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.

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.

May Day, along with notions of radical worker action, has largely been ignored in the United States in recent years. But the time for complacency has passed.

While a worker walk-out may have been born from the secessio plebis of Ancient Rome, English Chartist and radical preacher William Benbow brought to modern times the idea of general strike as a “sacred month” in the first mass working-class labor movement. In 1877, the Great Railroad Strike began the first major labor action in the United States; centered in East Saint Louis, the strike shut down all industrial railway traffic through the National Stockyards, letting only passenger and mail trains through. In 1936, early in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, a series of strikes spread; half a million textile workers united in states across the country, dock workers and their associates in San Francisco, and radical Teamsters in Minneapolis all fought against the violence of police and armed strikebreakers. These strikes, and the unemployment councils that cropped up to encourage progressive change, pushed Roosevelt to enact bold reforms to the American system.

Over the course of two days in December of 1946, radical action brought the City of Oakland to a standstill. The general strike there inspired the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act that President Truman called a “conflict with important principles of our democratic society,” even as he used it twelve times over the course of his presidency. The act essentially killed the general strike as a tactic for the labor movement.

The power of the working class, however, is not tied to mainstream organized labor.  Concessions by the AFL-CIO to the government’s National Labor Relations Board have made the organization little more than a special interest group for the Democrats, even as they pass anti-labor and anti-free speech legislation. While the working class needs the strength of militant unionization—the IWW Food and Retail Workers United union in the Pacific Northwest being a good example—the policies of the National Labor Relations Board are decidedly anti-worker. Capitulation of reactionary unions to NLRB demands, and to the Democratic Party, constitutes abandonment of the working class.

Knowing that union leadership would be refused the blessing of their Democratic Party masters, rank-and-file members of labor joined with the Occupy Movement to speak for themselves; in October 2011, the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland voted overwhelmingly to shut down the city on November 2nd in response to the military-style crackdown on demonstrators by eighteen different police agencies, including the critical wounding of Scott Olsen and Kayvan Sabehgi, two veterans of the war in Iraq. The convergence of radical labor and Occupy Oakland made it possible to shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth-largest container port in the nation, disrupting millions of dollars of capitalist income. This is only the beginning.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking!

— William Butler Yeats

In December of 2011, Occupy Los Angeles called for a general strike on May Day, to “recognize housing, education, and healthcare as human rights.” This revival of May Day has been echoed by Occupations from wealthy Wall Street to poverty-stricken Oklahoma. Already, nationwide strikes have rocked other countries hit hard by the capitalist crisis, including Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece.  Austerity measures in these countries have been enacted solely to appease unelected European Union technocrats, protecting the interests of wealthy investors and multinational banking cartels. The civil war that capitalism calls “peace” is intensifying universally; the May Day General Strike will be our response to their crisis.

On May 1st, 2012, we will revive the May Day the ruling class has tried to erase; we will celebrate International Workers’ Day in the United States as a political manifestation of class consciousness and international solidarity.

However, our demonstrations on May Day cannot be an exercise in paying homage to the past days of the global justice movement; instead, they must embody concrete preparation for the future. The anarchist concept of pre-figurative politics demands that we lay the foundations of future society solidly in the present. By retaking May Day, we stand in solidarity with a legacy of international struggle against neoliberal capitalism and authoritarian control. Values such as classlessness, autonomy, self-management, diversity, and mutual aid preclude borders; the internationalism of May Day is only one step in a long march towards an international solidarity.

The atmosphere across the globe seems pregnant with a revolutionary fervor unseen in recent years. The occupation at New York City’s New School in 2008 provided a glimpse into the possibilities of occupation when students seized their school building as a show of solidarity against the policies of a broken administration. The nascent student movement later reclaimed campuses across California, inspiring actions nationwide with the release of an influential text called “Communiqué from an Absent Future.” At the same time, organizers linked themselves to demonstrations in Greece over the police murder of a 15-year old anarchist in the neighborhood of Exarcheia.

With the European crisis beginning in late 2010 and Arab Spring blossoming in early 2011, international resistance to gutter government became not only widespread, but populist in nature. In Greece, the “I Won’t Pay” movement took shape as normal citizens ignored tolls, transit ticket costs, and bills for healthcare. Governor Scott Walker’s anti-labor actions designed to eliminate collective bargaining were met with thousands of people descending on the Madison, Wisconsin State Capitol. Later that spring, the May 15th movement known as los Indignados took over public squares in Spain and Greece and demanded a radical change to the political milieu.

Millions of people around the world are waking up to the realization that capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

Our unity with the workers of the world extends beyond May Day. Radical movements must seek more than an end to illegitimate and authoritarian governments; we demand the recognition of universal rights, respect of individual autonomy and local decision-making, and an end to coercive and subordinate relationships in all areas of our lives. As Bob Black writes inThe Abolition of Work:

To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical, albeit contract-consecrated, subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst … Your supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

Our struggle has to be more than mere conflict with a rigged economic system. Economics do not exist in a vacuum, but at the convergence of complex political, financial, and military interests. Historical, social, and legal dimensions come into play with the understanding that markets perpetrate inequities by favoring those with more power, wealth, and privilege. To avoid essentialism, we must strike hard at the intersections that prop up systemic inequality, even as we focus on unbridled market fundamentalism itself.

One of the most dangerous institutions that undergird capitalist economic structure is the military-industrial complex.

On May 20-21st, tens of thousands will gather in Chicago to demonstrate against the NATO military bloc. Serving as the armed will of the U.S. and Western Europe, NATO accounts for a staggering 70% of the world’s military spending, money that is used to control strategic resources of the Global South on behalf of a Western capitalist economic minority. While the majority of the planet lives on less than $2 per day, NATO swallows $2 billion per week on a war that nobody seems to want. The reasons are simple: poverty and wealth are functions of politico-economic entanglement; when resources abroad like oil or precious metals are determined to be matters of national security, the politics of who deserveswhat comes into play.

Contrast the billions spent by countries on weapons and war technology and the amount of money spent on help for the poverty-stricken children, women and men of the Global South. A stark picture is soon painted.

As spokesman for the Coalition Against NATO/G-8 War & Poverty Agenda, Andy Thayer reminds us that Richard Nixon, President of the US in ‘68, was no friend of the working class. However, even despite being “ideologically… far to the right of any previous post-WW II president, and a notorious racist and anti-Semite to boot,” Nixon enacted a series of measures “that marked him as by far the most “progressive” president since the Great Depression—far to the left of, yes, President Obama.” Despite his conservative principles, a mass movement of citizen agitation forced Nixon to enact Affirmative Action, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), expand food stamps, nominate a Supreme Court that gave us Roe v. Wade, and finally, a wind-down of the Vietnam War.

Young men and women who join the military, many for an education or a job opportunity, are being slaughtered around the world as the American Empire advances, using poor countries as proxy in many cases. As many soldiers refuse to reenlist, the temptation of tactical nuclear strike grows for the Pentagon. Without an immediate demand for disarmament, a global nuclear war is almost certainly on the horizon; already, we see the case built for attacks on Iran and North Korea. Thayer’s call for continuous and forceful action against warmongering is an urgent one; the opportunity to act against imperial militarism must be seized in Chicago as Obama takes the stage in his effort to make the NATO summit the centerpiece of his reelection campaign.

Chicago 1968 marked the beginning of the end for the Vietnam War. Exposing NATO’s military expansionist policies in Chicago 2012 may provide a valuable victory for Occupy Wall Street and for the global justice movement as a whole. War must be understood as a critical underpinning of the capitalist agenda.

The call for a general strike and the mobilization of opposition to NATO’s military stranglehold, however, must only be the beginning of a growing and sustained process of radical organization: of fellow citizens in the workplace, in our neighborhoods, and in our schools. Our movement must include the homeless, the working poor, the uneducated, the societal marginalized—those most disadvantaged by capitalist exploitation. Radical mo(ve)ments such as these serve as a wake-up call, not only to socio-political elites faced with a critical mass demanding change, but to the entirety of the working class who have realized the power they seek lies in their own direct action. Profound social transformation must be at the root of any economic recovery.

We live in a time when half-hearted notions of “reform” are served only as a recuperative mechanism for capitalist greed, where governments pledge that the only escape from financial crisis must come through workers surrendering their rights, where the commons is privatized and the rights of all are turned into a bargaining chip that benefits only a few. Women’s bodies are turned into battlegrounds as politicians fight for office. Social services, education, and jobs are being slashed in a scorched-earth campaign to preserve power.

Historically, government has failed in its responsibilities, unless forced by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Today, we can be sure we will not see any change from the status quo … unless popular upsurge demands it. The best way to make our demands known? Hit capitalism in its pocketbook.

I’ll meet you at the barricades.

— Associated Press, February 3, 2012

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the run-up to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

The justice has found himself convicted in the Gürtel public corruption case for authorising illegal phone tapping of conversations in jail houses between suspects and their lawyers of the Popular Party.  He has been suspended from the judiciary for 11 years.  In a turn of fortunes, he also faces a judgment which bars him from appealing, something he might well be adept at doing, and two other legal cases that will keep him busy on the other side of the bench for years to come.

The judge’s conduct has been something of a flashpoint in the battle over Spain’s historical memory.  He riles the forces of conservatism as he attracts the adoration of the left.  He was instrumental in commencing the legal proceedings against the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, a state of affairs that set the more conservative members of the legal profession on edge.  He successfully prosecuted former Argentinean military officer Adolfo Scilingo for his role in the ‘death flights’ during the Dirty War years between 1976 and 1983.

But here, he was facing the stern wording of a fellow judge, who ruled that his actions ‘these days are only found in totalitarian regimes.’  This was reverse logic at play – a man who had dedicated many years of his life fighting the incidents and features of authoritarian systems, found himself the subject of that very same legal rhetoric.

The proceedings have had a potent mixture of high comedy and farce.  And, just to make matters more colourful, Garzón finds himself embroiled with two other cases as well – allegations of bribery, and another more explosive trial in which he is charged with the unpardonable offence of peering into the Spanish past under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, supposedly violating the amnesty law of 1977.

The case on Garzón and his attempt to bypass the amnesty is potentially the most telling one, not to mention crippling – a disbarment of 20 years is on the judicial cards.  Burrowing into the dirtied archives of history is tantamount not merely to upsetting the apple cart, but replacing it altogether.  This particular bit of burrowing involved looking at atrocities committed during the Spanish Civil War (1939-39) and the subsequent and long rule of Franco, which only ended in 1975.

Spain’s pathway to democratic transition was premised on the mutual acceptance of blindness to cruelty – a blindness to the past that Garzón found hard to accept.  Indeed, he continues to believe that the 1977 law does not preclude human rights abuses from being investigated.  ‘I did what I believed should have been done.  It is not a question of ideology – judges are not supposed to be ideological.  There are hundreds of thousands of victims whose rights have not been respected’ (El Pais, Jan 31).

The question then posed was what the zealous advocate was going to do with his findings. According to Garzón, he was not intent on exhuming skeletons in the name of mounting persecutions.  His inquiry, egged on by 20 historical memory associations and 10 individuals, did not commence to find any bodies in the absence of jurisdiction to do so.  In November 2008, the full High Court panel decided that he should cease his investigations, something he did, in fact, do.  The right wing union Manos Limpias chose to see it differently, and the Spanish Supreme court agreed that there was, in fact, standing to pursue a case against Garzón.  This, despite the support for Garzón’s case from the Supreme Court’s chief prosecutor Luis Navajas.

The judge is being somewhat naïve in certain respects.  Human rights is an assumed ideology on the state of humanity, a set of principles and beliefs that has its followers.  In the end, it might be argued that, to be blind, may be wiser than otherwise.  But the mission of Garzón is different – to right the records of the past, but within the confines of existing laws.

Garzón finds himself in a contested area of justice practitioners call ‘transitional’.  In the fruit salad of jurisprudence on human rights violations, various ideas mix – the application of considered punishment, the encouragement of reconciliation, or a more open and direct acceptance of what actually happened, the necessary, cathartic confessional. The latter is the position most sought by human rights groups, the light on the hill that must be reached if a state is to move on and accept its standing as an international citizen.  This is certainly the imperfect model that has been embraced in the ad hoc tribunals on Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia.

But absolutist criteria on human rights – and we have seen this in the context of assessing the brutality of a whole host of regimes – can be dangerous, destabilising and misplaced.  The unhappy medium is almost impossible to find.  Despite these reservations, it is impossible to assume that the right wing forces in Spain were not intent on barring Garzón from the legal arena.  He has proven to be a distinct nuisance to murderous figures in the past, and there is no reason why he should stop doing so in the future. His opponents have one clear wish: to make memory forget, to commit what amounts to a form of historiocide.

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

After a century of scheming in the Middle East and Central Asia by first Britain and then the US, the tables turned much faster than anyone could have imagined. As the pivotal 2011 draws to a close, it is the perfect moment to look at how we got here. The rollercoaster ride has been long and terrifying, and it is vital to understand where it is taking us.

From the 19th century on, it was clear to imperial strategists such as Cecil Rhodes and Halford MacKinder, motivated by the desire to conquer the world, that the “heartland”, Eurasia, was the key to securing the proposed world empire. WWI was supposed to clinch the deal, with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate leaving the Levant “free” to be carved up and secured. The Indian Raj was the empire’s base for securing Central Asia and the Far East .

But the horrors of the war led to an unforeseen result: revolution in Russia, inspiring a growing anti-imperial movement across Eurasia. Inspired by Russian revolutionaries, the Raj seethed in discontent, demanding freedom from the British yoke, and Chinese patriots coalesced around their own rapidly growing Communist movement. Historic Turkestan was now off limits, part of the Soviet Union or in the case of Afghanistan, unconquerable.

WWII erupted as Germany attempted to snatch the world empire from the British and destroy its Russian nemesis, but this merely accelerated the decline of the Euro-imperialists, their schemes exposed as relying on mass slaughter and cold, calculating privilege for the elite of the imperial centre.

When the war ended, there were hopes that imperialism would end too. The empire had been forced to ally with the Communists to defeat the Germans, and to promise to dismantle the imperial system after WWII. This new world order was to be one of independent nations competing on a level playing field. But what should have been the last gasp of this inhuman system of “free trade” in the service of empire gained a new lease on life, as the US had escaped the 20th century’s cataclysms unscathed, and its capitalists were eager to take on the mantle of empire ceded by the bankrupt Brits.

Moreover, a new, subtle but key force in the new empire was the Jewish state established by the British and Americans in the heart of the Middle East, a blatant colonial entity which draped its imperial role in the language of anti-colonial liberation. This, despite the fact that it was created by dispossessing the native Arabs, even as neighbouring Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and North Africa were gaining nominal independence from their colonial masters.

This new playing field witnessed a long, bloody match, pitting the empire’s forces against both Communists and anti-colonial forces. After millions of deaths, it culminated in the defeat of the Communists in 1991, and a new game began, with world control once again the prize.

The dreams of revolution and an end to empire were dashed, and this new world order was once again baldly imperial, as planners accelerated their plans, epitomised by the rise of the neoconservatives with their Project for a New American Century, combining market fundamentalism and imperial aggression in a deadly cocktail where there were no longer any geographical limits.

The former Communist union, especially Turkestan, with its strategic location and oil wealth, was quickly brought into the imperial orbit. Even China was accommodated, as it acceded to the world economic order established by the empire after WWII.

But the baggage of empire continued to complicate the picture. The Islamists, so useful in the destruction of the Communist bloc, resisted imperial designs. Israel, also useful throughout the post-WWII struggle against both the Communists and the 3rd world liberation forces, established itself as an independent player and even posed as the new imperial coach, penetrating to the heart of the empire and asserting its own goals of expansion and hostility against its Muslim neighbours.

At its beheast, the resulting wars have been against the Arab and Muslim world, but two decades of attempts to subdue them have merely hardened Muslims’ opposition to empire, even as the devastation caused by imperial designs increases.

Hence, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the accession to power of Islamists via the ballot box across the Middle East . Hence, the unwinnable war against the Afghan people, that brought empire to its knees in fateful 2011, even as the slaughter of insurgents and civilians increased. Yes, the imperialists managed a clever ruse, invading Libya to depose the clownish Gaddafi, but the Islamists and fiercely independent tribes there are unlikely allies of empire.

The tsunami of resistance to imperialism surged throughout 2011 around the world, while the empire’s leaders put a worldwide “missile defence” system in place. But even as radars and missiles were installed in Europe, the rising tide reached the empire’s shores in 2011, as financial crisis led to rising poverty and unrest in the imperial centre itself.

Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring, mass demonstrations in Greece and Spain erupted and Wall Street, the empire’s “heartland”, was occupied. The “99 per cent” entered the political lexicon as the people vs the ruling elite (the 1 per cent who own half of the country’s assets). Even Israel and newly capitalist Russia witnessed mass demonstrations, as ordinary citizens began to realise how the system works, or rather doesn’t work for them. How increasing disparity of wealth is the logical result of market fundamentalism and control of the economy by financial capital.

2011 will go down in history as a year as fateful as 1917, when the blinkers fell away from the common people’s eyes in Russia and they rose up against their oppressors. But while 1917 witnessed a Communist revolution against capitalism and imperialism by a small corps of professional revolutionaries, 2011 has witnessed a mass, leaderless revolution facilitated by telecommunications, and in the case of the key Middle East, inspired by Islam.

There is no Lenin, not even a Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the one Arab leader who managed to slow down the imperial steamroller in the Middle East and is still revered for his defiance. Unlike Communist revolutionaries of yore, the new leaders in the Middle East of what must be called the Islamic revolution of 2011 are not the object of veneration, something that Islam as a religion warns against.

Revolutions always start in the weakest links. Thus, the Middle East has a head start on the revolutionary process over the West, though through the growing Palestinian solidarity movement, notably the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, the struggles of East and West are increasingly seen to be one and the same. What will be the decisive test for the new revolutionaries in the Middle East and the West itself is how well they can navigate the political shoals and landmines laid by a century of empire.

How to dismantle apartheid Israel without it unleashing nuclear war on the world? How to put an end to US world financial blackmail centred on the dollar without the US strategists taking everyone else down with them? While the empire is on the defensive, it is still powerful and as its star wanes, it will only become more lethal.

The foes of empire are popping up faster than the empire’s drones can knock them off. They are found not only in Arab (and Persian) lands, or even in a skeptical Russia and still-Communist China. As the links in the system continue to fray, they are increasingly in the heart of the empire itself. Americans and Europeans will continue to develop alternatives to empire, financially, economically and politically, in their own communities and continue to link up with their comrades-against-arms in the heart of the supposed enemy in Eurasia .

More and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to capitalism. Some 130 million Americans are part owners of co-op businesses and credit unions. As Obama cuts funding to states, the latter considers establishing their own banks and use public pensions to fund state economic development.

There is a wealth of expertise in the “heartland” of the empire that can help show the whole world the way out of the imperial dead end. The new generation in America lacks the Cold War paranoia about socialism: Americans under 30 years old are “essentially evenly divided” as to whether they preferred “capitalism” or “socialism”, according to a 2009 Rasmussen poll.

Even as the world environment degrades, even as imperial arms continue to kill, maim and choke demonstrators and insurgents both at the heart of the empire and in the heart of the “enemy”, we can take heart in the new sense of human dignity which 2011 spawned, and fight the intrigues of empire with new vigour in 2012.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

The relation of information technology (IT), and more specifically the internet, to politics is a central issue facing contemporary social movements.  Like many previous scientific advances the IT innovations have a dual purpose:  on the one hand, it has accelerated the global flow of capital, especially financial capital and facilitated imperialist ‘globalization’.  On the other hand, the internet has served to provide alternative critical sources of analysis as well as easy communication to mobilize popular movements.

The IT industry has created a new class of billionaires, from Silicon Valley in California to Bangalore, India.  They have played a central role in the expansion of economic colonialism via their monopoly control in diverse spheres of information flows and entertainment.

To paraphrase Marx “the internet has become the opium of the people”.  Young and old, employed and unemployed alike, spend hours passively gazing at spectacles, pornography, video games, online consumerism and even “news” in isolation from other citizens, fellow workers and employees.

In many cases the “overflow” of “news” on the internet has saturated the internet, absorbing time and energy and diverting the ‘watchers’ from reflection and action.  Just as too little and biased news by the mass media distorts popular consciousness, too many internet messages can immobilize citizen action.

The internet, deliberately or not, has “privatized” political life.  Many otherwise potential activists have come to believe that circulating manifestos to other individuals is a political act, forgetting that only public action, including confrontations with their adversaries in public spaces in city centers and in the countryside, is the basis of political transformations.

IT and Financial Capital

Let us remember that the original impetus for the growth of “IT” came from the demands of big financial institutions, investment banks and speculative traders who sought to move billions of dollars and euros with the touch of a finger from one country to another, from one enterprise to another, from one commodity to another.

Internet technology was the motor force for the growth of globalization at the service of financial capital.  In some ways IT played a major role in precipitating the two global financial crises of the past decade (2001-2002, 2008–2009).  The  bubble in IT stocks of 2001 was a result of the speculative promotion of overvalued “software firms” de-linked from the ‘real economy’.  The global financial crash of 2008-2009 and its continuation today, was induced by the computerized packaging of financial swindles and underfunded real estate mortgages.  The ‘virtues’ of the internet, its rapid relay of information in the context of speculator capitalism turned out to be a major contributing factor to the worse capitalist crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Democratization of the Internet

The internet became accessible to the masses as a market for commercial enterprise and then spread to other social and political uses. Most importantly it became a means of informing the larger public of the exploitation and pillage of countries and people by multi-national banks.  The internet exposed the lies which accompany US and EU imperialist wars in the Middle East and Sothern Asia.

The internet has become contested terrain, a new form of class struggle, engaging  national liberation and pro-democracy movements.  The major movements and leaders from the armed fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan to the pro-democracy activists in Egypt, to the student movements in Chile and including the poor peoples’ housing movement in Turkey, rely on the internet to inform the world of their struggles, programs, state repression and popular victories.  The internet links peoples’ struggles across national boundaries – it is a key weapon in creating a new internationalism to counter capitalist globalization and imperial wars.

To paraphrase Lenin, we could argue that 21st century socialism can be summed up by the equation:  “soviets plus internet = participatory socialism”.

The Internet and Class Politics

We should remember that computerized information techniques are not ‘neutral’ – their political impact depends on their users and overseers who determine who and what class interests they will serve.  More generally the internet must be contextualized in terms of its insertion in public space.

The internet has served to mobilize thousands of workers in China and peasants in India against corporate exploiters and real estate developers.  But computerized aerial warfare has become the NATO weapon of choice to bomb and destroy independent Libya. The US drones which send missiles that kill civilians in Pakistan and Yemen are directed by computer ‘intelligence’.  The location of Colombian guerrillas and the deadly aerial bombings are computerized.  In other words, IT technology has dual uses:  for popular liberation or imperial counter revolution.

Neo-liberalism and Public Space

The discussion of “public space” has frequently assumed that “public” means greater state intervention on behalf of the welfare of the majority; greater regulation of capitalismand increased protection of the environment.  In other words, benign “public” actors are counter-posed to exploitative private market forces.

In the context of the rise of neo-liberal ideology and policies, many progressive writers argue about the “decline of the public sphere”. This argument overlooks the fact that the “public sphere” has increased its role in society, economy and politics on behalf of capital, especially financial capital, and foreign investors.  The “public sphere”, specifically the state, is much more intrusive in civil society as a repressive force, particularly as neo-liberal policies increase inequalities.  Because of the intensification and deepening of the financial crises, the public sphere (the state) has undertaken a massive role in bailing out bankrupt banks.

Because of large scale fiscal deficits provoked by capitalist class tax evasion, colonial war spending and public subsidies to big business, the public sphere (state) imposes class based “austerity” program-cutting social expenditures and prejudicing public employees, pensioners, and private wage and salaried employees.

The public sphere diminished its role in the productive sector of the economy.  However, the military sector has grown with expansion of colonial and imperial wars.

The basic issue underlying any discussion of the public sphere and the social opposition is not its decline or growth but rather the class interests which define the role of the public sphere.  Under neo-liberalism, the public sphere is directed by the use of public treasury to finance bank bailouts, militarism and expanded police state intervention.  A public sphere directed by the “social opposition” (workers, farmers, professionals, employees) would enlarge the scope of public sphere activity with regard to health, education, pensions, environment and employment.

The concept of the “public sphere” has two opposing faces (Janus-like): one facing capital and the military; the other labor/social opposition.  The role of the internet is also subject to this duality: on the one hand the internet facilitates large scale movements of capital and rapid imperial military interventions; on the other hand it provides rapid flow of information to mobilize the social opposition.  The basic question is what kind of information is transmitted to what political actors and for what social interest?

The Internet and the Social Opposition:  The Threat of State Repression

For the social opposition the internet is first and foremost a vital source of alternative critical information to educate and mobilize the “public” – especially among progressive opinion — leaders, professionals, trade unionists and peasant leaders, militants and activists.  The internet is the alternative to the capitalist mass media and its propaganda, a source of news and information that relays manifestos and informs activists of sites for public action.  Because of the internet’s progressive role as an instrument of the social opposition it is subject to surveillance by the repressive police-state apparatus.  For example, in the USA over 800,000 functionaries are employed by the “Homeland Security” police agency to spy on billions of emails, faxes, telephone calls of millions of US citizens.  How effective the policing of tons of information each day is another question.  But the fact is that the internet is not a “free and secure source of information, debate and discussion”.  In fact, as the internet becomes more effective in mobilizing the social movements in opposition to the imperial and colonial state, the greater is the likelihood of police-state intervention under the pretext “combating terrorism”.

The Internet and Contemporary Struggle:  Is it Revolutionary?

It is important to recognize the importance of the internet in detonating certain social movements as well as relativizing its overall significance.

The internet has played a vital role in publicizing and mobilizing “spontaneous protests” like the ‘indignados’ (the indignant protestors) mostly unaffiliated unemployed youth in Spain and the protestors involved in the US “Occupy Wall Street”.  In other instances, for example, the mass general strikes in Italy, Portugal, Greece and elsewhere the organized trade union confederations played a central role and the internet had a secondary impact.

In highly repressive countries like Egypt, Tunisia and China, the internet played a major role in publicizing public action and organizing mass protests.  However, the internet has not led to any successful revolutions – it can inform, provide a forum for debate, and  mobilize, but it cannot provide leadership and organization to sustain political action let alone a strategy for taking state power.  The illusion that some internet gurus foster, that ‘computerized’ action replaces the need for a disciplined, political party, has been demonstrated to be false:  the internet can facilitate movement but only an organized social opposition can provide the tactical and strategic direction which can sustain the movement against state repression and toward successful struggles.

In other words, the internet is not an “end in itself” – the self-congratulatory posture of internet ideologues in heralding a new “revolutionary” information age overlooks the fact that the NATO powers, Israel and their allies and clients now use the internet to plantviruses to disrupt economies, sabotage defense programs and promote ethno-religious uprisings.  Israel sent damaging viruses to hinder Iran’s peaceful nuclear program; the US, France and Turkey incited client social opposition in Libya and Syria.  In a word, the internet has become the new terrain of class and anti-imperialist struggle.  The internet is a means not an end in itself.  The internet is part of a public sphere whose purpose and results are determined by the larger class structure in which it is embedded.

Concluding Remarks:  “Desktop Militants” and Public Intellectuals

The social opposition is defined by public action:  the presence of collectivities in political meetings, individuals speaking at public meetings, activists marching in public squares, militant trade unionists confronting employers, poor people demanding sites for housing and public services from public authorities…

To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”.  It is a form of pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed.  Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind.

The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power.  By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual:  of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere.  The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little.  The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity.  The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office.  The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.

The popular perception is that the ordinary people have been living “beyond their means”, a false and invidious conventional wisdom which masks the real nature of the crisis. For it is the elites across Europe and the Americas who have benefited most from the European Union, built on Reaganite neoliberalism, which in turn was fashioned to meet the needs of business. The neoliberal policies of all Western governments, “left” or “right” during the past three decades are the direct cause of the current highly skewed income distribution – by some accounts, worse than in any previous era of human history.

The supposed generous patriarch of this big happy family is Germany, with its hard workers and tidy streets. But while the Aesopian Greek hares are told they must tighten their belts and make do with less health and education, the fact that the Greek arms imports continue to grow — importing German weapons and “defence” systems (against what threat?) — is not mentioned. And it is not only weapons, but consumer goods from Germany that have displaced Greek products in the anonymous Euro-market, as Greece increasingly becomes northern Europeans’ decadent playground, albeit with more than its fair share of un- and under-employed.

As long as banks were lending freely to governments to finance this fool’s paradise, the lower classes were not made to feel the pinch, and the system kept chugging along. Now that government debts and bank reserves have approached their limit and reckless banks are going bankrupt, the struggle is on over who should pay for the untenable system. Since the economic elites are also the political elites, naturally they want the broad people to pay with social service cuts, reduced and delayed pensions, regressive sales taxes and the like. The intense propaganda campaign now underway is to convince the poor in the Euro-laggards that they are the guilty ones, not their own elites or the Euro-elites in Frankfurt or Berlin or wherever.

The EU was a project to end the prospect of war in Europe and to gather the broken pieces of shattered empires into a workable collective economic-political force in the world. To a surprising extent it succeeded, but without facing hard choices and a frank debate about who benefits. As the problems sharpen, any sense of collective goodwill evaporates, and chauvinist, even racist parties gain rapidly in popularity, hearkening back to faux-halcyon days of distant imperial privilege. But as history shows, the ability of individual European countries to extract surplus from colonies is not guaranteed indefinitely. The same goes for the ability of Germany to lord it over its Euro-partners. As the knives come out, the very existence of the European project comes into question.

The rich standard of living that Europe has enjoyed over the past few decades is directly a result of first the import of Third World workers (to a large extent Muslim) and then the incorporation of the ex-Socialist bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the financial crisis plays itself out, these immigrant workers, the very ones who have served Europeans so well, are now targeted and racially profiled, as the elites try to deflect attention from their own hidden role in the ongoing crisis. This is the First World/Third World extension of the above argument about Euro-laggards, with the victims no longer the Greek hares, but Nigerian and Egyptian immigrants.

A similar tale can be told for the US , with its large immigrant population, its Tea Partiers and Islamophobes, unable or unwilling to face the underlying problems resulting from decades of neoliberal policies. In the Americas, it is China that provides the manufactured goods which are paid for by US treasury bonds piling up in Chinese bank vaults, and no one in particular is accused of being the carefree Aesopian hare — state governments merely use their deficits as the deus ex machina — but the pattern is the same.

As the people who have woken up to the reality are arrested and booted out of Trafalgar Square, Zuccotti Park, Chapman Square (Oakland) and dozens of other city commons around the world, the long cold winter of discontent sets in. However, the problems are going nowhere and the people are just waiting for the next opportunity to express their outrage.

The toppling of governments means nothing in this scenario. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Greece’s George Papandreou only handed over power on the explicit understanding that the “fresh faces” would carry out the austerity plans imposed by the EU heavyweights. Berlusconi’s replacement is 68-year-old, ex-EU commissioner Mario Monti, an economics professor steeped in the dogmas that brought Italy to its current impasse. Papandreou’s replacement is ex-European Central Bank vice president Lucas Papademos who immediately announced, “Our membership of the euro is our only choice.” Not much thinking outside the box from these folks, the very ones who got their people into their present fix.

Some Americans at the top are already awake. The 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” (0.005% of all US millionaires) have been lobbying President Barack Obama and congressional leaders for a year now pleading with them: “Please do the right thing, raise our taxes.” Not surprisingly, no response from a president and Congress beholden to the 3.1 million other millionaires — the proverbial 1%.

Occupy Washington DC published their no-brainer proposals 17 November: redistribute income through progressive taxation, end the wars, expand health care, democratise business. This will end the budget deficit overnight, create full employment through stimulating local demand, eventually ending the foreign trade deficit, making America strong and once again the envy of the world. But, of course, Congress is captive to the current military industrial complex, and can and will do nothing.

The slow-motion drift into oblivion is surreal. Clearly momentous changes are in store for both Europe and America, and the sooner thinkers and actors get to work coming to grips with hard, cold reality, the better for the people — and for the elites, who are living on borrowed time, too. How long before the revolution?

In contrast the same opinion makers, plus their academic counterparts, project images of the United States and the European Union as stable societies, with steady economic growth, incremental expansion of social welfare programs, resolving issues via consensual compromises and practicing sound fiscal policies.

In recent times, the better part of the current decade, these images have taken on the character of ideological dogmas – they no longer correspond to reality. In fact, a good argument can be made that the roles have been reversed: the US and EU are in perpetual crises and Latin America, at least most of the major countries, have experienced stability and growth which is the envy (or should be) of Washington pundits and financial commentators.

This ‘role reversal’ has been recognized by many US, EU and Asian investors and multinationals, even as respectable journalistic hacks for the Financial Times, NY Times and Wall Street Journal still write about vulnerabilities, imbalances and other weaknesses while grudgingly acknowledging the dynamic growth of the region.

Progressive opinion is equally at fault, focusing on the ‘advances’ of the left regimes but overlooking the underlying dynamics affecting most of the region and thus losing sight of the new points of conflict and contention.

We will proceed to outline the contrasting realities between the crises ridden “North” (US/EU) and the sustained growth of the “South” (South America). The analysis will raise questions of whether the South American experience is transferable to the North and what ‘structural adjustments’ would be necessary to pull the US and EU out of the downward spiral of stagnation and violent conflicts which have characterized these regions for the better part of the past decade.

The Lost Decade, US and EU Style

The Latin American countries during the 1980’s experienced a deep and persistent crises, manifested in negative growth, increased poverty levels and heavy indebtedness, which allowed creditors (like the IMF) to impose harsh and regressive austerity measures and “structural adjustment” policies which came to be known as neo-liberalization. These included the privatization of most strategic, lucrative public enterprises, and the ending of any semblance of state-directed industrial strategies.

For the peasants and the working and middle class the short-lived neo-liberal “boom” of the 1990s was a continuation of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were based on fundamentally flawed structural foundations and polarizing income and public expenditures involving huge transfers of income to capital and downward pressures on wages and welfare. The neo-liberal regimes went into a deep crisis early in 2000 provoking major popular upheavals. The outcome resulted in a new set of political configurations and social power equations, which evolved into new post-neo-liberal regimes, at least in most of the major countries in Latin America.

In contrast and, in part thanks to the profitable opportunities opened by the debt crises and neo-liberalization of Latin America in the 1990s (and in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic/Balkan states) the US and EU prospered. In Latin America over 5,000 lucrative extractive resource-based industries, banks, tele-communications and other industries passed into the hands of foreign private MNC and local capital. High returns on bonds and loans and rents from technology transfers enriched the Northern capitalists even as poverty multiplied in the South. The 1990s was the “golden age” of Western capital as profits rose and leftist parties and the traditional urban trade unions appeared unable to withstand the ‘wave’ of predatory capitalism capturing the commanding heights of the economy.

The very successes of the US and EU countries, the enormous easy gains from pillage, speculation, and exploitation led to the dominance of financial capital and the belief in an irrevocable “new world order”. The dominance of the US and EU was built on their military superiority backed by pliant, collaborative, neo-liberal client regimes. The ‘new order’ lasted less than a decade: the economic crises of 1999/2000 smashed the illusions of a century of imperial grandeur. As markets collapsed so too did the Latin American oligarchic electoral regimes (dubbed “democracies”) which along with the financial elite and the military formed the triple alliance that defined Western supremacy. The final blow was the economic crises of 2001-2002 in the US and EU which steeply eroded their capacity to intervene and prop up their collapsing Latin clients ousted by rebellious masses.

The first decade of the new millennia has been the “lost decade”  of the North.   Over the course of the past eleven years the North has witnessed stagnation and recessions which have not given way to recoveries. The capitalist states temporarily saved the bankers but were powerless to set in motion economic growth.

The credit rating of the US economy was downgraded by the risk agencies. Unemployment and underemployment hovers close to one-fifth of the labor force, figures comparable to stagnant Third World countries. Social programs  are severely slashed in the US and throughout the European Union, reversing decades of incremental gains. Trade and budget deficits in the US have become chronic, while private and public lenders are becoming increasingly reticent to lend in the face of deep-seated recessionary tendencies.

The financial sector in the US and EU is rife with large scale fraud, swindles, mismanagement and falsified balance sheets, conditions previously prevalent among Latin economies. Wars proliferate. Military spending far exceeds productive investments, draining the US economy in a fashion reminiscent of the weapons spending during the reign of the warlords of Africa and the military dictators of Latin America.

In the EU, faced with brutal cuts in wages, pensions and jobs millions of workers and unemployed youth in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have taken to the streets. General strikes threaten the stability of increasingly isolated regimes, reminiscent of the popular rebellions which resulted in regime changes in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the US, public protests reflect deepening private discontent: over 75% of the population expresses negative views of the Congress and 60% of the White House. Deepening political alienation of the US electorate is comparable to the loss of popular faith in Latin governments during the “lost decades”, 1980-2000.

Both the US and the EU have been radically transformed for the worse during the lost decade of the current century. Economically, politically and socially the ‘North’ has been “Latin Americanized”: social instability, economic stagnation, political alienation, growing class inequalities and poverty is presided over by corrupt political elites.

Signs of the Better Times: Latin America

Recently the finance minister of Brazil raised the possibility that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might take a hand in a “rescue plan” to prop up the crises-ridden economies of Europe. While the statement had greater symbolic rather substantive consequences, it does reflect a certain reality: while the North plunges into deeper, unending crises, the Latin economies are doing reasonably well.

Except for the Latin countries still under US dominance, especially Mexico and most of Central America, the rest of Latin America has not only avoided the crises afflicting the North but have been growing at a healthy rate, three times that of the US over the decade. The new millennium, especially between 2003-2011 (except for a brief interlude in 2009) has been a period of high growth, general prosperity, booming exports, rising imports, greater inter-regional co-operation, and large scale poverty reduction.

Brazil alone has reduced the number of poor by 30 million. Regular elections, relatively honest and competitive, result in stable legitimate transfers of political power. Except for US-backed coups in Honduras and intervention in Haiti and Venezuela, violent seizures of power have disappeared over the past decade. Regional institution–building has prospered with the advent of UNASUR and a Latin American regional bank.  Because of fiscal controls and banking regulations, both results of the lessons learned from the crisis of the lost decades (1980-2000), Latin America was only slightly affected by the US-EU financial crash of 2008-2011.

Latin American trade has doubled, especially with Asia, aided by China’s double digit growth. Demand for agro-mineral commodities has tripled. The key to this new export-powered growth is Latin America’s growing economic independence. This has led to the diversification of its markets, taking advantage of new opportunities and reducing their dependence on the US. Latin America’s emphasis on economic growth, new markets and investments has led it to avoid entanglements in the proliferating and costly colonial wars which engage the US and EU.

While the US and EU print more money and increase indebtedness to cover trade deficits, Latin America has quadrupled its foreign reserves. These cushion any downturns and avoid any dependence on the IMF, architect of the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Within Latin America, the issue of poverty reduction has been tackled with varying degrees of effectiveness. With Venezuela under President Chavez leading the way the general direction has been toward increasing social payments, by increments in most cases, but with greater efforts in others. Except for Mexico, nothing resembling the social cuts of the US-EU has taken place in Latin America. The most striking structural advances have occurred in Venezuela and to a lesser degree in Argentina. They have significantly increased the minimum wage and pensions and increased welfare payments to the most vulnerable (single mothers, the disabled, those in extreme poverty).

With the exception of Colombia (the US’s principle military ally in the region) which is still the murder capital of the world for human rights advocates, trade unionists and peasant activists, human rights violations have declined. While the US-EU have vastly increased their human rights violations geometrically via multiple colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and clandestine death squad ‘operations’, Latin America’s overseas human rights violations are largely limited to its occupation forces in Haiti – at the behest of the US and EU. Nevertheless repression of popular movements, especially indigenous peoples and peasant movements and students has increased in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere as the high growth policies on community rights and social expenditures.

Because of Latin America’s current political stability and dynamic growth, institutional and corporate investment is pouring into the region. In contrast the US and EU are suffering from disinvestment and declining rates of private investment. In other words, the development of Latin America is the other side of the coin of the US-EU under-development.

Latin America: New Contradictions

The class struggle is still the motor force in the social progress of Latin America. But unlike EU-US, Latin America’s class struggle is directed at increasing social and monitory wages, even if incrementally, as part of an offensive strategy to capture a greater share of rising income. In the US and EU the class struggle is ‘defensive’: an effort to stop declining income shares, limit job losses and cuts in pensions.

While militant class action including land occupations, street demonstrations and strikes are still part of the repertory of working class social weapons, they take place within the political parameters of democratic institutions. In Europe the elites have increasingly ignored mass street protests and strikes, largely pursuing austerity policies dictated by non-elected domestic and foreign bankers and creditors.

The limitations and ‘contradictions’ affecting all Latin American countries are located in the internal class inequalities. As national income has increased and exports boom, the inequalities between the ruling investor class and the mass of wage earners has increased. While initially the problem of class inequality was papered over by the general rise in living standards and employment, over time the employed and productive classes are no longer satisfied with incremental gains which barely surpass inflation rates. The rising standards of living have raised expectations. The percentage of poor may have declined but subsisting just above $4 dollars a day is increasingly unacceptable. Growth brings forth its own set of contradictions and a new set of demands. Formerly excluded classes included in the system, but exploited, have only their class organizations as their weapons to advance their socio-economic interests.

This is clearly the case in contemporary Chile where long term growth is accompanied by deeply entrenched inequalities comparable to the worse in the OECD. Beginning in July 2011 massive student protests over the high cost of public and private education and low levels of social expenditures have detonated mass activity from trade unions covering the gamut of economic sectors from teachers to copper miners.

The new and explosive issue confronting rulers and ruled in most of high growth Latin America is raising incomes for whom? The class issues are front and foremost in the current period and immediate future.

Growth, stability and democratic class struggles characterize most of the major countries, but not all. In several countries, the authoritarian and violent legacy of the dictatorial regimes continues robust. Colombia’s practice of murdering trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists and human rights activists continues unabated: over 30 trade unionists were murdered during the first eight  months of 2011.

Honduras’ ruling regime, product of a US-backed coup and its allies among the paramilitary private armies of landowners, have killed scores of peasants and dozens of pro-democracy political and social activists.

Mexico’s killing fields are notorious: over 40,000 people have been killed by the police, military and drug gangs in a ‘war on drugs’ promoted by Obama and implemented by President Calderon.

What these three retro-regimes have in common is that they continue to follow the dictates of Washington, remain highly militarized states, with a strong US military and police presence in the form of bases, overseas advisers, and an intrusive role in setting policy. All three have failed to diversify markets and continue with a high degree of dependence on the stagnant US market. All have secured, or are in the process of signing, bi-lateral free trade agreements at the expense of exploring greater links with the dynamic Asian markets.

The three retro-regimes have never experienced the kind of popular rebellions and resultant center-left regimes which have emerged in most of Latin America. In Mexico pro-democracy candidates were twice defrauded of electoral victories, first in 1988 and later in 2006. In Honduras, a progressive liberal democratic President seeking to diversify markets was ousted by a military coup backed by the Obama regime in 2010. In Colombia, the murder of 5,000 activists and leaders of the pro-democracy Patriotic Union between 1984-86, the subsequent assassination of several thousand social activists, blocked a democratic opening. The abrupt termination of peace negotiations in 2002 and the total militarization of the country (2002-2011) funded by $6 billion in US military aid precluded the emergence of the political and social changes, which have dynamized the rest of Latin America’s sustained growth and opened the door for ‘democratic class struggle’.

While most of Latin America has forged ahead, thus far largely avoiding the instability and economic crises of the US and EU, past legacies and present inequities present a new set of structural impediments to the consolidation of long-term growth and political and social stability. The biggest structural contradiction is found in the high growth/increasing inequalities, socio-economic model based on the “3 ½ alliance”: foreign capital-national capital-the developmental state and the co-opted trade union/peasant leaders.

The profits and investments of this power configuration has been driven by the growth of agro-mineral exports, rising commodity prices, easy consumer credit and state regulation of financial markets. The economic returns on growth have been disproportionately appropriated by the “big three” with incremental payoffs to a minority of better paid organized workers. The ‘residuals’ are used to “lift the poor” from abject poverty to subsistence.

These growing inequalities have been “papered over” by the general rise of income, easy credit and improved public services. But rising incomes have set in motion a new set of class conflicts which will be exacerbated when the prices of commodities decline and the governments can no longer fund incremental improvements. Even today, severe conflicts have emerged between predator mining and timber, multi nationals and Indian/peasants in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. These sometimes violent struggles between the state/MNC and peasants in the “periphery of the countryside” can detonate a larger conflict in the central cities, if export revenues decline.

The second contradiction is between the “marginalized working poor” and a new class of local middle and business class investors who have invested their “savings” in shares of the foreign and locally-owned mining companies. Conservative and closely aligned with the rapacious multi-nationals, these new middle class investors have enriched themselves on the bases of unregulated plunder of natural resources and contamination of the adjoining rural communities. If, and when, commodity prices nose dive, the regimes will face a bankrupt hysterical middle class looking for a political savior where none exist, at least among the existing civilian parties.

The rightward drift of the center-left regimes and their opportune links to big business especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay has led to corruption in high places. Liberalization and exorbitant executive salaries has been accompanied by “unofficial payoffs” to public officials. Corruptions has eroded the social ethic of center-left politicians and replaced it with the ethos of “bringing in new and bigger investments”, whatever shortcuts and payoffs it requires. Corruption at the top spreads downwards greasing the wheels for foreign investors, but certainly lowering the trust and loyalties of employees and formal and informal workers not in the ‘magic circle’, a bribe takers and givers. “Patronage” and poverty reduction payouts can limit the fallout from corruption in high places among poverty-funded recipients. However, in time of economic downturn, it can turn social protests toward political regime change.

The third contradiction is found between the high level of dependency on commodity exports (which heretofore have been the dynamic element of growth) and the relative and absolute decline of manufacturing exports and production. The growth of income from commodities has led to the appreciation of the currency which has lessened the competitiveness of nationally produced manufactured products, leading to a sharp decline in profits and even bankruptcy.

Asian manufacturer-exporters – especially in China and to a lesser extent India and Korea – are increasingly penetrating Latin markets with lower cost finished products “de-industrializing” the Latin economies. In some cases, Latin American capitalists are looking to investing in Asia to lower costs and exporting back to their “home markets”. Brazilian industry, which has been hardest hit, has initiated “protectionist” measures including tariffs, 65% local content rules and state subsidies to counter the de-diversification of the economy.

The fourth contradiction is found precisely in the successful economic growth and high returns, which has attracted both speculative and “takeover” capital as well as productive investments. Speculative capital will flee and destabilize the financial system at the first sign of slowdown. Foreign ownership will lessen the government’s ability to leverage investment decisions in time of crises. Productive investments respond to expanding markets. They do not create them.

In summary, Latin America’s decade long dynamic growth has certainly out-performed the US and EU on a whole series of important economic, social and political dimensions. Yet, out of this growth have emerged a new set of contradictions and the need to correct increasingly grave “imbalances”: popular demands for a shift in income distribution, industrialist pressure for a rebalancing of the economy from dependence on finance and commodities to manufacturing and the urban poor demand improved social services especially in public health care and crowded classrooms.

These changes require a structural adjustment in the power structure. The economic imbalances reflect the growing concentration of political power among the extractive capitalists, bankers and local middle class investors of the major cities. Public employees, labor, the urban poor, the peasants and environmentally concerned Indians and ecologists, are marginalized from the key economic posts. They need to once again take to the streets with new independent movements which raise two basic questions: What kind of growth and growth for whom?

Lessons of Latin America: Listen Yankees and Eurocrats

Can the positive lessons of the dynamic Latin American experience provide a ‘model’ for the US and Europe? Is the “model”, in whole or part, transferable to the North or are the two regions so different that the lessons are not applicable?

Granted there are vast historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the regions yet some lessons from the Latin America’s decade of dynamic growth provides new ideas to counter the negative, self-defeating economic formulas put forth and practiced by US and EU experts, economists and policymakers.

Let us start from the beginning. The rise of Latin America was precipitated by a deep economic crisis, the breakdown of the economy, large scale unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle class. The crises led to the total discrediting of what has been called alternately the “free market”, “neo-liberal” and “de-regulated” capitalist model. So far so good: the US and EU likewise are experiencing a prolonged and deepening economic crises which has bankrupted Southern Europe, plunged the US into a double dip recession and led to a 20% un and underemployment rate. The entire “political class” in the US and Europe is largely discredited. From there forward the regions diverge.

In Latin America, the crises led to mass protests, popular uprisings and regime changes. Post neo-liberal center-left regimes, under mass pressure, subsequently launched employment generating investments and aid poverty reducing public works programs. Argentina, facing a financial crisis similar to Greece, Portugal and Spain today, defaulted on its foreign debt – channeling public revenues into reviving the economy. Because financial speculation linked to Wall Street and the City of London precipitated the crises, the Latin regimes instituted financial controls and regulations which limited financial volatility. The new regimes, influenced by the commodity boom, diversified their trading partners, entering dynamic Asian markets, reaping high returns and stimulating local consumption and public investments. What lessons can the crises-ridden US and EU learn from the Latin America’s successful recovery and expansion?

First, the beginning of a successful response depends on a political transformation. Regime change, a complete break with the ‘neo-liberal’ free market, and the political leaders and parties who are totally embedded in failed institutions and policies. Regime change presupposes the eruption of dynamic mass organizations, new, old, improvised and organized, capable of moving from protest and resistance to political power.

The object is to rebalance the US and EU economies from “financialization” and “militarism” to large scale, long term investments in manufacturing, applied technology, civilian infrastructure and social services. Direct public investments and loans applied to concrete employment-generating projects; total rejection of trickle down, monetary policies which never move from private banks to public works.

The entire militarist- Zionist-permanent war mentality is entirely vulnerable to change: doing so, will create jobs, the top priority for over two-thirds of the US public. The “war on terrorism”, the banner of the warlords in office, is considered a priority by only 3% of Americans. Once again the shift from militarism to the civilian economy in Latin America was a result of popular civilian upheavals via the street and the ballot box.

Of course, the Latin American republics had an easier time in rebalancing their economic priorities from failed military rulers and discredited neo-liberal policies. Citizen movements in the US and EU imperial states will have a harder time in closing down hundreds of military bases, ousting militarist politicians backed by powerful domestic and foreign lobbies and converting the empires to productive republics. Yet, Latin American exporters have prospered by avoiding entanglement in overseas imperial wars. They continue to pursue new markets in the Middle East and elsewhere instead of destroying adversaries of Israel as the EU and US have done through colonial wars in Iraq and Libya and sanctions against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

The contrasting performance between Latin American republics and Euro-American empire builders is striking. The US and EU should shed their self-centered images of “successful” developed countries and outdated stereotype of Latin America as a collection of “volatile”, coup prone underdeveloped countries. The US is in deep trouble and it is heading into a deeper, less manageable economic crisis with few resources to counter it. Internationally it is increasingly isolated and in conflict with potential economic partners. Washington sides with Israel, alienating over 1.5 billion rich and poor Islamic peoples, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and all points east, west and south. It antagonizes Brazil via financial pump priming, overpricing the real (Brazilian currency) without helping US recovery.
Domestic and international failures multiply as the crisis deepens and nothing proposed by the blighted incumbents and besotted opposition offers any programmatic solution.

As in Latin America during the first years of this decade we need a popular rebellion: we need a profound regime change; we need to think of productive public investments not monumental loss of capital via Wall Street speculation and the waste of public resources via expenditures in weapons of destruction.

In contrast, in Northern and Central Europe the hard right and neo-fascist movements have made significant inroads among workers and the lower middle class at the expense of the traditional center-left and center-right parties. ¹ The relative stability, affluence and stable employment of the Nordic working class has been accompanied by increasing support for racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic parties. ²

In the case of the United States, with a few notable exceptions, the working class has remained a passive spectator in the face of the right turn of the Democratic Party and the hard right’s capture of the Republican Party.  There are no left wing street politics in the US, unlike Southern Europe, and only a passive rejection and repudiation of the hard right policies of Congress and the White House.

Rather than solidarity, the economic crisis highlights working class fragmentation, disunity and internal polarization.

The Right/Left Polarizations

One of the key reasons for the growth of right wing appeals to Northern European workers is the demise of working class-based ideology, parties and leaders.  The Labor and Social Democratic Parties have initiated and administered neoliberal programs while promoting multi-national corporation-led export strategies.  They have embraced regressive tax ‘breaks’ for big business; they have participated in imperialist wars of aggression (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya); they have embraced the so-called “war on terror” mostly against Muslim countries while tolerating the growth of the neo-fascist, far-right Islamophobes who practice “direct action” to expel immigrants in Europe.

The European governing parties of the center-left (social democratic and labor) and the center-right (Sarkozy, Cameron and Merkle) have been outspoken in their assault on “multiculturalism” code-word for Muslim immigrant rights. Their tolerance and exploitation of Islamophobia serves as a cheap vote getter among their xenophobic electorate and as a justification for their involvement in US-Israeli wars of aggression in the Middle East and South Asia. As a result the “mainstream” regimes have weakened working class solidarity with immigrant workers and undermined any concerted effort by the state and civil society to actively counteract the neo-fascist racists who ply a more virulent version of Islamophobia embracing the Zionist ideologues’ vision of ethnic cleansing.

The trade unions have lost membership due especially to the growth of ‘contingent or temporary workers’ who are especially susceptible to far-right appeals. Equally important, trade unions no longer engage in political education aimed at strengthening class solidarity among all workers.  While in Northern Europe wages may increase, the trade unions collaboration with the corporate elite has left workers vulnerable to anti-immigrant and Islamophobic propaganda.  In this context a perverse “class struggle” pits the unorganized workers against those “below”, the immigrants.  The neo-fascists gain by promoting and exploiting cultural and chauvinist beliefs which trade unions and social democratic parties no longer actively combat through worker education and class struggle.  In other words, the neoliberal practice and ideology of the “center-left” parties and unions undermine class political identities and open the door for right wing penetration and influence.  This is especially evident when center-left and trade union leaders no longer bother to consult or debate policies with their members:  They impose policies from above, providing the ‘far right’ with a formidable weapon to attack the ‘elitist nature’ of the center-left political system.

In contrast, in Southern Europe the profound economic crisis,  due in large part to the harsh conditions imposed by Northern and Western European bankers and their local center-left and right-wing politicians, has strengthened and sharpened class consciousness and politics.  Right-wing appeals to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim politics has little resonance among Southern European workers in the face of skyrocketing unemployment and brutal wage and pension cuts.

Northern European workers have allied with the right, and their own politicians and bankers, in demanding the imposition of greater austerity measures against Southern European countries, buying into the racist ideology that Mediterranean workers are lazy, irresponsible and on permanent vacation.  In fact, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish workers work more days per year, enjoy less vacation time and much less secure pensions.  The same racist sentiments pitting Northern workers against immigrants also promote chauvinist stereotypes against militant Southern European workers and fuel right-wing sympathies.

Creditor Northern European bankers and political leaders squeeze their own working and middle class taxpayers in order to bail-out their counterparts among the Southern European debtor elites, who, in turn, agree to squeeze their workers and public employees to meet the debt payment demands of the North.  The Northern workers in the imperial countries have been convinced that their living standards are threatened by the irresponsible and indebted South, and not by the speculative activity and irresponsible lending of their own bankers.  In the South, the workers have to shoulder the double exploitation of the Northern European creditors as well as their own local elites; hence, they have greater class awareness of the injustice of the imperial and local capitalist system.

To the degree that Northern workers make common cause with their own creditor ruling class and shift their resentments toward workers abroad and immigrants below, they become vulnerable to right wing appeals.  They openly express resentment against striking Greek, Spanish or Portuguese workers’, whose militant struggles might disrupt their planned vacations to the Mediterranean islands and seashore resorts.  The ideological battle which should pit the workers of Northern Europe against their own state creditors and speculator financial elite is transformed into hostility towards Southern European workers and immigrants.  Overseas bailouts, imperial wars and cuts in social programs lead to greater competition over shrinking social expenditures and conflict between employed and unemployed, ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ workers’.

International workers solidarity has been severely weakened and replaced, in some cases, by the proliferation of international far-right networks propagating virulent anti- immigrant (and anti-socialist)  propaganda and, as in the case of the massacre of almost 70 left-wing youth, mostly teenage, activists of the Norwegian Labor Party,  poses a direct murderous threat to progressive supporters of immigrant rights.  The extreme-right began its assault on immigrants and Muslims and has now moved against the local left and progressive movements which support them.  This has taken on an even more complex dimension with the marriage of rabid pro-Israel, Zionist ideologues (mostly based in the US) and the neo-fascist Islamophobes attacking supporters of Palestinian rights, an issue repeatedly stressed by the Norwegian fascist mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik. The problem is that the ‘respectable’ liberal, social democratic and conservative parties, in their electioneering, have pandered to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim appeals of the far-right in order to attract workers rather than embarking on far-reaching class reforms which would lessen inequalities, financing them via increases in progressive taxes and greater public investments to unify all workers (local and immigrant) against capital.

Lacking working class solidarity, the sons and daughters of immigrants, especially the disproportionately unemployed young workers, engage in forms of direct action such as the pillage of local business, confrontations with the police and general mayhem, as was evident in the nationwide riots in England in the “hot August” of 2011.  The demise of working class politics thus has produced violent right-wing extremism, racial-immigrant riots and pillage.  The labor elite are spectators, confined to condemning extremism and violence, calling for investigations, but without any semblance of self-criticism or any programs for changing the socio-economic structures that produce the right turn and violence among workers and the unemployed.

The United States:  The Rise of the Right

Unlike Europe, the extreme right is at home within the US established order.  Brutal anti-immigration policies have led to the expulsion of nearly 1 million undocumented workers or family members in the first three years of the Obama regime (a three-fold increase over the George W. Bush years).  The Tea Party has elected Congress members in the Republican Party who promote massive cuts in the social safety net with the collaboration of the White House.  The mass media, Congress, the White House, mass-based Christian fundamentalist politicians and leading Zionist personalities and organizations actively promote Islamophobia and lead virulent campaigns against Muslims by fanning public insecurity. The US ‘establishment’ has pre-empted the racist agenda of the far-right in Europe.  The far-right has turned its guns directly on the social programs of the poor, the working class and public employees (especially school teachers).

Moreover, their assault on debt financing and public expenditures has led to conflicts with sectors of the capitalist class, who are dependent on the State.  In the course of the recent Congressional ‘debate’ over raising the debt ceiling, Wall Street joined in a selective struggle against the far-right:  calling for “compromise” involving social cuts and tax reforms while supporting their anti-public union offensive.

Unlike in Europe, the mass of the US working class and poor are passive. They have been neutered: neither engaging in the street riots of England, nor taking the sharp right turn of their Northern European counterparts, nor participating in militant workers’ strikes of Southern Europe.  The US trade unions, with the exception of the public employees union in Wisconsin, have been totally absent from any of the big confrontations. The American trade union bosses concentrate on lobbying the corporate Democratic Party and are incapable of mobilizing their shrinking membership.

The Tea Party, unlike its Northern European counterparts, does not attract many workers because of their virulent attacks on popular public programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and especially Social Security – all of the programs most likely to benefit American workers and their families.  On the other hand, the economic crisis in the US has not led to Mediterranean-style mass action because American trade unions either don’t exist (93% of the private sector is not unionized) or are compromised to the point of paralysis.

So far the US working class is a spectator to the rise of the extreme right, because its organized leaders have tied their fortunes to the Democratic Party, which, in turn, has adopted significant parts of the far right’s agenda.

Conclusion

The US, in contrast to Europe, is experiencing a peaceful transition from neoliberalism to far-right politics, where the working and middle class are passive victims rather than active combatants for either the left or the right.  In Europe, the current crisis reveals a deep polarization between the radical left turn of workers in the South and the growing shift to the far right among workers in Northern Europe.  The ideal of international worker solidarity is being replaced, at best, by regional solidarity among the workers of Southern Europe and, at worst, by a network of rightist parties in the Northern European countries.  With the decline of international solidarity, chauvinist and racist tendencies are rampant in the North, while in the South workers’ movements are joining with a broad range of social movements, including the unemployed, students, small business people and pensioners.

While the electoral right is capitalizing on the disenchantment with the center-left in Southern Europe, they still face formidable resistance from the extra-parliamentary workers and social movements.  In contrast, in Northern Europe and the US, the far-right faces no such conscious opposition – in the streets or in the workplace.  In these regions only the breakdown of the economic system or a prolonged severe economic recession, combined with devastating cuts of basic social programs and protections, may set in motion a revival of working class movements. and hopefully it will be from the class-conscious left and not from the far right.

1. According to a study of workers support for far right wing parties in Western Europe, “workers have become their core clientele”. See Daniel Oesch, “Explaining Workers’ Support for Right-wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland”, International Political Science Review 2008: 29; pp. 350 -373
2. While some of the motivations of the workers vary, the far-right wing parties are the beneficiaries

Yet the now rich and self-satisfied secular West, after centuries of conquest and imposition of its colonial and now neocolonial order, has found itself at a nightmarish deadend. Wars, riots, drug addiction, corruption, famine, ecological Armageddon … There is little to cheer for and no coherent explanation for the impasse and the way forward. So the demand that the Muslim world follow in Western footsteps rings hollow.

For non-believers, there are social laws that can help to understand Islam’s continued relevance. One is Mayer Rothschild’s dictum: “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” The other is Carl Clausewitz’s “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Together, they point to the underlying economic and political problems which have led to the current crisis. In a nutshell, the dominance of banks (as opposed to governments representing the popular will) in controlling economic affairs has created a world where politics serves their particular needs (interest and profit), and the politics which promotes the interests of banks is — just look around — war and speculation (read: pillage and theft).

This is the “logic” underlying modern Western society, especially in the past three decades, with the alternative to capitalism, the Soviet Union, now dismantled, discredited, and more or less absorbed into the Western economic order. This triumph over the “enemy” left the field open to the Rothschild-Clausewitz mechanism. Electoral democracy is vaunted, but is a threadbare facade, for while the popular will consistently rejects war and banker hegemony, no political party is able to get elected to represent this popular will.

Believers need no explanation for the why and how of Islam and the devilish deadend the West now faces. Islam advocates a social order where there are no one-sided usurers using their monopoly on money to control economics and politics, a social order where peace (Islam) is the highest attainment of society, the goal of all “policy”, to which all should submit. If presented with the choice between the current chaos and the true Islamic alternative, there is little doubt that the Islamic alternative would be the overwhelming choice of the common people, both in Europe and America, despite the fact that Muslims represent only 2-8 per cent of the population in the West.

Of course, this social order is the ideal. The history of Islam witnessed periods of benign and far-from-benign rule. It began with military victories and the spreading of the Caliphate from Atlantic to Pacific. The majority of conquered peoples decided to adopt this powerful religion, converting from polytheism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism, though, contrary to Western prejudice, not “by the sword”. Throughout the various Islamic political orders, Christians, Jews and others continued to profess their faiths, enjoying a peaceful coexistence with Muslims. There was no period of imperial conquest and genocide equivalent to the Western imperial order from the fifteenth century to today.

The westward march of Islam was stopped in Spain and on the fringes of Byzantium by Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century. The Iberian peninsula — Al-Andalus — was the pearl of Islamic civilisation from 711 to 1492, as a province of the Umayyad Caliphate, and later the Caliphate of Cordoba and the Emirate of Granada.

Islamophobes portray Europe today as in danger of a new Muslim conquest, politicians and mass media egging on the likes of Norway’s Anders Breivik, who calls for the ethnic cleansing of all Muslims from Europe, much like Christian conquerors expelled Muslims and Jews following the reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century. But consider for a moment the legacy of Moorish Spain. This period saw Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in harmony, creating a prosperous, peaceful society, a highpoint in Spain’s history. Under the Caliphate of Cordoba, Al-Andalus became a beacon of learning, and the city of Cordoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centres in both the Mediterranean basin and the Islamic world.

As part of the Alliance of Civilisations, Spain is now rediscovering this Golden Age before the Christian re-conquest of Spain, which saw the torture, murder, forced conversion and expulsion of Muslims and Jews, and the genocide of New World Indigenous peoples following the “discovery” of the continent by Christopher Columbus. While Al-Andalus lasted eight centuries, the post-Islamic period of Spain has lasted only six centuries, and suffers poorly in comparison to the Islamic Golden Age that preceded it.

This was acknowledged by Spain’s current leader, Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when he co-sponsored the Alliance of Civilisations along with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2005, as a way to “bridge the divide” between the West and Islam, through projects in youth, education, media, and migration. Forums have been held in Madrid (2008), Istanbul (2009) and Rio de Janiero (2010).

Given the current tyranny of money that characterised Western civilisation, it is not surprising that the Zapatero/ Erdogan attempt at bringing peace and understanding among the founding faiths of Spain and the Middle East is greeted with sneers and resentment by Israel and its supporters in the West. Israel-firsters such as Soeren Kern twist the positive moves to bring East and West together as a cover for “Muslim countries in the Persian Gulf and North Africa funnelling large sums of money to radical Islamic groups in towns and cities across Spain”.

But there is a more enduring dialectic at work in Europe. Despite the Israel lobby’s energetic efforts to blacken Islam, the wave of revulsion against Israeli apartheid continues to grow throughout Europe, but especially in Spain. Ilan Pappe describes how all Israeli ambassadors to Europe are more than glad to end their terms, complaining about their inability to speak in campuses and whining about the overall hostile atmosphere in Europe these days. The Israeli ambassador to Spain, Raphael Schutz, just finished his term in Madrid, and in an op-ed in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, he summarised what he termed as a very dismal stay, charging that he was the victim of local and ancient anti-Semitism, comparing the situation to the Inquisition of five centuries ago.

In “Why the Spanish hate us”, Schutz states that the people of Spain are anti-Israeli because subconsciously they are anti-Semitic and still approve of the Inquisition. He ignores the fact that the Muslims were the main victims of the Inquisition, that Jews fought and suffered side by side with their Muslim allies as the Christian invaders flooded into Spain. Claiming that Spaniards who criticise Israel are racist and motivated by 500-year-old Christian bigotry rather than by Israeli’s criminal policies is just a feeble attempt at hasbara (public diplomacy) by desperate Israeli diplomats who have long ago lost the moral battle in Europe.

The Kerns and Schutzes are supported by Spain’s real latterday Inquisition, the National Intelligence Center (CNI), which published a report in July, warning of tens of millions of dollars coming to Spain from Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to support Muslims, and calling for close monitoring of these funds. The CNI’s report hinted that the money would be used to promote Islamic courts, remove girls from schools, and encourage forced marriages. The Spanish government’s knee-jerk response was to call for all donations from the Gulf Arab states to be channelled through a government-controlled “Islamic Commission of Spain”.

The CNI pointed to the Kuwaiti government’s funding of the construction of mosques in Catalonia, from which Islamic preachers are supposedly “spreading a religious interpretation that opposes the integration of Muslims into Spanish society and promotes the separation and hate towards non-Muslim groups.” Qatari donations are made through the Islamic League for Dialogue and Coexistence in Spain, a group the CNI says is “linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria”.

While the CNI talks only of the need to monitor funds, such as Kern argue that this is all part of a conspiracy by Muslim countries to take back Spain. He points to “the UAE, together with Libya [sic] and Morocco”, which paid for the construction of the Great Mosque of Granada. Says Abdel Haqq Salaberria, a spokesman for the mosque: “It will act as a focal point for the Islamic revival in Europe. It is a symbol of a return to Islam among the Spanish people and among indigenous Europeans.” Worse yet for Islamophobes, Muslims in Cordoba are demanding that the Spanish government allow them to worship in the main cathedral, which was originally the Great Mosque of Al-Andalus and is now a World Heritage Site.

Pointing to Saudi financing of the construction of Islamic Cultural Centres and mosques in Madrid and elsewhere, Kern conjures up the Saudi Wahhabi bugaboo, arguing that most Muslim immigrants in Spain are poor, and their low standard of living and low level of education make them susceptible to Saudi propaganda, ignoring the fact that Saudi Arabia is a close ally of the US, that Wahhabism is the quietist brand of Islam, and the only real way to improve the security situation is to raise the standard of living and level of education of the poor.

Despite such cries of “Wolf!”, attempts to reintegrate Islam into the fabric of Spanish culture are proceeding. Morocco recently co-sponsored a seminar in Barcelona titled “Muslims and European Values”, explaining that the construction of big mosques would be “a useful formula” to fight Islamic fundamentalism in Spain. According to Noureddine Ziani, a Barcelona-based Moroccan imam: “It is easier to disseminate fundamentalist ideas in small mosques set up in garages, than in large mosques that are open to everyone.” Using this logic, Spain should welcome more Libyan funding of Great Mosques, rather than participate in NATO’s efforts to destroy the Libyan state and create real grounds for terrorism.

Ziani also said that Islamic values are compatible with European values and that the so-called Western “Judeo-Christian” civilisation is really an “Islamo-Christian” one. The cultural construct “Judeo-Christian heritage” entered the English language only in the 1940s as a reaction to Nazism, and is used by the imperial elite in its “clash of civilizations” targeting Islam. A concept useful to a largely Christian empire where Jewish elites play a powerful role, but one which is rejected by serious scholars, both Christian and Jewish. Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner calls it a “secular myth favoured by people who are not really believers themselves”. Not only Ziani but American scholars such as Richard Bulliet argue for the use of “Islamo-Christian” to characterise Western civilisation.

Spain suffered several terrorist bombings in the wake of 9/11, notably the 2004 11-M bombings in Madrid, but no evidence was ever presented to suggest Al-Qaeda or Muslims were the perpetrators. Many observers point to Basque and other independence movements as the culprits, or even the Spanish police themselves as part of a false-flag operation. The reality of Spain today is not the existence of any external threat from Islam, but on the contrary, domestic unrest due to the economic crisis and political paralysis.

This gloomy situation prompted concerned young people to boycott Spain’s elections in May and — ironically — emulate their largely Muslim Arab Spring heroes by constructing tent cities in protest at the lack of meaningful democracy. Just as Egyptian revolutionaries borrowed techniques from their Western counterparts to throw off their taskmasters, so Spaniards are emulating them in turn — a true Alliance of Civilisations. European, US and Canadian youth are also impressed by the endurance, the resolution of Palestinians in the face of Israel and its supporters, a 21st-century Judeo-Christian Inquisition persecuting Muslims, not only in Palestine, but in so-called Eurabia and North America.

The Islamophobes turn the truth on its head, attacking the Alliance of Civilisations as a “one-way bridge” undermining European society. But the West’s relations with the Muslim world show just the opposite — the West has invaded and continues to try to shape the Muslim world to meet capitalism’s requirements. That Muslims stubbornly hold to their beliefs and traditions is an important contribution to the search for a way forward for a crisis-ridden world.

Britain’s riots prove that Muslims are a boon to European society, being inherently peaceful and law-abiding. Muslims from the East London Mosque and the Islamic Forum Europe played an important role in helping to fight the looting and preserve public safety. Three Muslims died in Birmingham defending shops from looters, though in the media they were merely called Asians. “When accused of terrorism we are Muslims, when killed by looters, we become Asian,” a Muslim student told Al-Jazeerah bitterly.

Rather than the “clash of civilisations” advocated by Islamophobes, those who seek social and economic justice can find inspiration in the eternal truths of Islam, looking to Europe’s own Islamo-Christian heritage — past and present — to discover an alliance of civilisations that rejects war, theft, moral degeneration and racism. This is the lesson that Ramadan offers to the West today.

The ‘Indignados’ are fully aware of the fact that their government does not represent them, whenever they congregate they shout that loud and clear. They know that only popular unity will salvage them from the train wreck, which complicit speculators and politicians have created, and as they read the financial news, they know things can only get worse. When the EU announced today that the economic crisis is no longer restricted to the Euro-zone periphery countries, people in the movement understood that this could only mean bad news for them. The same was clear when the New York Times began to speculate about a double-dip recession in the United States after reporting 60,000 job cuts in July. Or when Scott Minerd, CIO of Guggenheim Partners, said that Europe was on the brink of a major financial collapse. The ‘indignados’ understand that in the game of global speculation they are always the losers. So as financial ‘experts’ in Spain speak of the impossibility of an economic recovery, the media speculates about a possible bailout, the country’s borrowing costs surge, and Moody’s speaks of Spain as being on the verge of ‘shock’, the ‘indignados’ understand that mobilizing is their only defense.

The indignation on Spanish streets has not risen out of ignorance, when newspapers announced last week that the airport of Ciudad Real had joined the growing list of airports in Spain closing because of lack of flights, the ‘indignados’ understood that it had only been constructed during the building boom so that speculators could receive huge sums of public subsidies which will never be returned to the Spanish people. That is why they were not surprised a few days ago when the IMF recommended that the country cut salaries of public servants and raise VAT, or when Spanish Finance Minister Elena Salgado suggested that the nation might need to endure even deeper spending cuts than those approved by Parliament. Nor was there a sense of surprise when the Catalan Government announced yesterday that it would sell-off 37 of its government buildings at a loss of 42,4 million Euros. Nothing shocks the ‘indignados,’ they just hope that one day they will have enough critical mass to stop these incessant attacks from the financial and political elite, on the country’s citizenry.

A few weeks ago, Norman Birnbaum, Emeritus professor of the Law Faculty at Georgetown University, said that on both shores of the Atlantic the only thing that is clear is that something bad is going to happen; the ‘indignados’ have been witnessing this for a while. At around the same time, Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European Studies at Oxford University published an article in which he concluded that the United States and Europe are in an all out struggle towards decadence, and that Western politicians are like drunks dancing on the edge of the abyss of bankruptcy. The ‘indignados’ understand that politicians will pay for this bankruptcy by mortgaging the people’s future; the problem is that through the current political structures they have no hope of avoiding this. The governing socialist party, PSOE, has demonstrated that it responds only to the banking cartel, and although the prime minister has called for early elections in October, if the right-wing Partido Popular comes into office, things can only get worse. This was made clear in a recent Reuters interview in which senior advisers and members of the party acknowledged that presidential candidate Mariano Rajoy, will implement a “shock plan” if he wins the general elections.

Since May 15th, when ‘indignados’ camped in city squares across the country inspired by the so called ‘Arab revolts’, they have engaged in a parallel strategy consisting of nonviolent civil disobedience aimed at denouncing the injustice of the political and economic system, together with a constructive program aimed at reaching out, educating and organizing the Spanish public in an attempt to gain critical mass. Throughout this process, the ‘indignados’ have attempted to present the government with proposals for change, which the government has done everything possible to ignore. Even as recently as July 6th, the then First Deputy Prime Minister, and now socialist candidate Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, refused to receive a document from the ‘indignados’ highlighting their demands.

These past months, ‘indignados’ in every major city of Spain have endured police charges, evictions from city squares, beatings and arrests; yet, the movement has remained persistent, creative and engaged. Across the country, ‘indignados’ have organized and made decisions collectively through popular assemblies organized in city squares, they have stopped families from being evicted from repossessed homes, they have stopped the police from arresting ‘illegal’ immigrants in poor neighbourhoods, they have attempted to stop the closing of public hospitals following drastic public spending cuts, and they have organized neighborhood committees aimed at rebuilding the social fabric destroyed by the last two decades of rampant neo-liberal economics.

A recent survey conducted by the Instituto de Investigación de Mercados IPSOS, highlighted that between 6 and 8.5 million people have participated in the movement, and that 76% percent of those surveyed think that the demands made by the ‘indignados’ are reasonable and that they have a legitimate and democratic right to protest. In addition, The Economist magazine has suggested that the ‘indignados’ with their nonviolent practices are the most serious demonstrators in Europe. Yet, the Spanish government is bent on beating them instead of listening to their legitimate demands for a just economic and political system.

Last night’s beatings in Madrid represent a low point in Spain’s young representative democracy, the actions of the police are a tragic reminder of how little progress has been made institutionally, since the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet, the perseverance and commitment apparent in the nonviolent actions of the ‘indignados’, demonstrates to what extent Spanish social movements have interiorized the true meaning of democracy and are spearheading the West’s move from a stage of low-intensity democracy to one of highly intensified democratization.

In a truly Gandhian manner, a group of Spanish ‘indignados’ is currently walking from Madrid to Brussels in order to make their voices heard by the bureaucrats of the European Union. They aim to get there before the global protest they have called for to be staged on October 15th. Perhaps by the time they get to Brussels, their indignation will have rubbed-off on those in other European nations who have understood the farce of our imperialist representative democracies, and the Spanish ‘indignados’ will not find themselves camping alone in front of the buildings of the European Union.

It has been one month since the country’s Indignados (Indignant Ones) movement claimed nonviolently sixty city-squares in cities across the country, calling for economic democracy, political justice and peace. Since then, much has happened within Spanish borders, and what is happening there is clearly spreading across Europe, where we have already witnessed social movements making similar demands. We have seen the Bastille in Paris, taken nonviolently by French Indignados only to be quickly reclaimed by the country’s police force. We have observed the rise of a parallel movement in Portugal where most city squares have also been camped on by Indignados, and where only hours before the country’s general elections protestors in Lisbon were attacked and beaten by police. We have witnessed how on that same night, in Athens, Greece, 80,000 protestors congregated in the city’s main square in opposition to the country’s ‘austerity measures’, waving banners in solidarity with the Indignados of Spain and of other European countries.

Wherever you focus in Europe you hear the same cries of indignation, in some countries with more intensity than others, but the cry is becoming louder everywhere, and what seemed like a slow-motion financial collapse, is rapidly becoming an accelerated social catastrophe. Specifically in Spain, despite the political elite presenting a country recovering from the financial collapse, every day things are getting worse economically, politically, and socially, and protest, although nonviolent for the most part, could be on the verge of becoming violent unless political and economic elites begin to make some concessions.

On the economic front, Spain began June with comments from the European Commission about the potential of the country missing its economic growth and budget-deficit targets for the year; its recommendation was further economic reform. Then a report from the ratings agency, Moody’s, pointed out that the high Catalan deficit was affecting the solvency of the whole of Spain. A few days later, in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, the incoming administration of the right wing Popular Party (PP), before even taking office, had already proclaimed that the region was “totally bankrupt”. Then, the National Statistics Institute revealed that Spain’s property sales in April had been the lowest since the institute began reporting in 2007. Obviously, this stream of negative news, coupled with discussions taking place in Europe regarding a potential debt default by Greece, affected Spain’s bond sales and moved the country one step closer to a bailout, or a default followed by its subsequent debt restructuring.

On the political front, June has been equally intense.  The government has approved by decree reforms against collective bargaining agreements, despite failed negotiations with the two major trade unions in the country. It has approved the extension, indefinitely, of the country’s Spanish military mission in Libya, and has announced the creation of a new NATO operations centre, which will control Spanish airspace and will help in missions coordinated from Southern Europe.

In regards to the social front, as of the first of June, the government warned that the Indignados could not remain camped on city squares for much longer. Then, using a visit from Tony Blair, in which Blair said, “demonstrators should be heard but not allowed to govern”, Spain’s prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, addressed the request for electoral reform by the Indignados, by telling them this could only be possible through consensus from all political parties – a cowardly way of responding without complying.

In response to these numerous events, commissions of the Indignados from squares across the country met in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, to discuss the future of the movement. Through a long process of popular assembly, they agreed to three important actions: First, to boycott the country’s Town Halls as the new governments were sworn in following the recent regional and local elections; second, to abandon city squares, and move their social action into city neighbourhoods – in an attempt to broaden the movement’s involvement with the rest of the citizenry; and third, to continue organizing protests on specific dates focused on particular issues – including a firm commitment to a global protest of Indignados on October 15th.

The movement’s first nationwide coordinated initiative since the spontaneous movement mushroomed on May 15th, the boycott of Town Halls, was well represented over the weekend by Indignados across Spain. Demonstrators across the country blocked entrances to Town Halls, climbed onto the balconies, blocked official cars from exiting car parks, disturbed investiture sessions with incriminating speeches, and followed politicians across cities as they celebrated their victories, shouting to them, “shame on you!”

Sadly, the police force was equally mobilized. In Valencia, where the new government has ten of its members including its president facing corruption charges, police charged at demonstrators injuring twelve and arresting five. The vice president of Spain, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, was forced to cancel a planned trip to the city in order to avoid further protests. In the city of Santiago de Compostela police also attacked the protestors. In the city of Madrid, police batons hit them. In the city of Salamanca five Indignados were injured. In the city of Burgos two were arrested. In the city of Castellón, they were violently dispersed. In the city of Vigo, they were also dispersed; and, in the city of Palma de Mallorca, three were arrested. Following the numerous arrests across the country, spontaneous demonstrations followed in front of police headquarters demanding the prompt release of those detained. Most protestors where released on bail.

As things stand in Spain right now, according to a survey published by newspaper El Pais, there exists wide support (81%) amidst the Spanish population for the movement. In fact, in addition to public intellectuals such as Vicent Navarro, Arcadi Oliveras, or Eduardo Galeano giving them support, political figures such as Santiago Carrillo, who was the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party during the country’s transition to democracy – a key voice throughout the transition – and Cayo Lara, the coordinator for the third largest political party in Spain, Izquierda Unida, have both aligned with the movement’s views. Even Rosalía Mera, who is Spain’s richest woman according to Forbes Magazine, has expressed public support for the Indignados.

It seems clear, when one has an in-depth look into current events unfolding in Spain, that these protests have hit a nerve throughout Spanish society, and although the movement is practicing a form of nonviolent direct democracy which is not familiar to most Spaniards (indeed to the majority of citizens in Western style democracies), the present Spanish political, social, and economic climate is beginning to be shaped, at least partially, by its cries of indignation. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight, that unless economic and political elites begin to listen and engage in some serious dialogue with the Indignados instead of sending out the police force to hit them on the head, the nonviolent stance of the majority of protestors could quickly turn into a violent response to sustained police brutality. After all, it is important to remember that this is a one-month-old spontaneous and heterogeneous movement, which is only now beginning to organize and present specific demands.

The nonviolent protestors on Spanish streets are not Gandhi’s exemplary well-trained and disciplined nonviolent peacemakers. These protestors have not made pledges of nonviolence or have endured months of rigorous nonviolence training in Gandhian Ashrams. Whether the Indignados can refrain from violence as the police continue to beat them, we will only learn as events unfold. However, if the country’s elites have any dignity left, they will not continue testing their endurance and will instead begin a credible process of reform which examines and addresses all of their demands. At the time of writing, Artur Mas, the President of the Generalitat (the government of the Catalan autonomous region) was forced to arrive to parliament in a police helicopter, as thousands of Indignados blocked the entrance in an attempt to boycott the region’s budget approval. They were shouting: “You do not represent us!” The parliamentary session began with only half of the representatives able to enter the building.

The ‘talk’, in most cases, has been good; in some cases, very good. ‘Professional’ politicians, in the worst sense of the term, have been sweet talking the protests first and foremost because the proximity of elections gave them no other choice, at least if they didn’t want to put their own interests in danger. Who would have been brave enough to send the police in to vacate the encampments by force, once the protesters’ declarations and placards were plastered all over most dailies and newspapers in the world?

A student encampment is as good an occasion as any for those who have been down on their luck, sleeping for years on nothing but a mattress and a box spring, to chance a dream. High-level decision makers in the PSOE [the ruling Socialist Workers Party] have another dream of the people as a stupid bunch, announcing with their infinite arrogance on TV that they ‘understand’ the people’s outrage, hoping to lay the crisis to rest just like that—a crisis which, we might add, miraculously does not affect politicians or their banker friends. We could say that while it is one thing to preach democracy in the Libyan desert or in the mountains of Afghanistan, it is an entirely different matter to actually try to build it up in the streets of Spain.

The PP, [Popular Party, conservative opposition] for its part, dreams of an even stupider populace which has finally come to appreciate the many virtues of its leaders and the strength of its political program—supposedly this would lead the party to victory in the elections with little else but promises of a good, sound future for all. It’s as if they can’t even wait for the PSOE to finish doing their dirty work (Zapatero just announced that the plan is to continue using the same exact measures to combat the crisis as before) or for it to sink even deeper before they start shouting about the upcoming general elections.

The only thing that would make the PP’s politics slightly different when the PSOE does eventually go down the tubes would be appointing a bishop to the head of the Ministry of Education and a general to the Ministry of Defense.

On the other side of the spectrum, true leftists dream and hope that the Arab Spring is being translated into the European context and that Spain will spearhead the movement.

But this remains to be seen. At the moment, the ‘outrage’ has not had any short-term results, or rather, it has not brought votes towards the left, or even towards a massive abstention. Nor does it seem as if it is going to have long-term effects for various reasons; one in particular is the most fundamental that we can place our hopes in: the victory of Bildu.¹

The votes of the ‘indignados’ were cast for the PP, or as blank votes, which brings one to ask oneself once again if it is possible to transform a political situation without political consciousness or political action, instead basing everything on indignation alone.

Of course folks are outraged (even the PSOE admits that). But that is not even close to enough to make those responsible for a situation that benefits themselves to change it so that it benefits everyone else, no matter how clearly or collectively this outrage is expressed in the encampments or the protests. The PP adores the ‘indignados’, and so on the night of the elections Rajoy gave “his thanks to everyone, especially to PSOE voters who’ve now placed their faith in the PP”.

Aside from this lover’s spat between the PP and PSOE, the Bildu movement—older than that of the ‘indignados’, although it does not show this off in its political activity—has truly taught us a lesson in how to transform that fundamental reality that causes indignation in the first place: with political consciousness and, consequently, organized action.

There are other examples, also with a long and storied histories, that have had success in their respective environments and have something to show for themselves, such as Marinaleda.²

It seems that certain young people, and others who aren’t so young, have a certain aversion (maybe even fear) of organized politics. That they feel burned by ‘traditional’ political parties—fed up with their corruption, nepotism, simony—is nothing strange, it’s natural. But without much more than this, the encampments can only plant the seeds for something else. They cannot by themselves be a solution. They would best be served by studying these other examples of people who fight constantly and with passion for change, each with different means.

In terms of concrete action, in the kinds of dictatorships that are (at least on the surface) entrenched in Arab countries, the mere occupation of public plazas in various cities itself constitutes a challenge to political power, because it is a direct attack on the ability to control people. But in (what is at least on the surface) a democracy, power doesn’t tremble when people limit themselves to pouring out into the streets for a few hours without something a little more to push it.

Moreover, if power can negotiate the situation skillfully, as it has in the Puerta del Sol and other plazas (except at the beginning of it all, when it slipped up by trying to repress the crowds), the situation will exhaust itself on its own. It seems that one must come face to face with non-dictatorial power by other means, with actions that make it truly pay a high price.

Indignation, at first a positive thing, isn’t of itself a political attitude, much less a program. It is simply a human response to abuse, which is not going to end without more ‘work’—and certainly more sacrifice—from the ‘indignados’.

Once again, Bildu is an example. In the wake of the persecution it faced it has managed to come out victorious. Certainly something of a surprise for most, most important in this is that it still overcame everything in its path.

Fortunately, here one does not need to put one’s life in such danger as has been the case in the Arab world, but that doesn’t mean power (whether it be the PSOE’s or the PP’s) will concede to anything that doesn’t suit it nicely. Each one is so absorbed in their own melodrama—one in how not to lose more votes and the other how to gain more—that they are barely even paying attention to the indignados.

For the good of democracy, justice, liberty, and socialism, let us hope that this is the indignados’ hour to shine. But it won’t be so by their indignation alone, or by their youth, or even their mere unemployment, but by an increased awareness of their lot and by working to change it in their favor, alongside all of those who suffer under the heel of the political-corporate democratic alliance.

1. Bildu is a recently formed leftist-nationalist [Basque] coalition, which the Spanish state has been investigating for some time now for potential links with the terrorist organization ETA. Of course, during its formation, the party urged all of its candidates on its roster to put in writing their rejection of violence as a political tool. It has garnered a number of votes in the May 22nd municipal elections, and managed to achieve a majority in the government of San Sebastián – Donostia.
2. Marinaleda is a municipality in the Seville province which has a long history of worker’s struggle. Read Marinaleda (Seville, Spain): a step ahead on the road to Utopia.

Just twenty-four hours after Spain’s largest telecom company, Telefonica, announced a new round of layoffs affecting 8500 people, 25% of the work force, and as the G8 is meeting in Deauville, France, to discuss amongst other things the discontent sweeping across Europe, the Catalan police force – the Mossos d’Esquadra – following orders from the Town Hall’s new Catalan Nationalist Party (CiU) government, surrounded the nonviolent citizens camped at the Plaza Cataluña in Barcelona’s city centre. Armed with full riot gear, batons and machine-guns with rubber bullets, the police kettled in the protestors, making it impossible for them to leave or others to enter.

With the excuse of cleaning up the square for safety reasons, in preparation for tomorrow’s Champions League soccer final between Barcelona and Manchester United, the city government called for the dispersal of the crowds in order to allow for clean up teams to enter. Although this was the official stance, it soon became apparent that cleaning garbage from the square was not the true intent, and that the real aim of the operation was to seize computers, printers and documents from the movement’s steering committees, and to put an end to this popular uprising which is posing a threat to the country’s political and economic elites.

As soon as the police surrounded the crowds and the news aired on local television stations and radios, citizens from across the city began to leave their work places and made their way to the square in order to show their solidarity with those being harassed by the police. The scene they encountered resembled one of Gandhi’s legendary acts of civil disobedience – the demonstrators sitting on the floor, in silence, with their legs crossed and hands up in the air; symbolizing their defiance to the oppressive and brutal nature of this unannounced police action.

Unlike during pre-election campaigning time, eleven days ago, when the 15M Movement began to congregate in city squares across the country with shouts of indignation, this time the police did not hesitate, the orders where clear. The police began to point their guns at those outside the square that were shouting “This is our democracy”, and one by one they began to pull those sitting down inside the square – beating them with their batons. I have just heard that economics professor Arcadi Oliveras (Spain’s Noam Chomsky), was amongst those on the receiving end of the police’s indiscriminate use of batons.

At the time of writing, thousands of citizens are making their way to the square in Barcelona, and following two arrests and 99 injured, around 5000 protestors have already reclaimed the city square. In Madrid Esperanza Aguirre, who presides over the autonomous region and who also heads Madrid’s Partido Popular, has asked the ministry of the Interior to evict the protestors at the Puerta del Sol. On their part, the protestors at Madrid’s plaza have sent messages of solidarity to those being attacked in Barcelona. The police force in the city of Lerida has also evicted the crowds camped in the city square using water canons, and two protesters have been arrested. While in the city of Granada, the town hall is in negotiations with the central government about how to empty the city’s square.

The ambiance in Barcelona’s plaza is now jovial, once the city showed its support to the protestors, the police was forced to leave, and despite the fact that they have confiscated many laptops and pamphlets, and have destroyed tents and equipment, which the protestors have been using for their popular assemblies, people intend to stay. A large banner in the middle of the square reads in Spanish: “You have cleaned up our exhaustion and now we are back”

Despite the fact that the political elites in Spain, in this new era of right-wing dominance are showing their mass use of force, they have encountered a well-organized nonviolent movement. If the movement holds to its principles, and other European countries join in the struggle, it will be the European Union which will be forced to restrain this police brutality, and which will eventually have to make concessions to this democratic citizens fighting non-violently for change. If the movement spreads, as many signs already seem to indicate, European political and economic elites will have to decide between reform and revolution.

In Spain, the elections have come and gone, with the squares full of thousands of people continuing with their shouts of indignation, but so far they have not been heard. The political party PSOE of Zapatero’s ruling socialist government has taken a beating, but the formal democracy in which we live has not changed, and the centre-right Partido Popular has taken control of much of the country. What this means, according to most market analysts, is that as the new administrations take control of regional and local governments, previously undeclared debt will surface making Spain’s economic reality much more dire than what has been estimated to date.

The post-election week has already begun as a sober reminder of the economic tsunami engulfing the country. The bond market has already punished Spain for the ‘indignados’ movement and for the election defeat of the ruling party. The stock market has also reflected doubts about the country’s austerity measures, and the privatization of National corporations has continued with the announcement of the privatizing of the National lottery and a couple of the country’s airports. In addition, the Popular Party (PP) has made repeated calls for an early general election in which they are poised to win. Therefore, it is not naïve to state that so far the popular uprising has helped consolidate the centre-right as the people’s choice for spearheading the country’s return to economic growth – an economic growth which according to the PP’s political program will be achieved by cutting corporate taxes, reducing public spending, easing the firing of workers, bailing out failing banks, making it harder for immigrants to stay in the country, and augmenting the securitization of Spain in order to create a stable investment environment.

In essence, the choice made by those who opted to vote, reflects the opposite solution to what is being discussed by people in the squares. This is the unpleasant reality that those in city squares must reflect upon, if their demands are to be heard by the rest of the population. The ‘indignados’ want to be heard; now it is time for them to listen to the rest of the country in order to propose a truly constructive program with which the majority of the population can identify – we must move from this moment of indignation to a post-indignation space in which ‘responsibility’ becomes the mantra citizens embrace.

I have personally camped in the city squares and listened to the proposals made by those committee’s that have already hijacked the movement. What started as a call for electoral reform and the punishing of political and economic corruption – call that indeed attracted thousands of people to the city squares – has quickly metamorphosed into some kind of Bolshevik-like political project led by the country’s squatter movement. Although to those observing from the outside the calls for nonviolence and participatory democracy coming from the microphones of the committees seem to point to a truly revolutionary change, a close look from within the squares, reveals that those calls are as empty as the calls for change we are used to hearing from the country’s politicians.

It is my opinion, that this hijacking of a truly democratic uprising – inspired by a general indignation and glued together through solidarity – has already caused great damage to this spontaneous call for change. Of course it is difficult to put forth clear proposals when thousands of people find themselves on the streets, it is obvious, that in such situations groups with organizing capacity are going to take charge in the steering of the movement, but just because a group has the ability to organize meals, public toilets, and speaking engagements in a public square, it does not mean it has the ability to lead over the discontent of a mass of people. Sadly, those who called for the squares to be filled, do not seem to understand this, and their mistake, I think has already begun to demobilize those whose indignation is not only aimed at the actions of politicians and bankers, but is also aimed at the actions of the committees taking control of the squares. Hopefully, these committees will realize that the best option for the movement today, is for them to turn the microphones away from themselves, and hand them down, to those filling the squares asking for some form of real democracy.

Unless one thinks that the calls of indignation are going to be met by a centre-right government, it seems apparent that indignation is not salvaging Spain. Therefore, if we – the people in the squares – are to gain true democracy while avoiding the International Monetary Fund from ‘salvaging’ our country through a Greek style bailout and its subsequent debt restructuring, we must act responsibly and acknowledge that we need the majority of the country to rally behind our calls for change. This only seems possible, once we critique our own actions, correct our mistakes, and stop proposing utopian ideals through undemocratic means, and instead offer real solutions through truly participatory democracy.

Amidst local and regional election campaigns, with the banners of the different political parties plastered across the country’s streets, people are saying ‘enough!’ Disillusioned youth, unemployed, pensioners, students, immigrants and other disenfranchised groups have emulated their brothers in the Arab world and are now demanding a voice – demanding an opportunity to live with dignity.

As the country continues to explode economically, with unemployment growing incessantly – one in two young people unemployed across many of the country’s regions. With many in the crumbling middle class on the verge of losing their homes while bankers profit from their loss and the government uses citizen taxes to expand the military industrial complex by going off to war; the people have grasped that they only have each other if they are to rise from the debris of the militarized political and economic nightmare in which they have found themselves.

Spain is finally re-embracing its radical past, its popular movements, its anarcho-syndicalist traditions and its republican dreams. Crushed by Generalissimo Francisco Franco seventy years ago, it seemed that Spanish popular culture would never recover from the void left by a rightwing dictatorship, which exterminated anyone with a dissenting voice; but the 15th of May 2011, is the reminder to those in power that Spanish direct democracy is still alive and has finally awaken.

In the 1970’s a transition through pact, transformed Spain’s totalitarian structures into a representative democracy in which all the economic structures remained intact. For the highly illiterate generations of the time, marred in the reality of a poverty-stricken country, the concessions made by the country’s elite seemed something worth celebrating. Nevertheless, as the decades passed, the state-owned corporations were privatized robbing the nation of its collective wealth, and the political scene crystallized into a pseudo-democracy in which two large parties PP and PSOE marginalized truly democratic alternatives. As this neoliberal political project materialized, the discontent begun to resurface, but the fear mongers, Spain’s baby-boomers who had once fought for democracy, were quick to remind the youth of the dangers of rebellion. For many decades in Spain, the mantra was, ‘it is better to live as we are than to go back to the totalitarianism of the past, and if you shake the system too much, it will take away our hard-earned rights’. So the youth remained silent, fearful of what could happen if they spoke, and the baby-boomers in their content blamed the youth for their indifference. According to them, it was the youth unwilling to work, which were bringing the country to its knees. But the youth have stopped this blame game, and aware of the true risks to their future are finally enticing the whole country to mobilize.

A failed European project, with its borders quickly being reinstated, a collapsing Euro currency, and the examples of Greece, Portugal and Ireland are the reminders to those on the streets of what it is they are fighting to disassociate themselves from, and of the freedoms they are working towards. The economic and political project of the country’s elite has destroyed the economic dreams of whole generations of naïve and apathetic Spaniards; it has left the country in the hands of bond speculators and central bankers, and Spaniards will have to pay that price. Nevertheless, the debt accumulated by the Spanish family, has also earned it the education with which it can understand what is going on, and through it Spanish people will liberate themselves from the tyranny of their government.

What has begun in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and has been echoed in fifty-two cities across the country is the crystallization of a popular movement for freedom, which has no intention of fading away. The people have no choice, either they take city squares as symbols of their struggle, or their message is never heard. The government knows this and that is why it has quickly responded by trying to disperse the crowds with its repressive police force, but following some arrests, the people are back with more strength.

A silent revolution has begun in Spain, a nonviolent revolution which seeks democracy through democratic means, justice through just means, and peace through peaceful means has finally captivated the imagination of the Spanish people, and now there is no turning back. The challenge ahead will be in keeping the collective spirit nonviolent as the police force does everything in its power to disintegrate the movement into a violent chaos that can justify its repression. The popular movement will also have to be alert as the bond speculators threaten the country with economic sanctions in order to scare the population into submission, and a constructive program will have to be articulated so that the movement can continue to function whilst providing sustainable alternatives for a different Spain.

Hopefully an articulate steering committee will flourish soon from amongst the crowds, which is capable of making clear and viable demands that grab the imagination of the country and force the political elite to comply. These are delicate times in Spain, if this spontaneous nonviolent movement succeeds, Spain may welcome a brighter future, if it fails, I fear violence will become the only option for those in pain. What those outside of the country can do for Spain is to echo the shouts of indignation coming from the country’s streets. So far both mainstream and progressive international media channels have opted for silence. Let us hope this silence breaks.