An Interview with Héctor Madera

Héctor Madera interviewed in Caracas, Venezuela, 6 August 2012.

Héctor Madera (HM): I was born in the barrio called Candelaria in Caracas. I’m going to tell you about my personal trajectory in a popular way. I was living with my grandma when I was 8 or 9 years old. And the Left was functioning clandestinely out of necessity in the 1950s and 1960s. It was craziness. And my grandma passed on the craziness, every day I got crazier (smiling). Part of this craziness she passed on was how not to live as a consumer, how to live in a different way. I was taught that living as a consumer was the real craziness, we get confused that consumption is a way of life. When I was given anything as a child, my mother and my grandma would gather around and teach me that it wasn’t mine – all the men and women in my community would teach me this, how to live in the form of a collective.

Let me give an example that I remember clearly from my grandma and my mother. I was given a pair of shoes. I took care of these shoes like you wouldn’t believe. When other kids would come around and look at my shoes I used to yell at them to get away from my stuff. And my mother and grandma scolded me. Those aren’t yours, they would say, they are for whoever needs them. Try to imagine this kind of formation, education – that these things aren’t ours, we don’t live for consumption, these things are for those that need them. This is how I became who I am today.

JW and SS: Can you tell us about the history of your barrio?

HM: When this barrio was born, it was born like every barrio in Caracas, through hard work. In the mornings, my parents, and my grandparents, would go far away to work, in factories and other sorts of labour, in order to earn money. And in the evenings, they helped build the barrio. This barrio, like all the others, was self-produced, and self-produced with a tremendous labour, and self-produced by women and men.

JW and SS: What was the objective in forming the Urban Land Committees?

HM: The Urban Land Committees were created following a proposal that was approved by the Minister of Labour at the time, María Cristina Iglesias, and Hugo Chávez but it came from below. There was a discussion about this proposal in the barrios outside the city, at the margins of everything. Many people participated in this discussion, and because of this pressure from below Chávez announced Decree 1666, on February 4, 2002.

The new law opened up an initial stage in the struggle for land in urban areas. Remember, Chávez was still a social democrat at the time. He was still speaking like the Workers’ Party in Sao Paolo, Brazil, or Tony Blair in England. But the difference with Chávez is that Chávez listened, he discussed things with the people. And the real force of the Bolivarian process emerged out of the Urban Land Committees and the Barrio Assemblies.

So, in 2002 the legal space was opened up for land titling. The Urban Land Committee was a product of decades of struggle, beginning with our grandparents and ancestors, which led ultimately to opening up this legal space. It wasn’t the legal decision that made this happen, it was the people gathered in the Barrio Assembly.

JW and SS: After a number of years in this process of change under Chávez, can you describe, from your perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the Bolivarian process to date?

HM: I don’t see the strengths as some sort of miracle, the best thing in the world, but what we have achieved is a maturation of an organic political process. And the biggest obstacle we face today is bureaucracy, bureaucratization. But this is part of the struggle. I’m not going to say that there aren’t petty-bourgeois Ministers, and Ministers who are similar to those in the past, because this is what we have. But those of us in the movements are organizing and articulating ourselves in order to overcome these obstacles. The good thing about the present moment is that there is no political persecution. We can continue organizing and building and we won’t be persecuted. And the state is forced to make concessions. When there is organic popular organization, it has an effect on the state.

JW and SS: In your barrio, what are the most important popular organizations?

HM: This is an important subject for us in Candelaria. We have the House of Culture, which is the centre of everything. Then we have the Urban Land Committees that emerged from the political conjuncture, then the technical water forum working on the theme of water, then the Bolivarian Circles, and the Communal Councils. The Communal Council integrates and articulates all the different organizational forms – the Urban Land Committees, and the committees around water and health.

…in the Commune, neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian state exists, but rather the people themselves, living in common and harmony with the Pachamama (mother earth) and ourselves. This is the dream, which demonstrates that another world is possible. ”

It is also important to mention that in the current context Communal Councils are then articulated in Communes, which emerged later, and the Commune is nothing else but the expression of the demands from below, an expression of living collectively. It’s a form or organizing that avoids getting caught up in the new state – because the state is an apparatus of oppression, of one class over another. In the case of Venezuela, the bourgeois state has its apparatus, and the proletarian state has its apparatus. But in the Commune, neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian state exists, but rather the people themselves, living in common and harmony with the Pachamama (mother earth) and ourselves. This is the dream, which demonstrates that another world is possible.

JW and SS: How does the Commune maintain this independence, this autonomy, from the state?

HM: To begin with, for me, autonomy means the purest expression of individualism, even though Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists with the best kind of theoretical framework used this idea. Look, autonomy is ‘auto’ and ‘auto’ is one person. I therefore believe more in independence and sovereignty than autonomy. Our independence and our sovereignty requires that I recognize you and you recognize me, and that neither of us rises above the other. Rather, we recognize each other, we respect each other, and we work toward consensus. If we don’t try to work toward consensus amongst each other, we don’t respect each other. If you’re only worried about yourself, your autonomy, there we have individualism, which negates everything we’re trying to do. Individualism, as such, is the negation of life itself, the negation of our dreams.

I understand that, for now, we need the state. But to the extent that the revolution advances it will require social articulation, that expands, eventually encompassing Europe, Africa, North America, and the state in such a process will ultimately be nothing but a trap.

JW and SS: Can you speak about what has happened with the initiative to develop Empresas de Producción Social (Social Production Enterprises, EPS)?

HM: This experience in its entirety never had the necessary force behind it, to be the authentic seed of our dreams, to produce a distinct form of production. Because what did the bureaucracy, bureaucratism, or the ‘Red Right’ do [editors’ note: bureaucrats who pretend to be Chavistas but are ideologically conservative]? It destroyed and corrupted this initiative. This experience that everyone from below was supporting and attempting to participate in was destroyed. The idea was that in the first instance, the producers themselves, the workers of the enterprise would control the EPS and secondly, decisions about what would be produced would be made through the Commune, and the government itself.

But what happened? An exclusive relationship developed between the government and the Commune that ignored the community, which disallowed active participation of the people of the community. And so the communities themselves never controlled the EPS and never enjoyed the fruits of their labour. Production has to be collective and distributed to the people in its entirety; otherwise it’s just another farce. The ethic of each person contributing according to their capacities, and receiving according to their needs, has to be the basis of production all the way to the highest levels, in the production of oil, iron, and so on. This is what social production should mean, and as such it would transform Venezuela, authentically, into an example for the world, to achieve something that’s never been achieved. In 1936, the Spanish in Catalonia began to live like this, but it didn’t last. If it didn’t last in 1936 in Spain, it must be realized in the Venezuela of today, to become the most genuine expression of the dream to transform society.

But we encounter internal enemies within the Bolivarian process, when we attempt to move toward such social production, alongside external enemies, and the obstacle of our own consciousness. The last of these is an especially serious problem for turning toward real social production. But I know that we can do it. This kind of production can be constructed. But this isn’t a problem of Caracas, this isn’t even a problem of Venezuela, this is a problem that faces humanity as such, a problem for all nations. The problems facing Italy, Greece, Spain, and others at the moment, for example, require the transcendence of liberalism, the socialization of production. We need more and more people to assume this struggle, to experiment and to learn how to socialize production. And this means going much beyond what you asked me in your question, beyond the EPS idea. We need to multiply this idea, and to have more and more people involved.

JW and SS: Since 2005, Chávez has employed the rhetoric of Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. From your perspective, what does this kind of socialism signify?

HM: I share the idea of twenty-first century socialism with Chávez up to a certain point, with some reservations. What are my reservations? First of all, transnational and national corporations continue to control production in Venezuela, and how is the bourgeoisie going to produce socialism? This is a lie. But I understand the posture of the government, in its attempt to push this agenda forward. And there are confrontations with the bourgeoisie, between the government and the bourgeoisie.

We require technical assistance and knowledge, in engineering, architecture, sociology, anthropology, but we need to put these disciplines at the service of the people, rather than placing the people at the service of these disciplines, which is still the situation here in Venezuela. The socialist community, the Bolivarian Revolution, has made some advances, but very tiny advances toward socialism, through the community councils, and popular movements. But private enterprise continues to control 80 per cent of production, the inverse of what it should be by now.

So the socialist community in Venezuela doesn’t always use this discourse of twenty-first century socialism, but insists instead that transnational corporations – whether they are from China, Belorussia, or wherever, are nothing but transnational corporations seeking profits. They’re savage capitalist enterprises, and nothing else. They pursue profit. So the question is how to really break with all of this, and how to assume control of things.

JW and SS: What is the importance of the political transformations in the rest of the region in the Bolivarian process?

HM: The international oligarchy is opposed to the process that is taking place in Venezuela. The importance of the process in Venezuela is that the transformation is social, about the people; it is not just an economic transformation. Chavez is the spokesperson for this process, also various Ministers and people who work in the state. This tendency is growing and continues to grow. Lately, the bourgeoisie in other parts of the region such as Uruguay and Paraguay have benefited from the process in Venezuela, and they declare their allegiance to this battle cry but have benefited from moving toward the centre. The real conversation, however, is taking place between people in their neighbourhoods, in their organizations; the conversation begins and ends here. It is the only way that the myth of living in peace in capitalism can be exposed as just that, a myth, and that peace will become a reality. It is impossible to live in harmony under capitalism, because all capitalism cares about is how to reproduce itself. All capitalists care about is profit. When we are demonstrating that another world is possible, that another logic is possible, capitalism’s myth of progress and happiness is revealed as such.

JW and SS: What steps has your barrio taken to unite the popular forces and overcome the divisions of race and gender, etc.?

HM: I will answer this question by talking about gender. This problem has been relatively easy to overcome because the majority of participants who run the popular organizations are women. So it is women who are creating the political world, while the men collaborate economically. Women are reclaiming their sovereignty, the sovereignty that they have always had. But it appears to me, that the problem is really about class. After all, Margaret Thatcher is a woman but she reproduces a discourse of capital. Indeed, what is really messing us up is capital. We need to produce differently. The problem of capital is not just a problem of women or men; it is a problem of class.

JW and SS: People talk a lot about the problem of security. What have been the popular strategies to confront this problem?

HM: This question makes me laugh – the question of security. Why does it make me laugh? The majority of the victims of violence are poor people, the proletariat. How do you explain the fact that there is always theft? It is the product of a country that maintains the logic of capitalism. Venezuela is looking to move toward creating a different system. For now, however, you will find more police stations in the wealthy districts of Caracas, such as in the shopping malls, but no police stations in the marginal barrios. The problem of violence is diminishing with greater social equality. Before Chavez was elected, there was a high level of poverty of 40-50% of the population; now it is only 18-20%. The poor people now have food to eat thanks to the social programs. The Bolivarian Revolution has invested billions of dollars in social programs.

JW and SS: What is the importance of the presidential elections to take place on October 7, 2012?

HM: The opposition knows that we have them beat 7 to 3. They have no chance. I will give you an example. The opposition decided not to participate in previous elections, as in 2004 when the PPT, the MAS, etc… all withdrew from the electoral process. One of the good things that Chavez is doing is registering all the citizens of the country so that they can vote. There are still important struggles taking place. We must remember the fact that there are over 1,500 peasants who have died in the struggle for land in the past years. 400 people from the urban land committees have also died in the struggle for land. Politicians have also been killed. We are still saying that, ‘This is democracy.’ It is still important to see the revolution from this perspective. •

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Red October: Left Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Haymarket, 2012).

Susan Spronk teaches international development at the University of Ottawa. She is a research associate with the Municipal Services Project and has published various articles on working-class formation and water politics in Latin America.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

We offer comprehensive information and analysis on this important issue—

(1) By Stephen Gowans, what’s left

Professing grave concern over Syria’s escalating violence, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday demanded that “all in Syria immediately and visibly commit to ending violence.”

This would be all to the good except that the General Assembly’s idea of what constitutes “all in Syria” and what it means by “ending violence” amounts to one side in the civil war (the Republic) laying down its arms unilaterally, while President Assad steps down and cedes his authority to an interim government approved by the “international community,” which is to say, the very same countries that are furnishing the rebels with arms, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, territory from which to launch attacks, salaries for fighters, lucre to induce government officials to defect, and propaganda.

The resolution is hardly a plea for peace. It’s a demand that the Republic capitulate. (NB: Russia and China along with a dozen other nations denounced the resolution. See addendum below.) Significantly, the resolution’s sponsor, Saudi Arabia, is the rebels’ main arms supplier. No wonder the Bolivian representative to the UN was moved to declare that the aim of the text is not to assist the Syrian population, but to ‘defeat Damascus’.” “Anybody who doesn’t believe that needs only read it,” he said.

Indeed, the text is perfectly clear: peace means regime change and regime change means peace.

“Rapid progress on a political transition,” the General Assembly said is “the best opportunity” to resolve the conflict peacefully. That is: peace equals Assad stepping down. Or, peace, yes, but on the rebels’, which is to say, the United States’, terms. And UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon, echoing US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, has underscored the equating of peace with Assad’s departure, defining “political transition” as a necessary condition of peace.

Importantly, the United States—whose efforts to eliminate Syria’s Arab nationalist government antedate the Arab Spring—opposes Assad, not because he is a “dictator” or “kills his own people” as the propaganda has it, but because his government has long charted a course on foreign and economic policy independent of Washington. Assad’s crime, in the view of Washington, is to have tried to privilege the Syrian population over the interests, both immediate and distal, of US banks and corporations.

Significantly, the resolution ignores the political and constitutional concessions the Syrian government has already made in what has turned out to be a fruitless attempt to engineer a peaceful settlement with an opposition that is hostile to peace. With Libya as a model for how a opposition with the backing of only part of the population need not negotiate with the government it opposes if it can enlist the support of the United States and Europe, the Syrian rebels have never had an incentive to sit down with Damascus and work out a modus vivendi. On the contrary, all the incentives are on the side of an intransigent commitment to violent overthrow of the government. The overthrow comes about as a result of the support in arms and political and propaganda backing the United States and its allies provide, and therefore is effectively authored in Washington, but attributed, for political and propaganda purposes, to the rebels’ own efforts. Having the US State Department, CIA and Pentagon on your side can more than adequately make up for the deficiency of failing to win the support of significant parts of the population.

The General Assembly’s text demands that “the first step in ending the violence must be made by the Syrian authorities,” who are called upon to withdraw their troops. It is highly unlikely that a US ally would ever be called upon to withdraw its troops in the face of an armed insurrection. This is a standard reserved exclusively for communist, socialist, and economic nationalist governments—those whose commitment to self-directed, independent development runs counter to the unrestrained profit-making of US banks and corporations. No international body has ever seriously demanded that Saudi Arabia refrain from violence in putting down rebellions in its eastern provinces, or that Bahrain—home to the US Fifth Fleet—cease its use of violence to extinguish its own, local, eruption of the Arab Spring (a military action against civilians ably assisted by Saudi tanks.) Asking Damascus to unilaterally lay down its arms is a demand for capitulation, disguised as a desire for peace.

Parenthetically, the uprisings in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are regularly depicted in the Western media as “Shia” and backed by Shia Iran and therefore sectarian, not as popular democratic movements against tyrannical monarchies. By contrast, the Syrian uprising, though having a strong sectarian content and being principally Sunni and supported by the Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the Sunni-dominated government of Turkey, is depicted as a democratic uprising against dictatorship, not sectarian.

The United States and Israel, in backing the General Assembly resolution, denounced Syria’s use of “heavy weapons, armour and the air forces against populated areas”—though Washington’s concern for using overwhelming military force against populated areas stops at Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Populated areas of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have felt the heavy hand of Israeli heavy weapons, armour and air force. And Turkey’s rulers—who allow their territory to be used by the rebels as a launching pad for attacks on Syria—continue to kill their own people in their longstanding war against Kurd nationalists.

Ban Ki-moon warned the Syrian government that its actions “might constitute crimes against humanity or war crimes, which must be investigated and the perpetrators held to account,” words he never uttered in connection with Nato’s assault on Libya nor Saudi Arabia’s and Bahrain’s use of violence to quell uprisings in their countries. Nor have his predecessors uttered similar words in connection with the United States’ and Israel’s frequent and undoubted crimes against humanity and war crimes. Moreover, Ban hasn’t warned Syria’s rebels that they too will be held to account for their crimes. (The Libyan rebels haven’t been.)

Thirteen countries opposed the resolution, almost all of them committed to independent self-directed development outside the domination of the United States. These include Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Against this axis of independence are the sponsors and chief backers of the resolution: the US-vassal Sunni petro-tyrannies—champions of a Sunni rebel movement that’s supposed to be (improbably) galvanized by democratic, not sectarian, ambitions—while the United States, its Nato allies, and Israel—authors of the gravest humanitarian tragedies of recent times, hypocritically profess concern over escalating violence in Syria. The resolution can hardly be seen as a genuine expression of humanitarian concern. It’s a demand for the Republic’s, which is to say, the non-sectarian Arab nationalists’, capitulation, disguised as a plea for peace, and a blatant taking of the imperialist side in a civil war.

Stephen Gowans is the founding editor of What’s Left, a leading Canadian political events column.

(2)
UN General Assembly targets Syria as US proxy war escalates
By Alex Lantier
4 August 2012

The UN General Assembly voted 133-12, with 31 abstentions, to endorse a resolution denouncing the Syrian government yesterday, as fighting escalated in the US-led proxy war in Syria. The vote was the focus of a massive propaganda campaign, aiming at placing blame for the bloody proxy war waged by the US and its European and Middle Eastern allies on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Having been blocked by Russian and Chinese vetoes at the UN Security Council from passing resolutions condemning Syria and giving a legal fig leaf for a US-led invasion, the US and its allies proceeded to organize a vote at the UN General Assembly.

The resolution effectively blamed Assad for the fighting, stating that “the first step in the cessation of violence has to be made by the Syrian authorities.” It denounced “the increasing use by the Syrian authorities of heavy weapons, including indiscriminate shelling from tanks and helicopters, and the failure to withdraw its troops and the heavy weapons to their barracks.”

This is nothing other than a demand that the Syrian government commit political suicide, by unilaterally disarming in the face of an international Islamist insurgency armed, financed, and organized by the US and its allies.

The vote came only days after reports emerged confirming that US President Barack Obama had previously signed a “finding” ordering US intelligence agencies to give covert aid to anti-Assad forces. It had already been widely reported that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming oppositional forces in Syria, which include a large number of foreign fighters recruited by Al Qaeda-affiliated groups. Their operations are directed from Adana, the site of the United States’ Incirlik air base in nearby Turkey.

Yesterday British Foreign Secretary William Hague confirmed that Britain is also giving covert support to anti-Assad forces. He said, “I do not ever comment on intelligence matters, but I can say that we are helping elements of the Syrian opposition, but in a practical and non-lethal way. We have helped them with communications of that kind, and we will help them more.”

Hague added that the British government aims to “isolate the Assad regime from its remaining associates, or friends, in the world.”
The UN General Assembly resolution also criticized the UN Security Council for its “failure” to act against Syria, in a barely veiled attack on Russia and China. They have voted against Security Resolutions criticizing Syria, fearing that such resolutions could allow Washington to openly attack Syria, the way NATO used UN resolution 1973 last year to justify its aggression in Libya. Both Russia and China voted against the resolution at the General Assembly.

With the lopsided General Assembly vote and its enthusiastic reception in the American and European press, the UN and the media functioned as lackeys of imperialism. Were it not for the deadly seriousness of the situation—the Syrian war alone has already cost over 10,000 lives, with 200,000 Syrians fleeing their country, and over 1 million turned into refugees inside Syria—the absurdity of the UN resolution would be laughable.

The UN resolution was drafted by the Saudi, Qatari, and Bahraini absolute monarchies. News reports presented the handiwork of these ultra-right Sunni-sectarian regimes, freshly covered in blood from their crushing of last spring’s mass protests in Bahrain, as part of a democratic US campaign to protect civilians from authoritarian governments!

Nor did anyone seek to explain what principles make the Assad regime’s use of heavy weapons in a proxy war with Washington more reprehensible than the Turkey’s bombings of Kurdish villages, as part of its long-standing military suppression of Turkey’s Kurdish minority.

All of these points are well known to the diplomats who gathered at the UN and voted for the resolution. One suspects that for many governments, their decision on how to vote was quickly settled by their financial dependence on US subsidies. The rest heeded the examples of heads of state who crossed Washington—Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, murdered in the streets of his bombed-out home town after being sodomized with a bayonet, or Assad, for whom the Washington Post recently predicted that the “only exit may be [a] body bag.”

In its slavish hypocrisy and propaganda, special mention must be reserved for the role of the American media, which is moving into full war mode. On Friday morning, the New York Times published a lead article by C.J. Chivers, which opened by declaring that “diplomatic efforts [are] dead and the future of Syria [is] playing out on the battlefield.” The announcement by Kofi Annan on Friday that he will resign as UN negotiator for Syria is seen as confirmation of the end to all negotiations with the Assad government.

The US media has enthusiastically endorsed the anti-Assad forces, even after it has been widely reported that Al Qaeda is active among them. This ranges from the sympathetic portrayal on last night’s ABC News show of anti-Assad youth, armed with Kalashnikovs and driven to fight by faith in Allah, to Chivers and the Times praising anti-Assad insurgents’ use of roadside bombs.
In the Orwellian world of American bourgeois politics, no one stops to ask how to resolve the crying contradiction between US policy in Syria and its claim it is fighting a “war on terror.”

If the media cannot answer or indeed even ask such questions, it is because the answer is too explosive: the “war on terror”—ostensibly the basis of US politics for over a decade—is a pack of lies. Washington makes or breaks de facto alliances with Al Qaeda purely based on the cynical calculation of its imperialist interests.

Why is Washington fighting Assad and backing the brutal regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai? The answer has nothing to with democracy or a fight against Islamist terrorism. It is that the US and its allies have first pickings of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth and enjoy the advantages of controlling its highly strategic location. Syria, however, is as an ally of Iran and Russia. It is considered a threat to Israel and, more broadly, to US hegemony in the Middle East.

As a result, the anti-Assad forces are lionized by US officials and the media, even as reports emerge of their hostility to the Syrian population and their mass killings of political opponents.

Thus yesterday Abu Ahmed, an official in the Syrian town of Azaz near the Turkish border, told Reuters: “The Free Syrian Army is causing us headaches now. If they don’t like the actions of a person, they tie him up, beat him, and arrest him. Personality differences between brigade members are being settled using kidnappings and force.”

A widely circulated video also appeared on YouTube showing the interrogation of Ali Zein al-Abidine Berri, a pro-Assad leader of an Aleppo clan who was captured by anti-Assad forces. The video shows him, his arm bandaged and his mouth bloodied, answering questions and shielding himself with his arms. He was reportedly executed after the interrogation.
____
Alex Lantier is a senior political analyst with WSWS.ORG.

 

ADDENDUM
BBC News/ Middle East
Russia says UN vote undermines peace efforts in Syria

Barbara Plett
BBC UN correspondent

Russia has said a resolution on Syria passed by the UN General Assembly undermines peace efforts there, as fighting continues on the ground. Moscow’s UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters the resolution was one-sided and supported the armed opposition.

Western nations praised the resolution, which passed by 133 votes to 12 with 31 abstentions. It criticises both the UN’s own Security Council and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The assembly debated the resolution, which was proposed by Saudi Arabia, shortly after the resignation of UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and the failure of his six-point peace plan.

In Syria, government forces backed by tanks launched a new assault in Damascus while shelling continued in the country’s largest city, Aleppo.

The resolution condemning the Syrian government and calling for a political transition is not legally binding, but its Arab and Western sponsors see the overwhelming “Yes” vote as proof that they have world opinion behind them, despite the deadlock in the Security Council, which they harshly criticised.

Even so, the massive majority came at a price: the text had to be watered down in an attempt to win over many states, dropping explicit calls for Bashar al-Assad to step down and for member states to support Arab League sanctions.

And even though the opposition was small, it again included China and Russia. Moscow opposed the resolution as unbalanced, making clear that it believes the UN is taking one side in a civil war. So the General Assembly intervention will do nothing to bridge the fundamental divides in the Security Council, and may widen them.

Activists say more than 20,000 people – mostly civilians – have died in 17 months of unrest.

‘Strong message’
Russia voted “no” on Friday along with China, Syria, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Burma, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Among those states abstaining were India and Pakistan.

Mr Churkin told the UN that the Saudi-drafted resolution concealed “blatant support for the armed opposition”.

He said his country regretted the resolution which “only aggravates confrontational approaches to the resolution of the Syrian crisis, doing nothing to facilitate dialogue between the parties”.  It was “written as if no armed opposition existed at all”, he added.

Mr Churkin pointed out that the resolution called on the UN envoy to work towards a transition to democracy in Syria, yet the envoy’s task had been to arrange dialogue, not regime change.

Chinese deputy UN ambassador Wang Min said pressuring Syria’s government would “cause further escalation of the turmoil” and allow the crisis to spread to neighbouring countries.

Russia and China have blocked three attempts in the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against Damascus.
Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, suggested Saudi Arabia and fellow resolution sponsor Qatar were trying to act as both “a fireman and an arsonist at the same time”.

The resolution expresses “grave concern” at the escalation of violence in Syria and deplores “the failure of the Security Council to agree on measures to ensure the compliance of Syrian authorities with its decisions”.

It says it is up to the Syrian government to take the “first step in the cessation of violence”.

Susan Rice, the US envoy at the UN, welcomed the passing of the resolution. The UN General Assembly “sent a strong message today: the overwhelming majority of nations stand with the people of Syria”, she wrote on Twitter.

Britain’s UN ambassador Sir Mark Lyall Grant said a “colossal majority” had supported the resolution.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said: “This resolution… sends a clear signal that the world stands together in condemning the Syrian regime’s systematic human rights violations and in calling for accountability.”

During the assembly’s session, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the conflict in Syria had become a “proxy war” and called on powers to overcome their rivalries in an effort to end the violence.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

The reality of meat-eating

By Benjamin Abelow, M.D.
New Marlborough, Massachusetts

A recent lead story in The Berkshire Eagle on the ammonia-treated hamburger filler known as “pink slime” drew attention to the integrity of our food supply [“Meat markets’ pink boon,” April 4, 2012]. But as consumers, we need to ask a basic question: Where does hamburger come from and, ethically or otherwise, is pink slime really any worse than the meat itself?

I recently spent time with calves on a Berkshire dairy farm. The experience was unusual, in that I got to know the calves well and personally. For six months, I visited up to four times a week, in some cases starting on the day of birth. I formed close bonds with some of the calves.

I learned that calves are warm and gentle creatures with distinct personalities. When happy, they sometimes kick up their rear legs like a foal. They express affection and show courage.

I witnessed a calf standing watch over a dying mate in a cold and dark barn. I saw another calf trying to escape her tiny pen by boldly—yet impossibly—attempting to hurdle a high fence. She failed, and ended up leaping painfully, face first, into the fence. I saw another calf slowly drop to her forelegs, deliberately lowering herself into the layer of feces and mud that covered the floor of her dank enclosure. She spent several minutes trying vainly to push herself under the metal gate that held her captive. When she stood up, filth was smeared on her torso and face.

On most commercial farms, calves are permanently separated from their mothers—some are literally dragged away—within a day of birth. They pine for their mothers and their mothers pine for them. Some of the calves become despondent. More than a few die. The male calves, which have no role in a dairy operation, are shipped off. Many are reared for veal—isolated, tightly confined, utterly alone—and killed at a few months of age.

Those females who survive to maturity endure their own particular nightmare. They are artificially inseminated on a scientifically determined schedule and have their own calves repeatedly taken away. They spend most of their lives crowded together in a small, cement world. Through breeding, tightly managed impregnation cycles, special feeds, intensive milking, and sometimes artificial growth hormones, these cows are driven to produce many times more milk than they would for their own calves. Some develop mastitis or arthritis and live in chronic pain.

The intense lactation exhausts the cows quickly. In four or five years—about a quarter of their natural lifespan—their milk slows. Their purpose served, the cows are now worth more dead than alive and so are taken to slaughter. Smelling the blood of those who came before them, they are stunned with a bolt gun, have their throats slit, and are ground up for hamburger and processed meats. Yes, this is the source of most hamburger we eat: frightened, spent dairy cows who started life as gentle and playful creatures longing for their mothers.

Is the ammonia used to make pink slime any worse than the antibiotics and hormones that are often given these cows? Is the meat that we use for ordinary hamburger ultimately any less horrific than the leftover butchering scraps that are used to make the filler?

I have focused here on calves because I know them best, but the suffering of other farm animals is equally acute. Think of times you’ve accidentally stepped on the foot of your cat or dog—and how they reacted. Now think of a piglet being castrated and having its tail cut off without anesthetic—standard practice on most pig farms.

The scope of the disaster we inflict on sentient farm animals is almost beyond imagining—incomparably worse than any “tooth and claw” they might experience in nature. Each year in the U.S., over nine billion farm animals, including 150 million mammals, are killed for food. These numbers come from the USDA. The situation has much in common with slavery, with a gulag, with a concentration camp. The scale is infinitely more vast than anything humans have ever done to other humans.

Animal products are not necessary for a healthy diet. This means we do all this for nothing more important than a personal taste preference. In fact, these food preferences contribute to rampant cardiovascular disease and cancer.

If you are moved by the plight of these animals, keep feeling. Bring your behavior into accord with your empathy and your ethics. Educate yourself. Adjust your lifestyle. Perhaps you will wish to start spreading the word yourself. If you stop eating animal products, you will save dozens of feeling animals every year from intensely painful lives and terrible deaths. You don’t need to do this all at once. Start gradually. If you eat half as many animals, you will cause half as much suffering.

To learn more, watch the 12-minute film narrated by Paul McCartney at Meat.org. Or watch the equally good short video at MeatVideo.com, narrated by James Cromwell. These mini-documentaries are graphic and hard to watch but are necessary to see if we wish to understand the consequences of our diet and farming practices.

Or read a book. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is one of many volumes on the subject that helps communicate what it really means to eat hamburger and other animal products.

Benjamin Abelow, M.D.
New Marlborough, Massachusetts
_____________________________________________________________

Cruel Cuts – Illegal Slaughter Exposed in Los Angeles

Courtesy of Mercy for Animals
Hidden-camera footage obtained by Mercy For Animals has led to the arrest of Roberto Celedon for three felony and 10 misdemeanor criminal charges related to his illegal slaughter operation in Los Angeles County, California. The shocking video evidence shows animals being violently pinned down, having their throats crudely sawed open, and slowly bleeding to death.

Celedon was also cited for numerous violations of the California Food and Agriculture Code for operating without a license. He not only subjected animals to needless cruelty and suffering, but also failed to meet building and sanitation standards required by California law.

During a raid of the facility, Los Angeles County Animal Control officers seized dozens sick,injured and emaciated animals. These animals are now being rehabilitated at The Gentle Barn, a sanctuary for farmed animals in California. MFA praises law enforcement for its swift and decisive action in pursuing justice in this important case.

This case graphically illustrates the cruel, inhumane and illegal abuses that farmed animals are all too often subjected to in California and across the nation. In a civilized society, it is our moral obligation to protect all animals, including animals raised and killed for food, from needless cruelty and suffering.

Read more:
• Undercover investigations group Mercy for Animals to go international
• Backyard butcher reports to serve time

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

Chris Marsden. WSWS.ORG

The Olympic Games bring together the finest sportsmen and sportswomen in the world. No one who follows the various events can fail to be moved by the spectacular displays of athleticism and physical prowess of the competitors. The apparently superhuman character of their achievements is in reality proof of the contrary—the tremendous potentialities of the human race.

Major sporting matches, however, are inevitably coloured by broader economic, social and political factors, and none more so than this, the premier global event. There has never been a “golden age” of the Olympics and there is no justification for doe-eyed complaints about the betrayal of the Olympics’ “ideals” and “spirit” at this late stage.

It is over a hundred years since Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the games. He did so based not merely on a belief that organised sport was a source of individual “moral and social strength,” but that physical education would better prepare [French] men to fight and win wars.

The games have ever since been refracted through the prism of nationalism and national antagonisms, most famously in the failed attempt by Hitler to utilise the 1936 Olympics as a demonstration of Aryan prowess. For most of the post-Second World War era, the Games were an arena in which the Cold War between US imperialism and the Soviet Union was fought by proxy—including the tit-for-tat boycotts of 1980 and 1984.

Even when viewed against the backdrop of this history, the past quarter century distinguishes itself for the ever more malevolent presence of nationalism and commercialism in successive Olympics.

Gold, silver and bronze medals that should be symbols of individual and collective sacrifice, dedication and attainment have long been aggregated and utilised as marks of national superiority. But this distortion has been reinforced by the grotesque amounts of corporate money invested in sport. Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 were benchmarks in the commercialisation of the games, bringing with it ever higher staging costs and admission prices.

With London 2012, the baleful impact of the social, political and cultural impasse of contemporary capitalism on sport finds its most pronounced expression. Alongside stunning performances, we have seen more than a dozen athletes disqualified for illegal drug use. Another two, Greece’s Pareskevi Papahristou and Switzerland’s Michel Morganella, were kicked out for posting racist messages on social networking sites.

The games have also witnessed a match-throwing scandal, involving female badminton doubles teams from China, Indonesia and South Korea who were disqualified for deliberately losing points in their final group matches so as to secure a favourable draw in the next round.

The image of rows of empty seats continues to be a feature. At least 275,000 tickets remain unsold, including 200,000 soccer tickets. This is because many working people have been priced out of an event that has been dedicated instead to corporate junketing—including £2,012 tickets for the opening ceremony and £655 and £1,500 tickets for the close. Even less prominent events charge ludicrous sums for standard tickets—£65 for beach volleyball, £75 for women’s archery, £125 for men’s weight-lifting.

Commercial sponsors have shelled out £1.4 billion in expectation of vast returns. This is on top of the sponsorship of teams and individual athletes by the sports companies, energy drink manufacturers, et al, which ratchets up the pressure to secure medals. Sponsorship of athletes is the main reason for the ongoing plague of performance enhancing drugs.

Then there is the blanket use of Olympic symbolism in advertising, with adverts for patriotic Union flag nappies and Olympic-themed tampons among the most bizarre.

The most disturbing and significant feature of London 2012 is that it takes place behind what the British Armed Forces describe as a “ring of steel”. A fly-past by the Red Arrows, and the Union and Olympic flags being raised by members of the armed forces in the opening ceremony were reminders of the extraordinary militarisation of these games.

At a cost well in excess of £1 billion, 49,000 uniformed personnel, including 17,000 troops, have been mobilized to guard the games in the largest single mobilization of British security forces since the 1956 Suez crisis. Also deployed are the carrier HMS Ocean, fighter planes, attack helicopters and surface-to-air missiles. Not to be outdone, the US sent personnel from the CIA, FBI and other agencies to guard its athletes, police airport customs checkpoints, and establish a “threat integration center” in the US embassy.

This cannot be explained as a response to a perceived terrorist threat. London appears like a city under occupation. The global elite have descended on London to party and do business deals, and the city has been handed over to them as a virtual fiefdom. It is London’s residents—those who will foot the bill for the games even as their lives are blighted by hardship, poverty and unemployment—rather than Islamic fundamentalists whom the oligarchy considers to be a threat.

The government and the state forces have determined that the lower orders will be kept away from the proceedings and there will be no political protest or incident involving a VIP to sully the capital’s reputation as a financial and commercial centre.

The World Socialist Web Site has already drawn attention in a previous perspective column to the official claim that the Olympic spirit seeks to “place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity,” along with “social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”

No sporting activity could fulfill such a mandate. But today more than ever, it is not sport that must promote the development of humankind, but the further development of humankind and its social organization that must save sport.

Sport should belong to and be enjoyed by everyone. But, like so much else, it is appropriated and controlled by the ruling elite and denied to those who cannot afford to pay, and in the process distorted and degraded.

Every aspect of human endeavour—not just athletic, but artistic, scientific and intellectual—is threatened by and militates against the stultifying constraints of the profit system. What is intrinsically a noble and life-affirming pursuit of excellence is cheapened by being made to function as a mechanism for giant corporations and the super rich to add to their bank balances and promote nationalism.

_____________________

Chris Marsden is a senior cultural and political affairs critic with WSWS.ORG.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

Our Rome correspondent Gaither Stewart has filed this little gem of an interview with the controversial author. We trust it will be of interest to many of our readers.—Ed

DATELINE (Gaither Stewart in Rome) When I interviewed Gore Vidal in October, 1983, in his penthouse apartment on Largo (Piazza) Argentina in the very center of Rome, he related the time a lady from the New York Times asked as her first question: “Mr. Vidal, you really hate the United States, don’t you.” He answered: “No, I hate the New York Times.”

Like the time, he recalled, he was introduced on an NBC television show as “the outrageous Gore Vidal”, he stopped the show when he asked why outrageous. “Ronald Reagan is outrageous,” he replied.

During the over two hours we spoke about politics and literature which I recorded on tape, Vidal never once minced his words or resorted to niceties toward anyone or anything. Forever irreverent as was his nature.

From the huge transcript, I fashioned articles subsequently published in various European leftwing newspapers and magazines, including L’Unità, the official daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, De Morgen, the major Belgian Socialist daily in Gent, The Haagse Post, an Amsterdam leftwing weekly, and others I no longer recall.

We tried sitting on his terrace overlooking Piazza Argentina and the ruins of four Roman temples but the noise from the late Sunday afternoon traffic was so deafening we soon retired to the huge salon. Yet this apartment that he had owned for 20 years, he called his retreat, reserved for work—reading and writing and thinking. The only reason he agreed to the interview here was because I lived in Rome.

American artists were all over a cheap Europe in the early post-war period. And they all passed through Rome: that catastrophic driver Tennessee Williams, writer and composer Paul Bowles, William Styron, Normal Mailer and Saul Bellow. Here on the loud Rome piazza he wrote his famous Myra Breckenbridge. Though the figure of Gore Vidal that Sunday loomed larger than expected against the reflections of the flashing lights from the heart of Rome below us, I had the thought that we could just as well have been in New York or his beloved California.

Rather than try to reconstruct the interview, I have recalled here some of his chief political points, familiar to older readers, but most likely new to the younger generation, which Vidal describes as a ‘non-reading generation.’ Surprisingly, most of his words of nearly 30 years ago ring quite contemporary today.

“American leaders never deal with real political and social problems. The Founding Fathers feared most of all democracy and monarchy and saw to it that we could never have either. We should scrap the Constitution and start over. It is only a document to protect property owners while America has the weakest union movement in the Western world, with only 20% of workers organized. I attack the system that has done this to the American people. Meanwhile we should get rid of both the New York Times and the Constitution.

“On the other hand the people are not concerned about real problems either. Americans don’t vote, while corporations select and pay for the politicians and get the Senators and Presidents they pay for. They function like Italy’s mafia that buys its votes.

“The Left-Right classifications are complex. I have said I am a man of the Left. But I think we need a new definition of the Left and its goals and how they can be achieved. It’s a good thing for people to govern themselves but it must be explained how it can be done. We need a new document, a new analysis, a new synthesis of those goals.”

Gore Vidal, 30 years ago, saw literature in a grim situation. “In my visits to some 125 university campuses I have seen that literature has become something that is taught, not actually read. Literature is chiefly a subject of university study. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the universities preserved the best of our literary past, Instead, it is often a case of Professor x writing a book and Professor y teaching it in his classes. The university campus is not real life, but 90% of our writers are connected with universities.”

Punto Press Publishing.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.