Get some new lawyers.

— Then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on his assertion that the bombing of Balkan States was illegal under international law. (1999) ¹

In this sixteenth anniversary year of Madeleine Albright stating her endorsement of half a million child sacrifices at the alter of the UN Embargo on Iraq as a “price worth it”, this silent holocaust is to be commemorated annually.

In New Haven, CT., on 12th May, marking the day of Albright’s infamous broadcast  a banner was unfurled and a minute’s silence held as the Middle East Crisis Committee, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CT), the Tree of Life Education Fund and We Refuse to be Enemies, inaugurated the first Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.

Stanley Heller, Chair of the Middle East Crisis Committee, commented:

This horrific loss of life was ignored for six years until the US Ambassador to the UN appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and admitted the deaths of half a million children … We in the Middle East Crisis Committee call for May 12^th to be marked as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.

Iraq’s children, of course, continued to die at an average of six thousand a month until the illegal 2003 invasion wrought further apocalyptic disaster.  Currently many hospitals are assessed as even more woeful than under the embargo, thus they continue to die in a near forgotten tragedy of UN-US-UK making. Soaring cancers and birth deformities linked to weapons used in the 1991 bombings, twelve years of subsequent bombings, 2003 and the following years have exacerbated and compounded a tragedy of enormity.²

As others accused of crimes against humanity and the peace end up at the International Criminal Court (but so far, only if black or Eastern European, it seems) Albright gathers a bizarre collection of “humanitarian” awards.

One of the strangest is surely the Freedom Award from the International Rescue Committee, initiated by Albert Einstein which, “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive and rebuild their lives (offering) life saving care and life-changing assistance …” Endorsing infanticide hardly falls within the IRC’s lofty stated aspirations.

Two years after her statement on disposable children, Albright, now having abandoned further tarnishing the United Nations fine founding aspirations, to become US Secretary of State, declared in February 1998:

Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

A year later, the 1999 razing of much of the Balkans became known as “Madeleine’s war.” The largely unrecognized nation of Kosova, carved from that decimation, is now rated one of the most corrupt and lawless countries in the region and high in world ranking, according to December 2011 findings by Transparency International.

Talking after the virtual destruction of Iraq as a nation state, its records, government institutions bombed, looted, stolen, Albright told Jim Lehrer in September 2003:

… I think we actually … kept him (Saddam Hussein) in a strategic box. We bombed very much if you remember all the maps, always in terms of North and South — covers a great portion of Iraq. I think we had him in the box.

No mention that both the bombing and the “box” were comprehensively illegal.

As ever, the  majority of “bombed” victims were Iraq’s children for whom her contempt was seemingly boundless — small rural shepherds and goat herders tending the family flocks on the vast flat tundra with no place to hide.

One politician with whom she had sparred did take a stand in vast contrast. Robin Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, resigned in protest two days before the invasion. His resignation speech in Parliament on March 18, 2003 was a searing indictment of stark double standards on dealing with Iraq. Deliberate selective perception which could now equally apply to threats to Iran.

He began by saying:

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but twelve years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted

Yet it is more than thirty years since (UN) Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

He talked of  “ … the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest”, noting that Britain’s credibility was not “helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.  That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.”

And as Iran now, he pleaded that “Inspections be given a chance (that the UK was) “being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.“

He asked for the halt of “commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support” and ended with, “I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action. It is for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.”

On the first anniversary of the invasion he stated in Parliament:

It seems only too likely that the judgement of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy in the half century since Suez. In truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq.

Robin Cook died of a heart complication whilst hill walking on remote Ben Stack in Scotland, coincidentally within a swathe of land owned by the Duke of Westminster, a Major General, and at the time Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, who visited British-held Basra a number of times after the invasion.

His death was on the 6th of August, 2005, Hiroshima Day, and the 15th anniversary of the imposition of the all denying embargo on Iraq. A price Robin Cook had clearly not thought “worth it.”

It has to be hoped that Iraq Genocide Memorial Day spreads worldwide both in memory of those abandoned by the inspiring words committed to in the UN Charter, the numerous hidden casualties, dead and alive – and as a reminder that for a great swathe of the world,  mortifyingly, it is the West which appears to be increasingly despotic.

1. William Blum,  “Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.”  January 3, 2012
2. Bie Kentane,  “The Children of Iraq: “Was the Price Worth it?”, Global Research,  May 9, 2012

The prosecutors of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had not done their homework, though their argument here is that it was a “clerical error”.  While it is not clear at this stage, it seems that between 2 million to 8 million pages of case files and witness statements were not disclosed to the defence team.  These altogether amount to 40 thousand documents relevant to the first 24 witnesses that would have been called between the end of this month and July (Telegraph, May 17).

How that disclosure did not take place is itself a reflection about what legal proceedings have become – a matter of downloading, uploading and retrieving documents from a database.  It so happened that those documents were never ‘uploaded’.  “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience”, wrote the prosecutors to Mladic’s lawyer.

What this seemingly bungling prosecution hopes to show is that former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic issued instructions to Mladic to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica”.  Mladic himself, on hearing  of Karadzic’s document ‘Six Strategic Goals of Serbian People in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ presented on May 12, 1992, made no secret of the awe and bloody terror that was being proposed.  “Do you think you just move people like that, as if they were a set of keys?  What you are asking me to do, gentlemen, is called genocide”.

The statement has not been taken to be a mitigating one.  Journalist Refik Hodzic saw it less an appeal to the kinder side of humanity than a means “to ensure everyone was on the same page” (Al Jazeera, May 17). Commissioned to undertake the task, Mladic did proclaim after the fall of the not so protected enclave of Srebrenica that, “The time has finally come for revenge against Turks [Bosnian Muslims] who live in the area.”

Even with this apparent gold mine of documentary evidence, the prosecutors fudged it, showing how history can be made by seemingly small errors.  Judge Alphons Orie could only describe this failing as an “unpleasant surprise” while Mladic’s defence lawyer was crowing when describing the oversight as “unprecedented in the history of the tribunal”.

Till that surprise, the prosecutors had been setting the scene – the role Mladic is said to have played behind the killing of 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.  He was portrayed as casual before massacre, a brute who proved happy to attend a wedding even as his Vojska Republike Srpske forces perpetrated their deeds.  “The VRS”, advanced UN prosecutor Peter McCloskey, “was a professional army which carried out orders with incredible discipline, organisation and military efficiency.  Capturing, transporting, murdering and burying over 7000 men and boys, at first in total secrecy from the outside world, was a truly amazing feat of utter brutality.”

The trial has already been pencilled in for two years, though court officialdom tends to be rather lax in matters of case management.  Such laxity can be fatal in the lessons of history, showing how court rooms are often inadequate venues of moral instruction.  They do, in some cases, become the forums for revisionist martyrs.  It certainly will have no constructive effect on individuals such as the president of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik, who is on record as claiming that Sarajevo was never besieged.  To suggest otherwise, Dodik claims, is itself an act forecasting the cleansing of Serbs from the city.

An “ecumenical government”?

President Papoulias, himself a conservative politician coming from PASOK, concentrated initially his efforts to the formation of an “ecumenical government” supported by PASOK, New Democracy, Democratic Left and SYRIZA. At the Sunday meeting of the three political leaders, Samaras, Venizelos, and Tsipras (Kouvelis was not present), he showed an unofficial and unsigned (!) note by Lukas Papadimos, the former Prime Minister, who made a very pessimistic presentation of the economic situation, predicting the collapse of the Greek state and an inability to fulfill its obligations during June.

This was utilized to press for a government with the participation of SYRIZA as well as the three other parties as a “national need”. PASOK and New Democracy posed as willing to accept even a left government formed by SYRIZA and the Democratic Left, to which they would lend support without participating. However, such a government would in fact make SYRIZA a hostage to the other parties, since New Democracy and PASOK alone have 149 seats in Parliament, and the Democratic Left is much closer to them than to SYRIZA.

This attempt failed due to SYRIZA’s well-founded negative response, a position also taken by Panos Kammenos of the Independent Greeks, who declared he could not accept an informal paper as a basis to take political decisions.

It became thus clear that there was no real prospect of an “ecumenical government” being formed. After this, the efforts of the presidency turned to the formation of a non-political, technocratic government of the Monti type, which was proposed by the New Democracy leader, A. Samaras. Forming such a government would mean a further break from democratic rules and procedures than that made by the former Papadimos government. Moreover, in the severe situation facing Greece, it would definitely result in a total failure, since there is not the dimmest prospect of stabilizing it in a technocratic way even temporarily, as in Italy.

This attempt also failed due to the insistence of the Democratic Left that it would not consent to any solution unless SYRIZA also lent it support, which SYRIZA refused to do.

The Sunday events gave a chance to Samaras, Venizelos, and Kouvelis (those three had a joint meeting before the President later at Μonday evening) to accuse SYRIZA for taking an irresponsible and irreconcilable stance, not in accord with the grave situation and the will of the people. However hearing such accusations from the spokesmen of the former two big parties, who had been stuck for decades to an arrogant one-party administration, makes an ironic impression.

In fact, arrogance characterized the stance of the two ruling parties, which, despite their modest phraseology, were insisting on a solution prolonging their domination. Their hidden intention was to draw SYRIZA to a kind of government that would differ only insignificantly from the past memorandum governments. In this way they would make SYRIZA pay for the failure to get out of the crisis and, most importantly, avoid the “dangerous” prospect of a further radicalization and increasing protests by the people, of which recent elections gave much promise. The Democratic Left reproduced these claims as a result of its “ministerialism”, aiding in fact the reactionary plans with a left oratory.

All three parties, PASOK, New Democracy and the Democratic Left, were totally unwilling to form a government without SYRIZA, based on their sole support. They judged correctly that if they proceeded this way, the government would not stand long and their parties would face annihilation in any new elections.

A government of the right?

After the prospects of a ND-PASOK-DL-SYRIZA government had faded, attention shifted suddenly during Monday to the possibility of forming a government supported by New Democracy, PASOK and the Independent Greeks of Panos Kammenos. This in fact would be a government of the right, like the former Papadimos one, with the Independent Greeks taking the part of LAOS. It would be even weaker, since it would possess a much slimmer majority in a more severe situation.

The formation of such a government would clearly be more difficult than the ND-PASOK-DL one, since Kammenos in the pre-election period took a much harder “anti-memorandum” stance than the Democratic Left. He supported an immediate and unilateral denunciation of the memorandum, as compared to the “renegotiation” and “gradual disengagement” of Kouvelis. Kammenos formulated 7 conditions in order to take part in a government, which repeated the demand for unilateral denunciation, coupled with the nationalization of the Central Bank of Greece, the demand for a debt audit and some other points which the two former big parties had avoided for years and were not really ready to accept. Moreover, Kammenos would evidently have a great problem in justifying to his voters such a dramatic turn, and judging from the fate of LAOS and the fact that his newly founded party lacks any tradition and firm mass support, he would run an obvious danger of being smashed in next elections, perhaps after some months. This explains why the prospect of the right government had not appeared in former discussions and was not considered realistic by most commentators.

However Kammenos left open the question of such a government during his visit to president Papoulias, calling it an “ecumenical” one. Later on both Samaras and Venizelos consented to discussing the Kammenos 7 points, a fact indicative of the severe pressure exerted by the European Union for the formation of a government and avoidance of new elections. Kammenos agreed to visit President Papoulias today in the morning, to be supposedly presented with the official information he was asking about the economic situation. There were even rumors about the position of Prime Minister in the designed government being taken by Vasilios Markezinis, the son of Spyros Markezinis (a reactionary politician who became Prime Minister in the Papadopoulos junta in 1973) and an ardent nationalist reactionary himself.

Things began to become more interesting, however, when the Presidency made public the minutes of Papoulias’ talks with the political leaders. It was revealed that, together with his 7 conditions, Kammenos had delivered to the President a paper referring to the possible governmental scenarios which differed significantly from his official and open proposals.

Kammenos had categorically refused he was taking part in any secret negotiations, insisting that the Independent Greeks are making everything in daylight. This paper clearly exposed his lie, revealing the decay of the political establishment. Kammenos reacted to the publication of the minutes by saying that this paper was not knowingly delivered by him to the President, not denying thus its authenticity but implying it was not official and got accidentally mixed with his 7 point proposals, offering at the same time an alternative explanation that it could had been fabricated. Yet the whole thing exposed him severely and will definitely cost him politically. The immediate result was the cancelation of his private encounter with President Papoulias today, which in effect meant the failure of the right government prospect as well.

It should not be left unmentioned, by the way, that a part of the establishment media, not the mainline ones but those which already support the ultra-right, pressed Kammenos strongly to avoid consenting to any government, on whatever conditions it were to be formed. This includes the right, completely yellow “Extra 3 Chanel” and the notorious populist journalist George Tragas. It seems that these circles, pondering on the lack of cooperation within the left, already consider that a further aggravation of the crisis in the next few months will help in the long run the ultra-right. Kammenos, who enjoyed much of their support, had to appear at Monday night in Tragas’ TV news , to excuse himself clumsily for his vacillations.

KKE leadership hardens its sectarian, adventurist stance

Throughout the whole course of events, KKE retained its ultra-sectarian stance, repeating its position that a left government would be equally harmful to the people as a government of the right. Aleka Papariga, the KKE General Secretary, restated this at a KKE mass gathering held in Athens at the Pedion Areos Square at Monday.

However, A. Papariga’s statements at her Sunday meeting with President Papoulias are the most indicative, allowing everyone to form an idea about the real content of the KKE position, which in fact directly serves the Greek ruling classes. During her discussion with the President, Papariga did not only limit herself to denouncing as a “demagogy” the prospect of a left government. Surpassing anything else the KKE had said until then, she even went so far as to urge for a direct legitimization of Mihaloliakos, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party leader.

During the discussion, President Papoulias, mentioning the former example of the cooperation between KKE and the other left forces in 1989, set Papariga the question: “Didn’t you consider the idea to make a similar coalition?”

Papariga’s answer to that was: “Not now. This is a different phase, another question, another object. It cannot be compared. We are facing now a crisis and a crisis cannot be overcome by funny things”.

Why coalitions can be formed only in good occasions and not in times of crisis and why a coalition with SYRIZA would be by definition “funny” was the secret of the KKE General Secretary, which she did not consider appropriate to reveal to the Greek people.

Sensing the absurdity of her assertions, Papariga went on to recall hypocritically the heroic example of Dimitris Christoulas, the same Christoulas which the KKE scorned when he committed suicide at Syntagma, presenting him as a coward and avoiding mention his message and even his name in “Rizospastis”, the official KKE organ.

“Had we decided, having become crazy – which luckily we are not –”, Papariga declared, “and said such things to the people, that we will form a government and solve their problems, I would prefer – I say – to go like Christoulas, to go to commit suicide at Syntagma with a gun”. The reason she would do that, she explained, is that those who propose such things “are fooling the people” and that “with the people at home waiting for things to be fixed by others” no real change can be made. Why a left government would have people stay at home and not call them to actively take part in the struggle to change things, was again the secret of A. Papariga.

Papariga kept her biggest show however for the end, when the problem of whether Mihaloliakos would take part at the Tuesday political leaders’ council under the President came up. All other leaders, including Samaras of New Democracy and even Kammenos, had excluded that possibility. Papariga surprised the President by stating that she would not only readily accept Mihaloliakos’ participation, but even him standing beside her at the meeting.

She said that she would not like it, of course, but “I cannot say ‘I do not sit [with him]‘. If it becomes necessary, we will all sit together. What can we do?” Papariga mentioned that KKE party members urged her not to take part if Mihaloliakos was called, but declared that she did not consider it her duty to protest, as Tsipras and Kouvelis had already done, because Golden Dawn was voted by the people. If she took such a stance, she added, the result would be “to strengthen them [the neo-Nazis]. You cannot exclude them”.

This Papariga statement was in fact a monument of political naivety and servility to reaction. The Golden Dawn party is largely based on its para-state organization and connections with security forces. It may have gained a success in recent elections, but the big majority of the Greek people are still antifascist, understanding that the neo-Nazi gangs represent a threat to democracy and to their political freedoms. To call for accepting Mihaloliakos at the leaders’ council, as Papariga urged, means in fact to offer Mihaloliakos democratic credit, and help the neo-Nazis gain acceptance from a bigger part of the people.

Papariga not only failed to understand this, but was so naive as to relate to the President the answer she gave to the party members who urged her to avoid Mihaloliakos. “I told them “Well, guys, we will be side by side, if the President puts me near him [i.e. Mihaloliakos] what will I say, that I do not sit?”

To which President Papoulias commented with just one word: “Lovely!”

Papoulias is a former left who had taken part in the National Resistance movement and posed as progressive, before offering his services to the system. He is moreover a clever person. He could not fail therefore to notice the glaring contradiction in Papariga’s position, on the one hand declaring that she will not take part in a left government in order not to betray the people, and on the other hand accepting readily to stand side by side with Mihaloliakos, if the President said so. This was in fact the meaning of his comment.

All this goes to reveal the stance of the KKE leadership as a reactionary stance, which directly aids the system close its holes and even openly helps the ultra-right. Let us mention by the way that Papariga eventually did not take part in the Tuesday council of political leaders, perhaps in protest for not calling Mihaloliakos as well…

The final act

The final act of the present episode of the Greek drama took place at the meeting held before President Papoulias at 2 o’clock today, Tuesday 15th. All leaders of parliamentary parties participated, except, as already mentioned, Mihaloliakos of the Golden Dawn and Papariga of the KKE. The meeting failed to reach an agreement on forming a government, along any of the lines proposed during these last days. This means that the country is heading towards new elections. They will take part in June, being open to a variety of regroupings and results, although a further strengthening of SYRIZA is considered very probable. The former governing parties, together with the Democratic Left will try to blame SYRIZA for the failure to form a government, thus reducing its dynamic; while SYRIZA will counter that it justly refused to become part of the memorandum front. Clearly, strong dilemmas will be put to the people, which means that smaller parties, especially strongly defeated ones like PASOK and, objectively, KKE, will find it difficult to repeat their results of the May 6th elections.

Irrespective of the new elections result, though, it has become patently clear that the Greek crisis is deepening and there is no easy way out. Greece has a long tradition of dictatorships during the 20th century, including those of Pangalos (1925), Metaxas (1936) and the colonels led by Papadopoulos (1967). Comments are appearing already in the foreign press that this might be also the outcome of the present anomaly. However, these comments are made with the obvious aim to terrorize the people and affirm that the only possible way for Greece is prolonging the austerity policies, as many leading European politicians asserted during the last two days. In fact, the ruling classes are not yet ready to impose a dictatorial solution, which is made more difficult by international conditions as well as the radicalization of the Greek people towards the left.

Odds are that during the following months a chance for the formation of a government of the left will appear. This government, the concrete form of which, the parties participating, etc., cannot be foreseen now, will not have an easy task to solve. In the best case, it may help Greece avoid passing the worst part of Argentina’s experience in 2001 and find a way out of this crisis with the least cost by mobilizing the people. But a left government might also come after a bankruptcy and as a result of the country’s passing from a bloody unrest and turmoil. It is the task of responsible radical left forces in Greece to do everything they can to channel things towards the first direction but also be ready for the second.

The establishment of a left government in Greece could be the sign for a broader radicalization in other European countries as well. The fear with which the ruling classes react to this prospect makes clear it is a valid prospect, which may not lead to a direct overthrow of capitalism, but will mean a big step forward.

If however the government of the left fails to materialize or be followed properly, then all kinds of dangers from the ultra-right and the right will become intensified. The future of Greece will darken and the left upsurge in Europe will receive a lesser impetus. In this respect, exposing and defeating the adventurist stance of the KKE leadership is perhaps the most urgent task of the Greek left. For if this stance persists the possibilities of a left government will be drastically reduced or even nullified.

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that India has a stockpile of 80-100 nuclear weapons while North Korea has less than ten. North Korea originally signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons (NPT) but withdrew in 2003.

Like Israel and Pakistan, also nuclear powers, India has never signed the NPT. Despite this, the US has supported the development of nuclear weapons in all three countries – India receiving particular support from George W. Bush and Obama. The 2008 India Civilian Nuclear Agreement — an agreement of cooperation between India, the US, and other providers of nuclear technology — is linked with plans to build dozens of nuclear plants in India, a country that exploded five nuclear devices at its Pokhran test site in 1998. Environmental journalist Gar Smith writes:

While this scheme will generate a lot of global cash-flow for the nuclear marketers and their government boosters, it could deal a death blow to nonproliferation hopes by allowing India to become the first country to buy nuclear materials without being a party to the NPT. In April 2010, Washington signed off on a deal that permits India to reprocess its own nuclear fuel. The arrangement, however, has raised fears in neighboring Pakistan, which is now expected to embark on a ‘significant nuclear military buildup’.

Meanwhile, the US government regularly lambasts North Korea for its nuclear weapons programme and, of course, Iran for an alleged nuclear weapons programme that, according to the 16 US intelligence agencies, does not exist.

As Noam Chomsky comments:

Small wonder that outside the West few can take the US charges against Iran very seriously…¹

The headline for the BBC article on India was neutral enough:

India test launches Agni-V long-range missile.

The headline for the article on North Korea struck a different tone:

UN “deplores” North Korea botched rocket launch.

The introduction to the Korean piece continued with the same emphasis:

The UN Security Council has deplored the launch by North Korea of a rocket which broke up shortly after take-off.

A statement issued after closed-door talks said the launch was in breach of two Security Council resolutions…’

The introduction to the India piece was positive, even celebratory:

India has successfully launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile able to carry a nuclear warhead, officials say…

India said the launch was “flawless” and the missile had reached its target…

With this, India joins an elite nuclear club of China, Russia, France, the US and UK which already have long-range missiles, although with a much greater range. Israel is also thought to possess them.

‘It was a perfect launch. It met all the test parameters and hit its pre-determined target’, SP Das, director of the test range, told the BBC. He confirmed the missile had flown more than 5,000km before reaching the target.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated the scientists for the “successful launch” of the missile.

If anyone on Planet Earth had anything negative to say about the launch, the BBC was unable to find them.

The primary source for views on the Indian launch were Indian. By contrast, North Korean opinion was buried in the last of five sections in the article. Perhaps no humanising comments from named North Korean officials or experts were available – the BBC provided only two bland, anonymous sentences from ‘North Korea’s state news agency KCN.’

Ask A World Policeman

The article on North Korea presented the missile launch as a threat eliciting punishment:

Earlier, Washington accused the communist state of threatening regional security. It said North Korea had isolated itself still further from the outside world.

The US has also cancelled a proposed food aid deal with Pyongyang.

A US National Security Council spokesman said they would look at additional sanctions if Pyongyang continued its ‘provocations’.

As for the Indian launch:

The BBC’s Andrew North in Delhi says Indian officials deny it, but everyone believes the missile is mainly aimed at deterring China…

The North Korean missile, then, was portrayed as a threat; the Indian missile as a deterrent. Additionally, the BBC commented: “Many outside the country saw the launch as an illegal test of long-range missile technology.” The sentence could apply to either launch – we will leave readers to guess in which article it appeared.

The article on North Korea repeatedly referenced US sources: “US ambassador Susan Rice”, “Washington”, “A US National Security Council spokesman”, “Washington” (again), and finally “White House spokesman Jay Carney”. When media discussion centres on global “Bad Guys” it is   US opinion that matters. This not so subtly portrays the US as the actual and rightful World Policeman. One might reasonably wonder what on earth events on the Korean peninsula ever had to do with the United States.

The North Korea piece lined up the denunciations, here White House spokesman Jay Carney:

North Korea is only further isolating itself by engaging in provocative acts, and is wasting its money on weapons and propaganda displays while the North Korean people go hungry.

Nothing along these lines appeared in the article on India, a country with 57 billionaires and one-third of the world’s poor. In January, India’s Premier Manmohan Singh called malnutrition in the country “a national shame” as he released a major survey that found 42 per cent of children under five were underweight. One of the NGOs that produced the report commented that, measured by the prevalence of malnutrition, India is “doing worse than sub-Saharan Africa”.

To round off the criticism, the BBC article on North Korea cited South Korea, the North’s main enemy:

South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan accused the North of a ‘clear breach of the UN resolution that prohibits any launch using ballistic missile technology’.

No mention was made of the Pakistani view of India’s launch. There was also no word at all on the view from “Washington” or the US more generally.

The silence is understandable. As discussed, while preaching against nuclear proliferation to countries like North Korea and Iran, the US and Britain have been working hard to arm both India and Pakistan.

In September 2003, Britain’s BAE Systems announced the sale of 66 Hawk jets to India in a £1 billion package. This constituted 10 times the value of annual UK development aid to India. In July 2010, a further 57 aircraft were sold in a deal worth £700,000,000 described by The Times of India as ‘a quantum jump for Indo-British military ties’.

The Hawks, which can also be used as ground-attack aircraft, are used to train Indian pilots to fly more powerful jets, including 139 BAE Systems Jaguar bombers built under licence. The Ministry of Defence accepts that Jaguars could deliver India’s nuclear weapons. The Indian government receiving these jets has fought three wars with Pakistan in the last 70 years.

In 2003, the Guardian provided the sensible emphasis in a piece entitled:  “5,000 jobs safe as India buys Hawks”.

Similarly, in March 2005, the press reported that the United States had agreed to sell two dozen F-16 nuclear-capable jet fighters to Pakistan. US Senator Larry Pressler commented in The New York Times:

Pakistan… is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance.²

It could be coincidence that, with important arms contracts and strategic alliances at stake, the BBC should fail to muster a single criticism of Indian nuclear missile technology. It could also be coincidence that the BBC demonises and lambasts an enemy of the same state-corporate interests. But, in truth, the pattern is so obvious, so consistent, over years and decades. We can debate the precise mechanisms corrupting BBC performance – the fact that senior managers and trustees are Establishment grandees selected by the government of the day. Or we can focus on the role of the entire corporate media system in furthering state-corporate power – system-wide corruption that generates industrial strength pressure to conform on the less overtly corporate BBC. Whatever the reasons, there is no question that the BBC heavily promotes the interests of power at the expense of honesty, critical thought and compassion.

1. Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Hamish Hamilton, 2010, p.220
2. Pressler, “Dissing Democracy in Asia”, The New York Times, March 21, 2005

Despite these election results, parties representing financial interests and the corporate media insist that austerity measures must go ahead.  At a time when real wages are steadily declining and unemployment has reached levels not seen for more than fifty years, the supporters of finance capital insist that the problem is public debt. They demand cuts to social services, public employment and wages and salaries.

For majorities who depend on income from labour—not on profits from capital—austerity is not a solution.  It is the problem. The one per cent, or 0.1 per cent, who depend on income from capital, insist the people are wrong. The interests of capital, regardless of the costs to others, must come first.

Austerity has led to steadily rising unemployment and declining markets in most European countries. Its most devastating effects are in Greece.  Public employment, pensions and other social services have been gutted. The country’s assets are being plundered.  Public utilities are being sold off to corporations from other countries. A quarter of the population—half of people under thirty—are unemployed. Still the supporters of capitalist interests claim that Greece has been living beyond its means.  The only way that the country can expect to get any new money is if it cuts back its profligate spending.

In fact, Greece is one of the poorer countries in Europe.  Its social services do not come close to matching the coverage, quality or cost of the social services of more prosperous countries like Germany and France. The funds that Greece gets if it agrees to austerity measures do not go to Greece, but to the banks that hold the credits that were used to pay for past government expenditures—including the Olympics. The banks that hold these debts are mainly in Germany and France and but also in the U.K., U.S., Switzerland, and elsewhere.

Faced with a 60 per cent vote against austerity in Greece, the capitalist strategy is to hope that the lure of power can induce enough of the elected representatives to switch sides and support the proposed cuts.  What the people of Greece are being pushed to do is to accept rising unemployment and worsening poverty to sustain global financial interests.  Past Greek governments can be blamed for allowing the country to descend into a state of debt peonage, but the primary blame is with the global financial institutions.  Due diligence would have made it clear that Greece could not realistically pay back the money loaned, even at the original low interest rates. As these loans were renegotiated at predictably higher rates it should have been obvious that paying back the loans was impossible.

Greece is a repeat of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage debacle. Low income, often unemployed people were enticed to purchase homes with little or no down payment at interest rates which for the first year or so were attractively low. The borrowers may or may not have been told that these rates would shortly rise dramatically, making it nearly impossible for these loans to ever be repaid. U.S. financial institutions who engaged in these irresponsible lending practices have not been held to account. European financial interests, backed by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and transnational capital generally, continue on, pursuing their interests at the expense of public employees, social services, union conditions, and consumer income.

NATO has always been a war-making institution lacking in accountability to the peoples of the nations it claims to represent. But NATO at least once claimed a defensive purpose that it neither claims nor represents any longer.

NATO has militarized the nations of Europe against the will of their people, now maintains hundreds of nuclear weapons in non-nuclear European nations in blatant violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and is threatening Russia with missile base construction on its borders.

Having fought aggressive wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, NATO remains in Afghanistan, illegally, immorally, and to no coherent purpose. The people of the United States, other NATO nations, and Afghanistan itself, overwhelmingly favor an end to NATO’s presence, while Presidents Obama and Karzai, against the will of their people, work to commit U.S. forces to at least 12.5 more years in Afghanistan.

NATO provides the United States with a pretense of global coalition and legality. Approximately half of the world’s military spending is U.S., while adding the other NATO nations brings the total to three-quarters. The head of the Pentagon, Leon Panetta, recently testified in Congress that a war could be made legal by working through either the United Nations or NATO. While no written law supports that claim, it is a claim that has served its intended purpose. NATO also serves as a false legal shield, protecting the U.S. military from Congressional oversight.

The U.S. dominated NATO holds up the past year’s war on Libya as a model for the future, with an eye on various potential victims, including Syria and Iran. In so doing, NATO serves as the armed enforcer of the exploitative agenda of the G-8, which has fled Chicago for the guarded compound at Camp David.

NATO’s interests are neither democratically determined nor humanitarian in purpose. NATO does not bomb all nations guilty of humanitarian abuses. Nor does NATO’s bombing alleviate human suffering, it adds to it. Saudi Arabia is not a target. Bahrain is not a target. Ben Ali and Mubarak were not targets. An analysis of NATO’s real motivations reveals a desire to control the global flow of oil, to support dictators who have supported U.S./NATO wars, prisons and torture operations, to back Israel’s expansionist agenda, and to surround and threaten the nation of Iran.

The killing and destruction engaged in by NATO in Libya was illegal, immoral, and counter-productive as is its aggression in Afghanistan. NATO’s wars have not brought democracy, peace, or human rights anywhere.

Libya is not a model for future NATO action. There is no model for future NATO action. NATO has lost its reason to exist if it ever had one. Veterans For Peace joins with our brothers and sisters in Europe, who are also rallying nonviolently against NATO, in calling for its elimination.

The term comes from a tactic that was commonly employed many centuries ago by all the navies of fledgling empires. Although these navies very occasionally engaged in heroic battles with each other in order to protect the citizens of their countries from invading hoards, as our history books suggest, the far more common use of mighty battleships was for theft. Sinking an enemy ship was never the intention of these engagements, and would have been seen as something of a failure. The purpose was to capture the ship, preferably undamaged, and steal anything and everything from the personal possessions of the crew to the very ship itself, which would then be recycled by the victors. After all, what could possibly be the point of sinking an expensive ship, laden to the gunnels with the riches of plundered foreign colonies, when its capture would serve exactly the same political purpose, as well as providing vast wealth?

The Royal Navy, for example, routinely operated a “prize” system right up until quite recent times; and although acts of piracy don’t form quite the same staple diet in the senior service as they used to do, prize legislation remains on British statute books to this day. Right up until the nineteenth century “prize courts” would routinely assess and divvy-up the wealth of ships that had been attacked and seized by the jolly Jack Tars. Some of the plunder was apportioned to the ship’s crew. Of course, it wasn’t an equal distribution of wealth, where the loblolly boy, say, received as much of a cut as the captain; nor was the cut in any way equal to the share gifted to the high and mighty Lords of the Admiralty, who weren’t required to do anything more dangerous for their cut than over-indulge themselves in London society. However, some small portion of the “prize” would find its way to even the lowliest cabin boy – the original “trickle-down” effect perhaps. In short, the routine day-job of the glorious Royal Navy was plunder. In fact, the only way the great sailors of Nelson’s day differed from common pirates was that the piracy of Nelson’s navy was simply deemed to be legal. It’s a similar principle to the one that’s alive and well to this day, and helping to keep investment bankers out of jail.

But even hardened cynics such as myself find it difficult not to admire the considerable skill that was often required for some of the encounters that took place between the mighty warships of Nelson’s day. In the days before modern communications these great behemoths, seventy metres long with a thousand souls on board, could only use the power of the wind to move around, so finding and engaging and defeating an enemy in thousands of square miles of empty ocean was no easy matter, and the seamanship required for these encounters was often truly amazing. Apart from some acts of genuine courage, with perhaps just a hint of insanity, these sailors also relied on a host of devious tricks and raw cunning to capture a “prize”. Apart from plenty of luck, you also needed a good brain to be an effective captain in Nelson’s day; and it’s hardly surprising, given hundreds of years of regular practice in the dark arts of subterfuge and deceit, that the roots of the British intelligence service were established in the Royal Navy.

One of the many tricks used in the days of sail was to make your ship appear friendly to the watchful telescopes of the prospective prize; and the easiest way to do this was to ensure the flags your ship were flying were not those of your own country but were either exactly the same as those of the prize, or the same as those of whichever country was friendly to the prize. This simple ruse would, of course, eventually be discovered as a trick; and, of course, every ship’s crew knew about the trick. However, it would invariably buy some invaluable time, making all the difference between success and failure, enabling the hunter to get close enough to his prey to capture him before the darkness of night might come to the hapless victim’s rescue.

This tactic is still very much alive and well, and survives in modern language usage as the “false flag” attack, to mean an attack by someone who isn’t quite who they seem to be. Variations of it include attacks perpetrated by people pretending to be enemies of the state. These attacks may be carried out by the state’s own armed forces, or by paid mercenaries, or by allies of the state. History is rich with evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous sinking of the Maine. In 1898, when the US was beginning to flex its expansionist muscles abroad, the battleship USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbour. Although there was no evidence to support it, the incident was blamed on Spain, who controlled Cuba at the time; and it had the desired effect of triggering the Spanish American war which eventually led to Spain’s eviction from the island and the installation of a US puppet regime – a model that would be successfully repeated time and again for many decades to come. Fifty-five years later something very similar happened again – this time without going to the extra expense of actually sinking any ships.

On August 4, 1964 the world was informed that another US warship, the USS Maddox, had come under sustained attack by North Vietnam. It was the event which directly led to ten years of total hell for tens of millions of people in South East Asia, and whose effects are still being felt to this day. Fifty years after the false flag event of the Maddox, declassified documents revealed that the US government was fully aware at the time that no such attack had taken place. But by then, of course, the false flag had long served its purpose.

Although the term “false flag” originated from these naval deceptions, false flag incidents have never been solely confined to the high seas. Armies have always used any number of devices to deceive their victims, and anyone who’s ever watched a Hollywood war movie is probably aware of it; for how many of these movies have included a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys dress up in the uniforms of their enemy in order to carry out some raid or another? Is that not a completely routine story-line? Although many of these movies are obviously fictitious, these deceptions, which might also be called “false flag” adventures, are based on normal military tactics which have been used by almost every army, probably since the beginning of civilisation.

However, Hollywood movies seldom reveal the true evil and cynicism of war. Therefore not many of the 99%, who obtain much of their understanding of the world in general and history in particular from the silver screen, know anything at all about the truly dark side of all armies in general, and their leaders in particular. For how many Hollywood movies tell the stories of how armies routinely slaughter defenceless people? Although they will sometimes depict the enemy of the day carrying out these atrocities, they never show the so-called “good guys” doing it – which creates in the mind of the viewer the impression that our armies never behave in such a beastly fashion. But they most certainly do.

Consider the vast number of movies that came out of Hollywood telling how the west was won – how handfuls of brave adventurers defeated marauding hoards of screaming bloodthirsty savages, which was, in fact, a complete inversion of the truth. And how many war movies told the truth about the bombing of Dresden, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These completely needless events took place in the closing days of World War Two, when Germany and Japan were already crushed nations. They were events which deliberately targeted hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians, and served absolutely no military purpose whatsoever. They were war crimes, already outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Not many Hollywood movies tell us that.

It’s important to grasp this principle of war that not even Hollywood can glamorise: that our trusted leaders can and do routinely issue orders to slaughter innocent defenceless civilians, and that brainwashed young people then carry out those orders, and that society is then brainwashed into considering these young people to be heroes. Not even Hollywood can glamorise the deep cynicism of that fact.

Although the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians is a different aspect of the cynicism of war, and cannot be considered a false flag adventure, it’s important to cite it as evidence of the psychotic ruthlessness of our own trusted leaders and the brainwashed youngsters who are routinely conditioned to obey an order, any order.

My own personal first-hand experience of false flag adventures was obtained in the late seventies, in Rhodesia, where I was batting out my national service as an intelligence officer. Our army had a small unit of people called the Selous Scouts. They were considered the elite of the elite, and were supposedly originally created by a couple of junior officers serving in the Rhodesian SAS who thought the SAS wasn’t quite hard enough. I did some of my training with the Scouts. They were definitely different.

Later on, when I was operational, I was based in a small rural outpost called Rusape. For me it was a very comfortable posting and, I’m very glad to say, I managed to see out my time there without being injured and, I’m even more glad to say, without causing injury to anyone else.

Each morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I would saunter over to the operations room to see what was going on. Like almost every military operations room in the world, one wall of it was given over to a huge map of our area of responsibility. Most of the time it was just a map of rural Rhodesia, with little coloured stickers on it depicting some sort of recent “terrorist” incident – such as a landmine going off, or an attack on some isolated school or clinic. My job would be to go out to investigate these incidents and report on them. Sometimes it was very harrowing, but mostly it was a fairly pleasant way to sit out the war.

But every now and then I would turn up to the ops room in the morning and would be met with the sight of a sizeable chunk of the map covered over in hatched lines. Everyone understood that that area had been “frozen”. This meant that no army personnel or police were to go into that area. The Scouts had moved into it. For a few weeks after that life went on pretty much as normal everywhere else on the patch; but no information at all emerged from the area with the mysterious hatching; and then one morning I’d turn up for work and the hatching would have been removed from the map as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

Within a day or two of that happening the reports would start rolling in from where the Scouts had been, about “terrorist” murders at some isolated village or another, of a “terrorist” rocket attack on a small business centre perhaps, or a “terrorist” landmine blowing up a rural bus. These would all have been carried out by the Scouts, dressed up as “terrorists” and using “terrorist” weaponry.

The purpose of these attacks was a variation of that old favourite: the hard cop/soft cop routine. The Scouts’ role was to try to out-terrorise the forces working for the likes of Robert Mugabe, to try to alienate the local population from Mugabe’s men by pretending to be Mugabe’s men and committing such atrocities that the locals would be repulsed by them. Then when the soft cops turned up in the shape of government forces, the locals would feel like offering their help and support. It’s called winning hearts and minds, and was a tactic that had already been used by US special forces in Vietnam before that, and by British special forces all over the place before that: Malaya, Congo, Kenya, Aden…

Some would dismiss false flag adventures as conspiracy theory, which is, of course, a very convenient way to persuade the 99% that our trusted leaders couldn’t possibly stoop so low. But history is rich with proof that they most certainly do stoop so low, with amazing frequency. So the really important lesson to learn in all of this is that whenever a so-called “terrorist” outrage occurs, especially those outrages where the perpetrators haven’t been caught in action (and rounding up “suspects” after the event cannot be trusted either – as the “Guildford Four” and “Birmingham Six”, for example, could confirm)… always, always recall the very real world of false flag adventures.

Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in Washington by the Barack Obama administration.

Prince Salman – who Bahraini propaganda sells as a “moderate” – showed up at the US State Department side-by-side with Secretary of State Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton. Those who “die” are evil dictators of the Muammar Gaddafi variety; “our” bastards get to party in DC after being extended a red carpet welcome.

Is there any Arab Spring-related repression and killing going in Bahrain? According to Clinton, of course not; these are only “internal issues” – in her own words.

What this means in practice is that Clinton subscribes to the official narrative that the sectarianization of everything happening in Bahrain is to be blamed on the protesters – and not the al-Khalifas, who for a year now have been destroying Shi’ite mosques and investing on all-out demonization of all things Shi’ite (blame it on “evil” Iran).

The al-Khalifas have been way wilier than President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; they have killed only an acceptable number of people. But why is Bahrain substantially “different” from Syria? Because “it hosts the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, helping the US military project its might in the Gulf and contain Iran”; and that’s not a neo-conservative talking, but Washington director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski.

A Bunch of Cowards

Here is Libya conqueror Clinton:

Bahrain is a valued ally of the United States. We partner on many important issues of mutual concern to each of our nations and to the regional and global concerns as well. I’m looking forward to a chance to talk over with His Royal Highness a number of the issues both internally and externally that Bahrain is dealing with and have some better understanding of the ongoing efforts that the government of Bahrain is undertaking. So again, His Royal Highness, welcome to the United States.

Here’s a Bahraini government spokesman telling it like it is to Reuters only one day before the Clinton-Crown Prince schmooze:

We are looking into the perpetrators and people who use print, broadcast and social media to encourage illegal protest and violence around the country. If applying the law means tougher action, then so be it.

Translation: we will keep going on a rampage because the masters in Washington have our backs covered.

Not a word from the Obama administration on the arrest of top Bahraini human-rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who Amnesty International declared a “prisoner of conscience”, as well as calling for his immediate release. Activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, for his part, has been on a hunger strike for three months, protesting his life imprisonment by the al-Khalifa regime.

R2P, “responsibility to protect”, that oh so lovely doctrine espoused by the Three Graces – Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Special Assistant to Obama Samantha Power – does not apply to civilian protesters, the majority of them Shi’ites, in Bahrain. They have been yelling for their basic human rights – of which they don’t have much – to be protected for over a year now.

Bahrain’s Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa – whose Medieval methods would lead Egyptian Omar “Sheikh al-Torture” Suleiman to blush with envy, not to mention Prince Nayef from the House of Saud – has been in power for 40 years.

And Bahrain’s King Hamad has been oh so generous; after all he commissioned a report on the repression. Needless to say, the report, even highly sanitized, hasn’t been implemented.

What makes it even more tragic is that these people are cowards. It would take just a single word from Clinton or Obama for the al-Khalifas to immediately stop their concerted repression, using their hardcore Sunni police force recruited from Pakistan, Syria and Yemen; release the thousands of prisoners; and rehire the thousands of workers who were laid off because they are “subversive”. Here’s why.

There has been a rumor in Britain that Nasser Bin Hamad, the son of Bahrain’s King, might be banned from attending the London Summer Olympic Games this summer. There are graphic reasons for it; he personally threatened many athletes, on top of being accused of torture. So what did he do? In haste, he deleted all his threatening tweets. Expect Nasser to be partying in Mayfair in July.

•  This article first appeared in Asia Times.

I take to the streets and go to rallies but maybe I should go to parliament to blow my brains out.

– Dimitris Christoulas to a friend, Business Insider, Apr 5, 2012

The cornered tend to be desperate. The insecure can lose their bearings. The Greek financial crisis is producing an assortment of warring metaphors, some more plausible than others. The common target in this whole business is Germany, implying that more than just the eurozone may be under threat. It suggests, in fact, that financial instability will, in time, lead to a nationalist critique of the European idea.

As with broader conflicts, the national is explained through the local. Global events can be seen through individual lenses, the stories of citizens who have suffered, even if those stories can unduly simplify the complex. In Greece, Dimitris Christoulas has offered the premise for the Greek protest movement. The 77-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself on Syntagma Square in Athens early last month leaving behind a poignant and powerful note. In that note, he claimed that he would ‘rather die than scavenge in rubbish bins for his food’ (Guardian, Apr 5).

Christoulas’s suicide has been labelled as the first ‘act of resistance’ akin to the revolutionary actions of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit and veg vendor whose act of self-conflagration in December 2010 set the Arab Spring in motion. But what was he resisting against? Unemployment levels in Greece stand at 21 percent and GDP has shrunk. The country is now in its fifth straight year of economic contraction. Soup kitchens in Athens are full with one in every eleven residents making regular trips. A bartering economy is starting to thrive.

The country’s suicide rate has climbed dramatically. From being one of Europe’s lowest, it has officially doubled. An elderly woman, wanting to alleviate the burden on her children, set herself on fire. Such cases make the political ground rich for disaffection, an all too prominent feature in the electoral rhetoric prior to last week’s ballot. Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party has made gains on the platform of attacking those ‘loan sharks’ who have appropriated Greek sovereignty, promising an annulment of the bailout package. Those loan sharks are, of course, German, giving outsiders the sense that Teutonic bank managers will don their jackboots and march through Athens. The German role behind the bailout has even been deemed to be an imposition of an ‘economic Fourth Reich’ by the nationalist party, the Independent Greeks.

The suicide note by Christoulas also drew on history as a weapon. The government of Lucas Papademos, he suggested, was effectively collaborating with external forces the way Georgios Tsolakoglou did with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Even if Christoulas was drawing a very long bow, the problem of sovereignty is certainly critical. The leaders of the New Resistance movement led by Mikos Theodorakis have been enthusiastic and exaggerating in their praise of the Syriza leader. ‘I support with all my strength Alexis Tsipras in his efforts to form a government that will terminate the memorandum and will seek to recover the sovereignty of our country.’

Many would prefer a state of unchanged, moneyed comforts – pensions that are unreduced in perpetuity; a retirement age in the late 40s that enables a good deal of the rest of life to be enjoyed. But the tragedy of the money economy is that the hard means of supporting such lifestyles requires a base, preferably not on quicksand. When that base is crumbling, the rest will follow suit. Bad governance produces discontented, even revolutionary citizens. Internal disaffection encourages an often fruitless search for external excuses.

In a sense, there is a true ‘occupation’ – an economic one ruled by a cadre of technocrats. The banksters are in indirect command, dictating the programs of several countries in Europe where the finances have been shown to be poor. Sovereignty has become subservient to repayment, conditional on financial assistance. A vicious cycle has come into play: the banks have been responsible for lending to those who cannot pay. The books have been cooked; the credentials of those receiving borrowing exaggerated. The result is pure, inconsolable misery. The blame, as ever, is easily levelled against states whose better finances are seen as a means of bullying rather than an issue of praise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel becomes less a sound economic manager than a cruel stifler of independence.

As with any complex, undermining event, several factors feature. Either the political forces are deemed complicit with external forces (notably the Germans), and are accused of collaborators as a shorthand reference; or they are complicit in accepting the entire list of expectations dictated to by Brussels. The true impoverishment that has taken place in Greece is its political promise. The people, as they always have done, will survive in spite of their efforts.

The two traditional parties, pillars of the neoliberal policies, lost more than half of their previous vote. Combined together, they make now just a 32% of the electorate, in comparison to 77% they had scored in the 2009 elections. New Democracy has dropped from 33% in 2009 to 19%, while PASOK has sunk even more dramatically from 44% to 13%, losing more than 2.000.000 votes. This was the punishment for their reactionary “Memorandum” policies, which they followed in cooperation with the European Union and the IMF. These policies led to a vast impoverishment of the majority of the people and a mass unemployment officially already at 23%, resulting even to a plethora of suicides by desperate men and women.

The vote of the broad left rose from a modest 12% in 2009 to an impressive 35.5% (17% for SYRIZA, 8.5% for KKE, 1.2% for the anticapitalist left party ANTARSYA and some 6.1% for the Democratic Left and 2.9% for the Greens). However the prospect of a left government is made problematic since the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is an ultra-Stalinist party, denying beforehand any cooperation with “opportunists”, which it considers to be all other left parties except from itself. Moreover, the Democratic Left and the Greens are moderate center-left parties, which do not differ radically from PASOK and have supported until lately a rather conservative agenda. Even so, the collective result of the three radical left parties, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, an impressive 26.5%, makes it possible to have some real hope for the future.

The other significant feature of the elections is the abrupt rise of the ultra-right, jumping together to an astonishing 20.5%. Formerly represented by just one party, LAOS, which had scored a modest 6% 3 years ago, the ultra-right now was able to present three major parties, Independent Greeks, LAOS, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which took respectively 10.6%, 2.9% and 7%. LAOS paid for its support of the Papadimos government, holding office during the last months in Greece to implement the austerity programs of the Troika, falling just short from the required 3% to enter the parliament.

However, the shocking 7% achieved by Golden Dawn, an openly neo-Nazi and racist anti-immigrant party, marks perhaps more than anything else the result of the Greek elections. It is the first time such a party not only enters the parliament but gains mass support, which the Nazis lacked during the whole political history of Greece, famous for its resistance movement in 1941-45.

This result had been anticipated by left activists and publicists, between others by our group in Marxist Thought, which devoted its whole last issue to the problem of fascism, neo-fascism, and the new ultra-right. There was a mass mobilization by left organizations during the last three weeks calling the attention of the people to the danger of the neo-Nazi gangs. However, all this proved largely ineffective, as they have gained hold during the last years in degraded neighborhoods and within the unemployed youth. The stance of the Stalinist KKE, which not only is doing absolutely nothing to fight the ultra-right but gives shelter to nationalists like the notorious journalist Liana Kanelli, and even went so far as to welcome the Golden Dawn representatives at the Halyvourgiki strike through the local workers’ union it controls, added largely to the problem.

It is true that the ultra-right gathered together “only” 20.5%, in comparison to the radical left’s 26.5%. However, it is also true that it more than tripled its forces, while the radical left “just” doubled them.

The ensuing situation has been utilized by conservative commentators of the media and the Press, to interpret the result as an illogical expression of anger, pushing to extremes, against the demands of logic and caution. According to this reading, people were carried away by the false promises of demagogues, which are impossible to fulfill. The correct way would have been to foster the reactionary “reforms” that would eventually lead to an overcoming of the crisis through development and higher productivity and an improvement of democracy. Dora Bakogianni, the leader of the ultra neo-liberal (and falsely called so) Democratic Alliance, which failed to enter the Parliament by a narrow margin, has many times argued so in the most clear cut way.

This type of argument has in fact a double purpose. On the one hand, it attempts to equate in a tricky way the ultra-right menace and the prospect of left change as two complementary facets of the problem facing Greece, thus presenting the left as a danger too and denying beforehand there can be any radical positive solution. And on the other hand it seeks to embellish the corrupted Greek parliamentary system and make the parties of the establishment look like a guarantee for stability and improvement, while they are in fact the cause of the problem and of the ultra-right menace too. In Greece, corruption of leading politicians and public officials has been extremely widespread, taking enormous proportions with practically no one of them being ever punished. This decay has been one of the main causes that facilitated the rise of ultra-right and neo-Nazism. Yet, we are urged now to believe that these very forces that produced this situation have the magic clue to lead the country out of the crisis, and this by following the recipes that made it so deep. In fact, when reactionary politicians like Bakogianni are talking about “improving productivity” they only mean more layoffs and a new lowering of wages in the public and private sectors, thus making the existing bad situation even more desperate.

SYRIZA has countered these stereotypes in a successful way, by proposing the formation of a government of the left, which attracted much support from the people. The charismatic personality of its president, Alexis Tsipras, played a part in this too. Other radical left parties like KKE and ANTARSYA failed to make an equivalent impression. The KKE insisted on an ultra-sectarian policy, calling for the establishment of a front for the direct overthrow of the system by a “popular power”, connecting every fight for a bettering of the sad lot of the people with this prospect and denying harshly that anything could be done before establishing the “popular power.” This in fact meant condemning itself to passivity and a bureaucratic break with reality under the deceptive guise of fighting for the revolution, as has so often been the case with Stalinism. ANTARSYA had a much better approach and has played a vital role in the fight against the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis during the last years. Yet it paid for its lack of strong bonds with the people and its inability to cooperate with other left forces. This it failed to do not only with SYRIZA, with which it has a number of programmatic differences, but even with the FSO (Front of Solidarity and Overthrow), a small radical left formation led by Alekos Alavanos, a former eminent SYRIZA leader who broke with SYRIZA and kept largely aside in these elections.

The KKE has been accusing SYRIZA for being opportunistic and spreading illusions to the people by proposing a government of the left, since such a government would be no better than the existing ones. Aleka Papariga, the dogmatist General Secretary of the KKE, has even gone so far as to suggest that taking part in such a government would mean to betray the people for some ministerial “chairs” and state that the KKE would give no vote of confidence to it, should it appear before the Greek Parliament. Their political estimate after the elections was that the rise of support for SYRIZA signifies an attempt by the system to thwart the radicalization of the people and channel it to roads acceptable to the ruling classes. Moreover, Papariga has plainly refused even to meet A. Tsipras who took yesterday the mandate to form a government, after A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, failed to do so and resigned his mandate.

All this however and the assertion of the KKE leadership that no change at all can be achieved in a parliamentary way is highly sectarian dogmatism. Of course socialism cannot be finally established in a parliamentary way, to achieve that a revolution by the people is needed. Yet the experience of Chavez in Venezuela shows that with the support of a mass movement big radical changes can be initiated using the parliament as a lever, and there is no real reason that this should be in principle impossible for Greece.

Real problems, however, start from this point on. To enforce such a radical change with the help of a left government based on a parliamentary majority, a mass front is needed, which will lend support to the whole project. This is all the more essential in Greece, to be able to withstand the strong pressure by foreign lenders and the European governments and imperialist institutions. However, neither such a majority, nor a front exists presently. And while numbers might make the government of the left abstractly possible at a later stage, it is not at all certain that it will materialize.

The KKE stance is the main problem to that. This party has the support of a significant part of the industrial working class, the fighting elements of which would strengthen and cement the proposed front. However, the KKE, after a break in 1991, has followed for two decades an increasingly Stalinist course. This has gone to the length of not only rehabilitating recently Nikos Zahariadis, the authoritarian and cynical Stalinist General Secretary of the KKE in 1931-56, but also presenting Stalin as one of the greatest of all Marxists, accepting the validity of the Moscow trials and adopting the accusations that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Bolshevik leaders were agents of the Gestapo. A number of hard Stalinist pseudo-theorists like politburo members Makis Mailis and Stefanos Loukas have formed a circle directing the party’s inner political and ideological life, thus lowering the level of its members and making it vulnerable to all kinds of careerists and opportunists.

The KKE has repudiated the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the great movements of the “indignados” in Greece and Europe as being suspect and perhaps even guided by organs of the imperialistic secret services, refusing to take part in them. Instead of that it calls the people to unite in party fabricated “fronts” that are directed from above and have little connection with the people. Recently it has gone so far as to ignore the dramatic suicide of Dimitris Christoulas, a 77 year old man who shot himself at Syntagma and left a moving message to the younger generation, urging it to fight against the corrupt rulers. Christoulas was a member of the “indignados” movement and so “Rizospastis,” the official organ of the KKE, in the few lines it devoted to the incident did not even mention his name (calling him “the 77 year old man”) and shamelessly censored his message, reaching even the point off hurling accusations at him that his action was in the interests of the ruling classes, who want the people to commit suicide. Alekos Halvatzis, the son of Spyros Halvatzis, the KKE spokesman in the parliament, left the KKE one or two years ago, accusing the Papariga leadership of having filled the party with “stowaways.”

The SYRIZA is on the other hand a coalition of various groups including Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, left and moderate reformists, greens, and a number of other tendencies. The party has a genuinely democratic character and this variety of views lends it liveliness, as a center of discussion and production of ideas. However, in the grave situation facing Greece it could also prove a problem, by preventing at a critical moment a unified stance on crucial questions on which the various components hold different views. For the moment, of course, the electoral success strengthens the unity of the party, but this cannot be sure to hold indefinitely in the future.

The KKE, with its usual fanaticism, seems likely to “bet” on the possibility that a balancing of views will not be possible in SYRIZA and after a probable failure of the attempt to set up a left government or pursue it properly in case it is established, in the not very remote future the Greek people might turn to them. Such a hope can be sustained by the fact that SYRIZA does not have strong bonds with the masses that came over to it in the present elections, and its foothold is not in the working class but mainly in civil servants and the youth. It is a vain hope though in the sense that if SYRIZA fails to cope with the difficulties, chaos will be made universal, and in such a situation the ultra-right and not the KKE will be the one most likely to benefit.

The SYRIZA victory has coincided with the victory of Francois Hollande in France. Yet, it should be made clear, these are two events of an entirely different character. Hollande’s success, even if he has gained the support of many left voters, signifies just a shift of policy within the ruling classes and its parties. It may lead to some partial changes and adjustments, a somewhat different tone and orientation, but it will leave the general foundations of European policies untouched. The turn to SYRIZA in Greece however has a potential to challenge the very foundations of the austerity policies and the domination of the markets. It may serve as an example, especially if it is successful, for other countries facing similar problems, like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, and instigate a general and real European movement to the left.

The ruling European elites, as represented by Merkel, Schäuble, Barroso, etc, are fully conscious of this and have reacted nervously, either by intervening shamelessly before the elections to dictate the result, or by simply stating that the country’s obligations, signed by the previous government, must be fulfilled. Their fears are certainly justified, especially in the case that a broader movement to the radical left takes place in Europe. However the really urgent question is: how will SYRIZA cope with their intensified pressure during the following months and what it will strive and be able to achieve at a moment the reactionary forces still remain stronger in Europe as a whole?

SYRIZA’s program aims at a denouncement of the “Memorandum” and a re-negotiation of debt, which will include cancelling a large part of it as odious. It also claims a 3-year period of suspension of debt obligations, which would be an important relief step, if achieved. SYRIZA aims at nationalizing a number of banks, heavier taxation of the rich and improving the situation of the people, to a restoration of their former living standards. After having received the mandate, Tsipras proposed a 5-point program which is a concretization of this.

Other left forces like ANTARSYA argue, however, that this is not enough and that a unilateral repudiation of debt will be needed, which will mean that the country will have to leave the Euro zone and return to its national currency. This position is largely held also by the Left Current, a significant component of SYRIZA headed by its parliamentary spokesman Panagiotis Lafazanis, while a number of influential Greek economists, like Kostas Lapavitsas, have also argued this way. Significantly, the KKE connects the cancelation of debt too with the “popular power” slogan, considering it to be impossible under parliamentary conditions. This, of course, is an absurdity since the repudiation of debt is a reform that concerns the system of distribution leaving untouched the capitalist system of production as such. Thus it is perfectly conceivable under capitalism, as a number of examples show (Ecuador, Russia, etc.).

The difficulty with the unilateral repudiation of debt is that, although being in the long run most beneficial to the people, it will cause in its initial stages significant problems and disorganization. To minimize this and avoid an experience like that of Argentina in 2001, it is essential that the majority of the people are convinced for its necessity and it is pursued in an ordered way by a left government that is determined and conscious of its aims. This means that while the European left is still on the defensive, the attempt to implement the “compromising” program of SYRIZA and reach an agreement with the EU should be made. If, as it is quite possible, the neoliberal EU elites refuse to make any real and significant concessions, then this could convince the Greek people for the necessity of more radical steps. Prospectively, it will be ideal if this course coincides will a general revival of mass movements in Europe, especially in Europe’s south, leading to a “European Spring,” like the Arab one.

This prospect is not so remote as it may seem. The ruling classes in Greece and Europe are taking it seriously and making preparations to face the challenge it will pose to their system. The recent rise of the ultra-right in Greece, openly supported by a part of the media, capitalist circles, and the state security machine, is a part of this.

The breakup of the Greek political system has been compared in this respect with the downfall of the Weimar Republic and it is true that there is a number of striking analogies. Under a similar situation of deep economic crisis, mass unemployment, and poverty, we attend the bankruptcy not only of the formerly leading political parties but of the parliamentary system as well. The Papadimos government was important in this regard, as it signified a first step away from normal democratic government, towards technocratic-bureaucratic administration, reminiscent in many ways of the Brüning government in Weimar. The program of the newly created Independent Greeks party, headed by Panos Kammenos (a former New Democracy minister), contains a number of even more dangerous reactionary points, combining an ultra-privatization plan with proposals of appointing the chiefs of police and the army ministers of security and national defense respectively. This is clearly a Bonapartist plan, which would open up a threat to the very foundations of bourgeois democracy and of the labor movement. For the time being, such measures are supported only by the Kammenos party and those even more to the right (LAOS, Golden Dawn). It is not to be excluded that as the crisis intensifies, the more traditional parties, PASOK and New Democracy, or at least certain groups within them, might turn to similar directions.

The May 6th elections had the important consequence of producing a stalemate, not allowing the formation of any viable government. PASOK and New Democracy together have 149 seats, which do not give the needed parliamentary majority of 151. But even if they possessed this, forming a government would be out of question since it would be weak and without authority. This excludes also the possibility of a government being formed by these two parties together the Democratic Left, which would indeed possess a majority of 168 seats. Democratic Left has wisely excluded this possibility, as it would mean to identify itself with the two formerly big parties which were condemned by the people. The broad left on the other hand cannot form a majority, even if we count together all its disunited components. The possibility of forming a “national government” supported by a broad spectrum of forces except the ultra right, as proposed by PASOK and New Democracy leaders, is also excluded since it would simply mean to involve the left in the memorandum policies.

Greece is heading therefore almost inevitably to new elections, which will take place somewhere in the middle of June. These new elections have the potential to provoke a further impressive restructuring of the political scene.

SYRIZA’s tactics will be to unite around it the other left forces, which failed to enter the parliament (KKE of course has declared it is against unity under all conditions). That includes not only the Greens and ANTARSYA, but possibly some other groups that broke from PASOK like the small (and farily conservative) “Social Agreement” party. SYRIZA may also draw votes from KKE and improve its performance in the agrarian areas, which voted more conservative than the big cities (SYRIZA got more than 20% of the vote in Athens but much less in the countryside). If all this materializes, SYRIZA will almost certainly come first and take advantage of the 50 seats bonus the illogical electoral law grants the first party. This could augment its parliamentary force from 52 seats now to some 120, facilitating greatly the formation of a left government.

However, the ruling class parties have some prospects of countering this. The New Democracy party might be able to unite with the two small ultra-neoliberal parties, Bakogianni’s Democratic Alliance and Action of Stefanos Manos (a Greek big capitalist), which gathered together a respectable 5% of the electorate. Should such a regrouping be achieved, then first place in the coming elections will be a very open issue. However, A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, is not in good terms with the leaders of the other two parties, so it will be rather difficult to happen (although the New Democracy leader has already made the proposal). Alternatively, it is quite possible that the two ultra-neoliberal parties will make a joint appearance, but this, while ensuring their representation in the new parliament, would not stop SYRIZA from coming first.

There is also a possibility of mass desertions of New Democracy and PASOK voters towards the “Independent Greeks” party, which poses as a patriotic and popular right, defending the interests of the people. This might take big proportions if certain sections of the ruling classes and media, who still supported the traditional parties, decide to move towards Kammenos as their only viable representative. However, there is a 7% difference in favor of SYRIZA now, so this movement would have to be very pronounced to enable the Independent Greeks to take the lead. A convergence between the Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn is not very likely since the Independent Greeks leadership takes pains to dissociate itself from Nazism. It will be very interesting though to see what will be the result of Golden Dawn in these new elections.

One thing is certain. After the next elections, the hour of truth will come for Greece. It will also be the hour of truth for the Greek radical left. Developments will show if it is able to unite, withstand the enormous pressures the EU authorities will apply and open up a new progressive way for Greece and a window of hope for the rest of Europe.

Update

Developments are running fast here in Greece, so that the situation changes abruptly and forecasts may prove wrong or inexact in just a few hours.

After E. Venizelos, the PASOK leader, took the mandate from President Papoulias this day, he had a meeting with Fotis Kouvelis, the leader of the Democratic Left. In it, there was a proposal by Kouvelis of forming an “Ecumenical government” of so-called limited purpose, which will supposedly renegotiate the Memorandum and hold office until the 2014 European parliament elections. Venizelos reacted positively to that, saying that it practically coincides with PASOK’s proposal for a government of “National salvation.”
So it seems that for the first time there is a real prospect of a government being formed after the stalemate of the last days.

This government will in fact be the New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left government, which Kouvelis himself had excluded just a few days ago. SYRIZA almost certainly will not take part in it, as will also be the case with the other parties represented in the Greek parliament. However, for obvious reasons of legitimization, the three parties will try to make it appear as something different, perhaps by appointing Kouvelis as Prime Minister and limiting or even wholly avoiding the participation of PASOK and New Democracy.
If this prospect materializes, it will be a flagrant violation of the will of the people, as expressed in the elections. Its real aim will be to continue the Memorandum policies, albeit in a slightly different manner, by extracting a few rather insignificant concessions from the European Union and make it appear as a great achievement. It will also signify a further step towards political anomaly, as it will be based mainly in the two formerly ruling parties condemned for their policies and will represent just 37% of the total vote.

Alexis Tsipras has justly called this plan an attempt by PASOK and New Democracy to find a “left Karatzaferis” – comparing thus Kouvelis with Giorgos Karatzaferis, the leader of the ultra-right LAOS, who had supported, with PASOK and New Democracy, the former Papadimos government, his party failing to enter the new parliament for that reason. The plan to establish such a government shows how horrified the ruling circles are from the prospect of a new election which might give a clear victory to SYRIZA and the left (some polls having already shown an increase of the support for SYRIZA after the election to the level of 25%). It is also a sign of how much the European Union governments and institutions are worried from the prospect of a left government in Greece and strongly press behind the scene for this kind of solution.

It remains to be seen if during the meeting of the Political Leaders with President Papoulias, which the constitution provides for as an attempt to form a government when the circle of mandates ends, it will become possible to reach this solution. The meeting will take place at most after 3 days, if Venizelos exhausts the duration of his mandate. Even if it is established, however, such a government will be patently weak and will not have any real prospect of solving the grave problems of Greece. It is doubtful therefore – although not impossible – if the three parties will take the risk of appointing it and coming to a total failure which will be blamed upon them after a few months.

You fasten the triggers for others to fire,
Then you sit back and watch,
When the death count gets higher.
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in mud.

— “Masters of War”, Bob Dylan, 1941- present

Humanitarian Awards are surely taking on a whole new meaning. The end of April brought the obscenity of the announcement that Madeleine Albright, a woman prepared to sacrifice children by proxy was to be awarded America’s highest honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her role as a long time champion of democracy and human rights all over the world.

In the same 24 hours, an announcement was made that Britain’s Prince Harry is to receive a special award for his “humanitarian work”.

The ”Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership” award “recognizes outstanding achievement” and is presented annually by the Atlantic Council. Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William, have been jointly nominated, with Prince Harry traveling to Washington to accept on behalf of both, on May 7.

Madeleine Albright’s latest honour for her services to humanity has been awarded to others who compete admirably with her dedication. They include such peerless warmongers as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, General Colin Powell, whose pack of lies to the United Nations (February 2003) initiated Iraq’s destruction – and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair whose offices and officers provided those lies.

That human dove of peace, Dick Cheney, has been a recipient, as has his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, and General Norman “No one left to kill” Schartzkopf, to name a few.

Fellow recipient of the Award with Albright is Bob Dylan. Funny world.

Prince William and Harry are both in the armed forces (between social engagements). In a career move that has been dubbed by many “a cynical PR stunt”, William flies Naval Rescue helicopters. Seemingly it no longer looks good for a future king to kill people. Harry clearly faces no such trying constraints.

Deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2007, he reportedly lurked safely, deep in a bunker, out of harm’s way, surrounded by a phalanx of armed Royal Protection Officers whilst playing at being a Forward Air Controller, who remotely (in all senses of the word) guide in aircraft to attack the locals.

There is not alone an irony, but a terrible deviance, about a supremely privileged young man, whose entire upbringing has been in palaces, castles and most elite of schools, calling in aircraft to destroy peasant farmers in remote, poverty stricken villages – along with their subsistence livelihood and simple adobe homes.

There is a further irony in that his “child within” knows loss. At thirteen he walked behind his mother, Princess Diana’s, coffin, as it was transported for her funeral, after her death in Paris in an appalling car crash, with her Muslim lover – some say fiancée – Dodi al Fayad.

Freud might have had something to say of his display of crusading  contempt for the people of Afghanistan – 99% Muslim population – just before he was hurriedly whisked out of the country for his safety in January 2008, once the media had exposed that he was there. His attitude, “day job”, and his fleeing, beneath contempt. If Albright sacrificed children by proxy, the Prince, arguably, killed them by proxy.

Back home he and his brother have their own households, with flunkies to provide, and an aristocratic titled adviser to oversee, the all and their lives.

Now his delayed return to Afghanistan to hone his killing skills is seeming more imminent. He will be more hands on, having been awarded his Apache Flying Badge, so he can return and dissect living beings from an air borne, mass human shredder of obscene and terrifying destructive power.

That the two Princes have established a charity to aid needy children in Africa, whilst Prince Harry has been involved in orphaning, maiming and ending fledgling lives in Afghanistan, and now returning, is surely a near schitzophrenic perversity.

The Atlantic Council presentation for the pair’s humanitarian endeavors, however, is “for efforts in championing” other soldiers involved in invading and killing in two decimated lands which posed no threat to anyone, yet alone far away Britain and America.

Prince Harry “is being recognized (with The Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership trinket) for support to Forces’ charities like Walking With The Wounded, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity, and Help For Heroes.” All of which are funded with the sort of monies which would help the maimed, destitute and traumatized in the countries the Charity’s beneficiaries have helped destroy back to normality for many years.

A St James’s Palace spokesperson commented:

Prince Harry will use the award to pay tribute to British and American veterans’ charities for their achievements in helping to rehabilitate wounded servicemen and women, and to reintegrate those who have served in the armed forces into civilian life.

No such helping and rehabilitation for their Afghan or Iraqi victims.

The Prince, however, is in good company. Previous presentations of the Awards have included Madeleine Albright’s philandering, Iraq strangulating boss, William Jefferson Clinton; President George W. “Crusader” Bush, wanted by many for Crimes Against the Peace; Tony Blair; Henry Kissinger, of course – and General Colin Powell (2005, just two years after his serial misleading of the UN.)

Blair’s acceptance speech air-brushed out “Shock and Awed”, destitute Iraqis and Afghans and blathered on about “commitment to freedom … economically, politically, culturally …”

Brent Scowcroft, Former National Security Advisor and Atlantic Council Director, lauded Colin Powell’s “wisdom, sagacity, integrity …” Powell, of course, responded by talking of “Peace and freedom … respect for human rights …”

Sponsors of this peaceful and freedom loving establishment run into several pages but include the US Departments of the Air Force, Navy, Defence and Energy, and Los Alamos National Laboratory which brought the world the atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In October of that year the Laboratory received the “Army-Navy ‘E” Award” for “excellence in production.”

Another sponsor is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory whose development aimed originally to “spur innovation and provide competition to nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos.” It also brought the world the Polaris nuclear armed submarine.

NATO and Lockheed Martin are on the roll of honour, as Raytheon and SAIC ($2.6 Billion in trade with the Department of Defence in 2003, year of the invasion of Iraq.) SAIC’s Management team includes Bill Clinton, a clutch of former US Defence Secretaries, and former UN Iraq Weapons Inspector David Kay, who continued his fruitless hunt for Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq invasion, when the US-UK coalition was using them.

General Dynamics is at the table, so to speak, as is Boeing and Dow Chemical, which swallowed up Union Carbide, which brought the world the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Exact casualty numbers have never been established relating to Bhopal, but upper figures are fifteen thousand dead and over half a million medically affected, still ongoing.

The Atlantic Council lists its “important contributions” as including:  “The process of NATO transformation and enlargement” and “drafting roadmaps for U.S. policy towards the Balkans, Africa, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and Libya.”

No “E” for Excellence Award for the Balkans and Iraq — watch out Africa and Cuba. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, under whose watch and UNSCR 1973  Libya was largely destroyed by NATO’s “Humanitarian Intervention”, is a fellow recipient of this year’s  Distinguished  Humanitarian Leadership Awards.

It can only be hoped that this joyous occasion is not sullied by the Prince’s lack of respect for cultural diversities and that he is sparing with the liquid refreshment. Hopefully he will also dress suitably .

One episode, when he dressed in a Nazi uniform complete with Swastika arm band, caused Royal Photographer, Arthur Edwards to write:

Where were his father and the highly-paid courtiers who advise this young man? Who let him drive out of (Highgrove House, his father, Prince Charles’ residence) dressed this way? Smoking cannabis, late-night drinking and brawling with paparazzi could be explained away as the errors of youth. But Harry, what must you have been thinking when you put on that armband?

This was shortly before his Uncle, Prince Edward, was to attend the commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, representing the Queen.

Incidentally, Prince Harry’s Award is to be presented by Colin Powell and Ban Ki-Moon’s by Henry Kissinger.

In all, mind stretching stuff. Oh, to be a fly on the wall!

Dan Freeman-Maloy: In your book, you describe the determination of Israeli planners to develop closer ties with the European Union. Has Israel’s traditional policy of trying to limit European diplomatic involvement in the Middle East changed?

David Cronin: Yes and no.

In recent years, there has been quite a bit of strategic thinking undertaken by the Israeli foreign ministry. This was particularly the case when Tzipi Livni was in charge of that ministry.

One of the conclusions of that thinking was that Israel should not rely entirely on the US to defend its indefensible actions. There was a realisation that while the US remains the only superpower at the moment, other powers are emerging. The decision to “reach out” more to the EU was taken in that context. Israel is similarly seeking to engage more with China, India and Brazil, particularly with regard to sales of weaponry and surveillance technology.

There is a perception in some circles that European diplomats are hostile to Israel. In the first few months of this year, a series of leaked reports from EU representatives in East Jerusalem and Ramallah expressed frustration with the expansion of Israeli settlements. Yet it’s significant that these reports were drawn up by people who witness the results of Israel’s activities “on the ground”. The EU also has representatives in Tel Aviv and Brussels, who see things very differently and have been beavering away to increase cooperation between Israel and the Union.

We occasionally see newspaper articles in which Israeli ministers accuse the EU of meddling in Israel’s affairs or suggesting that the EU is biased towards the Palestinians. Yet if you dig even a tiny bit beneath the surface, you will see that this apparent tension is at odds with the real picture. The real picture is one where the EU has become so close to Israel that, I would argue, it has become complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

DF: Not long after Operation Cast Lead, then NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made a cordial visit to Israel (where his hosts drew a parallel between Israeli operations in Gaza and NATO operations in Afghanistan). You report that NATO-Israel relations may be set to deepen.

DC: We should never forget that in 2010, Israel killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American in international waters, while these activists were taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. I’m not an expert on these matters but my understanding is that this attack was tantamount to an act of war against Turkey, a member of NATO.

I think it’s fair to say that if Iran had done something comparable, NATO would have reacted forcefully. Yet Israel has a so-called “individual cooperation programme” with NATO since 2006, under which both sides share sensitive information; the scope of the programme was extended in 2008. Israel’s relationship with NATO has remained strong despite how the alliance condemned the flotilla attack. Shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military last year, he was treated to a farewell dinner by senior NATO officers in Brussels. He also was called in to give NATO advice on how to fight the war in Afghanistan.

And Israel is taking part in a NATO operation in the Mediterranean called Active Endeavour. Originally, this was supposed to be an “anti-terrorism” initiative in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities. But it has subsequently been broadened to cover immigration. What this means is that Israel is helping Western governments, especially Greece, to prevent vulnerable people fleeing poverty and persecution from reaching Europe’s shores. It’s quite disgusting.

DF: Turning back to the EU specifically, where does the recent Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) agreement fit in the broader struggle around Europe’s preferential trade ties with Israel?

DC: ACAA sounds dull and technical. But it is deeply political.

This is an agreement reached between the EU and Israel, whereby quality checks carried out by the Israeli authorities on manufactured goods would have the same status as similar checks carried out by authorities within the EU. At the moment, it’s limited to pharmaceutical products but it could easily be extended to other goods.

This agreement is a top priority for the Israelis because once it enters into force, Israel would take an important step towards being integrated into the EU’s single market.

To their credit, some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been asking difficult questions about ACAA for a few years. And this has meant that the Parliament has not yet approved the agreement. It’s not clear when the Parliament will make a final decision about the matter. There was a discussion at the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee in the past couple of weeks, where it was decided to delay holding a vote on the dossier until legal assurances are provided on the question of whether or not the agreement would apply to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It’s significant that the Israelis have hired a top public relations firm, Kreab Gavin Anderson, to help with their efforts to break the deadlock on ACAA. Kreab’s Brussels office is headed by a guy who used to be the chief adviser to MEPs with the Swedish Conservative Party. It cannot be a coincidence that one of the MEPs most vocal in supporting ACAA, Christoffer Fjellner, belongs to that party. He is arguing that if the agreement is not approved, Europeans will have less access to medicines. This is scaremongering, in my view, and is hypocritical because Fjellner is very supportive of the big players in the global pharmaceutical industry, who are actively seeking to use intellectual property issues to prevent the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America from having access to affordable medicines.

DF: Even people writing for quasi-official EU publications have felt compelled to question ‘the sincerity of repeated declarations encouraging Palestinian unity’ from official spokespeople. How have EU donor and diplomatic policies contributed to fragmenting Palestinian politics?

DC: Those declarations have zero credibility.

The EU always claims that it wishes to promote democracy around the world. In 2006, an election took place in Palestine. The EU’s own observation team found the election to be free and fair and something of a model for the Arab world. And then the EU decided to ignore that election because in its eyes the “wrong” party – namely Hamas – won.

I’m personally not a fan of either Hamas nor Fatah but if Hamas won a democratic mandate, that should be respected.

It’s a classical colonial attitude for an imperial power to show preference for one side in an occupied territory over another. Divide and rule. That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, and Salam Fayyad, the so-called prime minister, lack any democratic mandate. Yet they are treated as real darlings by the EU and US. Why? Because rather than resisting the occupation, they accommodate it.

In particular, they are also happy to pursue the kind of neo-liberal economic policies that are treated as sacrosanct in Brussels and Washington. Salam Fayyad used to work for the International Monetary Fund and has clearly been inculcated with its ideology.

DF: Can you describe the EUPOL COPPS programme and its relationship to the US training of PA forces in the West Bank?

DC: This is another “divide and rule” case.

The EU’s police mission for Palestine (COPPS) was originally supposed to apply to both the West Bank and Gaza. But in practice it only applies to the West Bank because the Union refuses to deal with the Hamas administration in Gaza.

What has happened is that the EU is in charge of training civil police and the US has been charged of training more militarised police units in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority. We are told that this is helping the Palestinian Authority get ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood. This is nonsense. One of the key aims of the these training missions is to boost cooperation between the PA police and Israeli forces. So the EU is really helping Palestinians to police their own occupation.

Worse again, it has been documented that police loyal to Fatah have used brutal methods – including torture – against their political rivals. Even though these police are trained by the EU, the Union says nothing about these human rights abuses. This silence is shameful.

DF: Germany is reportedly in the process of selling Israel a sixth partially subsidized ‘Dolphin’ submarine. What’s the significance of these sales?

DC: I’d put these sales in the context of wider military cooperation between the EU and Israel.

As well as helping to arm Israel, Europe is helping Israel to sell its weaponry abroad. The British Army has been using Israeli unmanned warplanes, or drones as they are generally called, in Afghanistan, for example. The ethical question of using weapons that have been “battle-tested” in an obscene manner isn’t even broached in “polite society”. Drones were used extensively to kill and maim innocent civilians during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

What’s also significant is that Israeli arms companies are receiving scientific research grants from the Union. These include Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the two suppliers of drones used in Cast Lead. At the moment, Israel is taking part in 800 EU-financed research projects, which have a total value of 4 billion euros. This means that my tax is helping to subsidise Israel’s war industry.

DF: Historically, France has been seen as the European power most likely to challenge the US monopoly on diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. Is this reputation still deserved?

DC: Definitely not.

Jacques Chirac demonstrated occasionally that he could be independent of the US when he was president. But Nicolas Sarkozy has been much more of an “Atlanticist” – for example, he decided that France should participate more fully in NATO than it has for a number of decades.

I’m answering this question a few days before the second round of voting in France’s presidential election. If Francois Hollande wins, then I don’t predict any major changes in terms of France’s policy on Israel-Palestine. I hope, however, that I am proved wrong.

Hollande has been quite happy to pander to the Zionist lobby in France. Both he and Sarkozy turned up at the annual dinner of CRIF, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Paris, earlier this year. It was clear that Hollande wasn’t there to denounce Israel’s crimes.

DF: The Greek government brazenly cooperated with Israel in blocking the ‘Freedom Flotilla II’ from challenging the Gaza blockade last summer. You’ve suggested that specific US-Israeli pressure (‘possibly even financial blackmail’) was at work, but that the incident was also a ‘logical consequence of a process that was already underway’.

DC: Yeah. This is quite closely connected to the question you asked about NATO. Greece and Israel have been working together in NATO operations a lot recently.

George Papandreou, the former Greek prime minister, was quite happy to court Israel. When it became clear that relations between Israel and Turkey had soured, Papandreou sniffed an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s key ally in the Mediterranean.

Even though Greece has been going through an economic nightmare, the Athens authorities have decided to take part in a series of military operations with Israel over the past few years. Let’s not forget that Greece has been spending more on the military as a proportion of national income than most countries in Europe. You can see why the Israeli arms industry would be interested in cultivating stronger links with Greece because, even though Greece is in the doldrums financially, it’s still spending much more than it should be on weapons, while cutting back drastically on essential services like healthcare.

DF: One of your recent articles notes that many of the British officers deployed in post-WWI Palestine were veterans of the Black and Tans, the colonial force infamous for its brutality in Ireland. How has the Irish anti-colonial experience affected Irish politics on the Palestine question?

DC: Among the Irish public, there is a huge amount of sympathy for the Palestinians. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been described by some Zionist watchdogs as the best organised Palestine solidarity group in the world. That’s very interesting because the IPSC relies almost entirely on volunteers.

The Dublin government is a different story. In the current Irish government, there are at least three strong supporters of Israel. These include the ministers for defence and education.

Last year, a number of Irish activists were abducted by Israel as they tried to sail to Gaza. The response of the Dublin government was extremely weak. The Irish foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, even attended a ceremony film festival sponsored by the Israeli government soon after that incident. He appears to regard avoiding or minimising tension with Israel as a priority.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that it’s Ireland’s representative at the European Commission, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is administering the research grants to Israeli arms companies I mentioned earlier. She won’t even acknowledge that giving money to firms profiting from human rights abuses is problematic.

DF: In 2010, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights issued a report criticizing EU maintenance of ‘anti-terrorist’ blacklists that effectively function ‘as ideological and political tools for undermining the right to popular resistance and self-determination.’ How do these lists constrain European politics on Palestine, and are there active campaigns to get them overturned?

DC: This is an important issue.

Israel has lobbied successfully over the past decade to have both the political and military wings of Hamas placed on the EU’s “anti-terrorist” blacklist. EU officials and governments have, as a result, been able to say “we don’t talk to terrorists”, even when the “terrorists” have a democratic mandate. I note, however, that there have been press reports lately indicating that Hamas has had some contacts with European governments. So perhaps this is changing a little bit. But in general, there is an enormous double standard, when the EU is happy to embrace Israel, a state that uses violence and intimidation against civilians on a daily basis, yet brands those who resist Israeli oppression as “terrorists”.

DF: Finally, in recent years the gap between European government support for Israel and public opinion has sometimes been so wide that the EU leadership has issued official apologies to Israel for polling results. What opportunities does this gap provide for strategic Palestine solidarity?

DC: The European public is way more critical of Israel than our governments are. This offers real hope.

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was only launched in 2005. And it has made enormous progress. Veolia, the major French corporation, has ignominiously lost a number of major contracts around the world, for example. Why? Because of public outrage at how Veolia is involved in constructing a tramway that would effectively be reserved for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. This illustrates how supporting Israeli apartheid can prove bad for business if ordinary people monitor what corporations get up to and protest.

The BDS campaign is often compared to the one undertaken against South Africa. As it happens, the call for boycott was originally made by South African political activists in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it had a major impact internationally. So the Palestinian BDS campaign has achieved in seven years what it took the South African campaign three decades to achieve.

The challenge now is to maintain the momentum – and intensify the pressure on Israel and its “corporate sponsors”.

1. Cronin maintains a blog.

The answer, even though they see over and over again that austerity leads to collapse of the economy, the answer over and over [from politicians] is more austerity.

— Joseph Stiglitz, Asian Financial Forum, January 17, 2012

It has been a busy weekend. France finds itself with a new president, its first socialist leader since François Mitterand left office in 1995. Greek voters flocked to the parties of the anti-bailout movement with indignant enthusiasm. The liberals seem to be holding on, narrowly, in Serbia.

The true effigy in burning after the elections is austerity itself, a doctrine that has assumed the form of biblical doctrine in the hands of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Sarkozy was its co-progenitor, though his failings were far more profound than his dalliance with the German leader.

And that doctrine has shown itself to be flawed. Le Monde (May 4), prior to the election on Sunday, suggested that embracing austerity was dangerous and poisonous, the sure guarantee of electoral suicide. The mood in Europe was changing towards those “drastic cuts in state expenditures, raising taxes, reforming the labour market and so on. More growth will bring higher tax revenues that are necessary to service the public debt.”

Whether François Hollande actually makes the difference is questionable. Sarkozy, for one, can hardly be said to have suffered a comprehensive defeat. The National Front candidate Marine Le Pen refused to endorse either two of the frontrunners. Hollande was in the end fortunate that the centrist François Bayrou endorsed him on Friday. Promises have been made to raise taxes with an acknowledgment that economic growth is essential.

The austerity doctrine took its predictable hammering in the Greek elections, with both New Democracy and the main socialist party Pasok getting respective pastings. Austerity has been made a condition of EU-IMF assistance, not to mention the country remaining in the eurozone. The voters felt otherwise. Yiorgos Vrassidis, a voter who directed his ballot to Syriza, the grouping of the Radical Left, made his intentions clear: “The politicians who got us in to this mess continue to mock us. Neither of them will do anything, all they are interested in is pulling the wool over our eyes so they can get into power again”. (Guardian, May 6). The bailout has been termed everything from being “barbaric” to a constituted “economic Fourth Reich”.

Alex Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, has vowed to do something that will shake Brussels to the core – suspend the servicing of Greece’s debt altogether and add a ‘pro-growth’ clause to the repayment arrangements. But the options presented to voters, according to the Greek left-liberal newspaper To Vima (May 4) have merely suggested that the country’s politicians have run out of ideas. Lies are in ample supply, even if the money is not. “The only thing they don’t talk about is reality”. Greece has two options: abide by the wishes of the creditors (the austerity credo), which will reduce it to a rump state economically on par with Romania or Bulgaria; or abandon the program altogether, which would lead to “an even greater shock”. The German magazine Der Spiegel (May 6) is steadfast in its glumness. “It’s clear that there is no alternative to austerity.”

There is little need to speculate too much about where things will go with such notions as the fiscal pact Merkel has endorsed, or the technocratic gospel that holds sway over budgets. The tight pocket is not necessarily the most feasible one and constrained spending has shown itself to be disastrous. The institutional arrangements for the euro, for one, were not sound to begin with, and fracturing is inevitable. Cutting something that is shrinking has the tag of suicide written all over it, but it is a suicide that European governments have been propelled towards for some time now.

The electoral reality has shown that austerity has been willed a slow death, but so have the victors who have profited from voter dissatisfaction. They are only bound to disappoint. As the Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz notes, “Politics is at the root of the problem”.

In addition to reporting on the International Brigades fighting Franco and fascism, which included members of the Lincoln Brigades from the United States, Hughes was particularly focused on the volunteer Moors, those soldiers of color primarily from Morocco who signed up for both Republican and Nationalist causes. He and African-Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén, bussed through Barcelona admiring relics of its modernist antiquity while lamenting the visible destruction in the wake of war.  By day two of their trip, Hughes and Guillén witnessed an air raid for themselves, which rattled Hughes from his bed and sent him scurrying to his hotel lobby where he met Guillén.  Hughes was overwhelmed with the traumatizing scenes of death and inhumane violence to such a degree that he would record the event in several articles, essays, and poems.  Together, these macabre vignettes speak volumes about how the war impacted his political and artistic consciousness.  Not long after the experience in Barcelona, he penned these verses:

Black smoke of sound
Curls against the midnight sky.

Deeper than a whistle,
Louder than a cry,
Worse than a scream
Tangled in the wail
Of a nightmare dream,
The siren
Of the air raid sounds.

“Air Raid: Barcelona” is a lyrical testimony to fascist bombing campaigns employed during the Spanish Civil War and a paean to its victims.  The short, staccato phrasing elicits confusion and anxiety, as if to place the reader in the center of the frightening chaos.  Hughes’s punctuated, march-like iambs slowly accelerate in anticipation of the bedlam to come:

Flames and bombs and
Death in the ear!
The siren announces
Planes drawing near.
Down from bedrooms
Stumble women in gowns.
Men, half-dressed,
Carrying children rush down.
Up in the sky-lanes
Against the stars
A flock of death birds
Whose wings are steel bars
Fill the sky with a low dull roar
Of a plane,
two planes,
three planes,
five planes,
or more.
The anti-aircraft guns bark into space.
The searchlights make wounds
On the night’s dark face.

The verses read like an image taken from a journalistic account that puts a print story in lyrical form.  “Air Raid: Barcelona” literally reads as a headline, making Hughes’s rendering of war a kind of textual documentary and therefore more immediate and sensorial to the reader.

We live in a time when Hughes’s horror may be relived in a different context, when leaders in Washington increasingly advocate the use of drones in the arsenal against terrorism. In contrast to the high visibility of the German- and Italian-backed bombing campaigns in Spain, which proved to be a dress rehearsal for World War II, today we remain at a safe distance from the sequestered scenes of the “War on Terror.”  The strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia pose a different moral dilemma for western observers because there appear to be no witnesses and few “innocent” bystanders.  Civilian casualties are by and large disavowed in favor of an assertion that modern technology has cleaned up war, so that only the guilty are eradicated and the lawful safely preserved.  The use of drones reportedly maximizes security for the United States with minimal civilian casualties.  Local governments and international media outlets silence the voices of those impacted by surgical strikes. Implemented with the consent (and even urging) of foreign governments, these clandestine operations seek to promote regional and international stability yet actually contribute to domestic inquietude, as leaders pay a price for allowing and encouraging U.S. actions.

In conventional war, the argument proffered by the administration is that the use of drones for surveillance and “signature attacks” is, in fact, in accordance with international law.  Most recently, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, defended the wide implementation of drones against terror suspects, saying they were “legal, ethical, and wise.”  But it is precisely their legality, ethicality, and wisdom that are in doubt.  In targeting non-state individuals, questions of human rights and rightful protections readily present themselves.  They center on uncovering the criteria that deem certain individuals “terrorist,” “militant,” or “insurgent.”  A select, multinational decision making network of high level intelligence officials act as judge and jury regarding who and what constitute global and local threats.  But in this process there are no democratic standards, no transparent forms of indictment, no outside accountability.  We do not always know the exact crimes suspects were meant to have committed.  In short, there is no definite way of pinpointing how guilt of an individual is assessed or the resulting consequences bore by families and communities that fall victim to unmanned war.

Consequently, omitted from much of the public record is exactly how many civilians have been killed in the 260 Predator and Reaper Drone attacks since President Obama took office.  According to the New American Foundation, out of the nearly 300 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, somewhere between 1,785 and 2,771 individuals have died, with a “non-military fatality rate” of roughly 17%.  With the expansive use of drones, estimates vary on the number of innocent people killed.  In Yemen, where strikes are on the rise, some 50 civilians have perished in over two dozen operations since 2009. Numbers vary according to independent tabulators, but most point to several hundred as the total number of collateral damage to date, dozens of them children.

Hughes painted his bombing scene as indiscriminate, a slow crescendo and accelerando that peaks as the bombers arrive, which generates the gruesome frenzy of war:

The siren’s wild cry
Like a hollow scream
Echoes out of hell in a nightmare dream.
Then the BOMBS fall!
All other noises are nothing at all
When the first BOMBS fall.
All other noises are suddenly still
When the BOMBS fall.
All other noises are deathly still
As blood spatters the wall
And the whirling sound
Of the iron star of death
Comes hurtling down.
No other noises can be heard
As a child’s life goes up
In the night like a bird.
Swift pursuit planes
Dart over the town,
Steel bullets fly
Slitting the starry silk
Of the sky:
A bomber’s brought down
In flames orange and blue,
And the night’s all red
Like blood, too.
The last BOMB falls.

Today, bombing “militants” for national preservation and regional stabilization poses the additional problem of labeling.  How do we distinguish militant from civilian?  For targets also have families, friends, and communities.  Those killed are uncles, fathers, brothers, children, wives, and mothers.  Such actions increase the probability of fueling flames of anti-American discontent.  The matter is further complicated when U.S. citizens are added to the list of targets, as were Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both killed in Yemen for their suspected role in Al Qaeda.  Critics question the elimination of due process that formally charges and sentences suspected criminals.

However, more human rights organizations are taking note.  The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other agencies are crying foul at the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone program.  Recently, a Drone Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., by CODEPINK, Reprieve, and the Center for Constitutional Rights as an effort towards interrogating the legality and morality of state-sponsored bombing of individuals and their communities. A multinational conglomeration, which included attendees from Pakistan, discussed the controversial deployment of drones and their wider social and political ramifications.

Hughes’s evocation of war was made more surreal with its reliance on natur alist metaphor to convey destruction wrought by technology.  He concluded his poem with the avian attackers retreating but leaving damage behind:

The death birds wheel East
To their lairs again
Leaving iron eggs
In the streets of Spain.
With wings like black cubes
Against the far dawn,
The stench of their passage
Remains when they’re gone.
In what was a courtyard
A child weeps alone.

Men uncover bodies
From ruins of stone.

One cannot help but ruefully ponder Hughes’s words when reading headlines about drone strikes seventy-five years later.  Further use of drones not only means the laying of more “iron eggs” but also increased surveillance of U.S. citizens in the effort to enhance border security.  Beyond surveillance is the human toll that such warfare inflicts anonymously, with little public record or scrutiny.  In wanting to install democracy in conflicted areas around the world, the U.S. loses credibility while undermining sovereignty abroad by resorting to an anti-democratic method of eliminating its enemies.  These developments should beckon America’s attention and spark urgency to seek information about conditions on the ground.  It is the public’s right to know whose lives are overturned and the degree to which such strikes actually produce a more peaceful world.

Various members of the EU have already taken steps to boycott the state, heeding the position of Eugenia Tymoshenko, daughter of the imprisoned opposition leader.  “European leaders can’t be seen to support this repression by standing next to President (Viktor) Yanukovych”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has added her voice to the chorus about the plight of the former Ukrainian leader.  Tymoshenko, in her eyes, is becoming something of a wounded, brutalised heroine – and one who has gone on a prolonged hunger strike.  She also has the bruises to show it.  “The photographs of Mrs. Tymoshenko released by the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman further call into question the conditions of her confinement” (Voice of Russia, May 2).  Penal colonies have a habit of turning their inmates into luminary martyrs.

And the fuss? A cruelly administered seven year sentence, being served in Kharkov for Tymoshenko’s signing of a lucrative gas contract with Russia.  She has also been forced to pay an amount of around 1.51 billion hryvni (the equivalent of 200 million dollars) to Neftegaz Ukrainy.  Dealing in energy resources is a hazardous pastime in the former Soviet bloc.  The result of the treatment of the high profile inmate is that countries such as Austria and The Netherlands have refused to send government ministers to the tournament unless an improvement is made in the treatment of Tymoshenko.

The authorities in Kiev have taken the familiar view that such a sporting boycott unduly politicises the non-political.  The Ukrainian foreign ministry was even touching in its statement.  “We view as destructive attempts to politicise sporting events, which since ancient times have played a paramount role in improving understanding and agreement between nations”. (ABC, May 4).  This view might mimic the aching sounds of violins, but it hardly stands to reason.

The statement sees such politicisation as regressive, a well directed blow to development. This, in itself, would suggest that the authorities are aware of the potential sport has – far from being a hermetically pursued, self-indulgent escape from the political, it embraces it.  “An attack on this big dream undermines the chances of… all the former Socialist Bloc members to prove that their economic, human and scientific potential can turn them from the debtors of Europe to its engine of growth.” Sport is hardly going to put food on the table, but it may well feed the spirit.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin is similarly of the view that football and politics don’t mix. “Leave sports alone!” he exclaimed, citing the principle of the International Olympic Committee that sports is a province beyond the political.  This is a good vintage of nonsense.  The Cold War itself demonstrated that sports was yet another frontier in the culture wars between the West and the communist bloc. Far from being separate from the field of human conflict, it was integral to it.  Sporting boycotts are simply another weapon of war, as the old ostracised apartheid government of South Africa could attest to.

This stands to reason.  By 1930, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset would state that modern life had “become universalised”, an age of the masses which made cultural and political phenomena an intertwined entity.  And that culture, whatever the merits of the EU’s position on football and the Ukraine, is here to stay

Calling the audience “my brothers and sisters,” he praised the troops for their courage, patriotism, and endurance in fighting the endless battle in Afghanistan, a nation with no air force, navy, or organized military. He pointed out what brave warriors this generation of Americans had turned out to be.

Seven of the members of the audience expressed some concern when Obama announced that he might carry out a series of midnight drone attacks on Paris, France, within the week, because of a series of concerns that had been brought to his attention. Several unnamed members of his National Security Legal Staff had informed him that a known socialist might actually win the upcoming French election. In addition, French authorities had announced that their NATO forces were threatening to withdraw from several of the war zones that Obama had in mind for them.

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was a report from Homeland Security that three known terrorists had slipped into Paris sometime during the previous four months. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta and Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, both strongly urged his quick response to these threats, and expressed their total support for the proposed action. Clinton pointed out that at her urging, his Cabinet was 100% behind the President.

“National Security” was the explanation given for the proposed bombing of Paris, and no further clarification was needed in light of that rationale. Department of Justice head, Eric Holder, reiterated that the President has the authority to bomb large cities regardless of public opinion, given that President Bush was allowed to level Fallujah during the Iraq War, and Obama already had received authority to destroy any city in Pakistan or Afghanistan, according to his mood at the time. Congress had shown that they were unwilling to prevent the bombing or destruction of any place on earth, other than the hidden locations of their family vacation homes on tropical islands throughout the globe.

Extrapolating from the legal memos produced by Professor Adolph Yoo, at Berkeley, and Justice Benito Bybee, appointed as a Federal Judge to the Court of Appeals, the President explained that since the torture of individuals had been approved by the Supreme Court and Congress, destroying entire cities was clearly authorized as well. The Federal Courts had consistently supported the use of extraterritorial extraditions (“renditions” in Pentagon parlance), for purposes of torturing enemies of the U.S. abroad, and had thereby given the green light for Obama to use whatever force was deemed in the national interest against any other terrorists worldwide.

The seven military personnel who balked at the announcement were immediately discharged from the service without benefits, and told that if they publicly discussed their reasons for questioning the President’s decision to destroy Paris, they would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Bradley Manning was used as an example of what they would have in store, if they so much as uttered a word about the propriety of the destruction of the French capital.

One of the embedded reporters at the news conference expressed some concern regarding the destruction of monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, and some of the other well-known tourist destinations of Paris, but Obama assured the reporter that the action was necessary, if “Americans are to rid the world of terrorism.” He also hinted that the use of technologically advanced concussion bombs, which would kill all living creatures in the Paris area, might leave standing some of the buildings Americans had grown to love. With that assurance, 96% of the American people responded by signing petitions to “support our troops,” and promised to vote either Republican or Democratic in the upcoming election. Since both political parties had the same foreign policies, nobody in government was left to oppose the President.