100 posted by bat020

British death toll in Iraq reaches 100

Update: The Stop the War Coalition has called a protest for 5pm this evening (Tuesday 31 January) in Parliament Square. Stop the War has also called for protests in other city centres at 5pm tomorrow night.

Hamas, and liberal terror. posted by lenin

"Wait til you see the whites of their eyes, boys..."

The reaction to Hamas' electoral win has been almost universal: horror compounded by the darkest imaginings about exactly what these guys have in store. An Islamic State, the dread burqa, suicide bombings, and absolutely no recognition of Israel's Right To Exist. Decades of bloodshed, all because of Extremists On Both Sides/Palestinian Intransigence/Hamas' Refusal To Stop Terror/Etc. There are threats that aid to the Palestinians will be cut, a more or less open admission that aid is a political tool to domesticate and control Palestinian politics.

A couple of observations. Here's Shuggy, one of the sweeter HP Sauce types, pouring what I suppose he imagines is scorn on the "bloggers, clapped-out pseudo-Marxists, and liberal journalists" (and, he forgot to add, "bruschetta munchers, wreckers, woolly Hampstead liberals, car theives" etc). What's eating him apart from tapeworm? Well, Jonathan Steele - said liberal journalist - remarks that "Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus." Unto which: "I'm still shocked to read the liberal apologetics for those that declare there to be no difference between civilian casualties incurred and those who target only civilians; between those who might be shown to be careless, even criminally negligent with regards to civilian casualties and those for whom killing civilians is as legitimate pursuit of their ends as killing Israeli or American soldiers - because for them the concept of a civilian is meaningless, if the civilian in question happens to be a Jew."

Why does it have to be repeated and underlined? Israel deliberately and specifically targets civilians all the time. Here are some samples:

[Human Rights Watch] found a pattern of repeated Israeli use of excessive lethal force during clashes between its security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in situations where demonstrators were unarmed and posed no threat of death or serious injury to the security forces or to others. In cases that Human Rights Watch investigated where gunfire by Palestinian security forces or armed protesters was a factor, use of lethal force by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was indiscriminate and not directed at the source of the threat, in violation of international law enforcement standards. (Source)

[T]he majority of people killed were taking part in demonstrations where stones were the only weapon used ... A large proportion of those injured and killed included children usually present and often among those throwing stones during demonstrations. Bystanders, people within their homes and ambulance personnel were also killed. Many persons were apparently killed by poorly targeted lethal fire; others ... appear, on many occasions, to have been deliberately targeted. In many of the locations where children were killed there was no imminent danger to life nor reasonable expectation of future danger. (Source)

[Open-fire] regulations apparently enable firing in situations where there is no clear and present danger to life, or even in situations where there is no life-threatening danger at all ... the Military Police investigations unit has opened almost no investigations into cases where soldiers fired in violation of the Regulations ... During the first months of the al-Aqsa intifada, Palestinians held hundreds of demonstrations near IDF posts ... there was no shooting by Palestinian demonstrators in the vast majority of demonstrations. The soldiers’ response to these demonstrations is characterized by use of excessive and disproportional use of force, leading to the death and injury of many persons, including children. (Source).

Samples, mind you. The daily war on the Palestinians, where demonstrations against the occupation are a frequent fixture of political life, must inevitably eventuate many such incidents given the open-fire regulations that B'Tselem discusses. And, of course, one could think of grand massacres like the one in Jenin, where both HRW and Amnesty found ample evidence that civilians had been killed deliberately by the IDF. It isn't as if the IDF is somehow incapable of sparing life and limb - no Jewish demonstration has ever been fired upon, not even with rubber bullets. Not even the cringeworthy, lachrymose, but often quite violent demonstrations organised by the colonists of Gaza could induce the IDF to pull the trigger. For the IDF, 'civilian' is a meaningless concept if you're a Palestinian.

To acknowledge this is to be guilty, in Shuggy's eyes, of 'moral equivalence' - that greasy neocon phrase, as meaningless as it is supposed to be disarming. Of course it isn't Shuggy's fault, or at least not entirely, as we shall see. But I do want to mention a few other things before departing from his post: he notes that Hamas "played down" its tactic of suicide bombings in the elections, and takes satisfaction that "most people - including, obviously, people in Palestine - take a fairly dim view of this blowing yourself up business ... Because most people haven't been trained in the moral relativism laced with western liberal guilt that seems to be so popular with the Guardian." He goes on to add "expect lots of hand-wringing about the hypocrisy of our democracy from the usual suspects, with liberal eyes rolling at the mention of anything to do with terrorism from any western politician. Just quibbling because they don't like the result of the election, they'll say." And then, in a scandalous use of hypertext, he ironically links to a "quibble" which turns out to be a story about a suicide attack in Israel. As one of the "usual suspects" (people who actually do give a damn about the Palestinians) I have no desire to make Shuggy feel guilty, or to drag him down into a morass of relativism where there are only various shades of grey. (Curious, however, that this alleged "liberal guilt" so captures the imagination of the pro-war crowd.) What I will say is that: a) he is wrong if he imagines that most Palestinians do not endorse the tactic of suicide bombing (the last poll I saw in 2002 showed that approximately 7 in 10 Palestinians supported it - see also. As Diego Gambetta et al point out, suicide attackers in Palestine rely upon a community of support and an enabling infrastructure supplied by the public); b) Hamas is by no means alone in using the tactic, since many of these attacks are carried out by groups within Fateh and by other secular groups like the PFLP, so the 'quibble' amounts to precisely fuck all, c) of course the occupiers of Palestine and their international backers are not just "quibbling" over the election results. They are both furious at the Palestinians' insubordination and at alert to the possibility of finally implementing the Sharonist/Kadima programme of ethnically cleansing the West Bank, colonising it in the same process and demolishing the Palestinians as a nation. This has nothing to do with suicide attacks, since Hamas has not launched one in a whole year, and has offered a truce. It is to do with seeking excuses to further marginalise the Palestinians and crush their expectations.

Ben White writes, in an excellent article:

In the last few years Israel has continued its time-honored practice of establishing facts on the ground, unhindered in part due to its stalling tactics in the remaining vestiges of a 'peace process'. The typical argument has been that there can be no progress in negotiations or concessions until the Palestinians, one, 'reform' their institutions and purge the corruption from the PA, and two, 'rein in the militants'.

The implications of these demands have almost been rendered irrelevant by the spirit in which they are repeated – to distract from the main issues of occupation and rapacious land confiscation. 'Reform' and disarmament became the tests the Palestinians are intended to fail, foiling even feeble efforts at energizing negotiations.

The same can be said of demands that Hamas 'recognise Israel's Right To Exist', as if the Palestinians can really, genuinely be expected to consider the occupation of any part of their land legitimate. But of course, the discussion of this issue is permanently crippled by wilful and engendered ignorance, as well as no small measure of racism. On Channel Four tonight, Azzam Tamimi was asked to debate the Hamas victory with someone whose brother was killed by a Hamas suicide attack. A nice, even-handed debate, then. What was noticeable was just how much Mr Tamimi would have had to explain to make his points remotely comprehensible to his opponent, to Jon Snow, and to the audience. How does one call Israel a "terrorist state" - which it is, and much more besides, if so few people understand that Israel does in fact engage in terrorism (I'm talking text-book definition terrorism) and targets civilians? How does one even begin, if the news routinely gives people the impression that the conflict is over Palestinian aggression, or religious intolerance, or a struggle over a strip of land between two contiguous states - as various respondents told Greg Philo's study (see Bad News From Israel)?

Hamas has won the election because Fatah has shown that it is hideously servile, prepared to accept US-Israeli tutelage in return for control of a corrupt little fiefdom. Whether there will be suicide bombings or not depends on whether Israel intends to relinquish its present plan to leave Gaza an open-air prison and continue to expand settlements into the West Bank as 'facts on the ground' while constructing a wall that will subsume huge amounts of Palestinian territory into 'official' Israeli boundaries. It depends on whether the five thousand residents of Qalqiliya will continue to be imprisoned in an Israeli-siezed ghetto. It depends on whether Israel continues to impose 'collective punishment' on Palestinian neighbourhoods, blockade the cash-strapped Palestinian economy, imprison children, beat and torture prisoners. This much would be balls-achingly obvious to anyone who understood either the history of the Zionist movement or its present comportment, or indeed the condition of Palestine. Whether you like it or not, the Palestinians want freedom: that is why they voted Hamas.

The forgotten Shiite resistance, briefly remembered. posted by lenin

I wrote some while back about how the southern Maysan region of Iraq had been the most turbulent area for the British occupying forces. Indeed, it was there that the support for resistance attacks rose to 65%. Today, the region is suddenly in the news because a British soldier has been killed.

No context, background, or history. Just a killing, properly senseless in viewers' eyes, because the reporting gives it no sense. Cut to John Reid in army fatigues looking red-faced. "Gad, sah, we shell quell these savage Mohammedans! By dem, we shell!" I didn't actually hear what he said, but that must be a reasonable approximation.

New Menezes Cover-up Revealed. posted by lenin

Exactly a week ago, the Menezes family held a vigil outside Stockwell tube station, and demanded that the Independent Police Complaints Commission report be made public. Ian Blair, exercised of late about media racism (a bit like the BNP calling UKIP a bunch of fascists), denied that there was a cover-up.

The punchline? There was a cover-up - by Special Branch:

Specific words were understood to have been changed to cover up the fact that surveillance officers had wrongly identified Mr de Menezes as terror suspect Hussein Osman.

Alterations were hastily made to amend the wording of the official log once the shocking truth emerged that the dead man was not, in fact, the extremist wanted in connection with the failed 21 July Tube bombings.

This was in a bid to pass the blame for the shooting on to the firearms officers who actually shot the electrician and on to senior officers at Scotland Yard who were in charge of the operation.

These revelations are reportedly contained in the report of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

Attack of the drones. posted by lenin

The US military's use drones in Iraq is at least now heard of, if still languishing in obscurity for most, but today the LA Times reports that the CIA is intensifying and expanding their use in other situations, like the attack in Pakistan. These are used for targetted killings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen. The drones are deployed in "lawless pockets" of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, where troops dare not venture. This, of course, guarantees the killing of innocents, such as in Pakistan. The US claims the right to unleash such attacks across the world as part of the 'war on terror', and there is actually a 'debate' presented about where and when this can be done:

Some critics, including a U.N. human rights watchdog group and Amnesty International, have urged the Bush administration to be more open about how it decides whom to kill and under what circumstances.

A U.N. report in the wake of the 2002 strike in Yemen called it "an alarming precedent [and] a clear case of extrajudicial killing" in violation of international laws and treaties. The Bush administration, which did not return calls seeking comment for this story, has said it does not recognize the mandate of the U.N. special body in connection with its military actions against Al Qaeda, according to Amnesty International.

"Zawahiri is an easy case. No one is going to question us going after him," said Juliette N. Kayyem, a former U.S. government counter-terrorism consultant and Justice Department lawyer. "But where can you do it and who can you do it against? Who authorizes it? All of these are totally unregulated areas of presidential authority."

"Paris, it's easy to say we won't do it there," said Kayyem, now a Harvard University law professor specializing in terrorism-related legal issues. "But what about Lebanon?"

Paul Pillar, a former CIA deputy counter-terrorism chief, said the authority claimed by the Bush administration was murky.

"I don't think anyone is dealing with solid footing here. There is legal as well as operational doctrine that is being developed as we go along," Pillar said. "We are pretty much in uncharted territory here."

This is not 'uncharted territory' at all. In 1986, the US bombed targets in Lebanon and killed 100 people - the justification was 'preemptive': "self-defense against future attacks". Article 51 of the UN Charter was invoked. (Ironically, when the Libyans captured two pilots who had bombed Libya and killed 37 people, it was used as an excuse to reject a Libyan offer to release those falsely accused of the Lockerbie bombing for trial in some neutral venue: to a judge nominated by the UN, at the Hague "under Scottish law" - exactly what transpired in the end, in however farcical circumstances). Aside from which, it is easy to see how this can be used as a tactic in other wars. Consider: the US bombs and kills "Islamist militants" in, say, Uzbekistan. Despite the fact that there is no threat to the US there, it can be justified as a strike against 'terrorism'. The opposition in Uzbekistan is largely not composed of Islamists, yet any such strike could be portrayed as an attack on 'Al Qaeda'. Subsequently, and surreptitiously, the tactic is used in other counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the one to crush the Maoists in Nepal, or Farc in Colombia (already, Dyncorp uses these planes to dump poison on coca growers in Colombia).

Sleight of hand. posted by lenin

I do, admittedly, like to try out the odd 'magic' trick. This doesn't involve me in any particularly dextrous activity, because a) I don't have the time for it, and b) my hands are spectacularly inflexible. However, as you must know, it isn't even necessary to fuck around with too much fancy stuff. To achieve the desired effect, it is sufficient to distract the mark with some irrelevant behaviour that appears to be central to the trick, yet is not. For instance, while palming a card you might have the mark count or inspect a portion of the deck. You might also keep up an ongoing spiel, a superficially relevant barrage of meaningless data that is supposed to overload the brain so that otherwise trickery on your part goes unnoticed. I think, reader, you detect a parable already. Lenin's Tomb does not suddenly suspend political perspicuity for a foray into gimcrack mentalism.

Quite right. The latest buzz from the liberal left in the United States is that Molly Ivins - hallowed be her name - is not going to support Hillary Clinton for President in 2008. She says it: I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President. I am glad to hear it, and I too pledge not to support this lachrymose ambulance chaser, or any other member of the pampered US bourgeoisie. This is seen as a radical challenge to the Democrats. But what's Ivins so worked up about? Well, apparently there's too much triangulation, equivocation, "clever straddling" etc. Aside from the fact that this misses the point of triangulation, which is not the same thing as "equivocation" (see Hitchens' No One Left To Lie To, one of his earliest ta-ras to the American Left and perhaps his last bout of full sanity), I wonder what exactly it is that Hillary prevaricates about? Ah: "Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq" Except when she does (she's all for it). Oh, and also: "Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo". Well, what could she say? "This woman's brain has liquefied, and all her biological lines are flat - put her on the payroll"? Hillary 'panders' on issues such as "flag-burning". And how does this come to be a surprise? Does not the infantile American Left like its politics diapered in the stars n stripes? Has Hillary not always been a mountebank for capital, willingly purloining the medicine of the reactionary right? Did she not also advocate teenage abstinence, when she was doing her "soccer mom Democrat" thing? Didn't she applaud the bombing of Afghanistan? Isn't she a repellent supporter of Zionism? Didn't she hypocritically support her husband's tax cuts for the rich, before finding herself opposed to Bush's extension of the same logic?

Of course, the former First Lady has started her campaign already, resurrecting her terminal healthcare programme, which in fact involved a costly and complex scheme that would benefit large HMOs where a single-payer system would have been more advantageous and fiscally conservative to boot. She has already been branded "formidable" by President Bush (and how she must bask in that judgement). So perhaps it is important to get these things out of the way, and declare up front that one will not be that much of a sap. As Ivins points out, there is a majority in America that could easily be coalesced around a reformist platform - healthcare, the minimum wage, taxes, the environment, Iraq - so why fuck around with snake oil? Still, if you've read the Ivins article now (difficult as it is to negotiate away from my compelling prose) and still don't see the ruse for which she has fallen, I shall explain: the entire article is advice offered to the Democratic Party and its leadership, as if they were the proper audience for a reformist address. As if, in fact, they were not themselves parties to the ongoing crime. As if one of the leading profiteers from the destruction, military take-over and ethnic cleansing of New Orleans was not Louisiana Democratic Party chairman and Shaw Group CEO Jim Bernhard. As if the Democrats were not themselves thoroughly imbricated and implicated in the Abramoff scandal (like Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, or Harry Reid - whom Ivins regards as a liberal). As if most Democrats had not voted for war, and for giving Bush the extraordinary powers that he now wields. As if they had even properly formulated an objection to Bush's conservative supreme court nominations. As if they did not represent a section of the US ruling class that is itself moving sharply to the right, as it has been for some decades. As if the Democrats had not criminalised hundreds of thousands of black men, thus - not at all ironically - leading to their electoral weakness. As if, perhaps, an Al Gore presidency would have been less concerned with such matters as oil extraction and more impressed by environmentalist arguments (whereas in fact Gore owned $1 million of shares in the Occidental Petroleum Company when he recommended as Vice-President that the Elk Hills in California be sold to the same company).

The perplexity in the article at the Democrats' putative spinelessness, purblindness, failure to spot an opportunity when it presents itself, is ubiquitous on the articulate American Left. How do they come to miss every opportunity, the proud blue-staters wonder? Is it really because of Joe Lieberman and the DLC? Is it because of corporate pressure and the right-wing noise machine? Is it because of God and his earthly affiliates? Maybe, some liberal voices venture, gays were too truculent with their demands for gay rights? You really have to be living in denial to miss the fact that this is not political timidity but outright aggression against the Left, the peaceniks, the gays, the blacks, the working class, the disenfranchised etc. The Democrats rely on the support of all these groups, but do not mean them anything but harm, and do not want anything but silence from them.

Alright, granted, sometimes the conduct of the Democrats does puzzle. Why, for instance, did they not challenge the spate of bizarre results in the 2004 election, never mind the manifestly rigged 2000 election? In 2000, the National Opinion Research Centre checked the votes and found conclusively that no matter what way they were recounted - even excluding the question of illegally disenfranchised voters who could not get into the polling station - Gore won the Florida election, and hence his absolute majority of the votes would transmute into a majority of the electoral college votes. So why did Gore 'graciously' concede, and why didn't the Democrats fight it? In 2004, in Florida, there were 237,522 more presidential votes cast than the actual turnout - and this doesn't suggest fraud? In the same year, Clinton Curtis - a registered Republican - signed an affidavit saying that he had been asked during his employment at Yang Enterprises Inc to devise voting software that would allow votes to be stolen without trace - by future Republican congressman Tom Feeney. No worries here, then. During the 2004 election, the exit polls were more wrong than is mathematically probable: The odds of the exit polls being as far out as they were in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida are 250 million to 1. So, some glib explanations were offered: perhaps Bush voters had been overly reticent in talking to exit pollsters (not a credible thesis say statisticians); or maybe the moral majority had spoken. Talk of the morals and values governing the election outcome was shortly ubiquitous despite the fact that, as the Economist pointed out, substantially fewer voters had identified their reasons for their vote choice as moral ones than in previous elections.

Now, it is quite possible that even without substantial fraud going on, Bush would still have won it - because the Democrats did not care to even pretend to offer a serious alternative, because they failed in their endeavour to fetishise the flag more ardently than their Republican opponents, because they couldn't bash gays and criminalise blacks more completely than the theocrats in the White House. However, the fact that the Democrats didn't even ask too many questions suggests that they perceived that their interests lay more closely with allowing the electorate to be ripped off than in stirring up dissent from potentially implacable and ungovernable constituencies. This points not to the 'cowardice' of the Democrats, however, but to the parlous state of democracy and political culture in the US: if the Democrats are happily raking in a fortune on Wall Street, taking bribes from Jack Abramoff, lying through their teeth, weeding out and trampling on the would-be insurgents within, back-stabbing, selling out, jacking up the value of their shares and attacking the poor, then who are they to complain of a little electoral fraud or worry about disenfranchised voters? It's all just tough competition, a plutocratic catfight in which the lower orders are either potential saps or employees.

Back to Ivins' celebrated piece, I note that it doesn't even mention Katrina, murderous neglect, racism, expropriation for the real estate kings, military occupation of the city etc. It extemporises on how to handle the charge of insufficient patriotism (dress up as Captain America would seem to be the answer), but doesn't level the more appropriate charges of murderous imperialism, racism, theft and so on. In fact, it is astonishing to note just how obedient the commentariat have been on this issue. The media treats New Orleans as if the crisis were over, and 'recovery' beginning - and so, it just slips out of the Bush-haters' eyeline. The 'liberal' press, for its part, has found the correct, capital-friendly critique of Bush: the administration, having solicited a plan that would disregard the wishes of residents and allow the destruction of large areas of the city, now refuses to use the plan devised by Nagin and his cohorts. No one, mark you, will dare during an election campaign to step outside the parameters of that 'debate'.

If the herbivorous gaggle of eunuchs on the US left - at least the articulate left, the ones who pleaded with Nader not to stand last time round, the ones who are in such awe of the flag-n-foetus right, the Todd Gitlins who insist tying the left to 'patriotism' (read unabashed American nationalism), the MoveOn cocktail party activists - cannot get beyond worrying about which Democrat will piss on them less, the road to future defeat is mapped out: they shall submissively defer their political engagement to the next electoral pantomime; allow the capitalist media to set the terms of debate; insist on settling for whatever cheap, lousy scumbag the Democrats offer up; furiously impute all manner of hidden radical stances to their candidate (which will in turn be energetically denied by the candidate's agents); lose the election again. And all of this will have happened because instead of supporting the unions, instead of joining the New Orleans residents marching for their right to life and property, instead of trying to forge an organisation that unites the various bases of the left, they were obediently hearkening to the noise and displacement activity and tasks set by capital and its political advocates.

How shall the Masters of the Universe deal with us? posted by lenin

Via Le Colonel Chabert, Haitian Government Announces No Voting Stations for Cite Soleil:

[T]he Haitian government has announced it will not be putting any voting stations inside Haiti’s largest poor community, Cite Soleil. The announcement comes just one day after hundreds of Cite Soleil residents took to the streets to demand polling stations. Between 250,000 and 600,000 people live in Cite Soleil. It is widely known as a stronghold for the Lavalas movement of ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Haitian officials said the neighborhood is too dangerous for voting. But a UN official told Reuters voting is feasible in Cite Soleil, pointing out thousands of voters have been registered without incident. Rene Lundi, a local community leader, said: "It is clear they want to prevent us from voting, because they know our vote won't go their way.”

Becuase international capital and the local client elite own Haiti and determine the rules about who gets to vote and why. Because Israel owns Palestine, and can say what is a legitimate government to talk to, and who may vote and why. Because, the US government owns New Orleans and says who gets to have their property back, under what circumstances and why:

So: as far as the platitude providers, faux leftists and provocative trolls are concerned, They don't even have to establish, legally or practically, their possession of the prerogative to dispose of other people's property (property damaged through their criminal negligence which they will, only naturally, steal in recompense). Thus a delicate, risky assault on the laws and ideology of private property right in the US, which even this divinely ordained despot and his court might hesitate to push too far, will not be required. The Bush Crime family and their caporegimes already own the 9th ward, according to the magnanimous volunteer overseers of their disempowered victims. It is a fact universally acknowledged. Due process? Another noisome technicality to be swept aside by the benevolent They Who Decide For Us (with our wise vizierly advice weighed of course). No need to linger over the dull, passé issue of legality; comment must rush forward into fascist utopian dreams.

Right on the money: to speak of the fate of New Orleans as if the people who own those houses, who paid taxes to build those amenities, who lived and worked there are irrelevant except as passive recipients of government largesse (ha!) is to give the federal, state and local government as well as the real estate kings the power to callously dispose of even those rights that we might have taken for granted in a capitalist society. That, just as the society is mounting a fight-back against the city's attempts to flush them out, to convert the place into a playpen for the rich, is criminal subservience. The residents of the 9th ward have just won a battle to stop the government from bulldozing their houses without due process. The fact that they had to fight this battle at all, and every other fact about the fate of New Orleans before, during and after Katrina, tells you exactly what the government and its capital affiliates reckon of such small lives.



But, you know, human rights, democracy, legality is all so passé.

Homophobia: still the rule, not an anomaly. posted by lenin

Watching the alleged 'controversy' over two Liberal Democrat contenders for the leadership of their party, one is struck by how much homophobia really persists under the surface. I can't believe that the whisphering campaign about Simon 'ban-tube-strikes' Hughes is really about the fact that he didn't come out openly and admit that he had slept with men when asked. For one thing, given the scale of homophobia in this society, it would be perfectly understandable if someone wanted to keep that secret. Hughes must have rightly calculated that the public can handle anonymously gay politicians, but a gay leader is still subtly beyond the pale. For another, those who are so sanctimoniously demanding that public figures confess their guilt - and that's exactly the flavour of it - forget something crucial: what business is it of yours?

And the answer to that is generally some flannel about "judgement" - what does this say about Hughes' judgement? What does it say about Mr Oaten's "judgement" that he went off with rent boys and didn't expect to be recognised (not an unreasonable assumption)? I saw a news anchor on C4 yesterday suggesting that Liberal Democrats might just want to "put a question mark next to Simon Hughes' judgement" after this admission. This strikes me as a silly public school euphemism - what is actually meant by it is that someone who dares to have secrets, to live, as it were, as if there was still such a thing as privacy, as if the age of the confessional had not destroyed any such notion, is not quite top drawer.

Now, there is an awful lot of schtick from certain quarters about "yes, but we're not as bad as those dark-skinned countries - look at China, Sudan, Iran etc". Others still insist that Islam is more homophobic than Christianity and Judaism, a remarkably dim assertion that nevertheless issues from intelligent people who ought to know better (if you want to think about this seriously, consider the former Chief Rabbi's call for the genetic elimination of homosexuality). The unstated assumption is the old colonial one - that people from "backward" countries are less Enlightened, cultured and civilised than those in the West. This gesture manages to both apologise for and minimise homophobia in the West and introduce an insidious racism into the discussion. Let's take it head on: the homophobic laws in many countries, such as the ones mentioned, are much worse than those in, say, the US. And the UK has formally allowed 'gay marriage' and repealed that execrable Section 28. But this was not a gift of liberal and enlightened societies: it is the result of decades of struggle, of risk, of resisting homophobic violence. It is an ongoing struggle, because homophobia persists in the culture, gay pubs can still be bricked or blown up, homosexual men can still be beaten to death, and because reactionary leaders like George W Bush and his temporary ally in the Vatican continue to insist that gays are less equal than everyone else.

Now, consider this: US aligned with Iran in anti-gay vote. Forget, if you like, that the scary tell is supposed to be that the US would align with Iran (as if the US doesn't have enough of its own homophobia to be getting on with). What it illustrates is that homophobia is still very much a 'ruling idea' in the world, and that this is not the preserve of various official enemies. There is a curious ideological movement here, too: when a form of bigotry becomes disreputable, the majority disavow it and transfer it onto a minority. Hence, when gay rights or womens' liberation make inroads, pompous white liberals and even reactionaries pat themselves on the back for having been obliged to concede the terrain (in public, at least) and start to complain about the homophobia and misogyny in 'black youth culture' or Islam or "backward" areas of the world. And one is not racist to behave like this, of course, because "I've got black friends and they're great fun, I just don't like this political correctness" etc.

I modestly suggest that the struggle for gay rights is far too important to be left to those whose sole point of consistency is they are apologists for the West, and certainly too crucial to be imbricated with the naked and unashamed prejudice of some groups (like Galha) which divides the movement and demeans the struggle.

How to Cover Up a Massacre of the Innocents. posted by lenin

Don't talk about it, mention it only in passing, get the facts wrong, refuse to investigate. The massacre is as follows:

Before dawn on January 15th, an Israeli special forces unit killed a Palestinian mother and her 24-year-old son in their home. The mother had three bullets in her; the son 15. The Israeli soldiers also shot and wounded the woman's husband and four other family members: young women were shot in the pelvis and chest, young men in the foot, chest, torso, liver. The firing lasted over an hour. Then the Israeli squad shot at an arriving ambulance and prevented it for 45 minutes from tending to the dying, bleeding family.

It was all the result of a "misunderstanding," as the Israeli press put it.

The Israeli special forces commandos, invading a Palestinian village, had mistakenly taken a man standing guard in his home against vandalism for a resistance fighter. At first the Israeli military claimed that the now-dead man had shot at them, but before long the soldiers admitted that they had fired first. They saw the man cock his gun, they explain. The soldiers say, and at least some witnesses concur, that after they killed the man, someone from inside the house returned their fire. The soldiers claim that they then continued to shoot, but that their firing was "precise and limited." The husband says that even when he yelled at them to stop, that his wife and son were dead, the onslaught continued for at least an hour. None of the Israeli soldiers were killed or wounded.

According to the Israeli military, none of those they killed or injured had been wanted by Israel. It was simply an error. The 4,000 villagers of Rojeeb, east of Nablus, declared a state of mourning to honor the dead. Hundreds attended the funeral.

And the coverage:

That day and since, the US press has carried long news stories on Israel/Palestine. Yet, almost none of the reports have mentioned the above incident. The Boston Globe seems to have missed it entirely, as did the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Constitution, the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, a multitude of other papers across the country, and, it appears, every mainstream American television and radio network.

The LA Times mentioned it in two sentences in the next to the last paragraph of a 20-paragraph story titled "Israel Eases Curbs on Palestinian Election" (and got the facts wrong); the New York Times reported it in the last two paragraphs of a 24 paragraph story. The Washington Post and Newsday reported it in their briefs columns. Not one reported the raid correctly.

And the intermediary:

How did AP cover the killings?

For almost all American newspapers, the Associated Press is the primary source for international news. AP supplies 24-hour news feeds to 1,700 U.S. daily, weekly, non-English and college newspapers; 5,000 radio/TV outlets; and 1000 radio stations.

A Lexis-Nexis search of its coverage of this incident, and others, is revealing. The Associated Press has several wires that distribute the news.

On the "Associated Press Worldstream" wire, AP sent out a story headlined "Israeli troops kill Palestinian mother and son in apparent mistake, Palestinians say." This Worldstream wire is distributed throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and the UK. Only a smattering, at most, of US papers appear to receive it.

On the "Associated Press Online" wire, AP distributed a report headlined "Israeli Army Kills 2 in West Bank Village." Stories on this wire appear to be sent in an automatic feed to newspaper websites, where such stories are typically filed under the "additional AP stories" link. Most readers don't come across them if they're not featured in the print version of the paper.

On the "Associated Press" wire, the wire from which almost all US newspapers draw the news that they print in their newspapers, it carried a report headlined "Disgruntled policemen block main roads in Gaza Strip; Israeli army kills two in West Bank."

As with the Online and Worldstream wires, the US wire also included some information on the incident near the end of some of their other stories. This information was minimal; sometimes incorrect. None of the above stories told that the soldiers were part of an Israeli special forces unit, the kind that is sent to assassinate resistance fighters; none reported that an ambulance had been fired on and prevented from attending the wounded; almost none, in fact, even mentioned that there were wounded. Most emphasized the false report given by Israel that its soldiers had been fired upon first.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the differential in headlines. It is hard to understand why the American wire carried such a different headline from the other wires, and one that so underplayed the deaths, since all three stories were so similar.

The Third Filter: Sourcing Mass Media News.

Or, from Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media by Messrs Edwards & Cromwell:

Robert McChesney, professor of communications at the University of Illinois, notes that professional journalism relies heavily on official sources. Reporters have to talk to the PM's official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, the business association, the army general: 'What those people say is news. Their perspectives are automatically legitimate.' Whereas, McChesney notes, 'if you talk to prisoners, strikers, the homeless, or protesters, you have to paint their perspective as unreliable, or else you've become and advocate and are no longer a "neutral" professional journalist.'

How to Cover Up A Terrorist Atrocity. posted by lenin

According to Professor Bruce Lawrence, you fake a tape of Osama:

"It was like a voice from the grave," Lawrence said.

He thinks bin Laden is dead and has doubts about the tape. Lawrence recently analyzed more than 20 complete speeches and interviews of the al Qaida leader for his book. He says the new message is missing several key elements.

"There's nothing in this from the Koran. He's, by his own standards, a faithful Muslim," Lawrence said. "He quotes scripture in defense of his actions. There's no quotation from the Koran in the excerpts we got, no reference to specific events, no reference to past atrocities."

While the CIA confirms the voice on the tape is bin Laden's, Lawrence questions when it was recorded. He says the timing of its release could be to divert attention from last week's U.S. air strike in Pakistan.

And then you keep unfriendly faces away from the scene of the crime.

Unnatural disaster.

CIA: Jews Control the Media. posted by lenin

Mark Elf notes that the latest twist in the propaganda campaign against Hugo Chavez amounts to systematic lying. FAIR has produced a report showing how the US media have manipulated Chavez's words to declare that he is an anti-Semite. Here's how it goes:

It began with a bulletin from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (1/4/06) accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of invoking an old anti-Semitic slur. In a Christmas Eve speech, the Center said, Chavez declared that "the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world."

The Voice of America (1/5/06) covered the charge immediately. Then opinion journals on the right took up the issue. "On Christmas Eve, Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez's Christian-socialist cant drifted into anti-Semitism," wrote the Daily Standard (1/12/06), the Weekly Standard's Web-only edition. The American Spectator (1/6/06) was so excited about the quote, which it called "the standard populist hatemongering of Latin America's new left leaders," that it presented it as coming from two different speeches:

Venezuela's Chavez in his 2005 Christmas address couldn't resist commenting that "the descendants of those who crucified Christ" own the riches of the world. And on a Dec. 24 visit to the Venezuelan countryside, Chavez stirred up the peasants by claiming that "the world offers riches to all. However, minorities such as the descendants of those who crucified Christ" have become "the owners of the riches of the world."

Then more mainstream outlets began to pick up the story. "Chavez lambasted Jews (in a televised Christmas Eve speech, no less) as 'descendants of those who crucified Christ' and 'a minority [who] took the world's riches for themselves,'" the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove reported (1/13/06). A column in the Los Angeles Times (1/14/06) used the quote to label Chavez "a jerk and a friend of tyranny." The Wall Street Journal's "Americas" columnist, Mary Anastasia O'Grady (1/16/06), called Chavez’s words "an ugly anti-Semitic swipe.”

However:

The biggest problem with depicting Chavez's speech as an anti-Semitic attack is that Chavez clearly suggested that "the descendants of those who crucified Christ" are the same people as "the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here." As American Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who questioned the charge, told the Associated Press (1/5/06), "I know of no one who accuses the Jews of fighting against Bolivar." Bolivar, in fact, fought against the government of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, who reinstituted the anti-Semitic Spanish Inquisition when he took power in 1813. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a Jewish sympathizer in Curacao provided refuge to Bolivar and his family when he fled from Venezuela.

Most of the accounts attacking Chavez (the Daily Standard was an exception) left the reference to Bolivar out entirely; the Wiesenthal Center deleted that clause from the speech without even offering an ellipsis, which is tantamount to fabrication.

Now, Le Colonel Chabert reminds us that the tactic has precedent:

Edgar Chomorro recalled a meeting with three CIA officers in the spring of 1983 to discuss ways of promoting the contras inside the United States. One propaganda idea was to target American Jews by portraying the Sandinistas as anti-Semitic. According to Chamorro, the CIA officers "said that the media was controlled by Jews and if we could show that Jews were being persecuted it would help a lot."

The CIA introduced the anti-Semitic slur. The rather sick irony is that it is the CIA which backed anti-Semitic forces, not just in Latin America but in most of its counter-insurgency wars - from ex-Nazi Argentinian generals in Nicaragua to the use of General Reinhard Gehlen in Europe after the Second World War.

Speaking of anti-Semitism.

Emerald Pile. posted by lenin

Noreen has tagged me for this meme and when Noreen tells you to do something, you do it or risk being told off.

Seven things to do before I die:
1) Lead the revolution to success.
2) Counteract the Thermidorian reaction.
3) Etc.

Seven things I cannot do:
1) Feign enthusiasm.
2) Get published for money (or love).
3) Grow up.

Seven things that attract me to a city:
1) Enormous populations.
2) Endless Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Ben Elton musicals.
3) Urban working classes malleable to my malevolent message.

Seven things I say:
1) I do not have catchphrases, so kindly fuck off with your "Let's see what lenin's little foibles are" madness.

Seven books I like:
1) I've done this sort of thing before.
2) Almost anything by Gore Vidal or Oscar Wilde.
3) The Ticklish Subject by Slavoj Zizek.
4) Several hundred others.
5) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Foucault before Foucault).
6) Everything by Noam Chomsky.
7) Some Martin Amis stuff, but someone needs to explain to him that a cliche doesn't cease being one because you make it readable (as in "I saw in his eyes the assertion that..."), that Trotsky was not into killing nuns, and that things don't reside "in the back" of one's mind as if the brain is a theatre with all the light gathered at the proscenium.

Seven movies that I’ve loved:
1) Three Kings.
2) Cradle Will Rock.
3) The Battle of Algiers.
4) Nico (Steven Segal kicking Reaganite CIA ass/arse).
5) Citizen Kane.
6) American Beauty.
7) Fight Club.

Seven people to tag:
1) I'm not putting anyone else through this. Want to take part in this unenlightening charade? And end up like me? Fine. If you want Bloggery to end up even more self-referential and navel-gazing than it already is, go ahead.

A Full and Independent Inquiry. posted by lenin

US Government Blocks Katrina Probe:

The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina, senators leading the investigation have said. Democrat Joseph Lieberman, a member of the Senate panel, said warnings about the risk Katrina posed to New Orleans had been ignored.

He accused the White House of being unwilling to hand over documents which might explain why no action was taken.

A White House spokesman insisted the administration was co-operating fully.

Homeland Security Committee senators said agency officials had refused to answer questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House.

Meanwhile...

Separated at Birth. posted by lenin

Harry Lime:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce - the cuckoo clock!

The Late Christopher Hitchens:

But those who view the history of North America as a narrative of genocide and slavery are, it seems to me, hopelessly stuck on this reactionary position. They can think of the Western expansion of the United States only in terms of plague blankets, bootleg booze and dead buffalo, never in terms of the medicine chest, the wheel and the railway.

One need not be an automatic positivist about this. But it does happen to be the way that history is made, and to complain about it is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic shift.

Trials of Galloway. posted by lenin

Victory In Absentia:

The Daily Telegraph's libel action appeal against George Galloway has been dismissed.
Mr Galloway successfully sued the newspaper in 2004 for alleging that he had received a portion of Iraq's oil revenues, worth £375,000, from Saddam Hussein's regime.

The Telegraph was ordered to pay £1.2m legal costs and £150,000 in damages.

As for this, just let them try nailing him with those old forgeries.



Yes yes yes, the desperados of imperialism are eager to dredge up all the old shit, anything to divert attention from the rotten carrion-like smell issuing from Iraq: did you know, for instance, that Galloway visited Iraq in 1999? Oh yes - here's footage. Look at him - he's smiling and talking about weight loss! And on top of it all, the bastard's pretending to be a fucking pussycat on Big Brother! What more do you need? Perfidy! Scandal! His constituents have been duped!

Pensions, healthcare, education, welfare: it's all up for grabs. posted by lenin

Eagerly floating measures to increase the working age, the government casually misinformed the public about a savings crisis that necessitated cuts, in a strategy that mimicked Bush's "social security crisis".

Today, we hear about "perverse incentives" that encourage people to laze around in their wheelchairs rather than seek work. There is, the government says, is "sick note culture" which means that the ranks of the disabled and infirm are peppered with fakes, and they intend to do away with it. The two subjects are not unrelated, for when Blair was asked how he intended to handle the "pensions crisis", he denied that tax rises would be necessary: instead they would do it "cutting welfare costs by making changes to incapacity benefits".

So, John Hutton MP, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has the ideal neoliberal solution:

Under the slogan "work is good for you", John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will say that the Government will offer more support to people looking to re-enter the job market, but that this must be matched by "increased obligations" for claimants.

People on incapacity benefit will be summoned to interviews to see if they are genuine cases and risk losing part of their benefit if they refuse to take part in back-to-work programmes. Payments could be cut by up to £10.93 a week - from a maximum of £76.45 - for refusing to go to a work interview, and by up to £21.86 for a refusal a second time.

The number of people of working age on incapacity benefit is 2,638,400. Undoubtedly, a huge amount of this is simply concealed unemployment, since research shows that four out of ten people on these benefits want to get back to work. However, the same research also shows that:

a) "[L]ess than 1% of claimants were fraudulent".

b) Many disabled people face "prejudice when trying to find work".

c) "The number of people who get [incapacity benefit] has been falling for years."

d) "Britain spends much less on employment help for disabled people than other European countries."

The average number of job vacancies in 2005 was 606,500. That, of course, includes a huge number of very temporary vacancies created by shifts between work, maternity leave etc. And it is by no means clear that even if the work was suitable for those who want it, and have disabilities, they would be able to access it. Vacancies are often created by skill shortages in particular areas: one's suitability for a job often doesn't correlate to its availability. That is why those 606,500 vacancies are not immediately wolfed up by the million or so classified as unemployed (depending one whether you accept the claimant count, which no one should, or the International Labour Force survey). To put it bluntly, the jobs simply are not there for the wheelchair layabouts, even if they could do them, even if there were a million fakers ready to be copped by a New Labour feeler. The UK economy is simply not equipped to handle a large influx into the labour market unless the government is about to undertake public works programmes, which I sort of feel would be on a par with child abuse as far as this government goes.

Almost simultaneously, the government is attempting to introduce an Education White Paper which, the Audit Commission says, works "against the interests of the most disadvantaged, least mobile and worst informed parents and children". The proposals include allowing a new breed of "trust schools", independent from democratic control, to have much more say in determining what pupils they include - and exclude. Business-owned City Academies already operate on this basis. Far from assisting Labour's key constituents, the policy would involve the unfair advantage that already accrues to middle and upper class pupils as a result of their mobility and resources being compounded. The source of the policy is believed to be the same intellectual midget and former Observer columnist (if that isn't a tautology) that promoted the 'city academies' from within the Downing Street clique, Lord Andrew Adonis. The government's white paper, the Commission notes, assumes that spare capacity in schools is somehow due to poor performance and unpopularity and therefore a little healthy competition will oblige them to buck up their act - yet, in most cases it is actually due to demographic change. Further, if choice is really what is at issue and if it really were a virtue, then much more spare capacity would be needed. Finally, the transfer of the public education system into private, unaccountable hands - bear in mind that every primary and secondary school would be encouraged to become a trust, in which the local elected authority has no direct authority - would be extraordinarily difficult to reverse once effected. Local authorities need to provide an overall strategy for provision based on aggregated information, whereas what the government intends is an inefficient, marketised free-for-all that will disadvantage the poor.

Finally, and again coterminously, the unctuous health secretary Patricia Hewitt is leading the charge against the greedy bastards on hospital beds. There is too much of a 'handout culture' in the NHS, according to the government - so it is demanding that financial management be put ahead of clinical objectives, which is about as nakedly callous as one can get. If there is a financial crisis in the NHS, it will be in no small part due to the extraordinarily wasteful PFI projects that New Labour continues to impose on the public sector (do you notice a common thread developing here?). Once again, hospitals are encouraged to compete over meagre resources:

Until this year, hospitals could fairly accurately predict the number of patients they would be expected to treat. They agreed contracts with local primary care trusts guaranteeing most of the income they needed to do the work. Patients can now choose, however, from a menu of at least four local NHS trusts where they are entitled to free treatment. Consequently, hospitals can lose income if they do not attract enough patients.

The fee they get for each attendance is also being priced differently. A national tariff was set last April for all non-emergency operations. If a hospital spent more than the norm for a particular procedure, it lost money on every patient treated.

That is, hospitals that are most in need of investment receive less cash, and those stuck with the 'underperforming hospital' get an underfunded service.

There is, underlying all of this, not mere opportunism or an obsession with 'pragmatism' or polling data or technocratic efficiency - it is an ideologically coherent project. The government intends to reduce the role of the state in the provision of key services on the basis of the neoliberal doctrine that private enterprise and markets are more efficient than planning and public ownership. And, proceeding in accordance with another dogma of neoliberalism, the idea of a 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment (NAIRU) which can only be reduced through supply-side measures, they intend to coerce a large number of people in incapacity benefit into the labour market, thus reducing the cost of labour in general. Finally, accepting these doctrines, the government intends to restore profitability to British industry by compelling workers who are not fortunate enough to be able to afford an early retirement to labour for longer. Despite paying tax and national insurance, despite a lifetime of contribution to the growth of the economy, workers will be obliged to work longer and harder. Some will never see a day of retirement, and many already do not: in Calton, Glasgow, the average life expectancy of a male is 53.9 years. Poverty kills, particularly pensioner poverty. The government's response: "work is good for you".

How to resist this neoliberal offensive? Well, striking dockers gave a glimpse of how this week when they defeated the EU's attempt to liberalise ports and diminish working conditions. Here are some future possibilities.

"Soft Power" posted by lenin

If the soft power doesn't win, hard power follows.

In Haiti:

AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, can you just lay out what the National Endowment for Democracy is?

ANTHONY FENTON: Well, yeah, they were formed in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration. Ostensibly, they purport to promote pro-democracy organizations and democratic values across the world. Just last October, President Bush spoke at a National Endowment for Democracy gathering, reiterating the vision of Reagan as he set about to, as they say, “promote democracy throughout the world,” and they were given – they've been given various budgets allocated by Congress every year, as you said at the onset. Now their budget stands at $80 million a year. But they are, of course, just one organization among many that are linked to the U.S. Agency for International Development, as I said, the State Department. Hundreds of millions of dollars now, in fact, more money is now being spent than ever before on what they call democracy promotion.

Now, the historical record on the National Endowment for Democracy is very clear, when we look at the work of people like Philip Agee and William Robinson and William Blum, Noam Chomsky and others, and most recently, if we look at the work of attorney and independent journalist, Eva Golinger, who exposed, through Freedom of Information Act requests, the role that the N.E.D. played in attempting to subvert democracy and the revolutionary process that’s unfolding in Venezuela in 2002. The N.E.D. played a crucial role in fomenting the opposition to Hugo Chavez, and they did play a role in the attempted coup against him in April of 2002, and very much the same patterns we have seen develop in Haiti.

...

Now, I would like to mention that in my interview, and this is a rare interview with an N.E.D. program officer, and this is the program officer in Washington who is responsible for Haiti currently, a woman named Fabiola Cordoba. She took over in, I believe in, November, as the program officer, and she revealed to me, not only an extensive list of documents that show the N.E.D.’s approved grants for 2005. These are, in a sense, declassified, because these are documents that are not supposed to be published until May of 2006, at least according to another N.E.D. spokesperson. But what’s clear in these documents is that the N.E.D. went from, for example, a zero dollar budget in Haiti in 2003 to a $540,000 budget in Haiti in 2005.

What they’ve also done -- and many Haitian people that I speak to have told me that Haiti is considered the laboratory for these sort of subversive activities on the part of the United States government. And in the context of this experimental process, they’ve hired, for the first time, an in-country program officer, as you mentioned, Régine Alexandre, who was a stringer for the Associated Press and the New York Times, was doubling, moonlighting as an N.E.D. program officer, and the Associated Press severed ties with her as a result.

Now, Fabiola Cordoba also told me that when she was in Haiti in 2002, working for one of the N.E.D.’s affiliated organizations, the National Democratic Institute, she said a lot of lines were being drawn between Haiti and Venezuela, where although 70% of the population supported Aristide, there was a very fragmented opposition. The rest of the 30% was divided between 120 different opposition groups, so the objective of the I.R.I. and the N.E.D. was to consolidate this opposition to build a viable opposition to somehow break the grip that the popular movement in Haiti had on the political environment there. And she said that Chavez – something very similar was happening in Venezuela, and of course, in 2002, the coup d’état happened there on the basis of this sort of analysis, the basis, this fear that the United States has of popular democracy and the need to subvert any attempts at consolidating popular rule and implementing policies that are in the interests of the majority poor in places like Venezuela and Haiti.

And in Palestine:

The Washington Post On Sunday reported that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) gave $2 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA) to boost its image before the polls.

The paper said the assistance was intended to counter Islamic resistance group Hamas, which the US considers a terrorist organisation.

Fatah is the de facto governing party of the PA and faces a formidable challenge from Hamas, which is participating in legislative elections for the first time.

An Audience With George Galloway (update) posted by lenin

Speaking of court cases, law suits and that sort of thing, it has been drawn to my attention that my fellow left-winger Stephen Pollard has been obliged to back-waddle from an attempted slander against Interpal, the Palestinian charity. He wrote:

Interpal, his [Galloway's] 'designated charity' is described by the US Treasury as a "Hamas-related charity" and has been listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. So a vote for Galloway is, quite literally, a vote for an organisation described by the US government as terrorist.(1)

Oh dear. Someone must have apprised him of the fact that the Charities Commission had investigated Interpal twice and found not a solitary thing wrong, and that the Board of Deputies had been heavily embarrassed over a similar claim. For, the following day:

You might notice that a posting from yesterday on Interpal is no longer up. I removed it after a few minutes (although I understand that it remained visible for a little while afterwards). It concerned its nomination by George Galloway in the Big Brother programme.

I want to make clear that the charity operates as an entirely legitimate organisation for the relief of suffering and no evidence has ever been produced to suggest otherwise.(2)

Via Islamophobia Watch. So, I guess we now know what to make of America's definition of a terrorist organisation: humanitarianism toward the enemy is sufficient, as Dr Rafil Dhafir has discovered to his immense cost.

1) http://www.stephenpollard.net/002424.html

2) http://www.stephenpollard.net/002433.html

Reds On The Doorstep. posted by lenin

An inspiring panic in today's Telegraph about the wave of victories for the Left in Latin America. Just a few delicious nuggets of absurdity:

The next country in the region that could soon turn "red" is Peru. Among Mr Morales's personal guests was Ollanta Humala, a favourite to win April's Peruvian presidential elections.

Like President Chavez, Mr Humala is a former army colonel who led a coup. Like Mr Morales he has the backing of his country's militant coca farmers. Like both he is an ultra-nationalist, and should he win the Bush administration will lose another friendly regime in the region.

Ultra-nationalists. Chavez' comportment makes him out to be an internationalist above all else, not least his supplying cheap oil to America's poor. Yet, anyone who is not automatically susceptible to neoliberal dogma, does not tear down 'trade barriers' and tarrifs, does not reduce 'barriers to investment' such as the minimum wage and safety regulations, does not wish to sell off any prime asset in the country's possession, is an ultra-nationalist.

The White House has decided not to react to Mr Morales's critical rhetoric, but rather wait and see what the new president does rather than says. Washington sent Thomas Shannon, the assistant secretary of state, to attend the swearing-in ceremony.

The language of pure power: it is for the White House to decide what fate will befall democratically elected leaders whose policies are not strictly compatible with Washington's concerns.

Apart from Mr Chavez, sitting astride the largest reserves of oil outside the Middle East, and Mr Castro, still unbowed after four decades of a US economic embargo, Latin America's Left-wing leaders have taken a pragmatic approach to relations with the US, and Washington is hoping that Mr Morales will do the same.

With more than 60 per cent of the population living in poverty, the new president can ill afford to reject US aid nor can he hope to exploit the country's massive gas reserves without international help.

Yes, you certainly can't go around rejecting US 'aid' when there's so much poverty, even if that aid comes with strings that will deepen the impoverishment. And by all means, seek "international help" in exploiting your own resources. The euphemism is delectable, and can be reiterated endlessly. Imagine if Iraq hadn't sought "international help" in exploiting its oil resources.

Curiously enough, while much was made of Bachelet's victory in Chile introducing the first woman president to the country, comparatively little has been said about the fact that Morales is the first Indian president in Bolivia. It isn't that Bachelet's being a woman is insignificant - it just may be the only significant thing about her victory. Whereas Morales background intersects with the whole variety of reasons why he was elected. In short, this is the first Indian political leader Bolivia has had, in a country with an Indian majority, since Spanish colonialists conquered the area in 1525. It was the Indian population that provided an army of slave labourers to augment the "international help" in exploiting the silver mines. It was the colonial elite that controlled the country even after the colonists had been kicked out in 1809 - and a weak elite it was, too, susceptible to invasion and the loss of territory on all sides. It is fairly safe to say that this elite would have been dispatched a lot more rapidly and properly buried had it not been for US intervention. For although the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement had, following the 1952 revolution in which it ousted much of the old landed oligarchy and expropriated the mines, begun the process of consolidating the rule of the domestic middle class, it did create the conditions in which dual power could subsist. That was terminated by a CIA supported military coup in 1964, which saw Rene Barrientos take power until 1969, during which time miners had their wages cut and were massacred at Catavi. There was a short-lived left-nationalist regime under Gen. J.J. Torres in which workers's self-government was created in a popular assembly, and - yes - that too was supplanted after a mere two years by yet another CIA backed coup in 1971. General Banzer, after seven years of rule, was followed by a succession of military dictators known for their corruption, illicit narco-trafficking, and extraoardinary brutality. Subsequently, a sequence of liberalising governments allowed the country's nationalised assets to be bought off in large chunks by foreign investors - the so-called 'capitalisation' programme. Gen. Banzer won power electorally in 1997, with a mere 22% of the vote, and proceeded to crack down hard on the coca growers whose militancy had dogged previous governments, privatise industry, and renege on his pledge to suspend the privatisation of the oil company. All in accordance with the wishes of Washington. In 2001, he gave way to a former IBM employee, who in turn gave way to another 'technocratic' neoliberal. However, by then the genie was out of the bottle again - in 1998, the World Bank refused to guarantee a loan to finance water services in Cochabamba unless the utility was privatised and the costs passed on to consumers. In 1999, consortium led by Bechtel won the contract, and immediately doubled the price of water, which meant that for many it cost more than food. The World Bank kindly announced that it supported the full-cost pricing and declared that none of its loan could be used to subsidise water for the poor. In 2000, mass strikes and demonstrations broke the government and Bechtel were ordered out.

And of course, the most recent wave of strikes and protests led to the Bush administration saying it was "very concerned about serious challenges to Bolivia’s stability from radical opposition groups that threaten the country’s hard-won gains in democracy". There have been threats to impose yet another dictatorship, (and of course, as we all know, multinationals have a history of deep support for and involvement with these dictators). The domestic Bolivian ruling class is a very weak one, moulded during colonialism, broken through various lost wars and internal rebellions, and yet saved every time from the latter by US imperialism. One assumes that it will happen again, if Mr Morales does not care to be "pragmatic" (oh, this is real Mafia talk - "'Ey, think it over, be pragmatic, don't bust my fockin balls..."). Self-evidently, Bolivia's workers can take on their own government, but not the combined might of international capital, and certainly not a US military intervention - even by proxy. Had the Venezuelan coup not been botched, it is very unlikely that Morales would have been sworn in. If the Haitian coup is not botched (and there is still considerable room for that), then Morales cannot expect to stay in power for long and do anything meaningful. If Afghanistan can be off-loaded onto the Nato forces, and Iraq pacified somehow, then perhaps Iran can expect a noisy public strike while death squads are despatched to Bolivia direct from the School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

To say that capital is only as strong as its weakest link only rises above useless platitude if those who are ideologically prepared to strike against it at its weakest points are supported by those who live in its centre. That is what anti-imperialism is about. And that is what the neophytic leftie converts to imperialism have forgotten, if they ever knew it in the first place.

Bolivia: Between Colonisation and Revolution.

Haiti: the mildest hint of criticism... posted by lenin

...will probably have Amnesty International branded 'extremist'. Here is their latest press-release:

According to eye-witness accounts provided to Amnesty International, at least one civilian died and another was injured last Thursday in the locality of Ouanaminthe (on the Haitian-Dominican Republic border), after shots were allegedly fired from a convoy consisting of a Dominican truck accompanied by vehicles from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

The crowd was demonstrating as the bodies of more than 20 Haitians -- who died after being illegally trafficked to the Dominican Republic – were being taken to the Ouanaminthe cemetery to be buried.

The demonstrators wanted to prevent the burying of the bodies in a mass grave without a proper identification of the victims or a formal ceremony. They threw rocks at the truck transporting the bodies and at MINUSTAH vehicles escorting it. According to the eye-witnesses, none of the civilians demonstrating was armed.

Furthermore, a second person was reportedly injured when hit by a MINUSTAH armoured vehicle. There are also reports that several MINUSTAH peacekeepers were injured.

Two journalists from a local radio station were physically prevented from covering the events and had their tape recorders confiscated by MINUSTAH personnel.

Amnesty International is calling on MINUSTAH officials and the Haitian government to launch an urgent, independent investigation into this incident and to make the conclusions public. Those found responsible for using or ordering excessive force should be brought to justice.

MINUSTAH has been deployed in Haiti since June 2004. According to reports, MINUSTAH officials recently admitted that an internal investigation concluded that a number of unarmed civilians may have been killed during a UN operation in Cité Soleil on 6 July 2005. Amnesty International urges UN officials to make public its findings.

Scroll back up to that bit about being "illegally trafficked to the Dominican Republic". What's that all about? you wonder. Well, as I mentioned last year, one thing that has really thrived under the UN occupation has been the trade in Haitian slave workers, mostly children, in the Dominican Republic: they are used for domestic service, prostitution or rural labour. Of course, Haitians are uniquely positioned to be exploited, as MediaLens noted shortly after the coup:

The United States is Haiti's main commercial 'partner' accounting for about 60% of the flows of exports and imports. Along with the manufacture of baseballs, textiles, cheap electronics, and toys, Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal are all controlled by American corporations. Disney, for example, has used Haitian sweatshops to produce Pocahontas pyjamas, among other items, at the rate of 11 cents per hour. Most Haitians are willing to work for almost nothing.

Pochohantas pyjamas, boys and girls - that's what the killing is for.

Speaking of killing, eyewitness reports suggest that UN troops have attacked St Catherine's Hospital in Cite Soleil, presumably one of the UN's increasing number of "anti-gang raids". In fact, the reports appear to be confirmed by Aaron Lakoff, who visited the hospital some days ago and noticed "that the exterior and interior walls of the hospital were covered with bullet holes. In a shocking image that will never leave my mind, there was a large bullet hole in a glass window looking in on cribs in the children's ward. Eyewitnesses told us that at around 11pm the previous night, the hospital came under heavy fire, and the perpetrators were MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) troops". For the UN's part, it can only consider itself at war with "gang members", universal code in Haiti for armed supporters of Aristide fighting against the coup government.

Meanwhile, Lavalas party member Reverend Gerard Jean-Juste, declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International last year, has predictably been acquitted of the trumped up charges against him, but still insist on keeping him in prison for "weapons possession" and "conspiracy". This coming from the government that conspired in a bloody coup to bring down the democratically elected government is almost admirable for its brutal, ruthless chutzpah. Hardly a surprise, however, as Lakoff notes:

The Group of 184 is led by a shady cast of characters. Their spokesperson, Andy Apaid Jr., is the owner of Alpha Industries, the largest garment producer in Haiti. In his factories, more aptly called sweatshops, workers toil to produce clothing for Montreal-based Gildan Activewear. Most are women between the ages of 18-30 years old, and are paid a measly 75 Gourdes (Less than $2 US) per day.

Another important Group of 184 player is Reginald Boulos, head of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce. According to the Haiti Information Project, Boulos was also implicated in the death of 60 children after his company, Pharval Pharmaceuticals, produced a poisonous cough syrup distributed throughout poor neighborhoods of the capital. . Patrick Elie, a Haitian activist we met the other day, recounts to us how he applied for a job with a pharmaceutical company in Canada. When he told his prospective employers that he used to work for the Boulos family in Haiti, they replied, “You know, those guys are killers...”

So...

So how does a group of rich maquiladora-owners and mad scientists maintain even a shred of credibility on the international scene? Through plenty of funding and support from the USA, France, and Canada.

Since the 2004 coup d'etat, Canada has lent its explicit support to the Group of 184, not only in sending 500 soldiers to aid in the process of ousting Aristide, but also by funding many of the opposition groups in the Group of 184 via CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). Seemingly progressive Canadian NGO's such as Alternatives and Rights and Democracy have helped maintain the Group of 184's credibility by affirming that they are indeed a 'civil society' group.

Through this support for the Group of 184, Canada has also supported de facto all the institutions that are committing human rights abuses in post-coup Haiti, including the interim Haitian government. Thousands of political prisoners continue to sit behind bars without charges since the coup, while Paul Martin has denied their very existence as such. At the same time, known killer and coup leader, Guy Phillipe, who was trained by the CIA in Ecuador, is running for president. The Canadian Embassy in Haiti, who was quick to support the removal of Aristide, has had little to say about this.

And, as they have been doing for some time, coup leaders are demanding that the MINUSTAH troops get tougher with "the gangs", while still threatening a capital "strike" if they don't get their way. It occurs to me, however, that there may be a certain amount of panic among Haiti's elite. If, two years after the coup, they still haven't put down the resistance and still cannot control the society, they are in trouble. The apparent favourite to win the frequently deferred Haitian elections is Lavalas member and Aristide ally Rene Preval. Unlike in 1991, it seems that Haitian society is equipped to fight the death squads and their UN guarantors. If this is correct, then it means that they will turn to more and more desperate measures: the last thing they want is a Lavalas president greeting Mr Aristide as he lands at Port Au Prince airport. One expects the atrocities to intensify - those 'gang' hospitals heard the last of it.

Finally, a number of people e-mailed this to me over the last few days: the 'security company' Consultants Advisory Group, it appears, has been shopping whistleblowers who report human rights abuses so that they can be detained. Read the whole report for some enlightening background...

An Audience With George Galloway. posted by lenin

This is not a post about Celebrity Big Brother. If you're still watching that shit, you are personally evil and deserve to be burnt at the stake. No, Mark Elf has been on the case of accusations of 'anti-Semitism' against George Galloway. Such claims typically come from untrustworthy buffoons whom one does well to ignore. However, if they come from Matthew Kramer, Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at Cambridge University, you sit up and pay attention (unless, of course, you are one of his students). And when Professor Norman Geras repeats them on his site (1), that's two potential libel suits. Double trouble. (Note that as I have no desire to improve the traffic for a number of the sites that I will be discussing, the URLs will simply be provided at the end of the post for you to pursue if you insist).

Matthew Kramer, writing to the Cambridge Arts theatre to protest Galloway's appearance in An Audience With George Galloway, suggested:

[Y]ou are apparently intending to allow the Arts Theatre to be used as a platform by a man who has made a number of anti-Semitic pronouncements in various settings. I shall be happy to supply you with relevant quotations. I should note that, when I say "anti-Semitic", I mean "anti-Semitic"; I do not mean "anti-Israeli" (though Galloway is of course implacably opposed to the state of Israel).

Naturally, the director of the theatre told him in various pacifying terms to cram it, but the allegations have not been retracted. As Jews Sans Frontieres asks "Leaving aside the fact that being anti the State of Israel doesn't make a person "anti-Israeli", does anyone have any quotations from Galloway that are anti-semitic?" Someone tried to find out. A friend of Mark Elf wrote to Mr Kramer to see if he would yield the "relevant quotations". The response: "He referred my friend to the comments of Harry's Place on 6 December 2005. Don't laugh it's true. A Cambridge don has used, not just Harry's Place, but the comments at Harry's Place as source material."

This called for some detective work. Reading HP Sauce, I suspect the comments box he refers to is actually from the post 'Mr Galloway Goes to Cambridge' from December 7th. HP contributor 'Gene' links to a post by Geras which cites, but does not link, comments GG allegedly made on Al Jazeera referring to "the newspapers and news media which are controlled by Zionism". This, Norm says, is 'conspiracy theory' with 'poison at its heart' - the Professor is not a prose stylist (2). But let's put it bluntly: there are newspapers and news media controlled by Zionists, not least the Telegraph (well, it was at any rate). Rupert Murdoch is a Zionist, par excellence, and manages to control four of the nation's newspapers, not to mention Fox News, Sky News etc. Unless referring to obvious facts is 'anti-Semitic', Professor Kramer's defense team would struggle with this one (3).

Zionist academic David Hirsh of Goldsmith's College provides further such 'examples' in the same comments box. There is one in which Galloway is actually acquitted of having referred to Israel as a "Hitler state" (much to the chagrin of the Engage author), but then accused of conspiracy theories and "dehumanising" language, because he refers to the war leaders as having a "simian swagger". Galloway is then quoted as saying that Israel engaged in activities to drive Jewish people out of Arab countries. This happens to be true, and it was largely driven by the Jewish National Fund Yet, it is simply cited in order to imply some an anti-Jewish animus at work (4) Then there is some guilt by association in which Galloway and Joseph Massad are crudely compared to David Duke by Mr Hirsh because the latter believes the Jews control the global media and conspire to control governments. Hirsh adds that "George Galloway ... also believes that the 'Zionists' control the global media", which could land Hirsh in court too, as the evidence he adduces plainly confutes his claim (5).

Another article is sourced to support the claim that Galloway is anti-Semitic, despite the fact that Galloway is not mentioned once in the whole article (6). And yet another, where Galloway correctly pins Louise Ellman as "Israel's MP on Merseyside" because she is one of the most disgraceful apologists for Israeli crimes as well as a member of Labour Friends of Israel (7).

And that's it. From this, I would have to deduce that a) referring to Zionists controlling newspapers is 'conspiracy theory' (and no need to ensure the translation is accurate or that the words were ever said, is anti-Semitic, b) to refer to certifiable facts about Zionist history is anti-Semitic, c) to vilify warmonger Richard Perle is anti-Semitic, d) to criticise a Jewish MP is anti-Semitic... in fact, to oppose Zionism and to criticise anyone who happens to support it - especially if they are Jewish - is anti-Semitic. That's a definition that no court would accept, (unless perhaps it was an Israeli one).

What I'm saying is that these calumnious slagheaps, who are themselves - all of them - apologists for Israel, a racist settler state whose very existence relies upon ethnic cleansing, really have more to worry about than, say, Endemol productions. In fact, Respect could use a nice shiny new bus, so I hope George can be persuaded to sue.

1 http://tinyurl.com/9x9eb

2 http://tinyurl.com/9esss

3 http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/comment.php?id=53

4 http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/comment.php?id=162

5 http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/comment.php?id=128

6 http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/index.php?id=7

7 http://tinyurl.com/763gb

Right of return? posted by Levi9909

I've been sent this report from the Arab Human Rights Association in Israel (AHRA). Headed 3 year old lives in anonymity in Baqa al Gharbiyyah, the article sets out how it is that the child of an Israeli mother is barred from attaining Israeli citizenship:

The Israeli Interior Ministry continues to repeatedly refuse Israeli citizenship to Qadar Ismail Mawasi, who three years ago was born in Nabulus when her mother from Baqa al Gharbiyyah in Israel was visiting her husband in the West Bank city.

Qadar's name was also not imprinted on her mother's ID as is usually done for children of Israeli parents. This denial of identity stems from the fact that she was born at the Rafidia hospital in Nabulus. Qadar's brothers, Fahmi and Ahmad are both Israeli citizens.

Qadar's mother, Izdihar Mawasi, says, "When I was in my last month of pregnancy (3 years ago) I was visiting my husband Ismail at his home in Nabulus; being from the West Bank, he is forbidden entrance into Israel. During that visit, I felt that I was about to deliver, so began my return to Baqa al Gharbiyyah. However, I was stopped at the checkpoint leading into Israel due to a security closure. This kept me in Nabulus, even though I told security staff that I was on the verge of delivery". Shortly after Qadar was born, Izdihar's husband suffered a heart attack and passed away; all this time her daughter had been living with her in Baqa al Gharbiyyah in Israel.

Izdihar then attempted to have her daughter registered at the Interior Ministry in Israel given their current residence within the State and Izdihar's status as an Israeli citizen, but was refused. Again, the reason given was that Qadar was born in Nabulus. Izdihar has been going to the Interior Ministry on multiple occasions (with all the appropriate documentation) but has continually been denied identity papers for her daughter.

Izdihar fears much for her daughter's future because it rests in uncertainty. The fact that three year old Qadar has no identity papers implies she is not registered by the government, and therefore registering her in school and ensuring access to health care is also put into question.

This is another example of Israel's continued ethnic cleansing from within its internationally accepted boundaries and, again, an abuse that could juts as easily happen under the most far-reaching of "left" zionist "peace" proposals.

ITN: Filthy scumbags. posted by lenin

ITN report on Haiti this evening - the most disgusting, racist episode I've seen on television for some time. It begins by setting the scene, explaining that the country has been in chaos and civil war "for years" - not true, of course. The country has been in civil war since the US, France & Canada despatched trained death squad militias from the Dominican Republic in 2004. It continues, that this has been the case since Aristide "fled" two years ago - he did not, of course. He was kidnapped and bungled out of the country against his will by US marines. Then we hear that "gun toting gangs" have run the place since. No sense of analysis, understanding, not even an attempt to grasp what is happening. No one, especially not a journalist, need detain themselves with such trivialities as the attempt by a new government of sweatshop owners and death squad leaders to wipe out the Lavalas party after a decade of pacific rule, in which the army was disbanded, and in which Aristide - despite considerable pressure from Washington - attempted to increase the minimum wage and improve conditions. It's just "gun toting gangs". And, of course, when a woman explains that she has been shot by UN 'peacekeepers', the tone is repulsively condescending: "this woman insists that she was shot by peacekeepers".

And finally, the worst moment in the whole report, we are told that "The world is at a loss to know what to do about Haiti. Everything from aid to foreign invasion has been tried. The result is anarchy." As if the requirement for aid was not created by colonialism and client-state imperialism, a process stretching right up until 1994. As if the 'aid' was benign. As if the foreign invasion were not part of the problem. As if these dirty brown people were simply beyond help, congenitally predisposed to violence and - who knows - probably rape and drugs and all sorts of evil things. This is frightening. To be amazed at how brutal the present is (as in "in this day and age") is a sure sign of naivete. And yet, I can't help feeling that the most weathered cynic would wilt and fume at such a performance.

"Every day, we are counting dead bodies" posted by lenin

WSWS:

Demonstrations erupted in Cité Soleil on Thursday, January 12 against the UN occupation and its collusion with the coup government that has jailed political opponents. One person was confirmed killed and 17 were injured in clashes with UN troops as of Wednesday last week. One of the wounded was a 12-year-old girl. “Every day, we are counting dead bodies,” said Joel.

A 30-year-old woman named Edline Pierre-Louis, who lost her unborn baby when she was shot by UN troops on July 6, protested the UN’s denial of the massacre. “The blue helmets [UN troops] are lying,” she told the Haitian Information Project. “They killed so many people, and I praise God that I am alive to call them liars.”

As witnessed by independent Canadian reporters Leslie Bagg and Aaron Lakoff, “multiple killings of civilians have been committed by UN forces.” In Cité Soleil they interviewed a resident named Dieunord Edme, who spoke of his wife, Annette Moleron, being shot and killed by UN troops on January 7 in an incident that also claimed the lives of four other women in a marketplace. The reporters witnessed a bloated corpse by a roadside that residents couldn’t retrieve because the UN military in Haiti (MINUSTAH) would fire on anyone that approached it. The reporters claim the corpse was left out in order to intimidate the neighborhood.

On Monday, January 9, Reginald Boulos, the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Andy Apaid, the Haitian-American who owns Haiti’s oldest and largest sweatshop empire—both members of the Canadian and US-backed Group 184—called for a “strike” allegedly to protest the wave of kidnappings.

Cold War: Is It Over Yet? posted by lenin

In the most vulgarised Cold War discourse, we are invited to believe that the United States and Europe were engaged - through NATO - in a titanic struggle against something called "totalitarianism". One of the curiosities here is that it is liberalism which contains the seed of uncompromising (if benign) despotism, total scrutability and organicism (Hobbes' Leviathan, Bentham's panopticon and Hegel's concrete universal, respectively) which are supposed to be the crucial ingredients of the 'totalitarian' monster. A fairly superficial excursus from this ideological coercion (you're with us or with the evil-doers, commies etc) would appear to be offered by traditional realist approaches to foreign policy and IR. The Cold War, rather than being seen as a new departure in world affairs in which democracy combats its inscrutable Evil Other for decades, is simply a new form of inter-state conflict in which states as equivalent units engage in power-maximising strategies on the basis of developments in military technology. (This isn't always the case: John Lewis Gaddis, the archetypal realist, argues in We Now Know that Stalin organised his foreign policy according to his ideological proclivities more than state interests: classically, however, realists have understood his strategy as being centred on straightforward state interest concerns about continental encirclement and fear of attack through Eastern Europe). In this way, the Cold War is understood as a bipolar arrangement into which most conficts can be subsumed, as a form of proxy military struggle between the leading superpowers. The fact of the Soviet Union professing to be a communist state and the US being a liberal capitalist one was not, therefore, seen as the reason why conflict developed after 1945: after all, it had not prevented an alliance between 1941 and 1945. And as Gaddis notes in an earlier work, (The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947), US policymakers perceived a sharp break on Stalin's part not only from international revolution, but also from communism internally. Even George Kennan, asserting that the Soviet Union was ruled by "messianic Bolshevism", considered USSR foreign policy no more than commonplace pragmatic opportunism. Ideology is seen as something that can be decoupled from foreign policy, albeit it may have some incidental effects.

However, there are obvious and striking problems with the traditional realist approach, and it can hardly be surprising that most such accounts have tended to put US policy in a better light than might otherwise be the case, since in treating Cold War geopolitics as a mere matter of strategic conflict between two super-states, the realists have tended to internalise the priorities and purview of the US. But the problems lie deeper than that. As Justin Rosenberg points out (The Empire of Civil Society), the supposition that states are simply power-maximising units in which military power predominates is recursive. If you equate the state with coercive-military power and therefore assert that statesmen only engage in politics internationally when they attend to security matters, then the claim becomes self-justifying. This approach is reductionist, screening out other actors and other possible sources of policy. Hence, it is argued by realists that it was Reagan's policy of military build-up during the 1980s that forced Gorbachev to redefine Soviet policy and eventually bring about the implosion of the USSR. This fails to account for the internal de-legitimising of the regime, and the economic failure which contributed to that process. In particular, as Mary Kaldor notes, there was a strong 'civil society' current, ranging from various workers uprisings in 1956 and 1968 to Solidarnosc and Charter 77. These movements had the effect of relaxing domestic policies and terminating the Brezhnev doctrine, with obvious consequences for the future of the Warsaw Pact. Similarly, one might consider some well-known internal factors which shaped US foreign policy. In particular, Kennan's notes in US PPS 23: "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." We might add planning document NSC 68, which, alongside widely feted concerns about the USSR's value-system and so on, worries about potential economic instability without the government stimulus of military spending. It then proceeds, handily enough, to embed a zero-sum outlook in official doctrine. Michael Cox argues further from an historical materialist perspective that the Cold War relationship had a primary function of allowing each competing state to realise its goals within its own sphere of influence. For the US it served its dominance of the postwar capitalist order, while for the USSR it assured the internal security and rule of the CPSU.

Cox, and a number of other critics, rightly maintain that there was nothing inherently anticapitalist about the USSR: it had, at least since the 1920s, given up any prospect of challenging the liberal capitalist order beyond its zones of control. Much is made of Stalin's decision to annexe Eastern Europe and partition Germany, however as Carolyn Eisenberg points out (Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949), the latter was as much an American policy as it was Stalin's. (Also see Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR: 1945-53 for an account of the role of German communist workers in forging an alliance with the Stalinist elite, an alliance that was perpetually strained and ultimately betrayed). New Left critics like Noam Chomsky have always maintained that the USSR, as a state capitalist formation, had very limited aspirations (and capabilities) in foreign policy and that US policy could not therefore be understood as a matter of 'containment'. Melvyn Leffler and David S. Painter argue in Origins of the Cold War: An International History that Stalin's attitude was opportunistic and pragmatic - ready to expand Soviet power, but keenly attuned to the constraints and risks involved. Indeed, Gaddis still maintains such a position, despite preferring to interpret Stalin's expansionism as an artefact of ideology these days. These two claims are consistent with one another, and consistent with the evidence. To illustrate this, and also to introduce the most frequently underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the Cold War, the one which forces us to problematise the inherited categories of that discourse, we can take a brief look at the revolutionary movements in South East Asia during the Cold War: in particular, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The distinctive point about these three states was their colonial or semi-colonial status. China was a semi-colonial state from the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanking right until the victorious 1949 revolution; Vietnam was ruled by the French, and then divided between an American proxy and an independent North Vietnamese state, until 1975 when the last Marines and diplomats escaped from the roof of the US embassy; the Phillipines was of course ruled by the Spanish, and then by a US client network of hacienda owners after a protracted colonial war between the US and the Phillipines from 1898 to 1913. These revolutionary movements were, as with so many other cases across the world, anti-colonial uprisings that expressed themselves in the idiom of Marxism - which is not to say that the leaders of these movements were not serious about intending to construct socialism, but really to understand the uprisings as comprising as their primary element an anti-imperialist dimension, which often intersected with class concerns. This, along with the semi-feudal economic make-up, imposed an unusual amount of ideological and organisational flexibility on the communists. In China, for instance, the crisis of the state began with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and the reaction to it was first felt among urban intellectuals who could get access to the texts of Marx, and later Lenin, and translate this into an appeal to an overwhelmingly agrarian mass. The CCP, when it was founded in 1920-1, had a mere fifty members. Initially, it attempted to forge a base in the urban centres among the working class, but found this both dangerous and inhospitable, and so had to remove to the countryside where 80% of the population lived. They had to face the Nationalists (with whom the Stalinists insisted they form a subordinate bloc, an almost fatal move for them - see Trotsky's critique here), then the Japanese, and then the Nationalists backed by the United States. The Viet Minh, for their part, were able to solve the problem of uniting class war with anti-imperialism by battling the Japanese imperialists and also waging war on famine at the same time. By 1945, both movements had created conditions of dual sovereignty: the Viet Minh siezed Hanoi and created the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in August 1945, while the CCP began an accelerated civil war with the Nationalists in 1946, that finally led to victory in 1949.

The Phillipines, by contrast, did not experience a successful communist revolution. Despite rural disorder and peasant resistance, the movement was hegemonised by the Socialist Party, with which the Phillipine Communist Party merged in 1938. It was not until after the war, and the defeat of the Japanese invaders by the Huks (People's Anti-Japanese Army) that a serious insurgency began. It was evident on the one hand that peaceful peasant resistance was futile against the US client state. On the other hand, the decision to launch a bid for power in January 1950 proved to be premature: there had been insufficient ideological and organisational groundwork, and as soon as the threat became apparent, Washington rushed aid to Manila. Ramon Magsayay was entrusted with 'rural pacification' (counterinsurgency terror), while pledging land reform. The Huk leaders were rapidly captured and the revolt dissipated.

It was this experience that gave rise to America's systematic counterinsurgency strategy during the Cold War. And what this highlights is that, far from being an idealistic clash between two superpowers, or a game of military strategy, the Cold War was essentially about class struggle, in however mediated a form. The Soviet Union could sometimes pose as bearers of the interests of the peasants or working class (although it faced considerable difficulties in doing so, even among sympathetic leaders of the CCP, not least because of Stalin's incredible fecklessness), but the US could not do so. It was unwilling to consider alternatives to patrimonial domination, and did not heed Ho Chi Minh's requests for assistance against colonial domination. For all its claims to represent something different to the former colonial powers, it was essentially the bearer of Western ruling class interests. It was also, on account of the Cold War, able to catastrophically cripple internal dissent through McCarthyism. And because of the economic stability that the permanent arms economy conferred, it could satisfy working class needs enough to diminish the appeal of socialism in any variant. And this process did not simply begin in 1945 with the initial tensions with Russia: it began with the first anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1920s and 30s, with the support for the White Army. It began with European elites supporting fascist movements against communism, and continued with both the US and USSR crushing Antifascist committees in postwar Germany, American forces restoring Emperor Hirohito, British support for far right monarchists in the Greek civil war, Eisenhower forming an historic alliance with Franco in 1953, and the 'Alliance for Progress' in Latin America, which ensured a rolling spree of dictatorships and mass murder.

Well yes, anyway, the Cold War is over, largely because of the historic failure to date of the communist alternative, and because of the collapse of the major state claiming to bear that cause. But it is not hard to detect in the 'war on terror', as it manifests itself in Iraq, Colombia, the Phillipines, perhaps even Venezuela, a continuation of the same policy under different conditions. The 'war on terror' licenses intensified internal repression, and external aggression, just as the Cold War did. It licenses the suppression of trade unions and insurgency in Iraq, just as it warrants the ongoing support for repression in Colombia. It entitled the British government to call striking firefighters 'the enemy within' just as they prepared for the invasion of Iraq. It merits "no protest" zones, and government spying on the populace. It will also undoubtedly be used to justify suppression of anticapitalist demonstrators, who will surely be penetrated by turrrsts.

Yes, it's all over: no, the enemy is still not defeated.

It Still Keeps the Men Happy. posted by lenin

Follow up to this. US refuses to hand over four Marines charged with rape:

The United States on Tuesday refused a Philippine request to hand over four Marines charged with rape, provoking anti-American protests in the capital and the Muslim south, where U.S. troops began annual counterterrorism training of Filipino soldiers.

In a letter to the Philippine government, the U.S. Embassy invoked the bilateral Visiting Forces Agreement, which allows large-scale U.S. training in the country, and vowed to keep the Marines in its custody during an upcoming trial.


...

Zaynab Ampatuan, deputy head of the left-wing Muslim group Suara Bangsamoro, said the local Muslim community ''should not allow U.S. troops to train Filipino troops to run after suspected terrorists. No other suspects are being arrested except (Muslims).''
The protesters carried streamers ''Never again to gang rape,'' and ''U.S. troops out now.''

Rinse and Repeat. posted by lenin

Guest post from Leon Kuhn.

Niall Ferguson's Latest Counterfactual. posted by lenin

Follow up to this post by Bat. Today, Justin Raimondo has an excellent riposte to a recent World War IV fantasy by Niall Ferguson, the famous poetaster of Empire.

In particular, he notes the racist stereotyping involved:

In trying to prevent this war's outbreak, therefore, one may as well attempt to cap a volcano. So, too, the demography of the Arab world – which imparts to it, according to Ferguson, a potentially deadly and threateningly youthful "vitality," as opposed to the "senescent" West. The belligerence of those combative Middle Eastern folk – Israel, of course, excepted – is due to a primitive animal vitality, rather like that of the savages depicted in Kipling's panegyrics to the British imperium, on whose behalf "the white man's burden" must be taken up.

Even the "Islamist" angle is depicted as if it were a force of nature, some inherent energy that emanates out of the very soil of the Middle East and insinuates itself into the minds of the people, like a poisonous mist. Absent from this analysis is any concept of cause and effect, of Islamic radicalism as a reaction to Western colonialism and interventionism. Certainly the British, in Ferguson's view, are completely blameless, although they ruled the region (excepting Syria) since the fall of the Ottomans up until their own inevitable decline into post-imperial "senescence."

However, suffice to say that Ferguson's counterfactual is a putative future war between Iran and the settler-colonial state. As the imperial historian explains, looking back on the present:

Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.

You see the point. Israel is threatened with incineration. The Americans, weak of will and flabby of paunch following the refusal to demonstrate sufficient steely resolve in Iraq, aren't anxious to have another war. Because the West - so, heh heh heh, enfeebled by its 'democracy' - chooses to allow Iranians to overthrow their malevolent regime, Iran is left alone, with its own nuclear devices, and with manic, Hitlerite glee, prepares the destruction of Israel. It points a nuke toward Tel Aviv. Israel already has its nukes pointing at Tehran. "As in the 1930s", an "anti-Semitic demagogue" breaks with its treaty obligations: the West tries appeasement, then economic coercion. The first flash, a ripple of destruction, and then a mushroom cloud. A colossal suicide bomb, as it invites destruction in equal measure. The Evil Ones thrive on the prospect of annihiliation, and Israel gives it to them. Meanwhile, Iran's Shiites overrun American bases, and the Chinese make noises about siding with the theocracy. The war lasts until 2011. The West is broken, and the Oil Age is over. The fundamentalist ascendancy teems over in the brown countries.

The punchline: "Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost."

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the counterfactual: if we don't smack those dirty brown people about, they will get some of our nuclear material and use it, and undermine our civilisation. It's lovely, of course, the cheap turn there: "the historian is bound to ask". For this mimics exactly Ferguson's strategy for normalising and rendering acceptable British crimes during its Empire. If Britain had not subjugated the savages, they would have continued to live in shitpiles and kill one another. They would never have known the Holy Profit or the sanctity of Supply and Demand. Without slavery, they might never have seen the fruits of the Protestant work ethic. The Enlightenment ideals of the Empire enjoined it to the betterment of man, even if it was itself a racist, hierarchical and violently coercive affair. By such means do intellectuals infused with colonial virtue render the slow death march of empire tolerable. Ferguson is a man for whom F Scott Fitzgerald might have written: "See that little stream, we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a whole month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs." (From Tender is the Night).

And as Curtis White notes, this is all part of the Speilbergian ethical order: "[A]lways choose death, for if you do not, death will come anyway, later, multiplied." (See passim).

"Nuclear Scare" posted by lenin

"Defiance". posted by lenin

It transpires that "defiance of the international community" is a crime meriting sanctions and the threat of air strikes. Iran, for shame, is supposed to be seeking nuclear weapons. Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesperson has said, without any apparent trace of irony, "We believe the combination of fanatical ideology together with nuclear weaponry is a combination that no thinking person can feel comfortable with". And Israel, for its part, may well be considering a military attack. Albeit, however, there may be a modest amount of embarrassment over this.

Where to even begin? Setting aside the obvious questions of justice and equity - if Israel may have nukes, why not Iran, you might ask - I have straightforward and obvious proposition: there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. There have certainly been a number of intelligence claims, but I think we all know what to do with those before flushing. If not, then consult this. Even if, hypothetically speaking, there were such a programme, the IISS concludes that "if Iran threw caution to the wind, and sought a nuclear weapon capability as quickly as possible without regard for international reaction, it might be able to produce enough HEU for a single nuclear weapon by the end of this decade", assuming no problems of supply or technical difficulties. Undertaking more plausible options would take considerably longer. They'll also have to get round Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's fatwa against the stockpiling, production and use of such weapons.

At any rate, there seems to be a curious ideological movement going on here: destructive military technology circulates about the world, horribly enough, as part of the normal state of affairs in the international system. The British government has just announced that it will spend £25bn on an updated Trident programme. The United States possesses, of course, very extensive nuclear weapons programmes. Yet, as soon as an official enemy (without, you will note, a history of external aggression) is even accused of aiming at climbing the nuclear ladder, all is suddenly murky and mysterious. Consider this report on anonymous intelligence claims (I assume they come from MI6): "It concludes that Syria and Pakistan have also been buying technology and chemicals needed to develop rocket programmes and to enrich uranium. It outlines the role played by Russia in the escalating Middle East arms build-up, and examines the part that dozens of Chinese front companies have played in North Korea's nuclear weapons programme." Note that it does not outline the quite extensive US role in the escalating Middle East arms build-up. It continues: "The assessment declares that Iran has developed an extensive web of front companies, official bodies, academic institutes and middlemen dedicated to obtaining - in western Europe and in the former Soviet Union - the expertise, training, and equipment for nuclear programmes, missile development, and biological and chemical weapons arsenals."

You really would have to have a soft spot for faecal matter to swallow this stuff. Coprophobes can merely amuse themselves with the thought that the crazy clerics in Iran have set up an extensive conspiracy in the heart of Europe for the sole purpose of pursuing nuclear megadeath. But another obvious proposition does suggest itself: there is no such thing as "the international community". We are invited to conceive of a Federation-style panel of pacific nations to which one counterpoints the pathological anomaly of the "rogue state". The concept of the "international community" contracts and expands upon demand. This week, Russia is part of the international community, next week it stands in defiance, shortly thereafter it is re-enlisted to this strange affiliation so that it can support this or that venture. Put it another way: "the international community" is an endlessly deployable euphemism that handily avoids addressing imperialism and the temporary, shifting alliances that are formed within it.

Meanwhile! The United States kills 18 people in a terrorist attack on Pakistan, claiming initially to have killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in the raid. It is now clear that he was not there. That is not the reason why this was a crime, of course. In that case, the only crime would be poor intelligence. And it is not just that the US was insufficiently solicitous with the Pakistani authorities before launching the strike. State sovereignty is important, especially when the alternative is unrestrained imperialist rule, but the weak client-state in Pakistan has long been a surrogate of US power in the region. It is that the US assumed the right to drop a bomb in a civilian area on the assumption that someone they want is there, regardless of how many are murdered in the process. And further, they must stand upon this right because they calculate that if he is not there, such an attack would certainly terrify anyone thinking of supporting or 'harbouring' the enemy. Were Iran to launch such an attack on a neighbouring state, one would hear 'bloody murder' hallooed from every cathode tube. Instead, the news tonight restrains itself to the thought that the US will have to admit to itself that Zawahiri is still on the wanted list: the story, then, is about the US government and the putative psychological drama it undergoes in facing up to a mistake, not about those it has murdered and not about when it will be brought before the UN and faced with sanctions.

On Rhetoric posted by lenin

'Rhetoric is like a branch ... of the science dealing with behaviour, which it is right to call political.' Aristotle's words (Rhetoric, 1356a) prefigure those researches of the last few decades aimed at demonstrating that rhetorical conventions exist in order to satisfy specifically social requirements. This Kenneth Burke in 1950: 'The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counter-pressure, the logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War ... Its ideal culminations are more often beset by strife as the condition of their organised expression, or material embodiment. Their very universality becomes transformed into a partisan weapon. For one need not scrutinise the concept of "identification" very sharply to see, implied in it at ever turn, its ironic counterpart: division. Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall. Its contribution to a "sociology of knowledge" must often carry us far into the lugubrious regions of malice and lie.' Thus also, to cite someone who is intellectually at the opposite pole from Burke, Giulio Preti in 1968: 'Rhetorical discourse is a discourse addressed to a particular (I prefer to call it a "determinate") audience ... In other words, rhetorical argument starts from presuppositions as well as from feelings, emotions, evaluations - in a word "opinions" (doxai) - which it supposes to be present and at work in its audience.' And further on, commenting on some passages from the Logique du Port-Royal: 'Two things stand out in particular here: the first is the emotional character indicated a little crudely by terms like "amour propre", "interest", "utility", "passion", but which is nonetheless quite definite ... The second is the typically social character of these forms of sophism: they are linked to man's relations to other men within the nation, the social group or institution. This social character is contrasted with the universality of rational conviction.'

Rhetoric has a social, emotive, partisan character, in short, an evaluative character. To persuade is the opposite of to convince. The aim is not to ascertain an intersubjective truth but to enlist support for a particular system of values. In the seventeenth century - which witnessed the first great flowering of empirical science, and at the same time the collapse of all social 'organicity' in the fight to the death between opposing faiths and interest - the perception of this contrast was extremely acute. (Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Form, 1983).

One doesn't, of course, feign innocence when dealing with rhetoric, and the point is not to introduce some ersatz academic disdain for, and equidistance between, rhetoricians as vulgarisers and debasers of Enlightened discourse. Rather, to recognise the social bases of such strategies, all the better to undermine the ideological foe. I mentioned elsewhere that Hitchens, who is if nothing else an adept rhetorician, relied a great deal on precisely the kind of bourgeois assumptions that it is safe to say he would have rejected some years ago. His speech and writing is often impressionistic, carefully compounding details and associations that arouse a sort of 'common sense'. The Iraqi resistance is therefore dealt with on the basis of media mythemes - they're head-choppers, sadists, depraved maniacs, psychopaths, lumpen religious medievalists, theocrats, fascists, etc etc. The Taliban was characterised as 'Islamofascist', with a list of regime traits that indeed bear a superficial resemblance to fascism, but which escape any analysis of fascism. The US army's patently murderous conduct in New Orleans is avoided with an appeal to straightforward militaristic patriotism: aren't you proud of how the army handled the situation? Let there be no mistake - the tactics have not altered, rather it is the specific social appeal that has changed. Irony, which Hitchens described in Letters to a Young Contrarian as a weapon of the weak is now in his hands a prop for entirely conventional assumptions. You mean to say you're not delighted that Iraqis can now read hundreds of newspapers and vote? Are you sure you want to tell people that you are swooning for theocrats?

Blair, a less adept but nonetheless quite successful rhetorician, simply proceeds as if the 'values' of propertied centre-right voters and reactionaries were universal. We will never give the Tories the middle ground again. We will not return to the failed ways of the past. I believe we should level up rather than level down. Rights and responsibilities, fairness not favours, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Blair's speeches, where they are not simply incoherent, often feel like a sequence of staccato non-sequiturs, punctuated by penumbral blurs. The reason, as Derren Brown knows, is that effective political speakers have a way of issuing a bewildering and often quite useless amount of information - statistics, anecdotes, examples, 'jokes' written by John O'Farrel - followed by an easily retained soundbite. The information will be useless, misleading drivel, but it is quite impossible to assess all of it while it is being conveyed, so audiences will be so relieved to have arrived at the satisfying and undemanding phrase or statement. Even where the audiences were not selected for suggestibility (Labour conference), Blair used to be quite facile with this hypnogogic trick. Audiences were often, if not convinced, persuaded that the neoliberal policy mix was good sense, common sense, actually intended for them, actually protecting them from unreasonable demands. There can be no doubt that in its social content, Blair's rhetoric is carefully judged advocacy on behalf of the ruling class and the right. His infamous 'memo' in which he worried about his image being insufficiently pro-family, tough-on-crime, anti-yobbo, pro-Defense-of-the-Realm etc (in other words, insufficiently upholding the 'values' of the bourgeoisie) exposed this with unanswerable clarity.

So the Leninist question is: cui bono? For whom is one so exquisitely didactic? Whose desire do you massage, and for what purpose?

Urgent: demonstration tomorrow. posted by lenin

Following on from this post, in which I discussed the victimisation of Eileen Short, the Tower Hamlets council worker who has been campaigning against housing stock transfers, it transpires that she has been fired.

Eileen has worked for Tower Hamlets Council for fifteen years. As Helene Mulholland reported in The Guardian, there has never been any question regarding the quality of her work. After a recent internal reorganisation she was told that there was no longer a job for her, despite the fact that four jobs remain vacant within the department, which she is more than qualified to do.

She is a RESPECT activist, and a tireless campaigner for Defend Council Housing. She spends hours of her free time fighting to keep local authority homes in the public sector, defending the right to a secure tenancy and an accountable landlord, and trying to stop the give away of this most valuable asset to the likes of the Guinness Trust and Poplar Harca. The success of the five out of seven ballots before Christmas, in that the estates voted NO to transfer, along with the suspension of the ballot on the Ocean Estate, and other estates more recently, has been largely down to Eileen's work.

Eileen has clearly lost her job because her politics are at variance with those of the council.

There will be a demonstration tomorrow at 4.30pm, outside the Town Hall in Mulberry Place.

The American Air War in Iraq: a recipe for civilian slaughter. posted by lenin

Censored story number one at the moment has to be the ongoing and escalating air war in Iraq, which I alluded to yesterday. There have been a few reports from Dahr Jamail, but comparatively little in the embedded media, except for the odd aside and now the occasional report that it may escalate further as troops are withdrawn from combat centres. Only Seymour Hersh has drawn attention to this aspect of the occupation in any mainstream media outlet.

Now Michael Schwartz has written a brilliant piece summarising the key information. The air war is, he says, a "formula for slaughter", and accounts in large measure for the extraoardinarily high level of civilian casualties. For instance, take one story from Baiji, in which a pilotless drone 'detected' three men which the US claims was planting a bomb by the roadside - the plane tracked the men to what is neutrally described as a 'building', which they strafed with 100 cannon rounds before dropping a bomb which - predictably - destroyed the building and damaged six others around it. The building turned out to be a house. Three women and three boys aged younger than ten were killed in their nightclothes and blankets. There was no report of whether a bomb was in fact discovered by the roadside, but the 'coalition' press information centre said: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."

Aside from the callousness of this statement, Schwartz notes that it "did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to 'shield themselves.' These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures. Put another way, it is more important to stop the insurgents than protect the innocent." This is a standard, Schwartz notes, that would be widely condemned if applied in the US, for instance (unless it's Waco). But the air strikes are implemented in part because of an explicit US military strategy of minimising the loss of soldiers' lives. And maximising the cost to civilians who 'harbour terrorists':

As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating." A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."

This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism -- attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.

This ongoing strategy of terrorism accrues quite impressive death tolls with single strikes:

One particularly vivid recent account by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer discussed the impact of air power during the American offensive in Western Anbar province last November. Using testimony from medical personnel and local civilians, Knickmeyer reported that 97 civilians were killed in one attack in Husaybah, 40 in another in Qaimone, 18 children (and an unknown number of adults) in Ramadi, and uncounted others in numerous other cities and towns.

And, remember, "this mayhem was not a matter of dumb munitions, human error, carelessness, or gratuitous brutality. It was policy." With 3,000 violent engagements each month, only a handful of which involve suicide bombings, and with overwhelming force the policy, quite a few houses, shops, mosques and schools become targets. And it's escalating:

Quoting military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of 2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November. The Sunday Times of London reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past that threshold.

Consider then this gruesome arithmetic: If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.

So if, breaking out of the Gaussian strait-jacket, we can speak credibly of 500,000 deaths so far, what might the figure be if the occupation is allowed to continue until the end of 2006?

Genocide and the West. posted by lenin

As a judicious arbiter of fact and a consensus-builder, I'd like to start with something obvious: Saddam Hussein was a ruthless and cruel man, the quality of whose mercy was, alas, not strained. And about him we could say that he presided over a regime which killed or disappeared, on a widely circulated estimate by Human Rights Watch, up to 300,000 people over 24 years. That includes the toll from the Anfal campaign, successive wars, executions and the suppression of the 1991 uprising. Some of these crimes, particularly Anfal, have been described as genocide, and those that were not external wars ruthlessly crushed internal uprisings and dissent. There is an obvious correlation between Saddam's determination to, as he saw it, preserve the Iraqi nation-state and the crimes that he oversaw. (See for instance Faleh A Jabar, The Shiite Movement in Iraq, 2005, pp 225-6). So, aside from the testimonial and other forms of data accrued by human rights organisations, there is means, motive and ample opportunity. So much is hardly controversial, even if details are disputed.

Before the Iraq war began, and immediately after, there was a great deal of utilitarian-style babble: the war would kill people, lots of people, but possibly not as many as Saddam himself killed. On Question Time, April 10th 2003, Digby Jones of the CBI claimed that Saddam had killed 3 million people and with that declared any cost-benefit analysis of the war conclusively won. He was at least 2,700,000 out: perhaps he was thinking of his share options windfall. Shortly after, on April 17th, Timothy Garton Ash wrote "The cold moral calculus of reckoning victim numbers against each other always feels inhuman: more than 100,000 Kurds killed by Saddam against perhaps as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties in this war, past v present, actual v potential, gulag v holocaust." He added, as if we had not thought of it already, that "War is always horrible". Andrew Rawnsley wrote: "Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short. The death toll has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared. Thousands have died in this war; millions have died at the hands of Saddam." While Saddam had "killing fields" "millions" of deaths, and "atrocities" to answer for, the West had only a war which was unavoidably "horrible" yet also redeemed by its conclusion. Marr famously concluded that the Prime Minister had proven his critics wrong and miraculously inflated in stature. John Irvine beamed on ITN that the war had ended "three decades of misery" for the Iraqi people. A massive war crime had been committed, yet the hardest journalistic heart could not fail to be moved by the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

I think it is safe to say that few of the journalists who were so slap-happy to see the troops and so vicariously outraged about Saddam's crimes will ever evince a similar outrage about the mass murder currently being perpetrated in Iraq. As of October 2004, 100,000 on a conservative estimate. Since then, another deadly assault on Fallujah, then Tal Afar, al-Qaim, Haditha and Ramadi. The deliberate targetting of hospitals, the shutting off of water supplies and electricity. The strangling of medical supplies. And the escalation in air strikes which are taking a toll on civilians, the torture, the deployment of death squads with cordless drills. Perhaps, now, as many as 500,000 dead. General Michael Rose is right: Blair should be impeached.

But I want to return to a prior genocide, one that is usually forgotten or mislaid or misrepresented. It is sometimes, craftily enough, deployed as a justification for the present one. The UN imposed sanctions on Iraq throught Resolution 687 after the first Gulf War ended in 1991. The resolution's primary sponsors, of course, were the US and UK. They were aware of the likely consequences of imposing such a regime: a January 22nd 1991 from the Defense Intelligence Agency entitled Iraq's Water Treatment Vulnerabilities describes how Iraq's water treatment system had already been degraded by war and sanctions, and how it would degrade completely if sanctions continued to be imposed. Subsequent documents described the outbreak of diseases due to poor sanitary conditions, the breakdown of ordinary medicine, the destruction of electricity plants and the absence of clean water. (See documents here, here, here and here).

The sanctions were therefore imposed with some foreknowledge of their likely effects. In 1995, researchers for the FAO wrote that as a result of the application of sanctions, 576,000 children had died. It was shortly after this, on CBS's 60 Minutes programme, that Madeleine Albright made her cold statement that "the price, we think, is worth it". This figure may in fact have been an overestimate at the time, but the reaction bears examination: Albright showed no surprise at the figures, and in fact managed to make a rather rapid accomodation to the apparent scale of catastrophe. Subsequent studies by Richard Garfield suggested that between 1990 and 1998, a total of 227,000 Iraqi children perished as a result of the sanctions. Combining his research with that by Mohammed Ali and Iqbal Shah for the Lancet, he calculated that as of 2000, the figure was 350,000 excess deaths among children under five years old. This was a remarkable infanticide. As Garfield notes "the is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under five years in the modern world".

The sanctions created shortage, decreased access to food, stagnated the economy and made it almost impossible to rebuild what had been, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, "one of the most modern" infrastructures with one of the "highest standards of living" in the Middle East. The war had wrecked flood control and power generation, bombs had hit twenty-eight civilian hospitals and destroyed four of the major water-pumping stations, not to mention destroying the communications system, fertiliser plants, oil facilities, bridges and iron and steel plants. The targeting and subsequent sanctions were designed to render Iraq dependent on the West. (See Abbas Alnasrawi 'Economic devastation, underdevelopment and outlook', in Fran Hazleton (ed), Iraq Since the Gulf War: Prospects for Democracy, Z Books, 1994).

It was argued in the late 1990s and in the run up to war that the sanctions were no longer to blame for any deaths: "oil for food" had fixed everything, and if any more suffering visited the Iraqi people it was entirely Saddam's fault. Blair pushed this line repeatedly, telling a doubtless nodding Kamal Ahmad in 2001: "The truth is Saddam Hussein could perfectly easily give his people the money that they need for food and medicine. He's not doing it because he needs them to believe that the reason why they're starving and have difficulties is because of the United States and Britain." In 2000, Hain claimed that although the oil-for-food programme had been put in place, the Iraqi people had not seen the benefits they should have: the dictator was squandering it on palaces and such. Indeed, when the oil-for-food programme was first introduced, the BBC's Ben Brown was on the case, explaining that malnutrition and mass death had been "a powerful propaganda weapon" for Saddam Hussein that he would now have to "give up".


Powerful propaganda weapons.

However, the UN's humanitarian panel reported in 1999 that "the 'oil for food' system alone would not suffice and massive investment would be required in a number of key sectors, including oil, energy, agriculture and sanitation" in order for Iraq to recover. Oil for food, they said, "can admittedly only meet but a small fraction of the priority needs of the Iraqi people". According to Denis Halliday, who resigned over the continuing effects of sanctions, "it wasn’t designed to work; it’s not funded to work; it’s strangled by the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council". Asked about whether the money should have been enough, Halliday replied: "Of the $20 billion that has been provided through the ‘oil for food’ programme, about a third, or $7 billion, has been spent on UN ’expenses’, reparations to Kuwait and assorted compensation claims. That leaves $13 billion available to the Iraqi government. If you divide that figure by the population of Iraq, which is 22 million, it leave some $190 per head of population per year over 3 years – that is pitifully inadequate". Was the regime diverting most of the money anyway? "There’s no basis for that assertion at all." Two years after Halliday resigned, Hans von Sponeck resigned, asking "For how long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent on all this, be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?"

And, predictably, the deaths continued. In 1999, Denis Halliday wrote: "Even the most conservative, independent estimates hold economic sanctions responsible for a public health catastrophe of epic proportions. The World Health Organization believes at least 5,000 children under the age of 5 die each month from lack of access to food, medicine and clean water. Malnutrition, disease, poverty and premature death now ravage a once relatively prosperous society whose public health system was the envy of the Middle East." In the same year, UNICEF calculated that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions. The reaction was curiously indifferent: hostile even, in some quarters. John Sweeney made a 2003 documentary, "The Mother of All Ironies", claiming on the basis of utterly spurious evidence that Saddam Hussein himself was behind the statistics and that more than enough money had been provided. I asked him why he had said this, and he replied: "On the UNICEF figures, if a government tortures children - and Saddam's does - then is it impossible to imagine that it doesn't torture figures? The raw data came from the Iraqi Ministry of Health." This was a straightforward fabrication. The figures were gathered by UNICEF who went out into Iraqi communities and households and conducted their own tests. They had, inevitably, to seek the cooperation of the Ministry of Health, but the data analysis was theirs and theirs alone. Of course, to accept the extensively documented fact of this genocide is to undermine completely any putative humanitarian logic behind the war. As Scott Ritter put it: "The concept of us trying to save the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein is ludicrous. He is a brutal dictator. He may torture to death 1,800 people a year. That’s terrible and unacceptable. But we kill 6,000 a month. Let’s put that on a scale."

Here's a curious thing, however. According to UNICEF, between 1999 and 2002, there was some mild improvement in child mortality - from 130 per thousand live births to 125 per thousand. However, "since the war, there are several indications that under-five mortality continued to rise". They explained to MediaLens, "Since the war more children in Iraq are malnourished, fewer children are protected from immunisable diseases and there has been an increase in the incidence of diarrhoeal disease." The occupation had renewed the infanticide, despite the ending of sanctions. One mass murder flows into another, and with dreary predictability the media and government apologists find reasons to dismiss the abundant evidence for it, or ignore it. The sheer scale of what has been done to Iraq - the destruction of its economy and infrastructure, the repeated bombings, the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands, the war that has killed further hundreds of thousands, the escalation that now threatens to kill even more - simply defies superlative. Yet it is borne with utter equanimity by those who profess to have been daily concerned with the freedom and integrity of Iraqis.

If one thing compels itself with brutal clarity, it is that we are not entitled to consider genocide as something pathologically external or alien: it is absolutely part of the rule of capitalism and its system of competing nation-states. The word should haunt the discourse of liberal imperialists, who happily use it to describe the actions of official enemies, yet miss it when it is right in front of them.

Iraq deaths "could be as high as half a million". posted by lenin

An interesting article on the Lancet study from Andrew Cockburn at Counterpunch:

Seeking further elucidation on the mathematical tools available to reveal the hidden miseries of today's Iraq, I turned to CounterPunch's consultant statistician, Pierre Sprey. He reviewed not only the Iraq study as published in the Lancet, but also the raw data collected in the household survey and kindly forwarded me by Dr. Roberts.

"I have the highest respect for the rigor of the sampling method used and the meticulous and courageous collection of the data. I'm certainly not criticizing in any way Robert's data or the importance of the results. But they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble had they discarded the straitjacket of Gaussian distribution in favor of a more practical statistical approach", says Sprey. "As with all such studies, the key question is that of 'scatter' i.e. the random spread in data between each cluster sampled. So cluster A might have a ratio of twice as many deaths after the invasion as before, while cluster B might experience only two thirds as many. The academically conventional approach is to assume that scatter follows the bell shaped curve, otherwise known as 'normal distribution,' popularized by Carl Gauss in the early 19th century. This is a formula dictating that the most frequent occurrence of data will be close to the mean, or center, and that frequency of occurrence will fall off smoothly and symmetrically as data scatters further and further from the mean - following the curve of a bell shaped mountain as you move from the center of the data.

"Generations of statisticians have had it beaten in to their skulls that any data that scatters does so according to the iron dictates of the bell shaped curve. The truth is that in no case has a sizable body of naturally occurring data ever been proven to follow the curve". (A $200,000 prize offered in the 1920s for anyone who could provide rigorous evidence of a natural occurrence of the curve remains unclaimed.)

"Slavish adherence to this formula obscures information of great value. The true shape of the data scatter almost invariably contains insights of great physical or, in this case medical importance. In particular it very frequently grossly exaggerates the true scatter of the data. Why? Simply because the mathematics of making the data fit the bell curve inexorably leads one to placing huge emphasis on isolated extreme 'outliers' of the data.

"For example if the average cluster had ten deaths and most clusters had 8 to 12 deaths, but some had 0 or 20, the Gaussian math would force you to weight the importance of those rare points like 0 or 20 (i.e. 'outliers') by the square of their distance from the center, or average. So a point at 20 would have a weight of 100 (20 minus 10 squared) while a point of 11 would have a weight of 1 (11 minus 10 squared.)

"This approach has inherently pernicious effects. Suppose for example one is studying survival rates of plant- destroying spider mites, and the sampled population happens to be a mix of a strain of very hardy mites and another strain that is quite vulnerable to pesticides. Fanatical Gaussians will immediately clamp the bell shaped curve onto the overall population of mites being studied, thereby wiping out any evidence that this group is in fact a mixture of two strains.

"The commonsensical amateur meanwhile would look at the scatter of the data and see very quickly that instead of a single "peak" in surviving mites, which would be the result if the data were processed by traditional Gaussian rules, there are instead two obvious peaks. He would promptly discern that he has two different strains mixed together on his plants, a conclusion of overwhelming importance for pesticide application".

(Sprey once conducted such a statistical study at Cornell - a bad day for mites.)

So how to escape the Gaussian distortion?

"The answer lies in quite simple statistical techniques called 'distribution free' or 'non parametric' methods. These make the obviously more reasonable assumption that one hasn't the foggiest notion of what the distribution of the data should be, especially when considering data one hasn't seen -- before one is prepared to let the data define its own distribution, whatever that unusual shape may be, rather than forcing it into the bell curve. The relatively simple computational methods used in this approach basically treat each point as if it has the same weight as any other, with the happy result that outliers don't greatly exaggerate the scatter.

"So, applying that simple notion to the death rates before and after the US invasion of Iraq, we find that the confidence intervals around the estimated 100,000 "excess deaths" not only shrink considerably but also that the numbers move significantly higher. With a distribution-free approach, a 95 per cent confidence interval thereby becomes 53,000 to 279,000. (Recall that the Gaussian approach gave a 95 per cent confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000.) With an 80 per cent confidence interval, the lower bound is 78,000 and the upper bound is 229,000. This shift to higher excess deaths occurs because the real, as opposed to the Gaussian, distribution of the data is heavily skewed to the high side of the distribution center".

Cockburn adds:

Of course the survey on which all these figures are based was conducted fifteen months ago. Assuming the rate of death has proceeded at the same pace since the study was carried out, Sprey calculates that deaths inflicted to date as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq could be, at best estimate, 183,000, with an upper 95 per cent confidence boundary of 511,000.

In many ways, what we are seeing is a continuation under occupation of the genocidal level of deaths that we witnessed in the 1990s, about which more later.

"Demographic" business as usual with or without Sharon posted by Levi9909

Ha'aretz reports that there is a "conference to be held on achieving Jewish majority in Acre."

A conference on finding ways to achieve a permanent Jewish majority in Acre is to be held on Sunday in the northern Jewish-Arab city. The convention, the first of its kind, was initiated by the New Forum for Strengthening the Jewish community in Acre, lead by council member Muli Cohen, a member of Mayor Shimon Lankri's faction in the city council.

Over the weekend, Cohen told a local newspaper that Acre has the right to exist as a mixed city only if it has a permanent Jewish majority. "The real solution is to establish appropriate institutions so that the city would be able to receive nationalist ultra-Orthodox families," he told the Zafon1 newspaper.

The Acre municipality said in response that "the mayor supports any activity that may advance the city and bring in strong populations to advance it."

I'm fairly certain that these conferences would still take place without Sharon and even under the Geneva Accords. Worse still, any recommendations they make could still be implemented.

Readying the Cataclysm. posted by lenin

First of all, on Haiti, I want to know how some reporters can write sentences like "the troubled Caribbean country struggles to hold its first election since former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in an armed revolt in February 2004" and still sleep at night. Aristide was deposed by US marines, a straightforward and widely reported fact that was occluded only briefly by a weak lie that Aristide had 'resigned'. The press aren't even bothering to claim that this is the case any more. As for the "struggle" to hold an election, isn't it mind-numbingly obvious that the reason it continues to be put off is because the French-American-Canadian occupation wants to destroy Lavalas and its supporters first?

In this light, I can only agree with Le Colonel Chabert's suggestion that Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, the Brazilian head of the UN forces was whacked on account of some dispute with the new sweatshop-deathsquad rulers. Chabert cites Haiti Action:

Bacellar's death comes on the heels of Boulos's announcement of a nationwide general strike on Monday aimed at forcing the UN mission to get tough with bandits in Cite Soleil. The term "Bandits" is often seen as a code word for Lavalas supporters, and Cite Soleil has served as a launching site for massive demonstrations demanding the return of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Mario Andresol, the current Chief of Police, representing the US-installed government of Gerard Latortue, recently alleged that the community was also being used by Columbian drug traffickers and "certain political forces" to hide victims of a recent spate of kidnappings in the capital.

It transpires that the recent UN assassination of Emmanuel Wilme, a key Lavalas grassroots activist, exacted a heavy toll on civilians in the area. The effort to wipe out the 'street gangs' who are trying to defend themselves and their communities from the revenant genocidaires is clearly being stepped up, and the Haitian ruling class is desperate enough to turn to genocide. If they cannot persuade the UN to provide a humanitarian blue facade for it through a capital strike, who can doubt that they will visit the same cataclysm on Haitians that they did after 1991? It is, after all, what they have been preparing for.

Shortly after the coup in early 2004, Stephen Kerr wrote:

Since 1% of Haitians control 50% of the country’s wealth, and this 1% forms the backbone of opposition to Aristide, the USA, France and Canada were without a large Haitian social base from which to organize effective electoral opposition. Unable to win at the polls, they used their money and connections to arm the convicted criminal military officers and death squad commanders who in 1994 fled to the Dominican Republic and Queens NY. Behold Haiti’s latest coup d’etat, made by our “rebels.” Today armed death squads roam the streets of Haiti, killing their enemies in the streets, while Canadian and US soldiers stand aside.

And why has this hell been unleashed on Haiti? Well, just for example:

As of March 2nd, 2004 Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) states, “some Canadian companies are looking to shift garment production to Haiti.” DFAIT provides research and Haitian contacts through a variety of sub-agencies to Canadian companies that want to exploit low Haitian wages.

Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people. Gildan, one of the largest T shirt makers in the world, claimed recently to CBC radio to pay its workers a premium on the minimum Haitian wage. However unionized workers at Gildan’s Montreal factory earn more than 10 times the Haitian wage, and unorganized Haitian workers employed by Gildan recently told the CBC that their wages are not enough to live on. With recent increases in the cost of fuel in Haiti – the IMF demanded it be deregulated and the price has soared – Haitian workers have once again been demanding their minimum wage of 36 Gourdes per day be increased to keep up with inflation.

But what’s bad for Haitian workers - low wages and appalling conditions - are good business for the T shirt trade. At the time of writing, a blank Gildan T sells on Ebay for about $1.25. It’s a volume business, our appetite for T shirts. Gildan’s sales have nearly doubled, from $344 million in 1999 to $630 million in 2003. In the same period Gildan stock soared on the Toronto Stock Exchange from $5 to $44 per share. According to UNITE, Gildan has received over $3 million dollars of federal subsidies while it contemplated moving production offshore.

But:

Haitian union organizers understand their situation well. According to one, “The general weakness of the bourgeoisie…makes it extremely ferocious toward the working class, seeing it as merely a means to extract the maximum profits. To do this the local bourgeoisie leans on the imperialists who, as bandleaders, manipulate and organize the forces of repression, still in the hands of the paramilitary Ton-tons Macoutes….They refuse workers any form of the historical social gains long acquired by the working class internationally and established by national legislation yet constantly violated by the bosses. By denying sick leave, pensions, severance pay, and so on, the Haitian and foreign capitalists can expect to receive super-profits in Haiti.” Your tax dollars at work, financing state terror.

Indeed, as Penny Green and Tony Ward write in State Crimes: Governments, Violence, and Corruption (Pluto Press, 2003), there is a close correlation between the level of state violence and the ability of the ruling class to satisfy demands emanating from below while remaining profitable. In particular, they note the contrast between different Latin American states in the US-sponsored drive to crush the workers and peasant movements during the 1980s:

Honduras in the 1980s faced a rebel threat of comparable severity to those in Guatemala and El Salvador, but although it employed a CIA-trained death squad to 'disappear' and torture suspected guerillas (National Commissioner 1994), it did not engage in the wholesale murder and destruction practised by its neighbours ... Brocket argues that because Honduras had a weak army, less coercive and exploitative rural class relations than Guatemala or El Salvador, and sufficient land available to concede some of the peasant movement's demands, it did not perceive the guerilla threat as warranting such an extreme response. Similarly, Jonas (1991) attributes the exceptional brutality of Guatemalan repression from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed (CEH 1999), to the attitudes of the ruling elite following the US-backed overthrow of a progressive elexted government in 1954. The elite was unwilling to contemplate concessions to the peasants or to the working class, and unable to fomrulate any political project that would achieve broad support. Thus violent repression, for which (thanks to the US) it was well equipped, appeared the only available means to achieve its goals. [p 109]

The opportunity-motivational structure in Haiti is reasonably transparent: the Haitian ruling class and the international capital to which it is integrated is unwilling to accept trade unions, working class mobilisation, or even a modest minimum wage; has not been able to formulate a political programme with any popular purchase; and has the means available to destroy the opposition. If the UN will not step up its activities, the US, France and Canada will simply encourage the genocidaires to throw off MINUSTAH like a bespoke strait-jacket and set the rebels they have been training in the Dominican Republic to their task. Haiti, for all the bloodiness and awfulness of the past two years, has yet to see the worst.

Life in a Glass Box. posted by lenin

Inevitable thought it was, I have to salute the resourcefulness and - oh yes, indefatigability - of the Labour Party and the press in turning the spectacle of Galloway munching toast in a night gown on a celebrity charity reality teevee bash into an opportunity for some pretty obvious smears. They're only jealous because Galloway is more hip and with it than they are (although probably not quite as cool as your truly). And although it risks inflating a quite marginal issue to unwarranted import, something has to be said - preferrably by someone like me.

Item: Ireland Online, followed by a few other news outlets, claims that Galloway "voters" have mounted a protest demanding their MP back. Upon reading the story, of course, you realise that they refer to a dozen people standing about outside the surgery, none of whom are actually Galloway 'voters'. In fact, the bulk of them appear to be Labour Party members. To put it another way, New Labour raised up a bit of a publicity stunt because they're bitter whining fucks who can't handle that their slavering pro-war thick as shit MP lost to Respect.

Item: The Telegraph tries to reflate old, discredited claims about the Palestinian charity Interpal, because Galloway has chosen to direct his share of the money to them. Interpal is accused of links with 'terrorism'. It has been investigated twice by the Charities Commission and exonerated both times. The Board of Deputies was recently humiliated on account of making such claims. I love the idea, though: Celebrity Big Brother subsidising the Palestinian armed struggle would have to make my giggle-of-the-week.

Item: The Guardian instructs a few hacks to sit at their desks and make a few phone calls in between munching their pasties so as to 'discover' - aha! - that Respect ain't around for their constituents. They called here, they called there, they even used Google! Truly, journalism broke the surly bonds of earth in this spectacular. Or perhaps not:

George Galloway's office was dealing with constituents' problems on Friday just as we do every day of the week, including Christmas and New Year. Our office was, to my knowledge, unable to respond to only two calls from people saying they wanted to raise constituency problems - one who did not leave a phone number to return their call on and one where it was not possible, despite repeated attempts, to hear the number left. And this despite the fact that we were bombarded with dozens of fatuous calls from journalists like Dodd and that BT, unfortunately, failed to install the phones in our new office which was due to open on Friday.

Most MPs did not hold surgeries on Friday because of the parliamentary recess. But we did. A dozen constituents came to the surgery which we hold every Friday from 4pm to 7pm. The issues were predominantly the same as they always are - appalling housing conditions resulting from the year's of neglect and lack of investment by the New Labour government in Whitehall and the New Labour Council in Tower Hamlets, and immigration and asylum problems arising from this government's iniquitous, racist immigration and asylum legislation.

It was New Labour's propaganda before last May's election that George would not represent his constituency properly and it has remained so ever since. And yet not only has George held surgeries almost every week since his election and taken up and vigorously pursued hundreds of constituents' problems, he has spoken at more public meetings on campaigning issues around the constituency than his New Labour predecessor did in all the eight anonymous years of her incumbency. He has combined this with taking the Respect message around the country speaking to thousands and playing a very significant role building the international anti-war movement.

Rob Hoveman, Assistant to George Galloway MP

There has also been a string of Labour peers, MPs and sub-luminaries (like Helen Mirren, who apparently campaigned for Oona King, ho ho ho) issuing statements about Galloway's appearance in the glass box. It's all like, "he's in it for self-interest", or even better "he just wants publicity"! The wonder is that such folks ever appear on television, or stand in elections or do anything to further their own careers, such is their aversion to "self-interest" and "publicity". All those politicians who maintain businesses or extra-parliamentary vocations of any kind had better shrivel up into a spineless ball on the backbenches than risk the attention of these worldly asceitics!

Anyway, let's turn on E4, see what's going down: ah, Dennis Rodman's pumping iron. Disgusting.

Update: Galloway spoke with his mouth full! What a gaffe! Spread the word! This is the kind of despicable manners that the unwitting residents of Bethnal Green & Bow have voted for!

RIP Official Secrets Act... posted by lenin

Following Craig Murray's post last week and today's leak to The Guardian, we can probably declare the Official Secrets Act a dead duck:

[A] document has fallen into the Guardian's hands that seems to explain why ministers have become so bankrupt in these failures to stem a tide of disclosures (most revolve in one way or another around Iraq and allegations of our craven relationship with the US).

Murray, abiding by official regulations, submitted his memoirs to the Foreign Office last autumn. Before sending them to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, in December for a final ruling, an official, Heather Yasamee, was deputed to circulate each Whitehall person mentioned. In what may be the first review to decorate Murray's bookjacket, she said: "He writes vividly about his colleagues, not always flatteringly, and with much gratuitous comment."

We have obtained one of Ms Yasamee's private Whitehall letters, written last October. But publication of its contents here does not make it likely that the Guardian is in turn due for a knock on the door by Special Branch. She writes that the government is entitled to ask for alterations to passages in Murray's book that "might damage national security, international relations or confidential relationships". But this "depends on the willingness of the author to make changes".

She warns: "To succeed with any legal action, we would have to demonstrate clearly to a court that real damage would result from publication. From previous experience and advice ... we know that the damage threshold is very high for successful court action. It is questionable whether this book falls into that category." And she gives the game away by saying that it is questionable if "more public airing of Craig's alleged grievances is in anybody's interest".

Of course, this misses a very important point. Some years back, Murray's revelations would certainly have been suppressed by a complicit media, just as they comply with ludicrous D-Notices that have no legal force. The internet, and particularly bloggers, made the revelations possible, just as they made the revelations about White Phosphorus possible. One other thing occurs. The airy Oxonian condescension with which this Ms Yasamee dismisses "Craig's alleged grievances" is telling. The "grievances" relate to the government's complicity with torture, of course. To coldly reduce it to a matter of personal uppitiness, which is what is implied... well, it tells you what kind of personality succeeds in the Foreign Office. You've got to be able to separate your ordinary day-to-day behaviour from your professional role as a sociopath. About which suggestion, I am sure, there would be much snigggering if anyone in Whitehall were to read it.

A Zionist Falls and the BBC Goes Nuts. posted by lenin

The BBC cannot stop itself tonight. The grief embarks from the first word of the report, stops on the faces of George Aligayah, John Simpson and Jeremy Bowen (this morning, they had former ME correspondent Orla Guerin doing the same act), and finishes on a desperate sigh from the newscaster. Ariel Sharon has had a stroke, and suddenly the Israeli-Palestine conflict is supposed to be set go aflame again. There is the usual hiding behind unidentified others: "many Palestinians" supposedly felt that Sharon may have made their lives better, for instance. But the open editorialising simply repeats these claims - Sharon had a plan for peace, and now it could all be in ruins, wrecked by a tiny clot of blood, and woe betide the Palestinians, woe betide Israel.

It bears remembering at this vital time, then, that Sharon's plan was not one of "peace" (interesting way to frame the question). He was implementing a plan which his senior adviser Dov Weisglass described as formaldehyde. As in "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." Disengagement from Gaza was a precursor to the encroachment and final capture of the much larger West Bank. As secret British government documents revealed, Israel was engaged in actions destined to terminate the very possibility of a negotiated settlement. Gerald Kaufman MP called the process "ethnic cleansing".

Of course, the withdrawal from Gaza wasn't really quite that. Israel remains the occupying power in Gaza under international law. Israel made certain to destroy much of the area before exiting too, making 16,000 people homeless. They subsequently destroyed 3,000 homes under a spurious pretext. And of course, Israel reserves the right to attack Gaza.

At any rate, it is glaringly obvious that Sharon and his jaded ally, the loathsome Shimon Peres, were not engaging in a plan to reach a just peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that two-staters would recognise as reasonable.

The Future of New Labour. posted by lenin

Neal Lawson writes today that Labour cannot be taken out of its perpetually expanding rut by Gordon Brown, which would seem on the face of it to be a step in the direction of political realism. Brown, as Dead Men Left notes, is not merely a leading architect in the New Labour project and the chief promulgator of neoliberalism in the Cabinet. He is also pitching forcefully in the direction of neoconservatism. Yet Lawson, quite predictably, makes nothing of those cardinal facts, preferring to indulge some rather fanciful ruminations about Comrade Brown.

Brown, in Lawson's imagining of him, uses the term "comrades", dedicates himself to setting Labour "free of its Thatcherite chains", closing the gap between rich and poor and so forth. It's the old "secret socialist" fantasy, and it ought to have long since lost any purchase it had with even the centre-left commentariat. Yet, Lawson is at least correct to note that the malaise is deeper than in the Labour leadership. He puts the matter down to a dearth of ideas, and hopes that some kind of moderately left zeal can be imported back into the government by Ed Balls, John Denham and some rather feeble think-tanks. It is a much deeper crisis than that.

Consider: the Labour membership has halved since 1997, and is now at its lowest level since Ramsay MacDonald split the party in 1931. It is 65,000 lower than when Blair became leader in 1994. That alone is quite significant for the New Labour project because the drive to increase membership was part of a strategy to minimise the input of unions at conference. The union block vote had always served the Labour right well in the past, but the Whiggish modernisers believed it would be better to take in a large swathe of atomised and largely passive members. The constitutional re-arrangements were presented as democratic reforms, but of course what actually happened of course was that power was centralised in the hands of the leadership. Well, the sharply declining membership may present a problem for any New Labour leader who wishes to cut ties with the unions. However, when you consider the kind of membership that is left behind, it also illustrates the impossibility of resuscitating radicalism in the party. Not only are they disproportionately male, middle-aged, middle class and professional, they are also disproportionately sheep. In the elections last May, Labour lost a number of heartland seats to left-wing candidates, and saw a number of supermajorities seriously eroded. All indications are that the local elections will see it receive a further blow, as it is losing both the fair-weather Tory supporters and core working class votes. The Lib Dems were a temporary beneficiary in this process, but since the Orange Book wierdos have taken over the scene they look less likely to continue to do so in the future. The Tories have elected a media darling who may well sufficiently conceal his hard right policies behind the emollient rhetoric that he is currently offering the press daily that he can pose a serious threat to Labour. (Cameron, incidentally, is mimicking Bush's 2000 strategy by calling for compassionate conservatism while nurturing a perniciously reactionary agenda. The analogy is accentuated further by the fact that this follows years of 'triangulation' by the notionally left-of-centre government).

And yet, for all this, Labour has displayed its unwillingness and inability to attract, retain and promote the kind of membership capable of renewing it. It is spent as a force for reform. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the infatuation with Brown, the desperate fantasy embellishments and the surreptitious ommissions about his record in government. Because he has introduced tax credits and finally funnelled some money into the NHS, the man who has cut benefits for single mothers, threatens to do the same to the disabled, bankrolled the war, imposed neoliberal economic policies and allowed what was left of the manufacturing sector to be destroyed is somehow a progressive viper in the New Labour nest. Brown has supported Blair on every right-wing move he has made, including this cozying up with the Euro-Right. Yet, who else is there for the anti-Blair left to look to if they intend to stick with Labour?

If it cannot be a force for reform in the traditional sense, New Labour could revive itself as an electoral force following defeat. It could do so if the left failed to make a serious incursion into its electoral base, leaving the working class to be serenaded by the Liberals or the Nazis. It could do so if all its betrayals meant was a stay-home electorate and a Tory victory, or a string of Tory victories. It could do so if the unions made no attempt to defend their members, and if the antiwar movement was to peter out, finding no permanent, broad political representation. In short, it could do so over the left's dead bodies. It is madness tantamount to suicide to insist that the Left therefore hitches itself to the Labour Party, much less a collection of New Labour ministers and emasculated think-tanks.

It's Bigger Than Hip Hop. posted by lenin

Well, the latest outrage about Young Black Men, and the supposedly concomitant violence and misogyny, centres around the latest 50 Cent movie advertisements. Before I start, I do want to mention that I think 50 Cent is a talentless fuckwit and a relentless crawler up every rich arsehole he can find. (There's even a mixtape somewhere where he and the rest of G-Unit waste fifteen minutes of radio time sucking up to Donald Trump, of all people). But the latest manufactured controversy is about this:



You see, apparently the fact that he is carrying a baby while packing a gun is offensive because there has been gun crime in some parts of Britain, and this could be seen as 'condoning' such acts. Before we go any further, why was there no such controversy over this?:



That's not 'condoning' gun violence: it is nakedly, unashamedly, sexualising it. If you've seen the film, you know it does this more brutally and disgustingly than even the poster makes out - and, of course, the killing is on behalf of the CIA, a repulsive and bloodsoaked arm of US imperialism. So, where were all the concerned citizens then? There are countless other examples, of course, and they pass by the censorious eye of consumers and the Advertising Standards Agency without a blush or even a glint in the eye. Young Black Men are what these defenders of the peace are frightened of. For Young Black Men are supposedly especially prone to cultural manipulation, particularly unable to critically digest the fare that is placed before them by largely white, rich plutocrats.

Naturally, one couldn't indulge in such transparent racism on national television without putting a black face on it. So, ITN got soul-singer Mica Paris, whose brother was shot and killed, to denounce the 50 Cent ad. She explained that when you go to these neighbourhoods (not specified, but you know she's referring to Young Black Men), "all they're listening to is 50 Cent" and hence something is up. That is precisely wrong, of course. Via Chabert, here is bell hooks:

The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. As the crudest and most brutal expression of sexism, misogynistic attitudes tend to be portrayed by the dominant culture as an expression of male deviance. In reality they are part of a sexist continuum, necessary for the maintenance of patriarchal social order. While patriarchy and sexism continue to be the political and cultural norm in our society, feminist movement has created a climate where crude expressions of male domination are called into question, especially if they are made by men in power. It is useful to think of misogyny as a field that must be labored in and maintained both to sustain patriarchy but also to serve as an ideological anti-feminist backlash. And what better group to labor on this "plantation" than young black men.

To see gangsta rap as a reflection of dominant values in our culture rather than as an aberrant "pathological" standpoint does not mean that a rigorous feminist critique of the sexist and misogyny expressed in this music is not needed. Without a doubt black males, young and old, must be held politically accountable for their sexism. Yet this critique must always be contextualized or we risk making it appear that the behaviors this thinking supports and condones,--rape, male violence against women, etc.-- is a black male thing. And this is what is happening. Young black males are forced to take the "heat" for encouraging, via their music, the hatred of and violence against women that is a central core of patriarchy.

...

More than anything gangsta rap celebrates the world of the "material, " the dog-eat-dog world where you do what you gotta do to make it. In this world view killing is necessary for survival. Significantly, the logic here is a crude expression of the logic of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In his new book "Sexy Dressing, Etc." privileged white male law professor Duncan Kennedy gives what he calls "a set of general characterizations of U. S. culture" explaining that, "It is individual (cowboys), material (gangsters) and philistine." Using this general description of mainstream culture would lead us to place "gangsta rap" not on the margins of what this nation is about, but at the center. Rather than being viewed as a subversion or disruption of the norm we would need to see it as an embodiment of the norm.

That viewpoint was graphically highlighted in the film "Menace To Society" which dramatized not only young black males killing for sport, but also mass audiences voyeuristically watching and, in many cases, "enjoying" the kill. Significantly, at one point in the movie we see that the young black males have learned their "gangsta" values from watching television and movies--shows where white male gangsters are center stage. This scene undermines any notion of "essentialist" blackness that would have viewers believe the gangsterism these young black males embraced emerged from some unique black cultural experience.

...

Contrary to a racist white imagination which assumes that most young black males, especially those who are poor, live in a self- created cultural vacuum, uninfluenced by mainstream, cultural values, it is the application of those values, largely learned through passive uncritical consumption of mass media, that is revealed in "gangsta rap." Brent Staples is willing to challenge the notion that "urban primitivism is romantic" when it suggests that black males become "real men" by displaying the will to do violence, yet he remains resolutely silent about that world of privileged white culture that has historically romanticized primitivism, and eroticized male violence. Contemporary films like "Reservoir Dogs" and "The Bad Lieutenant" celebrate urban primitivism and many less well done films ("Trespass, Rising Sun") create and/or exploit the cultural demand for depictions of hardcore blacks who are willing to kill for sport.

50 Cent is not "all they're listening to", and even if he were, he reflects the dominant values of this society rather than presenting a deviation from them. 50 Cent and people like him merit criticism not for some pathological alterity, but for reproducing the worst aspects of culture in capitalist society - the kind, in fact, that keeps people in chains. But if you refuse to broaden the net of your critique, and obsess only about black misogyny, black violence, black gangsterism, the terrible homophobia and sexism in hip hop, the awful violence etc - as if it's a black thing - then you should least be honest and consider yourself a racist.

Evil. posted by lenin

The liberal theodicy: how to account for evil, when the system is essentially benign? Latest theory: an "evil ideology", namely Islamism. Via interbreeding, this message in a bottle washes up in Johann Hari's bath tub:

A woman has been installed as mayor of the Palestinian Authority’s political capital Ramallah thanks to the support of the Islamist movement Hamas, officials said yesterday.

Janette Khuri, a 62-year-old Christian, became the first woman mayor of a major West Bank municipality when she was elected by a majority of her 15 fellow councillors.

Khuri, a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), triumphed over the ruling Fatah faction’s candidate Ghazi Hanania when the three Hamas members voted for her.

A secular Marxist woman of Christian background? Now, wouldn't you have expected her to be stuffed into a burqa and told to wash the dishes? A thought occurs: perhaps the first thing that Palestinian movements are concerned about, religious or otherwise, is obtaining their freedom from this brutal and suffocating occupation.

Pink Triangle, Yellow Crescent. posted by lenin

Following on from this guest post from last year, it is worth following up on the tendency of some gay activists to "provide a pink patina for Islamophobic stereotypes". The Guardian reports today that the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association has been harshly criticised by other gay activists and groups for describing Islam as growing like a "canker" in the UK because of "unrestrained and irresponsible breeding". I seem to recall the same sort of shit being levelled at Catholics in Northern Ireland. Dour, fearful and resentful Unionists would utter expletive-laden sentences about them fuckin taigs havin wee bastards and takin the fuckin welfare when they're not robbin the fuckin Post Offices etc etc. Galha's commentary doesn't really rise above the bar rant of your average racist.

Although Galha has apparently experienced some internal criticism of such remarks (made repeatedly and fervently, it has to be said) and has therefore had to fire the editor and deputy editor of their magazine, the group's secretary Mr Broadhead stands by his comments about Islam, which he described as a "barmy doctrine". He says:

There may be people who think of themselves as moderate but we've yet to see them coming out and condemning their fundamentalist counterparts. If they want to follow a belief that we think is execrable it's up to them - it's a question of religion per se and the damage it can do in extremist form in theocracies where gays are not just put in jail but whipped and tortured.

Never mind for a second that plenty of Muslims do criticise the 'fundamentalists' all the fucking time - Muslims, uniquely, must pass a test. This is McCarthyite witch-hunting: prove yourself! Expose and denounce your comrades before the tribunal! Imaan, the support group for LGBT Muslims, comments:

In lots of ways the gay community reflects the straight community but Galha has gone beyond what the average straight person thinks. These comments are disgusting. They are worse than what the BNP would publish. It is racist.

It is sad that Galha, who you would expect to understand how oppression works - and feels - divides itself from another oppressed group who are in considerable need of solidarity at this time, and allows itself to reproduce the most sinister bilge from the racist far right.

Populism and Haiti. posted by lenin

Oh, you know, it's nice to have a theme. Le Colonel Chabert:

It was emphasized by CNN that Aristide, while campaigning for the 2000 election - there was a campaign of terror attacks against Lavalas during this period - this guy who poses as a man of the people, the defrocked shantytown priest, kissing the dirty slum-dwelling waifs, snicker snicker, had a chauffeur, as if presidential candidates of countries paying hundreds of millions in interest yearly to international lenders customarily drive themselves.

This somehow seems like a familiar ideological gesture. Galloway wears Guccis and smokes fat cigars, Trotsky dressed like a fin de siecle intellectual, Aristide had a chauffeur, Noam Chomsky has a share portfolio, Gore Vidal is a snooty blueblood who lives in an Italian villa - ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Of course it is particularly vile and hypocritical of the pampered, blow-dried, glittering, preening hosts of television shows in the richest country on the face of the earth (who, I presume, also have use of a chauffeur from time to time) to sneer at Aristide in this fashion, and compress his achievements into an anecdote. Presumably, the image of a black leader wearing suits and being driven around while his people starve is evocative. One is supposed to ask: Who does this jumped up little tinpot ruler of a banana republic povo shitpile think he is? Never mind that this particular black leader was popularly elected, yet bound by agreement with Washington to sustain precisely the 'free market' policies that allowed sweatshop owners and US capital to exploit the poor blind.

Anyway, more via Chabert. In preparation for the 2004 coup, the US, France and Canadian paramilitaries were busily training 'rebels' in the Dominican Republic. Coterminously, the media began to issue dire warnings about Haiti the basket-case, Aristide the dictator, fraud, corruption, thuggishness etc. After the coup, The Guardian's sub-editors managed to mangle an article written by Charles Arthur on Haiti, in order to call Aristide a "General". Aristide was not, of course, ever even in the military, much less a military leader. He had no army, having demobilised it in 1995. Still, they persist. Mark this:

In the dead of the night, some 400 Brazilian, Jordanian and Peruvian soldiers fanned through the maze of tin shacks and sewage canals to take out Emanuel "Dread" Wilmé, a gang leader who had refused to surrender one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the hemisphere.

When the sun rose after a five-hour battle, Wilmé and at least five of his crew were dead. So were dozens of men, women and children caught in the gunfire, community leaders and residents said.

UN officials hailed the July 6 raid as a turning point in ridding this shantytown of gangs loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist former priest who was ousted by armed rebels 23 months ago.

But Operation Iron Fist, as the raid was called, became an Operation Band-Aid. A new gang leader quickly replaced Wilmé. And bandits and UN peacekeepers trade gunfire in the slum almost daily, injuring or killing civilians in the process.

The atmosphere of "blackness" is palpable. Gangs. Wilme has been one of those resisting the attempt to return the country to a death-squad dictatorship. The immensely popular Lavalas had a great deal of grass-roots support to organise and Wilme tried to unite what are referred to as "street gangs" against the UN invaders. Yet, they who murder and do so under the rubric of the new sweatshop regime are not gangs, any more than are those UN troops who join the new 'Haitian National Police' in cutting people down in the streets. And yes, dear me yes, Aristide was a populist.

Populism and Council Housing. posted by lenin

Dead Men Left wrote some time ago of the overwhelming votes against stock transfer of council houses in Tower Hamlets. A few things that stood out were 1) because of the spate of 'No' votes, the tenants of Ocean Estate in Stepney were to have their vote postponed because of the 'mood' on the estate; 2) the victimisation of Eileen Short, who has been sacked from her job despite an unblemished record because - one suspects - she is publicly and vociferously opposed to the stock transfers; 3) the local Labour authority is terrified, correctly, of losing out to Respect, which has been actively campaigning for a 'No' vote on the effective privatisation of council housing.

Helene Mulholland writes on much the same themes in The Guardian today:

New Labour has a manifesto pledge to repair council homes to decent standards by 2010, but it will only release the necessary investment to achieve this to local authorities that relinquish control of their housing stock. Despite a motion passed at two consecutive Labour party conferences calling for a "level playing field" on funding for councils, the government has twice refused to implement the party's democratic wishes.

Many tenants prefer to stay with their accountable council rather than an unaccountable alternative. They don't want their homes to switch hands and believe such a move would threaten the long-term security of tenure and rent levels. Defending council housing has proved an eye-opener for all concerned. A report published last year by the local government regeneration agency revealed the tactics being used. As part of plans to transfer properties on the rundown Ocean estate in Tower Hamlets to a housing association, "housing partners and community leaders will also work to undermine the aims and integrity of those campaigning against the transfer", the document stated.

Well, some of those tactics appear to have included the farcical 'protest' by HARCA, a 'social landlord' looking to run the Lansbury Estate. They turned up with placards and all, crashed a Defend Council Housing meeting yelling abuse and so forth, and got sufficiently rowdy that the organiser called the police. As Dead Men Left says "it struck me as a classically New Labour manoeuvre: a completely simulated 'movement' papered over the atomisation of social and political life New Labour strive for." Other such tactics include re-running the vote if you didn't like the first result, with intimidation and threats of legal action.

Mulholland adds:

The future of home ownership has become a test case for the government's mantra of choice, and highlights the limits to this boast. But there is a sting in the tale. The failure of councils to respect tenants' wishes is delivering votes to other parties. In Tower Hamlets, 12 council seats are expected to be lost to Respect in the local election. And this is one ballot that cannot be delayed because of the "mood" of residents.

Quite how well Respect will do in these elections I can't judge, but there does seem to be something of the old 'populism' bogeyman in the council's moaning about the 'mood' on Ocean Estate. The Liberal Democrats in Sefton accused the DHC of frightening people "to death" with "misinformation". There were also a gaggle accusations about 'intimidation' - from whom and against whom was never specified, but the implication was allowed to malinger, without evidence. Naturally, the supposition is that outside agitators are disrupting a perfect harmony of opinion and the free exchange of professional, unbiased information between the local council and cooperative tenants. However, worked into a lather by the agitators, the tenants lose all reason and vote against their benign representatives. Clearly, something eeeeevilll must be afoot. Evidently, we must re-ballot. And so, the local government - encouraged by the national one, and supplied with immense resources - resumes the burden of explaining to the easily led exactly what's best for them. If and when Respect takes Tower Hamlets, doubtless it will be put down to demagoguery, populism etc. If the working classes must be allowed the franchise, even though their brains are surely too poor and tired with their daily concerns to properly engage in civil society, then they need to be protected from the insinuating voices and "boilerplate rhetoric" of "firebrands".

Aceh Revisited. posted by lenin

Last year I was writing about the fact that the Indonesian military (TNI) had taken advantage of the devastation wreaked by the tsunami to intensify repression in Aceh, which predictably was blacked out by the media.

Let me just run a quick reminder. First, the Clinton gesture: Aceh is a region in the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra (see map). What's so special about this spot in the sun is that it has been a locus for colonial predation for centuries on account of its rich resources. It had acquired some measure of autonomy in the British and Dutch competition over Javan spices, for which Aceh was a major trading centre, but the Dutch put paid to that in 1873 by invading - a decision that they were to have some small reason to regret, as the Acehnese engaged the Dutch in a war of attrition lasting right until 1942, when the Japanese took the region. The Acehnese had hoped, following the defeat of the Axis powers, that they might have autonomy, but the United Nations insisted that the region was to be included in the new Republic of Indonesia. Indonesia, for its part, secured the region by sending troops to annexe it. It was the experience of being subject to repressive military presence and intensive exploitation of the resources, particularly under the dictator Suharto that was to lead to the formation in 1976 of the Gerekan Aceh Merdeka (GAM), an armed resistance movement seeking independence for the region. Then: a thirty year war in which the TNI afford themselves of every possible means of repression: rape, torture, murder, the usual fare. Activists smuggled photographs out of the country depicting atrocities, such as the TNI forcing a pole down a prisoner's throat.


Aceh after the tsunami.

Anyway, back to last year. On Christmas Day 2004, the TNI killed 18 guerillas in Aceh. This was in the context of a harsh crackdown under martial law operative from May 2003 in which the Indonesian army admitted to having killed 8,216 people.

As Alan Nairn explained on Democracy Now:

But just five years ago, the yard in front of that mosque was filled with anywhere from 400,000 to a million Acehnese, who were carrying out a peaceful demonstration calling for referendum, a vote, a free vote, in which they could choose whether they wanted to become independent of Indonesia.

In proportional terms, Aceh has a population -- before this disaster, had a population of about four million. This means that anywhere from 10 percent to 25 percent of the entire population of Aceh turned up on the lawn of the mosque that day to call for freedom. It's -- proportionally, it's actually one of the largest political demonstrations in recent world history. If a similar thing happened in the U.S., you’d be talking anywhere from 30 to 60 million people here, to give an idea of the enormity. Faced with that kind of civilian movement, the Indonesian military moved to crush them, assassinating, disappearing leaders, raping female activists.

In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, the repression continued (just as the Sri Lankan government continued its war against the LTTE). To such effect, in fact, that the television media did eventually begin to cover some of it (albeit, tactfully omitting any reference to British complicity in these atrocities). The GAM was predictably devastated by the disaster - not only was its base largely either dead, dislocated or traumatised, but the TNI was attempting to control the distribution of aid in such ways as to deprive actual or alleged GAM supporters. They offered several peace deals and in the end did capture the interest of the Indonesian government. The reasons for this are various, but some of them are as follows: 1) while the GAM had only a few hundred active members when martial law began, by late 2004 it had reached 10,000. The risk of this movement refounding itself was too much for the Indonesian government to countenance; 2) the US has a multitude of corporate interests in Aceh and hopes to have more. Former US diplomat Richard Holbrooke is working with the United States Indonesian Society, a group sponsored by prominent US corporations, to maximise private sector involvement in the reconstruction of the region. So, while the GAM needed a respite from the military campaign, the government and its multinational affiliates needed a stable investment climate in order to properly exploit the resource-rich zone.



A peace deal was formally signed on August 15th 2005, and on Tuesday 27th December 2005, the GAM announced that it was disbanding its military wing. It had given up its goal of independence in return for a withdrawal of Indonesian troops. This was followed by the immediate announcement by the government that a different section of the military would return - entirely for reconstruction purposes, you understand.

The US began to restore military relations with Indonesia on February 26th last year, when it readmitted the latter to its International Military Education and Training programme, (in which the US government subsidises foreign military personnel to receive training at any of its 150 military schools). On 22nd November 2005, the State Department decided to over-ride Congressional restrictions on military ties with Indonesia. Tapol, the Indonesian human rights organisation, commented:

It will allow the export of lethal equipment to Indonesia and the possibility of the US providing loans or grants for the purchase of weapons. The US could in effect end up making gifts of weaponry to the abusive Indonesian military.

...

Last week Congress approved a foreign aid bill which made the resumption of full military ties conditional upon the prosecution of members of the armed forces involved in gross violations of human rights, co-operation with international efforts to resolve serious crimes in East Timor, and reforms to improve civilian control of the military. The State Department has used its power to waive the conditions despite a lack of substantive progress in these areas.

The government, while taking advantage of the peace offered by the GAM, has been increasing suppression in West Papua. Oh, and check this out: The military in West Papua is receiving 'assistance' from a New Orleans-based gold company. Corporations reap considerable profits from the mineral rich territory, but aid agencies say little of that is seen by West Papuans as starvation has set in since November. In fact, as Tom Benedetti writes today in the International Herald Tribune, most of the money for the Indonesian army comes not from the government, but from various forms of business income - licit or illicit. He cites a Dutch government report which suggests that there's a lot of money in those territories and "the troops go where the money is".

Seven years after the overthrow of the dictatorship, the military remains a significant and semi-autonomous bloc in the Indonesian state. And look who it works for: the same regiments of Western capital that stitched up the economy after the British-supported Suharto coup in 1965 and that have been lining up to extract the benefits ever since.