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.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

The Dangers of Digital Diplomacy

The Senate report, “Latin American Governments Need to ‘Friend’ Social Media and Technology” was written at the request of U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) in order to assess the U.S. Department of State’s use of digital diplomacy.

“Despite Latin America’s broad social and economic progress, many countries in the region still face challenges to democracy similar to those recently seen in the Middle East,” wrote Lugar in the introduction to the report. “In the extreme cases, countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua are led by authoritarian leaders who curtail civil and political freedoms.”

The report urges improving internet infrastructure in the region, along with expanding the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter as essential in order to advance Washington’s foreign policy interests. This is also identified as a way to reassert Washington’s influence in a part of the world where it has been perceived to be waning since the Bush Administration and the subsequent rise of center-left governments in the region.

“In particular, the characteristics of Latin American social media use and engagement of connectivity resources…indicate that this area could be primed for substantial positive change in a manner similar in nature, if not in process, to that recently observed in the Middle East,” the report states.

The right-leaning journal Americas Quarterly praises this “smart idea” calling it “an innovative strategy to advance U.S. goals”, one of them being the need to “ramp up our data collection and research on the impact of social media and technology on fostering democracy in the region, particularly Venezuela.”

This all falls under what has been dubbed 21st Century Statecraft, the brainchild of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate re-branding—swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy—a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism,” explains the New York Times in a July 2010 article.

Described as a “marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department,” Washington has turned to “Software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech C.E.O.’s…to think of unconventional ways to shore up democracy and spur development” abroad.

“On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does,” said Clinton in a speech on internet freedom in January 2010.

In August 2011 the Washington Post reported findings by the Lowy Institute for International Policy which show that U.S. State Department officials now operate some 230 Facebook accounts, 80 Twitter feeds, 55 YouTube channels and 40 pages on Flickr.

But Judith McHale, former under secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department, gave a more honest assessment in March 2011 of what’s driving the State Department’s new initiative, stripped of the flowery and misleading language of freedom and democracy.

“New media and connective technologies enhance our ability to listen…Social media provides new ways for us to keep our ear to the ground,” said McHale. “Of course, we are not interested in developing social media platforms for the sake of having them. We are interested in applying social media to promote our strategic objectives in the Americas.”

But as history has shown, Washington’s strategic interests are often antithetical to freedom and human rights. And it is naïve to think that the State Department would be conducting this form of diplomacy in “a principled and regime-neutral fashion,” as intellectual apologists like Anne-Marie Slaughter may profess. And in Latin America, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries are undoubtedly in Washington’s cross-hairs.

During a June 30, 2011 Senate hearing,“The State of Democracy in the Americas”, Senator Lugar asked Roberta Jacobson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of the Western Hemisphere at the time, to name programs specifically targeting ALBA countries. Jackson noted in her answer that the “Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has programs that support media training in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador; these programs address the use and impact of social media, along with traditional topics such as independent journalism, investigative reporting, and overcoming self-censorship.”

All of these countries have democratically-elected governments, and while they all are struggling in varying ways to build stronger democratic institutions and to translate democratic rhetoric into functioning policy, Washington’s meddling in internal affairs through 21st Century Statecraft is dangerous for social movements and democratic activists.

The Social Networking Counterinsurgency

On February 3, 2011 the Senate held a hearing examining US intelligence agencies’ alleged lack of anticipation of the uprisings in Egypt. Afterwards, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said “she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government,” the Washington Post reported. The CIA has an Open Source Center, where analysts based in a headquarters in an undisclosed location in Virginia, along with analysts in working in U.S. Embassies (“to get a step closer to their subjects”) throughout the world monitor as many as millions of tweets per day, along with Facebook updates and other open source media outlets.

Wired Magazine reported in July that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. Wired’s Adam Rawnsley points out:

It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself…SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what.

Furthermore, the military solicited contracts for the development of software to create fake Facebook personas, to be “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent,” the Raw Story reported in February. Private security contractor HB Gary has already been exposed for doing such a thing on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce as a way to “infiltrate left-leaning groups” in the country, as ThinkProgress revealed last year courtesy of 75,000 private company emails provided by the hactivst group Anonymous.

These strategies are particularly cynical given the following passage from Lugar’s Senate report:

Collaborators of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently hacked the Twitter accounts of opposition activists. Staff strongly believes that this example indicates how policy needs to take into consideration the extent repressive governments will take to silence democratic voices using this technology.

What officials seem to be saying is: never-mind what happens in this country. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring “social media sites, blogs, and forums throughout the world” isn’t important. And while US corporations are selling surveillance systems to repressive regimes, that’s just the free-market supply and demand economics at work.

And even if, “What elevated the [Occupy Wall Street] activism to a national and global movement, though, was the sophisticated and widespread use of social media,” as Betty Yu, national organizer at the Center for Media Justice, wrote last month, these same tools can, and are, being used to monitor, undermine and co-opt these and similar movements.

So if Washington approaches Latin American governments with aid for internet infrastructure and training, citizens and governments should approach this as a very loaded Trojan Horse.

If they get in the way of civilization’s quest for petroleum, lumber, tin, zinc, copper, whatever, they must be killed wholesale, or one by one, as was accomplished by Chris Kyle, currently touring bookstores to promote his American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. Kyle killed 255 “savages,” his term, and can stand before God with a clear conscience, he told Bill O’Reilly, because he was saving American lives. FOX being FOX, the question of why Kyle was in Iraq in the first place was not probed.

With his tunnel vision specialty, teamwork ethics and preoccupation with numbers, Kyle is the quintessential tool in civilization’s machinery. Tasked with long-distance, targeted killing, he performed outstandingly, and is proud of his feats, all carefully quantified. His 160 Pentagon-confirmed kills wipe out the previous American record of 109, held by Delbert F. Waldron, not to mention the relatively puny 93 of Carlos Hathcock. Kyle’s longest shot was 2,100 yards. Though impressively long, yes, very long, it’s dwarfed by the 2,700 yards recorded by one Horse Craig Harrison, a Brit.

Empire is civilization’s greatest efflorescence and final aim. With empire comes the tallest, biggest and longest of everything. Citizens of empire, down to the lowest cog, bathe themselves daily with numbers as a kind of self-congratulation. Counting themselves hoarse to prove that they are, in fact, content, they measure their achievement and happiness with Dow and Nasdaq indexes, inches on flat-screen TVs, cars sold, runs and touchdowns scored by sport heroes, and savages killed by even more heroes. A large number denoting anything, even debt, cheers up denizens of an empire since it is proof of their gigantism. Empires compete to see who can piss the longest and furthest, over the most continents.

What a contrast this is to a primitive nomad, who sees properties as a burden, and thus does not care to count hardly anything. The most extreme example of this is another Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose language includes no cardinal numbers at all. They simply can’t count, and have no interest in doing so. American scholar Daniel Everett spent an hour each night for eight months trying to teach them numbers in Portuguese, with zero success, “It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board.”

Though living on a finite planet, the subjects of empire are indoctrinated into the religion of infinite growth, with anything short of that seen as a major disaster. With their gross appetites, they cannot conceive of a no-growth existence, though that was the economy of man for thousands of years. During the age of fossil fuels, now winding down, this infinite growth formula can appear sane and sustainable, but as oil and gas go scarce, its murderous and suicidal nature will become ever starker, like an innocent girl being burnt at the stake.

Most of the planet must slave and starve, so the anointed few can consume, yet even these lucky buyers must themselves slave, commute long hours and pop  uppers or downers nonstop to afford that Ipod, Ipad and Xbox. Speaking of which, here’s a still relevant insight from Ben Franklin:

Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.

— from his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America

With social networking, who needs face-to-face conversations? Slaves to bogus needs and virtual thrills, we have become estranged from the real, with our savage instincts, suppressed, flaring up as conceits or pathologies. Often they explode overseas, as the T-shirt says: TRAVEL TO EXOTIC LANDS, MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE THEN KILL THEM.

In an advanced civilization, a nomadic existence, with its hunting pack, can only be approximated in a war, but instead of hunting animals for subsistence, our boys are gunning down people who are merely trying to prevent us from exploiting and humiliating them. With such a dubious reason to kill or be killed, it’s not surprising that many of these soldiers come back home only to kill themselves.

As I write this, the US is encircling, harassing and sabotaging Iran, yet few Americans seem alarmed that for the sake of oil, again, and that increasingly elusive economic growth, their leaders may kill millions and wreck this earth even further, but as their empire convulses and collapses, most Americans will find themselves reduced to the level of those they’ve been annihilating. They will discover that they, too, are just collateral savages.

Working with One of Pinochet’s Victims

Owing to the four years I worked with one of his torture victims in my Seattle practice, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 was a profoundly moving and personal event. The Spanish extradition order issued by Judge Baltasar Garzon heralded in a new era in international justice. Primary to 1998, deposed dictators like Batista, the Shah of Iran, and Fernando Marcos could look forward to a luxurious and secure retirement, thanks to the American military and intelligence sponsors who brought them to power. The US refuses to recognize International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction over war crimes committed by Americans or foreign dictators they support. Although they have no problem facilitating the transport of political enemies to the Hague, for example Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (who many believe was innocent), no American will ever stand trial at the ICC for crimes against humanity.

Prior to the 1973 CIA coup that overturned Chile’s democratically elected government (and brought Pinochet to power), Father X taught literature at a Catholic university in Santiago. Except for being antifascist, Father X was totally apolitical. I suspect Pinochet’s military regime arrested and imprisoned him more to set an example than to eliminate one of their adversaries, In one important respect, all intellectuals are enemies in a totalitarian regime. The desire to be well-informed and engage in critical thinking can be very dangerous in a regime that demands total conformity.

Destroying a Man Psychologically

The only scars Father X ever showed me were on his forearms. On both arms the scar tissue was full thickness, indicating the muscle had been cut to the bone. The scars ran from the decubitus (inner elbow) to his wrist. The impact of the psychological pain his captors inflicted was far more damaging. Father X was arrested along with all his fellow priests from his university. Then he was forced to listen as, one by one, they were tortured and killed. His jailers threatened him on a daily basis, “Tomorrow we’re coming to kill you, Father.” To the best of his knowledge, all the other priests were murdered. Mysteriously, one year after his arrest, he was released. Escaping into Argentina, after four years he was granted refugee status in the US.

Sentenced to Life in the US

Though technically he had his “freedom” in the US and was safe from overt political persecution, Father X was deprived of both his livelihood and the Chilean culture that had been the fabric of his life. Father X had always viewed American culture as shallow and materialistic. In his mind, the US was a country where people were stripped of cultural identity and moral values to get them to spend money and accumulate possessions. He had no illusions about the role the US government had played in creating and supporting Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. However Argentina was also ruled by a US-appointed dictator, and Father X had no other options. His new life in the US was just another sentence – one that offered no chance of reprieve, short of natural death or suicide.

The American Catholic church had no comparable academic positions to offer him, and he had no experience of parish work. The best the Church could offer was help in applying for Supplemental Security Income (a Social Security program for disabled people with no work history). The latter provides an extremely meager and insecure income and lifestyle. This was especially true after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Father X routinely received letters that his benefits were about to be canceled because of his immigration status.

Judge Garzon and the Bush 6

Although Judge Garzon is most famous for ordering Pinochet arrested, he also indicted Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, as well as issuing an order for British authorities to detain Henry Kissinger for questioning. In 2009, he attempted to indict six former Bush officials for crimes against humanity. The Bush 6 were the legal team who authorized Bush’s use of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere. They included Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, Douglas Feith (Undersecretary of Defense for Policy), William Hayne (Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief Counsel), Jay Bybee (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel), and David Addington (Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff). Wikileaks cables released last year reveal the heavy handed role the Obama administration in played in having Garzon removed from the Bush 6 case and its eventual dismissal.

The December 2010 Wikileaks Cables

The cables also reveal that the US pressured the Spanish government to force Garzon to drop his investigation into the death of a Spanish reporter who was killed by US shelling in Baghdad, into allegations by Spanish Guantanamo detainees of being tortured and into the use of Spanish bases for CIA “rendition” flights (in which the CIA kidnapped foreign nationals and transported them to prisons in countries that openly practiced torture).¹
Prior to Garzon’s May 2010 suspension on so-called “corruption” charges, he was an examining magistrate for the Audencia National, Spain’s central criminal court. He was appointed in 1998 and was responsible for investigating Spain’s most important “organized” crime cases, especially those involving terrorism, criminal syndicates, state corruption and money laundering.

Inquisitorial Justice

The “inquisitorial” legal system used in France and Spain is very different from the adversarial system used in the US, Britain and other former British colonies. In an inquisitorial system, the court actively investigates the facts of a case. In an adversarial system, the court merely functions as an impartial referee, leaving it to the prosecution and defense to collect and present evidence. Inquisitorial justice is based on “civil” or “natural” law. This holds that legislation based on inherent rights and binding rules of behavior is the source of law. An adversarial system is based on “common law.” The latter regards prior judicial precedent (i.e. previous court rulings) as the main source of judicial law.

In Spain the role of an examining magistrate like Garzon is merely to gather facts, not to prosecute or make legal findings. Once a case is referred for prosecution, another judge oversees the trial and makes judicial findings.

Going After the Extreme Right – and Left

Some of Garzon’s more famous investigations include those of Spanish drug traffickers working with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, violent extremists belonging to the Basque separatist movement ETA, and an interior minister who oversaw Spain’s “dirty war” against ETA (involving right wing vigilantes and mercenaries who engaged in extrajudicial killings and other atrocities). In 1999 he helped convict the Mayor of Marbella for corruption.

Spanish law, which recognizes universal jurisdiction, allows an examining magistrate to charge and investigate a war criminal from another country, provided their own country chooses not to charge them. This is based on the principle that crimes against humanity warrant prosecution, even when they occur outside the national boundaries of the country exercising judicial authority. Because genocide, torture, and similar abuses of state power, are crimes against all, many jurists argue that it’s wrong to limit their prosecution to national boundaries. Especially as countries like the US, which refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court, are unlikely to charge their own leaders with crimes against humanity.

Garzon’s indictment of Pinochet was the first high profile example of universal jurisdiction. His international cases include genocide charges he filed against Argentine military officers for their activities during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, resulting in the successful prosecution of two of them.

The Charges Against Garzon

Judge Baltasar Garzon himself faces three charges. On reviewing the charges, the Spanish Supreme Court has ruled he must face trial on all of them. The first alleges that he dismissed a tax evasion case against the director of Banco Santander, in return for a 302,000 euro donation to fund human rights classes Garzon taught at the Juan Carlos I Center at the University of New York in 2005-2006. Although no funds went to Garzon personally, the prosecution has a letter he signed requesting the donation from the bank’s chairman Emilio Botin. The evidence suggests the judge may be guilty of a conflict of interest. Although he took the case against Santander more than a year after Biotin made the donation, strictly speaking he should have stepped aside to allow another judge to oversee the investigation. In the US, judicial conflict of interest charges occasionally result in censure, but are more likely to be ignored.²

The second charge relates to violating attorney-client privilege by ordering “illegal” phone taps between defendants (top politicians of the opposition party) and their lawyers. Garzon insists the taps were necessary because the attorneys were serving as financial messengers in a criminal scheme.

Investigating Crimes against Humanity: Illegal under Spanish Law

The third and most serious charge is that Garzon exceeded his authority in investigating crimes against humanity by the brutal Franco regime, in violation of Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law. If found guilty, Garzon could be disqualified from the bench for 20 years. His supporters find it ironic that he has stood up to multiple death threats from Colombian and Spanish drug dealers, Basque and Islamic terrorists, and organized crime figures – only to be blind-sided by archaic legislation considered illegal under international law.

The charge stems from an order Garzon issued, at the request of families, to exhume the remains of victims assassinated and/or disappeared by the Franco regime. Garzon and the more than two hundred international organizations that condemn the prosecution against him, contend that international law supersedes a national amnesty law in dealing with crimes against humanity. In 2008 the UN Committee on Human Rights advised Spain to repeal the 1977 Amnesty Law. Likewise the European Tribunal of Human Rights has warned that a guilty verdict on this charge will result in Spain’s suspension.

Although Garzon was suspended from his official duties in May 2010, the Spanish authorities allowed him to work as a consultant to the International Criminal Court in La Hague for six months been May and November 2010. In October 2010, an Argentine judge successfully petitioned Spain to be allowed to investigate Franco regime crimes that Garzon was barred from pursuing.

Recognizing and Supporting Moral Courage

I shouldn’t have to make the case why all Americans, across the political spectrum, should support courageous judges like Garzon. They take enormous personal risks to take a stand against US officials who further their political interests by committing crimes against humanity. Without brave individuals like Baltasar Garzon, genuine political change would be impossible. Join the Support Baltasar Garzon Facebook page.

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2. See a, b, and c.

“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.

In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to “the right” to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ‘civilizing mission’. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences.

This essay will concentrate on analyzing contemporary US imperialist ideological arguments for legitimizing wars and sanctions to sustain dominance.

Contextualizing Imperial Ideology

Imperialist propaganda varies according to whether it is directed against a competitor for global power, or whether as a justification for applying sanctions, or engaging in open warfare against a local or regional socio-political adversary.

With regard to established imperialist (Europe) or rising world economic competitors (China), US imperialist propaganda varies over time. Early in the 19th century, Washington proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine”, denouncing European efforts to colonize Latin America, privileging its own imperial designs in that region. In the 20th century when the US imperial policymakers were displacing Europe from prime resource based colonies in the Middle East and Africa, it played on several themes. It condemned ‘colonial forms of domination’ and promoted ‘neo-colonial’ transitions that ended European monopolies and facilitated US multi-national corporate penetration. This was clearly evident during and after World War 2, in the Middle East petrol-countries.

During the 1950s as the US assumed imperial primacy and radical anti-colonial nationalism came to the fore, Washington forged alliances with the declining colonial power to combat a common enemy and to prop up post-colonial powers to combat a common enemy. Even with the post-World War II economic recovery, growth and unification of Europe, it still works in tandem and under US leadership in militarily repressing nationalist insurgencies and regimes. When conflicts and competition occur, between US and European regimes, banks and enterprises, the mass media of each region publish “investigatory findings” highlighting the frauds and malfeasance of its competitors — and US regulatory agencies levy heavy fines on their European counterparts, overlooking similar practices by Wall Street financial firms.

In recent times the rising tide of militarist imperialism and colonial wars fueled by Israeli proxies in the US state has led to some serious divergencies between US and European imperialism. With the exception of England, Europe made a minimum symbolic commitment to the US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Germany and France concentrated on expanding their export markets and economic capacities; displacing the US in major markets and resource sites. The convergence of US and European empires led to the integration of financial institutions and the subsequent common crises and collapse but without any coordinated policy of recovery. US ideologists propagated the idea of a “declining and decaying European Union”, while the European ideologues emphasized the failures of Anglo-American de-regulated, ‘free markets’ and Wall Street swindles.

Imperialist Ideology, Rising Economic Powers and Nationalist Challengers

There is a long history of imperialist “anti-imperialism”, officially sponsored condemnation, exposés and moral indignation directed exclusively against rival imperialists, emerging powers or simply competitors, who in some cases are simply following in the footsteps of the established imperial powers.

English imperialists in their heyday justified their world-wide plunder of three continents by perpetuating the “Black Legend”, of Spanish empire’s “exceptional cruelty” toward indigenous people of Latin America, while engaging in the biggest and most lucrative African slave trade. While the Spanish colonists enslaved the indigenous people, the Anglo-American settlers exterminated them.

In the run-up to World War II, European and US imperial powers, while exploiting their Asian colonies condemned Japanese imperial powers’ invasion and colonization of China. Japan, in turn claimed it was leading Asia’s forces fighting against Western imperialism and projected a post-colonial “co-prosperity” sphere of equal Asian partners.

The imperialist use of “anti-imperialist” moral rhetoric was designed to weaken rivals and was directed to several audiences. In fact, at no point did the anti-imperialist rhetoric serve to “liberate” any of the colonized people. In almost all cases the victorious imperial power only substituted one form colonial or neo-colonial rule for another.

The “anti-imperialism” of the imperialists is directed at the nationalist movements of the colonized countries and at their domestic public. British imperialists fomented uprisings among the agro-mining elites in Latin America promising “free trade” against Spanish mercantilist rule; they backed the “self-determination” of the slave-holding cotton plantation owners in the US South against the Union; they supported the territorial claims of the Iroquois tribal leaders against the US anti-colonial revolutionaries — exploiting legitimate grievances for imperial ends.

During World War II, the Japanese imperialists supported a sector of the nationalist, anti-colonial movement in India against the British Empire. The US condemned Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and went to war to “liberate” the oppressed peoples from tyranny and remained to impose a reign of terror, exploitation and colonial rule.

The imperialist powers sought to divide the anti-colonial movements and create future “client rulers” when and if they succeeded. The use of anti-imperialist rhetoric was designed to attract two sets of groups. A conservative group with common political and economic interests with the imperial power, which shared their hostility to revolutionary nationalists and which sought to accrue greater advantage by tying their fortunes to a rising imperial power. A radical sector of the movement tactically allied itself with the rising imperial power, with the idea of using the imperial power to secure resources (arms, propaganda, vehicles and financial aid) and, once securing power, to discard them. More often than not, in this game of mutual manipulation between empire and nationalists, the former won out, as is the case then and now.

The imperialist “anti-imperialist” rhetoric was equally directed at the domestic public, especially in countries like the US which prized its 18th anti-colonial heritage. The purpose was to broaden the base of empire building beyond the hard line empire loyalists, militarists and corporate beneficiaries. Their appeal sought to include liberals, humanitarians, progressive intellectuals, religious and secular moralists, and other “opinion-makers” who had a certain cachet with the larger public, the ones who would have to pay with their lives and tax money for the inter-imperial and colonial wars.

The official spokespeople of empire publicize real and fabricated atrocities of their imperial rivals, and highlight the plight of the colonized victims. The corporate elite and the hardline militarists demand military action to protect property, or to seize strategic resources; the humanitarians and progressives denounce the “crimes against humanity” and echo the calls “to do something concrete” to save the victims from genocide. Sectors of the Left join the chorus and, finding a sector of victims who fit in with their abstract ideology, plead for the imperial powers to “arm the people to liberate themselves” (sic). By lending moral support and a veneer of respectability to the imperial war, by swallowing the propaganda of “war to save victims” the progressives become the prototype of the “anti-imperialism of the fools”. Having secured broad public support on the bases of “anti-imperialism”, the imperialist powers feel free to sacrifice citizens’ lives and the public treasury, to pursue war, fueled by the moral fervor of a righteous cause. As the butchery drags on and the casualties mount, and the public wearies of war and its cost, progressive and leftist enthusiasm turns to silence or worse, moral hypocrisy with claims that “the nature of the war changed” or “that this isn’t the kind of war that we had in mind …” As if the war makers ever intended to consult the progressives and left on how and why they should engage in imperial wars!

In the contemporary period the imperial “anti-imperialist wars” and aggression have been greatly aided and abetted by well-funded “grass roots” so-called “non-governmental organizations” which act to mobilize popular movements which can “invite” imperial aggression.

Over the past four decades US imperialism has fomented at least two dozen “grass roots” movements which have destroyed democratic governments, or decimated collectivist welfare states or provoked major damage to the economy of targeted countries.

In Chile throughout 1972-73 under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the CIA financed and provided major support — via the AFL-CIO — to private truck owners to paralyze the flow of goods and services. They also funded a strike by a sector of the copper workers union (at the El Tenient mine) to undermine copper production and exports, in the lead up to the coup. After the military took power, several “grass roots” Christian Democratic union officials participated in the purge of elected leftist union activists. Needless to say, in short order the truck owners and copper workers ended the strike, dropped their demands and subsequently lost all bargaining rights!

In the 1980’s the CIA via Vatican channels transferred millions of dollars to sustain the “Solidarity Union” in Poland, making a hero of the Gdansk shipyards worker-leader Lech Walesa, who spearheaded the general strike to topple the Communist regime. With the overthrow of Communism so also went guaranteed employment, social security, and trade union militancy: the neo-liberal regimes reduced the workforce at Gdansk by fifty percent and eventually closed it, giving the boot to the entire workforce. Walesa retired with a magnificent Presidential pension, while his former workmates walked the streets and the new “independent” Polish rulers provided NATO with military bases and mercenaries for imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2002 the White House, the CIA, the AFL-CIO and NGOs, backed a Venezuelan military-business — trade-union bureaucrat-led “grass roots” coup that overthrew democratically elected President Chavez. In 48 hours, a million strong authentic grass roots mobilization of the urban poor backed by constitutionalist military forces defeated the US backed dictators and restored Chavez to power. Subsequently, oil executives directed a lockout backed by several US-financed NGOs. They were defeated by the workers’ takeover of the oil industry. The unsuccessful coup and lockout cost the Venezuelan economy billions of dollars in lost income and caused a double digit decline in GNP.

The US backed “grass roots” armed jihadists to liberated “Bosnia” and armed the “grass roots” terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to break-up Yugoslavia. Almost the entire Western Left cheered as, the US bombed Belgrade, degraded the economy and claimed it was “responding to genocide”. Kosovo “free and independent” became a huge market for white slavers, housed the biggest US military base in Europe, with the highest per-capita out migration of any country in Europe.

The imperialist “grass roots” strategy combines humanitarian, democratic, and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and trained local NGOs, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially “prestigious leftist moral critics” behind their power grabs.

The Consequence of Imperial Promoted “Anti-Imperialist” Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses?

The historic record of imperialist promoted “anti-imperialist” and “pro-democracy” “grass roots movements” is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ‘grass roots’ truck owners strike led to the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the imposition of brutal “free market policies” and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary, the US multi-national copper corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The US backed “grass roots uprisings” in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and the growth of pensioner poverty. The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts.

Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ‘entrepeneurs’ seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ‘partners’ were the socio-economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire’s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack.

If we measure the consequences of the shift in imperialist power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia. Western induced financial crises have devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperialist wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media are under Western commercial control. Most of all, the degree of imperialist control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed under the Soviets. The Eastern European “grass roots” movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace, social justice, national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers.

Western liberals, progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist-promoted “anti-imperialism” are also big losers. Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosova. Their blind support for the imperial promoted “liberation” of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western regimes’ need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via “grass roots” uprisings were the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the right-wing free market neo-liberals. As the entire political spectrum moved to the right, a sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements dwindled, and their “moral critiques” lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed “grass roots movements”, whether in the name of “anti-Stalinism”, “pro-democracy”, or “anti-imperialism” have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity.

The long history of imperialist manipulation of “anti-imperialist” narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran’s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela’s “drug-networks”, and Syria’s “bloodbath” are part and parcel of the use and abuse of “anti-imperialism” to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a ‘progressive cover’ to imperial dubbed “rebels”. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO, and the mass media.

Celac is the greatest event in the last 200 years.

—  Raul Castro, President of the Council of State Cuba

The OAS is the meeting of the colonies with their empire, while the CELAC is the summit of peer countries in search of joint development, through the value of solidarity.

— Nicmer Evans, International Affairs Analyst

On the cusp of 2012 a gutsy band of insurgent countries are coming together and forming a communion of nations, which does not include either Canada or the United States.

American New Agers, mystics, neo-shamans, and doomsayers may be waiting for a precious Mayan prognostication, but perhaps (without much fanfare) this much ballyhooed premonition has already come to pass. After all since Monroe warned the other Western powers not to extend their systems into Latin America, the US has viewed the continent as its virtual protectorate —or a doltish, subordinate and ancillary expanse.

When leaders have arisen who didn’t want to go along with the neo-Monroeian program, they have experienced phenomena as varied as a coups d’etat, or their airliners peculiarly crashing into the Earth, and, for sure, the United States would do its level best to make them a part of the past.

Indeed, events against both Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales —  of this nature — have been sufficiently documented, though not much at all by the mainstream press. For Chavez it involved a strike of the bosses, and Morales an effort from the DEA. One wonders what the Obama administration might be busily working away at — if anything — cooking up in this regard? Just letting Latin America be, has not been a policy that is very familiar to many (any?) of the administrations to the north.

It is what will be built —  not destroyed — though, that raises the spirits of all well-seeking folks, who are viewing the so-called pink tide revolutions from afar. As Morales put it at the recent Celac gathering, “We have to establish the bases for a new model, for socialism, neo-socialism, living well, 21st century socialism or whatever you want to call it.” And his ebullient amigo, Hugo Chavez, eloquently stated, “For how long are we going to be the backwards periphery, exploited and denigrated? Enough! Here we are putting down the fundamental building block for South American unity, independence and development. If we hesitate, we are lost!”

Undoubtedly, hesitation, division, misdirection, interference, and perhaps even intervention — with its mascot for Wall Street at the helm — is what the empire will position itself for; and moreover, the former Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, can certainly attest to that. Although it’s nothing new, however, the Americans and the British — trying to break up unions that they oppose — and tear them apart. To proverbialize it, the fist is mightier than its lonely, isolated and disparate parts. Thus, hitting upon, of course, the very crux of what projects like Celac are entirely about.

United developing countries is not exactly on the grand wish list of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful states. Regardless of what their spokes-billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, would like — for the masses and the plebeians — to think. Ironically, if Celac achieves its goals — and its ambitions — then that is when we can expect probably the most virulent, and infernal opposition from its “keeper”  and “overseer” from the north.

Of course, we should never forget what the malevolent Kissinger had to say about Allende’s Chile, that he didn’t understand why issues “[that] are much too important”, should be left to the Chilean people to determine for themselves.

Consequently, as I’ve stated, we really don’t have any idea, what the “left-liberal” Obama administration might be ginning up, preparing or daydreaming about. But, conversely, we do know what the Celac nations are preparing, thinking and envisioning around — and we do wish them the very best. The best in their efforts to escape hegemony, and create survival; and a just, healthy, and a lengthy one at that for all of the people of those states.

Reportedly employed by powerful landowners in Mato Grosso do Sul state, the gunmen are creating a climate of fear to prevent Guarani Indians from returning to their ancestral land.

Guarani leader Nísio Gomes was murdered by gunmen. © Survival

The tactics employed in recent incidents have been almost identical. Gunmen encircle vehicles transporting Guarani, force them to stop, and then verbally abuse and interrogate passengers about the names on the hit list.

One Guarani leader told Survival, ’They’ve pinpointed us and they’re set to kill us. We’re at great risk. Here in Brazil, we have no justice. We have nowhere left to run.’

On Sunday, around 100 Guarani returning from a meeting in the district of Iguatemi were targeted. Guarani witnesses told Survival one of the four men involved was a local mayor.

The Guarani said the men shouted insults such as, ‘We’re going to burn these buses full of Indians!’ Members of a government team were also present at the scene.

Continued threats have also forced the son of an assassinated leader to flee his community. Ranchers killed Marcos Veron in 2003 after he repeatedly tried to recover a small piece of his community’s ancestral land – his son Ladio is now being targeted.

Marcos Veron was killed in 2003 during an attempt to return to his land. © Joaó Ripper/Survival

Gomes’ killers have yet to be arrested, but last week Brazil’s Public Ministry said six men had been charged with the murder of two Guarani teachers in 2009.

The accused include a notorious Brazilian rancher who held the teachers’ community hostage, and local politicians.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

The Russian investigative journalist, Nikolay Starikov, has written a book which discusses the role of unknown snipers in the destabilization of countries targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies. The following article attempts to elucidate some historical examples of this technique with a view to providing a background within which to understand the current cover war on the people of Syria by death squads in the service of Western intelligence.

Romania, 1989

In Susanne Brandstätter’s documentary Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution aired on Arte television station some years ago,  Western intelligence officials revealed how  death squads were used to destabilize Romania and turn its people against the head of state Nicolai Ceaucescu.

Brandstätter’s film is a must see for anyone interested in how Western intelligence agencies, human rights groups and the corporate press collude in the systematic destruction of countries whose leadership conflicts with the interests of big capital and empire.

Former secret agent with the French secret service, the DGSE(La Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) Dominique Fonvielle, spoke candidly about the role of Western intelligence operatives in destabilizing the Romanian population.

How do you organize a revolution? I believe the first step is to locate oppositional forces in a given country. It is sufficient to have a highly developed intelligence service in order to determine which people are credible enough to have influence at their hands to destabilize the people to the disadvantage of the ruling regime.

This open and rare admission of Western sponsorship of terrorism was justified on the grounds of the “greater good” brought to Romania by free-market capitalism. It was necessary, according to the strategists of Romania’s “revolution”, for some people to die.

Today, Romania remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. A report on Euractiv reads:

Most Romanians associate the last two decades with a continuous process of impoverishment and deteriorating living standards, according to Romania’s Life Quality Research Institute, quoted by the Financiarul daily.

The western intelligence officials interviewed in the documentary also revealed how the Western press played a central role in disinformation. For example, the victims of Western-backed snipers were photographed by presented to the world as evidence of a crazed dictator who was “killing his own people”.

To this day, there is a Museum in the back streets of Timisoara Romania which promotes the myth of the “Romanian Revolution”.  The Arte documentary was one of the rare occasions when the mainstream press revealed some of  the dark secrets of Western liberal democracy. The documentary caused a scandal when it was aired in France, with the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique discussing the moral dilemma of the West’s support of terror in its desire to spread ‘democracy’.

Since the destruction of Libya and the ongoing cover war on Syria, Le Monde Diplomatique has stood safely on the side of political correction, condemning Bashar Al Assad for the crimes of the DGSE and the CIA. In its current edition, the front page article reads Ou est la gauche? Where is the left ? Certainly not in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique !

Russia, 1993

During Boris Yeltsin’s counter-revolution in Russia in 1993, when the Russian parliament was bombed resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, Yeltsin’s counter-revolutionaries made extensive use of snipers. According to many eye witness reports, snipers were seen shooting civilians from the building opposite the US embassy in Moscow. The snipers were attributed to the Soviet government by the international media.

Venezuela, 2002

In 2002, the CIA attempted to overthrow Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, in a military coup. On the 11th of April 2002, an opposition march towards the presidential palace was organized by the US-backed Venezuelan opposition. Snipers hidden in buildings near the palace opened fire on protestors killing 18. The Venezuelan and international media claimed that Chavez was “killing his own people” thereby justifying the military coup presented as a humanitarian intervention.  It was subsequently proved that the coup had been organized by the CIA but the identity of the snipers was never established.

Thailand, April 2010

On April 12th 2010, Christian Science Monitor published a detailed report of the riots in Thailand between “red-shirt” activists and the Thai government. The article headline read: ‘Thailand’s red shirt protests darken with unknown snipers, parade of coffins’.

Like their counterparts in Tunisia, Thailand’s red shirts were calling for the resignation of the Thai prime minister. While a heavy-handed response by the Thai security forces to the protestors was indicated in the report, the government’s version of events was also reported:

Mr. Abhisit has used solemn televised addresses to tell his story. He has blamed rogue gunmen, or “terrorists,” for the intense violence (at least 21 people died and 800 were injured) and emphasized the need for a full investigation into the killings of both soldiers and protesters. State television has broadcast repeated images of soldiers coming under fire from bullets and explosives.

The CSM report went on to quote Thai military officials and unnamed Western diplomats:

Military observers say Thai troops stumbled into a trap set by agents provocateurs with military expertise. By pinning down soldiers after dark and sparking chaotic battles with unarmed protesters, the unknown gunmen ensured heavy casualties on both sides.

Some were caught on camera and seen by reporters, including this one. Snipers targeted military ground commanders, indicating a degree of advance planning and knowledge of Army movements, say Western diplomats briefed by Thai officials. While leaders of the demonstrations have disowned the use of firearms and say their struggle is nonviolent, it is unclear whether radicals in the movement knew of the trap.

“You can’t claim to be a peaceful political movement and have an arsenal of weapons out the back if needed. You can’t have it both ways,” says a Western diplomat in regular contact with protest leaders.

The CSM article also explores the possibility that the snipers could be rogue elements in the Thai military, agents provocateurs used to justify a crack down on democratic opposition. Thailand’s ruling elite is currently coming under pressure from a George Soros funded colour revolution hysteria called the Red Shirts.

Kyrgystan, June 2010

Ethnic violence broke out in the Central Asian republic of  Kirgystan  in June 2010. It was widely reported that unknown snipers opened fire on members of the Uzbek minority in Kyrgystan. Eurasia.net reports:

In many Uzbek mahallas, inhabitants offer convincing testimony of gunmen targeting their neighborhoods from vantage points. Men barricaded into the Arygali Niyazov neighborhood, for example, testified to seeing gunmen on the upper floors of a nearby medical institute hostel with a view over the district’s narrow streets. They said that during the height of the violence these gunmen were covering attackers and looters, assaulting their area with sniper fire. Men in other Uzbek neighborhoods tell similar stories.

Among the rumours and unconfirmed reports circulating in Kyrgyzstan after the 2010 violence were claims that water supplies to Uzbek areas were about to be  poisoned. Such rumours had also been spread against the Ceaucescu regime in Romania during the CIA- backed coup in 1989. Eurasia.net goes on to claim that:

Many people are convinced that they’ve seen foreign mercenaries acting as snipers. These alleged foreign combatants are distinguished by their appearance – inhabitants report seeing black snipers and tall, blonde, female snipers from the Baltic states. The idea that English snipers have been roaming the streets of Osh shooting at Uzbeks is also popular. There’ve been no independent corroborations of such sightings by foreign journalists or representatives of international organizations.

None of these reports have been independently investigated or corroborated. It is therefore impossible to draw any hard conclusions from these stories.

Ethnic violence against Uzbek citizens in Kyrgyzstan occurred pari pasu with a popular revolt against the US-backed regime, which many analysts have attributed to the machinations of Moscow.

The Bakiyev régime came to power in a CIA-backed people-power coup known to the world as the Tulip Revolution in 2005.

Located to the West of China and bordering Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan hosts one of America’s biggest and most important military bases in Central Asia, the Manas Air Base, which is vital for the NATO occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan.

Despite initial worries,US/Kyrgyz relations have remained good under the regime of President Roza Otunbayeva. This is not surprising as Otunbayeva had previously participated in the US-created Tulip Revolution in 2004, taking power as foreign minister.

To date no proper investigation has been conducted into the origins of the ethnic violence that spread throughout  the south of Kyryzstan in 2010, nor have the marauding gangs of unknown snipers been identified and apprehended.

Given the geo-strategic and geo-political importance of Kyrgyzstan to both the United States and Russia, and the formers track-record of using death squads to divide and weaken countries so as to maintain US domination, US involvement in the dissemination of terrorism in Kyrgyzstan cannot be ruled out. One effective way of maintaining a grip on Central Asian countries would be to exacerbate ethnic tensions.

In August 6th 2008, the Russian newspaper Kommersa`nt reported that a US arms cache had been found in a house in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, which was being rented by two American citizens. The US embassy claimed the arms were being used for “anti-terrorism” exercises. However, this was not confirmed by Kyrgyz authorities.

Covert US military support to terrorist groups in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia proved to be an effective strategy in creating the conditions for “humanitarian” bombing in 1999. An effective means of  keeping the government in Bishkek firmly on America’s side would be to insist on a US and European presence in the country to help “protect” the Uzbek minority.

Military intervention similar to that in the former Yugoslavia by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe  has already been advocated by the New York Times, whose misleading article on the riots on June 24th 2010 has the headline “Kyrgyzstan asks European Security Body for Police Teams”. The article is misleading as the headline contradicts the actual report which cites a Kyrgyz official stating:

A government spokesman said officials had discussed an outside police presence with the O.S.C.E., but said he could not confirm that a request for a deployment had been made.

There is no evidence in the article of any request by the Kyrgyz government for military intervention. In fact, the article presents much evidence to the contrary. However, before the reader has a chance to read the explanation of the Kyrgyz government, the New York Times writer presents the now all too horribly familiar narrative of oppressed peoples begging the West to come and bomb or occupy their country:

Ethnic Uzbeks in the south have clamored for international intervention. Many Uzbeks said they were attacked in their neighborhoods not only by civilian mobs, but also by the Kyrgyz military and police officers.

Only towards the end of the article do we find out that the Kyrgyz authorities blamed the US-backed dictator for fomenting ethnic violence in the country, through the use of Islamic jihadists in Uzbekistan. This policy of using ethnic tension to create an environment of fear in order to prop up an extremely unpopular dictatorship, the policy of using Islamic Jihadism as a political tool to create what former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski called “ an arc of crisis”, ties in well with the history of US involvement in Central Asia from the creation of Al Qaida in Afghanistan in 1978 to the present day.

Again, the question persists, who were the “unknown snipers” terrorizing the Uzbek population, where did their weapons come from and who would benefit from ethnic conflict in Central Asia’s geopolitical hotspot?

Tunisia, January 2011

On January 16th 2011, CNN reported that ‘’armed gangs’’ were fighting Tunisian security forces.  Many of the murders committed throughout the Tunisian uprising were by “unknown snipers”. There were also videos posted on the internet showing Swedish nationals detained by Tunisian security forces. The men were clearly armed with sniper rifles. Russia Today aired the dramatic pictures.

In spite of articles by professor Michel Chossudovsky, William Engdahl and  others showing how the uprisings in North Africa were following the patterns of US backed people-power coups rather than genuinely popular revolutions, left wing parties and organizations continued to believe the version of events presented to them by Al Jazeera and the mainstream press. Had the left taken a left from old Lenin’s book they would have transposed his comments on the February/March revolution in Russia thus:

The  whole course of events in the January/February Revolution clearly shows that the British, French and American embassies, with their agents and “connections”,… directly organized a plot.. in conjunction with a section of the generals and army and Tunisian garrison officers, with the express object of deposing Ben Ali

What the left did not understand is that sometimes it is necessary for imperialism to overthrow some of its clients. A suitable successor to Ben Ali could always be found among the feudalists of the Muslim Brotherhood who now look likely to take power.

In their revolutionary sloganeering and arrogant insistence that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were “spontaneous and popular uprisings” they committed what Lenin identified as the most dangerous sins in a revolution; namely, the substitution of the abstract for the concrete. In other words, left wing groups were simply fooled by the sophistication of the Western backed “Arab Spring” events.

That is why the violence of the demonstrators and, in particular, the widespread use of snipers possibly linked to Western intelligence was the great unthought of the Tunisian uprising. The same techniques would be used in Libya a few weeks later, forcing the left to back track and modifiy its initial enthusiasm for the CIA’s “Arab Spring”.

When we are talking about the” left” here, we are referring to genuine left wing parties, that is to say, parties who supported the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya in their long and brave fight against Western imperialism, not the infantile petty bourgeois dupes who supported NATO’s Benghazi terrorists.  The blatant idiocy of such a stance should be crystal clear to anyone who understands global politics and class struggle.

Egypt, 2011

On October 20th 2011, the Telegraph newspaper published an article entitled, “Our brother died for a better Egypt”. According to the Telegraph, Mina Daniel, an anti-government activist in Cairo, had been ‘shot from an unknown sniper, wounding him fatally in the chest”

Inexplicably, the article is no longer available on the Telegraph’s website for online perusal. But a google search for ‘Egypt, unknown sniper, Telegraph’ clearly shows the above quoted explanation for Mina Daniel’s death. So, who could these “unknown snipers’’ be?

On February 6th Al Jazeera reported that Egyptian journalist, Ahmad Mahmoud, was shot by snipers as he attempted to cover clashes between Egyptian security forces and protestors. Referring to statements made by Mahmoud’s wife, Enas Abdel-Alim, the Al Jazeera article insinuates that Mahmoud may have been killed by Egyptian security forces:

Abdel-Alim said several eyewitnesses told her a uniformed police captain with Egypt’s notorious Central Security forces yelled at her husband to stop filming. Before Mahmoud even had a chance to react, she said, a sniper shot him.

While the Al Jazeera article advances the theory that the snipers were agents of the Mubarak regime, their role in the uprising still remains a mystery. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television stations owned by the Emir Hamid Bin Khalifa Al Thani, played a key role in provoking protests in Tunisia and Egypt before launching a campaign of unmitigated pro-NATO war propaganda and lies during the destruction of Libya.

The Qatari channel has been a central participant in the current covert war waged by NATO agencies and their clients against the Republic of Syria. Al Jazeera’s incessant disinformation against Libya and Syria resulted in the resignation of several prominent journalists such as Beirut station chief Ghassan Bin Jeddo and senior Al Jazeera executive Wadah Khanfar who was forced to resign after a Wikileaks cable revealed he was a co-operating with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many people were killed during the US-backed colour revolution in Egypt. Although, the killings have been attributed to former US semi-client Hosni Mubarak, the involvement of Western intelligence cannot be ruled out. However, it should be pointed out that the role of unknown snipers in mass demonstrations remains complex and multi-faceted and therefore one should not jump to conclusions. For example, after the Bloody Sunday massacre (Domhnach na Fola) in Derry, Ireland 1972, where peaceful demonstrators were shot dead by the British army, British officials claimed that they had come under fire from snipers. But the 30 year long Bloody Sunday  inquiry subsequently proved this to be false.  But the question persists once more,  who were the snipers in Egypt and whose purposes did they serve?

Libya,  2011

During the destabilization of Libya, a video was aired by Al Jazeera purporting to show peaceful “pro-democracy” demonstrators being fired upon by “Gaddafi’s forces”. The video was edited to convince the viewer that anti-Gaddafi demonstrators were being murdered by the security forces. However, the unedited version of the video is available on utube. It clearly shows pro-Gaddafi demonstrators with Green flags being fired upon by unknown snipers. The attribution of NATO-linked crimes to the security forces of the Libyan Jamahirya was a constant feature of the brutal media war waged against the Libyan people.

Syria, 2011

The people of Syria have been beset by death squads and snipers since the outbreak of violence there in March. Hundreds of Syrian soldiers and security personnel have been murdered, tortured and mutilated by Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood militants. Yet the international media corporations continue to spread the pathetic lie that the deaths are the result of Bashar Al Assad’s dictatorship.

When I visited Syria in April of this year, I personally encountered merchants and citizens in Hama who told me they had seen armed terrorists roaming the streets of that once peaceful city, terrorizing the neighbourhood. I recall speaking to a fruit seller in the city of Hama who  spoke about the horror he had witnessed that day. As he described the scenes of violence to me, my attention was arrested by a newspaper headline in English from the Washington Post  shown on Syrian television: “CIA backs Syrian opposition”. The Central Intelligence Agency provides training and funding for groups who do the bidding of US imperialist interests. The history of the CIA shows that backing opposition forces means providing them with arms and finance, actions illegal under international law.

A few days later, while at a hostel in the ancient, cultured city of Aleppo, I spoke to a Syrian business man and his family. The business man ran many hotels in the city and was pro-Assad. He told me that he used to watch Al Jazeera television but now had doubts about their honesty. As we conversed, the Al Jazeera television in the background showed scenes of Syrian soldiers beating and torturing protestors. “ Now if that is true, it is simply unacceptable” he said. It is sometimes impossible to verify whether the images shown on television are true or not. Many of the crimes attributed to the Syrian army have been committed by the armed gangs, such as the dumping of mutilated bodies into the river in Hama, presented to the world as more proof of the crimes of the Assad regime.

There is a minority of innocent opponents of the Assad regime who believe everything they see and hear on Al Jazeera and the other pro-Western satellite stations. These people simply do not understand the intricacies of international politics.

But the facts on the ground show that most people in Syria support the government. Syrians have access to all internet websites and international TV channels. They can watch BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, read the New York Times online or Le Monde before tuning into their own state media. In this respect, many Syrians are more informed about international politics than the average European or American. Most Europeans and Americans believe their own media. Few are capable of reading the Syrian press in original Arabic or watching Syrian television. The Western powers are the masters of discourse, who own the means of communication. The Arab Spring has been the most horrifying example of the wanton abuse of this power.

Disinformation is effective in sowing the seeds of doubt among those who are seduced by Western propaganda. Syrian state media has disproved hundreds of Al Jazeera lies since the beginning of this conflict.  Yet the western media has refused to even report the Syrian government’s position lest fair coverage of the other side of this story encourage a modicum of critical thought in the public mind.

Conclusion.

The use of mercenaries, death squads and snipers by Western intelligence agencies is well documented.  No rational government attempting to stay in power would resort to unknown snipers to intimidate its opponents. Shooting at innocent protestors would be counterproductive in the face of unmitigated pressure from Western governments determined to install a client regime in Damascus. Shooting of unarmed protestors is only acceptable in dictatorships that enjoy the unconditional support of Western governments such as Bahrain, Honduras or Colombia.

A government which is so massively supported by the population of Syria would not sabotage its own survival by setting snipers against the protests of a small minority.

The opposition to the Syrian regime is, in fact, miniscule. Tear gas, mass arrests and other non lethal methods would be perfectly sufficient for a government wishing to control unarmed demonstrators.

Snipers are used to create terror, fear and anti-regime propaganda. They are an integral feature of Western sponsored regime change. If one were to make a serious criticism of the Syrian government over the past few months, it is that they have failed to implement effective anti-terrorism measures in the country. The Syrian people want troops on the streets and the roofs of public buildings. In the weeks and months ahead, the Syrian armed forces will probably rely more and more on their Russian military specialists to strengthen the country’s defenses as the Western crusade begun in Libya in March spreads to the Levant. There is no conclusive proof that the snipers murdering men, women and children in Syria are the agents of Western imperialism. But there is overwhelming proof that Western imperialism is attempting to destroy the Syrian state. As in Libya, they have never once mentioned the possibility of negotiations between the so-called opposition and the Syrian government. The West wants regime change and is determined to repeat the slaughter in Libya to achieve this geopolitical objective.

It now looks likely that the cradle of civilization and science will be overrun by semi-literate barbarians as the terminal decline of the West plays itself out in the deserts of the East.

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.

To transcend without transcending

— Ernst Bloch

In the 20thCentury, real socialism failed. In the 21st Century, unreal capitalism.

— Luis Eduardo Aute

In those heady early days of the Oakland Commune when the little village of newly-dubbed “Oscar Grant Plaza” was being set up, an old comrade who had been part of the early organizing of the occupation was walking through the village and describing it to me on his cell phone. We were doing relay reporting: I’d been down the day before and reported back to him, now he was giving me an update.

“…And just past the media tent and the library is the supply tent…” A young woman working at the supply tent jumped into the conversation and began to show him where things went as my friend explained that he was giving a comrade a “virtual tour” of sorts.

“Over here you drop off clothes; there is where you drop off food; tents and camping supplies go over there…”

“And money?” my friend asked. He had been carrying a $5 bill in his hand, money someone had given him to pass on to the camp.

“Oh.  We don’t do money,” she replied.

“’We don’t do money!’ ‘We don’t do money!’” my friend repeated incredulously as he walked away from the supply tent. “That’s the most radical statement I’ve heard so far!”

Since those glorious first moments of what could now be called an uprising or a movement, the occupiers have had to make greater concessions to “reality,” meaning that they now “do” money, but it’s to their credit that they have done so tentatively and on their own conditions. Every revolution begins by questioning the very concept of “reality” as it is socially defined and by pushing against it until it begins to fray and finally give way to a new definition. The root of the word “reality” is intertwined with “royalty” (“real” in Spanish means both “real” and “royal”) because there was a time when royalty defined reality. Now, in the Americas at least, “royalty” no longer exists and “reality” has been transformed in a redefinition that excludes royalty itself.

What seemed utopian before that moment in that moment suddenly became the very definition of reality. In the past this process has involved violence, like the execution of King James in the English Civil War, but that itself was only a culminating symbolic representation of a long process of psycho-social transformation through education, culture, ritual, etc. in the construction of a new model of reality that eventually supplanted the “royal” model.  In that sense “utopia” must be the home and destiny of a revolutionary struggle, and poetry must be its most powerful weapon, if it is to succeed.

One element in the process of the construction of new models of reality, or “revolutions” is the meme, the “viral message,” and it often takes the form of a slogan or chant. The power of political mantras to transform our understanding or redefine our understanding of reality is evident when we consider what the slogan “we are the 99%” has done in the Occupy movement.

Slogans can be prosaic, functional statements, rational and unambiguous, like a statement of doctrine for a church service or a political rally (“We are the 99%” or “The people united will never be defeated” etc.), or they can operate like a poem, suprarational and ambiguous, forcing us to reconsider our sense of “reality.” Those aphorisms in this latter category fit with the “sixth” type of ambiguity as enumerated by William Empson: “when a statement says nothing and the readers are forced to invent a statement of their own, most likely in conflict with that of the author.”

Of this latter group is the Situationist epigraph, “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” This statement, in fact, does say something, but it’s akin to “nothing” insofar as it is apparently contradictory: When could the “impossible” be considered “realistic”? What could be “realistic” about “demand[ing] the impossible”?  In contrast to the prosaic “marching” slogans repeated at every demonstration to unite and strengthen group solidarity, this Situationist epigraph is elusive and subversive by its very nature. And for that reason it warrants a closer look.

While we don’t know the actual context that inspired the writer of the Situationist epigram since the Situationist as a movement spanned the years 1957 to 1972, it is most likely that the slogan, “Be realistic: demand the impossible,” first appeared during the uprising of May 1968 in Paris. The slogan then probably referred to the clarity the writer had at that moment that the state would eventually cede to its demands and thereby destroy the movement for radical social change. This common ruling class response to the social demands of the oppressed is summed up in the words of a prince in Luchino Visconti’s classic movie, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” Making “realistic” demands that could, and would, be met, therefore, would ensure the end of the struggle, the destruction of the movement, and guarantee that “things stay the same.”

A few years later, reflecting on that romantic May of 1968, the French singer/songwriter, Georges Moustaki in his song, “Le Temps de Vivre”  (“The Time to Live”), reinterpreted that Situationist slogan:

Nous prendrons le temps de vivre  - We’ll take the time to live

D’être libres mon amour – to be free, my love.

Sans projets et sans habitudes – Without projects or habits

Nous pourrons rêver notre vie – we’ll dream our life.

Viens, je suis là, je n’attends que toi – Come, I’m here, awaiting only you

Tout est possible, tout est permis – Everything is possible.  Everything is permitted.

Viens, écoute, les mots qui vibrant – Come listen to these words that vibrate

Sur les murs du mois de mai – on the walls of the month of May

Ils te disent la certitude – They give us certitude

Que tout peut changer un jour – that everything can one day change

The song expresses the same utopian spirit as the slogan; it is also an affirmation that what is deemed “impossible” can be realistic. Moustaki, reflecting back on that historical moment from a context in which such a slogan had become an “impossible demand,” sees the revolutionary upsurge of 1968 as a hope or a “certitude” of revolutionary change “one day” in some indeterminate future.

A few years later, when the reaction against the “Revolution of 1968” was in full bloom and the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and other champions of neoliberal capitalism suggested “There Is No Alternative” (the famous “TINA” that dominated the late 20th Century), the Situationist slogan took on a new meaning. It became a statement of resistance against impossible odds in the struggle for a new world that was nowhere to be seen. It was a statement of defiance of a “reality” decreed by the masters of the totalitarian lie of the neoliberal capitalist system watching over a locked-down world. With the collapse of “real” socialism and as the world slouched off into that netherland of the “end of history” where the hope of every left alternative, and even the humane possibilities of capitalism, if such existed, were extinguished with the end of the Cold War and the supreme victory of neoliberalism, the Situationist slogan was stored in the dusty attic of history. TINA was the only slogan allowed in this brave new world of neoliberal rule, the echolalia of a mantra that darkened the human mind and increasingly reduced it to catatonia with each repetition.

But almost immediately the “impossible” reappeared, especially in Berkeley, where I was living at the time, but also around the world. Little by little, the circle A of anarchism, no doubt painted by anarcho-punks with a clear grasp of the need for the “impossible,” was sprayed on walls and billboards. Then increasingly the circle “A” began to appear more broadly in personal wear, silk-screened on t-shirts, until it became a fashion statement. In the context of a Capitalist State that claimed the whole planet, the demand for the impossible demand reemerged.

With the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and thereafter, the slogan once again took on an immediate, positive meaning for people in the movement for a “possible world in which many worlds fit.” Contesting with the hegemon, the dream of the possible new world became not merely a demand for “the impossible” but for a plurality of possibilities, a rainbow of possibilities.

Out of the collapse of the 20th century utopia-turned-dystopia of “real socialism” and the flatulent promise of the “Third Way,” both of which having clouded and overshadowed all other radical alternatives of an earlier time, such as social democracy, mystical anarchism, secular anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, utopian cooperativism, religious socialism and, yes, the multitude of Marxist socialist alternatives, the World Social Forums (WSF) arose in the heart of the capitalist world that had prohibited the possibility of dreams. The “impossible” was transformed by WSF’s belief that “another world is possible” and as anti-globalization activists confronted the brutal capitalist state in Seattle and elsewhere.

But the definitive break with TINA and the neoliberal siege of the world, formed in iron around the “possible,” came with the changes in Latin America, particularly in South America, where left governments took power in the process of emerging from the military dictatorships organized and supported by the US. “Demanding the impossible” meant in that context something very similar to what it meant in 1968: it became a call to not settle for reforms to capitalism, but to push the agenda farther, beyond the realm of the “possible” as defined for us by the capitalist system or even by so-called “socialist” governments proclaiming the “socialism of the 21st century” but offering only more handouts and top-heavy, bureaucratic parties in the style of the Marxist-Leninist parties of 20th century communism.

In the present, just ten years after the uprisings in Argentina, the victory of left governments throughout Latin America, and the presidential victory of the first African American in US history, the slogan has a new, even more dramatic meaning: if the planet is to survive, we have no choice but to “demand the impossible.” Many of what were viewed as “impossible” achievements in 1968 have been won, and they clearly don’t go far enough.

In Latin America the “left” governments continue to follow the extractivist development model dictated by world capitalism even as they turn more attention to their poorest citizens. This is particularly true of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, who has repeatedly directed repressive military and police forces against environmentalists and indigenous people attempting to defend the earth. But even President Evo Morales works from a double discourse, proclaiming socialism and respect for indigenous rights and Pachamama while building roads through indigenous lands and nature reserves to facilitate the business of Brazilian capital.

Then, of course, there’s the United States, where the official political spectrum, by world standards, has been reduced to that very small space between the far right and the extreme right, rigidly confined, to this day, by strict neoliberal orthodoxy. Just a few years ago “demanding the impossible” seemed to consist of electing an African American liberal to the presidency. That achievement of anti-racist progressive forces still remains one of the most inspiring moments in the 21st Century USA despite the disappointment that followed. At best, President Obama has turned out to be only a shade different from his predecessor, and in some ways he’s worse: it’s doubtful that Bush would have managed to pass the free trade agreements Obama has pushed through, nor would Bush have been able to get away with murder – literally, in the case of bin Laden, Al-Awlaki and countless Pakistanis – without an enormous outcry from left liberals.

In this context, what does it mean to “be realistic” and “demand the impossible”? What “impossible demand” must we make in our context, a context in which the continuation of the capitalist system has become impossible (if Immanuel Wallerstein is correct in his analysis that we’re now experiencing a “systemic crisis”), and the survival of human civilization unlikely?

Those currently occupying the cities across the US and the world have been criticized for not “making demands” or “having a program” or “an agenda.” Occupiers have responded that “our occupation is our demand.” Certainly the right to peaceably assemble is a first requirement for any movement, but the occupiers, more than anyone, are quite clear that the demands can’t end there. Many argue that the occupiers need to come up with a long list of specific demands, but I would side with those Situationists who would argue that such a list would be self-defeating: it would invite the rulers of the world to cede demands and ensure that “things stay the same.”

Yet it’s clear that the “impossible” demand is the only alternative to this impossibly irrational and unsustainable system that turns “reason” and all its resources to the exploitation and destruction of the planet. The occupiers, for the most part, aren’t so simple-minded as to fall for the “possible.” They know that the last thing they should do is offer a “realistic” set of demands and settle for a “realistic” program. The time has come to make “impossible” demands on this impossible system because the future of the world is at stake. And we can’t settle for anything less

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

Recently, Dictionary.com featured a question: “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?”:

But what about America itself? Why aren’t the continents of North and South America called “Columbusia” after Christopher Columbus? The word America comes from a lesser-known navigator and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.¹

Maybe Vespucci is the source for the naming of the western hemisphere, but it is disputed by others. The historian and sailor Samuel Morison was sure the hemisphere’s continents are named after Welshman Richard Amerike, the man who financed John Cabot’s westward voyage in 1497.²

BBC History wrote, “… it is also probable that, as the chief sponsor of the Matthew’s voyage, and with Cabot’s wife and children then living, at his instigation, in a house belonging to a close friend, Amerike sought reward for his patronage by asking that any new-found lands should be named after him.”³

A weeks ago, I read a grade 10 Social Studies test. On it was a question: “Who discovered Vancouver Island?” The multiple-choice question offered the names of five Europeans. Even if the question had been posed as “Which non-Indigenous explorer first reached an island later to become named Vancouver Island?,” all five proposed names were wrong. It was a terribly worded and trivial question. People who are not blinkered by ethnocentrism today realize that it is incorrect to depict a place where human beings already reside as being discovered by human beings from another ethnic group.

Can it therefore be morally correct to append a colonial designation upon the land inhabited by another people without their consent?

Three major First Nations reside on Vancouver Island (immodestly named Quadra and Vancouver Island by seafarers Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver): Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish. I have never been able to determine an Indigenous designation for the island. These nations each reside in their own section of the largest island on the west coast of Turtle Island.

Turning to the northern continent, how then should one refer to the landmass in deference to the Original Peoples? The eastern nations of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnabek both refer to the continent as Turtle Island – a name derived from folklore.

One Indigenous website, Mexica Uprising!, urges Indigenous peoples to “rise up against the illegal settler population whom continue to enslave us socially, economically, politically and spiritually.”⁴ It proffers another name for the landmasses of the western hemisphere.

The website complains, “Latin America is named after the White people of Latin descent who stole our land and claimed it as their own. The Europeans brand everything they ‘own’ with their name, it is no different with our land.” The proper name in Nahuatl is given as Ixachilan – “one mass of land united by the Eagle and Condor not two seperate [sic] continents.”

Mexica Uprising! implores Indigenous peoples, “It is time to de-colonize our minds and think as individuals. Don’t let the wasicu control your destiny, learn your true history and culture!”

Is de-colonization just meant for the minds of the colonized? Is it not about time for those who have profited from the actions of colonialist ancestors to reorient their thinking along a different moral path — a path that acknowledges and rejects past crimes against humanity and seeks to atone for past crimes, not committed by themselves, but from which they profit in some sense?

Or is aggressive Martian morality acceptable?

1. the hot word, “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?” Dictionary.com, 9 October 2011.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.
3. Peter MacDonald, “The Naming of America,” BBC History. Last updated 29 March 2011.
4. “Welcome to Mexica Uprising!” Mexica Uprising.

Methodology

In comparing the performance of Fernandez and Obama it is necessary to locate them in an historical context.  More specifically, both presidents and their immediate predecessors, George Bush in the US and Nestor Kirchner (deceased husband of Fernandez) in Argentina confronted major economic and social crises. What is telling, however, are the diametrically opposing responses to the crises and the divergent results.  On the one hand sustained growth with equity in Argentina and deepening crises and failed policies in the US.

Historical Context:  Argentina:  Depression, Revolt and Recovery

Between 1998–2002, Argentina experienced the worse socio-economic crises in its history.  The economy nose-dived from recession to full scale depression, culminating in double digit negative growth in 2001–2002.  Unemployment reached over 25% and in many working class neighborhoods, over 50%.  Tens of thousands of impoverished middle class professional lined up to receive bread and soup only blocks away from the Presidential palace.  Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, ‘piqueteros’ (picketers), blocked major highways and some raided trains shipping cattle and grain overseas.  Banks closed depriving millions of depositors of their savings.  Millions of middle class protestors organized radical neighborhood councils and linked up with unemployed assemblies.  The country was heavily indebted, the people deeply impoverished.  The popular mood was moving toward a revolutionary uprising.  Incumbent President Fernando De la Rua was overthrown (2001), scores of protestors were killed and wounded, as a popular rebellion threatened to seize the Presidential palace.  By the end of 2002, hundreds of bankrupt factories were ‘occupied’, taken over and run by workers.  Argentina defaulted on its external debt.  In early 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President, in the midst of this systemic crisis, and proceeded to reject efforts to enforce debt payment or repress the popular movements.  Instead he inaugurated a series of emergency public works programs.  He authorized payments to unemployed workers (150 pesos per month) to meet the basic needs of nearly half the labor force.

The most popular slogan of the multitudinous movements occupying the financial districts factories, public buildings and the streets was “Que se vayan todos” (“All politicians get out’).  The entire political class, parties and leaders, Congress and presidents were rejected outright.  But while the movements were vast, militant and united in what they rejected, they had no coherent program for taking state power, nor national political leadership to lead them.  After two years of turmoil, the populace turned to the ballot box and elected Kirchner with a mandate to produce or perish.  Kirchner heard the message, at least the part which demanded growth with equity.

Context:  The US under Bush-Obama

The last years of the Bush administration and the Obama presidency presided over the worse socio-economic crises since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Unemployment and underemployment rose to almost a third of the labor force by 2009.  Millions of homes were foreclosed.  Bankruptcies multiplied and banks were on the verge of collapse.  Negative growth rates and a sharp decline in income, increased poverty and multiplied the number of food stamp recipients.  Unlike Argentina, discontented citizens took to the ballot box.  Attracted by the demagogic “change” rhetoric of Obama, they placed their hopes in the new president. The Democrats won the Presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress.  The first priority of Obama and Congress was to pour trillions of dollars in bailing out the banks, even as unemployment deepened and the recession continued.  Their second priority was to deepen and expand overseas imperial wars.

Obama increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 30,000; expanded the military budget to $750 billion dollars; launched new military operations in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere; augmented military aid to Israeli colonial armed forces; signed military pacts with Asian countries (India, Philippines, Australia) proximate to China.

In sum, Obama gave maximum priority to expanding the militarized empire, depleting the public treasury of funds to finance the recovery of the domestic economy and reducing unemployment.

In contrast, Kirchner/Fernandez curtailed the power of the military, cut military spending and channeled state revenues toward employment programs, productive investments and non-traditional exports.

Under Obama the crises became an opportunity to revive and consolidate the financial power of Wall Street.  The White House augmented the military budget to expand imperial wars by deepening the budget deficit and then proposed to cut essential social programs to ‘reduce the deficit’.

Argentina from Crises to Dynamic Growth

In Argentina the economic catastrophe and popular uprising provided Kirchner with an opportunity to bring about a basic shift from militarism and speculative pillage to social programs and sustained economic growth.

The electoral victories of both Kirchner and Fernandez reflect their success in creating a ‘normal’ capitalist welfare state.  After 30 years of US backed predator neo-liberal regimes, this was a great positive change.  Between 1966 and 2002, Argentina suffered brutal military dictatorships culminating in the genocidal generals who murdered 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1982. From 1983 to 1989 Argentina suffered under a neo-liberal regime (Raul Alfonsin) which failed to deal with the dictatorial legacy and which presided over triple digit hyper-inflation.  From 1989–1999 under President Carlos Menem Argentina witnessed the biggest sell-off of its most lucrative public firms, natural resources (petrol included), banks, highways, zoo and public toilets to foreign investors and kleptocratic cronies for bargain basement prices.

Last but not least, Fernando De la Rua (2000–2001), promised change and proceeded to deepen the recession that led to the final catastrophic crash of December 2001 and the closing of the banks, the bankruptcy of 10,000 firms and the collapse of the economy.

Against this background of total and unmitigated failure and the human disaster of US–IMF promoted “free-market” policies, Kirchner/Fernandez defaulted on the external debt, re-nationalized several privatized firms and the pension funds, intervened the banks and doubled social spending, expanded public investment in production and increased popular consumption, on the road to economic recovery.  By the end of 2003 Argentina turned from negative to 8% growth.

Human Rights, Social Programs and Independent Foreign Economic Policy

Argentina’s economy has grown over 90% from 2003–2011, over three times that of the United States. Its recovery has been accompanied by a tripling of social spending, especially on programs reducing poverty.  The percentage of poor Argentines has declined from over 50% in 2001 to less than 15% in 2011.  In contrast US poverty has risen over the same decade from 12% to 17% and is on an upward trajectory over the same period.

The US has become the country with the greatest inequalities in the OECD with 1% controlling 40% of the country’s wealth, (up from 30% in less than a decade).  In contrast, Argentina’s inequalities have shrunken by half.  The US economy has failed to recover from the deep recession of 2008-2009, during which it declined by over 8%.  In contrast Argentina declined less than 1% in 2009, and has been growing at a healthy 8% (2010-2011).  Argentina has nationalized pension funds, doubled basic pensions and introduced a universal child welfare program to counter malnutrition and guarantee school attendance.

In contrast 20% of children in the US are now suffering from poor diets, drop-out rates are increasing for adolescents and malnutrition affects over 25% of minority children.  With more social cuts in health/education under way, social conditions can only worsen.  In Argentina the income of wage and salaried workers has increased over 50% over the decade in real terms, while in the US they have declined by nearly 10%.

Argentina’s dynamic growth of GNP has been fueled by growing domestic consumption and dynamic export earnings.  Argentina has a consistent large trade surplus based on favorable market prices and increased competitiveness.  In contrast domestic consumption has stagnated in the US, the trade deficit is close to $1.5 trillion dollars and revenues are wasted on non-productive military expenditures of over $900 billion a year.

While in Argentina the impulse for a policy of default with growth came about because of a popular rebellion and mass movements.  In the US popular discontent was channeled toward the election of a Wall Street financial con-man named Obama.  He proceeded to pour resources into rescuing the financial elite instead of letting them go bankrupt and funding growth, competitiveness and social consumption.

The Argentine Alternative to Bailouts and Poverty

The Argentine experience goes counter to all the precepts of the international financial agencies (the IMF, World Bank), their political backers, and publicists in the financial press.  From the first year (2003) of Argentina’s recovery to the present, the economic experts have “predicted” that its growth was “not sustainable” – it has continued robustly for over a decade.  The financial writers claimed the default would lead to Argentina being shut out of financial markets and that its economy would collapse.  Argentina relied on self-financing based on export earnings and re-activation of the domestic economy and confounded the prestigious economists.

As growth continued, the critics in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal claimed it would end once “unused capacity was exhausted”.  Instead growth earnings financed the expansion of the domestic market and created new capacity for growth especially to new markets in Asia and Brazil.

Even as late as October 25, 2011, Financial Times columnists still prattle about “the coming crises” in the manner of messianic fundamentalists who predict the pending apocalypse.  They harp on “high inflation”, “unsustainable social programs”, “overvalued currency”, and more predictions of “the end of prosperity”. All these dire warnings occur in the face of continued growth of 8% in 2011 and the overwhelming electoral victory of President Fernandez. Anglo-American financial scribes should focus on the demise of their free market regimes in Europe and North America instead of denigrating an economic experience from which they might learn.

In refutation of the Wall Street critics, Mark Weisbrot and his associates point out¹ that Argentina’s growth was based on the expansion of domestic consumption, increased manufacturing exports to regional trading partners as well as traditional agro-mineral exports to Asia.  In other words, Argentina is not totally dependent on primary exports; it has balanced trade and is not over-dependent on commodity prices.  In regard to high inflation, Weisbrot points out that “inflation may be high in Argentina but it is real growth and income distribution that matter with regard to the well-being of the vast majority of population”, (page 14) (my emphasis).

The US under Bush-Obama has pursued a totally perverse and divergent path to that of Kirchner-Fernandez.  They have prioritized military spending and expanded the security apparatus over the productive economy. Obama and Congress have vastly increased the police state apparatus, reinforced their political influence over regressive budgetary policies while increasingly violating human and civil rights.  In contrast Kirchner/Fernandez have prosecuted dozens of human rights violators in the military and police and weakened the military’s political power.

In other words, the Argentine Presidents have weakened the militarist pressure bloc which demands greater arms and security expenditures. They created a state more accommodative to their political project of financing economic competitiveness, new markets and social programs.  Bush-Obama revived the parasitical financial sector further unbalancing the economy.

Kirchner/Fernandez ensured that the banking sector financed the growth of the export sector, manufactures and domestic consumption.  Obama slashes social consumption to pay creditors.  Kirchner-Fernandez imposed a 75% “haircut” on bondholders in order to finance social spending.

Kirchner-Fernandez have won three presidential elections, each by a larger margin.  Obama may be a one-term president, even with the billion dollar campaign funding from Wall Street, the military industrial complex and the pro-Israel power configuration.

The popular opposition to Obama, especially the “Occupy Wall Street movement” has a long way to go to emulate the success of the Argentine movements that rousted incumbent presidents, blocked highways paralyzing production and circulation and imposed a social agenda that prioritized production over finance, social consumption over military expenditures.  The “Occupy Wall Street Movement” has taken a first step toward mobilizing millions of active participants necessary to creating the social muscle that turned Argentina from a US style client state into a dynamic independent welfare state.

1. The Argentina Success Story, Center for Economic Bad Policy Research, Oct. 2011

Some 1500 people later attended a daily General Assembly and voted for a general strike on November 2. It would be the first one in the United States since l946, which was also in Oakland. Such a strike calls on workers and students to stay home from work and school and try to shut down the city. Downtown banks were also encouraged to close and demonstrators vowed to enter them if they did not.

“The whole world is watching Oakland” chants can be heard at various occupations around the United States and read in their communications.

In Oakland’s police riot, shotguns fired projectiles and helicopters and armored personnel carriers were employed by the some 400 police officers. They created a martial law environment to intimidate unarmed citizens as they mobilized against multiple social injustices. Some described it as a “drill” for what could happen at other occupation sites. But this repression is stimulating more resistance around the Bay Area and elsewhere.

In San Francisco, police gathered on the morning of October 27 with their masks and riot gear, with the apparent intention of evicting occupiers. They were met by 1000 protestors and backed down. As with the threat by New York City’s mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who ordered police to evict Occupy Wall Street, there have now been three important coast-to-coast victories for the 99% in the growing struggle against the 1%.

Four San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a California state senator, and other elected officials joined the protestors. They called for negotiations with the occupiers, rather than force. In two weeks San Francisco will vote for mayor. The current interim Mayor Ed Lee is running. A failed attempt to evict the emboldened occupiers would doom his campaign.
In all three Bay Area occupy sites that this reporter attended or watched, including Santa Rosa, some elected officials have supported the occupiers by pressuring mayors, city administrators, and police chiefs not to use force. The new occupation movement is using not only its street smarts but also more traditional political routes to increase allies among elected officials, unions, and neighborhood, church, and community groups.

“Oakland is the vanguard and epicenter of the Occupy movement,” Clarence Thomas, was quoted in the daily Oakland Tribune as saying. He is a member of the powerful International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union and urged people to support the strike. Other unions have also come forward with support, though some have reservations.

Labor historian Fred Glass of San Francisco City College was recently interviewed on Pacifica’s KPFA radio. He said that to be successful a general strike needs four things: anger, a spark, leadership willing to call the strike, and an organizational structure to implement it.

The occupation movement has already demonstrated the first three components. Mass discontent exists throughout the U.S. by the 99% that are ruled by the 1%. The police wounding of Iraq vet and Marine Scott Olsen on October 26 in Oakland provided the spark that ignited the calling of the strike.

It remains to be seen how well Occupy Oakland can organize the general strike. It is a risky tactic, especially since the unions that once called for such strikes are now weaker. Whereas most unions in l946 represented workers from private companies, most unions today represent service workers. For example, I am a member of the California Faculty Association, which represents teachers at Sonoma State University.
Oakland’s 1946 general strike brought 100,000 people into the streets and shut down the city for 56 hours. The largest gathering at any of the current occupations here in the U.S. was apparently some 20,000 people. However, ccupations in Madrid and Rome have had over 100,000 participants.

Professor Glass reviewed the history of general strikes in the U.S., which have been few and far in between. Elsewhere in the world, like in Latin America where I have lived, and in Europe, general strikes called by labor unions are more common.

“The biggest general strike waves in the U.S. have been after World War I and World War II,” Glass explained. “Veterans came home to many promises, which were not fulfilled,” he added. This is happening again with vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace rallied to support Olsen and have been active at many occupations.

October 26 started as a sad day for veterans and others when we heard in the morning of Olsen’s serious wounding. We were somewhat relieved when we heard of the strong response to the police brutality that forced Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to back off her troops. Some of Quan’s allies have been highly critical of her role and even have called for her resignation.

The police wounding of Olsen has galvanized occupation encampments in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere, where vigils have been held for him. A tribute to Olsen has been constructed around a flagpole in Oakland with the words “Pray 4 Scott.” Photos of his face with a dog appear on the internet. Groups such as Amnesty International have condemned the use of tear gas on unarmed citizens, as well as the actions of Oakland Mayor Quan.

Even the corporate media, which has tried to paint negative images of the occupiers with terms such as “dirty hippies,” has had to report the substantial presence of veterans and other patriotic Americans in the growing movement.

Olsen woke up on October 27, though he was apparently still unable to speak. His parents have arrived from Wisconsin and he has been upgraded to fair condition and moved from the emergency room to an intensive care unit at Highland Hospital.

Santa Rosa’s occupation on October 15 was the sixth largest in the nation, though this Sonoma County city only has around 150,000 people. A constant presence at city hall has occurred since then, as well as daily decision-making General Assemblies. The protestors and police have been collaborating and working well together in Santa Rosa. However, that may change as Occupy Santa Rosa is considering engaging in civil disobedience. They plan to erect a tent city to facilitate better overnight stays. That might cause a police reaction.

The first Occupy Petaluma, also in Sonoma County, is scheduled for October 29. An earlier one in the small town of Sonoma on October 14 drew some 500 people.

Such events happening in the San Francisco Bay Area represent many people in the region thinking deeply about what is happening in the U.S. and taking direct action to change the course of events. An uprising of old-fashioned democracy is happening. This is not the first time that this has happened.

As someone who moved to Chile, after serving in the U.S. Army, during the democratically-elected government of President Salvador Allende in the early l970s, today’s events evoke memories. The current victories of the Occupy movement are substantial. But the 1% is carefully calculating its next steps to quell this movement that threatens their domination and horded treasures.

In Chile I experienced hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets for democracy. They were eventually struck down by the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. A reign of terror was initiated throughout South America that took thousands of lives and dashed the hopes of a democratic, nonviolent revolution.

Let’s not be naïve and innocent to expect that the 1% will give up their substantial wealth exploited from the labor of the rest of us and nature’s bounty. The struggle has only entered its next stages. There is likely to be setbacks, but victory is still possible.

“I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death,” wrote Chilean-American author Ariel Dorfman on October 10 as the Occupy movement unfolded. He wrote of “that other September 11th,” I have also been haunted by those voices, given the torture and assassination of my good friend Frank Teruggi by the Chilean military. If it is to successfully challenge power, the Occupy movement is likely to experience deaths, as we did in the l960s with the Kent State murders. Then what? Some will retreat to their private lives.

There is much to learn from defeat, as Dorfman writes. There have been “many who tried and failed.” They “gave their lives to change the world.”

Might the Occupy movement be a next step in the fall of the American Empire? After the mighty U.S. defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wounded beasts can be deadly. What might be left after such a fall? Could we return to the American Republic and its values of liberty, freedom, and equality for all?

“Go down fighting,” Dorfman advises. Better than groveling on one’s knees for crumbs.

The Chinese/Russian veto has revived hopes of peace and security among developing countries, who have watched the orgy of violence unleashed by NATO bombings in Libya over the past 8 months with horror and outrage.

The security forces of the Syrian Arab Republic have been battling armed gangs backed by Western intelligence agencies since February. Thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of security personnel have been killed. NATO’s Blitzkrieg on the people of Libya and the covert war on the people of Syria have  proven the extent of the desperation that now besets Western capitalism and have served to highlight the sharp divide that now exists between progressive countries who are striving to create a multipolar world and the cancerous Western plutocracies now engaging in looting, pillaging and mass murder in a desperate attempt to maintain their global hegemony.

AlBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, have been unwavering in their support for the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya and the Syrian Arab Republic in their long struggle against NATO backed terrorists.

On October 9th a delegation of Alba officials visited the Syrian capital Damascus to express their solidarity with the terror-stricken country. The delegation included Bolivian Communications Minister Eban Canelas, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro Moros, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriquez, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Pablo Villa Gomez, and Deputy Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Maria Rubiales.

Nicolas Madura, Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs told Syrian television on October 10th:

The world order which dominates the media is using media terrorism, political and psychological warfare to impose its vision on the world.

Madura added that during the past thirty years:

This order has imposed its own culture on the world, a culture of violence, of death and of drugs and it has formed a network of television stations and newspapers to subjugate the world.

The Bolivian communications minister Ivan Canelas told the same TV station:

What we saw on our visit to Syria was very different to what the foreign press have been showing us. We found peace and security here. People go about their business and live their lives normally. It is clear proof that many of the media outlets are working for the profits of the imperialist powers who have made attempting to damage the sovereignty and dignity not only of Syria but of other peoples in the world such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, Cuba and Peru.

Mr. Canales also stressed the necessity for radical reform of the United Nations so as to free the organization from US control.

Maria Rubiales, Nicaragua’s vice minister for foreign affairs said:

When an immense crisis occurs in the West, especially in the United States of America, the  easiest way for them to get out of it is by destroying other countries.

Referring to the existence of terrorist groups in Syria armed by the West, Rubiales said:

If that happened in the United States of America, they would send in the army to put down the armed terrorists.”

The arrival of the Latin American delegation in Damascus is another poignant example of the growing isolation of the Atlantic imperialist cult.  As more and more people tune into alternative media around the world, the lies and propaganda of the Atlantic imperialist configuration are being continually exposed.

AlBA countries, Venezuela in particular, have close relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. In November 2010, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro visited Damascus where 10 joint projects involving Syria, Belarus and Venezuela were agreed upon.

He told reporters “we are making a tour to consolidate the projects established with these brother countries, for the construction of a new world that has been designed in concrete terms.”

Belarus has been a close partner with Venezuela for many years. Minsk has been able to reduce its oil dependency on Russia through a deal with Caracas involving the importation of up to 10 million metric tons of oil.

On the other hand, Caracas has also benefited from close relations with the former Soviet Republic. Belarus has been helping Venezuela in its ambitious Mision Casa Vivienda, Great Housing Mission, which aims at overcoming the housing deficit in the country.

Belarus has also come under attack from the New World Order with several attempts at regime change there through US orchestrated ‘’colour revolutions’’.

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko told Russian reporters on October 7th:

They tried to push a revolution in Belarus through social networks. The person, who was running those social networks is in Poland, guarded by special services and funded by we know whom.

Bilateral trade ties between Syria and Belarus have intensified since 2007. Like the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance, Syria and Belarus strive for autonomy, national sovereignty and independence. The special trade agreements between Venezuela, Belarus and Syria are a cogent example of the desire of developing countries to create a multi-polar world.

The visit of the ALBA delegation to Syria was, unsurprisingly, ignored by the Western media. But the visit is highly significant. Syria has, since February, been fighting a covert war waged by Western intelligence agencies using Islamist terrorists presented to the world as ‘’peaceful protestors’’ by the corporate media.

Many of the ALBA countries have experienced US- orchestrated terrorism in the past.

The  US trained terrorists known as the “contras” used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s cost up to 30,000 Nicaraguan lives.  The Nicaraguan terrorists were presented by the Western press as ‘freedom fighters’ just as the terrorists in Syria today are being portrayed as “pro-democracy” and victims of ‘state terror’.  The US backed terrorism campaign was so successful in Nicaragua, Washington decided to send its principal organizer Michael Kozak to Belarus as US ambassador. Kozak told the Times newspaper on September 3, 2001 that ‘’the objective and to some extent methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua.

The ALBA delegation’s recent visit to Syria has made it clear that the real international community is aware of the “objectives” and “methodologies” of US imperialism in the Middle East and throughout the world, and, in particular, the nefarious role of the corporate media in misinforming the general public about the reality in Syria. But above all, the ALBA delegation’s visit has sent a signal to the degenerate Euro-Atlantic elites that their attempt to dominate the planet with their “culture of violence, death and drugs” is doomed to fail.

Further south in the Americas, civil society organization over the past decade brought social movement leaders to state power and marginalized peoples’ rights to national agendas. In this interview, Uruguayan intellectual and journalist, Raúl Zibechi, gives us a South American perspective of the momentous changes taking place globally, through a focus on the inaugural mobilizations in the Middle East. As the Occupy Wall Street protests gain ground, U.S. activists may well engage with such locally rooted yet transnational conversations aimed at the transformation of globalized power structures.

Raúl Zibechi is one of the foremost political theorists writing on, and working with, social movements in Latin America. His work combines acute, generative and ethical analyses of socio-political developments in Latin America with collaborative efforts to support grassroots transformation in the region. He is international section editor of the acclaimed Uruguayan weekly Brecha, lecturer and researcher with the Multiversidad Fransiscana de América Latina and a regular contributor to the Americas Policy Program and to La Jornada in Mexico. His recent books include Dispersing Power (2006, English translation 2010) and Territorios en Resistencia (2008). In order to contextualize the following interview with Zibechi in his wider body of work, our conversation is interspersed with selected translations from some of his essays previously available only in Spanish.

From “The Revolutions of Ordinary People”

(First published in La Jornada, 03 June 2011. Translation of entire article available here.)

The inherited and still hegemonic conception of revolution must be revised, and, in fact, is being revised by current events. Revolution as exclusively focused on the capture of state power is being replaced by another concept of revolution, more complex and integral, which does not exclude a state-centred strategy but supersedes and goes beyond it. In any case, the conquest of state power is a bend in a far longer trajectory, one which seeks something that cannot be achieved from within state institutions: to create a new world.

Traditional politics – anchored in forms of representation that replace collective subjects with managerial professionals, professionals of deception – are of little use in the creation of a new world. Instead, a new world that is different from the current one implies rehearsing and experimenting with horizontal social relations, in sovereign, self-controlled and autonomous spaces, in which no one imposes on or directs the collective…

Beyond their diverse circumstances, the Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol movements in Cairo and in Madrid, form part of the genealogy of “All of them must go!” declared in the 2001 Argentinian revolt, the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, the 2003 and 2005 Bolivian Gas Wars and the 2006 Oaxaca commune, to mention only the urban cases. These movements all share two characteristics: the curbing of those in power and the opening of spaces for direct democracy and collective participation without representatives.

Cristina Cielo: Is such a concept of revolution based on horizontal relations similar to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude? What is the difference between their multitude and your idea of dispersed power?

Raúl Zibechi: Hardt and Negri’s multitude is linked to post-Fordism and to non-material work in cognitive capitalism. This mode of production is still in the minority in Latin America and I believe in the Arab world as well. So while it is interesting, their idea of multitude cannot be employed to understand what is happening here. My take on the collective is quite different. We live in societies that are “variegated”, an interesting concept developed by the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado to describe social relations in his country. These are societies in which many different types of traditional and modern social relations co-exist.

The best example of this is the Andean market, or the urban market in the peripheries of cities like Buenos Aires. These are spaces in which many families live together in a small area, with various businesses that combine production and sales in different fields, with diverse modes of employment – familial, salaried, in kind, commissioned – that is, a “variegated” mode that implies diverse and complex social relations that are interwoven and combined. In this way, if one of these relationships is modified, the rest are as well…

My proposal of “dispersing power” is rooted in communities in movement, non-formal communities, which, once set into motion, can disperse state power. How? Simply because they are composed of mobile powers… These cannot confront the state frontally, because they are annihilated. They surround it, embrace it, paralyse it, penetrate it subtly. That is what we saw in Tahrir when protesters slept under tanks, when women approached soldiers.

CC: Reports on Tunisia and Egypt’s uprisings emphasized the use of Facebook, Twitter and the internet as media for the horizontal organization of the protests. Your own work has focused on the territorial character of Latin American social movements. What are the implications of the differences between the virtual spaces of Arab mobilizations and the physical territories of the Latin American movements?

RZ: I don’t believe in virtual spaces. Spaces are always material as well as symbolic. It’s another matter to speak of virtual media of communication among people in movement…. For me, territories are those places in which life is lived in an integral sense, they are settlements, as we say in Latin America. These have existed for a long time in rural areas: indigenous communities or settlements of Brazil’s Landless Movement, ancestral lands or lands recuperated in the struggle.

What was new in the 1970s onward was the proliferation of urban land occupations. In some cities, more that 70% of urban land, and therefore of households, are illegal yet legitimate occupations. In some cases, this marks the beginning of another type of social organization, in which semi-craftwork production – including urban gardens – is combined with popular markets and informal modes of distribution. In the decisive moments of struggles against the State or at times of profound crisis, these territories become “resistor territories,” that is, spaces that are in some senses liberated from state power and from which challenges to the system may be launched.

CC: What is the importance of urban spaces in popular mobilizations?

RZ: There is a double use of spaces. One is the daily spaces of the neighbourhoods, the markets, all the spaces of daily socialization. The other is the space of protest, the mega-space such as Tahrir Square in Cairo or the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. These spaces are occupied for a time, sometimes for longer periods such as the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, but they are not permanent spaces in which people live their daily lives, because they have to go to work, go home to sleep, etc.

It seems to me necessary to make this distinction and at the same time to establish links between both kinds of urban spaces. I agree with James Scott’s point that people tend to “rehearse” their public actions in spaces that are distant from power, spaces that they can control and in which they feel secure. In contemporary cities, those spaces are the markets, the churches or mosques, social or cultural clubs, youth gangs. It is important to understand what is happening in those spaces, because it is from there that people come out to take Tahrir Square. It is in those spaces that powerful rebellions are spun, that is why they are so important. And, of course, the family. The changes in family, the role of women, of children, the number of children, all of these are indications of what is to come. I don’t believe that great popular uprisings can take place without some shift in the role of patriarchy in the home.

From “This is No Time to be Given to Distraction”

(First published in La Jornada, 25 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

With the Arab revolts, the global systemic crisis enters a new phase, more unpredictable and increasingly beyond control. Until now, the main actors have been the financial oligarchs, the powerful multinationals and the leading governments, particularly the United States and China, followed at some distance by institutions such as the G-20. Now, as popular sectors around the world enter the scene, a momentous shift has taken place. It implies a deepening and speeding up of the global transformations taking place…

The activation of popular sectors modifies our analytic axes, and above all, imposes ethical choices. The scenarios of inter-state relations will increasingly collide with the scenarios of emancipatory struggles…

We are entering into a period of systemic chaos that at some moment will shed light on a new order, perhaps better, perhaps worse than the capitalist order. That system was born with the demographic catastrophe of the Black Plague, which killed a third of the European population over the span of a few years. It will not surrender on tiptoes and with fine manners, but rather in the midst of chaos and barbarity, as with Gaddafi’s regime.

From “The Arab Revolts and Strategic Thinking”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 4 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

It is a matter of understanding the lines of force, the relations of power, the strong and weak points in international relations understood as a system. It is like understanding that the bricks on a wall are what sustains the structure; if these bricks are removed or affected, the whole building – despite its appearance of stability – may tumble….

To say we are traversing a systemic crisis, however, is not to say that the capitalist system is in a terminal crisis. The point, rather, is that the international system will not continue to function as it has since its last great re-structuring, which took place more or less in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. While systemic analyses do not pretend to specify exact dates for such profound changes, they do indicate stages characterized by important tendencies. For example: the crisis of U.S. hegemony. [Some of these systemic shifts include] not only the decline of U.S. power, but also the growth of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China, to which South Africa has now been added). Turkey’s geopolitical shifts have also been noted, as it has slowly abandoned Washington’s sphere of influence. But the Arab revolts constitute a pronounced turn of the screw.

CC: Why has the coverage of events in the Middle East portrayed these as ‘revolts’, ‘rebellions’ or ‘uprisings’ rather than as social movements, as popular mobilizations in Latin America tend to be portrayed?

RZ: Social movement is a Eurocentric concept that has been useful in describing what happens in homogeneous societies that revolve around the capitalist market in which there is one basic form of social relations. In Latin America, the concept has and is used by academic intellectuals whose perspective is external to popular sector organization. If they were on the inside, they would see that, in fact, there are two societies: the official one, of the upper and middle-upper classes, and the other society, the informal one, of use values and of the popular sectors. When I say that there are two societies, I mean to say that each of these is shaped by different types of social relations, and as such, by diverse relationships of power. That is why when the alternative, popular society sets itself into action, it makes more sense to speak of societies in movement, or alternative societies in movement, rather than of social movements. The difference is critical.

In any case, I suspect that in the Arab case the international media has not spoken of social movements because of issues of racism, of colonialism, as if it takes some level of modernity – which they don’t consider the Middle Eastern people to have achieved – to have a so-called civil society, which is also a Eurocentric construction. I prefer to speak, along with Partha Chaterjee, of political society, because it is only by doing politics that it can exist.

CC: If socio-political transformations in different regions point to a global systemic crisis, how do particular events in one region influence the processes or possibilities in other regions? That is, are there ways in which such diverse and disperse forces can transform each other, or transform into something else?

RZ: Fundamental processes and situational junctures respond to different logics and views. There is no mechanical relation between the two; rather, we must focus our attention on the longer processes, and insert events into those, as Braudel taught us. The fundamental tendency is: a crisis of the centre-periphery relationship, a crisis of U.S. domination and of the unipolar world, and now, also, a crisis in Western hegemony. In this transition, which has been taking place over the last four decades, we must insert current processes.

What I mean to say is that the Arab and Latin American revolts disrupt previous equilibriums, or better said, they accelerate the processes of the crises of older structures. And when there are cracks in the imperial Occidental construction, emergent tendencies are strengthened: for example, China, India, Brazil. At the same time, we can register changes in micro structures such as the family, school, health system, the city itself; that is, in spaces of discipline that are undergoing very powerful transformations. Macro and micro transformations must be jointly examined, included within the same description. If we do that, we see a world in movement, one that enters into situations of systemic chaos at particular moments, such as the present one. We do not know what will come, but we are sure that it will be very different. All the cards say: Asia, multipolarity, emergent nations. I hope that some of the cards also say emancipation, but nothing is certain.

From “Everything Solid Melts into the Street”

(First published in America Latina en movimiento, 15 February 2011. Translation of entire article available here)

The people in the street are a spanner in the works in the accumulation of capital, which is why one of the first “measures” taken by the military after Mubarak left was to demand that citizens abandon the street and return to work. But if those in power cannot co-exist with the streets and occupied squares, those below – who have learned to topple Pharaohs – have not yet learned how to jam the flows and movements of capital. Something much more complex is needed than blocking tanks or dispersing anti-riot police. In contrast to state apparatuses, capital flows without territory, so it is impossible to pin down and confront. Still further: it traverses us, it models our bodies and behaviours, it is part of our everyday lives and, as Foucault pointed out, it shares our beds and our dreams. Although there is an outside to the State and its institutions, it is difficult to imagine an outside to capital. Neither barricades nor revolts will suffice to fight it.

Despite these limitations, the hunger revolts that became anti-authoritarian revolts are a depth charge to the most important equilibriums of the world system. These will not remain unscathed by the destabilization in the Middle East… We are entering into a period of uncertainty and increasing disorder. In South America, the emergent power of Brazil has assembled a regional architecture as an alternative to the one that has begun to collapse. Everything suggests, however, that things will be far more complicated in the Middle East, given the enormous political and social polarization in the region, the ferocious interstate competition and because both the United States and Israel believe that their future depends on sustaining realities that can, in fact, no longer be propped up.

The Middle East brings together some of the most brutal contradictions of the contemporary world. Firstly, there are determined efforts to sustain an outdated unilateralism. Secondly, it is the region where the principal tendency of the contemporary world is most visible: the brutal concentration of power and wealth…. It is possible that the Arab revolts may open a fissure in the colossal concentration of power [which] has been manifest in the region since the Second World War.

Only time will tell if what is brewing is a tsunami so powerful that not even the Pentagon will be able to surf its waves. But we mustn’t forget that tsunamis make no distinctions: they sweep up rights and lefts, the just and the sinners, the rebels and the conservatives. Nevertheless, they are in many ways similar to revolutions: they leave nothing in their place and they provoke enormous suffering before things return to some kind of normalcy, better perhaps than before, or maybe just less bad.

The work was advising a joint venture, errands like gauging risk and return, or squeezing ministerial face for a competitive edge. Life went on throughout the Congo war, and so did commerce. The trick is to find a niche on the ragged edges of the war. If you live in a place where capital markets are ropy, war torn countries are not a bad place to salt your long-term capital away. Some Israelis were in on the joint venture: Israelis don’t mind war, when the other side is helpless, and in this war almost everyone was helpless. A farmer’s rusty panga could be an overwhelming force. The Mai Mai used spears to great effect. Molars and penises served as weapons, for cannibalism and rape.

The war still smolders today, in Kivu, Ituri, and Katanga. It causes us no disquiet. But what if we got greedy for peace? What if peace changed from a heartwarming word to a remorseless objective like efficiency or profit? What if we demanded more and more?

Well, it’s happening, and it makes our rulers nervous. In the Wikileaks cable dump, American diplomats reticently quote a novel term, the right to peace. Officials from Spain and Russia invoke it. The UN Secretary General is heard to say it. The conjunction of two freighted terms sounds like heartwarming blather, but from the mouths of shrewd statesmen, it’s of import. Even the most aristocratic Hotchkiss/Harvard meathead will begin to think that something is afoot.

For our war machine and its government, peace is always trouble. In the run up to World War I our government sent a presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs,  to jail. His crime was opposing conscription. Socialist Charles Schenk was convicted of espionage. Schenk got a look at the Constitution, and pointed out that conscription looks a lot like unconstitutional involuntary servitude. Back then our antisemitism was for Jews, not Arabs, and we sent a few Jews up for twenty years. It seems they threw some leaflets out a window. In English and, insidiously, Yiddish, the alien anarchists denounced our invasion of Russia. They called for an end to arms production.

In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Smith Act to silence commie putschists and their nonaggression, and in the traditional patriotic frenzy that invariably cascades into backwoods slapstick, Mississippi took the concept and ran with it, crafting its own national security law. They convicted some Jehovah’s Witnesses of questioning the point of war. In this case, though, peace might not have been what tore it. In what was probably the crucial atrocity, the Dixie heretics also linked the origins of our Pledge of Allegiance to the convent-school rites of French Papists.  In Mississippi, that’s a clear and present danger.

This embarrassing arc of American history still bends toward idiocy, with every provincial rent-a-cop and stewardess a homeland security hero. Arabic lettering on a t-shirt gets you kicked off a plane and questioned (though nowadays Yiddish is mostly OK.) The nation teems with deputized authorities demanding fatuous reverence to our proletarian cannon fodder and their hopeless anti-terror snipe hunts.

It’s not quite classic Orwell: to patriotic Americans, war may not be peace, but peace is insidious war. The government charged a Vietnam War protester with sedition for grabbing the leg of the recruit who stepped on him. It seems the mere word peace can be seditious. “Make love for peace… We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know.” John Lennon’s mischievous wordplay triggered a federal investigation — and eventually, a traditional American lone nut came along and solved the nation’s problem.

The war on peace is heating up again. Led by Patrick Fitzgerald, hero of the wet-squib Scooter Libby trial, federal agents infiltrated peace groups, and squads of paramilitary commandos raided their homes.  The pretext was an edict criminalizing support for terror, an ingenious Ermächtigungsgestz that could put Jimmy Carter away. The guilty peaceniks were foiled by state-of-art security innovations: from their elite squadron of burly termagants to the FBI deployed fake lesbians as agents provocateur.

To observe the 2011 United Nations International Day of Peace, the US scheduled the launch of a Minuteman III ICBM. True to American traditions of hearty redneck defiance, we were to spend the day of global ceasefire plinking at the Marshall Islands, our backyard tin can target. But word got out, and with a week to go the government postponed the launch, spoiling some unsung Air Force Strangelove’s fun.

Peace was all right in the old days. Back then it was exclusively the bailiwick of states, a stateman’s concern that was above their subjects’ pay grade. The League of Nations’ remit was the peace of the world. The members were states, monolithic black boxes interacting for the peoples sealed inside. The scope of their covenant was international law and treaty. To safeguard peace, the covenant provided for dispute resolution: by arbitration, by a new International Court of Justice, or by unanimous decision of the Great War’s victors in Council. The League bound its member states into a defensive alliance. The League’s covenant mandated disarmament and arms control.

The covenant looked inside states for one purpose only. Its disarmament provisions were based on a shrewd appraisal of the danger of war profiteering: “The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections.”

Objectionable or not, war profiteering is the prerogative of America’s ruling class, and so Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman built us a top-quality enemy to fight. The two bankers were discreet stewards for Germany’s munitions, mining, and slaving interests.  Bush’s Nazi clients blew the League to smithereens.

The war made the allies nostalgic for peace. Perhaps they even idealized peace a bit, for they imagined it without misery. In June 1941, fourteen allies set out The Saint James Agreement, declaring:

the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security; and that it is their intention to work together, and with other free peoples, both in war and peace to this end.

The US had not yet joined the war and did not have occasion to sign on. But that summer, in The Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged to “lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.” The peace they promised to all men in all lands would let them “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want,” and it specifically included improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security. You could tell the commies had them running scared.

The United Nations first came on the scene not as an institution but as a group of belligerents. The Washington Declaration was their war cry. In the Washington Declaration the United Nations threw ‘human rights’ into the mix, more as a bonus of victory than of peace. Enumerated rights were then just a gleam in the eyes of Roosevelt’s Brains Trust, but rights were soon to take on a life of their own and complicate peace.

The Moscow Declaration of 1943 looked ahead to the end of war, to arms control and an international organization. The unnamed organization would keep the peace “with the least diversion of the world’s human and economic resources for armaments.” That principle carried through to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals defining the United Nations. Swords were to give way to ploughshares.  It was official. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference institutionalized well-being as part of peace.

The UN Charter was shot through with peace, as a purpose and a principle, but the institutional arrangements for pacific settlement of disputes left societies and associations out of it, focusing on states. Civil society was allowed a look in only on economic and social matters.

Peace waxed and waned. By 1984, the US had renewed its arms race. America planned to stud Europe with nuclear missiles. Europe reacted with mass protests for a nuclear freeze. The United Nations General Assembly weighed in with Resolution 39/11. Its Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace made explicit use of pervasive nuclear fears. The onus of peace-building was to fall on state policies and international dispute resolution, but the impetus had come from below. President Reagan blamed Soviet agents but he came to embrace arms reduction.

War returned to Europe and we bombed it to a frenzy in the Balkans, trying to help. The horn of Africa got out of hand too. America swaggered into the Somalia saloon to break it up and came back out through the window ass-up. This wasn’t what we had in mind at all.

Pacifists concluded that peace was too important to be left to the authorities. The Hague Agenda proposed the New Diplomacy, a collaborative process for citizens, pressure groups, and states. To put human and ecological needs ahead of national sovereignty and borders, they would “wrest peace-making away from the exclusive control of politicians and military establishments.”  The New Diplomacy dovetailed with the old pinko tradition of internationalism from below, which aimed to weaken states by linking different peoples across borders.

In 2000 the General Assembly adopted the Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.  As the UN members redefined it, peace is not merely the absence of conflict. It’s a process, a treadmill of dialogue and conflict resolution. Fractious masses get involved. No more master strokes of deft diplomacy, no more parceling out nations on scraps of paper, fifty-fifty, ninety-ten — the Great Men of Yalta were dead, and the world they left us was bursting at the seams. The genial shipboard tea or walk in the woods was now to be supplanted by a bewildering welter of responsibilities, some defined in treaty law, some not. Tolerance. Solidarity. Cooperation. Pluralism. Cultural diversity. Dialogue. Understanding.

It could have been terribly cumbersome but the Supreme Court installed George Bush, scion of war profiteers and secret agents, the Saudis stuck a thumb in America’s eye, and that took care of the Culture of Peace.

The peaceniks saw it coming. They were ready. The world let the first illegal war slide: America milked universal sympathy to get a Security Council resolution authorizing nothing, and waved it like a banner as they marched off to war in Afghanistan. Worked like a charm, thanks to Americans’ blissful ignorance of the supreme law of the land. No one here knows what UN Charter Chapter VII says.  It never came up.

But when America tried that again, with Iraq, the world dug in its heels with the largest coordinated mass protest in history. February 15th, 2003 saw public assemblies in 794 localities worldwide.¹

In America a lot of militarist energy went into mocking pacifists as mournful chubbies holding candles, begging pardon for things they had no hand in. Jingoes derided as affectations their gentle demeanor and the compassionate sidelong inclination of their heads. America’s home-front warriors poked at their Achille’s heel: their inner peace was ineffectual here, in the land of war and death. But the new pacifists are hard-nosed guerreros wielding the disruptive potential of law and institutions against the American rogue state. Their brand of peace would drop a wrench into the works of our national meat grinder, impoverishing death merchants, dispossessing kleptocrats, and bringing murderous authorities to book. They set guns against butter in a battle to the death.

The UN set out to make peace an endless chore of states. To do it they went back to their Atlantic Charter roots. The UN Human Rights Commission got into the peace business with Resolution 2002/71. Peace was vital for human rights, they declared. War was a competing claim on resources that states need to improve living conditions, as required by social and economic rights. The Commission tied peace to development, subordinating guns to butter.

Making war and social justice an either/or choice helped consolidate dissent in the US. Now a common ideal brought the peace movement together with the more rambunctious sorts who besieged the WTO or spiked trees. Labor groups took up the antiwar cause. The peace movement gained troublemaking know-how, clever means of escalating pressure. United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) coalesced, clogging the streets of Washington in 2003, falling in with 3 million people worldwide in 2004, and sparking protests in 750 US cities in March 2005.² Without losing focus they opposed trade pacts, Israeli genocide, and the boot we keep on dark-skinned peoples’ necks. Now there was something for everyone in peace. The October 2011 protests explicitly link our Afghan war to current economic deprivation.

Peace as social justice means the outrage never ends. Peace as not-war had kept pacifists reactive, their impetus dependent on imminent rumors of war. Antiwar energy flags when wars stop, or as they drag on. In America, party loyalty undercuts opposition to the wars your party starts or inherits. Political opposition to the Iraq war was tamped down once it had served its purpose as a Democratic party cause célèbre.

The work of linking peace with social justice brought the movement in America in line with the rest of the world. In America, a comprehensive view of law and human rights was confined to two distinct elements of society: governing elites and native peoples. By contrast, outside the US, peace and social justice movements had long fought for all the same things. Their governments do not shout down the UN or the ICC, so their societies could see human rights entwining with humanitarian law. For the rest of the world, questions of war and peace naturally involve rights: civil and political, economic, social and cultural. The European Social Forum spilled a million antiwar demonstrators into the streets in their usual overwhelming variety. The Jakarta Peace Consensus planned a people’s war-crimes tribunal to combat malefactors including neo-liberalism, corporate looters, the WTO and the World Bank.

It was not unheard of in America to link injustice and war. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” did just that, defining war as an enemy of the poor and rejecting the distinction between rights as a cause and peace. But then the Memphis police disbanded King’s security detail, a traditional American lone nut came along, and we heard nothing more of that for a long time.

Now, with peace propounded as a human right, legal experts worked to present peace and justice standards to the General Assembly. In 2006 a Spanish human-rights coalition met to write The Luarca Declaration on the Right to Peace.  The document left primary responsibility for peace with the UN and its member states, but it stepped back from war, as King did, to consider the desperation or predation that drives it, and linked war to the economic order. It defined human security in material terms as “instruments, means, and resources.” To permit mass participation it reaffirmed a right to truthful information. Since the most effective curb on war is populations dragging their feet, the Luarca Declaration asserted individual and collective rights of disobedience, objection, and denunciation.

The Luarca declaration spurred a hundred conferences and seminars in fifty cities worldwide. Local and regional governments signed on, along with universities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The ferment spawned Right to Peace declarations in Bilbao, Barcelona, La Plata, Yaounde, Bangkok, Johannesburg, Sarajevo, Alexandria, and Havana.

In June 2010 the UN Human Rights Council formally requested a draft declaration from The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace. Four experts drafted the Santiago Declaration as a UN General Assembly Resolution.

When founding mother Virginia Gildersleeve wrote the soaring preamble of the UN Charter, the self-evident poesy of it left peace undefined. The Right to Peace movement now defined peace as the sum of all the specific requirements of UN charter documents and treaties. Since each UN body justified its mission as a means to the end of peace, it was easy to trace the legal authority back to the UN. UN members created the Human Rights Commission because rights and freedoms are requisite for peace. They created the World Health Organization and UNESCO because health and development are requisite for peace. They created the International Labor Organization because peace takes social justice. They created the Food and Agriculture Organization because hunger threatens peace. It’s all there in black and white in the constitutions of the UN agencies, adopted by the world by acclamation.

Peace then encompasses all state duties set out in the UN Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and evolving humanitarian law. Any lapse of the state through overreach or neglect violates the people’s right to peace, even absent war. Peace is a continuous series of popular demands, an unending test for the state, a regimen that saps the energy for war. Under this conception of the right to peace, the simple two-finger gesture holds our government to the detailed, objective standards of the civilized world. In a word or a sign, peace confronts our state with its manifold failure.

The Right to Peace provides a unifying framework for the growing body of treaty law that subordinates the state to its people. It has much in common with another effort at synthesis, a doctrine promoted by the UN Secretariat called Responsibility to Protect. But Responsibility to Protect is focused on averting the most serious crimes. By contrast, peace is a continuum. There is no threshold for minor failings. The Right to Peace means each state must always do its best. Oppression, exclusion, and impoverishment all compromise peace.

Peace so defined is a right for people and a duty of states. The Santiago Declaration sets out specific implications of the right to peace. Several of the declaration’s clauses mean trouble for our exceptional American state.

Article 2: People have a right to education that embeds peace in their culture, and helps them resolve conflicts. This provision is a straight forward affirmation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 26 (2). The disruptive impact of this demand is fairly clear.

This is the land of Columbine and Virginia Tech, where massacre is practically an intramural sport. Competence in peacemaking would be something of a wrench here too, where conflict resolution is the purview of jack-booted school police who reprove their errant charges with handcuffs and Tasers, and of the paramilitary commandos who besieged a school in the war on tasteless bathroom pranks. When the yellow school bus lets them out under the protective wing of the No Passing sign, our men in blue shoot them dead. Yet it’s not all strictness and discipline. For tiny tots there are exciting helicopter visits from the National Guard for sanitized war play (we don’t make them play at pulping their little Pakistani pen pals from drones, not until they’re older.)

Extracurricular brutality aside, peace as a subject of inquiry is suspect here. The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a standardized course of study for the children of the international technocratic elite. It covers science, math, and the humanities. Despite its suspicious foreign provenance, the IB’s comprehensive rigor won the endorsement of the rock-ribbed jingoes of George W. Bush’s Education Department. The IB is an optional curriculum for No Child Left Behind. Today US schools conduct more than 1,300 IB programs, more than any other country. But the coursework includes subversive matter such as human rights and peace. In Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Utah, and even in the shadow of the imperial capital, Fairfax County, Virginia, the IB has come under attack.

The IB is not Judeo-Christian enough for Pennsylvania youth. Or it’s anti-American. Or Marxist. So say a slate of school board crackpots pledged to defend American values against their pupils’ desire to get into a decent college.  In the Republican gentile-Chełm of Fairfax, Virginia, the IB stands accused of encouraging “disarmament, socialism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.” Peace and conflict studies were a particular sticking point, though experimental science also rankled. The Fairfax cosmopolites smelled international conspiracy in the IB’s fancy foreign books. In a woebegone town in Minnesota, parents fear the IB will suborn all the above-average children to atheism and one-world government.

In their struggle against popular demand, canny nativists have learned to attack the IB in technocratic terms. The Pennsylvania board took issue with the higher indirect costs of the small classes enjoyed by the ambitious minority. IB courses don’t pack their classrooms tight enough, it seems. Utah eccentric Margaret Dayton slashed IB funding out of a hazy sense that it was Not Invented Here (and to be fair, it does slight indigenous local traditions such as polygamy and messianic cults.) The problem is, she says, America is special. It needs special education.

Factional strife in provincial backwaters has confined peace education to more cosmopolitan cultural centers. The philosophical underpinning of peace has become one more class marker to stratify our society. A grounding in rule of law and world-standard governance is most sought after in exclusive private schools and in the segregated districts of the dominant class. The privileged students who learn it are absorbed into the ruling elite, where they can use peace as our government intended, as a weapon to attack other countries and justify our wars. The masses remain largely insulated from subversive ideas about social justice, dignity or development.

As a result, it falls to civil society to inculcate a culture of peace. UFPJ stresses education for its organizing cadres. The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace has drawn religious organizations into a consultation process. Armed with the Right to Peace, these sects can ground the sentimental notion of peace in dispassionate rights and rule of law. The result is a well-established threat to the state, the sort of thing that got the old-time Christians crucified. In Latin America, US clients exterminated bumptious exponents of liberation theology for decades. When the Berlin Wall fell, we let freedom ring with a mass murder of Salvadoran clergy by assassins we trained at Fort Bragg.  Just this year in US satellite Colombia, unknown assailants bagged us six priests. The Week of Peace had just ended when they chopped the last one up.  Inside America, repression is somewhat less straight forward.

Other articles are also problematic. Take Article 3: People must have freedom from fear and want. States must protect you from violence or threat of any kind. You cannot be reduced to desperation. This is pure old-time Americana. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

Or take Article 4: Our right to peace entails development, including freedom from unjust debt, and release from the sort of unfair order that leads to poverty and exclusion. We have a right to environmental safety, free from weapons that damage the earth.

Or Article 6: You must be permitted to resist oppression by breach of law or rights. War propaganda is prohibited – no more indoctrination in the glory or necessity of war.

Security, development, and freedom are always just around the corner. Our state is beavering away for peace, we’re told, but we can’t have it yet. The ill-will of a few dozen mad bombers on the other side of the world requires a globe-girdling police state, Soviet-style secret law, automated blanket surveillance, and abject deference to arbitrary authority. Resistance to war and oppression must be punished as a threat to our existence. So freedom from fear is a luxury we can’t afford.

As for freedom from want, don’t even think it. We’re tapped out, having gone deeper into debt to give bankers several trillion. The bankers needed it, you see, they ran their firms into the ground. The bankers took it home, every last trillion, and now you have to pay it back. So social security has to go. Kiss your right to health goodbye. A decent home and living? Maybe someday.

So after paying for the bare necessities of overwhelming, crushing might, a totalitarian police state, and state-sanctioned predatory fraud, there’s no money left for peace. The sheer spendthrift recklessness of putting human security first would ruin this state, which defines itself as anything but peace.

The Santiago Declaration has an answer to that objection. Under Article 7, States must disarm at their people’s demand, and fairly distribute the resources freed for equitable development, poverty reduction, and protection of the vulnerable. States may not delegate their war powers to private institutions.

But don’t the authorities know best? They have secret information. That dodge fails the test of Article 8: You have the right to information, to see war coming and to freely denounce it. States may not manipulate you into backing war. Your peaceful culture must not be suppressed.

When driving us to war in Iraq, the US government relied on suppression of information for a veneer of legitimacy. Its best trick was illegal collusion with its satellite Columbia, which held the UN Presidency at the time. Colombia accepted the IAEA report on Iraqi compliance with disarmament, and immediately turned it over to US officials, who took it home and censored it. US spooks cut out three-quarters of it and came back to pass out bowdlerized pap to an incredulous Security Council. The resulting preparatory fog of war concealed the profiteering that impelled the war and helped Colin Powell’s whoppers pass the laugh test.

To pull this stunt the US government flouted Articles 19 and 20 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). The CCPR binds our state as treaty law, as we acknowledged when we signed up. It trumps our neo-Soviet secrecy rules. But the CCPR’s sole sanction is shame, and international disgrace was no deterrent to a government bent on war.

So the Santiago Declaration enlists the people to turn over our rogue state’s rocks. As the US went to war in Iraq, whistleblowers and foreign journalists gave the world a glimpse of what our government had to hide. Now independent entities such as Wikileaks help officials maintain their integrity and air the putrefaction of our wars. American activists such as David House risk vindictive prosecution to free our information.

You’d think there ought to be a role here for the authors of Pacem in Terris, with their universal viewpoint, but there is not. Ask the Catholics about cultural suppression. In Vatican doctrine, economic and social rights, the means of life, are as much a part of Catholicism as the right to life. But Catholic institutions and associations in America have been muzzled with respect to those bolshy rights. Perhaps it’s to do with the pyramid of priestly skulls down south. While the Catholic colleges do work of unique value, on UN reform and human rights – real advocacy, not foreign-service Pecksniffery – the laity by and large gets nothing out of human rights but monomaniacal fetus-hugging. The syncretic genius of the universal church makes room for lots of flag worship too. Say what you like about the Catholic Church, they certainly know how to ingratiate themselves with primitive cultures.

Consider Articles 9 and 10: Refugees and emigres must be protected when their human security is threatened. To safeguard their rights, they may participate in public affairs wherever they reside.

These articles would infringe quite drastically on American cultural identity. We love to torture migrants.  It’s the national pastime. It keeps us in touch with our genocidal folkways and helps insulate us from the global South’s dangerous ideas.

Under Article 11, victims have a right to know the truth, and a right to justice, including identification and punishment of those responsible, and redress, compensation and reparation. All their rights must be restored. This comes straight from the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, supreme law of the land.

Except… No. America’s Supreme Court³ fears that judicial redress might inhibit our courageous officials from using their authority. Authority here is understood to encompass murder, torture, and the highest crime, criminal aggression. In today’s America, justice is what our executive chooses to do.

Under Article 12, vulnerable groups must be protected. Vulnerable groups include individuals deprived of their liberty – even the bewildered children and dotards swept up in our terror dragnet. American public discourse distinguishes battlefield mayhem from torture as distinct technical problems. The Right to Peace says violence is violence. That includes even our venial violence to helpless captives – beating their hooded faces, gouging their eyes, slitting their genitals, drowning them, freezing them, pulping their flesh, asphyxiating them, leashing them, forcing them to masturbate, or raping them.

This provision really cramps our style. It fails to respect American culture in all its bestial glory. Our anti-terror gulag is run in precise accord with the exemplary domestic penal practices of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which is organized into White Supremacist gangs meting out lethal beatings and rape.

So in each of its aspects, peace rubs our government the wrong way but our ruling class accepts it, as a means to the end of social control. Democratic party placemen tried to channel pacifist ferment for partisan advantage and turn it off for subsequent wars. They were thwarted by the comprehensive demands of the right to peace. Public resentment mounted despite the party’s efforts to silence or deride dissent. Democrats showed they never wanted economic rights with their attacks on social programs. They showed they had no use for civil or political rights when they tightened the grip of the police state. They held the UN Charter in contempt when they tore up their authorizing resolution to topple a sovereign state and render one side defenseless in Libya’s civil war. They came out for state predation and exclusion when they propped up criminal banks that loot wealth worldwide.

When you assert your right to peace, neither party measures up. Voting is a pointless waste of time. The right to peace itself offers much more effective recourse: to disobedience, conscientious objection, denunciation, and non-participation, as set out in Article 5. You have a right to conscientious objection on non-religious UN Charter grounds. You may publicly denounce armaments production or development, and withhold participation. The troops may disobey unlawful orders – and orders without UN authorization are illegal under US law.

Organized groups exercising these rights could paralyze an outlaw state’s war apparat. America’s overwhelming destructive capacity can stand against the world, but not against its people. The requisite repression would bleed this weakened state white. Jihadist terror opened a vein, sapping the nation with a frenzied response of repression, profiteering, and war. As the state lurches toward failure, all opposition becomes a threat. Mounting repression marks a brittle and exhausted state. Consider the state’s torture and degradation of Bradley Manning for allegations that amount to crucial protections of the Santiago Declaration: the human right of disobedience under Article 5(4); and the peoples’ right to information under Article 8(1) and (2). Or take the pressure on Canada to extradite Jeremy Hinzman for exercising his right to conscientious objection under Article 5(3). When presidential candidate Ron Paul objected to US militarism and war, statist media engaged in a concerted campaign to silence him and shunt him aside.

It wouldn’t occur to a provincial like Paul to stand on his rights. Yet taxpayers like Paul who object to the use of their taxes for war would have recourse to Article 5(6): states must provide them with alternatives compatible with peace. Declining to pay taxes to the war machine, that is the A-bomb of peace. Libertarians, like all Americans, are trained to recoil from the UN as an overweening alien authority, but the rules of the so-called New World Order subject states to humans. In America, human rights are strictly diplomatic weapons, used by our state to club disobedient countries. By contrast, the Santiago Declaration uses human rights as intended, to help people resist overreaching states.

War, like peace, takes constant work. The population has to be brutalized every day. The preparatory propaganda for the Iraq war effectively demonized Saddam Hussein with nightmarish tales of torture from captured pilots. This proved to us that Saddam was a cowardly animal. The government knew that when our turn came to be cowardly animals, all loyal Americans would turn on a dime and torment the designated victims. The state maintains our bestiality with human sacrifice by lethal injection. Crowds celebrate each new sacrifice outside the prison, and party activists cheer the death toll in political rallies.

To America’s dominant religious tradition, war is sacred.  The right kind of war fulfills the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, lifting a curse, renewing heaven and earth, annihilating unbelievers, and uniting obedient Christians with their god. This is no outcast cult. Its worshipers include leading legislators, presidential candidates, senior special forces staff, and an Air Force hierarchy that coercively proselytizes cadets. Their final battle’s coming: they’ve poured out the sixth bowl. Their enemy is peace. We are the mirror image of Iran, with vulnerable humanists struggling to appease a hostile blood-and-soil theocracy.

Death and suffering, that’s the critical national resource. The state has harnessed them to generate power. Death and suffering power this state. We’re the wasting assets being depleted. But weak nations and powerless peoples have begun to form a sort of cartel. They want to take control of death, constrict supply and raise its price. The Right to Peace is an OPEC for blood.

1. Bennis, Phyllis, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power, Northampton MA, Interlink Publishing Group, 2006, p. 261.
2. Bennis, op. cit., p. 63-67
3. Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2087 (2011) Kennedy, J., concurring

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.