Getting Ahead

By William T. Hathaway

This photo of my parents reveals much about their personalities (hers vivacious and outgoing, his withdrawn and closed off), their relationship (little real contact), and also the times (could be captioned Gender Roles in the 1950s: The Bathing Beauty and the Soldier).

The typicality of their lives reveals much about the USA. My mother was a farmer’s daughter whose father lost the farm to the banks, and they had to scrabble along in the slums of the big city, St. Louis. All her life she yearned for her bucolic childhood when everything was “nice.” My father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner from West Virginia. He hated the mines so much that after the Second World War he stayed in the military as a professional soldier.

Both were imbued with the all-American drive to get ahead of the pack, to wrest advantage over others. My mother’s great-great-grandfather had gotten ahead by owning slaves, using their stolen labor to become wealthy. Although he died decades before she was born, she spoke of him with patriarchal reverence, telling what a good master he had been. His slaves loved him so much that during the Civil War they protected him from Yankee soldiers by hiding him in a well, then hauling him back up when they were gone.

She admitted that not all masters were that kind, though, and she felt slavery wasn’t a good thing. But it was the only way for the Negroes to come to America. Most of the Europeans could afford to pay their way over, but the Africans didn’t have money, so they signed up to be slaves in order to come here. Deep down my mother knew this wasn’t true, but she repeated it as a litany to shore up the family myth that great-great-grandfather had been a good man, hadn’t done anything wrong in achieving his success. When slave labor ended, so did the family’s advantage. Their fortunes declined, and her father lost the farm in the 1920s before the Depression. But they were still much better off than the descendants of the people whose unpaid work had generated the wealth.

[pullquote]Both my parents were imbued with the all-American drive to get ahead of the pack, to wrest advantage over others. My mother’s great-great-grandfather had gotten ahead by owning slaves, using their stolen labor to become wealthy.[/pullquote]

My father managed to become an officer in the Second World War, making the leap from working class to middle class. In the 1950s he was stationed in Colorado as the state coordinator for civil defense. He organized the Ground Observer Corps, groups of citizens who gathered on the roofs of tall buildings to scan the skies with their binoculars. He gave them cards showing silhouettes of Soviet bombers, and if they saw an airplane that resembled those, they were supposed to immediately inform the authorities. He gave presentations on making basement bomb shelters: where the secure corners are, how much food and water to store, how to give first aid for radiation burns. When I eagerly asked him when we would be making our bomb shelter, he said we weren’t going to: Basement shelters were useless against atomic weapons. The whole thing was just a scare campaign to convince the public of the need for a strong military to counter the communist threat. He didn’t disapprove of the campaign, though. It was his job, providing us with food, clothing, and bombless shelter of considerably higher quality than coal mining would have.

But he chafed under the limited horizons of military life and was always seeking ways to get ahead, to get rich. One of these was through radio stickers. When the communists attacked, all the commercial radio stations were going to stop broadcasting and clear the airwaves for two military stations that would inform the public on civil defense measures. My father invented stickers that people could buy and put on their radio dial at the frequencies of these two stations so they could instantly find them. But the invention was not a great success. Since all the other stations would be off the air, anyone could just spin the dial and find the two military stations.

He also invented a clever display mechanism that would make beer bottles appear to float in the air behind the bar, circling and hovering in front of the eager customers. He journeyed to the headquarters of the major beer companies and presented it to the marketing managers, but none of them recognized its brilliance.

Although fortune eluded him, he found military success in Colorado and was promoted several times. The state was fertile ground for civil defense; the threat of war and annihilation was deeply rooted. The first defenses were forts erected against the Native Americans from whom the Europeans had stolen the land. These forts and their commanders are proudly commemorated today in the names of cities and military bases. Some have been restored as shrines for patriotic indoctrination.

[pullquote]Denver was the manufacturing site for the state-of-the-art intercontinental missile, the Titan. Colorado was where the wild-west mentality merged with foreign policy.[/pullquote]

In the 1950s Cheyenne Mountain, a granite colossus towering above Colorado Springs and named after a nearly exterminated Native nation, was hollowed out to serve as a military headquarters during the upcoming war. Even if the rest of the country were being incinerated, the commanders could still fire intercontinental ballistic missiles on the Soviets from there. The new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs was training the next generation of bomber pilots and missile experts. The Rocky Flats Arsenal near Denver produced hydrogen bombs and contaminated the air, land, and water with radioactive poisons. The uranium used to make the bombs was mined in the state under negligent supervision, resulting in toxic residues and increased cancer rates. Denver was also the manufacturing site for the state-of-the-art intercontinental missile, the Titan. Colorado was where the wild-west mentality merged with foreign policy.

All this is madness of course, a monstrous psychosis, and it affects our minds on the subconscious level. The psychotics among us are particularly sensitive to these signals, and they act on them. It’s no accident that Denver has been the site of so many mass murders. The first one was in 1955 at the height of the H-bomb terror. A fault line in the collective consciousness cracked under the stress, and a young man put a bomb in his mother’s suitcase as she was flying away for a trip. Everyone in the plane died. This was the first time anyone had done anything like that, and the country was aghast. But the man proved to be a pioneer; since then mass murder has become commonplace. The people follow their leaders. The Columbine School shooting in 1999 happened in the same suburb as the Titan missile factory. The Dark Knight shooting in 2012 happened only a few miles from Rocky Flats Arsenal. Colorado is also home to Guantánamo West, the new supermax prison for terrorists. And Colorado Springs has become a center of the evangelical Christian movement, fundamentalists praying to their patriarchal God to spare them from the fires of hell.

My mother was a moderate Christian, sincere in her Presbyterian faith but seeing the institution as a practical arena for getting ahead. As befitting my father’s rank, we lived in a lower-middle class suburb of Denver (Aurora, the site of the Dark Knight shooting). As their marriage crumbled, largely on account of father’s drinking, mother had the foresight to develop a strategy for advantage. Shunning the local Presbyterian church, she joined one in the old rich section of Denver and hauled her children there every Sunday for services. She became active in the church, and after the divorce she was elected chairperson of the middle-aged singles social group. One of her duties was to welcome new members into the group. When a wealthy older man, recently widowed, joined it, her ample beauty and charm soon won her a new husband. She was a dutiful and attentive wife, and he was happy, not knowing that she never loved him.

His father had owned a rock quarry and amassed a small fortune by paying his workers (miners of a sort, like my father and his father had been) just enough to keep them working. My genteel last name comes from him. I started life as a Schuster.

My mother’s leap into the upper-middle class gave her children advantages, enabling my brother and me to attend Ivy League universities. We’ve been able to get ahead. Now the family fortunes are restored to what they were in the days of slavery. Success!

The American Dream is built on the American Nightmare.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior contributing editor William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His latest book, Wellsprings, concerns the environmental crisis: http://www.cosmicegg-books.com/books/wellsprings. He is a member of the Freedom Socialist Party (www.socialism.com). A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

Back to Vietnam

The Legacies of War: 1970-2013

by JUDY GUMBO ALBERT, Counterpunch

I am one among millions of people around the globe who protested the American war in Viet Nam. I am also one of perhaps 400 people from the United States who visited Viet Nam while the war still raged. I returned this past January 2013, part of a delegation of former peace activists, spouses, partners and supporters. We called ourselves the Hanoi 9, invited to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. I had been ridiculously nervous before this second trip, which I put down to fear of losing my illusions. Would this country which once embodied my highest ideals still maintain its moral hegemony in a 21st century world of Starbucks and a Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange?

When I visited the former North Viet Nam in 1970, U.S. troops had been waging war in that country for over seven years. More 14,500 American soldiers had died, close to half a million military personnel had served in combat. Republican Richard Nixon had replaced Democrat Lyndon Johnson as president, yet the threat by Johnson’s top general Curtis LeMay that the United States would bomb Viet Nam back into the Stone Age still resonated. Pro-war America labeled Vietnamese as gooks; demonizing combatant and civilian as a slant-eyed, black-pajama’d enemy who fought relentlessly by day and insinuated themselves by night into tunnels, encampments and nightmares of foot soldiers and Presidents alike.

At the same time, public opposition to the war had become a fact of life. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war activists like me idealized the North Vietnamese and their compatriots, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam as Davids battling the high-tech killing machine of the American Goliath. To my way of thinking, the chant “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Gonna Win” was not propagandistic wish fulfillment; it was inevitable.

I arrived in Hanoi in May 1970, along with fellow Yippie Nancy Kurshan and Genie Plamondon of the White Panther Party. We were a women’s delegation of three. On our first morning, a dilapidated dark green school bus with the number 4709 stenciled on its windshield waited for us on Ngo Quyen Street outside the former colonial French Hotel Metropole, now renamed Reunification. Also waiting was Do Xuan Oanh, the man who had invited us to visit Viet Nam. Oanh, pronounced ‘Wine’ with a nasal intonation and nnnng at the end, was more than just the go-to person for visiting peace activists. He was a composer, a poet in the romantic Vietnamese/French style, a watercolor artist and a translator into Vietnamese of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Everyone from the inner core of the U.S. anti-war movement knew him. The writer Susan Sontag who visited Hanoi in 1968 had written: “Oanh had a “personal authority, (he) walks and sits with that charming “American” slouch, and sometimes seems moody or distracted.” Oanh’s brooding may have stemmed from his personal history. Oanh’s wife, the granddaughter of the Chief of Staff of the French government in Indochina, had been arrested by the French in the early 1950s and held at the Maison Central, a concrete building in downtown Hanoi that would become infamous as the Hanoi Hilton. Oanh’s wife suffered chronic headaches and fainted whenever she saw a snake. Only in 2013 did I grasp the meaning of Oanh’s story when I saw on the wall of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City a depiction of a woman being held down by two burly, bare chested men who were raping her with a snake.

In 1970, Nancy, Genie, Oanh, three Vietnamese guides and I rode our bus south until we crossed the Ham Rong Bridge in Thanh Hoa province. A hole in the bus’s rusted floor allowed a view of brown muddy river water rushing mere yards under my feet. Oanh told us the North Vietnamese army moved war materiel by train, oxcart, bicycle and foot across this bridge to the South. U.S. planes had made at least 400 sorties, each one laying down a carpet of bombs. “Every day this bridge is demolished,” Oanh explained, “Every night it is rebuilt. The courage of the peasants is a local legend.”

Anti-aircraft artillery fighters, Viet Nam 1970. Photo by Judy Gumbo Albert

The instant after I had conjured up a socialist realist image of heroic peasants combating their victim hood by rebuilding a bridge each night, a mountain loomed on my right. One-half of the mountain’s top had been sheared away, as if some industrial-sized backhoe had strip-mined giant bites from it. I asked Oanh the meaning of the letters QUYET THANG I saw carved in white chalk into the mountain’s top. He replied.

“Determined to win. So American pilots will see this as they fly over.”

I did not question why the North Vietnamese believed American pilots could translate this slogan. Then I realized mine was an Americo-centric point of view; the slogan was much more to inspire resistance among peasants undergoing bombing than a deterrent to pilots. By the time the bus stopped, I was feeling no small measure of guilt and remorse, as if I was in some way responsible for the destruction I had witnessed. A woman in a stained lightweight patterned shirt, visibly pregnant, led us through a narrow passage into a low ceilinged cave hollowed into the mountain’s core. Bare bulbs attached to wires flickered orange; tons of mountain earth above us tamed Vietnam’s humidity. Seven or eight women and men bent over lathes that resembled oversize sewing machines. Oanh said that despite daily bombings this munitions factory had remained in continuous production.

I shivered, not from fear or from my cooling skin but because the air around me felt infused with such resolve I could not help but sop it up like a sponge. I told myself if Oanh and his compatriots could make a life amid such devastation, I could re-make myself. I would act more like my heroes: Mme. Binh, Che Guevara, the Trung Sisters and Emma Goldman. I’d become less self-centered! I’d learn empathy, compassion and determination! I would sacrifice my happiness for the good of others. The vows I made in that factory cave in 1970 in feel Utopian to me now, but at age 27 they changed my understanding of myself and thus my life.

WELCOME

AMERICAN FRIENDS/PEACE ACTIVISTS

TO DA NANG CENTER SUPPORTING FOR AGENT ORANGE VICTIMS AND UNFORTUNATED CHILDREN.

Da Nang 31/01/2013

This trip had been fast paced but now time slowed. I hate the word victim but in this case it felt apt. The Center director, a man half my size, legs bent and body contorted, informed our group that 1,400 intellectually disabled children lived in the Da Nang area. I sat among them: girls and boys, faces and backs of heads flat, eyes slanted in that recognizable way, some with feet deformed and four toes and one little girl, her body perfect but she was at best three feet tall. This girl appeared ageless, with an expression under her straight brown hair and pixie face of such unbearable sadness it broke my heart. The other children laughed and clapped, she did not join in or smile, as if she understood she had been cheated of a normal life by toxic chemicals leeched into and poisoning the soil of her community two generations before she had been born. I believe, although I have no evidence of this, that this girl realized whatever chance at normality she may have possessed had she been born into another body had been cruelly taken from her by military decisions made in the United States forty years ago. I was unable to join the raucous Gangnab style dance the other children and my compatriots enjoyed. The girl disappeared, as if unable to tolerate the fun-loving intensity disabled children can muster. I am responsible for the tragedy of this life, I told myself. Yet I felt powerless to act.

Judy and Nancy at the Ho Chi Minh Mauseoleum, Hanoi, 2013. Photo by Steve Whitman.

* * *

Like his male compatriots, Oanh had dressed for our farewell celebration in June of 1970 in his usual gray pants and white shirt; our women guides wore carefully preserved au dai’s of faded reds and blues. I knew the population suffered war-related food shortages yet the banquet in our honor felt sumptuous; a traditional gesture of gratitude. Spring rolls fried a delicate brown, bright red prawns, steaming bowls of Pho served concurrently with fish braised in brown sauce plus a beige vegetable cut in fantastical shapes that gave off what was to me an alien scent. A dessert of ripe yellow pineapple came accompanied by slices of fruit, its white flesh speckled with tiny black seeds as if an ironic Mother Nature had created a pellet bomb of peace and friendship just for us.

I also knew my job when I returned to the United States would be to bring back what I’d learned about the humanitarian consequences of war. But how to do that? I was especially bothered by how I would negotiate the factionalism and identity politics that were creating necessary but to my mind unfortunate splits within peace movement ranks. As if anticipating my confusion, Oanh answered in his goodbye speech, telling Nancy, Genie and I to keep the long term view in mind. He said,

“Be good to friends who are good to you; also be good to friends who are bad to you, for only friends will go with you on the long road to revolution.”

To this day I try to follow Oanh’s advice; the first is easy, it’s the second part remains a challenge. Oanh went on to recount a story told to him by his father. “You must not wait until the score is achieved to know who is the real hero,” Oanh’s father had said. Oanh had repeated this sentence when he buried his father and, as he put it, “pledged to look at life with the same eye.” He concluded, “I would not wait until revolution is achieved in America to know that you represent the future.” In 1970, I could not have asked for a more inspirational farewell.

On Friday, January 21, 2013, the 40th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, Nancy and I emerged from our bus to the music of a military band, then were guided past an honor guard, up a red carpet into a vast auditorium. Across the aisle from me sat a group of older men in white uniforms, all gray haired and balding, plus one woman in green military garb. Medals, ribbons and red stars gleamed on every chest. An impromptu peace ambassador from the former Woodstock Nation, I made my way down their row and shook each hand. “Thank you, thank you,” I said in English. They beamed with delight.

Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh and a frail diplomat named Van Loi were escorted to an oversized stage, where they stood behind by red velvet curtains on which hung a giant gold star, hammer and sickle. A gold bust of Ho Chi Minh, three times their size gazed down. As a ‘red diaper baby,’ I understood the symbolism: If Ho’s bust resembled a Hollywood Oscar, the Heroic Award of Armed Forces Mme. Binh and Van Loi received would be equivalent to a Lifetime Achievement Award. At 86, Mme Binh is now the only living Vietnamese signer of the Paris Peace Accords. She had been foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam, headed the PRG delegation at the Paris Peace Accords, had been a leader of the Viet Nam Women’s Union and my personal hero.

Judy and Mme Binh, 2013. Photo by Nancy Kurshan.

To the accompaniment of a classical orchestra, images began to flash on a giant screen: young Ho with wispy beard; destroyed buildings and pagodas surrounded by metal remnants of B52 bombers; peasants in rubber tire sandals guiding war materiel down the Ho Chi Minh trail; Mme Binh signing the Accords; devastation caused by Nixon’s subsequent carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, and, to conclude, victorious tanks from the North entering Saigon. As the film unfolded, dancers filled the stage like red, blue and yellow butterflies. The music slowed. A line of young women and men appeared; they were not Vietnamese, they were dressed as hippies, one of whom played an air guitar as if he was Bob Dylan. The group began to sing, in English, the international anti-war standard, ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. Such public recognition of our movement’s efforts made me understand my job in 2013: to convey as best I could the thanks and gratitude of the Vietnamese government to everyone who protested the American war in Viet Nam.

After the ceremony, I attended a banquet. As did Mme Binh. Her walk was steady; her eyes shone behind her glasses. I had carried with me from the United States a black and white photograph of a women’s anti-war demonstration at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami.Women In Revolt, Sisters Unite! I’m in the front line of demonstrators, pounding out a militant beat on a wooden drum I’d slung over my shoulder. To my left is a woman later identified as a police agent. To my right is Patty Oldenberg (then wife of the artist Claus Oldenberg.) Patty wears what I once called the Mme. Binh Livlikker t-shirt. Above a graphic of Mme. Binh’s head, the word ‘LiveLikeHer’ appears: an outcome of a volunteer designer squishing the words ‘Live Like Her’ into a single silkscreened slogan. It may be a cliche but as I approached Mme. Binh’s table, I changed into that young woman in 1970 in the presence of my hero. I handed Mme. Binh the photograph, and told her that my female anti-war compatriots and I had done our best to live like her. I said, “Thank you for all you have done.”

“And we will continue to do it,” she replied, then squeezed my hand.

A socialist-oriented market economy with Starbucks and a Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange may not be the type of independence I’d envisaged for Viet Nam when I first demonstrated against the war. Still, if I follow the example set by Mme. Binh, I will hang onto my ideals of the Vietnamese as revolutionary heroes, yet stay open to whatever future they determine for themselves.

Judy Gumbo Albert who was recently identified in the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of Berkeley’s well-known traditional rabble-rousers,” published her award-winning piece “Bugged” about being surveilled by the FBI in The Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60’s and 70’s, She Writes Press (2013). Judy was an original member of the Yippies, co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984) with her late husband Stew Albert, contributed to Sean Stewart’s On the Ground, P.M. Press (2011), has written for Counterpunch Magazine and Rag Blog and is currently completing Yippie Girl, a memoir in progress about love and conflict among the romantic revolutionaries of the late 1960s.

Sources:

Susan Sontag: Trip to Hanoi, Fararr, Strous and Giroux, New York 1968
Nick Turse: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Viet Nam, Henry Hold and Company, New York 2013
Susan Hammond, War Legacies Project www.warlegacies.org

OpEds: Talking Peace, Waging War

By Stephen Lendman

John Kerry: Unindicted war criminal, like his boss.

Obama’s war on Syria rages. It’s taken a horrific toll nationwide. Tens of thousands died. Dozens more do daily.

Millions were displaced. Numbers internally and abroad range up to one-third of Syria’s population. Humanitarian crisis conditions exist. Human suffering is extreme. Peace talks reflect more illusion than reality. On January 22, they’re scheduled to begin.

On Sunday and Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with so-called Friends of Syria countries in Paris. They include America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and UAE. They’re imperial collaborators. They no friends of the great majority of Syrians. On Sunday, they issued a joint statement, saying:

“Assad and his close associates with blood on their hands will have no role in Syria.”

Throughout nearly three years of conflict, they’ve wrongfully blamed him for Western-backed insurgent crimes. They’re imperial collaborators. They’re responsible for horrific bloodshed. They want regime change. They want mass slaughter and destruction to achieve it.

They want sole right to choose who’ll rule. They want Syrians having no say. They want pro-Western stooges in charge. They’re ravaging and destroying a once peaceful country. They’re responsible for high crimes against peace. No end of conflict looms. It’s unclear if talks will take place as scheduled. It’s unclear if it matters.

It’s unclear who’s attending. Divided opposition groups may not come. They’re preoccupied with slaughtering each other instead.

On January 12, AFP headlined “700 killed in Syria rebel-jihadist battle: monitor.” Hundreds more are missing. Fighting rages. It’s been ongoing for days. Civilians are caught in the middle. Perhaps well over 1,000 died. Expect many more to perish. Northern provinces are affected. Aleppo, Idlib and Raqa are hard hit. So are Hama and Homs. At least 16 suicide attacks occurred. Dozens were killed. More die daily. Syria remains a cauldron of violence.

On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius lied, saying:

“It’s the regime of Bashar al-Assad that is feeding terrorism. We must bring that regime to an end. There is no solution to the Syrian tragedy apart from a political solution. And there is no possibility to achieve (it) if Geneva two does not take place.”

Geneva I ended in failure. Washington and other opponents demanded he must go. They demand he go now. They do so illegitimately. On Sunday, John Kerry discussed prospects for Middle East peace. He addressed Syria. He blamed Assad for Obama’s war. “There is an urgent need for the Syrian regime to implement its obligations under the UN Security Council Presidential Statement,” he said.

“We believe it is possible for the regime to (cease fighting) before Geneva – local ceasefires if necessary – a ceasefire with respect to Aleppo, and send the signal that they are prepared to set a different mood, a different climate, a different stage for the possibility of success in Geneva.”

“They have the power to do that. And the opposition has pledged that if they will do that. The opposition will live by it.”

False! Kerry knows it. Extremist elements continue fighting. They reject peace talks. Washington bears full responsibility for ongoing conflict. Assad defends Syria responsibly. He’s battling US-backed foreign invaders. Don’t expect Kerry to explain. Continued aggression is planned. Washington is directly involved in supplying lethal aid. It’s been doing it all along. It’s coming cross border from Turkey and Jordan. Israel is supplying weapons. CIA and US special forces are directly involved.

Kerry lied saying Assad “disregard(s) the most basic human rights.” Extremist opposition forces are barbaric. They’ve committed numerous atrocities. Assad is wrongfully blamed. Washington wants war on Syria continued. Geneva II won’t end it. Demanding Assad must go is illegal. Syrians alone have sole right to decide who’ll lead them. Foreign interference violates international law.

Kerry is an unindicted war criminal. He has no legitimacy whatever. He’s less than optimistic about Syria. “None of us have an expectation,” he said. “(F)ull agreement” is unlikely.

“What we do expect is to begin to get the parties at the table convened and negotiating and beginning a process of waging an even stronger effort to provide for this political solution. It’ll take a little bit of time, but I’m confident that it needs that forum. It needs all the players at the table. It needs the umbrella of the United Nations.” It needs Assad gone, according to Kerry.

On Sunday, Friends of Syria countries issued a statement saying Geneva Two’s objective is replacing Assad with transitional governance. They want one fully empowered. They want pro-Western stooges in charge. They want what Syrians won’t tolerate. Ahmad Jarba heads the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. He replaced Moaz al-Khatib. He’s no friend of Syrians. He’s one-sidedly pro-Western.

He issued a statement saying:

“The most important aspect of today’s meeting is that we all agree to say that the Assad family has no future in Syria. Removing Assad from Syria for the future has now been clearly established in a unanimous decision adopted by (Friends of Syria countries) without the possibility for ambiguity.”

Lavrov responded saying:

“Our partners are blinded by an ideological mission for regime change. I am convinced that the West is doing this to demonstrate that they call the shots in the Middle East. This is a totally politicized approach.”

Russia is fundamentally opposed. It respects Syrian sovereignty. International laws matter. Putin calls force against sovereign nations unacceptable. He said waging it is aggression. Removing Assad assures endless conflict. Doing so frees jihadists to run wild. Syria will resemble Iraq and Libya. Daily conflict kills dozens in both countries. Violence shows no signs of ending. Pro-Western puppet governance can’t stop it. Institute of World Economy and International Relations senior fellow Stanislav Ivanov believes peace in Syria remains elusive.

He doubts Geneva II will work. Given what remains ongoing, it’s destined to fail, he said. He believes a UN-sponsored conference should precede Geneva. All relevant international parties should be involved. Iran should be invited unconditionally. It won’t attend Geneva any other way. Center for Contemporary Iranian Studies Rajab Safarov calls Geneva talks this month futile.

“The conference will not take place because of the US,” he said. “Washington cannot get rid of the heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They are not interested in finding a solution to the Syrian issue,” he added.

“There are almost no chances this conference and even holding it can succeed,” he said.

“Assad needs 4-6 months (more fighting) maximum. After that there will be no opposition in Syria. And no need” for peace talks, he believes. At the same time, he thinks Geneva II can achieve something positive. Geneva I failed by demanding Assad must go. Friends of Syria countries demand it now. Doing so runs counter to what most Syrians wish. Peace remains a convenient illusion. Expect conflict without end to continue. It’s virtually certain without Iran’s involvement to end it.

Regional violence shows no signs of ending. Greater war looms possible. Post-9/11, millions died. Washington bears full responsibility. It’s waging war on humanity. Expect other countries to be ravaged and destroyed before it ends.

The entire region may become embroiled in conflict. Global war is possible. Imagine the potential consequences. Imagine what no responsible leaders should risk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

Chris Hedges: The Trouble With Chris Christie

By Chris Hedges

The most retrograde billionaires and corporate capitalists have pinned their hopes, as well as their money, on the New Jersey governor for the next presidential race. They love him because he is as vicious as he looks.

Reprinted from truthdig.com

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been Wall Street’s anointed son for the presidency. He is backed by the most ruthless and corrupt figures in New Jersey politics, including the New Jersey multimillionaire and hard-line Democratic boss George Norcross III. Among his other supporters are many hedge fund managers and corporate executives and some of the nation’s most retrograde billionaires, including the Koch brothers. The brewing scandal over the closing of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge apparently in retaliation for the Fort Lee mayor’s refusal to support the governor’s 2013 re-election is a window into how federal agencies and the security and surveillance apparatus would be routinely employed in a Christie presidency to punish anyone who challenged this tiny cabal’s grip on power.

Christie is the caricature of a Third World despot. He has a vicious temper, a propensity to bully and belittle those weaker than himself, an insatiable thirst for revenge against real or perceived enemies, and little respect for the law and, as recent events have made clear, for the truth. He is gripped by a bottomless hedonism that includes a demand for private jets, huge entourages, exclusive hotels and lavish meals. Wall Street and the security and surveillance apparatus want a real son of a b*tch in power, someone with the moral compass of Al Capone, in order to ruthlessly silence and crush those of us who are working to overthrow the corporate state. They have had enough of what they perceive to be Barack Obama’s softness. Christie fits the profile and he is drooling for the opportunity.

Activists, Democratic and Republican rivals for power, liberals, reformers and environmentalists will, if Christie becomes president, see the vast forces of the security state surge into overdrive to stymie and reverse reform, gut our tepid financial and environmental regulations, further enrich the corporate elite who are pillaging the country, and savagely shut down all dissent. The corporate state’s repression, now on the brink of totalitarianism, would with the help of Christie, his corporate backers and his tea party loyalists become a full-blown corporate fascism.

Wall Street was unable to mask Mitt Romney’s cloying sense of entitlement and elitism, along with his Mr. Rogers blandness. But Wall Street sees in the profane, union-busting New Jersey governor the perfect Trojan horse for unfettered corporate power. Christie, eyeing a bid for the presidency in the 2016 election, has been promised massive financial backing by the Koch brothers; hedge fund titans such as Stanley Druckenmiller, Kenneth C. Griffin, Daniel S. Loeb, Paul E. Singer, Paul Tudor Jones II and David Tepper; financiers such as Charles Schwab and Stephen A. Schwarzman; real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman; former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso; former AIG head Maurice “Hank” Greenberg; former Morgan Stanley CEO John J. Mack; former GE Chairman Jack Welch; and Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone. David Koch has called Christie “a true political hero” and said he is “inspired by this man.” Rupert Murdoch, whose ethics seem to align with Christie’s, is similarly besotted with the governor.

Christie is pitched to the public, as was George W. Bush, as a regular guy, someone who speaks bluntly and candidly, someone you would want to have a beer with. But this is public relations crap. He is and has long been a hatchet man for corporate firms and big banks. He began his career as a corporate lobbyist in Trenton, N.J., working for clients such as the Securities Industry Association. He has done their bidding ever since. His wife, Mary Pat Christie, is a bond trader who has worked at JPMorgan Chase, Fleet Securities and Cantor Fitzgerald and is currently a managing director at Angelo Gordon, an investment firm in New York.

If Christie implodes politically, Wall Street will no doubt find another candidate to be its lackey. The system of corporate power, not the individual at the helm, is fundamentally the problem for democracy. But this does not mean we should not fear the excesses that surely would occur under a Christie presidency. Christie and those who want him to occupy the Oval Office have little regard for the impediments of law and do not know the meaning of the word “restraint.”

The quality of most of the reporting on Christie has been pathetic. The numerous portraits of the “regular-guy” governor are rewritten versions of the fatuous press releases provided by the governor’s public relations team. New Jersey desperately needs a version of the late columnist Mike Royko, whose unauthorized biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, “Boss,” laid bare the Mafia-like inner workings of the Daley political juggernaut. The Christie forces, which have made an unholy alliance with the state’s corrupt Democratic Party bosses to create an unassailable gang of corporate rulers, are as brutal and colorful as anything Royko chronicled in Chicago. The Democratic machine, led by Norcross, allied itself with the Republican Christie to crush the Democratic candidate for governor, Barbara Buono, who lost last November’s election by roughly 22 percentage points.

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in their book “Double Down: Game Change 2012” give us perhaps the best glimpse of Christie, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination during the last presidential race and was considered as a running mate for Romney. The authors devote a chapter to Christie called “Big Boy,” a nickname George W. Bush bestowed on the corpulent governor. When Romney met with Christie at the governor’s mansion in Princeton to obtain his endorsement, Christie not only demurred but warned Romney he better not approach any major donors in his state. “If you jump the gun and start raising money here, you can certainly kiss my support good-bye,” Christie told Romney, according to the book. The authors describe the conversation as “something out of “The Sopranos.’ ”

The Romney campaign, which reluctantly agreed to Christie’s incessant demands for private jets, ungainly entourages and expensive hotel rooms in return for campaign appearances by the governor in behalf of the GOP nominee, decided against selecting him as running mate because, as the authors write, Romney’s vetters were “stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record.”

A 2010 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in the federal job he held before he became governor, the book notes, called Christie “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and someone who offered “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at exclusive hotels such as the Four Seasons. In addition, the inspector general’s report raised questions among Romney’s vetters about “Christie’s relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many trips,” the book said.

“There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoffwas a senior SIA official–and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act,” Halperin and Heilemann wrote. “There [also] was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies such as former attorney general John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie, arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie [the governor’s brother], who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.’ (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all of that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on [the Romney] team: Christie’s other lobbying clients; his investments overseas; the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament; and the status of his health.”

Christie’s large public entourage always includes a videographer who captures the governor’s frequent public humiliation of those–public school teachers are his favorite targets for ridicule–who have the audacity to question his judgment. These exchanges are immediately edited and uploaded to YouTube. There are now more than 600.

State politicians who do not kowtow before Christie receive acidic notes and emails. A former acting New Jersey governor, Richard J. Codey, after defying Christie abruptly lost his police escort. A state senator who angered the governor was denied a promised judgeship. A Rutgers professor and political scientist who declined to endorse Republican redistricting plans abruptly lost state funding for his program at the university.

Christie’s warped pathology, as is evidenced in this 2010 YouTube videoin which he belittles a public school teacher, is a source of pride for the governor and has made him a darling of the right-wingers who target those who teach the vast majority of American schoolchildren.

In another incident, Christie angrily shoutsto a man who had questioned his attacks on public school teachers: “You’re a real big shot. You’re a real big shot shooting your mouth off.” The man replies, “Nah, just take care of the teachers.” Christie, pushing his bulk before him and surrounded by his security detail, strides toward the man, who slowly backs away. “Keep walking away,” Christie says menacingly. “Really good. Keep walking.” The brief clip is a disturbing window into the governor’s vindictiveness, one that is augmented by access to power.

The visceral need by Christie to ridicule and threaten anyone who does not bow before him, his dark lust for revenge, his greed, gluttony and hedonism, his need to surround himself with large, fawning entourages and his obsequiousness to corporate power are characteristics our corporate titans embrace and understand. They see in Christie versions of themselves. They know he will enthusiastically do their dirty work. They trust him to be a real bastard. If Christie and the billionaires behind him take the presidency and begin to manipulate government agencies and pull the levers of our Stasi-like security and surveillance apparatus, any pretense of democracy will be gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

MOURNING MANDELA: Plumbing the Depths of Hypocrisy

Guest editorials—

Deep consternation observed among the imperial delegations.

By Michael Faulkner

The falsification of history is nothing new. “Falsification” means more than an interpretation of history that may be biased in one direction or another. Indeed, it is inevitable that proponents of, for example, the Whig view of history will differ fundamentally about the selection and interpretation of facts and events from those committed to a Marxist perspective. Falsifying history means deliberately suppressing facts, twisting or distorting the historical record so as to present a systematically untruthful account intended to mislead. It is to concoct a body of lies intended to serve the interests of those who expect to benefit from their deceit by persuading the gullible that their falsified account is the truth. It is propaganda pure and simple. Propaganda is still frequently associated in the public mind with the practice of totalitarianism, and amongst the most blatant examples is the perversion of the historical record of the Russian revolution and the frame-up trials of old Bolsheviks in the 1930s, exposed in 1937 by Trotsky in The Stalin School of Falsification. Although in retrospect Stalinist methods of falsification may now seem crude in the extreme, many loyal communists worldwide were prepared to believe, on the basis of Stalin’s perceived infallibility, the lies they were told.

The funeral of Nelson Mandela in early December 2013 was the occasion for a rather more subtle, but nonetheless egregious example of historical falsification. The world’s media assembled to report on the coming together of thousands of mourners, including numerous heads of state and political leaders from every part of the globe, clergy and celebrities, all gathered to pay their last respects to the great man who, they would have us believe, had been such an inspiration to them all. Admiration was universal. This was the sanctification of Nelson Mandela. The media coverage of the event presented him as some kind of secular saint, although even this needs qualification as it was also suggested that he may after all have been a man of religious faith. His greatest virtue, it was suggested, was his gentleness; his preparedness to forgive his enemies – a great Christian virtue – and to work for reconciliation with them. The four decades of bitter struggle against the monstrous racist tyranny of apartheid received little attention as did the continuing extreme poverty of the great majority of South Africans and the continuing oppression of its grossly exploited workforce.

That Nelson Mandela was a man of heroic stature is beyond doubt. His inspiring example as a freedom fighter and his resilience during 27 years of incarceration should not and cannot be gainsaid. For nearly three decades he personified the struggle against apartheid and his leadership in that struggle is central to the historical record. But there were thousands of others and many of them also suffered years of imprisonment and exile. Many, like Ruth First, Steve Biko and Chris Hani paid with their lives, murdered by the fascist thugs who enforced the regime. And in looking at the historical record we confront the hypocrisy of so many of those who were most prominent amongst Mandela’s mourners. The record needs to be set straight.

Mandela’s funeral was preceded earlier last year by that of Margaret Thatcher. Some of the same people who attended Mandela’s funeral were also at hers. Amongst them was British prime minister David Cameron. Thatcher, as is well known, had no time at all for Mandela. She denounced the ANC as a terrorist organization and regarded Mandela as a terrorist. Throughout the 1980s her government had close relations with the Apartheid regime. She and her party were totally opposed to the boycott of South Africa. In the 1980s, the Confederation of Conservative students, to which David Cameron then belonged, were enthusiastic supporters of apartheid. Many Tory students wore tee shirts with the logo “Hang Mandela”. Cameron now says that he was inspired by Mandela, but before the end of the apartheid regime, he was part of a delegation that paid an official visit to South Africa. There is no evidence that any Tory MP or anyone prominent in the Tory party ever expressed any sympathy with or gave any support to the anti-apartheid movement in this country.

The funeral: Just another global photo-op for the master poseur.

The Mandela funeral: Just another global photo-op for the master poseur.

How little interest the BBC took in the political struggle against apartheid in their coverage of Mandela’s commemoration was evident in their treatment of the speeches made by visiting heads of state. Six were scheduled to speak – the Presidents of Brazil, Cuba, India, Namibia, the USA and the Vice-President of China. Barack Obama spoke first, for about 25 minutes. The whole of his speech was transmitted uninterrupted to viewers. After that the presenters ignored all the other speakers and cut to interviews with various people in order to discuss Obama’s speech and other sometimes trivial matters such as the weather, which was very wet. No other speaker was thought worth hearing. One of the most important speeches, packed with political acumen and recollections of solidarity with the ANC struggle, came from Raul Castro. He referred to the decades of support Cuba had given to the liberation struggle in South Africa and southern Africa when the Western powers were supporting the apartheid regime. The BBC didn’t think this worthy of attention.

Here is an irony. Obama, in his funeral oration, said in ringing Shakespearean style “We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again.” His soaring rhetoric, though probably heartfelt, was actually insubstantial. He made no apology for or reference to the decades-long co-operation between the CIA and the South African security services in their hounding of anti-apartheid activists and support for the regime. Raul Castro (whose handshake with Obama was the subject of much media gossip) referred to the close cooperation between the ANC and Cuba from the 1960s to the 1990s. What modesty prevented him from saying was that Cuba, despite the punitive 60+ years of US blockade, gave unstinting military and other support to the ANC and the liberation movements in Angola and Namibia. In fact it was the decisive victory of the combined Cuban and Angolan forces over the US-backed Savimbi counter-revolutionaries of Unita and their South African allies in Angola, and the defeat of South African forces by the Cubans and ANC fighters at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 that led to the independence of Namibia and hastened the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The truth is that the United States and Britain supported the South African regime. Cuba, motivated by a profound sense of international solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America, gave its unstinting support to those fighting against it. Following his release from jail, the first country Mandela visited was Cuba. In a speech at Matanzas in 1991 he said “I must say that when we wanted to take up arms we approached numerous western governments for assistance and we were never able to see any but the most junior ministers. When we visited Cuba we were received by the highest officials and were immediately offered whatever we wanted and needed. That was our earliest experience with Cuban internationalism.”

ANC Apostate Mbeki: “Just call me a Thatcherite.”

In the Western plaudits for Mandela none of this is mentioned. Its erasure is part of the deliberate falsification of the historical record. No mention is made of the fact that Mandela was for years a member of the South African Communist Party and, at the time of his arrest in 1962 sat on its central committee. In the falsified account of the struggle to end apartheid, the “great man” version of history looms large. It is almost as though the regime melted away in shame due to the power of his example. No mention is made of the role in this struggle played by the South African Communist Party. Its numerous activists set an example which the ANC took very seriously. The SACP’s influence infused the ANC. Whatever one may think of the party’s ideological subservience to the Soviet Union, its activists worked selflessly to rid South Africa of the world’s most brutal racist regime. In the post-1990 falsified account of this epic struggle they, like the Cubans, have been airbrushed from the picture.

In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein deals with post-apartheid South Africa in a devastating chapter entitled Democracy born in Chains. The ANC’s “Freedom Charter”, drawn up in 1955 after deliberations involving three thousand supporters, became the program to be implemented once the struggle against apartheid had been won. Its first commitment was that “The People shall govern”. In recognition of the fact that apartheid was also an economic system, land was to be given to landless people; education would be free regardless of color, race or nationality; the wealth of the country would be transferred to the people. This referred to mineral wealth (South Africa had the biggest goldfields in the world), the banks and monopoly industries. In January 1990, while still in prison, Mandela, in a note to his supporters, wrote decisively “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.”

Within a few years, prior to the 1994 election, the Freedom Charter had been scrapped and the ANC had capitulated to neoliberalism. Why this happened is still subject to controversy and the most generous explanation is that the ANC negotiators were outwitted, blackmailed and outmaneuvered by representatives of the Nationalist party, the IMF, the World Bank etc. and forced to accept responsibility for the national debt accumulated by the apartheid regime. Whatever the explanation, the ANC negotiated away the country’s economic sovereignty. In 1994, following the capitulation, Mandela said: ”In economic policies…there is not a single reference to things like nationalization, and that is not an accident…There is not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology.” In 1996, his successor as president, former Marxist Thabo Mbeki, who had taken the process of large-scale privatization much further, announced: “Just call me a Thatcherite.”

Today, twenty years after the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. In 2007 Naomi Klein reported that since 1994 the number of people living on less than $1 a day had doubled from 2 million to 4 million; between 1991 and 2002 the unemployment rate for black South Africans had risen from 23% to 48%; by 2004 almost 1 million people had been evicted from farms and the number of shack dwellers had grown by 50%. Many shacks were without water and electricity.

The failure, during the commemoration of Mandela’s life, to mention any of this, and in particular to place the main responsibility where it belongs – on the rapacious multi-national corporations and the largely, but not entirely white economic dominant class that has maintained and extended its privileged position in South Africa, is an example of the falsification of history.

A final example of this falsification by omission, often overlooked, is the fact that the abandonment of the Freedom Charter and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism followed immediately on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This allowed the ideologues of the Friedmanite Chicago School to proclaim loud and clear that “there is no alternative.” But, just as Fukuyama’s proclamation of “the end of history” turned out to be premature, the last chapter in South Africa’s “long march to freedom” still has not been written.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column, Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine (a fraternal site) since 2008. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United Sates where he has friends and family in New York City.