Who will get the natural gas concession to Obama's mouth? His intellectual flatulence is apparently uncontainable and his latest burst - in Cairo - takes its place in a long line of hollow Obama addresses that sound bad and smell worse.
Obama speaks, as always, in the value-neutral language of corporate liberalism, sidestepping questions of justice with meaningless concessions of the "mistakes were made" variety.
He says there is "tension" between "the United States and Muslims around the world" but does not say - cannot say - that the U.S. is guilty of systematic and longstanding injustice against both Muslims and Arabs. The words Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, U.S. and Israeli war crimes, do not fall from his hypocritical lips.
He claims that the identified "tension" between Islam and the West is "rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate," though there cannot be much doubt that if the U.S. withdrew its support for Israel's apartheid state, Muslim-U.S. tension would drastically decline and perhaps vanish altogether. But Obama does not support such a development, which means he is in favor of perpetuating the vast majority of the "tension" his disingenuous remarks are supposedly designed to dissolve.
Obama does allude to U.S. policy error (but never crimes), however the alleged mistakes always remain safely in the past, and he wants us to believe they were made inadvertently. For example, he says that "Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies" during the Cold War, an inadvertent and forgivable sin because the U.S. was (allegedly) fighting the Evil Empire on behalf of all humanity. He neglects to mention that (1) Muslim-majority countries are still treated as proxies today long after the Soviet Union vanished from the world scene, and (2) the Soviet Union deterred the U.S. from its worst behavior throughout the Cold War. Who can believe that Washington's wars against Yugoslavia and Iraq would have been dared in the face of a Soviet nuclear deterrent?
Obama does concede, however weakly, that the U.S. "played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government," the 1953 Mossadegh government. With the unanimous backing of parliament and overwhelming public support, Prime Minister Mossadegh had dared to nationalize Iranian oil. The CIA retaliated with a coup, overthrowing Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi. General Fazollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator and staunch partison of American oil interests, emerged as the new Iranian Prime Minister, while the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt became Vice-President of Gulf Oil. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to divulge details of the new arrangements on the grounds that "making them public would affect adversely the foreign relations of the United States." The New York Times hailed the destruction of Iranian democracy as "good news indeed," calling the putsch "an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid" by a country that "goes berserk with fanatical nationalism." Thousands of Mossadegh supporters were dispatched to jail, torture chambers, and graveyards. Why didn't Obama mention these details? Perhaps because they make his professed belief that "no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other" look ridiculous.
But even without them his statement that, "we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children" sounds patently absurd. There is no state on earth that kills more innocent civilians than the United States and nothing has changed in that regard under the Obama Administration. We are still killing Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Palestinians and we have no intention of stopping. Quite the contrary. Obama declared in Cairo that it is his first responsibility to "protect the American people," which means a continuation of just such policies.
Furthermore, in treating torture as an excess of Washington's post-911 policy, Obama overlooks the fact that U.S. torture long pre-dates 911 and will certainly continue by proxy even in the wake of Obama's proud declaration that "I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States."
Meanwhile, while condemning anti-Semitic stereotypes in the Muslim world Obama said nothing about Jewish demonization of Islam, which is the successor to the demonization of Communism that made possible the infliction of massive U.S. injustices on peoples struggling for their basic human rights throughout the world. In Cairo he said that "repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong" but he didn't even mention the vile stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims as congenital terrorists that constantly occurs in the U.S. media and movie industry. If this is fair play, prejudice is superfluous. Moreover, it should be pointed out that USrael's injustices against Muslims today are no more inadvertent error than were injustices committed against "Marxists" and "Soviet proxies" in the past; both were and are conscious policies designed to advance Zionist and U.S. corporate interests over the interests of Muslim and non-Muslim peoples alike, whatever the human cost. Obama has not broken with this tradition whatsoever.
Obama repeatedly refers to "violent extremists" as being the problem that should draw everyone together, but U.S. leaders somehow don't fit the designation, in spite of the massive violence they commit against civilians throughout the world, while those who take up arms to deter further such attacks do merit the label. Nowhere does he see fit to mention what ought to be done about Washington illegally invading sovereign nations and slaughtering civilians. The only national security question that deeply interests Obama is whether U.S. wars are to be designated "of necessity" (smart wars) or "of choice" (dumb wars). According to this peculiar optic slaughtering Iraqis is "dumb" (though forgivable) while slaughtering Afghans and Pakistanis is "smart." But in both cases he regards U.S. leaders as morally blameless, and he specifically mentions in the case of Iraq that the Iraqi people are "better off" without Saddam Hussein. Of course, the United States might very well have been "better off" without George Bush as president, but did this mean that another nation had the right to kill him and occupy the country? Obviously not.
Clearly, Obama would like us to forget that disastrous liberal leaders regularly claim, as he does, that "violent extremists" threaten good people everywhere and justify a U.S. policy of permanent counterinsurgency and war. This is what we were told about Korea and Vietnam, "police actions" that killed millions of civilians. This is what we were told about El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, whose tiny populations have been tortured and murdered by U.S. imperialism on an appalling scale. This is what we were told about the PLO when virtually the entire world recognized it as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This is what we are still told about Hizbollah, Hamas, and the government of Iran, though all three are legal entities elected to power. Somehow it escapes Obama's attention that it is the U.S., endlessly beholden to "violent extremists" who refuse to allow any alternative to Jewish supremacy and corporate capitalism, that is far and away the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," as Martin Luther King reminds us in one of his greatest speeches. Don't expect President Obama, supposedly a great admirer of Dr. King, to use that quote anytime soon.
Furthermore, Obama claims nonsensically that "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed," adding that "it was not violence that won full and equal rights" for black people in the U.S. This is a curious and inconsistent position. In the first place, if violent resistance truly is wrong, then it does not matter whether it succeeds or not. Wrong is wrong. Secondly, with the exception of a few pacifists no one, including Obama, really believes that violence is ineffective. Did the American Revolution triumph without the aid of violence? Obviously not. Does Obama look favorably on the American Revolution? Obviously, he does. So violent resistance can work. Furthermore, it is simply not true that black people non-violently won "full and equal rights" in the United States. Aside from the important question of whether black people in the U.S. enjoy equal rights even today, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution were a product of the Civil War, which ended chattel slavery via horrendous violence and laid the basis for legal equality through endless challenges in the courts. Without these, the civil rights movement could have played no role at all.
Obama also ignores U.S. and Israeli imperial violence, preferring to reduce intractable conflict to a psychological problem. "The cycle of suspicion and discord must end . . . . So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace." But is the cycle really "suspicion and discord," or rather, injustice and resistance? And how is it possible, let alone advisable, to ignore the distinction between oppression and resistance? Obviously, in Obama's eyes, those who take up arms against U.S. and Israeli imperial violence are guilty of "sow[ing] hatred." But is this really vile hatred, or rather, appropriate hatred of injustice? One can certainly debate the morality of violent resistance, but one is supposed to hate injustice.
In a show of false high-mindedness, Obama claims that "it is easy to point fingers" when in fact the personal and political cost of blaming the Jewish state for its hideously racist actions is more than daunting. Professors critical of the Holy State are run out of academia, politicians hounded out of office, newspapers harassed and defunded, books marginalized, careers ruined. And only the suicidally reckless dare wonder whether hugely disproportionate Jewish influence in the U.S. mass media is a factor in producing the relentless anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bias seen in its programming. Easy to point fingers? Quite the contrary. It is far easier to suck up to power, which is how Obama got where he is.
Obama claims that "six million Jews were killed" in an "unprecedented Holocaust" during WWII, and adds that, "denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful." He neglects to indicate how this nice round figure is arrived at, and does not bother to mention that even Raul Hillberg, the dean of Holocaust historians, puts the figure at 5.1 million, with other well-regarded writers adhering to even lower estimates. Is Obama saying that Raul Hillberg was an ignorant and hateful man? Probably not, but that is the logical import of his remarks.
Furthermore, why is it hateful to state that one does not believe a fact, or an alleged fact, that is widely accepted by others? This makes little sense. Most U.S. citizens vastly understate the number of deaths caused by the U.S. holocaust in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, but this hardly means that Americans are hateful towards Vietnamese, or Asians in general, and it would be bizarre to insist on the validity of such tortured logic. But organized Jewry is apparently entitled to a separate standard. Why?
Supposedly a brilliant man, President Obama thinks in the vague language of impotent cliche, repeatedly warning us to "make no mistake" and "let there be no doubt," just as Richard Nixon constantly declared "let me make this perfectly clear." He speaks vacuously of "moving forward," when he obviously doesn't know which way he's facing. He talks piously of "seeking common ground," "listening to each other," "respecting one another," "learning from each other," "sharing common aspirations," "focusing on the future," not being "bound by the past," of "deepening ties," of "undeniable progress," of "flames of division," and of "fear" and "mistrust," all divorced from any social context or set of political actors that would reveal where moral responsibility for injustice lies. But this is just the point. If he spelled out precisely the political context he is referring to, his empty rhetoric would be seen for what it is - an irrelevant distraction from horrendous conflicts Obama has no remedy for and, in fact, intends to perpetuate.
Sources:
William Shawcross, "The Shah's Last Ride," (Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition, 1945-1960," (Thunder's Mouth, 1973)
Noam Chomsky, "Towards a New Cold War," (Pantheon, 1973)
Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Friday, June 5, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Chavez Announces Nationalization of Carabobo Ceramics and Briquette Factories
May 21, Caracas.
President Hugo Chavez today gave the order to nationalize various companies in the briquette sector, as well as iron companies and ceramics factories, all in the southern state of Bolivar, with the goal of ending the trade union crisis that has emerged in these organizations in the last two months.
"Briquette sector - nationalize, there is nothing to debate," declared the head of state on a national channel from Guayana City, during a labor workshop with workers from basic industries. "These companies have to be under workers' control; it has to be that way," stated the chief executive, adding that "we have been involved in this for some time and it's been some time since we should have done it."
The companies Comsigua, Iron and Steel Works Materials (Matesi), Orinoco Iron, Venprecar, and Tavsa Tubes will pass under state control possibly starting this weekend (May 23-24). The nationalization of Carabobo Ceramics was also announced, a company that has sustained a prolonged labor conflict.
The shares of Comsigua include shares of Japan's Kobe Steel, Mitsui, and Sojitz. A good part of the iron production of this region is sold to Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Another company mentioned was Venezuela's Tubes of Steel (Tavsa), subsidiary of the Argentine group Tenaris, the largest manufacturer of seamless steel tubes for the oil industry in the world, whose plant in the south of Venezuela produces some 80,000 tons of tubes and employs 250 people, according to company data.
Orinoco Iron and Venprecar are subsidiaries of IBH, a briquette unit of the iron and steelworks plant Sivensa, one of the largest Venezuelan companies that until now hadn't been affected by the wave of nationalizations, and which has around 18% of the capital valued on the Caracas Stock Exchange. Between them the two firms produce around three million tons annually of prereduced iron briquettes, which are used as a substitute for high quality scrap iron in the process of producing steel. IBH produced net losses of $20 million in its first fiscal trimester, which ended in December 2008, compared to a $12 million profit registered in the same time period the year before.
"Start the process of nationalization at once, in order to be able to create this industrial complex," affirmed Chavez, who said that implementation of this measure should have begun some time ago. The head of state asserted that this new era "has to be assumed with responsibility, with a sense of integration between the government and the workers."
In addition, he explained that in this process of nationalization there must be transparency and strategic sense. Chavez made an appeal "for responsibility, for a struggle against mafias, against corruption, bad management, and the deviations and vices of the Fourth Republic," because "they are a threat to the socialist revolution."
According to the chief executive, the mafias, bad management, and corruption, "inherited from the Fourth Republic, led us to the trade union situation in the region." In agreement with the unions, the employees of the firms that will pass under state control haven't been paid in six months, and for this reason they have been soliciting government intervention since last year to remedy the constant delays.
Chavez indicated that now "each factory will be a school, in order to produce, like Che Guevara said, not just briquettes and irons and steel and aluminum, but rather, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."
Chavez maintained that all the easy paths lead to failure. It's for that reason that Venezuela follows the path of resistance and enrichment of the transformations that are being carried out in the country, in order that it have independent strength. "We don't want easy paths, Venezuela has the option of resistance in order to continue breaking the old structures imposed by the national bourgeosie that lived on its knees before North American imperialism," he said.
"We must broaden our project, but with the unity of the working class which now can play a larger role," he said. "How long will we continue importing products that we can make here? We must bring to fruition the workers' projects," he insisted. Chavez called for unity and indicated that "here we must leave fighting behind," and guaranteed that the Venezuelan working class would provide an example of greatness. "You tell me the passion that you feel," he emphasized.
Source: "Chavez anuncio nacionalizacion de Ceramics Carabobo y empresas briqueteras," 22 de mayo de 2009, www.aporrea.org
President Hugo Chavez today gave the order to nationalize various companies in the briquette sector, as well as iron companies and ceramics factories, all in the southern state of Bolivar, with the goal of ending the trade union crisis that has emerged in these organizations in the last two months.
"Briquette sector - nationalize, there is nothing to debate," declared the head of state on a national channel from Guayana City, during a labor workshop with workers from basic industries. "These companies have to be under workers' control; it has to be that way," stated the chief executive, adding that "we have been involved in this for some time and it's been some time since we should have done it."
The companies Comsigua, Iron and Steel Works Materials (Matesi), Orinoco Iron, Venprecar, and Tavsa Tubes will pass under state control possibly starting this weekend (May 23-24). The nationalization of Carabobo Ceramics was also announced, a company that has sustained a prolonged labor conflict.
The shares of Comsigua include shares of Japan's Kobe Steel, Mitsui, and Sojitz. A good part of the iron production of this region is sold to Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Another company mentioned was Venezuela's Tubes of Steel (Tavsa), subsidiary of the Argentine group Tenaris, the largest manufacturer of seamless steel tubes for the oil industry in the world, whose plant in the south of Venezuela produces some 80,000 tons of tubes and employs 250 people, according to company data.
Orinoco Iron and Venprecar are subsidiaries of IBH, a briquette unit of the iron and steelworks plant Sivensa, one of the largest Venezuelan companies that until now hadn't been affected by the wave of nationalizations, and which has around 18% of the capital valued on the Caracas Stock Exchange. Between them the two firms produce around three million tons annually of prereduced iron briquettes, which are used as a substitute for high quality scrap iron in the process of producing steel. IBH produced net losses of $20 million in its first fiscal trimester, which ended in December 2008, compared to a $12 million profit registered in the same time period the year before.
"Start the process of nationalization at once, in order to be able to create this industrial complex," affirmed Chavez, who said that implementation of this measure should have begun some time ago. The head of state asserted that this new era "has to be assumed with responsibility, with a sense of integration between the government and the workers."
In addition, he explained that in this process of nationalization there must be transparency and strategic sense. Chavez made an appeal "for responsibility, for a struggle against mafias, against corruption, bad management, and the deviations and vices of the Fourth Republic," because "they are a threat to the socialist revolution."
According to the chief executive, the mafias, bad management, and corruption, "inherited from the Fourth Republic, led us to the trade union situation in the region." In agreement with the unions, the employees of the firms that will pass under state control haven't been paid in six months, and for this reason they have been soliciting government intervention since last year to remedy the constant delays.
Chavez indicated that now "each factory will be a school, in order to produce, like Che Guevara said, not just briquettes and irons and steel and aluminum, but rather, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."
Chavez maintained that all the easy paths lead to failure. It's for that reason that Venezuela follows the path of resistance and enrichment of the transformations that are being carried out in the country, in order that it have independent strength. "We don't want easy paths, Venezuela has the option of resistance in order to continue breaking the old structures imposed by the national bourgeosie that lived on its knees before North American imperialism," he said.
"We must broaden our project, but with the unity of the working class which now can play a larger role," he said. "How long will we continue importing products that we can make here? We must bring to fruition the workers' projects," he insisted. Chavez called for unity and indicated that "here we must leave fighting behind," and guaranteed that the Venezuelan working class would provide an example of greatness. "You tell me the passion that you feel," he emphasized.
Source: "Chavez anuncio nacionalizacion de Ceramics Carabobo y empresas briqueteras," 22 de mayo de 2009, www.aporrea.org
Monday, May 25, 2009
Correa Together With Chavez and Morales, Declares He Will Radicalize His Revolution
May 24, Quito.
Flanked respectively by his Venezuelan and Bolivian counterparts, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa today commemorated the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha, which sealed the independence of Ecuador, and declared that he will radicalize his "Citizen Revolution."
Correa also confirmed his commitment to Latin American integration and his Bolivarian political posture.
In a speech given at The Temple of the Nation, a great historical museum constructed on the side of the Pichincha Volcano, at the foot of which Quito rises up, Correa said that today Ecuadorians are celebrating "two liberating births."
The first of them, he specified, is because on the side of that mountain, on May 24, 1822, occurred the Battle of Pichincha, the military action that put an end to Spanish colonial domination of South America.
In that place the Ecuadorian head of state evoked the names of the Liberator Simon Bolivar and Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre, who commanded the army at the heroic battle of Pichincha.
"We cannot say the word liberty without mentioning Bolivar," maintained Correa, and he reproached politicians opposed to his government, who try to discredit the historic importance of the Liberator.
The second "liberating birth," said Correa, took place last April 26 in the general elections, in which he was re-elected for a second term of four years, which, he says, indicates that the people support his "Citizen Revolution."
The people chose "this profound, rapid, and peaceful revolution," added the chief executive, who promised to "radicalize and deepen" his "Citizen Revolution," while maintaining that "the revolution is now, not tomorrow."
"We intensify the Citizen Revolution, continuing with the policy of openness with all the countries of the world, in a context of mutual respect, seeking Latin American integration, in order to continue constructing one great Latin America, about which Jose Marti spoke," observed Correa.
He highlighted the visits of Chavez and Morales to the Independence ceremony, the latter not anticipated, and paraphrased Bolivar: "The unity of our peoples is no mere chimera of men, but the inexorable decree of destiny."
In addition, the Ecuadorian leader reminded listeners that he had met with Chavez since yesterday in the Fifth Ecuador-Venezuela Presidential Meeting, in which both chief executives inspected bilateral projects and highlighted the advances registered in energy and oil matters.
Correa mentioned an agreement to exchange Ecuadorian crude oil for Venezuelan oil products, which have saved his country $252 million in two years, as well as advances in plans for constructing a petrochemical complex in the coastal province of Manabi (west).
Likewise, he pointed out the start of gas exploration in the Gulf of Guayaquil, specifically on the Island of Puna, but he criticized the fact that opponents broke into those installations yesterday while he was meeting with Chavez, in order to cast a shadow over the project.
Correa and Chavez have insisted on getting their South American partners to finance the Bank of the South and the Unified System of Regional Compensation (Sucre), as mechanisms to strengthen regional integration.
Chavez recalled that the Bank of the South and Sucre are two of the instruments that various Latin American countries have tried in order to create a common economic area.
Last night neither Correa nor Chavez let pass the opportunity to criticize capitalism and evoke the "socialism of the 21st Century" that both preach, and they insisted that the international financial crisis is the fault of neo-liberalism.
"The world is not going to be the same after this crisis," in which "the neo-liberal paradigm was pulverized," noted Chavez, although he said that he still sees the world collapse of capitalism as far off.
On the other hand, Correa repeated that his government "is and will be of the indigenous peoples," the poorest strata of Ecuadorian society, although he said that his administration will direct itself towards all social sectors, above all in favor of the most needy.
After the ceremony, Correa, Chavez, and Morales moved to the presidential palace of Carondelet and planned for the two guests to return to their countries in the next few hours.
(Source: "Correa, junto a Chavez y Morales, asegura que radicalizara su revolucion," www.univision.com, 24 de mayo de 2009)
Flanked respectively by his Venezuelan and Bolivian counterparts, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa today commemorated the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha, which sealed the independence of Ecuador, and declared that he will radicalize his "Citizen Revolution."
Correa also confirmed his commitment to Latin American integration and his Bolivarian political posture.
In a speech given at The Temple of the Nation, a great historical museum constructed on the side of the Pichincha Volcano, at the foot of which Quito rises up, Correa said that today Ecuadorians are celebrating "two liberating births."
The first of them, he specified, is because on the side of that mountain, on May 24, 1822, occurred the Battle of Pichincha, the military action that put an end to Spanish colonial domination of South America.
In that place the Ecuadorian head of state evoked the names of the Liberator Simon Bolivar and Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre, who commanded the army at the heroic battle of Pichincha.
"We cannot say the word liberty without mentioning Bolivar," maintained Correa, and he reproached politicians opposed to his government, who try to discredit the historic importance of the Liberator.
The second "liberating birth," said Correa, took place last April 26 in the general elections, in which he was re-elected for a second term of four years, which, he says, indicates that the people support his "Citizen Revolution."
The people chose "this profound, rapid, and peaceful revolution," added the chief executive, who promised to "radicalize and deepen" his "Citizen Revolution," while maintaining that "the revolution is now, not tomorrow."
"We intensify the Citizen Revolution, continuing with the policy of openness with all the countries of the world, in a context of mutual respect, seeking Latin American integration, in order to continue constructing one great Latin America, about which Jose Marti spoke," observed Correa.
He highlighted the visits of Chavez and Morales to the Independence ceremony, the latter not anticipated, and paraphrased Bolivar: "The unity of our peoples is no mere chimera of men, but the inexorable decree of destiny."
In addition, the Ecuadorian leader reminded listeners that he had met with Chavez since yesterday in the Fifth Ecuador-Venezuela Presidential Meeting, in which both chief executives inspected bilateral projects and highlighted the advances registered in energy and oil matters.
Correa mentioned an agreement to exchange Ecuadorian crude oil for Venezuelan oil products, which have saved his country $252 million in two years, as well as advances in plans for constructing a petrochemical complex in the coastal province of Manabi (west).
Likewise, he pointed out the start of gas exploration in the Gulf of Guayaquil, specifically on the Island of Puna, but he criticized the fact that opponents broke into those installations yesterday while he was meeting with Chavez, in order to cast a shadow over the project.
Correa and Chavez have insisted on getting their South American partners to finance the Bank of the South and the Unified System of Regional Compensation (Sucre), as mechanisms to strengthen regional integration.
Chavez recalled that the Bank of the South and Sucre are two of the instruments that various Latin American countries have tried in order to create a common economic area.
Last night neither Correa nor Chavez let pass the opportunity to criticize capitalism and evoke the "socialism of the 21st Century" that both preach, and they insisted that the international financial crisis is the fault of neo-liberalism.
"The world is not going to be the same after this crisis," in which "the neo-liberal paradigm was pulverized," noted Chavez, although he said that he still sees the world collapse of capitalism as far off.
On the other hand, Correa repeated that his government "is and will be of the indigenous peoples," the poorest strata of Ecuadorian society, although he said that his administration will direct itself towards all social sectors, above all in favor of the most needy.
After the ceremony, Correa, Chavez, and Morales moved to the presidential palace of Carondelet and planned for the two guests to return to their countries in the next few hours.
(Source: "Correa, junto a Chavez y Morales, asegura que radicalizara su revolucion," www.univision.com, 24 de mayo de 2009)
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The West vs The Rest
The U. N. conference against racism was boycotted by the USA , inventor of the most deadly and long lasting form of racism, and Israel, founded on racist dominance of one people over another. They, along with their surrogates attending under strict orders to protect Israel from any revelation about its nature , offered evidence of the fading status of western supremacy. A disgraceful performance by the west was only successful as reported to a minority of the world’s population .
While western media parroted the party line in claiming that alleged anti-Semitism in the Iranian president’s rhetoric provoked the prearranged rush for the exit by political puppets , President Ahmadinejad’s words actually echoed the sentiments of a global majority. He spoke bluntly, though only briefly, of the last racist regime on earth, but mostly he addressed the hope for global peace and challenged a political economic order that threatens humanity’s future .
The minority slouching out of the auditorium - while the majority applauded and cheered Ahmadinejad - was treated here as a shocked reaction by something called the international community. That refers to a loose global association of dependents and henchmen of the U.S. and Israel , but it represents a shrinking minority that needs military force and consciousness control to maintain its domination . It is slowly losing its power , which is good news for humanity.
Ahmadinejad’s speech addressed reality for an as yet officially unrepresented international community that relies on a few leaders from the subjugated world on which the west built much of its wealth. Only a brief mention of the Jewish apartheid state was enough to censor the rest of his talk for most westerners, while distorting the reality of the atrocious social policies he addressed. It seems nearly impossible, in the west, to speak critically of a racist state at the core of violence and misery in the middle east since its creation sixty years ago. At least to an audience which relies on the failing empire for its survival, and which will face an even more dismal future as long as it maintains that status.
Here in America, the Israel lobby had long been at work pressuring its servants to boycott the meeting, using the most hateful and often certifiably psychotic twisting of words and thoughts to further its cause. What are supposed to be representative members of our government bent to its will, as usual, lest their finances, reputations and political or professional careers be brought to an end. This coercive power exercised by agents of a foreign country over a theoretically democratic government is an outrage that is only just beginning to be confronted by the American people .
Ahmadinejad called for reorganizing the U. N. , with power moving from the western minority dominated Security Council to the global majority representing the General Assembly . This important point and the general thrust of his talk was nullified by his brief mention of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, made to seem outrageous to a mind managed western population . Alone among world leaders, he constantly speaks to the injustice of Palestinians made to suffer for European sins, and is depicted as a monstrous “uber” fiend intent on destroying the Jewish people for speaking this obvious truth. The west will soon have to face the reality he speaks of or the criminally immoral nature of its political economics will totally destroy what we call civilization.
A history of racism and present injustice in the middle east are hardly the only problems we face, given the destructive economics of capitalism. But the treatment of Palestine and its impact on the Arab world has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in wars and uprisings , and tens of trillions of dollars as well. The Iranian president may one day be acknowledged as a herald of the future by some of the same propaganda parrots joining in his defamation now. His speech should be read by all Americans in order that they understand exactly what he said, and see that his words reflect a reality far from the fiction presented to them by their media and politicians. And it is reality being experienced by more Americans than ever before.
The present economic chaos is only the latest in a series of financial disasters which profit a few at loss to the many , but it is threatening all of humanity and not just growing numbers of Americans. Political leaders from South America to Asia to Africa are addressing the critical need for global change, while the west tries to maintain its domination under a new regime made to seem a triumph of Affirmative Action. But the American brand of A.A. maintains the economic system by benefiting some only at the expense of others; it allows a few in, but still keeps most out, just as the economics of profit and loss must have losers in order for some to win. This is the basic economic contradiction that the world must confront and overcome democratically . The imperial rule of the west has benefitted some of the world by leaving most of the world in ruins and poverty , but voices of the previously unheard are beginning to resound, even as strictly controlled western media tries to exclude and distort them.
Under the intense strains of a disastrously wasteful consumption economy that is rapidly diminishing the environment of the entire globe, new movements and governments are beginning to face the fact that a future for humanity means an end to the system of western capital’s domination. It’s time we in the west joined the majority, but we’ll have to deal with obstructions caused by our own rulers in order to do so. We need exactly what Ahmadinejad called for at Geneva; democracy. And that means, among other things, that we must end to the coercive power of corporate capital over our economy, and the Israel lobby over our foreign policy.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net
While western media parroted the party line in claiming that alleged anti-Semitism in the Iranian president’s rhetoric provoked the prearranged rush for the exit by political puppets , President Ahmadinejad’s words actually echoed the sentiments of a global majority. He spoke bluntly, though only briefly, of the last racist regime on earth, but mostly he addressed the hope for global peace and challenged a political economic order that threatens humanity’s future .
The minority slouching out of the auditorium - while the majority applauded and cheered Ahmadinejad - was treated here as a shocked reaction by something called the international community. That refers to a loose global association of dependents and henchmen of the U.S. and Israel , but it represents a shrinking minority that needs military force and consciousness control to maintain its domination . It is slowly losing its power , which is good news for humanity.
Ahmadinejad’s speech addressed reality for an as yet officially unrepresented international community that relies on a few leaders from the subjugated world on which the west built much of its wealth. Only a brief mention of the Jewish apartheid state was enough to censor the rest of his talk for most westerners, while distorting the reality of the atrocious social policies he addressed. It seems nearly impossible, in the west, to speak critically of a racist state at the core of violence and misery in the middle east since its creation sixty years ago. At least to an audience which relies on the failing empire for its survival, and which will face an even more dismal future as long as it maintains that status.
Here in America, the Israel lobby had long been at work pressuring its servants to boycott the meeting, using the most hateful and often certifiably psychotic twisting of words and thoughts to further its cause. What are supposed to be representative members of our government bent to its will, as usual, lest their finances, reputations and political or professional careers be brought to an end. This coercive power exercised by agents of a foreign country over a theoretically democratic government is an outrage that is only just beginning to be confronted by the American people .
Ahmadinejad called for reorganizing the U. N. , with power moving from the western minority dominated Security Council to the global majority representing the General Assembly . This important point and the general thrust of his talk was nullified by his brief mention of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, made to seem outrageous to a mind managed western population . Alone among world leaders, he constantly speaks to the injustice of Palestinians made to suffer for European sins, and is depicted as a monstrous “uber” fiend intent on destroying the Jewish people for speaking this obvious truth. The west will soon have to face the reality he speaks of or the criminally immoral nature of its political economics will totally destroy what we call civilization.
A history of racism and present injustice in the middle east are hardly the only problems we face, given the destructive economics of capitalism. But the treatment of Palestine and its impact on the Arab world has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in wars and uprisings , and tens of trillions of dollars as well. The Iranian president may one day be acknowledged as a herald of the future by some of the same propaganda parrots joining in his defamation now. His speech should be read by all Americans in order that they understand exactly what he said, and see that his words reflect a reality far from the fiction presented to them by their media and politicians. And it is reality being experienced by more Americans than ever before.
The present economic chaos is only the latest in a series of financial disasters which profit a few at loss to the many , but it is threatening all of humanity and not just growing numbers of Americans. Political leaders from South America to Asia to Africa are addressing the critical need for global change, while the west tries to maintain its domination under a new regime made to seem a triumph of Affirmative Action. But the American brand of A.A. maintains the economic system by benefiting some only at the expense of others; it allows a few in, but still keeps most out, just as the economics of profit and loss must have losers in order for some to win. This is the basic economic contradiction that the world must confront and overcome democratically . The imperial rule of the west has benefitted some of the world by leaving most of the world in ruins and poverty , but voices of the previously unheard are beginning to resound, even as strictly controlled western media tries to exclude and distort them.
Under the intense strains of a disastrously wasteful consumption economy that is rapidly diminishing the environment of the entire globe, new movements and governments are beginning to face the fact that a future for humanity means an end to the system of western capital’s domination. It’s time we in the west joined the majority, but we’ll have to deal with obstructions caused by our own rulers in order to do so. We need exactly what Ahmadinejad called for at Geneva; democracy. And that means, among other things, that we must end to the coercive power of corporate capital over our economy, and the Israel lobby over our foreign policy.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net
Monday, May 11, 2009
Daniel Ortega Asks Barack Obama to "Stop Killing People in Afghanistan"
May 9, 2009
Managua, May 9
The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, today asked his American counterpart to stop "killing innocent people in Afghanistan" and condemned the "crimes and genocides" that, he said, the American air force is committing in that country.
In a speech given in Free San Francisco, 50 miles north of Managua, Ortega said that (the situation) pains him and he condemns the fact that "other countries are suffering bombings."
The head of state said that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez told Obama yesterday to stop killing and massacring innocent people in other countries.
"We are completely in agreement and we join that call that President Hugo Chavez has made and, from Free San Francisco, we tell President Barack Obama to stop killing people, children, defenseless women," said Ortega.
According to the chief executive, the bombings by the American air force in Afghanistan have caused more than 100 deaths in recent days.
"There have been changes in the United States because now George W. Bush is not president, but the bombings continue as though Bush were still there and these deaths in Afghanistan now can't be charged to Bush; now there's another president of the United States, one who should do everything possible to avoid these crimes and genocides," said Ortega.
The head of state also lashed out at the European Parliament for not condemning those crimes and attacked those he called "right wing forces" for having approved a resolution condemning Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua for violations of human rights.
He pointed out that the European Parliament approved that resolution "calmly, in a policy of interference that doesn't want to break with its colonial past, and seeks to disqualify Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as though there is no democracy in these countries."
He added that, "they approved that resolution simply because in these countries (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) traitors and oligarchs don't govern."
The head of state defended what he called the "resistance of the Afghan people, which has the right to struggle against being occupied and bombed."
He also attacked the International Court of Human Rights and the Organization of American States, which he called "garbage" for not condemning the United States for these crimes.
"In Nicaragua we face crises but we are at peace and we don't have the least fear that the American air force will bomb our country," said Ortega.
The head of state today inaugurated a dock in Free San Francisco, constructed with an investment of $1.5 million in order to improve transportation and encourage tourism in that town.
Source:
"Daniel Ortega pide a Barack Obama que 'deje de matar gente en Afganistan,'" www.univision.com
Managua, May 9
The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, today asked his American counterpart to stop "killing innocent people in Afghanistan" and condemned the "crimes and genocides" that, he said, the American air force is committing in that country.
In a speech given in Free San Francisco, 50 miles north of Managua, Ortega said that (the situation) pains him and he condemns the fact that "other countries are suffering bombings."
The head of state said that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez told Obama yesterday to stop killing and massacring innocent people in other countries.
"We are completely in agreement and we join that call that President Hugo Chavez has made and, from Free San Francisco, we tell President Barack Obama to stop killing people, children, defenseless women," said Ortega.
According to the chief executive, the bombings by the American air force in Afghanistan have caused more than 100 deaths in recent days.
"There have been changes in the United States because now George W. Bush is not president, but the bombings continue as though Bush were still there and these deaths in Afghanistan now can't be charged to Bush; now there's another president of the United States, one who should do everything possible to avoid these crimes and genocides," said Ortega.
The head of state also lashed out at the European Parliament for not condemning those crimes and attacked those he called "right wing forces" for having approved a resolution condemning Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua for violations of human rights.
He pointed out that the European Parliament approved that resolution "calmly, in a policy of interference that doesn't want to break with its colonial past, and seeks to disqualify Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, as though there is no democracy in these countries."
He added that, "they approved that resolution simply because in these countries (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela) traitors and oligarchs don't govern."
The head of state defended what he called the "resistance of the Afghan people, which has the right to struggle against being occupied and bombed."
He also attacked the International Court of Human Rights and the Organization of American States, which he called "garbage" for not condemning the United States for these crimes.
"In Nicaragua we face crises but we are at peace and we don't have the least fear that the American air force will bomb our country," said Ortega.
The head of state today inaugurated a dock in Free San Francisco, constructed with an investment of $1.5 million in order to improve transportation and encourage tourism in that town.
Source:
"Daniel Ortega pide a Barack Obama que 'deje de matar gente en Afganistan,'" www.univision.com
False Saviors - John F. Kennedy
"I don’t want to die!"
-----crying Los Angeles schoolchildren at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis
"I cut his balls off."
-----President Kennedy, exulting in what he took to be Premier Khrushchev’s humiliation in backing away from nuclear war
“End this madness,” Bertrand Russell cabled John Kennedy, imploring the American president to come to his senses while the world waited to discover if Kennedy’s game of “nuclear chicken” was destined to relegate Hiroshima and Nagasaki to footnotes of the atomic age.
In order to prevent Washington from staging a second Bay of Pigs (i.e., repeat invasion of Cuba) the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on the island in the fall of 1962. Though a negotiated settlement carried the least risk of catastrophe, the Kennedy administration rejected diplomacy for allegedly carrying the taint of moral weakness. At a time when nuclear-armed Soviet submarines could hit U.S. territory from the ocean, Kennedy opted to blockade Cuba, and he did so (in violation the U.N. Charter), cutting off Soviet access to the island.
Soviet supply ships with submarine escorts steamed toward the American blockade while the largest U.S. invasion force since WWII prepared for war with 42,000 nuclear-armed Soviet troops awaiting them in Cuba. The Strategic Air Command deployed its bomber fleet to pre-selected airfields throughout the United States, and nuclear bombs were loaded aboard planes on SAC bases in Britain, Spain, and Morocco. Nuclear-equipped fighter-bombers went on alert in Europe, preparing to hit assigned targets in the Soviet bloc. Polaris submarines possessed of enough firepower to destroy every major city in the USSR left Scotland to patrol the North Atlantic.
At the height of the crisis, Khrushchev broadcast a letter to Kennedy on Radio Moscow offering removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba and a non-aggression pledge to Turkey in return for a U.S. withdrawal of nuclear missiles from Turkey (Washington had apparently already issued a withdrawal order for those missiles) and a non-aggression pledge to Cuba. But Kennedy ignored the offer, pressing for unconditional victory with millions of lives in the balance.
According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the official JFK historian of his White House years, this was “the most dangerous moment in human history.” How close did the world come to nuclear war? Participants in a 2002 conference between former Kennedy administration officials, former Soviet military officers, Cuban officials, and scholars from all three countries, concluded that nuclear war was averted only because a Soviet submarine commander countermanded an order to launch nuclear-armed torpedoes in response to U.S. destroyers firing depth charges to force Soviet submarines to the surface. “The lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the (private) National Security Archive.
Among the documents pored over at the 2002 conference in Havana was a declassified 1961 Defense Department memo describing a three-step plan for the “US endeavor to cause the overthrow of the Castro government.” The strategy was to carry out intensive military exercises near Cuba to provoke a defensive reaction, which would then give the U.S. a pretext with which to “destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary and a conference participant, conceded that Cuba’s fears that they were going to be attacked by the U.S. were justified. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too.”
Exulting in the lucky outcome, Kennedy did not renounce Washington’s ongoing terrorist war against Cuba, which included chemical and biological attacks against the island and numerous attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. In fact, he had already effectively declared war on all of Latin America in order to prevent a second Cuban-style revolution in the hemisphere. Robert McNamara had announced in early 1962 that Latin American states receiving U.S. military assistance would henceforth change their mission from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” i.e., making war on their own peoples. Through the Agency For International Development, Latin American police were promised training in the use of gas guns, helicopters, anti-riot equipment, and torture. As the numbers of mutilated and dead mounted, the U.S. School of the Americas, where Washington’s counterinsurgency training was carried out, became known in Latin America as “the school of coups.”
Kennedy’s jingoist politics shouldn’t have surprised anyone, as they were a matter of longstanding record. Elected to Congress in 1946 as a rich war hero, JFK spent his time in the House condemning the “betrayal” of Poland at Yalta, thundering against the Truman administration’s “loss” of China, and voting for the McCarran Act (the Patriot Act of its day) which required that organizations tainted by “Communism” register with a Subversive Activities Control Board. Members of such organizations lost their right to travel, to hold government jobs, and to work in defense plants. In 1952 Kennedy was elected to the Senate, where he avoided condemning Joe McCarthy, who was a close friend of the Kennedy family (Bobby named him godfather of one of his children). According to Kennedy speech-writer Theodore Sorenson, the Massachusetts senator believed that military force was “the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament only a dream.” Preoccupied with shaking his fist at the Communist world, Kennedy paid little attention to the 1954 Brown decision ordering desegregation of the nation’s apartheid school system, dismissing school integration as “a judicial problem, not a legislative one.”
As president, Kennedy appointed shrewd technocrats - almost all from the upper class - who were clueless about social justice, but well-practiced in the exercise of power. Dean Rusk, a John Foster Dulles protege and president of the Rockefeller Foundation, became Secretary of State. C. Douglas Dillon of Wall Street’s Dillon, Read and Company was named Secretary of the Treasury. Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Company, was selected to be Secretary of Defense. Other top Kennedy officials were Averell Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, Paul Nitze, of Dillon-Read, Roswell Gilpatrick of another Wall Street firm, John McCone, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and William C. Foster. John J. McCloy, who Kennedy appointed to be his special adviser on disarmament, had a background, according to Arthur Schlesinger, that “combined the Republican party, the Pentagon, the Ford Foundation, the Chase Manhattan Bank, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Brook and the Links.”
From such a cast progressive policy was hardly to be expected, and indeed, it was not forthcoming. In Southeast Asia Kennedy changed Washington’s Vietnam policy from support for state terror to outright aggression, which led to the disastrous U.S. engagement that claimed the lives of millions of Indochinese, as well as more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers. Contrary to much Camelot romanticism, Kennedy never considered any policy other than military victory. Just three weeks before his assassination, in the wake of the overthrow of the Diem regime, he remained hopeful about the prospects for an intensification of the war, telling the press that he thought there was a “new situation” in Vietnam, which would lead to, “we hope, an increased effort in the war” (emphasis added). He added that the U.S. policy should be to “intensify the struggle” so that “we can bring Americans out of there” - after U.S. forces had subjugated the country, a goal he never renounced.
The carnage involved in attempting to fulfill such an aspiration was, as might be expected, appalling. Children were burned alive with napalm. Fragmentation bombs ripped villagers to shreds. Charred bodies fertilized the fields of “free Vietnam” and bullet-riddled corpses of Buddhist demonstrators lay crumpled in the streets. When external support for state terrorism proved inadequate to the task, Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam (October 1962), driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into “strategic hamlets,” where, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they were “protected” from the guerrilla movement the Pentagon conceded they were voluntarily supporting. By the time of Kennedy’s death, over half the population of South Vietnam was engaged in forced labor in such “strategic hamlets,” with the Kennedy administration planning to incarcerate nearly the entire rural population of the country to prevent it from acting on its political convictions.
The human cost of U.S. policy in Vietnam was devastating. According to the Bertrand Russell war crimes commission, by 1963 the Vietnam war had already yielded 160,000 dead; 700,000 tortured and maimed; 400,000 imprisoned; 31,000 raped; 3000 disemboweled with their livers cut out while alive; 4000 people burned alive; 1000 destroyed temples; and 46 instances of villages attacked with poisonous chemicals.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Kennedy did little to aid the desegregation movement, which he considered a trivial affair until worldwide publicity forced him to pay attention (Arthur Schlesinger’s book on the Kennedy presidency treats the theme in the 35th of 37 chapters). While pacifist civil rights activists endured savage attacks at the hands of racist mobs in an attempt to topple Jim Crow, Kennedy dismissed them as “sons of bitches” (SNCC) who had “an investment in violence,” a harsh judgment he could never bring himself to make about the segregationist terrorists the SNCC activists were being beaten and killed by. He refused to back civil rights legislation until well into 1963. Among civil rights leaders, what the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins referred to as Kennedy’s “supercaution” evoked almost universal condemnation.
Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda coup the Kremlin was reaping from his studied inaction in the face of horrifying brutality, Kennedy moved only belatedly and reluctantly to support the black freedom movement. While thousands were attacked and jailed throughout the South, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch in Mississippi, FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but did not move to protect the lives of black people, or even properly investigate when white supremacists shot them dead. Worried about his support in Congress, Kennedy moved to shore up his Southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent “pinks, radicals and black voters” from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering “a bunch of niggers on a voter drive.” And when the March on Washington threatened to include an indictment of federal government policy, Kennedy convinced black leaders to tone down their critical rhetoric and cancel plans for civil disobedience, provoking Malcolm X to dismiss the choreographed event as “the farce on Washington.”
In many ways Kennedy was Ronald Reagan. Although criticized for his participation in the McCarthy-led witch hunts (he was on a Senate committee that doggedly abused UAW leader Harold Christoffel for swearing he wasn’t a Communist, and also supported a bill that included concentration camps for heretics), he inspired admiration at home and abroad for his unwavering faith in American “democracy” (i.e., capitalism). Heir to a bootlegging fortune and helped into the White House by mob connections, he became president after besting Richard Nixon in televised campaign debates in which he promised to end the nation’s economic slump and pursue a more aggressive anti-Communist policy with Moscow once elected. While Nikita Khruschev radically cut back Soviet armaments and military forces - calling for reciprocal action by the U.S. - Kennedy ignored the plea in favor of a huge military build-up, warning repeatedly of the U.S.S.R.’s alleged “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy to take over the world.” He was obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban government (as Reagan later was with toppling the Nicaraguan Sandinistas), which he denounced as a Soviet proxy. To avoid the spread of the Cuban policy of nationalizing resources in order to raise the quality of life for the masses, he strongly supported military dictatorships throughout Latin America. He also supplied military advisors to Vietnam, enthusiastically backing their efforts to destroy popular organizations and terrorize the population into submission. To mobilize budgetary support for his massive increases in war spending, he warned the Congress and the public about a non-existent missile gap that supposedly favored the Soviets. On domestic policy, he advised restraint on social programs and a tax cut for business, which he argued would stimulate economic growth and lead to trickle down benefits for all Americans. (However, in the first five years of Kennedy-Johnson policy corporate profits increased 76.5%, but wages only 18 percent, demonstrating that JFK’s economic policies redistributed income from the poor to the rich.)
In short, an honest account of JFK’s legacy must include (1) an anti-Communist fanaticism that nearly blew up the world, (2) aggression in Vietnam that reached almost genocidal levels in subsequent years (3) contempt for civil liberties at crucial moments (4) equivocation in the face of K.K.K. terror (5) an invasion of the sovereign state of Cuba and years of terrorism against the island after the invasion failed (6) reverse Robin Hood economics.
The Sources:
Marion Lloyd, "Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb in 1962 Crisis," Boston Globe, October 13, 2002
Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, "Something To Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967,"(Columbia, 1978)
Kenneth, O'Reilly, "Racial Matters - The F.B.I.'s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972," (Free Press, 1989)
Taylor Branch, "Parting the Waters - America in the King Years, 1954-1963," (Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America - From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Walter LaFeber, "Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America" (Norton, 1984)
Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition - A Profile of the 'McCarthy Era'" (Thunder's Mouth, 1989)
Arthur Schlesinger, "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House," (Houghton Mifflin, 1965)
Todd Gitlin, "The Sixties - Years of Hope, Days of Rage," (Bantam, 1986)
Howard Zinn, Postwar America - 1945-1971," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)
Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1995)
Seymour Hersh, "The Dark Side of Camelot," (Little Brown, 1997)
Bertrand Russell, "War Crimes in Vietnam," (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1966)
Noam Chomsky, "Rethinking Camelot - JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture," (Verso, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "World Orders Old and New," (Columbia, 1994)
Noam Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival - America's Quest For Global Dominance," (Holt, 2003)
-----crying Los Angeles schoolchildren at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis
"I cut his balls off."
-----President Kennedy, exulting in what he took to be Premier Khrushchev’s humiliation in backing away from nuclear war
“End this madness,” Bertrand Russell cabled John Kennedy, imploring the American president to come to his senses while the world waited to discover if Kennedy’s game of “nuclear chicken” was destined to relegate Hiroshima and Nagasaki to footnotes of the atomic age.
In order to prevent Washington from staging a second Bay of Pigs (i.e., repeat invasion of Cuba) the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on the island in the fall of 1962. Though a negotiated settlement carried the least risk of catastrophe, the Kennedy administration rejected diplomacy for allegedly carrying the taint of moral weakness. At a time when nuclear-armed Soviet submarines could hit U.S. territory from the ocean, Kennedy opted to blockade Cuba, and he did so (in violation the U.N. Charter), cutting off Soviet access to the island.
Soviet supply ships with submarine escorts steamed toward the American blockade while the largest U.S. invasion force since WWII prepared for war with 42,000 nuclear-armed Soviet troops awaiting them in Cuba. The Strategic Air Command deployed its bomber fleet to pre-selected airfields throughout the United States, and nuclear bombs were loaded aboard planes on SAC bases in Britain, Spain, and Morocco. Nuclear-equipped fighter-bombers went on alert in Europe, preparing to hit assigned targets in the Soviet bloc. Polaris submarines possessed of enough firepower to destroy every major city in the USSR left Scotland to patrol the North Atlantic.
At the height of the crisis, Khrushchev broadcast a letter to Kennedy on Radio Moscow offering removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba and a non-aggression pledge to Turkey in return for a U.S. withdrawal of nuclear missiles from Turkey (Washington had apparently already issued a withdrawal order for those missiles) and a non-aggression pledge to Cuba. But Kennedy ignored the offer, pressing for unconditional victory with millions of lives in the balance.
According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the official JFK historian of his White House years, this was “the most dangerous moment in human history.” How close did the world come to nuclear war? Participants in a 2002 conference between former Kennedy administration officials, former Soviet military officers, Cuban officials, and scholars from all three countries, concluded that nuclear war was averted only because a Soviet submarine commander countermanded an order to launch nuclear-armed torpedoes in response to U.S. destroyers firing depth charges to force Soviet submarines to the surface. “The lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the (private) National Security Archive.
Among the documents pored over at the 2002 conference in Havana was a declassified 1961 Defense Department memo describing a three-step plan for the “US endeavor to cause the overthrow of the Castro government.” The strategy was to carry out intensive military exercises near Cuba to provoke a defensive reaction, which would then give the U.S. a pretext with which to “destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.” Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary and a conference participant, conceded that Cuba’s fears that they were going to be attacked by the U.S. were justified. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too.”
Exulting in the lucky outcome, Kennedy did not renounce Washington’s ongoing terrorist war against Cuba, which included chemical and biological attacks against the island and numerous attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. In fact, he had already effectively declared war on all of Latin America in order to prevent a second Cuban-style revolution in the hemisphere. Robert McNamara had announced in early 1962 that Latin American states receiving U.S. military assistance would henceforth change their mission from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security,” i.e., making war on their own peoples. Through the Agency For International Development, Latin American police were promised training in the use of gas guns, helicopters, anti-riot equipment, and torture. As the numbers of mutilated and dead mounted, the U.S. School of the Americas, where Washington’s counterinsurgency training was carried out, became known in Latin America as “the school of coups.”
Kennedy’s jingoist politics shouldn’t have surprised anyone, as they were a matter of longstanding record. Elected to Congress in 1946 as a rich war hero, JFK spent his time in the House condemning the “betrayal” of Poland at Yalta, thundering against the Truman administration’s “loss” of China, and voting for the McCarran Act (the Patriot Act of its day) which required that organizations tainted by “Communism” register with a Subversive Activities Control Board. Members of such organizations lost their right to travel, to hold government jobs, and to work in defense plants. In 1952 Kennedy was elected to the Senate, where he avoided condemning Joe McCarthy, who was a close friend of the Kennedy family (Bobby named him godfather of one of his children). According to Kennedy speech-writer Theodore Sorenson, the Massachusetts senator believed that military force was “the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament only a dream.” Preoccupied with shaking his fist at the Communist world, Kennedy paid little attention to the 1954 Brown decision ordering desegregation of the nation’s apartheid school system, dismissing school integration as “a judicial problem, not a legislative one.”
As president, Kennedy appointed shrewd technocrats - almost all from the upper class - who were clueless about social justice, but well-practiced in the exercise of power. Dean Rusk, a John Foster Dulles protege and president of the Rockefeller Foundation, became Secretary of State. C. Douglas Dillon of Wall Street’s Dillon, Read and Company was named Secretary of the Treasury. Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Company, was selected to be Secretary of Defense. Other top Kennedy officials were Averell Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, Paul Nitze, of Dillon-Read, Roswell Gilpatrick of another Wall Street firm, John McCone, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and William C. Foster. John J. McCloy, who Kennedy appointed to be his special adviser on disarmament, had a background, according to Arthur Schlesinger, that “combined the Republican party, the Pentagon, the Ford Foundation, the Chase Manhattan Bank, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Brook and the Links.”
From such a cast progressive policy was hardly to be expected, and indeed, it was not forthcoming. In Southeast Asia Kennedy changed Washington’s Vietnam policy from support for state terror to outright aggression, which led to the disastrous U.S. engagement that claimed the lives of millions of Indochinese, as well as more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers. Contrary to much Camelot romanticism, Kennedy never considered any policy other than military victory. Just three weeks before his assassination, in the wake of the overthrow of the Diem regime, he remained hopeful about the prospects for an intensification of the war, telling the press that he thought there was a “new situation” in Vietnam, which would lead to, “we hope, an increased effort in the war” (emphasis added). He added that the U.S. policy should be to “intensify the struggle” so that “we can bring Americans out of there” - after U.S. forces had subjugated the country, a goal he never renounced.
The carnage involved in attempting to fulfill such an aspiration was, as might be expected, appalling. Children were burned alive with napalm. Fragmentation bombs ripped villagers to shreds. Charred bodies fertilized the fields of “free Vietnam” and bullet-riddled corpses of Buddhist demonstrators lay crumpled in the streets. When external support for state terrorism proved inadequate to the task, Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam (October 1962), driving hundreds of thousands of peasants into “strategic hamlets,” where, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they were “protected” from the guerrilla movement the Pentagon conceded they were voluntarily supporting. By the time of Kennedy’s death, over half the population of South Vietnam was engaged in forced labor in such “strategic hamlets,” with the Kennedy administration planning to incarcerate nearly the entire rural population of the country to prevent it from acting on its political convictions.
The human cost of U.S. policy in Vietnam was devastating. According to the Bertrand Russell war crimes commission, by 1963 the Vietnam war had already yielded 160,000 dead; 700,000 tortured and maimed; 400,000 imprisoned; 31,000 raped; 3000 disemboweled with their livers cut out while alive; 4000 people burned alive; 1000 destroyed temples; and 46 instances of villages attacked with poisonous chemicals.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Kennedy did little to aid the desegregation movement, which he considered a trivial affair until worldwide publicity forced him to pay attention (Arthur Schlesinger’s book on the Kennedy presidency treats the theme in the 35th of 37 chapters). While pacifist civil rights activists endured savage attacks at the hands of racist mobs in an attempt to topple Jim Crow, Kennedy dismissed them as “sons of bitches” (SNCC) who had “an investment in violence,” a harsh judgment he could never bring himself to make about the segregationist terrorists the SNCC activists were being beaten and killed by. He refused to back civil rights legislation until well into 1963. Among civil rights leaders, what the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins referred to as Kennedy’s “supercaution” evoked almost universal condemnation.
Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda coup the Kremlin was reaping from his studied inaction in the face of horrifying brutality, Kennedy moved only belatedly and reluctantly to support the black freedom movement. While thousands were attacked and jailed throughout the South, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch in Mississippi, FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but did not move to protect the lives of black people, or even properly investigate when white supremacists shot them dead. Worried about his support in Congress, Kennedy moved to shore up his Southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent “pinks, radicals and black voters” from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering “a bunch of niggers on a voter drive.” And when the March on Washington threatened to include an indictment of federal government policy, Kennedy convinced black leaders to tone down their critical rhetoric and cancel plans for civil disobedience, provoking Malcolm X to dismiss the choreographed event as “the farce on Washington.”
In many ways Kennedy was Ronald Reagan. Although criticized for his participation in the McCarthy-led witch hunts (he was on a Senate committee that doggedly abused UAW leader Harold Christoffel for swearing he wasn’t a Communist, and also supported a bill that included concentration camps for heretics), he inspired admiration at home and abroad for his unwavering faith in American “democracy” (i.e., capitalism). Heir to a bootlegging fortune and helped into the White House by mob connections, he became president after besting Richard Nixon in televised campaign debates in which he promised to end the nation’s economic slump and pursue a more aggressive anti-Communist policy with Moscow once elected. While Nikita Khruschev radically cut back Soviet armaments and military forces - calling for reciprocal action by the U.S. - Kennedy ignored the plea in favor of a huge military build-up, warning repeatedly of the U.S.S.R.’s alleged “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy to take over the world.” He was obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban government (as Reagan later was with toppling the Nicaraguan Sandinistas), which he denounced as a Soviet proxy. To avoid the spread of the Cuban policy of nationalizing resources in order to raise the quality of life for the masses, he strongly supported military dictatorships throughout Latin America. He also supplied military advisors to Vietnam, enthusiastically backing their efforts to destroy popular organizations and terrorize the population into submission. To mobilize budgetary support for his massive increases in war spending, he warned the Congress and the public about a non-existent missile gap that supposedly favored the Soviets. On domestic policy, he advised restraint on social programs and a tax cut for business, which he argued would stimulate economic growth and lead to trickle down benefits for all Americans. (However, in the first five years of Kennedy-Johnson policy corporate profits increased 76.5%, but wages only 18 percent, demonstrating that JFK’s economic policies redistributed income from the poor to the rich.)
In short, an honest account of JFK’s legacy must include (1) an anti-Communist fanaticism that nearly blew up the world, (2) aggression in Vietnam that reached almost genocidal levels in subsequent years (3) contempt for civil liberties at crucial moments (4) equivocation in the face of K.K.K. terror (5) an invasion of the sovereign state of Cuba and years of terrorism against the island after the invasion failed (6) reverse Robin Hood economics.
The Sources:
Marion Lloyd, "Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb in 1962 Crisis," Boston Globe, October 13, 2002
Cedric Belfrage and James Aronson, "Something To Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian, 1948-1967,"(Columbia, 1978)
Kenneth, O'Reilly, "Racial Matters - The F.B.I.'s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972," (Free Press, 1989)
Taylor Branch, "Parting the Waters - America in the King Years, 1954-1963," (Simon and Schuster, 1988)
Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America - From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Walter LaFeber, "Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America" (Norton, 1984)
Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition - A Profile of the 'McCarthy Era'" (Thunder's Mouth, 1989)
Arthur Schlesinger, "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House," (Houghton Mifflin, 1965)
Todd Gitlin, "The Sixties - Years of Hope, Days of Rage," (Bantam, 1986)
Howard Zinn, Postwar America - 1945-1971," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)
Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1995)
Seymour Hersh, "The Dark Side of Camelot," (Little Brown, 1997)
Bertrand Russell, "War Crimes in Vietnam," (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1966)
Noam Chomsky, "Rethinking Camelot - JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture," (Verso, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "World Orders Old and New," (Columbia, 1994)
Noam Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival - America's Quest For Global Dominance," (Holt, 2003)
Monday, April 27, 2009
False Saviors - Harry Truman
This is the greatest thing in history.
-----Harry Truman, on receiving news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
The war was almost over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, Japan in ruins, when Harry Truman gave the order to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upwards of 200,000 people were killed, a few eerily vaporized into the concrete on the Aioi Bridge (Hiroshima), thousands more hurled through the air like missiles, then buried under piles of fallen debris, countless others doomed to a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning. While Truman gloated, saner minds recoiled in shocked horror: cultural historian Lewis Mumford accused the U.S. government of having reverted to Bronze Age barbarism and “reversed the whole course of human history.”
That Japan was already putting out peace feelers through its emissary in Moscow did not induce Truman to call off the atomization of defenseless cities, nor did the awesome nuclear destruction itself bring an end to the slaughter. Five days after Nagasaki, General “Hap” Arnold staged a 1000-plane raid that bombarded what remained of Japanese cities, killing thousands as leaflets fluttered to the ground announcing the Japanese surrender. This is how Truman ended "the good war."
For the cocky new president, the end of one war was but the prelude to beginning another - the Cold War. He was not concerned with the crimes of the USSR, real or imagined, but with the apparent success of the Soviet model of development, which enjoyed wide appeal. There was also concern that the Soviets might be considering offering support to working people in the West, and for that matter, exploited and oppressed people wherever they might be. The failure of Eastern Europe to resume its customary role of supplying food and raw materials to the West, aggravated these worries. The problem was not Communist human rights abuses, but political independence and the appeal of its example.
So with the U.S. public tired of killing and eager for demobilization and disarmament, Truman whipped up an atmosphere of permanent crisis and hysteria against "Communism," sharply escalating the military budget and shaking his fist at the USSR, which had just suffered 20 million dead (roughly every third male was killed) defeating a German army that destroyed the Soviet economy and vast reaches of its territory for the second time in a generation. If the U.S. had suffered proportionate destruction, William Mandel points out, it would have been as if everything east of Chicago had been burned to the ground.
Given the amazingly favorable circumstances Truman inherited, there was no need for a revived Cold War. The U.S. had 75% of the world’s investment capital, two-thirds of its industrial capacity, and a GNP that had doubled while Europe, Japan, and the USSR were reduced to rubble. It exercised military control over both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and had twelve million soldiers under arms throughout the world, backed up by an atomic monopoly. Both economically and militarily the U.S. enjoyed a security unparalleled in modern history.
But rather than establish peace, Truman turned his attention to instituting an American national security state. Although Joseph McCarthy carries the stigma of the repressive era that bears his name, it is Truman who deserves more of the credit. For it was his demand for loyalty oaths that formed the basis of a nationwide attack on unions, working class culture, and independent thought that eliminated the prospects for post-war democracy and plunged the country into an anti-Communist hysteria that did not abate until the popular revolts of the 1960s, and was not eradicated even then.
The anti-Communist purge started with Truman’s signing of Executive Order 9835, which authorized the government to probe the beliefs and associations of all its federal employees and “ferret out any infiltration of disloyal persons.” The accused were denied the right to confront their accusers or even to know the charges against them, while Attorney General Howard McGrath was granted the power to deny jobs, passports, federal housing, and even tax exemptions to anyone displaying “sympathetic association” with any of hundreds of “subversive organizations." Thus were ideas converted into crimes and petition-signing into treason.
While trembling government workers attempted to recall dollar donations and any deviant publications they may have read, Seth Richardson, Truman's point man in the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, explained that "the government is entitled to discharge any employee for reasons which seem sufficient to the government, and without extending to such employee any hearing whatsoever." Truman assured federal workers that the loyalty police existed "to safeguard their rights," then announced that "subversive elements must be removed from the employ of government."
Referring to the scope of the problem, Attorney General McGrath warned in 1949 that “Communists . . . are everywhere---in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses . . . each carry[ing] in himself the germ of death for society.” Millions of investigations were carried out using secret evidence, undercover and often paid informers, but without a judge or jury. In 1951, with the nation in the grip of utter panic, Truman expressed concern that civil liberties were being adversely affected, then amended his program for the worse, signing a new Executive Order altering the basis of dismissal from “reasonable grounds” of disloyalty to “reasonable doubt” of loyalty, thus shifting the burden of proof onto the accused. After years of traumatic upheaval, not a single case of espionage was ever uncovered.
Thus did Truman subordinate U.S. democracy to the needs of a world empire. As WWII approached its savage conclusion, he and his advisors planned a “Grand Area,” - a region “strategically necessary for world control” - to be subordinated to the needs of U.S. capital and administered by Wall Street financiers and Washington power brokers. The area modestly included the Western hemisphere, the former British domains, the Far East, the Pacific, and the richer half of Europe. The Communist world was regretfully considered out of reach, but only temporarily. Hopes were high that it could be obtained later through conquest or collapse. Such vast U.S. control was necessary, future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas said, “as part of our obligation to the security of the world.”
With Europe and much of Asia in ruins, Truman’s main goal became dissuading desperate peoples from forging an accommodation with the Soviets that would leave important sectors of the world independent of U.S. control. To head off this threat his administration backed fascist collaborators and traditional right-wing business interests in putting down popular formations that had been instrumental to winning the war, but threatened the terms of capitalist peace. In Greece, Truman backed the fascist-riddled Tsaldaris regime and denounced anti-fascist guerrillas challenging monarchists and Axis collaborators as an example of “outside forces” attacking “free peoples.” In France, the U.S. withheld desperately needed food aid to insure popular obedience while paying gangsters to organize goon squads and crush labor agitation. In Italy, the American military government rekindled friendly relations with fascism, banned politics, imposed censorship, and crushed a thriving labor movement that had achieved alarming levels of self-government and direct democracy before American troops arrived to “liberate” it.
Elsewhere the pattern was much the same, with methods often considerably more brutal. In China, the Truman administration backed Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody dictatorship until the bitter end, then declared his Formosa regime the “real” China against 400 million Communist impostors on the mainland. In Korea, the U.S. blasted and napalmed the country into a vast, barren graveyard to preserve Japan’s pre-war dictatorship. In Japan, General MacArthur beat back a surging labor movement, prohibiting a general strike and restoring authority to the militarists and ultranationalists. In the Phillipines, U.S. forces rounded up and shot Huk guerrillas who had helped Washington expel the Japanese, then burned their villages to the ground. In Vietnam, Truman ignored France’s deliberate policy of starvation, which Ho Chi Minh claimed had killed two million people, and never responded to his letters reminding the U.S. president of the self-determination commitments of the Atlantic Charter. In Latin America, the Truman administration insisted the region not entertain “excessive industrial development,” and opposed policies “designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.”
Meanwhile, in Germany, the U.S. shut down the operations of anti-fascist worker councils that had taken over hundreds of German companies, returned Nazis to power, and forced the division of the country by insisting that “West” Germany join an anti-Soviet military alliance (NATO). The Truman administration supported the Atlantic alliance, not to deter Soviet aggression against Western Europe, but to integrate Germany in a capitalist bloc permanently hostile to the USSR. In the early postwar years a neutralist movement in Europe was considered intolerable. Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson warned in 1952 that the Soviets might be disposed to exploit Third World political conflicts in an effort to “force the maximum number of non-Communist countries to pursue a neutral policy and to deny their resources to the principal Western powers,” which meant, of course, to deny them on the preferential terms the capitalist powers insisted on. Preparing for the meeting that established NATO in April 1949, U.S. policymakers became convinced that the Soviets might actually be interested in negotiating a deal that would unify Germany and end the division of Europe. This was regarded not as a welcome opportunity to end the Cold War, but as a threat to the primary national security goal of harnessing Germany’s economic and military potential to the anti-Communist Atlantic Community while blocking the “suicide of neutralism.” “The trend of our thinking,” George Kennan, a leading State Department dove wrote, “means . . . that we do not really want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” Therefore, the U.S. occupation of Germany would continue, even if the Soviets proposed a mutual withdrawal. Germany was to be integrated as a subisidiary part of the anti-Communist West headed by the U.S. The Soviets would have no significant say in the outcome, would not receive reparations, and would not influence German industrial development. This, after having absorbed 80% of the casualties in defeating the Nazi war machine.
Encouraged by Senator Vandenberg to “scare hell out of the American people” to extract financing for its fledgling world empire, Truman falsely presented permanent war as a defensive reaction to Communism’s alleged drive for world domination and called for a Holy War against the Godless Red Hordes. But the idea that the U.S. was required by the Cold War to project force beyond its borders ignores the fact that it was independent nationalism, not Bolshevism, that U.S. planners really feared, while dismissing the abundant evidence that U.S. imperialism long pre-dated Communism. In truth, Truman’s invoking of the Red Menace was simply a convenient pretext to justify U.S. interventions taken for quite other reasons, typically greed for cheap labor, strategic resources, profits, markets, and a secure overall system of U.S. global power. These motives were paramount in the Truman administration’s post-war Pax Americana, as the U.S. repeatedly intervened abroad to destroy incipient independence movements and make the world safe for U.S. domination.
Seeking to avert “economic, social and political” chaos, prevent the collapse of American exports, achieve “multilateralism” and dissipate the growing strength of indigenous communist parties throughout Europe, Truman unveiled the Marshall Plan, dangling economic assistance before war-ravaged Europe with powerful effect. In the absence of massive aid, his administration feared, the devastated continent might forsake capitalism for “experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls,” which could “jeopardize private enterprise,” even in the U.S. A major anxiety was the “dollar gap,” which kept Europe from being a market for U.S. manufactures, threatening to produce a glut of unbought goods that could drag the U.S. into economic chaos. Habitually presented as confirmation of the Robin Hood nature of U.S. foreign policy, the Marshall Plan in fact advanced U.S. strategic designs to subordinate Europe to American corporations, narrowing the European political spectrum, coercing choices, limiting welfare and wages, and paving the way for “large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe,” in the words of President Reagan’s Commerce Department. A non-negotiable element of the plan called for the exclusion of “Communists” from power, a broadly defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements. Through 1948, Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall made it clear that U.S. aid would cease should the wrong candidates be voted into office, a blackmail policy that carried considerable force given European conditions at the time.
In addition to his disastrous anti-Communism, Truman was also responsible for succumbing to Zionist lobbying pressure to recognize the new state of Israel. On the afternoon of May 14, 1948 a group of Jewish leaders met in a museum in Tel Aviv, Palestine to decide the future of their “homeland” on the edge of Western Asia. As midnight struck, the British Mandate over Palestine expired, and the Jewish leaders declared a Jewish state “in the name of the Jewish people,” making no mention of borders or the indigenous Arab majority. Minutes later, President Truman extended official recognition to the state, whose citizens were not the inhabitants of the land, but the Jewish people wherever in the world they happened to be. Whereas a Jew from Brooklyn belonged, a fortieth generation Palestinian from Haifa did not. Under the circumstances, war was inevitable.
According to U.S. historian Walter LaFeber Truman’s recognition of Israel was “astonishing” in that the Arab nations, who were on good terms with the U.S. and whose oil was a strategic resource of fantastic value to Washington’s national security state, were violently opposed to a Jewish state and had been for decades. Nevertheless, Truman ignored bitter opposition from Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal, opting instead to win the Jewish vote in the fall elections that year. While he got out the Jewish vote, Israel kicked out the Arabs, ethnically cleansing Palestine of hundreds of thousands of them in bloody massacres that have continued in one form or another for sixty-one years.
Truman liked to declare that "The Buck Stops Here." But in this case the buck was passed to transnational Jewry, with permanently disastrous results for the Palestinians and the world.
Few policies seem quite so difficult to forgive.
The Sources:
Michael Hogan, "The Marshall Plan," (Cambridge, 1987)
Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "What Uncle Sam Really Wants," (Odonian, 1993)
Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)
Lewis Mumford, "My Works and Days," (Harcourt, 1979)
Griffin Fariello, "Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition," (Avon, 1995)
Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Alfred M. Lilienthal, "The Zionist Connection," (Dodd, Mead, 1978)
Carolyn Eisenberg, "Drawing The Line - The American Decision To Divide Germany, 1944-1949," (Cambridge, 1996)
Laurence Shoup and William Mintner, "The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy," (Monthly Review, 1977)
Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1995)
Peter Wyden, "Day One," (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
Richard D. Walton, "Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War," (Viking, 1976)
Walter LaFeber, "The American Age," (Norton, 1989)
William Mandel, "Saying No To Power - Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker," (Creative Arts, 1999)
Howard Wachtel, "The Money Mandarins," (M. E. Sharpe, 1990)
-----Harry Truman, on receiving news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
The war was almost over, Hitler and Mussolini gone, Japan in ruins, when Harry Truman gave the order to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upwards of 200,000 people were killed, a few eerily vaporized into the concrete on the Aioi Bridge (Hiroshima), thousands more hurled through the air like missiles, then buried under piles of fallen debris, countless others doomed to a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning. While Truman gloated, saner minds recoiled in shocked horror: cultural historian Lewis Mumford accused the U.S. government of having reverted to Bronze Age barbarism and “reversed the whole course of human history.”
That Japan was already putting out peace feelers through its emissary in Moscow did not induce Truman to call off the atomization of defenseless cities, nor did the awesome nuclear destruction itself bring an end to the slaughter. Five days after Nagasaki, General “Hap” Arnold staged a 1000-plane raid that bombarded what remained of Japanese cities, killing thousands as leaflets fluttered to the ground announcing the Japanese surrender. This is how Truman ended "the good war."
For the cocky new president, the end of one war was but the prelude to beginning another - the Cold War. He was not concerned with the crimes of the USSR, real or imagined, but with the apparent success of the Soviet model of development, which enjoyed wide appeal. There was also concern that the Soviets might be considering offering support to working people in the West, and for that matter, exploited and oppressed people wherever they might be. The failure of Eastern Europe to resume its customary role of supplying food and raw materials to the West, aggravated these worries. The problem was not Communist human rights abuses, but political independence and the appeal of its example.
So with the U.S. public tired of killing and eager for demobilization and disarmament, Truman whipped up an atmosphere of permanent crisis and hysteria against "Communism," sharply escalating the military budget and shaking his fist at the USSR, which had just suffered 20 million dead (roughly every third male was killed) defeating a German army that destroyed the Soviet economy and vast reaches of its territory for the second time in a generation. If the U.S. had suffered proportionate destruction, William Mandel points out, it would have been as if everything east of Chicago had been burned to the ground.
Given the amazingly favorable circumstances Truman inherited, there was no need for a revived Cold War. The U.S. had 75% of the world’s investment capital, two-thirds of its industrial capacity, and a GNP that had doubled while Europe, Japan, and the USSR were reduced to rubble. It exercised military control over both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and had twelve million soldiers under arms throughout the world, backed up by an atomic monopoly. Both economically and militarily the U.S. enjoyed a security unparalleled in modern history.
But rather than establish peace, Truman turned his attention to instituting an American national security state. Although Joseph McCarthy carries the stigma of the repressive era that bears his name, it is Truman who deserves more of the credit. For it was his demand for loyalty oaths that formed the basis of a nationwide attack on unions, working class culture, and independent thought that eliminated the prospects for post-war democracy and plunged the country into an anti-Communist hysteria that did not abate until the popular revolts of the 1960s, and was not eradicated even then.
The anti-Communist purge started with Truman’s signing of Executive Order 9835, which authorized the government to probe the beliefs and associations of all its federal employees and “ferret out any infiltration of disloyal persons.” The accused were denied the right to confront their accusers or even to know the charges against them, while Attorney General Howard McGrath was granted the power to deny jobs, passports, federal housing, and even tax exemptions to anyone displaying “sympathetic association” with any of hundreds of “subversive organizations." Thus were ideas converted into crimes and petition-signing into treason.
While trembling government workers attempted to recall dollar donations and any deviant publications they may have read, Seth Richardson, Truman's point man in the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, explained that "the government is entitled to discharge any employee for reasons which seem sufficient to the government, and without extending to such employee any hearing whatsoever." Truman assured federal workers that the loyalty police existed "to safeguard their rights," then announced that "subversive elements must be removed from the employ of government."
Referring to the scope of the problem, Attorney General McGrath warned in 1949 that “Communists . . . are everywhere---in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses . . . each carry[ing] in himself the germ of death for society.” Millions of investigations were carried out using secret evidence, undercover and often paid informers, but without a judge or jury. In 1951, with the nation in the grip of utter panic, Truman expressed concern that civil liberties were being adversely affected, then amended his program for the worse, signing a new Executive Order altering the basis of dismissal from “reasonable grounds” of disloyalty to “reasonable doubt” of loyalty, thus shifting the burden of proof onto the accused. After years of traumatic upheaval, not a single case of espionage was ever uncovered.
Thus did Truman subordinate U.S. democracy to the needs of a world empire. As WWII approached its savage conclusion, he and his advisors planned a “Grand Area,” - a region “strategically necessary for world control” - to be subordinated to the needs of U.S. capital and administered by Wall Street financiers and Washington power brokers. The area modestly included the Western hemisphere, the former British domains, the Far East, the Pacific, and the richer half of Europe. The Communist world was regretfully considered out of reach, but only temporarily. Hopes were high that it could be obtained later through conquest or collapse. Such vast U.S. control was necessary, future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas said, “as part of our obligation to the security of the world.”
With Europe and much of Asia in ruins, Truman’s main goal became dissuading desperate peoples from forging an accommodation with the Soviets that would leave important sectors of the world independent of U.S. control. To head off this threat his administration backed fascist collaborators and traditional right-wing business interests in putting down popular formations that had been instrumental to winning the war, but threatened the terms of capitalist peace. In Greece, Truman backed the fascist-riddled Tsaldaris regime and denounced anti-fascist guerrillas challenging monarchists and Axis collaborators as an example of “outside forces” attacking “free peoples.” In France, the U.S. withheld desperately needed food aid to insure popular obedience while paying gangsters to organize goon squads and crush labor agitation. In Italy, the American military government rekindled friendly relations with fascism, banned politics, imposed censorship, and crushed a thriving labor movement that had achieved alarming levels of self-government and direct democracy before American troops arrived to “liberate” it.
Elsewhere the pattern was much the same, with methods often considerably more brutal. In China, the Truman administration backed Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody dictatorship until the bitter end, then declared his Formosa regime the “real” China against 400 million Communist impostors on the mainland. In Korea, the U.S. blasted and napalmed the country into a vast, barren graveyard to preserve Japan’s pre-war dictatorship. In Japan, General MacArthur beat back a surging labor movement, prohibiting a general strike and restoring authority to the militarists and ultranationalists. In the Phillipines, U.S. forces rounded up and shot Huk guerrillas who had helped Washington expel the Japanese, then burned their villages to the ground. In Vietnam, Truman ignored France’s deliberate policy of starvation, which Ho Chi Minh claimed had killed two million people, and never responded to his letters reminding the U.S. president of the self-determination commitments of the Atlantic Charter. In Latin America, the Truman administration insisted the region not entertain “excessive industrial development,” and opposed policies “designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.”
Meanwhile, in Germany, the U.S. shut down the operations of anti-fascist worker councils that had taken over hundreds of German companies, returned Nazis to power, and forced the division of the country by insisting that “West” Germany join an anti-Soviet military alliance (NATO). The Truman administration supported the Atlantic alliance, not to deter Soviet aggression against Western Europe, but to integrate Germany in a capitalist bloc permanently hostile to the USSR. In the early postwar years a neutralist movement in Europe was considered intolerable. Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson warned in 1952 that the Soviets might be disposed to exploit Third World political conflicts in an effort to “force the maximum number of non-Communist countries to pursue a neutral policy and to deny their resources to the principal Western powers,” which meant, of course, to deny them on the preferential terms the capitalist powers insisted on. Preparing for the meeting that established NATO in April 1949, U.S. policymakers became convinced that the Soviets might actually be interested in negotiating a deal that would unify Germany and end the division of Europe. This was regarded not as a welcome opportunity to end the Cold War, but as a threat to the primary national security goal of harnessing Germany’s economic and military potential to the anti-Communist Atlantic Community while blocking the “suicide of neutralism.” “The trend of our thinking,” George Kennan, a leading State Department dove wrote, “means . . . that we do not really want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” Therefore, the U.S. occupation of Germany would continue, even if the Soviets proposed a mutual withdrawal. Germany was to be integrated as a subisidiary part of the anti-Communist West headed by the U.S. The Soviets would have no significant say in the outcome, would not receive reparations, and would not influence German industrial development. This, after having absorbed 80% of the casualties in defeating the Nazi war machine.
Encouraged by Senator Vandenberg to “scare hell out of the American people” to extract financing for its fledgling world empire, Truman falsely presented permanent war as a defensive reaction to Communism’s alleged drive for world domination and called for a Holy War against the Godless Red Hordes. But the idea that the U.S. was required by the Cold War to project force beyond its borders ignores the fact that it was independent nationalism, not Bolshevism, that U.S. planners really feared, while dismissing the abundant evidence that U.S. imperialism long pre-dated Communism. In truth, Truman’s invoking of the Red Menace was simply a convenient pretext to justify U.S. interventions taken for quite other reasons, typically greed for cheap labor, strategic resources, profits, markets, and a secure overall system of U.S. global power. These motives were paramount in the Truman administration’s post-war Pax Americana, as the U.S. repeatedly intervened abroad to destroy incipient independence movements and make the world safe for U.S. domination.
Seeking to avert “economic, social and political” chaos, prevent the collapse of American exports, achieve “multilateralism” and dissipate the growing strength of indigenous communist parties throughout Europe, Truman unveiled the Marshall Plan, dangling economic assistance before war-ravaged Europe with powerful effect. In the absence of massive aid, his administration feared, the devastated continent might forsake capitalism for “experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls,” which could “jeopardize private enterprise,” even in the U.S. A major anxiety was the “dollar gap,” which kept Europe from being a market for U.S. manufactures, threatening to produce a glut of unbought goods that could drag the U.S. into economic chaos. Habitually presented as confirmation of the Robin Hood nature of U.S. foreign policy, the Marshall Plan in fact advanced U.S. strategic designs to subordinate Europe to American corporations, narrowing the European political spectrum, coercing choices, limiting welfare and wages, and paving the way for “large amounts of private U.S. direct investment in Europe,” in the words of President Reagan’s Commerce Department. A non-negotiable element of the plan called for the exclusion of “Communists” from power, a broadly defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements. Through 1948, Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall made it clear that U.S. aid would cease should the wrong candidates be voted into office, a blackmail policy that carried considerable force given European conditions at the time.
In addition to his disastrous anti-Communism, Truman was also responsible for succumbing to Zionist lobbying pressure to recognize the new state of Israel. On the afternoon of May 14, 1948 a group of Jewish leaders met in a museum in Tel Aviv, Palestine to decide the future of their “homeland” on the edge of Western Asia. As midnight struck, the British Mandate over Palestine expired, and the Jewish leaders declared a Jewish state “in the name of the Jewish people,” making no mention of borders or the indigenous Arab majority. Minutes later, President Truman extended official recognition to the state, whose citizens were not the inhabitants of the land, but the Jewish people wherever in the world they happened to be. Whereas a Jew from Brooklyn belonged, a fortieth generation Palestinian from Haifa did not. Under the circumstances, war was inevitable.
According to U.S. historian Walter LaFeber Truman’s recognition of Israel was “astonishing” in that the Arab nations, who were on good terms with the U.S. and whose oil was a strategic resource of fantastic value to Washington’s national security state, were violently opposed to a Jewish state and had been for decades. Nevertheless, Truman ignored bitter opposition from Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal, opting instead to win the Jewish vote in the fall elections that year. While he got out the Jewish vote, Israel kicked out the Arabs, ethnically cleansing Palestine of hundreds of thousands of them in bloody massacres that have continued in one form or another for sixty-one years.
Truman liked to declare that "The Buck Stops Here." But in this case the buck was passed to transnational Jewry, with permanently disastrous results for the Palestinians and the world.
Few policies seem quite so difficult to forgive.
The Sources:
Michael Hogan, "The Marshall Plan," (Cambridge, 1987)
Noam Chomsky, "Year 501 - The Conquest Continues," (South End, 1993)
Noam Chomsky, "What Uncle Sam Really Wants," (Odonian, 1993)
Cedric Belfrage, "The American Inquisition," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973)
Lewis Mumford, "My Works and Days," (Harcourt, 1979)
Griffin Fariello, "Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition," (Avon, 1995)
Lawrence S. Wittner, "Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate," (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Alfred M. Lilienthal, "The Zionist Connection," (Dodd, Mead, 1978)
Carolyn Eisenberg, "Drawing The Line - The American Decision To Divide Germany, 1944-1949," (Cambridge, 1996)
Laurence Shoup and William Mintner, "The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy," (Monthly Review, 1977)
Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1995)
Peter Wyden, "Day One," (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
Richard D. Walton, "Henry Wallace, Harry Truman and the Cold War," (Viking, 1976)
Walter LaFeber, "The American Age," (Norton, 1989)
William Mandel, "Saying No To Power - Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker," (Creative Arts, 1999)
Howard Wachtel, "The Money Mandarins," (M. E. Sharpe, 1990)
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