racism that remains fiercely alive today.

Like a multitude of fellow Americans, when I first read "Dreams of My Father", I was deeply impressed by Obama's exceptional intelligence as well as his humanity. I'm still impressed by those qualities evident in some of his more important speeches. I can't dismiss as "rhetoric" his address after the Charleston massacre or the recent one on the Iran agreement (although his compellingly logical argument for diplomacy was accompanied by usual misrepresentations of US policy). It isn't necessary to watch the GOP presidential debates to see Obama as exceptional. In qualities of mind and character, few if any among those in high political office during the last half century are his equal.

Yet, during Obama's presidency, the impact of reactionary forces on the political and economic trajectory of the country grew dangerously. The GOP moved even further to the extreme right, fought tenaciously to wreck Obama's presidency and to sabotage the most elementary social responsibilities of government. With a huge assist from the Supreme Court majority, interference in elections and politics by oligarchs like the Koch brothers and Sandy Adelson has grown apace with soaring economic and social inequality overall. And at the heart of the assault on Obama has been open, as well as often denied, racist fury at the very idea of a black president and family in the White House.

Obama's accomplishments have been important even if far from the original promise. Noteworthy is the major expansion of health care against a hurricane of hard-hearted resistance and greed. He tempered the war lust fostered by neocon hawks, some of them in his own administration, although he expanded "alternative" tactics of widespread drone bombings and assassinations in violation of international law.

Now, in the last stage of his presidency, the Obama "we hoped for" may be here (almost). Most important, he is putting up a fight for a more realistic and potentially peaceful approach to foreign policy, oriented to diplomacy and negotiation rather than the hubris of US superpower. There is the Iran agreement and a new attitude toward possible cooperation with Russia in Syria and with regard to ISIS. These are only a beginning of a turn toward a practical, common sense approach to international cooperation needed to cope with the problems plaguing this century. Inevitably, resistance from wealthy selfish interests and the GOP matches the hysteria mounted against "Obamacare". Restoring diplomacy and the influence of the United Nations is also anathema to the Netanyahu government, which fears that shifting winds will undermine its apartheid colonial rule over the Palestinians.

Obama is now more assertive on domestic issues: racism, immigrant rights, the justice and prison systems, the minimum wage, women's equality, and more. Looking back, Obama's presidency suffered from a stubborn faith that his special powers of persuasion could bring about bipartisanship, his determination to convince Wall Street of his essential loyalty to the system, and his desire to calm racist fears that he might be "an angry black man". As a result, he put a barrier between his presidency and the kind of citizen participation and support that might have made it transformative.

Important progressive advances during the Obama presidency have come from the grass-roots. Starting with a determined and militant movement, public opinion was transformed on gay rights and marriage equality. The institutions of government had to accept the new reality. The "Black Lives Matter" movement is also forcing a wider recognition of intolerable injustice and racist brutality. Tremors are beginning to be felt in challenges to the shameful racism that corrupts the criminal justice and prison systems.

Looking at the Obama presidency, now mostly through the rear view mirror, doesn't tell us where we go from here. But there are some things to be taken to heart and mind.

Leaders, even presidents, may be better or worse but they cannot be saviors. What counts most is achieving a critical mass of public support for causes that sustain progress and challenge the worst evils of a destructive system. Easier said than done, but possible as experience makes clear. The process of popular struggle illuminates every democratic gain in our history. It defines democracy itself.

Our capitalist system of inequality and greed can crush people and their hopes. But it is neither invincible nor immune to change. Nor is the power establishment monolithic in the control of public policy.

The divisions in our society, including at the top, are a very important part of the policy equation. The rise of extreme reaction in most branches of government, fueled by a clique of ultra-right oligarchs, is an immediate and existential threat to the nation and to the world. The face of Carly Fiorina may or may not be "beautiful", but her prescriptions for the future sound like an American "Mein Kampf". And most of her stage mates are just as violent whether it comes to war-mongering or lying about Planned Parenthood. That crowd has already "elected" most governors, controls most state legislatures, has a lasting Supreme Court majority, and at least temporary control of the Senate and the House. What a dangerous world this is! It would be crazy to ignore how much worse it could get if the ultra-right is in full control.

The dilemma is that one can't rely on Clinton-Schumer Democrats not to succumb to rightwing pressure and hawk hysterics. The very limited steps by Obama toward a realistic and less warlike foreign policy might be aborted.

There is no easy answer, but an answer nevertheless. Despite howls from the GOP and their friend Netanyahu, despite 30 million AIPAC dollars, there is enough support to sustain the Iran agreement - and that includes a majority of American Jews who underwent the fiercest badgering. Hopefully that can be replicated and expanded in efforts to get the most out of the Democratic primaries.

It has never been harder to predict the future and maybe it's pointless after all. I think the only real answer is in expanding public awareness, in struggles and support for movements determined to turn the tide on climate change, the search for peace, and each issue of justice and equality. Above all, the tide has to be turned, and soon, against those who would plunge America and the world into a rerun of the horrors of World War II.

Obama fell short of being the transformative leader he hoped to be. Still he deserves honorable recognition as one of our most significant presidents. Maybe in the course of events, a transformative popular movement can be the source of inspiring leaders that the country surely needs.

[Leon Wofsy is Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology / Immunology at the University of California at Berkeley. His career in science and academia began when he was almost forty years old. Earlier, for more than fifteen years, he was a leader of Marxist youth organizations. That experience began during the student upheavals at New York's City College (CCNY) in the late 1930s, and encompassed the time of McCarthyism in the 1950s. He became a professor at UC Berkeley in 1964 just as the Free Speech Movement was about to erupt. He is the author of many scientific papers and articles on social issues. He edited a book on the Cold War, Before the Point of No Return (Monthly Review Press, 1986). His memoir, Looking for the Future (IW Rose Press, 1995) is available online in the Free Speech Movement Archives, Book Collection, UC Bancroft Library.]

This article was posted on Portside October 1, 2015.

Photo: Obama with former presidents. Commons.wikimedia.org

Cuba is humanity

Pablo Gonzalez Casanova — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:32:00 +0000

Introduction by W.T.Whitney

Cuba in the world

U. S. efforts to isolate Cuba notwithstanding, that country has succeeded in developing diplomatic, trade, scientific, and tourist relations with almost every other country in the world. But Cuba's humanitarian outreach to all peoples, particularly to the world's non-industrialized countries, serves as an especially striking instance of Cuba's involvement with the wider world. Cubans call it solidarity.

In fact, Cuban national hero and teacher Jose Marti breathed life into a mode of international solidarity and altruism that would be a hallmark of Cuba's revolutionary movement, from the time when he was leading preparations for Cuba's Second War for Independence to the present day. Marti is famous for his slogan "Patria es humanidad" - Homeland is all of humanity - which he first enunciated in New York just before he left for Cuba and the War, and where he would die. In 2010, Armando Hart Dávalos, a former revolutionary combatant, minister of culture, and more recently head of the Jose Marti Cultural Society, commemorated that important legacy of Marti.

Hart, writing for the Center for Marti Studies web site, noted that, "Today we honor Marti more than ever before. (1) Humanity is in a crisis of civilization that for the first time, in the long and complex history of humankind, threatens to provoke the death of our species. Now exactly 115 years ago, in the 'At Home' section of the newspaper "Patria," with the issue of January 26, 1895, Marti formulated a concept that has a cardinal significance in our time: "Patria es Humanidad" ... "[O]nly with an integrating vision of reaching out universally can we successfully confront the colossal challenges that the entire world is dealing with today."

"It's the idea," Hart adds, "that guides hundreds of doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, and other Cuban health workers at work in Haiti, there to give aid to the population struck hard by the devastating earthquake ... It's also what inspired the sacrifice and combat of our five brothers Antonio, René, Gerardo, Fernando, and Ramón, held in North American prisons ... In the legacy of Marti, Cuba possesses the master key for helping save the world from a catastrophe with unpredictable consequences for all humanity. May we never lose either the patience or the intelligence for promoting the thinking of Marti oriented to a commitment, the idea that 'Homeland is all of Humanity.'"

Marti elaborated upon the meaning of those words in that article he wrote for the newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and to which Hart referred. (2) There Marti says:

"In the work of the world, everyone has to put himself near to what is closest, not because it may belong to him,- and being his, superior to anything else, finer and more virtuous - but because man's influence is exercised better and more naturally over that which he knows about and where penalty or pleasure comes immediately. And that partition of human labor, and nothing else, is the true, impregnable concept of homeland. It's best to be lifting up all parties at the same time. In the end everyone will be up. Refusing to lift up one part is no way for lifting up the whole. Homeland is humanity; it's that portion of humanity we see next to us, and into which it was our lot to be born. And it must not be permitted, through the trick of some holy name, that we defend useless monarchies, overstuffed religions, and brazen, haggard politicians. Nor, what with sins being committed often in the name of homeland, should we allow other humans from being prevented from fulfilling their duty for humanity, and doing so within the part of it that is closest to them. This is light. It's from the sun that never sets. Homeland is that. Whoever forgets it lives weak lives, and dies badly without support or self - esteem and without appreciation from others. Whoever does fulfill this duty enjoys things, and in their older years feels and transmits the force of youth. There's no one older than an egoist."

Recent commentary from a Mexican sociologist and academician explore Cuba's unique role in the well-being of contemporary dwellers on planet earth. In updating Marti's message that homeland and the rest of the world are one, the author maintains that Cuba's Revolution served as a catalyst so that Marti's prescription might actually come to pass. (3) For space reasons his segment on current world problems does not appear in the translation below.

Cuba is Humanity

By Pablo González Casanova, August 27, 2015.

Ending the cruel blockade of Cuba by the United States - a blockade that lasted for 50 years - is one of many problems we confront in today's world. The renewal of diplomatic, familiar, tourist, commercial, cultural, and financial ties between both countries provokes a mixture of jubilation over cessation of aggressive measures and our natural concern about the best way to keep on building and fighting for freedom, socialism, and emancipation.

The entire world recognizes Cuba's advances during these 50 years. In the midst of encirclement and continuing siege by the empire, the little Caribbean island is in the first ranks in the struggle for equality and for social well-being. Cuba attained the highest measurements of literacy and schooling, achieved the most fundamental agrarian reform and provided the strongest economic and technical support for farmers and farm workers. Cuba gained the sharpest reduction in unemployment, brought down common crime, and provided a degree of internal security for inhabitants, quite uncommon in other countries. She has achieved high levels of university education, and also in the preparation of technicians, engineers, doctors, and other professionals. Cuba promoted arts and sciences and achieved numerous scientific discoveries that are internationally recognized - above all in the biologic area and in medicine. The state rewarded music, ballet, theater, cinema and other fine arts - and innumerable sports too - with a strong boost.

But even though such achievements are undeniable and truly impressive from the point of view of human emancipation, many people don't accept them.

A people live today in Cuba whose consciousness has been converted into love, and love into intelligence, and intelligence into organization. And if a statement like this seems exaggerated, think not only about why Cuba has been able to resist the blockade and the many aggressions coming its way, but also about the fact that whole world in this year 2015 is capitalist. It's a world where now all those who were, or said they were, socialist have openly and even aggressively restored capitalism over the past half century or more.

Cuba is the only one that survives in the midst of that human tragedy. And the Cuban Revolution, far from being the last Marxist-Leninist one (We have to get used to that now.) is the first of a new type of revolution initiated by the "26th of July" movement. It is often said that Jose Marti was the intellectual author of the Cuban Revolution. But he was also the historical driver of today's mode of struggle and cooperation, and the proponent also of an impressive coherence between what is said and what is done.

Furthermore, moral force becomes a fount of motivation for those active in struggles in their own countries. They begin to think, and then ponder over that immensely meaningful precept "Homeland is all of Humanity" and decide to stay with it. That proposition enriches the link between proletarian internationalism and the immense culture adorned yesterday by Marx, Lenin, and Che, and by Fidel today.

Latin American versions of socialism emerge out of various manifestations of humanism that include radical liberalism and versions represented by Father Varela and Christian humanism that later, and on their own, showed up as liberation theology. That's the reality. We must give up on our myths and dogmas. It also represents hope, as long as we now re-think what has happened and why we struggled - and as long as we now give thought to what can happen and what we must keep on fighting for (...)

It's under such conditions that we become aware that Cuba must not confine itself to a culture of resistance, but instead as a nation-state must take on a double role quite impossible for any other country. And that is, in the first place, to be a venue for encounters among forces struggling in their own land for a better world and that are no longer inclined [exclusively]to negotiations and to defending in peaceful ways the general interests of communities, citizens, peoples, and workers. And they are not resorting to methods of violence just because they were denied the right to fight peacefully. The Cuban experience in this area is of resistance and of building socialism and above all true democracy - and defending national sovereignty. That experience qualifies Cuba as the Island of Earth most capable of embracing others similarly engaged.

In addition to this project for which Cuba has such enormous capacity, there is one other that is of equal or more importance, certainly not less. Cuba perhaps has the capacity to be the last arena where saving life on earth might be taken on. It would the place where an autonomous world organism is created, one where the most distinguished experts engage, where also those responsible for the different critical and scientific modes of thought in world do likewise. They would design models for a peaceful transition to models of organization of life and work that assures life on earth and moves away from the present dangers of destruction of the biosphere and of ecocide.

That the Cuban revolution is different in every way is something that doesn't need to be proven; it is proven already. Cuba's new relations with the United States came about without the Revolution going back or breaking up. It's a time for utopia, for a project that maybe seems unrealistic but is the only one able to save - with freedom - life on our planet. All history of emancipation and of humanity has begun with utopias. This will not be the exception.

Notes:

(1) http://www.josemarti.cu/cintio_hart/patria-es-humanidad/

(2) http://www.metro.inter.edu/cai/jose_marti/Guia.pdf - Vol. 5, p. 468

(3) http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2015/08/27/cuba-es-humanidad/#.Vd8Nyv_lu1s

Translation of the segment by Jose Marti and the article by Pablo Gonzalez Casanova by W.T. Whitney.

Photo: Jose Marti statue in Havana by dirkvdM Creative Commons share alike 2.5

Ethel Rosenberg honored on her 100th birthday

Norman Markowitz — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:56:00 +0000

On September 28 something remarkable happened in the New York City Council. The Council passed a resolution by Councilman Daniel Dromm honoring the memory of Ethel Rosenberg on her hundredth birthday. Gale Brewer, borough president of Manhattan, then declared September 28 "Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan."

Many activists and supporters never thought they would see a day like this as long as capitalism lasted in the U.S. The world of the "patriot act," illegal searches and seizures and preventive detention would warm the heart of J. Edgar Hoover, whose name still graces the FBI building in Washington, even though his monstrous crimes are fairly well known by more and more people.

Below we have posted the Rosenberg Fund for Children Press release of the remarkable events today. Our only caveat would be some worry about separating Ethel and Julius. When information released under the Freedom of Information Act (far less extensive than what we have now) made it clear that Ethel was brought into the case to intimidate Julius into confessing and naming names (something the Rosenbergs could have done right up to their last hours, but refused to do) the fall back position was to reluctantly admit that Ethel was the victim of injustice but that Julius, of course, was guilty. This reminds us that half a century ago some conservative scholars, faced with the overwhelming evidence of the injustice of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, (the trial, conviction and eventual execution of two Italian immigrant anarchists largely framed for a robbery and murder in Massaachusetts during the Red Scare of 1919-1920), contended that the semi-literate Sacco was guilty and the eloquent Vanzetti was innocent.

Below the press release from the Rosenberg Fund for Children we are reposting an article by Norman Markowitz that appeared in PA in November 2008 on the Rosenberg case. Just as the Sacco Vanzetti case became the symbol of both that Red Scare and the reaction and repression which followed, so the Rosenberg case, the great political show trial of the Cold War era, should be a symbol of the worst political repression of that period.

Both Julius and Ethel were the victims of injustice as were Sacco and Vanzetti. Both died in the electric chair before they reached the age of forty, as did Sacco and Vanzetti. Both deserve to be honored, as does Abel Meeropol, the teacher, writer and CPUSA activist who adopted the Rosenberg boys who have born his name for sixty years. Under the name of James Allen, he wrote for CPUSA publications and wrote the classic anti-lynching song , "Strange Fruit," which Billie Holliday sang and which was banned on commercial radio in the U.S. in 1939, fourteen years before the political execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

[Norman Markowitz is a member of the Political Affairs editorial collective. He joined the Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case in the 1970s and has been an active supporter since that time.]

Ethel Rosenberg Receives Two Honors in New York City on Her 100th Birthday:

NYC Council Declares "government wrongfully executed Ethel Rosenberg""Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan" declared by Manhattan Borough President

September 28, 2015, New York, NY - At 11:00 am Eastern, on September 28, 2015, in a ceremony on the steps of City Hall, New York City Council Members gathered, with three generations of Ethel Rosenberg's descendants present, to issue a stunning proclamation in Ethel's honor, stating in part, "...the govenment wrongfully executed Ethel Rosenberg; now therefore BE IT KNOWN: That we, the undersigned Members of the New York City Council, honor the life and memory of Ethel Rosenberg in observance of the 100th anniversary of her birth." See full proclamation by Members of the New York CIty Countil here.

"Ethel Rosenberg was wrongfully executed in 1953 which resulted in her two young children becoming orphans," said NYC Council Member Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights, Elmhurst). "Although nothing can erase this terrible loss of life, I am pleased to join my colleagues in the Council in posthumously acknowledging Ms. Rosenberg on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth. It is my hope that this tribute will restore some dignity to the memory of this much-maligned New Yorker and her family."

In addition, Gale Brewer, the Manhattan Borough President, bestowed a remarkable honor of her own on Ethel, proclaiming, "...I, Gale A. Brewer, do hereby recognize the injustice suffered by Ethel Rosenberg and her family, and on the occasion of her 100th birthday on Monday, September 28th, 2015, proclaim 'Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.'" See full proclamation by Borough President Brewer here.

"...To have so many Council Members of my parents' hometown - my hometown, my brother's hometown - acknowledge our mother's achievements and note that she was wrongfully executed is a dream come true. Today, a major elected institution of this great city and Manhattan's borough President have taken important steps towards acknowledging a terrible injustice. Next, it is time for the Federal Government to step up to do the same." - excerpt of statement of Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

"Let me echo Rob's thanks to the members of the City Council, the Manhattan Borough President and the Public Advocate for recognizing the injustice that was done to our mother and, as a result, to her entire family.

We also want to make it clear that the unjust prosecution and execution of our mother damaged our country as well...We believe that the issuance of these proclamations implicitly calls upon the federal government to take corrective action. We would like to make this request explicitly. Therefore, we call upon Attorney General Lynch and President Obama to acknowledge the injustice done to Ethel Rosenberg back in 1953 as a way of learning from our past in the hope that similar injustices will be avoided in the future."- excerpt of statement of Michael Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

For information contact:
Amber Black
Rosenberg Fund for Children
(413) 529-0063, amber@rfc.org

The Rosenberg "atomic spy" case is 58 years old, yet its reverberations are still being felt. In 1953, within three years of their arrest, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. From the beginning, many people hotly contested the outcome of the trial. Many, on both sides, still use the case to highlight the worst excesses of the Cold War. This past September, the release of previously secret grand jury testimony related to Ethel Rosenberg's role along with an 'admission' by Morton Sobell made news. And with the inevitable host of misrepresentations and claims made as a result, the case is worth reexamining in an historical perspective.

My experience with the Rosenberg case began when I joined the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA - formerly the Committee to Re-Open the Rosenberg Case) in the mid-1970s. There, I met Michael and Robert Meeropol, the Rosenberg's sons, and also the late Marshall "Mike" Perlin, Morton Sobell's attorney in the 1951 trial. I also came to know Walter and Miriam Schneir, whose pioneering work, Invitation to An Inquest, in effect re-opened the case for a new audience in the late 1960s.

Prior to my involvement, the Committee to Re-open the Rosenberg Case had compelled the FBI to release important but heavily censored documents on the case using the Freedom of Information Act. While the documents failed to prove Julius Rosenberg's innocence, they provided strong evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had been prosecuted as a ploy to intimidate Julius. The declassified documents also showed that Judge Irving Kaufman, who pronounced the death sentence on the Rosenbergs, had in the two years leading up to their execution, conspired with the Justice Department to thwart the defendant's appeals. Kaufman's actions, by any legal standard, violated judicial ethics.

The Anti-communist Cottage Industry

Subsequently historian Ronald Radosh, who formerly associated with New Left radicals in the 1960s, joined journalist Joyce Milton to use these documents and various interviews in their 1983 book, The Rosenberg File. This book claimed to affirm Julius Rosenberg's guilt. It presented the standard House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and FBI portrayal of the Communist Party USA as a conspiratorial front for both a Soviet-led world revolution and Soviet conquest of the United States.

At the time of its publication, I strongly criticized the Radosh and Milton work as an attempt to legitimize the Reagan administration's extreme intensification of the Cold War. Reagan, who not by accident gave Judge Kaufman the Medal of Freedom in 1987, had adopted a Cold War mentality that also enlisted a cadre of historians to recycle the anti-communist ideas of the 1950s. "The Witch-hunter's Truth," a pamphlet published by the Fund, dealt with these issues. In 1983, I attended a packed town hall debate between the Schneirs and Radosh and Milton sponsored by The Nation Magazine. At that debate various sections of the left and the former left, ranging from communists and ex-communists to Cold War liberals and ex-Cold War liberals (who came to support Reagan as self-styled "neo-conservatives") showed up to cheer and boo the respective sides.

In the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US government released its decryptions of Soviet intelligence messages under the code name "Venona Project." Since then, anti-communist historians have often used the decryptions in their research uncritically, even though such documents are notoriously inaccurate and politically colored. They created a sort of archival HUAC, to latch onto every encoded reference as fact and compile lists of "agents" and "dupes" of the communist conspiracy. Despite the fact that many such references are known to be false or planted, many scientists, government officials, non-communist journalists like the late I.F. Stone, found themselves accused of being Soviet agents because of listings in the Venona files. Julius Rosenberg, too, appeared in the Venona files under the code-name "liberal" as having providing information to the Soviets during World War II.

Some additional investigation, however, brought the Venona Project into serious doubt. For example, historians uncovered the fact that Kim Philby, the leading Soviet agent in the 1940s who also happened to head British counter-intelligence, knew about the Venona Project. Forced out of British intelligence in 1949 and under suspicion for years, Philby fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. Philby's role and subsequent exposure suggest that Venona materials from much of the 1940s should be considered suspect. In addition, few serious historians doubted that the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover's leadership, would hold itself above doctoring documents to support its political schemes. Hoover, after all, had furnished HUAC and Sen. Joseph McCarthy with all sorts of distorted and incomplete documents to foster their scurrilous investigations. Historians also now know that Hoover had used FBI files, many of them distorted, to blackmail prominent figures.

By the mid-1990s, the case receded into memory. Ronald Radosh took to writing books connecting Bill Clinton and the Democrats with communists and becoming even more the caricature of a 1950s red-baiter. By this time, second and third generation historians, who studied the Communist Party in the late 1980s and 1990s, began to emerge from the smog of anti-communism. Many of them came to portray Communist Party activists as making positive contributions to the labor movement and to civil rights and other struggles, even if this largely non-Marxist and certainly non-communist scholarship often looked critically at formal CPUSA positions and leadership.

About that time, I wrote an article for the Encyclopedia of American National Biography on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I dealt with the case as a politically motivated one, and addressed the clear anti-Semitic subtext of the case. My article had an interesting effect. Both far rightists on the Internet and historians, for whom study of the communist movement can only be the study of espionage, denounced the publication for permitting me to write the article. They referred to me as a "proud, "self-confessed, "admitted" communist, which should have disqualified me from writing about the Rosenbergs, since anything that I wrote would be untrustworthy and deceptive. Only anti-communists, they opined, could write about communists without being biased. Some even accused me of insisting that the Rosenberg case was simply about anti-Semitism. I felt as though I had been transported back into the period I had written about, which many of my accusers seemed to have never left.

New Evidence, Old Story

The recent revelations about the Rosenberg case added important documentation to what we had been saying for years: that the authorities fabricated evidence, particularly against Ethel. On September 11th, the National Security Archives at George Washington University released declassified grand jury testimony by Ruth Greenglass, Ethel's sister and wife of alleged accomplice David Greenglass. In that grand jury testimony, Ruth claimed that the secret information allegedly obtained by David Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg was sent to Soviet agents written in her own (Ruth's) handwriting. During the trial, however, Ruth testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed the information. This perjured contradiction caused historians reviewing the new documents to say it both cleared Ethel and proved that the federal attorneys on the case made up evidence against her in order to include her in the proceedings. Such a fabrication, by any standard, should have put the entire trial into jeopardy. It also shows that the US government executed a woman it knew to be innocent.

While the major media largely ignored the Greenglass revelations, a new piece of the story emerged at about the same time. On September 12th, the New York Times published what it called Morton Sobell's "confession." Unfortunately for those who have obsessed over the spy story for decades, Sobell made no mention of nuclear espionage - the whole crux of the case - or that he knew that Julius Rosenberg had anything to do with nuclear espionage. While the major media today seemed firmly intent on continuing this impression, for it was the same fabricated nuclear issue - that is allegedly handing to the Soviets 'the secret of the atomic bomb' - for which both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed.

Sobell, now over 90, stated clearly that he all he did was work with Julius Rosenberg to pass non-nuclear information to the Soviets during World War II. Sobell wrote, "As for me, I helped an ally (admittedly illegally) during World War II. I chose not to cooperate with the government in 1950. The issues are now with the historians." For a man who spent 19 years doing hard time in federal prison for those wartime activities, that is a fairly magnanimous statement.

Secret of the Atomic Bomb

Despite these new revelations, some aspects of the case, the most important ones, remain unchanged. There was no such thing as the 'secret of the atom bomb,' no more than there was a secret to the automobile. Unfortunately, no scientific expert witness had the courage to say at the Rosenberg's trial in 1951. Scientists had known about nuclear fission, the basic inner-workings of the bomb, since before World War II. The atomic bomb project was 'an industry, not a recipe,' nuclear physicist Phillip Morrison would say later.

When the US successfully built an atomic weapon, it became clear that the Truman administration intended to use it to threaten the Soviets. The US government shared nuclear information with the British during the war but refused to do so its Soviet allies. When Harry Truman informed Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the US had successfully tested such a weapon, he meant it as an implied threat to the Soviets to conform to US dictates. Truman's actions prompted the first steps in the nuclear arms race. Stalin immediately ordered his subordinates to contact Moscow and make the Soviet atom bomb project a high priority.

Americans built the first atomic bomb, but scientists familiar with the project understood they would probably not be the last. The Truman administration, as part of its developing Cold War policy against the Soviets, decided immediately after the war to refuse to work with the Soviets in the United Nations to promote a nuclear disarmament program. Truman wanted to maintain a monopoly over nuclear weapons, develop those weapons in quantity and quality, and use this nuclear monopoly to gain global hegemony.

The goal of maintaining a nuclear monopoly failed for many reasons. The Soviets' successful explosion of a nuclear device in 1949 stood as only one of many causes for this failure. Political reaction to the Soviets' successful test led directly to hysterical claims that Soviet spies in the Communist Party stole the "secret" of the atomic bomb. Right-wing pundits and demagogues blamed American communists and the Soviets entirely for the nuclear war danger, despite the fact that only the US had ever used an atomic bomb on people. Based on that irrational assertion and using a guilt by association logic, McCarthyites justified any action to fight the Soviets and go after communist movements as well as non-communist groups suspected of communist affiliations. The Rosenberg-Sobell political show trial served as "proof" for that assertion.

Spies Among Us

I do not mean to suggest that no spies were involved with nuclear questions. No one argued in 1951, for example, that Klaus Fuchs did not pass information to the Soviets. Fuchs, however, worked as an actual physicist, not an engineer and machine shop operator like Julius Rosenberg or a draftsman and college dropout like David Greenglass.

In recent years, historians also proved that Theodore Hall met with Soviet officials in New York in June 1945 and provided them with a drawing of a model of the atomic bomb that proved valuable for their project. Shortly before his death (he went on to a distinguished scientific career in Britain), Hall said that he took these steps to keep the US from establishing monopoly control over the atom bomb and nuclear weapons after the war. Such a monopoly would have endangered the world, he believed.

Likewise, historians think that physicist Joel Koval worked for the Soviets. Koval was born in Iowa to pre-revolution immigrants from Czarist Russia. Later, the Kovals moved with Joel to Birobidjan, a Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union established for Jewish citizens who wished to live in an area specifically set aside for Jews. There, Koval distinguished himself as a student of physics and then, in a story fit for Hollywood, returned to the US as an agent of Soviet military intelligence. Ironically, the Putin government of the capitalist "new Russia" gave him a posthumous medal.

Abuses of Power

The Soviet Union wasn't the only foreign country with spies operating in the US during the 1930 and 1940s. During this time, America had a large racist, openly anti-Semitic isolationist right wing, which only reluctantly joined the war effort against the Nazis. This ultra right included corporate leaders who prior to the war had been happy to do business with Hitler, as well as US military and State Department figures who sought to limit aid to the Soviets at a time when they were taking on more than 80 percent of Axis ground forces in Europe.

With the future of the world literally hanging in the balance, World War II was a desperate and unusual circumstance. Although the Soviet Union and the US were allies, the FBI, extensive recent scholarship has shown, continued to regard the Communist Party, anti-fascist émigrés from Germany and other countries, and all who had contact with the Soviet Union during the war as enemies, greater enemies even than individuals and groups that had pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sympathies. J. Edgar Hoover even put Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends under surveillance in an attempt to discredit her and her circle on political and personal grounds. And most of the military and corporate leaders whose powers now greatly increased during the war refused to hide their deep and long-standing hostility to the Communist Party or see the war in anti-fascist terms.

Patriotic, Not Subversive

Thousands of Communist Party members in the military services initially faced major forms of discrimination, from segregation into units that the military reserved for troublemakers to attempts to bar them from officers training programs. This didn't prevent an estimated 15,000 communists from serving in the US armed forces during World War II. Some served in the OSS (ironically, the predecessor to the CIA), where their knowledge of and commitment to fighting fascism made them in effect "advanced" soldiers. Others received decorations for individual acts of heroism. Collectively, the Communist Party focused its energies on achieving victory over fascism, winning the war and the peace. Communists organized the campaign to open an early Second Front, which, had it come to fruition earlier, might have saved millions of lives in Europe and Asia.

The Communist Party made serious mistakes. It supported, for example, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, for which it later issued a formal apology long before the US government did. The Communist Party's total commitment to winning the war and the use of all of its influence in all sectors of society, however, represented the highest form of patriotism. This sense of patriotic duty, shared by millions of working-class people, went unmatched by the capitalist class, which had to be bribed with cost-plus contracts to increase war production. Conservative politicians, who turned a blind eye to war profiteering, fought to protect corporate profits and sowed the seeds of racism.

Large sections of the US ruling class felt uneasy with and expressed contempt for what they saw as a "love affair" with the Soviet people. Mass media celebrated Soviet heroism and even portrayed Joseph Stalin as a friendly "Uncle Joe." Capitalists and the right wing feared that these sentiments somehow would spill over into a postwar radicalization, making it more difficult to trot out the Soviet bogey.

These conditions fostered an environment in which some people concluded that providing aid to the Soviet Union to help their war effort, despite opposition from right-wing leaders of the military industrial complex, served the interests of both the Soviet and American people.

Serious students of Communist Party activists in this period, those who have looked at rank-and-file communists and their activism, stress their identification with and love of the US working class, its vital popular culture and its potential to advance democracy and socialism. These widely held beliefs became something like a left "American exceptionalism," a belief that all of US history from the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights were large steps on the road to an eventual socialist "great society" which would play a major role in liberating humanity. While such views may be criticized as naïve or even utopian, making it difficult for many to respond to the massive and relatively sudden postwar repression, these views were a far cry from "subversive."

Friends of the Rosenbergs have long portrayed them in this light. These were people who, for ill or for good, admired both Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt as advancing the struggle for working-class liberation against fascism. They saw them as helping to bring about more than a "better world," but a world with a socialist system that fostered equality, peace and social justice. If patriotism in its most simple definition means love of country, this was the America that communists defended and loved, rather than the America of Standard Oil, Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover, the corporate leadership ready and willing to do business with Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists both to make money and fight socialist revolutions.

Loose Ends

Attorney Mike Perlin always said that the Rosenberg-Sobell trial was a frame-up, and even with the recent statement of his client, Morton Sobell, the new material released by the National Security Archives showed that. Those who for political purposes continue to try to make the history of the Communist Party a story of spies and conspiracy should be permitted to wallow in their own irrelevance, both to any serious study of the communist movement as a social movement or for that matter to any understanding of the complexities of espionage.

Other questions remain unanswered, some perhaps unanswerable. Did the information that Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Joel Koval and others provide the Soviets enable them to get a bomb in four years rather than the 10 years estimated by US intelligence? No one can say. Had the Soviets not gotten the atomic bomb when they did, would Truman's threat to use atomic weapons in the Korean War against both Korea and China have been carried out? Quite likely.

Judge Irving Kaufman, in ordering Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's execution, accused them of sentencing to death millions, including their own children by giving the Soviet Union the "secret" of the atom bomb. In that rationalization of the death sentence, Kaufman both told the big lie of the Rosenberg-Sobell case and expressed perfectly the purpose of the trial. No "secret" of the atom bomb existed for Julius Rosenberg to provide anyone. There was, however, the Korean War and a new race to build the hydrogen bomb. Above all, Kaufman pronounced his sentence during a Cold War that promised war without end. The ideology of anti-communism buttressed by the terror that possible nuclear war would bring stood at the heart of the trial, the conviction and the executions.

Let me conclude by putting the shoe politically on the other foot. In the future, the US government may view it politically feasible to give historians and journalists the incentive to seriously study the relationship of US corporations both before and during World War II to their business allies and subsidiaries in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. As a result of those relationships some corporations made available important secrets used for information technology, synthetic rubber, aircraft development and other materials of immediate and direct military value to the Axis war machines.

And perhaps these writers will study those political, business and military leaders whom Axis intelligence reports often commented upon favorably, not to mention those who leaked information about Roosevelt's pre-war efforts to aid the allies in order to deliberately scuttle those efforts, or the military leaders like George Patton who wanted an immediate war against the Soviets after hostilities with the Germans ended. Perhaps new light may be shed on US military leaders who busily prepared "preventive war" scenarios against the Soviets in which the US control of atomic weapons emerged as "the winning weapon" against the Soviet Union.

Photo: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. commons.wikimedia.org

Exciting new fossil find in South Africa

Emile Schepers — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 10:25:00 +0000

An exciting new hominid fossil has been found in the deepest recesses of the Rising Star Cave, about 20 miles Northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/10/africa/homo-naledi-human-relative-species The fossil remains include nearly complete skeletons of several individuals, and remains of at least 15 separate individuals, which is unusual because the more usual discovery is of isolated broken up crania only, with occasional other bits and pieces. Though the find will not revolutionize science's ideas of how our species evolved, it gives a more complete picture of the basic pattern and raises interesting questions about the cognitive abilities of these possible ancestors of modern human beings.

The findings from the initial 2013 discovery and subsequent research were just announced by Dr. Lee Berger, Research Professor at the Evolutionary Studies Institute and the Center of Excellence in Paleoscience at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Berger has had a distinguished career in physical anthropology and human paleontology, having discovered, among other things, a new species of Australopithecene, Australopithecus sediba, in another South African cave in 2008.

The remains were found in a very deep recesses of Rising Star Cave, so far in that Berger had to employ especially thin people to reach them. The positioning of the skeletons suggests that they may have been put there deliberately, but gives no clue as to why, when or by whom. The remains, with their advanced degree of fossilization, probably will not lend themselves to carbon 14 dating, so it might be a while before we know what approximate dates to assign to them.

The remains themselves show a mixture of very ancient and more modern features. The hands appear to be adapted for using tools, but the fingers also show curvature that suggests that they were capable tree-climbers. The feet are very similar to those of modern human beings rather than apes. The teeth include molars with smaller, human-like front teeth. The skulls look very much like those of the well-known Homo erectus, which lived in this part of Africa and also in Europe and Asia between 1.9 million and 200,000 years ago. African variants of early Homo are sometimes called Homo ergaster, but many scientists now think that this is just a sub variety of Homo erectus.

However, the cranial capacity, meaning brain size, of the individuals is considerably smaller than the average for other Homo erectus populations. This and other factors led Lee and his team to propose that this is actually a different Homo species, which they are calling Homo naledi. But this set off a controversy. In recent years, some scientists have been complaining that the way fossil hominid remains have been classified and named underplays the degree of anatomical variety found in any one species. So the designation of the skeletons as Homo naledi and not just as a subgroup of the old familiar Homo erectus, is being met with some skepticism. Unfortunately, with remains that have reached an advanced state of fossilization, it is impossible to do DNA analysis which might resolve this question. However, Berger's team will try.

Some reports express surprise at the placing of the remains in the furthest recesses of the cave. It looks deliberate, but did small brained beings like these have the capacity to carry out deliberate burials with some sort of symbolic meaning?

Well, why not? Even the species generally acknowledged to have preceded Homo erectus, the smaller-brained Homo habilis, is known to have made and used simple tools, and others of the Homo erectus/Homo ergaster complex made more sophisticated ones. Also, there are indications that the erectus/ergaster knew the use of fire and may even have had the beginnings of speech and language capacity. So it seems no big to stretch to think that they may have had some deliberate way of disposing of their dead. Yet the idea has been suggested that the skeletons were those of individuals killed by more modern human types who then stashed the bodies in the cave. To me, this seems very speculative.

Anyway, the find is stunning because of the number of individuals and the completeness of their remains. It does not radically change the overall understanding of how and where human beings evolved: This probable progression still holds: A split from the line that evolved into chimpanzees and bonobos perhaps ten million years ago, Sahelanthropus in what is now Chad dated at about 7 million years ago; then varieties of the genus Ardepithecus in East Africa about 4 ½ million years ago, and Australopithecus (several species) in East and Southern Africa about four million years ago. The first member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, our first known tool making ancestor, appears on the scene in Eastern and Southern Africa perhaps 2.8 to 1.5 million years ago, followed by the Homo erectus/Homo ergaster complex. Anatomically modern human beings appeared in East Africa around 200,000 years ago. Both erectus/ergaster and modern Homo sapiens had African origins from which they spread to Asia and Europe, and then Homo sapiens all over the globe.

The overall pattern since the split from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos has involved the development of erect bipedal posture, tool making, beginnings of language and increased cranial capacity. In all likelihood, increased sociality-the ability to function as an organized social group-developed along with all this, and the full development of modern brain capacity followed behind the rest, as postulated long ago by Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator and alter ego. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/

So the development of human sociality was the force driving the development of the modern human being, anatomically, cognitively and emotionally.

Or to quote a familiar Zulu saying from another area of South Africa: "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu". "A person becomes a person through (other) people". This originally referred to how we are socialized, but turns out to be applicable to how we evolved as well.

Image: Comparison of skull features of early human species. Wikimedia Creative Commons 4.0

Qualifications for Republican presidential nominees

Norman Markowitz — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 12:08:00 +0000

Is being a sociopath a qualification for the presidency? Adolf Hitler was a sociopath who gained power and advanced a policy of racism, militarism and war which led to the greatest war in human history and the mass murder of many millions of civilians based on the sociopathology of German fascism.

Donald Trump is a sociopath or someone giving a very good imitation of one when he calls for the mass deportation of eleven million people, undocumented workers and their families, and demands that Mexico build a border wall to keep out further immigrants. In practice, the first part of that "policy" could only be accomplished through the creation of a fascist police state, would in the very short run, lead to thousands of deaths, and in all likelihood a war with Mexico, the third largest nation in terms of population in the Western Hemisphere. But what would be the consequences of such a war, besides of course millions of deaths? Would Trump, like Hitler, see the Mexicans and all other Latinos as "untermenschen," inferior people who must make way for the superior North Americans, a murderous revival of the "Manifest Destiny" of the 1840s? Would his army and special forces begin to resettle North Americans, poor whites from the South, unemployed workers from the North, on property and businesses seized from Mexicans as Hitler's forces did with property seized from Jews, Poles, and other "untermenschen"?

If this speculation sounds crazy, it is not me but Trump who in his crazines has raised these issues. And he is what the media is talking about. They are talking much more about him that they are about Bernie Sanders for example, a point that would not be lost on Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who saw the press and radio as vehicles to repeat big lies over and over again until masses of people came to accept them passively and repeat them among themselves.

And then of course there are the others, speculating on various issues: Men pledging that they will protect women from abortions and education about sexuality, men and women invoking God as if he were both their personal friend and a registered Republican. Carly Fiorina doing a bad imitation of John Foster Dulles as she calls for "getting tough," with the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, while Donald Trump hurls sexist insults at her.

If the trickle down "theory" which the Republican right has revived and used as a rationale for economic policies that favor the corporations and the rich would be applied to their candidates' influence on society, bipolar mental disease, paranoia,, schizophrenia, borderline pyschosis, and for those less directly affected , various forms of neurosis can be expected to trickle down to the people, whose mental health would also be threatened by the increased inequality and poverty that the Republican policies would bring.

We can be sure that the ruling circles of U.S. finance capital will back any of these candidates, including Trump, to continue to accumulate more and more wealth for themselves. After all, their counterparts did that in Weimar Germany, where they were faced with both a devastating depression and also powerful albeit divided and rival Social Democratic and Communist parties.

And we shouldn't expect Hillary Clinton to offer a serious alternative to these Republicans unless we are as screwy as they are.

She wouldn't use force and violence to deport millions or actively bust unions, but she would protect the interests of finance capital as the concentration of wealth became more unequal, real wages continued to decline, and education, housing, transportation continued to deteriorate.

She would also continue the foreign policy which has produced one disaster after another along with a crippling military budget. In all likelihood, the Republican right would then grow stronger and more dangerous, just as in Weimar Germany, the Nazis grew stronger because non Nazi fiscal conservative governments refused to seriously address the mass unemployment produced by the depression.

All of this should really lead trade union activists, community activists, civil rights and civil liberties activities, those in the progressive wing of the Democratic party to realize and take seriously the dangers that the Republican right, Trump especially but the others also, represent today.

They should join the rest of us and begin to stand with Bernie Sanders who is offering concrete solutions to the economic crisis the nation faces. At least, they should begin to demand what Bernie Sanders is demanding and even if they have bought into or have been bought by the Clinton campaign, at the very least demand that Clinton identify herself with the issues that Sanders is raising and then hold her to those positions.

Those are the only sane response that one can make to Republican debates in which reason and logic have been invisible.

Image: The caricature of Donald Trump was adapted from Creative Commons licensed images from Gage Skidmore's Flickr photostream: face and body.

The Bolivarian left in Latin America: a challenge to imperialism

Emile Schepers — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 11:55:00 +0000

Since the election of Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in 1998, left or left-center governments have come to power or remained in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela and some of the smaller Caribbean states (left wing governments have been ousted by coups in Haiti, Honduras and Paraguay, and by this year's elections in Guyana).

This "Bolivarian pink tide" represents one of the greatest challenges to international monopoly capital and U.S. hegemony over the region since the fall of the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 1980s. Moreover, the process of regional integration which the Latin American and Caribbean left wing governments have undertaken has contributed to a rise in living standards for the majorities in each country. New structures of regional cooperation and economic integration have included the ALBA (The Bolivarian Alliance for Our America), UNASUR (Union of South American Nations), the revitalized MERCOSUR (South American Common Market), PETROCARIBE, CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and BANASUR (Bank of the South, a new South American development bank). These bodies have challenged the hegemony of the United States in the Western Hemisphere and have built new trade and political relationships with the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

However, right now these governments have hit a rough patch. Several key countries are experiencing economic slowdowns, there is new instability, and the historic advances, though not reversed, are threatened. The right wing is making a coordinated regional push to restore its power, counting on support from the United States in doing so. Left and left-center governments emphasize right wing sabotage as being at the root of the current difficulties, and there is certainly an element of that. The right and the ruling class, including corporate controlled media, rather, blame everything on the mistakes of the left and left-center governments. But there are some general characteristics of the whole panorama that constitute systemic challenges to the "Bolivarian" project that need to be overcome.

What are the major challenges the left wing governments in Latin America face?

First of all, their options are severely limited by the fact that they have to work within the overall framework of the neo-liberal imperialist world order.

I prefer the definition of imperialism used by V.I. Lenin in his 1917 book "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism". https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ For Lenin, imperialism is not a mere policy option of this or that government in wealthy capitalist countries, or just a conspiracy hatched in the basement of the White House or the Quay D'Orsay. To Lenin, imperialism is nothing less than the way that international monopoly capitalism is organized in both its economic and political dimensions. Though some aspects of imperialism have changed since Lenin's day (which I will refer to below), its major features remain, namely extreme inequality of wealth and of power between the wealthy "developed" countries such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, and the poor countries of Africa, most of Asia, and Latin America. In addition financialization, pointed to as an essential feature of imperialism by Lenin, has mushroomed to an immense degree since 1917.

The phrase "corporate globalization" is not an adequate gloss for the concept of imperialism, because it implies that the multinational corporations act alone in promoting their worldwide interests; in fact, the actions of the state, and of groups of states, in the wealthy capitalist countries are essential for the corporate agenda to be advanced worldwide. The big multi-state entities which push the agenda of the transnational corporations, such as NATO, NAFTA, CAFTA DR, other "free trade" pacts, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the proposed Transpacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement are primarily negotiated and established by national governments individually and collectively, with the wealthy capitalist countries calling the shots, and the poorer countries falling into line, either willingly or under duress, depending on the political nature of their own governments. So "corporate globalization" is a term which tends to let the state off the hook.

Secondly, with the exception of Cuba, none of the Western Hemisphere countries with left or left-center governments are actually socialist. The leaders they have elected are themselves sincere socialists, and they and millions of their followers aspire to creating new forms of socialism, but they have not achieved this yet. (Even Cuba's leaders modestly say they are trying to build socialism, not that they have perfected it). The old ruling classes, while ousted from some key positions in the state apparatus, still dominate others and most of the "commanding heights" of the economy in each country. The private press and media are just as much under the control of the wealthy in the Bolivarian countries as they are in the United States, and work assiduously against progressive policies. For example old ruling class interests contro wholesale and retail trade in staples and other items in Venezuela, giving them leverage against the Bolivarian state in that they can influence prices and the supply of goods. In Bolivia, old ruling groups in Santa Cruz province in the east of the country have caused major headaches for leftist president Evo Morales. Moreover the old ruling classes are allied with the multinational corporations and the governments of the wealthy developed countries, and coordinate with them in their never-ending efforts to return to full power in the presidential mansions, the legislatures, the military, the bureaucracy and all other state institutions.

The fact that Bolivarian "pink tide" leftism has to work within the confines of these two "straight jackets" - imperialism and the retention of massive power by "their own" ruling classes-is a severely limiting factor in what they can achieve in the short run.

Also, the mixed nature of the main left and left-center parties in power has to be borne in mind. Although almost without exception the communist parties are in strong support of the Bolivarian dynamic, these are not the largest parties anywhere except Cuba. The big parties in power such as the Workers' Party (PT) in Brazil, the Venezuelan United Socialist Party, the Alianza Pais coalition in Ecuador etc. are a mixture of Marxist, Christian left, social democratic, nationalist, left- Peronist and populist tendencies, which creates its own problems, internal conflicts and limitations.

There are other serious challenges to advances by the left-wing governments as well.

A major one is the fact that many of the left-wing governments have inherited an economic model based on export of commodities, which, although it may bring a lot of capital into the country, does not conduce to balanced development. And it leaves governments and nations at the mercy of commodity prices which they don't have many ways to control, even when, as in the case of Venezuela's oil, the industries in question have been nationalized. In Latin America, advances have been achieved by harnessing profits from the international sale of oil, natural gas and mining products for the purpose of raising the abysmally low living standards of the working class and poor agricultural population. But over the last year, the price of oil in the international marketplace has dropped by half.

Venezuela's economy is severely stressed by the oil price drop; efforts by the Venezuelan government to get OPEC to cut back on production and thus support oil prices failed due to opposition from Saudi Arabia. This is not a new phenomenon or one confined to the Western Hemisphere; in South Africa, for example, the issue of the fluctuating price of mining products (gold, platinum etc.) has been a cause of instability since pre-apartheid days, and the current slump in gold prices is having a deleterious effect. http://solidnet.org/south-africa-south-african-communist-party/south-african-cp-south-african-communist-party-press-statement-30-august-2015-en Every progressive government in Latin America has had the ambition of employing profits from commodity sales to diversify the economy by developing new industries, modernizing agriculture etc. But this takes time and is far from completion. Meanwhile a country like Venezuela has to import a large proportion of the goods its people need for everyday life, and the lower the price it can get for its oil, the more difficult it becomes either to keep on importing all these things, or to capitalize its own projects in the diversification of production, while at the same time continuing to improve the living standards of its poor and working class majority.

Then there is the debt trap. For poor countries in the past, the only way to get money for development projects has been to borrow it (often via the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), and the only way to pay it back has been to keep living standards low. Nevertheless the debt of many countries turns out to be unsustainable, and efforts to get out from under it are extremely difficult and traumatic. Argentina, for example, had to live under a military dictatorship during the 1970s that was as corrupt as it was bloodthirsty, and which got the country deeply into debt that had very bad long term consequences, some of which are still being felt today. http://peoplesworld.org/argentina-vulture-funds-and-the-u-s-supreme-court/

Another problem is that of balancing economic development vis a vis environmental protection and sustainability. There are legitimate demands by environmentalists and, in some cases, indigenous populations to limit certain kinds of growth. But to stop all development in the interests of protecting the rural environment is not a viable option because urban poor and working class populations demand improvements in their living standards, including jobs, housing, transportation, electricity and other things, all of which have their impact. Left wing governments like those of Bolivia, Ecuador and others which rely to some extent on extractive industries have had a difficult time managing this balance. http://www.alames.org/documentos/amazoniaAGL.pdf

Most of the countries in the region are ethnically diverse, and specific ethnic populations have their own longstanding demands, including retention or regaining of traditional lands, ending of racist discrimination, and protection of language and cultural rights. In each country, part of the promise of the left in power has been to attend to these demands; yet unity is also essential for the Bolivarian project to move forward. Various local elites and also agencies of the empire, including corporate funded non-government organizations, as well as those receiving money from U.S. government agencies such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, have been quick to move in and try to play on these ethnic differences. Recent mass disturbances in Ecuador are a case in point. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/After-Week-of-Violence-Ecuador-Opposition-Continues-Protests-20150820-0029.html There have been similar dynamics elsewhere.

Finally, there is an issue which must be of concern to all socialists everywhere, which is how to really build socialism rather than letting a sort of paternalistic clientalism (or patronage politics), perhaps using socialist phraseology, take over the Bolivarian project and destroy its socialist potential. The left-wing governments in Latin America have been correctly concerned with quickly raising the horrible living standards of millions of their people as an immediate, urgent priority. They have been successful in pulling millions out of poverty, and of vastly improving health care, schools, housing and other basic public services. In doing this, they have also created the mass base for governing, and, not least important, for continuing to win elections and staying in power.

But this still works within a framework of "the people demand and the government provides". The socialist project, from the very beginning, must go far beyond this or it will not thrive; it has to be based on the concept that "the people (workers, small farmers, etc.) organize and run the economy and the state". Otherwise, in hard times, when the left-wing government finds itself not able to provide the same level of services as before, important sectors of the population are likely to abandon their support for it, and listen to demagogic promises of the right. Moreover, the stopgap of raising living standards by redistributing wealth to the marginalized poor does not address the need to engage these sectors of the population in productive activities that will build up the economy and lead to the desired levels of diversification, including the creation of a larger industrialized sector, more productive and environmentally friendly agriculture and other things that all agree have to be achieved to make a final break with "underdevelopment".

This last point is the focus of major discussions on the socialist left worldwide, not just in Latin America. The task is in reality one of reconceptualizing what socialism actually is. That, in turn, entails careful study of the reasons that the socialist project in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe collapsed so spectacularly by 1991. A lot of the discussions on this topic that I have heard and read range from frustrating to useless, rehashing old sectarian battles that have little to teach people in places like Latin America. If Marxists can't come to grips with all this, we can't contribute much to the practical tasks of those who are trying to build socialism in extremely difficult circumstances.

Before I move on to the topic of internationalist solidarity, let me just point out that whatever the problems of the left and left-center governments, the situation of the other governments in the region is much worse. The president of Guatemala has just resigned and been arrested for corruption, http://peoplesworld.org/guatemalan-president-arrested-trouble-looms-as-election-goes-to-runoff/ things are trending the same way in Honduras. Both of these countries are mired in intractable poverty and violence. Mexico is in crisis, with a slumping economy, a shockingly corrupt political class, and major threats to the security of the public. Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic are in notably bad shape. Even Puerto Rico, controlled and heavily subsidized by the United States, is swamped by unsustainable debt and facing economic collapse. Badly as things are going in the Bolivarian pink tide countries, they are going much worse in Latin American countries that have simply gone with the flow of neo-liberal imperialism.

What is the duty of the left in the United States and other wealthy countries of the imperial center in this situation?

First of all, at the start of this piece, I noted that there were some differences between the imperialism of Lenin's day and that of our own time. One difference that is extremely important for our practical work is that, while in Lenin's day the imperial plunder of the "colonies and semi-colonies" allowed the bourgeoisie to partly satisfy short term demands of the working class in the imperial centers, this is no longer happening. On the contrary, the shift to outsourcing of industrial production and jobs to areas of the world where the cheapest labor can be found has the opposite effect, of dragging wages down everywhere, a dynamic that began in the 1950s and has reached a fever pitch today. Under so called "free trade" regimes, which are not mainly about "reducing trade barriers" but rather about enforcing corporate designed rules and limiting the power of the governments and people to have any control over what corporations can and can't do, austerity, deregulation, privatization and repression are applied everywhere in similar ways, both in rich countries and poor, and more than one person has described this as the "third worldization" of the working class and masses even in the wealthiest and most "advanced" countries. The environmental degradation and global warming as well as instability and conflict that characterize the current phase of neo-liberal imperialism also affect everybody, in rich countries as well as poor. Countries like Greece that try to break away from this pattern are in for a severe mauling by the wealthier and more powerful states like Germany.

This creates a more immediate communality of interests between workers in the rich countries and workers in the poor countries. But it is not always perceived that way by the former; there is still a tendency in the United States especially to frame the issue as one of the workers in the poorer countries "taking our jobs", a divisive formulation.

The left in the United States and the other wealthy countries should therefore undertake, with greater initiative and energy, the task of building international working class and all people's solidarity against neo-liberal capitalism and imperialism, and in support of those countries which are working, even if only partially, to break away from monopoly control.

Changes in U.S. labor in recent decades are opening up new possibilities for this type of solidarity work. Old Cold War attitudes under whose influences much (but not all) of U.S. organized labor collaborated with our government's efforts to undermine left wing labor organizing in Latin American countries have been fading. There have been genuine breakthroughs in positions taken by the AFL-CIO and individual unions opposing aid to repressive regimes in Central America, http://www.aflcio.org/content/download/147761/3770791/file/Honduras.PDF and in support of independent unions in Mexico. U.S. unions are also taking on major solidarity roles in Colombia and elsewhere. http://peoplesworld.org/in-colombia-it-s-killer-coke-the-union-must-fight/ Of signal importance has been labor's opposition to the Transpacific Partnership.

The major problem with the U.S. left's international solidarity efforts since World War II has been the difficulty of making international solidarity demands into mass demands that engage and mobilize millions instead of handfuls of people who end up being "the left talking to the left".

Opposition to the Vietnam War, organizing against the apartheid regime in South Africa and against the U.S. sponsored "Contra Wars" in Central America, and then against the Iraq War, began to help break us out of this pattern. The changes in organized labor have promise for greatly expanding the mass dimension of anti-imperialist solidarity work. Ways have to be found to point out to U.S. workers of every kind that what the U.S. government and corporations do to the mass of the population in a poor country hurts the interests of workers here. And conversely, advances in countries like the Bolivarian group are very much in the interests of U.S. workers.

This means showing the U.S. workers and masses, also, that U.S military interventions, direct (American boots on the ground) or indirect (subsidizing or "training"-School of the Americas style-- other countries' military and security forces to do the dirty work) is almost always something that leads to greater poverty and suffering in other countries, and by doing so harms U.S. workers also. This is why such things need the fig leaf of "humanitarian intervention", a fraud which must be exposed.

U.S. working class people are also harmed by the terrific waste of money on the bloated military budget, which does not contribute to the security of our people but rather undermines it by stealing resources that could go for schools, health care, infrastructure, jobs and environmental protection.

There are still many obstacles, but the possibility of creating unprecedented levels of international working class and all people's unity against the common corporate, imperialist enemy are getting greater every day.

We can do it, we must do it, and we will do it!

Photo: a "Social Mission", one of many set up under the late President Hugo Chavez, to eliminate illiteracy in Venezuela. Wikipedia

The Black Belt Communists

Robin D.G. Kelley — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 14:30:00 +0000

Even as late as the 1930s, Black farmers in Alabama labored under a highly exploitative system of tenant farming that preserved much of the power relations of slavery. But with the aid of the Communist Party, a militant movement of sharecroppers emerged to challenge this system.

Robin D. G. Kelley tells the story in his classic book Hammer and Hoe: Communists in Alabama During the Great Depression, now out in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition and excerpted below.

The rural world Communist organizers entered in 1930-31 made the poverty-stricken streets of Birmingham look like a paradise. Cotton farmers were in the midst of a crisis at least a decade old. After World War I, cotton prices plummeted, forcing planters to reduce acreage despite rising debts, and the boll weevil destroyed large stretches of crop.

When the stock market collapsed and cotton prices reached an all-time low, the real victims were small landholders who were forced into tenancy and tenants whose material wellbeing deteriorated even further. It is no coincidence, therefore, that black farmers straddling the line between tenancy and ownership formed the nucleus of Alabama's Communist-led rural movement.

Within the limited world of cotton culture existed a variety of production relations. Cash tenants, more often white than black, usually leased land for several years at a time, supplied their own implements, draft animals, seed, feed, and fertilizer, and farmed without supervision. Share tenants, on the other hand, might own some draft animals and planting materials, but the landowner provided any additional equipment, shelter, and if necessary, advances of cash, food, or other subsistence goods such as clothing.

Verbal contracts were made annually and the landowner generally marketed the crop, giving the tenant between three-fourths and two-thirds of the price, minus any advances or previous debts. The most common form of tenancy in the South was sharecropping.

Virtually propertyless workers paid with a portion of the crops raised, sharecroppers had little choice but to cultivate cotton - the landowner's choice of staple crops. The landowner supplied the acreage, houses, draft animals, planting materials, and nearly all subsistence necessities, including food and cash advances. These "furnishings" were then deducted from the sharecropper's portion of the crop at an incredibly high interest rate.

The system not only kept most tenants in debt, but it perpetuated living conditions that bordered on the intolerable. Landowners furnished entire families with poorly constructed one- or two-room shacks, usually without running water or adequate sanitary facilities. Living day-to-day on a diet of "fat back," beans, molasses, and cornbread, most Southern tenants suffered from nutritional deficiencies - pellagra and rickets were particularly common diseases in the Black Belt.

The gradations of tenancy must be understood in relation to both race and geographic distribution of cotton production. The Black Belt, the throne of King Cotton in Alabama, with its rich, black, calcareous clay soil, still resembled its antebellum past in that blacks outnumbered whites four to one in some counties in 1930.

As with other cotton-growing areas, the plant's life cycle and seasonal need determined the labor and living patterns of those who worked the land. In early spring, after the land had thawed and dried from winter, cotton farmers plowed and fertilized rows in preparation for planting, which followed several weeks later.

When the young plants began to sprout, the cotton had to be "chopped" - grass and weeds were removed and the stalks separated so that they did not grow too close together. If this was not done regularly the crop could be lost. Picking time, the most intense period of labor involving all family members, began around September 1 and continued through October. Once the cotton had been picked, ginned, baled, and sold, accounts were settled between the tenant and the landowner.

The tenants, who usually found themselves empty-handed after settling accounts, cultivated gardens to survive the winter, begged for food and cash advances, or spent several days without anything to eat. And throughout the entire year, particularly during the lean winters, tenants hauled firewood, cut hay, repaired their homes, fences, tools, and watering holes, cared for their stock, cleared trees, and removed stalks from the previous harvest.

Women's lives were especially hard in the world of cotton culture. Rising before dawn and the rest of the family, wives and daughters of tenant farmers prepared meals over a wood stove or open fire, fetched water from distant wells or springs, washed laundry by hand in pots of boiling water, toted firewood, tended livestock, made preserves, dyes, clothes, and medicinal remedies, ground cornmeal, fathered eggs, and tried to keep a house that generally lacked screens, windows, indoor plumbing, and electricity tidy.

Women also worked in the fields, especially during picking and chopping time, and in the midst of physically exacting labor they bore and raised children. Many had little choice but to take in laundry or perform domestic work for meager wages, thus tripling their workload. Women choppers and pickers generally earned half as much as their male counterparts.

To make matters worse, because husbands and elder sons occasionally migrated to nearby cities or mines to find work, escape family responsibilities, or avoid persecution in one form or another, many women and children in a variety of female-headed households and extended families were left to organize production without the benefit of adult male labor.

It is tempting to characterize the Black Belt as a timeless, static, semi-feudal remnant of the post-Reconstruction era, but such an idyllic picture ignores the history of rural opposition and does not take into account significant structural changes that have occurred since the 1890s.

Black and white populists waged a losing battle against the expansion of tenancy, and in the wake of defeat, many landless farmers resisted debt peonage with their feet. Drowning in a sea of debt, tenants often broke their contracts, leaving an unsuspecting landowner at a critical moment in the planting cycle.

Given the demography of the plantation, open collective rebellion was virtually impossible. Shacks were placed near the edge of the plantation, and two or three miles often separated tenant families from one another. Therefore, more individualized forms of resistance (theft, arson, sabotage, "foot dragging," slander, and occasional outbreaks of personal violence) were used effectively to wrest small material gains or to retaliate against unfair landlords.

Such tactics were legitimated by folk cultures that celebrated evasive and cunning activities and, ironically, by the dominant ideology of racist paternalism that constructed an image of blacks as naturally ignorant, childlike, shiftless laborers with a strong penchant for theft.

Resistance, in some ways, altered the structure of production as well as the planters' ability to make a profit. With the onset of World War I, for example, large numbers of workers left the countryside altogether to take advantage of employment opportunities in the sprawling urban centers of the North and South. Areas most affected by the exodus were forced to adopt limited forms of mechanization to make up for the dwindling labor force and rising wages.

The movement off the land was accompanied by improved roads and the availability of affordable automobiles, which increased rural mobility. The number of automobiles owned and operated by Alabama farmers increased from 16 to 592 in 1920 and to 73,634 in 1930. Small holders and tenants who acquired vehicles were no longer beholden to the plantation commissary and could now purchase supplies at much lower prices in the nearby urban centers.

The revolution in transportation compelled landowners to furnish tenants in cash in lieu of credit lines at plantation commissaries and county stores in an attempt to retain rural labor in the face of competitive wages offered in the cities. But after 1929, cash was a rare commodity, and landowners resurrected the commissary system, effectively undermining their tenants' newly acquired freedom and mobility.

By the time the Birmingham Communists established links to the cotton belt in early 1931, tenancy seemed on the verge of collapse. Advances of food and cash were cut off, debts were piling higher, and the city offered fewer opportunities to escape rural poverty. Subterranean forms of resistance were by no means abandoned, but groups of black farmers now saw the logic in the Communist Party's call for collective action.

The slogan demanding self-determination in the Black Belt did not inspire Birmingham's nascent Communist cadre to initiate a rural-based radical movement. James Allen, editor of the party newspaper the Southern Worker, argued that only industrial workers were capable of leading tenants and sharecroppers because the latter lacked the collective experience of industrial labor. Aside from spouting rhetorical slogans, party organizers all but ignored the Black Belt during their first year in Birmingham.

Then, in January 1931, an uprising of some five hundred sharecroppers in England, AR, compelled Southern Communists to take the rural poor more seriously. Birmingham party leaders immediately issued a statement exhorting Alabama farmers to follow the Arkansas example:

Call mass meetings in each township and on each large plantation. Set up Relief Councils at these meetings. Organize hunger marches on the towns to demand food and clothing from the supply merchants and bankers who have sucked you dry year after year . . . Join hands with the unemployed workers of the towns and with their organizations which are fighting the same battle for bread.

The response was startling. The Southern Worker was flooded with letters from poor black Alabama farmers. A sharecropper from Waverly, Alabama requested "full information on the Fight Against Starvation," and pledged to "do like the Arkansas farmers," with the assistance of Communist organizers.

A Shelby County tenant made a similar request: "We farmers in Vincent wish to know more about the Communist Party, an organization that fights for all farmers. And also to learn us how to fight for better conditions." Another "farmer correspondent" had already begun to make plans to "get a bunch together for a meeting," adding that poor farmers in his community were "mighty close to a breaking point."

District leadership enthusiastically laid plans for a sharecroppers' and farmworkers' union that would conceivably unite poor white farmers of northern Alabama and black tenants and sharecroppers in the Black Belt. An attempt to bring black and white farmers together in a joint conference, however, brought few results. The party's position on social equality and equal rights alienated most poor white farmers, and within a few months the party's white contacts in Cullman and St Clair counties had practically dissipated.

The Croppers' and Farm Workers' Union (CFWU) was eventually launched in Tallapoosa County, a section of the eastern piedmont whose varied topography ranges from the hill county of Appalachia in the north to the coastal-like plains and pine forests of the south. In 1930, almost 70 percent of those engaged in agriculture were either tenants or wage workers, the majority of whom were sharecroppers.

Blacks comprised the bulk of the county's tenant and rural laboring populations, and resided in the flat, fertile southeastern and southwestern sections of the county. As in the Black Belt counties further south, antebellum planter families in these two areas retained political and economic ascendancy, despite competition from textile and sawmill interests. Not surprisingly, the impetus to build a union came from local tenant farmers living primarily in southeastern Tallapoosa County.

Soon after the cotton had been planted and chopped, several landlords withdrew all cash and food advances in a calculated effort to generate labor for the newly built Russell Saw Mill. The mill paid exactly the same for unskilled labor as the going rate for cotton chopping - 50¢ per day for men and 25¢ a day for women.

By mid-May the Southern Worker reported significant union gains in Tallapoosa County and announced that black sawmill workers and farmers in the vicinity "have enthusiastically welcomed Communist leadership."

The nascent movement formulated seven basic demands, the most crucial being the continuation of food advances. The right of sharecroppers to market their own crops was also a critical issue because landlords usually gave their tenants the year's lowest price for cotton and held on to the bales until the price increased, thus denying the producer the full benefits of the crop.

Union leaders also demanded small gardens for resident wage hands, cash rather than wages in kind, a minimum wage of $1 per day, and a three-hour midday rest for all laborers - all of which were to be applied equally, irrespective of race, age, or sex.

By July 1931 the CFWU, now eight hundred strong, had won a few isolated victories in its battle for the continuation of food advances. Most Tallapoosa landlords, however, just would not tolerate a surreptitious organization of black tenant farmers and agricultural workers. Camp Hill, Alabama became the scene of the union's first major confrontation with the local power structure.

On July 15 Taft Holmes organized a group of sharecroppers near Camp Hill and invited several union members to address the group in a vacant house that doubled as a church. In all, about eighty black men and women piled into the abandoned house to discuss the CFWU and the Scottsboro case. After a black informant notified Tallapoosa County sheriff Kyle Young of the gathering, deputized vigilantes raided the meeting place, brutally beating men and women alike.

The posse then regrouped at CFWU leader Tommy Gray's home and assaulted his entire family, including his wife, who suffered a fractured skull, in an effort to obtain information about the CFWU. Union organizer Jasper Kennedy was arrested for possessing twenty copies of the Southern Worker, and Holmes was picked up by police the following day, interrogated for several hours, and upon release fled to Chattanooga.

Despite the violence, about 150 sharecroppers met with Mack Coad - an illiterate Birmingham steelworker originally from Charleston, SC who had become the party's organizer in Tallapoosa - the following evening in a vacant house southwest of Camp Hill. This time sentries were posted around the meeting place.

When Sheriff Young arrived on the scene with Camp Hill police chief J. M. Wilson and Deputy A. J. Thompson, he found Ralph Gray - Tommy Gray's brother and fellow CFWU organizer - standing guard about a quarter-mile from the meeting. Although accounts differ as to the sequence of events, both Gray and the sheriff traded harsh words and, in the heat of the argument, exchanged buckshot. Young, who received gunshot wounds to the stomach, was rushed to a hospital in nearby Alexander City while Gray lay on the side of the road, his legs riddled with bullets.

Fellow union members carried Gray to his home where the group, including Coad, barricaded themselves inside the house. The group held off a posse led by Wilson long enough to allow most members to escape, but the wounded Ralph Gray opted to remain in his house until the end.

The posse returned with reinforcements and found Gray lying in his bed and his family huddled in a corner. According to his brother, someone in the group "poked a pistol into Brother Ralph's mouth and shot down his throat." The mob burned the home to the ground and dumped his body on the steps of the Dadeville courthouse. The mangled and lifeless leader became an example for other black sharecroppers as groups of armed whites took turns shooting and kicking the bloody corpse of Ralph Gray.

Over the next few days, between thirty-four and fifty-five black men were arrested near Camp Hill, nine of whom were under eighteen years of age. Most of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to murder or with carrying a concealed weapon, but five union members were charged with assault to murder.

Although police chief Wilson could not legally act out his wish to "kill every member of the 'Reds' there and throw them into the creek," the Camp Hill police department stood idle as enraged white citizens waged genocidal attacks on the black community that left dozens wounded or dead and forced entire families to seek refuge in the woods. Union secretary Mack Coad, the vigilantes' prime target, fled all the way to Atlanta.

Behind the violence in Tallapapoosa County loomed the Scottsboro case. But unlike Scottsboro, the Camp Hill defendants were members of the party's organization; there was no question as to who was going to defend them. After lawyers associated with the party secured the release of all but seven of the imprisoned sharecroppers, prominent Alabama citizens wary of creating another Scottsboro episode pressured authorities to quietly drop the case.

National Communist leadership praised the union's resistance at Camp Hill as vindication of the party's slogan calling for the right of self-determination. The successful legal defense of the sharecroppers was further proof, they reasoned, of the effectiveness of mass pressure outside the courtroom.

But union organizers found little romance in the bloodletting or in the uprooting of hundreds of poor black farmers that followed the Camp Hill battle. Moreover, rural conditions in Tallapoosa County had not improved at all.

By September, the height of the cotton-picking season, landlords again promised to cut off all food and cash advances after the cotton was picked, and many tenants had to pick cotton on other plantations in order to earn enough to survive the winter. The going rate at the time was a meager 30¢ per one hundred pounds, a tidy sum considering the average laborer could only pick about two hundred pounds per day.

The repression and the deteriorating economic conditions stunted the union's growth initially, but the lessons of Camp Hill also provided a stimulus for a new type of movement, reborn from the ashes of the old. The Communist movement in Alabama resonated with the cultures and traditions of black working people, yet at the same time it offered something fundamentally different. It proposed a new direction, a new kind of politics that required the self-activity of people usually dismissed as inarticulate.

The sun had not set on the proud history of Communists in Alabama - black sharecroppers would continue to struggle.

Excerpted from the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, now available from University of North Carolina Press.

This excerpt was originally posted at jacobinmag.com August 20, 2015.

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.

Photo: A sharecropping family in Alabama 1939. Flat World Education.

A tale of two Katrinas

Thomas J. Adams — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 08:08:00 +0000

When I teach a course on the history of New Orleans I often tell my students that there were two Katrinas. To be sure, this is a heuristic device, but I've found that it helps students understand the historical origins of the disasters that struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. The first Katrina was the result of a low-pressure system that formed off the Bahamas on August 21st, 2005 and that in short order gained incredible speed and strength as it swept over South Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. By the time it made landfall in Southeast Louisiana on August 29th it was a Category 5 storm. The confluence of this hurricane with an antiquated, poorly funded, and incompetently managed federal levee system, along with bungling and criminal emergency management at all levels of government were the immediate causes of at least 1,833 lives being lost, 1.2 million people forced out of their homes, and the destruction of entire communities.

Like the first Katrina, the second was also a man-made disaster. Like the first, it visited tremendous destruction on the lives of poor New Orleanians and Southeastern Louisianans, a group of people disproportionately African American. At the meteorological level though the first Katrina really did not care about your income or racial status. Access to transportation and disposable dollars aside, if you were in the working-class and black Lower Ninth Ward on August 29, 2005 you were lucky to get out alive. If you were in working class and predominately white St. Bernard Parish that day you were lucky to get out alive. If you were in wealthy and white Lakeview that same day you were also lucky to get out alive.

The second Katrina, on the other hand, cares all too much about these things. Its ever-stronger winds swirl around New Orleans today, turning a city already rife with injustice in 2005 into an elite laboratory of plutocratic governance, market choice, education "reform," ever-skyrocketing rents and real estate values, and the second highest level of economic inequality in the nation. From liberal to conservative, Americans have seen in the second Katrina, a blank canvas onto which they can play out a variety of self-serving fantasies. The fantasy that choice leads to equality. That knowledge conferred in a Yale or Tulane classroom trumps experience. That the poor do not understand the things they should really want. That those who produce our culture and traditions and those provide the support for them to do so do it from their hearts and souls and thus don't need paychecks or places they can afford to live. That trickle down economics will actually lead to money trickling down. That the wealthy, powerful, and connected--by nature of their wealth, power, and connections--should be entrusted to make decisions for all of us. That a few small protests, hashtags, and petitions can constitute anything more than a sandbag in a levee breach.

Like all hurricanes, the second Katrina began as a low-pressure system. Our best radar systems show it forming in Washington D.C, on September 8th. That day, while water still covered much of New Orleans, President George W. Bush suspended the Davis-Act that mandates federal contractors pay prevailing wages. Many residents on the Gulf Coast were understandably occupied with other matters those days. In retrospect though, Bush's decision to guarantee that federally funded rebuilding efforts would not provide decent wages to help bring those in the Katrina diaspora home can be understood as the beginning of a new hurricane, a storm that unlike a regular hurricane which tracks and dissipates slowly upon landfall, would park itself over New Orleans and only gain strength as time went on.

Later that month, the second Katrina became a tropical storm when Mayor Ray Nagin named his Bring Back New Orleans Commission. A diverse black and white committee inclusive of many of the city's wealthiest residents and key powerbrokers, the only member of the Commission who was in any way answerable to any constituency of residents was City Councilman Oliver Thomas who went on record hoping that the "soap opera watchers" in public housing would not come home. Along with Thomas, many of the most influential members of the Commission like multimillionaire real estate developer Joe Canizaro, entrepreneur James Reiss, and shipbuilding magnate Donald Bollinger were clear in their advocation of a massive purge of poor people from the city.

The second Katrina reached hurricane status on January 31st, 2006. That day, the democratically elected Orleans Parish School Board, as a result of having the vast majority of schools stripped away from their control and handed over to an unelected state agency, fired all 4,600 teachers in New Orleans. This disproportionately African-American and female group had been the backbone of the city's black middle class before the first Katrina. Now, rather than having jobs to return to, this cohort of experienced classroom teachers were left blowing in the wind of the second Katrina.

The state's takeover of the school system and the firing of its teachers was a dream come true for a national education "reform" movement that proffered that market choice in schools combined with inexperienced yet energetic recent elite-college graduates would be a literal magic bean for underfunded and understaffed public schools serving students in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. New Orleans and its poor residents would be the lab rats in a grand experiment to show the world that schools should be managed like corporations, teachers should be evaluated like stock portfolios, and out of line students should be treated like prison detainees. Meteorologically speaking, the second Katrina became a category 2 storm when education "reformers" and leading opinion pages like those of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal doubled down on the notion of an educational grand experiment even as their own idiotic metric of high stakes test scores continued to show no improvement for poor and working-class New Orleanians--the people whose names these "reforms" were enacted in.

At is peak strength over land, the first Katrina topped out as a category 5 storm. As for the second Katrina, it continues to gather strength little by little, showing no signs of breaking up. It certainly hit category 5 status when the city's remaining public housing units were shuttered, despite their structural soundness, in favor of land giveaways to developers who have been vocal in their desire not to raise the prospects and equality of the city's poorest residents but to rather keep them as far away as possible from the new New Orleans. The second Katrina's wind speeds probably reached the category four threshold of 130 mph when the contractor chosen to run the state's Road Home Program, ICF International distributed only 1.5 billion dollars of the 6.4 billion it was allocated--even as its own stock price nearly tripled.

Day by day, the wind speed and quotidian storm surges of the second Katrina increase as the city is remade with amenities for tourists, property developers, and prospective residents with stable incomes while reliable transportation is a cruel joke, wages are stagnate and even declining in the city's largest employment sectors, and income inequality ranks second in the nation. They grow stronger when the entire world pays homage to the cultures of New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana but cares little if those who produce and enable that culture--as well as through their presence and performance add astronomical value to the city's real estate and tourist booms--live on less than $17,000 a year. They grow stronger when we see the little effectual resistance that has been mobilized against the second Katrina as anything even as strong as the shoddily maintained levees that allowed the first. The winds of the second Katrina will reach category five status when on August 29 many will celebrate the city's "recovery" and "resilience" without giving a second thought as to who has recovered and upon whose back they have done so.

The author is Lecturer in History and American Studies at the University of Sydney. This article was originally at Huffington Post August 29, 2015.

Photo: "Impeach" Counterpunch February 26, 2007.