Frequently Badly Answered Questions About The Cold War (FBAQ)

Question: Wasn't the U.S.S.R a totalitarian power, in principle opposed to human freedom, and never to be trusted for that reason?

Answer: This was the claim continually put forth by leaders of the capitalist West, and there is no danger in conceding some merit to it, as long as one keeps in mind that like most terms in the social sciences there is no precise definition to words like "totalitarian" and "freedom." Certainly personal liberty in the Soviet Union was restricted to an extent not seen in the Western industrial states, especially under Joseph Stalin, whose personal dictatorship earned him the title "Generalissimo." But a qualification should be included with this observation: Eastern Europe and Russia were long semi-colonial territories of the developing West, providing raw materials for industrialization (textile and metal industries), with the attendant ills of widespread poverty and foreign control of the economy. The military, the bureaucracy (partially), and finance and technology (railways, factories and banks) were in Western hands, making political liberty a futile dream for all but a privileged few. Bolshevik leaders inherited a deliberately underdeveloped country in which the vast majority were illiterate peasants engaged in back-breaking labor on the land, extending back for generations. Under such conditions, any comparison of the Soviet working class with middle class workers in the West was at best a mere ideological exercise, and at worst, a deliberate attempt to demonize rather than understand. Given the harsh historical conditions that prevailed in 1917 Russia, there was no chance of broad enjoyment of personal liberty no matter which group came to power or what policy choices they made.

Furthermore, in many ways the capitalist-socialist liberty comparison is one of apples to oranges. The capitalist West defines freedom as freedom from state "intrusion" in personal life, especially with respect to allocation of capital. The socialist U.S.S.R. stressed freedom from want, insecurity, and discrimination. Both social systems delivered on their definitions to vast populations within their political domains, a fact that cannot be perceived if we are forced to affiliate with one of the two sides as being necessarily "right" in its value judgments about what exactly constitutes the essence of human freedom.

Each side was untrustworthy in the eyes of the other precisely for differing in its fundamental value judgments. If opportunity to acquire and consume property free of government regulation is indispensable to human freedom, then the former USSR, dedicated not to "free markets" but economic development via state control, was not merely untrustworthy, but a principled and permanent antagonist, regardless of the policy choices of the West. On the other hand, if an absence of insecurity, want, and discrimination are essential characteristics of freedom, then the U.S.A., with its extensive poverty, racism, and gender discrimination, was (and remains) a fundamental obstacle to human liberty that the USSR had every right to resist and oppose.

Question: Wasn't the Soviet Union an expansionist military power dedicated to world conquest, which forced the U.S. to defend the free world from its aggressive design? Didn't Krushchev promise to "bury" the West?

Answer: Krushchev's "we will bury you" remark was not a threat to conquer the U.S., but a simple statement of ideological conviction. On the assumption that Soviet socialism better met the needs of human nature than did American capitalism, he expected that in the course of time the Soviet system would meet the approval of a majority of humanity, and therefore outlast capitalism. This did not happen, but at no time did the U.S.S.R. try to impose its ideology on the U.S. by force of arms. Sadly, the same cannot be said for U.S. capitalism, which was backed by a first-strike nuclear policy from the Truman years on. As President Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, the U.S. maintained a policy of "going to the brink of war" to destroy the U.S.S.R. Only by sheer luck did the Cold War end without a nuclear war.

On the expansionism charge, extension of Soviet borders ended with World War II. Nowhere did the Soviets take territory militarily that they hadn't held at the end of the war. They withdrew from Norway, Danish Bornholm Island, Czechoslovakia (returning later), Yugoslavia, and Iran. With the exception of one military base in each case, they also withdrew from Finland and Manchuria. These were the only external military bases the Soviets held in the entire world. Under Stalin and Krushchev, they withdrew from Korea and Austria, completed withdrawal from Bulgaria and Rumania, and surrendered naval bases in Finland and China. Meanwhile, Washington maintained a permanent military presence in Western Europe, Japan, Korea, mainland China (until 1949), the Western Pacific, the Philippines, and Latin America.

Naturally, Soviet leaders hoped to achieve the greatest influence possible for their cause, but this is the case with all adherents of a political ideology. Unlike the far more powerful U.S., their sphere of dominance was limited to neighboring territory, basically Eastern and parts of Central Europe, which twice in a generation was used as a pathway for invading German armies to leave the area a smoking ruin. While the U.S. was lifted out of the Great Depression by WWII, the Soviets were devastated by it. They lost over 20 million people, as well as their factories, farms, and housing for 25 million people, which was destroyed in the cities and villages occupied by the Nazis. Except for city streets the U.S.S.R. had never known the luxury of paved roads, and its railroads were ripped up by the Nazis' special plows and cam devices. Furthermore, the country's biggest power dam had been blown up, its coal mines flooded, and its blast mines and steel mills destroyed. In a 1963 speech President Kennedy emphasized that the extent of the damage was unprecedented in the annals of warfare: "No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland - a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago."

Meanwhile, the U.S. emerged from the war with a booming economy that had doubled its GNP while Europe and Japan were reduced to rubble. With six percent of the world's population, the U.S. held 75% of its investment capital and two-thirds of its industrial capacity. It exercised military control over both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and had 12 million soldiers encircling the globe, backed up by an atomic monopoly. Its strategic planners anticipated dominating what they called a Grand Area, a region "strategically necessary for world control," which included the Western hemisphere, the former British domains, the Far East, the Pacific, and the richer half of Europe. The Communist world was considered regretfully out of reach, but Washington anticipated obtaining it later through conquest or collapse. Future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas explained that such vast U.S. control was a form of noblesse oblige, simply "part of our obligation to the security of the world."

Quite at variance with all the talk of Kremlin subversion and an allegedly monolithic Communist conspiracy to take over the world, two generations of peace followed the end of WWII, during which time there was no attempt at Marxist revolution in Europe, Japan, or the United States. As for the Chinese revolution of 1949, it stemmed from indigenous causes, while the subsequent Sino-Soviet split demonstrated that Washington's paranoid conviction that all Communists think and act alike was not true.

Given its historical experience, Soviet leaders had a natural desire to use Eastern Europe as a buffer zone to guard against foreign invasion. Soviet violations of national sovereignty in Eastern and Central Europe were widely condemned with little attention given to the fact that the countries involved would have been Nazi occupied territories but for the military victory of the USSR in WWII. That does not make the Kremlin's interventions right, but it should be kept in mind that the United States has repeatedly intervened in neighboring countries, and far more bloodily, while rarely facing an invading force on its own soil, and never one as powerful as 20th century Germany.

Furthermore, though Washington's hostility to the U.S.S.R. was constantly presented to the U.S. public as a defensive reaction to Kremlin aggression, the documentary record reveals that U.S. antagonism pre-dated any Soviet action in the post-WWII era. On April 5, 1999 the Pentagon announced a Cold War Recognition Certificate, for which all 22 million Americans who had served in the U.S. armed forces during that period would be eligible. The document officially specified the beginning of the Cold War as the day the U.S.-Soviet WWII alliance ended - September 2, 1945 - the date of Japan's surrender. The last date for which a former serviceman could claim the certificate was December 26, 1991, the day of the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. This constitutes official admission that terminating Soviet socialism, not keeping world peace, was the real U.S. goal in the Cold War.

Soviet socialism was opposed, not because it posed some dreadful threat to human liberty per se, but because it was unwilling to complement the industrial economies of the West, preferring to withdraw from the profit system in favor of creating a self-sufficient internal economy based on national planning and production-for-use. This approach had great appeal in Third World countries attempting to throw off Western colonial rule and make rapid economic progress. In other words, the Soviet threat to the U.S. was not military, but political: the prospect that a non-profit world would induce other countries to also seek an exit from the capitalist order. It was for this reason that the U.S. and thirteen other countries invaded the U.S.S.R. just months after the Bolshevik Revolution triumphed in 1917, and for years maintained a total blockade against it, preventing entrance even of medicine and food. [According to William S. Graves, commander of U.S. forces in Siberia from 1918-1920, the vast majority of the killing in the U.S.S.R. was carried out not by Bolsheviks, but by Czarist forces and their foreign supporters: “There were horrible murders committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.”]

Nor did the so-called Soviet threat emanate solely from desperately poor masses in the Third World. Workers on the home front were also seeking a bigger slice of the pie, and were in a better position to get it. Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed medical care, indeed, virtually all of the U.S. social reforms of the 20th century, followed the Bolshevik Revolution. These concessions were granted not out of generosity, but because of extensive labor organization inside the U.S., coupled with the external example of an officially socialist system that could entice U.S. workers to reject capitalism. While loathing the official socialist alternative, U.S. leaders feared its broad appeal.

This fear sustained outright hysteria in the U.S. for many years. Consider just the 1948 independent presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Merely for entertaining the notion of peaceful co-existence between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., he was attacked as a traitor and hounded with accusations that his Progressive Party was run by Moscow.

Though the validity of his concerns was subsequently confirmed by events, Wallace's critique of U.S. policy fell on deaf ears. He argued that the U.S. couldn't expect to simply purchase allies, and predicted a world-wide network of reactionary dictatorships would result if such an attempt were made. (Somoza, Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah, etc.) He held that revolution was the harvest of thwarted needs and maintained that force ultimately could not hold back the rebellions decades of poverty, misery, and oppression created (China - 1949, Bolivia - 1952, Cuba - 1959, Vietnam - 1960s, Iran and Nicaragua - 1979, southern Mexico - 1994, Colombia - 1963 - present). He predicted that President Truman's attempt to impose a world-wide counterrevolution against the U.S.S.R. would militarize the U.S. and cost more in blood and treasure than Washington was counting on (endless undeclared wars, a world-wide network of U.S. military bases, steady decline of the U.S. middle class). He warned that obsessing over a presumed Red Menace would destroy individual rights, while the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan would divide the world into two irreconcilably hostile blocs (Two nuclear armed antagonists on hair-trigger alert, Truman-McCarthy hysteria via blacklistings, banning of heretical groups, and unconstitutional hearings). He foresaw that reaction to U.S. anti-Communist belligerence would lead colonial peoples to identify the Kremlin as their friend and Washington as their enemy (Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua etc.)

The response to Wallace's campaign was not reason, but harassment and violence. Meeting halls were denied for Progressive Party functions, and students threw eggs and screamed epithets to prevent pro-Wallace meetings from taking place on college campuses. Meanwhile, detectives conspicuously took down names at Wallace fund-raising events, the media dutifully published lists of Wallace petition-signers to incite abuse, and hundreds of Wallace supporters were fired or pressured into quitting their jobs.

In the South, Wallace himself was pelted with eggs for refusing to address segregated audiences. In Illinois, Progressive Party Senate candidate Curtis MacDougall was stoned. In Georgia, four women supporting Wallace were abducted and beaten. In Pontiac, Michigan, a Wallace campaigner was seized, beaten, and shaved bald with a pocket knife. In Birmingham, Wallace's running mate Glen Taylor was captured and jailed for attempting to pass through the "colored" door in church. In Chicago, police raided and arrested students attending a Wallace support meeting. In Charleston, Wallace supporter Robert New was killed by a fellow Maritime Union member who said he cut "the Communist nigger-lover's" jugular with a ten-inch knife. When he explained that his victim was a "despicable, slick, slimy Communist prowling the waterfront," he was let off with a light sentence.

Question: Wasn't the U.S.S.R. responsible for dividing Europe, locking countries east of the Elbe into Communist domination?

Answer: Actually, the division of Germany was at U.S. initiative, which locked the Soviets out of West Germany, where coal and related industrial production were heavily concentrated, denying them promised benefits of their WWII victory, particularly reparations. A major reason was fear of worker participation in management, the desire for which was longstanding in Germany. With workers forming works councils and trade unions, calls for co-determination in industry to accompany democratic grass-roots control of unions was deeply worrisome to Washington and its depoliticized labor associates, intent as they were on restoring German corporate power within an anti-Communist Western alliance. They feared that disgruntled West German workers could not be trusted to retain an allegiance to capitalism while mingling with disciplined Communists from the East.

In 1946, State Department dove George Kennan noted that an undivided Germany would be subject to Soviet political penetration, the solution for which was to "endeavor to rescue Western zones of Germany by walling them off against Eastern penetration" - the reverse of the standard image - "and integrating them into an international pattern of Western Europe rather than into a united Germany," a violation of wartime agreements. In short, Kennan (and Washington generally) was not worried about a Soviet military attack, but about Soviet political influence, especially insofar as it encouraged the substantive demands of Western labor for public ownership and codetermination (i.e., worker participation in management). In short, the main problem was labor threatening conservative business dominance. Carolyn Eisenberg, author of a thorough study of the division of Germany, concludes that Washington's great fear, in fact - "horror" - was "a unified, centralized politicized labor movement committed to a far-reaching program of social change."

After incorporating the most economically valuable part of Germany in a military alliance hostile to the U.S.S.R., Washington proved extremely skeptical of Soviet overtures towards a unified demilitarized Germany in subsequent years, as well as moves to dismantle the overarching military pacts that kept Europe divided. A significant thaw in the Cold War would have invited a resurgence of popular participation in economic decisions, which the U.S. in principle rejected, and still rejects.

Be that as it may, the Soviet Union did dominate Eastern Europe in the Cold War years, but not as extensively as Washington dominated the Third World. While Moscow controlled a handful of client states in Europe, the U.S. controlled dozens of client states throughout the world. Only ideological convention dictated that Soviet client states were called "Communist satellites" while U.S. client states were praised as "Free World allies." Both superpowers practiced torture on an administrative basis.

Question: But isn't it well-established that the Soviet Union was a dungeon state that maintained "the Gulag," torturing and murdering countless victims, many of them worked to death in concentration camps?

Answer: A troubling question intrudes right from the start when we confront the claim of systematic killing of millions of innocents by Communist evil. If the former U.S.S.R. was ruthless enough to establish a far-flung system of death camps that deliberately murdered tens of millions of victims, how is it that its leaders ultimately relinquished power peacefully? All through the Cold War it was claimed that Communist leaders never conceded power without resort to arms. But in the end the Soviet Union dissolved itself almost without firing a shot.

As for state-sponsored killing, estimates of the total number vary widely, but it is generally agreed that the bulk of the "murders" occurred in the Stalin years (1929-1953). Estimates range from 5 million to 20 to 25 million and up, with William Rusher of Claremont Institute claiming that "100 million people [were] wantonly murdered by Communist dictators since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917." Little if any convincing information is ever provided about how these fantastic and widely varying figures are arrived at, especially how to separate deaths due to harsh conditions attending industrialization from state-sanctioned murders in conformity with a deliberate campaign to eliminate whole categories of people. Unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency in anti-Communist literature to accept partisan denunciation as indisputable fact, leading to credulous acceptance of astronomical "murder" totals, the more extreme the better.

In any event, Soviet labor camps were not death camps, and there was no systematic extermination of inmates. The great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society, either through amnesty or because they had completed their sentences. In any given year, between twenty and forty percent of inmates were released, according to scholars who have reviewed Soviet archives. The documents show that more than half of all gulag deaths in the years 1934-1953 occurred during WWII, mostly from malnutrition, when severe deprivation was the common experience of the entire Soviet population, and over 20 million died. So while the labor camp death rate was 92 per 1000 in 1944, it fell to 3 per 1000 in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. That year over half of the gulag inmates were freed and by 1960 the camps no longer existed. Although some anti-Communist writers claim that the gulag continued until the final days of the USSR, no emaciated hordes were witnessed pouring out of concentration camps in 1991.


-------Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire," both from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com


Sources:

Mandel, William, Russia Re-Examined - The Land, The People and How They Live, (Hill and Wang, 1964)

Mandel, William, Saying No To Power - Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, (Creative Arts, 1999)

Belfrage, Cedric The American Inquisition, 1945-1960 - A Profile of the 'McCarthy' Era, (Thunder's Mouth, 1989)

Walton, Richard J., Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War, (Viking, 1976)

Chomsky, Noam, Year 501- The Conquest Continues, (South End, 1993)

Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy, (Hill and Wang, 1992)

Parenti, Michael - Blackshirts & Reds - Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, (City Lights, 1997)

Sweezy, Paul M. Socialism, (McGraw Hill, 1949)

Graves, William S., America's Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920, (New York, 1931)

Eisenberg, Carolyn, Drawing The Line - The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949, (Cambridge, 1996)

Shoup, Laurence and William Mintner, "The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy," (Monthly Review, 1977)

Wittner, Lawrence S., Cold War America - From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978)

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Just Kill, Oh Well

Senate Repeals Ban Against Openly Gay Military Personnel

The New York Times 

Published: December 18, 2010

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WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

In the armed forces we finally have true democracy. From now on, when the American military invades a country its inhabitants can glow in the knowledge that they are being killed by a multi-cultural and sexually diverse force unlike any other in the world. A military previously filled only with working class people of color, people of no color, and people of some color, will now include people of sexual persuasions once forced into secrecy in order to be members of our invading forces . At last, the descendants of slaves, indentured servants, manual laborers, legal and illegal immigrants and people formerly defined as sexual deviants  have finally achieved the American dream of equality. Makes you feel kinda warm and patriotic, doesn’t it?

 

Real Social Media

The violent suppression called western democracy has never been as blatantly exposed as in the Wikileaks episode. That is, to an audience within so-called western democracies and “the international community”, a minority of the global population. The overwhelming majority has long been subjected to this regime and needs no bulletins from corporate central to know what’s been going on. But at the empire’s core there is confusion bred by corporate capital’s media, and citizens trying to truly inform their fellows have become criminals threatened with prison and death. Their heroic attempts have awakened a sometimes dormant public often reduced to obeying the dictates of egoism by using what is supposedly social media to pursue individual activities like making purchases, swapping photos and sharing gossip. No more.

An aroused community sprang to the defense of Julian Assange and his Wikileaks cohorts by forming defense committees and attacking web sites that blocked the group from receiving funds and spreading their message. That message is about ending secrecy posing as democracy and beginning open government, which could lead to something completely different: real democracy. There is serious panic in high places because retaliatory forces have never had more potential for success even if some are not yet willing to accept that fact. But our rulers understand that the threat to their power is more significant than ever, even if some of their subjects are still looking for conspiracies of near mystical and supernatural origin.

At a time of tension within a global system confronting massive debt problems, environmental breakdown and an international class crisis, Wikileaks may represent more change than even its protagonists imagine. The global Internet dominated by corporations and their nation-state subsidiaries has served the market for commodity consumption by an affluent minority while denying a majority population victimized by that same economic system. Rebels among the network of hackers and communicators who do not simply seek ego gratification and market profiteering but demand greater democratic opportunity have found the openings offered by this uncontrollable communications system to offer more possibility for change than ever before.

Western capitalism attempts to resolve its budget deficit by acting on its moral deficit; take more from those who have less in order to take less from those who have more. Nations, states and municipalities weaken the bottom line of support for their citizens in order to strengthen the bottom line of profits for their banks. Jobs disappear, pensions shrink, poverty increases and hardship intensifies, while lavish wealth accrues to a minority of billionaires and trickles down to their affluent servants. This new global middle class exists on top of an ever-expanding global underclass which pays for its affluence with their suffering. This explosive situation of minority profits gained at majority loss is nothing new in political economics, but the present crisis is on a different terrain than any experienced in the past.

Assange confronts this system from an anarchist position that attracts a rebellious class of internet connected people who are against all authority, while Manning represents a class of military workers long opposed to the immorality of war because they know it, first hand. He and Assange utilize new media to confront old authority that has ruled the earth for hundreds of years. They disobey ruling codes of immorality and observe revolutionary codes of morality often preached by religions but totally disregarded by ruling political forces:

Goodness and decency are only to occur within places of worship, but once we get outside to the places of marketing, all hell breaks loose. And that is called acceptable reality.

Manning was repulsed by what he saw and compelled to do what he could to let his people know the truth. He acted on an ancient human impulse that dates to the earliest uprisings against slavery, royalty, and feudal autocracy. Assange is part of the same tradition though coming from a different background but both appear at a time when far more humans can heed the call to solidarity and community. This is what terrifies authority and leads to the most irrational threats by its servants, with liberals mouthing tirades of murderous madness and conservatives opting for a near fascist police state. According to the constitution, of course.

Just as a world community is confronting the fanatic racial supremacies of a minority religious based class in Palestine, the deadly global dominance of a minority billionaire based class over the world economy is called into question as well. And while dominating forces over majorities have always been resisted - with non-violence by the more materially able and violently by those most desperate – we are experiencing a time of more possibility that the temporarily able and the presently desperate could unite to confront the system that afflicts not only them but the human race itself.

There has probably never been such desperate need for humanity to end domination by un-chosen minorities since the very substance of life is threatened by their system of use and abuse of nature in pursuit of private benefit at public cost. The linking of groups in the struggle for creating a new world of possibility by ending minority injustice may be closer than ever before. It will be up to those of us most materially able to demand democracy peacefully, to help end the desperation that makes violent reaction not only inevitable but justified. The social media of information sharing can help resistance to oppression as never before by uniting global communities into a truly democratic movement to permanently retire war and begin an era of peace. This could be a great year for humanity, but it could also bring disaster if humanity doesn’t begin acting like a social entity, and not just a mass of separate individuals. Really social media can help us become a really human race. Let’s become one, and have a happy 2011.

Weak Links

The Wikileaks story has been treated by the establishment as a dangerous expose of imperial mind management and led to suppression, damage control and vindictive retribution.  Meanwhile much of what passes for an anti establishment has expressed cynical disregard for what seems like old news, or treated the entire episode as another of the  products of an all controlling deity-like complex of near invisible forces. These involve  theories of manipulative plots and conspiracies to plot conspiratorial manipulations, all of them unknown to any but a chosen sect who seem to understand everything but how to stop the evil conspirators. The most extreme members of this cult  are dangerously close to believing sunrise, sunset and the seasons are the result of machinations by a group of Talmudic billionaire Mossad agents sitting in a room in Tel Aviv or New York. In often mentally disabling ways  these sources almost make the dangers of global capitalism and Zionist dominance of the American government pale in importance or even existence beside the threat of seemingly invisible forces that conspire to arrange just about everything. But many establishment figures, among them some of the foremost jackals and hyenas of the foreign policy establishment, have joined in cynically asking “who is manipulating us here?” All but totally submerged in consciousness is the risk that has been run by the Wikileaks group and its sources, nor is there enough awareness of the  panic among keepers of the public mind and their lashing out in ways as irrational as some of the critics, though far more threatening. 

Along with near comical” illuminati” based theories of conspiracies, plots and counter plots, we have defamation of the character and intelligence of people taking heroic risk in making public what was once private. They are maligned as criminals, fools or enemy agents. A citizen of Australia is accused of being a traitor to America while Sweden charges him with a horrendous sex offense seemingly invented by otherwise sane Scandinavians: he refused to use a condom! It is almost bizarre enough to be funny but the potential tragedy is hardly humorous. The Wikileakers are subjected to death threats and demands for their execution by irrational voices in and out of government while small, shrill voices claim they are counter-counter-counter spies or dupes of dupes of dupes. Just what is going on here?



Instead of being grateful to people informing the public about matters normally kept secret from them, we have a variety of suspicions on the one hand, and the spinning of cables and messages by corporate media on the other. When major sources reveal only those parts of the information that fit the governing mind control operation and focus on Iran or China, it is not those media sources that are charged with misinforming but those bringing the information out of the darkness and into public light. Instead of often mindless speculation about what motivates Assange we would all do better to heed his warnings that the so-called journalistic process itself is nothing more than “ a craven sucking up to official sources”, as is clearly indicated in the editorial opions rendered and major media reportage of this story. This giant step towards democracy and anti secrecy is reduced to the vicious charges being made by some of the most scurrilous and murderous individuals and institutional forces in the society. Indeed, what is going on here? Imperial business as usual, and what else is new?



Calls for the execution of Assange have been made by elected fanatics and their crackpot rehab counterparts in media, with segments of the public whipped into a frenzy over his alleged treachery and nonsense that these leaks risk the lives of military personnel, despite not one shred of evidence to indicate anything of the sort. In fact and with rare exceptions, care has been taken by the Wiki leakers to omit what might indeed be dangerous to innocent employees of the empire. And the heroic military worker who turned the information over to Wikileaks is in a cell and facing a fifty-year prison sentence for the crime of actually serving his people and not their rulers. The murderous pretenders to democracy who send thousands to their death in foreign wars now shriek that Manning and Assange are endangering the lives of those who would be safe in their homes if not for these political employees of global capital and its Zionist affiliates who allegedly serve “public” interest with their bloody and racist militarism.

Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and their cohorts are definitely a threat to diplomacy that hides reality from the public when not totally distorting it, and to perverted government policies of war carried out in the public’s name and called dedication to peace. Establishment leaders and their stenographers in media treat this assault on logic, language and morality as patriotism. Meanwhile, efforts to bring information that should have reached us long ago if corporate media were not under control of the very forces it supposedly reports on, are seen as treason, disregarded as nothing new or treated as an adventure story. Maybe we’d be better off is all of this were just the sort of conspiracy from a supernatural realm that some suspect, but it is very real and demands the concern of all who wish for a different reality. Assange, Manning, and all their cohorts yet unknown in this drama need and demand the support of all who believe in peace, social justice and open democratic government to achieve those things. They have given the lie to the notion that there are, or should be, secrets in an open society or that there should be behind the scenes manipulation of nations, governments and media sources.

The Wikileaks group are sending a signal that we can know and should know everything that is done in our name and that in this electronic age there are no longer any secrets that can be kept from us, if we would simply demand  completely open government and defend those who take great risk to bring it about. The first call ought to be to come to the aid of Assange, and especially Manning. If we allow either of them to be made scapegoats and suffer more than they already have for their acts on behalf of humanity, we may all  suffer far more ourselves. And we will deserve it.   






Email: frankscott@comcast.net

No More Misplaced Gratitude

On this Thanksgiving weekend let us give thanks, not for the self-righteous Pilgrim Fathers who arrived to America full of persecutorial wrath, but to those genuine heroes down through the ages who have struggled to bequeath to us a legacy of freedom and democracy.

Obviously, there are too many candidates to mention in a brief blog post. But the abolitionists have to rank high on the list. Without their herculean efforts to end chattel slavery, the ¨peculiar institution¨would long since have destroyed the republic for which the United States supposedly stands. It is thanks to them that we know the difference between a human being and an animal, a subtlety that escaped our forebears.

We might also express gratitude to the labor movement for having created a middle class, forcing capital to accede to social democratic dignities it is now struggling mightily to retract. Long may its example live to inspire us to widen the circles of compassion that alone give meaning to the word ¨community.¨

Our thankfulness ought also to extend to the movements that conspired to liberate us from the dogma that women are mindless appendages of male egotism, by nature dedicated to serving the masculine delusions of omnipotence that have come dangerously close to ending human civilization altogether. A century ago women were widely considered to be childlike creatures whose infantile ambitions could only lead them astray, unless a man took pity enough to guide them right. Their labor went almost completely unpaid, and on the few occasions when a paycheck was granted, husbands and fathers had rights to collect it for them. Over the past century women have managed to put patriarchal domination consistently on the defensive, extracting concessions that have given them a vastly more independent life than that they knew before.

A word of thanks could also be extended to human rights movements around the world that have codified the rights to which every human being has fallen heir, while publicizing the inherent tendency of nation states to abuse them. This publicity has subtly constrained the worst excesses of state power, continually giving hope that future movements might find a way to transcend the arbitrary nature of unchecked power altogether.

And a special thanks to Ernst Zundel and many other Holocaust heretics, whose stoic dignity in challenging the Holocaust Industry´s vengeful orthodoxy has taught us once again that the price of freedom is eternal dissidence.

Bulletins-Breaking News!!

Another Impostor Fools American Government: Was Not Real Israeli

After being duped by an alleged Taliban negotiator who was actually a member of an Islamic comedy group, the USA suffered another diplomatic setback. Moishe Goldblatt, a deli owner from Brooklyn, New York, posed as an Israeli government official and was able to get a loan of 250 billion dollars from the USA. He said that Israel would refrain from killing Palestinians during the EID, an Islamic celebration at the end of Ramadan. He promised they would not resume brutalizing the Palestinian population until the three days of EID were over. The American government gratefully accepted the offer, made on behalf of the only democracy in the middle east and our closest ally in the entire world, and gave him a personal check for the full amount.

A chagrinned White House spokesman said ” We are very embarrassed but we put a stop check through immediately and hope that it will work before this man, who has escaped to Israel where he has impunity from any law, spends it all and ruins several more of our banks. We will definitely check papers and other credentials more carefully in future and this will not happen again.”

Abe Loxman of the American Semitic Society accused the official of blood libel on the Jewish people and warned of a pending pogrom and possible holocaust if America did not immediately exonerate Goldblatt and attack Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Russia and a suburban part of Mobile, Alabama.


Citizen Outrage Leads to Replacement of TSA program

Fist fights, stabbings and bombings of x-ray machines have led to the canceling of the frisk, feel up and bombard with x-rays program that had caused such embarrassment and so much cancer. The new program will assure that airplanes are kept free of terror threats and obnoxious patrons but will not be as embarrassing to innocent flyers on their way to family and business meetings in search of financing for rent or mortgage payments.

The new program is the Government Reconnaissance Of Passenger Equipment and does not involve x-rays nor any handling of people’s junk unless they are willing to be pawed at by a GROPE agent . These agents all look like super models and Hollywood stars . “We think passengers won't mind being felt up if we ask their permission and the groping agent looks hot enough to maybe spend a few hours with in a hotel room. Of course, the grope will only last a moment or so, but passengers will be free to arrange private meetings  on their own time if any of our professional gropers are willing.”

The first day of airport GROPE tests found a long line of people waiting to be groped, with many not even having airline tickets or intending to go anywhere after they were thoroughly searched for possible bombs that might be hidden in underwear, bras and other crotch and nipple covering garments. Except for the long lines of smiling people waiting to be groped and the long wait caused by folks who really weren’t flying anywhere but were only there to be examined by the very attractive Gropers, the first day was a success. 

Republicans, Democrats , Decline to States and even Tea  Party members all seemed to agree that this was a government program they could support. One traveler said “ I’m only going to take the bus but I couldn’t resist that babe who looked like Angelina Jolie. I’m going to insist she search my shorts, thoroughly.” And a woman said “ I intend to use public transit to go across town, but when I saw that agent who looked like Denzel Washington, I thought it was worth standing on line for an hour or so to get a chance at having him fondle my, uh, search my bra for, um, you know, weapons or bombs or whatever it is they are looking for.”

Respect Americans and Transform America

We approach the annual celebration of peace, love and over consumption as America's longest war threatens to become longer and spread to more nations. But there will be less consuming than usual in a time of political repression, economic recession and social depression.  Class relations are strained by the most unequal distribution of wealth in our history and political divisions are causing canine-like political disputes among confused citizens angrily chasing their own tails. We fight ourselves under controlling force that prevents us from recognizing commonality by stressing differences. Ethnicities, skin tones and identity groups are used to keep us from confronting a disaster we face in common and even our minds are hyphenated into divisions causing battles of self against self.
  

Some were near panic over Tea Party victories in the fiasco we call our electoral democracy, insisting that fascism was at hand. Other equally mystified voters crowed of triumph for the common man at having elected more employees of the rich.  Billion dollar campaigns mask the fact that both capitalist parties keep switching crews on the Titanic as the ship continues to sink. The cancer or polio choice offered the citizenry every two years has more than fifty percent never bothering to vote and results in minorities electing a government bought and paid for by infinitely smaller minorities. No wonder there is growing if baffling disgust with a politics dominated by corporate capital, billionaires and foreign interests.
  

Our anti-social politics create fear, anger and ignorance and send them into battle against ignorance, anger and fear. The minority voting for cancer shows contemptuous disrespect for the minority voting for polio. And vice versa. This civil war threatens a terminal social disease if it continues neglecting our political economy. A manipulated struggle between those thinking they are more virtuous or more patriotic makes respect for one another almost impossible and prevents identifying the real problem: a minority dominated economic monster spending trillions of public dollars on imperial war, bank bailouts and private wealth. It is bankrupting the nation and may bring further disaster if it is not democratically subdued.
  

People should be disgusted with government that serves minority interests and not the mass of Americans who think themselves democrats, republicans, independents or apathetics. A relatively tiny group representing corporations and finance capital dominates our politics. This cabal controls national wealth, which it uses to create staggering private profits from war and waste, all at the expense of a public absorbing the crippling loss. Calling this a democracy should make people furious but those using media to manage our minds the way they use politics to manage the rest of our lives propagandize us into lashing out at scapegoats.
  

The smug superiority shown by some liberals is negatively balanced by the hateful bigotry shown by some conservatives. These divisions are the product of a market culture that only profits some at the expense of others. But we all pay a price when we focus on the results and not the source of our problems. People from upscale communities who support immigration but whose only contact with immigrants is when their houses are cleaned, their children tended or their homes repaired are hardly more politically correct than those who complain about immigration because they deal with its social impact of crowded neighborhoods and lost jobs. Our anti-social environment makes immigration beneficial to some and costly to others. But that’s true of everything else in our profit and loss economy.  And those believing that America is failing not because government spends trillions on imperial warfare and service to great wealth, but because it spends millions on the most downtrodden in our society are not only misguided; they are loony. 
  

This is feudal era politics setting peasants against serfs while the landlord laughs all the way to the bank but it’s more deadly in the 21st century. Divide and conquer thoughts that would have taken years to put into people’s heads in ages past can corrupt minds more quickly in technologically wired societies where transmitting propaganda takes micro seconds. And when American political leaders mouth platitudes about social justice and fighting racism while they invest taxpayer dollars in propping up a racial theocracy in Israel, our problems are not tea party members, Muslims or immigrants but a power structure that rules with such murderous hypocrisy.
  

The holiday season is as good a time as any to begin acting on teachings of humanity and cooperation in direct contradiction to the prevailing values of anti-social bigotry and murderously competitive war making. We suffer under a system which is inflicting austerity on the public while a minority gorges itself and induces the people to blame one another for problems which originate not with individuals but in the social organization itself. Food, clothing and shelter are not rising in cost because poor people live in comfort but because rich people lavish in luxury. The military budget does not continually expand because we are threatened from outside the USA but because inside the USA there are psychotics demanding wars on Iran and any other nation or people that dare to attempt breaking the imperial model and changing the organization of nations to support humanity before private profit. And in order to deal with these and more problems that threaten our survival as a people and not simply as an identity group among people, we need to be human beings with common purpose. We could start by trying to understand why there is disagreement and ignorance among us and not simply demean others as secular idiots, religious morons, political terrorists or imbeciles from outer space. It might help us create democratic solutions to problems that threaten all of our futures. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and Bless Americans. At least try, for a change.

Race and Immigration

The abusive racial dynamic inherent in U.S. relations with its peoples of color is apparent to any honest observer. U.S. territory is where human slavery was firmly institutionalized for over two centuries; where abolitionists were regarded as violent extremists by virtually all whites in the decades leading up to the civil war; where lynchings were thrilling communal celebrations for another century; and where a burgeoning incarceration gulag today holds more black Americans in bondage than ever were enslaved (in percentages far beyond their proportion of the general population).

It would be naive to expect that a racism so deeply entrenched didn't manifest itself in some way in every dimension of social policy, including immigration. However, this does not mean that Americans who object to mass illegal immigration of largely non-white populations are necessarily bigots. Those who dislike being swamped by non-English-speaking immigrants do not have to be racists to feel this way, and many are not. Competition for scarce jobs, resources, and government services is a perfectly legitimate concern that cries of "racism" do nothing to allay. In fact, they tend to drive people into permanent opposition.

The root of mass illegal immigration is not racism per se, but the uprooting of Third World and indigenous populations by capital in its relentless pursuit of profit and market share. While it is true that the beneficiaries of this exploitation are overwhelmingly white, it is not true that every white person who raises an objection to the practical consequences of mass illegal migration is guilty of racist apologetics. Immigration law is not the same as Jim Crow law, and it is far from clear that a desire to see such law fully enforced is a racist concern. (And let us recall as well that in 1999 Washington bombed a group of white Europeans - the Serbs - continuously for two-and-a-half months in a successful effort to establish a NATO protectorate over the formerly socialist Yugoslavia. Being white did not protect them).

As a practical matter, it would be far better to make it possible for Third World and indigenous populations to remain in their countries of origin than to cheer them on as they try to find a way to live in an alien culture that thrives on exploiting their cheap labor. This would also obviate the need to waste effort giving anti-racist tutorials to U.S. "nativists" whose fears of economic decline are hardly delusional. In short, since both illegal immigrants and "nativists" have reason to oppose the creation of large classes of economic refugees, why not engage the problem at its source, where capital denies democratic representation to the present and former victims of Western colonialism and imperialism. Governments that even mention the rights of these populations are routinely hounded and destroyed by Washington, which leaves illegal immigration as the only realistic option for millions of desperate people.

Many Central American and Mexican immigrants currently working in the U.S. (even those who have green cards), would return to their countries of origin if (1) there were an end to the drug violence, and (2) there were a ready supply of $2 an hour jobs to live on. It would be far better to arrange for this to happen than to declare amnesty every generation for huge groups of displaced workers migrating from Latin America to the United States, while crying "racist" at those who object to the continual flouting of the law.

The practical benefits of confronting the illegal immigration problem at its source are considerable. Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa has declared it a national tragedy that so many Ecuadoreans have been forced to migrate in search of employment. Why not teach "nativists" and immigrants alike about the popular movements in Latin America seeking to put an economic floor beneath the poor, which will make it unnecessary for them to migrate in the first place? That way, groups of workers currently pitted against each other can come to understand their mutual exploitation at the hands of capital, instead of continuing to allow themselves to be divided. Narratives of Western racism give important background information but lead nowhere in terms of solutions. (How many "reforms" of immigration law will be required to absorb all the people of color who see better prospects in the U.S. than where they currently are? Will the U.S. be better off for having "reformed"?)

Opponents of illegal immigration often declare that it is up to migrant populations to stay in their countries of origin and fight to make them decent places, not escape to the U.S. by violating established immigration laws. "What is it about illegal you don't understand?" they habitually ask. Liberals rarely answer the question directly, preferring to invoke tear-jerking testimonials about divided families and other hardships immigrants endure, which do not speak to the issue of legality. This gives right-wing demagogues the opportunity to masquerade as defenders of the law, when in fact they continually cheerlead for blatantly illegal U.S. interventions around the world.

There simply is no need to evade the legality issue. Washington and the transnational corporations headquartered in the U.S. have long engaged in appalling illegality to maintain a secure global marketplace dominated by the United States, overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating political opponents, and crushing popular movements calling for basic human rights for all. These policies, not coincidentally, leave many of their victims with little alternative but to migrate to the United States in search of any work they can get. The "nativist" right scores a lot of points on the legality issue only because liberals do not confront their opponents with the facts of U.S. foreign and trade policy.

If the immigration debate is focused primarily on racism and how evil and racist "nativists" are in resisting large waves of illegal immigrants, attention is diverted from the overarching criminality of Washington's international policies, as well as the fact that the governments the U.S. most strenuously opposes in Latin America (that's where most U.S. immigrants are coming from) are doing the most to make mass migration unnecessary in the first place. Aside from the principled issue (legality is a value in itself), a fair number of Americans pre-disposed to antagonism towards illegal immigrants might be induced to support social democratic and socialist movements abroad if they knew that these movements stand the best chance of drying up illegal immigration flows by establishing basic economic security for vulnerable populations prone to migrate to the U.S..

Popular education along these lines seems a more promising strategy than constantly asserting that the unaddressed grievances of downwardly mobile U.S. workers are inherently racist.

9/11 Bulletin: Nano-Termites, not Nano-Thermite !

 "Such explosions may be explained by prior placement of nanothermite or another suitable explosive in the towers, possibly mixed in paint or fireproofing or embedded in ceiling tiles. Nine scientists reported finding nanothermite (an explosive agent) in the tower dust collected from multiple locations in Manhattan . "

Legalienate’s investigative reporting team  recently interviewed Gunter Von Schmutz, the European scientist who revealed that “nano-thermite” was found in the powdered ruins of the Twin Towers, proving that explosives  had been planted in the buildings prior to the alleged terrorist attack. But further studies and typographical corrections at the Institute Detecting International Operations of Terrorism led to an even more shocking conclusion:

The tracings were actually of laboratory created specially bred steel eating “nano-termites” !

The Legalienate team questioned  Doctor Von Schmutz, from the London Institute of Applied Research, about the many new questions raised by these  astounding theories.

Legalienate: What do these further findings  tell us about the previous work you had done and conclusions you had drawn?

Dr Von Schmutz: Well, as you may know we were working  with scientists from Denmark who had brought some Strawberry Danish into the testing rooms. Some of the residue of the Danish pastry mixed in with the powder from the twin tower ruins and naturally, we thought they were traces of nano-thermite, an explosive which leaves red debris similar to strawberry concentrate such as was used in the danish pastry - which was very tasty, by the way.

Legalienate: So you thought the strawberry was thermite? But then how did you get to the termite conclusion?

Von Schmutz: Well, termites can eat through wood, as we all know, but these specially  bred red termites were laboratory created to  eat steel, such as the columns used in constructing the twin towers and the other building that collapsed that day. We had thought thousands of pounds of nano-thermite would have been necessary to destroy the buildings and it became impossible to arrange a scheme to get that much explosive planted in the buildings without anyone knowing it, unless we could prove that all who worked in or visited the towers were visually, audibly and mentally too disabled to notice, so we naturally came up with a far more understandable conclusion connected to termites.  Several million of the tiny creatures - they were nano-bred, you understand - could be planted by just one agent who could easily carry the few pounds necessary and not be noticed, even by people without any disabilities.

Legalienate: But how and where would that agent  place them so as to get within the steel structure and how long would it take for the termites to eat the steel?

Von Schmutz: We have thought of that and it’s quite simple. The termites were planted within the beams when the buildings were constructed and immediately began their work, which would take years to complete in timing with the 9/11 phony plane crash attack.

Legalienate: You mean the termites were there when the building went up and had been eroding the structure for more than thirty years?

Von Schmutz: Of course, as is obvious to anyone who repeatedly watches replays of the collapsing towers falling into their own footprints in a matter of seconds. Any scientist can tell you such things are not possible without pre-planted termites eroding the superstructure of the buildings, and coordinated with precision timing to wait until the plane crash to finally crumble from within. It’s obvious.

Legalienate: But who, or what, would have planned such an operation some thirty years before it would be completed?

Von Schmutz: Well, as so few seem to understand, we are dealing with forces beyond human comprehension, unless the humans comprehending have scholastic background and credentials from various global correspondence schools which teach “out of the box” thinking. Conventional up-down day-night hot-cold reasoning will not serve in a perplexing dilemma like this one.

Legalienate: But it seemed pretty simple and clear that the hijacked airliners crashed into the towers, started fires stoked by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, weakened the steel beams of the structures, which, in a faster , cheaper and more profitable building technique were  not encased in protective cement, and gradually weakened them to collapse one floor on top of another, walls and windows to shatter and debris to fly out. How can you say that your theory , which seems to defy reason, is correct, and the event  witnessed by millions in real time and by hundreds of millions later on film and video, was a complete fabrication arranged long before the airliners were crashed into the towers?

Von Schmutz: Well, as I said, if you are unable to see the obvious illogical implications of such plots and conspiracies, there really is no use trying to explain them to you in a logical fashion. Had you been educated at the institutions from which those of us chosen to reveal these truths to you were  trained, it might be possible for you to see these things not quite visible to the naked eye or comprehensible to the fully clothed mind . Would you like  a brochure for the London Institute of Applied Research?

Legalienate: No, but thanks. And  now , back to our headquarters. On planet earth.

Ingrid Betancourt, FARC, and Death Squad Democracy

"I cannot understand how a revolutionary organization can end up behaving worse than the very people it is fighting."

-----Ingrid Betancourt, Even Silence Has an End

"The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman."

-----Retired U.S. Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff

Few have sought to rationally evaluate Ingrid Betancourt's above claim in the wake of her rescue from six plus years of captivity in the Colombian jungle at the hands of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a rebel group engaged in a half-century long war with Colombian security forces. Almost all discussion of Betancourt's harrowing experience as a prisoner takes it as an axiom that FARC violence is (1) evil, and (2) the principal cause of the war. It is apparently heretical to ask if - or even to what extent - this is really true.

Betancourt describes FARC members as full of class hatred, "with which they [are] brainwashed daily." She pronounces them "cowardly" and "cruel," dedicated to killing, lying, and betrayal, along with ritual humiliation of their captives.

Political figures like Betancourt, who was abducted while running for president, are treated as criminals, she says, for having voted to fund the war against FARC. All politicians are regarded as parasites, prolonging the war in order to profit from it. In Betancourt's judgment, "most of these (FARC) young people [do] not really understand the meaning of the word 'political.' They [are] taught that politics [is] an activity for those who managed to deceive and then amass wealth by stealing taxes." As a prisoner, Betancourt found it difficult to offer a rebuttal, since "for me the problem with their (FARC's) explanation was that to a large degree I shared it."

Nothing could convince the FARC members that their hostages were anything but bitter class enemies engaged in self-serving rationalizations of criminal conduct. "For them," writes Betancourt, "anyone who wasn't on the side of FARC was scum." When she tried to explain that she had gone into politics in order to fight corruption, injustice, and war, her captors replied dismissively: "You all say the same thing."

In short, what made FARC's belief system credible was the behavior of those who served the Colombian state, including Betancourt, a former Senator and presidential candidate.

Although Betancourt's book (Even Silence Has an End) is the story of her captivity, not an account of the civil war, it is impossible to make proper sense of a hostage's experience without some understanding of the wider war of which it is a part. In this respect, Betancourt's account of the Colombian civil war is disappointing, evidencing a distinct liberal bias, portraying the Colombian army as caught between right wing paramilitaries and FARC "terrorists." This is standard imperial apologetics for a vicious class war against the poor by the state and its affiliated death squads (backed up by Washington). The pretense is that the paramilitaries are independent of the state, which seeks to bring them under control, when in reality they are an expression of state policy that it is convenient for governing officials to deny. [Colombia's rulers play a major role in sustaining the death squads. Hundreds of FARC guerrillas have been dehumanized and tortured in Uribe and Bush's appalling high-security "special prisons."]

At the time of her abduction in February, 2002 Betancourt was running for president as the candidate of the Green Oxygen reformist party, which had the aim, she said, of "establish[ing] dialogue simultaneously with everyone involved in the conflict, while maintaining strong military pressure to ensure that the illegal factions had an incentive to sit at the negotiating table." She claims that the Colombian army fought both "the FARC" and "the paramilitaries."

In fact, however, the paramilitary death squads are not fundamentally opposed by the Colombian army. Both are an outgrowth of the Colombian state and have class enemies in common, including labor organizations, popular movements, indigenous organizations, opposition political parties, peasant movements, intellectuals, religious currents, youth and student groups, even neighborhood associations. This means that FARC's claim that the state is fundamentally criminal can't simply be dismissed as Marxist dogma.

"During the 1980s," writes Betancourt, "the Colombian government offered a peace agreement to the FARC, and a truce was signed and political reforms were voted in Congress to support the agreement." She blames the FARC for the failure of negotiations. "But with the rise of drug trafficking, the FARC found a way to finance its war and the peace agreement collapsed." She adds that "The FARC brought terror to the countryside, killing peasants and rural workers who would not accept their rule. A rivalry between the drug traffickers and the FARC gave rise to a new surge of violence." Paramilitaries emerged as a defensive reaction to FARC terror: "The paramilitaries emerged as an alliance between the political far right - in particular the landlords - and the drug traffickers, striving to confront the FARC and expel them from their regions."

But was "peace" ever really offered? In the mid-1980s the FARC agreed to a cease-fire and many of its members joined the electoral process. Thousands of guerrillas and their sympathizers formed a political party, the Patriotic Union, fielding candidates at all levels of government. But during the entire period of its announced cease fire the paramilitary AUC carried out military actions against civilians. In less than five years, five thousand activists, candidates, and elected officials were murdered by the military and "private" death squads, including two presidential candidates, several members of congress, scores of mayors, hundreds of city council members and local politicians. The survivors rejoined the guerrillas, fled into exile or disappeared underground. Betancourt's account makes no mention of these events.

Only when the FARC managed to extend its control to within 40 miles of the capital of Bogota did the government of Andrés Pastraña agree to another round of negotiations in an extensive demilitarized zone under FARC influence (1999-2002). In these years FARC engaged in peace negotiations with the Pastraña government, which, incidentally, rejected the "terrorist" characterization of the group. Moreover, many prominent business leaders from Wall Street, London and Bogota, along with notables like Queen Noor of Jordan, met with FARC leaders in the demilitarized zone during the peace negotations, and came away impressed with their efforts.

The radicalization of the Bush Administration after 911 served as a convenient pretext to break off the peace talks. Under pressure from Washington and Colombia's right wing, the Pastraña government abruptly terminated negotiations in 2002, and in less than 24 hours dispatched the Colombian Army to the demilitarized area in an effort to capture the FARC negotiators. The surprise attack failed, but did manage to provoke an escalation of the war.

During the three years of negotiations, open debates organized by the FARC had covered fundamental social, economic and political issues. Land reform, public investment in job creation, foreign investment and public ownership, economic alternatives to coca farming, education and health care, all had been debated without fear of death squad retribution. Many formerly hostile observers from Europe, Latin America, and North America, had left the negotiations convinced that peace for Colombia could be reached at the bargaining table.

In the post-911 world, rhetorical overkill through applying the word "terrorism" has become nearly an addiction. The Uribe Administration (2004-2010), like its patron the Bush Administration, quickly developed the habit of smearing virtually all of its critics as "terrorists," an apparently irresistible way of disposing of political opposition. Leaving this vulgar political tactic aside, we can say that whatever else might be claimed about FARC, it is the longest lasting, largest peasant-based guerrilla movement active in the world today. Prior to 911, it was recognized as a legitimate resistance movement by most countries in Latin America and the European Union, with the European Union rejecting the Clinton Administration's 1997 designation of the organization as "terrorist." (The Clinton administration never considered the Colombian government terrorist, even in 1998 when pilots from Palanquero air base dropped cluster bombs on a civilian target, killing 17 civilians.)

With the election of Alvaro Uribe, the FARC was officially branded a "terrorist" organization, with the EU deferring to Washington in accepting this label. In short order FARC negotiators and international representatives were arrested in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador. Protected by Washington's "War on Terrorism" President Uribe savagely repressed trade union general strikes and massive rural protests by major agricultural organizations opposed to his promotion of a "free trade" agreement with the U.S. Impunity was the order of the day.

In the midst of government sponsored butchery, the FARC pursued a policy of tactical retreat to jungle and mountain strongholds, and made offers of mutual prisoner releases as a confidence building step toward future peace negotiations. Washington opposed any prisoner swap and Uribe took the same position.

Meanwhile, the U.S. extradited two FARC prisoners held by the Colombian government and put them in solitary confinement, shackled 23 hours a day. Simon Trinidad was corralled into a show trial for "drug trafficking" and "terrorism" as well as "kidnapping." What are the chances that Trinidad will be allowed to write about the cruelty of his captors to a world-wide audience receptive to the idea that Washington's violence is inherently terroristic? There is plenty of evidence to substantiate this point of view, but few are likely to ever hear about it.

When Andrés Pastraña ran for president Betancourt supported him, and upon her release praised his successor, Alvaro Uribe, a rightwing politican with a history of ties to Colombian death squads. Uribe's victory inaugurated one of the bloodiest campaigns of state terror in the history of Colombia, with the paramilitaries committing about 80 percent of the human rights violations, compared to 16 percent by guerrillas. As mentioned before, the death squads are not independent of the state, but an outgrowth of it: police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.

In the Uribe years U.S. military officials and their Colombian partners funded a 31,000 member strong death squad force which sowed terror throughout the country, killing thousands of peasants in areas where FARC was influential. Hundreds of trade union activists were assassinated by hit men in broad daylight in towns and cities occupied by the army. Human rights workers, as well as journalists and professors who dared to report on the military's massacres, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. It was not a rare occurrence for them to be beheaded or disemboweled, in order to spread the kind of paralyzing terror that renders resistance unthinkable. Millions of peasants were driven off their land into wretched urban slums, their lands taken over by prominent paramilitary chiefs or large landowners. The purging of political undesirables from the countryside was strictly in accordance with Pentagon counterinsurgency training, which counseled the Colombian military to destroy the "social infrastructure" of the FARC, which had longstanding and extensive family, community and social ties with the peasantry. [The guerrilla moves among the people, said Mao Tse Tung, as the fish swims in the sea. U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine therefore calls for "draining the ocean." Without water (i.e., social support networks) all the "fish" (i.e., guerrillas) inevitably die. Not without reason Colombia has been called the "genocidal democracy." Ninety-seven percent of its human rights abuses go unpunished.]

Although few now seem willing to concede the point, the long political history of the FARC, its longstanding ties with a wide swathe of the Colombian rural population, its program of social reforms, its targeted use of force in its conflict with the Colombian military and security forces, its continued pursuit of peace negotiations based on the need for social and military reform, all militate strongly against any simple-minded designation of the organization as merely "terrorist." They are an army fighting a war, and war is always cruel. Which is not to justify the specific abuses Betancourt describes in her book. But let us not forget the thousands of mutilated corpses produced by Colombian security forces. Betancourt, at least, emerged with her life.

The real origin of the Colombian civil war is not FARC "evil," but savage poverty. In a country of roughly 45 million people, about 11 million people cannot afford even one nutritious meal a day. Close to two-thirds of the population is unable to regularly meet its most basic subsistence needs. In rural areas the poverty rate rises to as high as 85 percent. There is no way of maintaining such a status quo without major applications of state violence, which is to say, death squads.

Betancourt has praised Uribe as a "great president," though before her abduction she was harshly critical of him, and in her latest book she accuses him of a do-nothing hostage policy designed to "let time pass, hoping that our lives would become less valuable, forcing the guerrillas to release us without obtaining anything in return."

How "great" does his record show Uribe to be? His name is in the files of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the C.I.A. as a narco-trafficker, one of the most wanted international drug traffickers, in fact. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991 accuses him of being a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, whom Betancourt describes in a previous book as "a monster who had showed his fourteen-year-old son how to dig out a victim's eyeball with a red-hot spoon." The D.E.A. report states that Uribe was one of the "more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the U.S. and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as 'hit men' to assassinate individuals . . . and to perform terrorist attacks against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions."

When he was governor of the Department of Antioquia, Uribe was one of the ideologues and financiers of the paramilitaries. He was responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of peasants and for chemical contamination of the Amazon, which has spread cancer and other diseases among the people of Putumayo and Caqueta, leaving vast tracts of once fertile land unusable. He was George Bush's staunchest ally in Latin America, and cooperated with him in converting Colombia to a semi-colony of the U.S., armed to the teeth with high technology weaponry and nearly 400,000 troops, necessary for carrying out policies of unrestrained state terrorism against labor organizers and the rural poor.

A complete bill of indictment against Uribe would take considerable time to draw up. He collaborated in the crimes of the paramilitary death squads; caused massive forced displacement (over 4 million Colombians have been uprooted from the land); ignored structural problems in the rural economy linked to high unemployment and under-employment; allowed funds for the poor and social sectors to be systematically transferred to drug lords, paramilitaries, rich industrialists, and personal friends; pursued a high-growth economic strategy at the expense of creating jobs; denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors; closed down some of Colombia's biggest public hospitals, eliminating over 4000 medical jobs; carried out a policy of systematic murder of trade union organizers; sponsored an illegal invasion of neighboring Ecuador, carried on a childish confrontation with Hugo Chavez, costing Colombia dearly in trade with Venezuela; used the judicial system to attack civilians and political opponents; bought votes in Congress to amend the Constitution (in order to allow him to run for an illegal second term); illegally assigned contracts to personal relatives; approved "free trade" treaties and other legislation to advance the interests of a tiny few at the expense of the many; and violated Colombian sovereignty by permitting seven U.S. military bases in Colombia (the Colombian constitution does not allow the stationing of foreign troops on Colombian soil). In short, he has worked long and diligently to convert the Colombian state into a major criminal enterprise. If all this is the work of a "great" president, perhaps we would be better off with failures.

Upon her release Betancourt embraced and praised General Mario Montoya, who commanded the clandestine Anti-Communist Alliance that murdered thousands of Colombian dissidents, almost all of them hideously tortured beforehand. Betancourt, who repeatedly emphasizes the cruelty of her FARC captors, has had nothing to say about the ferocious barbarity of the Colombian security forces, and continues to endorse the Colombian army's prosecution of the war in order to achieve "peace" (through negotiations). But she offers no proposal for how to reign in the state terrorists who have shown no interest in peace.

Betancourt nowhere makes mention of the pronounced role of the United States in creating and maintaining the war. Colombia is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the hemisphere, and, not coincidentally, is also the worst human rights violator in the Americas. Much of the blame goes back to the Kennedy Administration, which went to great lengths to convert the Colombian army into counterinsurgency brigades that would fight "Communism" via death squads. This ushered in the National Security Doctrine that labeled all political resistance a form of treason, justifying making war on the Colombian people (the "internal enemy") with large doses of state terror. In 1966 the field manual U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while anti-guerrilla efforts should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was justified.

The liberation of Betancourt strengthened Uribe's terrorist regime and lent it renewed credibility, assisting its increasing militarization of the countryside while covering up ongoing murders of trade unionists and peasants. While regrettable, her suffering is nothing in comparison to what the Colombian poor have been forced to endure for fifty years at the hands of the butchers who set her free.

Sources:

Geraldo, Javier, S. J., Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, (Common Courage: 1996)

McClintock, Michael, Instruments of Statecraft - U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, (Pantheon, 1992)

Goff, Stan, Full Spectrum Disorder - The Military in the New American Century, (Soft Skull: 2004)

Betancourt, Ingrid, Even Silence Has an End - My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle, (Penguin: 2010)

Betancourt, Ingrid, Until Death Do Us Part - My Struggle To Reclaim Colombia, (Harper-Collins: 2002)

Morgan, Nick, "Colombia Elections," www.znet.org

Petras, James, "An Open Letter to the People and Government of the U.S. (and a reply to the FARC)," November 20, 2006, http://petras.lahaine.org

Rodrigues, Miguel Urbano, "Reaffirmation of Solidarity With FARC-EP, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia," www.rebelion.org

Petras, James, "Fidel Castro and the FARC: Eight Mistaken Thesis of Fidel Castro," July 7, 2006, http://petras.lahaine.org

Petras, James, "Colombia, Laboratory of Witches: Democracy and State Terrorism," August 12, 2008 http://petras.lahaine.org

Petras, James, "Leader of Deathsquads Wins Colombian Election," June 27, 2010, http://petras.lahaine.org

Petras, James, "Colombia: State Terror in the Name of Peace," May 4, 2010, http://petras.lahaine.org

Pimiento Susan and John Lindsay-Poland, "U.S. Base Deal for Colombia: Back to the Status Quo," October 8, 2010, http://upsidedownworld.org

Lindsay-Poland, John, "Army Commanders Fired For Killings," November 21, 2008, http://www.soaw.org

Bennett, Hans, "Neoliberalism Needs Death Squads in Colombia," September 3, 2009, http://upsidedownworld.org

Rozental, Manuel, "The Circle Opens Out: New Evidence of Criminality in Colombian Regime," May 25, 2010, http://upsidedownworld.org

Carroll, Rory, "Why the war on drugs in Colombia may never be won," February 16, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk

Betancourt, Ingrid, September 27, 2010, Democracy Now, www.democracynow.org

Democracy: The Cure For Depression

This is written before the November elections but it’s easy to predict their outcome;  the minority owners of the USA  will win . Finance capital, corporate wealth and Israel will still dominate  America and  people will still live under a government purchased by that minority . This is a democratic system  the way terminal cancer is a healthy organism. In fact, our social disease - capitalism -  is a terminal condition.


The 20th century  crisis called the Great Depression was survived by putting the economic cancer in remission with a primitive form of social democracy. It minimized the worst outrages of private fundamentalism with public spending which  lightened  burdens on at least some of the people. Its real purpose was to insure that  minority wealth  remain in control . Better informed capitalists understood that a complete breakdown might bring revolution and some kind of economic palliative was needed. Enter the “New Deal” which  made it possible for taxpayers to subsidize  the socially needed stimulants that profit seeking private capital would not finance. This introduced the novel idea of government spending to  prop up the private economy with public money, as  now. The point then and now was to protect  the dominance of private capital  by sanitizing the worst aspects of its fundamentalist fanaticism while  placing  the cost of social needs on the backs of the general public.


The protections for the corporate rich  have grown even worse  since then and we now have “recession” with greater inequality in wealth than  during that “depression”. The disease which was  in remission for a generation has returned to  terminal condition and now  threatens far more than the American people. In  pandemic global form it menaces the entire planet. The human and ecological destruction caused by manic pursuit of private profit at public expense has never been more obvious even with consciousness control attempting to hide its reality.


Whether  labeled a military industrial complex , climate change , media mind abuse,or corrupt government , the system  rewarding minorities that live comfortably while much of humanity goes hungry, is murdered in wars and lives in debt, poverty or colonized misery is no longer tolerable . This  election will hardly bring   change in that global condition nor even advance  democracy in the USA save in isolated cases . But democracy means  more than periodically  marching  to the polls and selecting from a pre-chosen group of professional employees of the ruling minority. It should involve  citizens in the everyday life of the national community but that’s something we have only entertained in theory . Elections like the present  fiasco make it more urgent we put that theory into practice.

This  campaign of political pornography had more billions spent than ever before and  candidates with no message  but that their opponents were criminals, bigots, nazis or psychopaths , while they were sent  to liberate us from such fiends. One wing of the ruling party claimed the other was using  foreign millions to elect its slate of monsters without mentioning the American  billions being spent on the whole sordid process. And while screeching about foreign influence on American politics it said nothing  about Israeli control exercised over national government and major media, since any mention of this can mean instant unemployment or a new career of public appearances to apologize for daring to say what many people think. The result of this hypocrisy and  treachery is that the people lose and the disease gets worse.

In order to move from a terminal condition and go beyond remission to a healthy  democracy we have to stop depending on representatives who not only carry the illness but spread its malignancy . Not an easy task in a society partitioned into competing individuals with occasional minority group cohesion, but  powerless  when up against the minority with trillions of dollars and massive weaponry at its disposal. Not easy, but hardly impossible and given the  worsening conditions we experience, absolutely necessary. Moving from identifying simply as self  or member of a minority to an identity as part  of an American majority is absolutely necessary.

Groups working for peace whether in the middle east or in local communities need to come together since none  will succeed without unity among all who want a  peaceful and socially just world. Those who demand government insured health care  need to join  with all workers, not just minorities, and form coalitions to bring a shorter work week which will enable small  businesses to hire more employees without fear of horrendous health care expense. We need to raise the minimum wage  for all and create a maximum wage as well and  an  economic stimulus  that devotes hundreds of billions to public job creation rather than to private financial forces  responsible for the present  near collapse. Public banks are an obvious way to help  finance what society  really needs rather than continuing the  obsessive and masturbatory economic focus on our nation’s private parts.

And foreign policy needs to be taken away from rich minorities operating for war profits  and to  benefit a foreign nation at the cost of  American tax payers  manipulated into supporting success for others which guarantees their own failure. The control of private capital over public minds  must be fought and the propaganda  countered with unbiased and respectful exchange of information that promotes understanding, unity and peace. That is in complete opposition to the  competitive, disrespectful and bigoted model we live under which defies logic by calling itself democratic freedom in action.

The terminal  system is economic but the potential victim is life itself and the cure for the disease is democracy, in politics , economics and morality. That is the work of the present in order to create a future. This election only makes it more imperative that we do that work.

Why Unemployment Is Good Business

“Business is business. The objective of industry is to make money. We are determined to make money. We concentrate solely on that aim. If we are satisfied that a billion-dollar merger will mean greater profits, we go ahead and engineer it.

“One of the easiest ways to cut down expenses being to cut down salary and wage rolls, we of course lay men off right and left. If elderly workers have become less nimble because of their long years of service, they are the logical ones to be dropped first. Naturally, the greater resources at the command of the enlarged combinations are unstintedly used to acquire the very latest labor-saving machinery, enabling us to dismiss still more wage-earners.

“In our eyes the most valuable executive is the one who can produce the most with the least amount of labor—the smallest number of workers and the smallest payroll. Our up-to-the-minute methods make it feasible for us to dispense with enormous numbers of workers—it is not uncommon for us to install one machine which enables half a dozen men to do what formerly took half a hundred or even a hundred men.

“Yes, we know that through our creation of gigantic enterprises—manufacturing, distributing, retailing, and every other kind—and through our vast expenditure on research, on invention, on machinery, we have caused grave dislocation of employment; but instead of being criticized for all this technological unemployment, we should be commended, since it is conclusive proof of our mastery of the science of management. What happens to all the hordes of workers we release is not our concern. Our responsibility begins and ends with running our business with surpassing efficiency, which means with a minimum of human labor.

“No, the unemployment thus created does not enter in any way into our calculations. Our bounden duty is to exercise every ounce of ingenuity we possess to do away with jobs, not to create them. Our objective is money, not more and more men, but fewer and fewer men.

“We are much too engrossed in increasing profits to give a thought to what happens because of our reducing the number of workers. How to take care of unemployment is a problem for others to solve. Let George do that.... We haven’t the time to bother with it. It isn’t our worry.”


------Forbes Magazine, April, 1930, "Are U.S. Business Leaders Morons?"