Celebrating Independence from America in England

There Are Only 22 Countries in the World That the British Haven’t Invaded. Now the Brits have become an ignoble appendage of the American empire. Some are beginning to chafe under the weight of foreign hegemony.

By David Swanson
Remarks at Independence from America event outside Menwith Hill “RFA” (NSA) base in Yorkshire.
http://warisacrime.org/content/celebrating-independence-america-england

[F]irst of all, thank you to Lindis Percy and everyone else involved in bringing me here, and letting me bring my son Wesley along.

And thank you to the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. I know you share my view that accountability of American bases would lead to elimination of American bases.

And thank you to Lindis for sending me her accounts of refusing to be arrested unless the police disarmed themselves. In the United States, refusing any sort of direction from a police officer will get you charged with the crime of refusing a lawful order, even when the order is unlawful. In fact, that’s often the only charge levied against people ordered to cease protests and demonstrations that in theory are completely legal. And, of course, telling a U.S. police officer to disarm could quite easily get you locked up for insanity if it didn’t get you shot.

Can I just say how wonderful it is to be outside of the United States on the Fourth of July? There are many wonderful and beautiful things in the United States, including my family and friends, including thousands of truly dedicated peace activists, including people bravely going to prison to protest the murders by drone of others they’ve never met in distant lands whose loved ones will probably never hear about the sacrifices protesters are making. (Did you know the commander of a military base in New York State has court orders of protection to keep specific nonviolent peace activists away from his base to ensure his physical safety — or is it his peace of mind?) And, of course, millions of Americans who tolerate or celebrate wars or climate destruction are wonderful and even heroic in their families and neighborhoods and towns — and that’s valuable too.

I’ve been cheering during U.S. World Cup games. But I cheer for neighborhood, city, and regional teams too. And I don’t talk about the teams as if I’m them. I don’t say “We scored!” as I sit in a chair opening a beer. And I don’t say “We won!” when the U.S. military destroys a nation, kills huge numbers of people, poisons the earth, water, and air, creates new enemies, wastes trillions of dollars, and passes its old weapons to the local police who restrict our rights in the name of wars fought in the name of freedom. I don’t say “We lost!” either. We who resist have a responsibility to resist harder, but not to identify with the killers, and certainly not to imagine that the men, women, children, and infants being murdered by the hundreds of thousands constitute an opposing team wearing a different uniform, a team whose defeat by hellfire missile I should cheer for.

Identifying with my street or my town or my continent doesn’t lead the same places that identifying with the military-plus-some-minor-side-services that calls itself my national government leads. And it’s very hard to identify with my street; I have such little control over what my neighbors do. And I can’t manage to identify with my state because I’ve never even seen most of it. So, once I start identifying abstractly with people I don’t know, I see no sensible argument for stopping anywhere short of identifying with everybody, rather than leaving out 95% and identifying with the United States, or leaving out 90% and identifying with the so-called “International Community” that cooperates with U.S. wars. Why not just identify with all humans everywhere? On those rare occasions when we learn the personal stories of distant or disparaged people, we’re supposed to remark, “Wow, that really humanizes them!” Well, I’d like to know, what were they before those details made them humanized?

In the U.S. there are U.S. flags everywhere all the time now, and there’s a military holiday for every day of the year. But the Fourth of July is the highest holiday of holy nationalism. More than any other day, you’re likely to see children being taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, regurgitating a psalm to obedience like little fascist robots. You’re more likely to hear the U.S. national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. Who knows which war the words of that song come from?

That’s right, the War of Canadian Liberation, in which the United States tried to liberate Canadians (not for the first or last time) who welcomed them much as the Iraqis would later do, and the British burned Washington. Also known as the War of 1812, the bicentennial was celebrated in the U.S. two years ago. During that war, which killed thousands of Americans and Brits, mostly through disease, during one pointless bloody battle among others, plenty of people died, but a flag survived. And so we celebrate the survival of that flag by singing about the land of the free that imprisons more people than anywhere else on earth and the home of the brave that strip-searches airplane passengers and launches wars if three Muslims shout “boo!”

Did you know the U.S. flag was recalled? You know how a car will be recalled by the manufacturer if the brakes don’t work? A satirical paper called the Onion reported that the U.S. flag had been recalled after resulting in 143 million deaths. Better late than never.

There are many wonderful and rapidly improving elements in U.S. culture. It has become widely and increasingly unacceptable to be bigoted or prejudiced against people, at least nearby people, because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, and other factors. It still goes on, of course, but it’s frowned upon. I had a conversation last year with a man sitting in the shadow of a carving of confederate generals on a spot that used to be sacred to the Ku Klux Klan, and I realized that he would never, even if he thought it, say something racist about blacks in the United States to a stranger he’d just met. And then he told me he’d like to see the entire Middle East wiped out with nuclear bombs.

We’ve had comedians’ and columnists’ careers ended over racist or sexist remarks, but weapons CEOs joke on the radio about wanting big new occupations of certain countries, and nobody blinks. We have antiwar groups that push for celebration of the military on Memorial Day and other days like this one. We have so-called progressive politicians who describe the military as a jobs program, even though it actually produces fewer jobs per dollar than education or energy or infrastructure or never taxing those dollars at all. We have peace groups that argue against wars on the grounds that the military needs to be kept ready for other, possibly more important wars. We have peace groups that oppose military waste, when the alternative of military efficiency is not what’s needed. We have libertarians who oppose wars because they cost money, exactly as they oppose schools or parks. We have humanitarian warriors who argue for wars because of their compassion for the people they want bombed. We have peace groups that side with the libertarians and urge selfishness, arguing for schools at home instead of bombs for Syrians, without explaining that we could give actual aid to Syrians and ourselves for a fraction of the cost of the bombs.

We have liberal lawyers who say they can’t tell whether blowing children up with drones is legal or not, because President Obama has a secret memo (now only partially secret) in which he legalizes it by making it part of a war, and they haven’t seen the memo, and as a matter of principle they, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, ignore the U.N. Charter, the Kellogg Briand Pact, and the illegality of war. We have people arguing that bombing Iraq is now a good thing because it finally gets the U.S. and Iran talking to each other. We have steadfast refusals to mention a half-million to a million-and-a-half Iraqis based on the belief that Americans can only possibly care about 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq. We have earnest crusades to turn the U.S. military into a force for good, and the inevitable demand of those who begin to turn against war, that the United States must lead the way to peace — when of course the world would be thrilled if it just brought up the rear.

And yet, we also have tremendous progress. A hundred years ago Americans were listening to snappy tunes about how hunting Huns was a fun game to play, and professors were teaching that war builds national character. Now war has to be sold as necessary and humanitarian because nobody believes it’s fun or good for you anymore. Polls in the United States put support for possible new wars below 20 percent and sometimes below 10 percent. After the House of Commons over here said No to missile strikes on Syria, Congress listened to an enormous public uproar in the U.S. and said No as well. In February, public pressure led to Congress backing off a new sanctions bill on Iran that became widely understood as a step toward war rather than away from it. A new war on Iraq is having to be sold and developed slowly in the face of huge public resistance that has even resulted in some prominent advocates of war in 2003 recently recanting.

This shift in attitude toward wars is largely the result of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the exposure of the lies and horrors involved. We shouldn’t underestimate this trend or imagine that it’s unique to the question of Syria or Ukraine. People are turning against war. For some it may be all about the money. For others it may be a question of which political party owns the White House. The Washington Post has a poll showing that almost nobody in the U.S. can find Ukraine on a map, and those who place it furthest from where it really lies are most likely to want a U.S. war there, including those who place it in the United States. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Yet the larger trend is this: from geniuses right down to morons, we are, most of us, turning against war. The Americans who want Ukraine attacked are fewer than those believing in ghosts, U.F.O.s, or the benefits of climate change.

Now, the question is whether we can shake off the idea that after hundreds of bad wars there just might be a good one around the corner. To do that we have to recognize that wars and militaries make us less safe, not safer. We have to understand that Iraqis aren’t ungrateful because they’re stupid but because the U.S. and allies destroyed their home.

We can pile even more weight on the argument for ending the institution of war. These U.S. spy bases are used for targeting missiles but also for spying on governments and companies and activists. And what justifies the secrecy? What allows treating everyone as an enemy? Well, one necessary component is the concept of an enemy. Without wars nations lose enemies. Without enemies, nations lose excuses to abuse people. Britain was the first enemy manufactured by the would-be rulers of the United States on July 4, 1776. And yet King George’s abuses don’t measure up to the abuses our governments now engage in, justified by their traditions of war making and enabled by the sort of technologies housed here.

War is our worst destroyer of the natural environment, the worst generator of human rights abuses, a leading cause of death and creator of refugee crises. It swallows some $2 trillion a year globally, while tens of billions could alleviate incredible suffering, and hundreds of billions could pay for a massive shift to renewable energies that might help protect us from an actual danger.

What we need now is a movement of education and lobbying and nonviolent resistance that doesn’t try to civilize war but to take steps in the direction of abolishing it — which begins by realizing that we can abolish it. If we can stop missiles into Syria, there’s no magical force that prevents our stopping missiles into every other country. War is not a primal urge of nations that must burst out a little later if once suppressed. Nations aren’t real like that. War is a decision made by people, and one that we can make utterly unacceptable.

People in dozens of countries are now working on a campaign for the elimination of all war called World Beyond War. Please check out WorldBeyondWar.org or talk to me about getting involved. Our goal is to bring many more people and organizations into a movement not aimed at a specific war proposal from a specific government, but at the entire institution of war everywhere. We’ll have to work globally to do this. We’ll have to throw our support behind the work being done by groups like the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases and the Movement for the Abolition of War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Veterans For Peace and so many more.

Some friends of ours in Afghanistan, the Afghan Peace Volunteers, have proposed that everyone living under the same blue sky who wants to move the world beyond war wear a sky blue scarf. You can make your own or find them at TheBlueScarf.org. I hope by wearing this to communicate my sense of connection to those back in the United States working for actual freedom and bravery, and my same sense of connection to those in the rest of the world who have had enough of war. Happy Fourth of July!

David Swanson wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War

The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War

Just blame Putin: a lot easier than telling the truth.

By Eric Zuesse

Obama wants to whack both Russia and China, to serve America’s aristocrats, who benefit enormously from the dollar’s being the global reserve currency.

When the Cold War ended, in 1990, Russia was in a very weak position, no real threat at all (except for nuclear weapons, but the nuclear rivalry had been greatly reduced via arms-control agreements). Communism was proven to have failed as an economic system, and this failure of communism had left a former U.S.S.R. that was decayed and unproductive. The Russian people were in misery. Alcoholism, which was historically a huge problem among Russian men, and which kept Russia’s overall life-expectancy figures remarkably low, was rampant.Here, courtesy of Trading Economics, is a chart showing the longevity of Russian men (the main victims of alcoholism), during the period from 1980 to 2010 (Russia’s transition out of communism, and into capitalism):

As you can see, there was a burst of progress at the end, right before 1986, when the fading regime merely relaxed controls (while it started a campaign against alcohol-consumption) and didn’t go into capitalism, but this progress mildly reversed during the reign of the liberal Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985-1991, and it sharply plunged during 1991-1994, which was the period of the libertarian Boris Yeltsin’s privatization of Russian industries. Russia’s climb-back, after that libertarian surge, was brief, ending in 1998, and Russia still hasn’t yet improved itself beyond the Soviet era. Communism had certainly failed there, but capitalism also failed there — or at least the capitalism that Russia tried did, and this capitalism was designed for them by the Harvard economics department, the capitalist world’s dominant economics department: it was mainstream economic theory being put into practice in a non-capitalist economy, capitalist theory being introduced where there had been no capitalism before. The same economic theory that a decade later would produce the 2008 global economic crash was being applied in Russia during 1991-1998, and it did not get Russia out of the doldrums.

The unspoken but universally recognized truth was that communism had failed, and that the Cold War had been won by the capitalist nations of the OECD (U.S., Western Europe, and Japan), not by any nations of the former Soviet Union.

There was no longer any doubt that Marxism was dead, and that it can never come back. As an ideology, its value had gone to zero. A few people (in places such as Cuba) still spout Marxism, but it’s actually finished, and there was in its wake within Russia only a kleptocratic form of capitalism, mainstream-economics “greed-is-good” corporatist or “fascist” economics, which, when introduced after communism, turned out to be hardly better than the communist regime itself was at its end. Though the 70-year Marxist experiment had definitely failed, Russia is still crippled by what Harvard designed and largely implemented in Russia to replace it. Since 2004 at the latest, Russia has been recovering from that form of “capitalism,” Harvard-economics capitalism, mainstream-economics capitalism.

Here, from p. 66 of Charles I. Jones, “What Every Leader Should Know About Macroeconomics”, is a chart showing the per-capita GDP of various nations, including Russia, as compared to the U.S. (=100%), from 1990-2010:

Measured in this way, purely economically, Russia started recovering earlier, in 1998, rather than in 2004. Perhaps there was a six-year delay in the impact of the improving economy showing up in the public’s improved health. As you can see from this graph, Russia went down during 1990-1998 (the era of the Harvard-run reforms), and has been edging back up ever since, toward the percentage now it had had at the very end of the Soviet Union. Growth at that rate, since 1998, makes them an economic threat to the U.S., long-term — a threat to continued U.S. global dominance, this time an economic threat, which it never seriously was before, but still not necessarily a military threat, which is a different matter.

If you want to understand why Russia was hobbled during 1990-1998, that’s explained in two excellent articles, one (brief) from Mark Ames in November 2008 titled variously “The Summers Conundrum” and “Larry Summers: A Suicidal Choice” (that latter referring to Obama’s committing his Administration to suicide by appointing Summers to lead Obama’s economic team), and the other (very lengthy) from David McClintick in February 2006, titled “How Harvard lost Russia.” Basically, it’s the story of how Harvard’s leading economists engineered the creation of Russia’s kleptocracy, or fascism, and how it hurt Russia. Russia’s switch to fascist or “crony” capitalism (the thing that Mark Ames feared then from Obama) was planned and masterminded first by Jeffrey Sachs in 1990-1991, then by the Russian-born Harvardian Andrei Shleifer in 1991-1997, who was the protege of Lawrence Summers, who had been the protege of Martin Feldstein, who had been the Chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, at the time (the 1980s) when “Greed is good” first became publicly and proudly the Republican Party’s ideology (subsequently to be championed with such phrases as, “Drill, baby, drill!”). Feldstein-clone Summers sent his man Shleifer, a native Russian-speaker, into Russia, during 1991, to take over the process from his previous man Jeffrey Sachs, who had introduced economic “shock therapy” in Poland the prior year, in 1990, and then run it for a year in Russia. Sachs and then Shleifer applied to Russia the “greed-is-good” economic theory that’s taught worldwide under the aegis of Adam Smith’s beneficent “invisible hand,” and that in the U.S. dominates the Republican Party, both ideologically and in practice, and that dominates the Democratic Party only at its very top, Presidential, level in actual practice, though not in the Democratic Party’s rhetoric, because the view that “Greed is good” had been condemned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, and it rabidly violates the Democratic Party’s egalitarian basic principles, which were established by FDR and his “New Deal”; and FDR’s ideology had dominated this entire country until Reagan’s “Greed is good” ideology came in after 1980 and replaced the progressive post-FDR-era with the conservative post-Reagan-era. Anyway, those two articles, about the Harvard operation in Russia, document a deeply corrupt economics profession (corrupt at its very top), and the application of its similarly corrupt “free market” economic theory, to Russia, as a form of supposed “aid” from the “West,” which was tragically invited into Russia at the very time when Russia was trying to recover from the clear and disastrous failure of communism.

The bottom line is that the economics of fascism wasn’t much, if at all, better than the economics of communism; and, so, the Russian economy kept on plunging, while the Harvard plan was being put into place there. Afterwards, and clearly after 2004, Russian growth has more closely mimicked the stellar growth in the Chinese economy, which never subjected itself so fully to the Harvard, or “capitalist,” economic system, and thus never experienced the “capitalist” (actually fascist capitalist) failure that Russia experienced during 1990-1998.

If you look at those trend-lines, both for Russia and for China, after 1998, they could cross America’s in per-capita GDP, within 20 to 30 years. This would mean the end of the dollar’s being the international reserve currency, within merely a few decades; and the consequence of that happening would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy, which benefits enormously from having the planet’s standard currency for international business transactions. That’s because it would mean the end of “the American Century,” the era of the dollar. For example, without the dollar as the global-exchange currency, the ability of the U.S. Federal Reserve to carry out “Quantitative Easing” (“QE1,” “QE2,” etc.), or unlimited monetization of “toxic assets” at full value, simply would not exist. That’s just one of many economic-policy tools that are available only to the nation that “prints” the world’s reserve currency. Consequently, if and when the dollar-era ends, the U.S. economy will probably go into a tailspin unprecedented in U.S. history (since we never previously experienced the end of the era of dollar-domination, since we’re still in it). This would unwind many decades of pent-up corruption within the U.S. economy (the result of the “Greed is good” ideology), which would be suddenly cast aside by international investors, after decades of U.S. immunity, that protect this country against otherwise-basic economic realities (the realities that non-reserve-currency countries must face every day).

Furthermore, Russia post-2004 has undertaken to slash its astronomical alcoholism-rate. This recent program increases the economic threat to the aristocrats in the U.S. Here is a good graph from Britain’s The Lancet, 26 April 2014, “Alcohol and mortality in Russia”:

U.S. President Barack Obama is therefore very concerned to stop the rise of Russia and of China. They are now a national security threat to the U.S., because they present a threat to the continuation of the dollar’s being the world’s reserve currency. That threat is clear from just that second chart alone (“Per Capita GDP”). Understandably, Obama wants to whack both Russia and China, to serve America’s aristocrats, who benefit enormously from the dollar’s being the global reserve currency. Whereas the Chinese threat right now is primarily economic, the Russian “threat” right now is supposedly military (and that’s fictitious because our military bases surround Russia, and Russia’s military bases don’t surround the U.S.; it’s a “threat” purely in U.S.-aristocracy-controlled “news” media, pure propaganda); but if those trend-lines continue, the aristocracies in both Russia and China will become powerful competitors against the now-dominant aristocracy (roughly the top 0.001%), which is the aristocracy in the U.S., the aristocracy that controls the largest number of international corporations.

The Obama-pushed international-trade agreements, the Trans Pacific Partnership, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TPP and TTIP, are designed to tie or bind, respectively, Asia and Europe to the dollar, and to give U.S. international corporations, which is to say the largest chunk of the world’s aristocratic wealth, supranational control over national laws regarding labor, consumer protection, environment, and the regulation of foods and drugs. This U.S.-led mega-corporate control will also protect the dollar’s dominance. Russia and China might separate themselves from American economic theory, but they won’t present a serious threat unless they break the dominance of the dollar. It’s the wealth and power of the various nations’ respective aristocracies that’s driving this, not any ideology at all.

This also explains why the U.S. is encircling Russia with NATO members and weapons and U.S. military bases. Things like this are probably major factors of concern at secret private meetings of U.S. and EU aristocrats and their top agents, at the annual Bilderberg conferences; but, since those meetings are secret, one cannot know. Among the attendees at both the 2013 and the 2014 meetings were not only Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers, but Robert Rubin, Eric Schmidt, Peter Sutherland, Peter Thiel, James Wolfensohn, Robert Zoellick, David Petraeus, Richard Perl, George Osborne, Mario Monti, John Mickelthwait, Peter Mandelson, Christine Lagarde, Henry Kissinger, Klaus Kleinfeld, Alex Karp, James Johnson, Kenneth Jacobs, Carl Bildt, John Kerr, and Roger Altman. Even the husband-wife pair of Henry and Marie-Josee Kravis attended it during both of those latest years. There were no Russian oligarchs, and none from China, attending either meeting. Even the Japanese oligarchs are excluded. This cannot make them feel welcomed by the western oligarchs. Various western kings and queens are also regularly in attendance, but none from outside Europe. Also attending the 2013 conference were both Jeff Bezos and Donald Graham, the former of whom purchased a few months later the Washington Post from the latter. Also attending then: Peter Carrington, Manuel Barroso, and Timothy Geithner. Among the people not attending (or at least not publicly listed) in either year were: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, and any member of the family that owns Koch Industries, and of the family that controls Walmart. Attendance is by invitation only; and, among the many secret features of these meetings is the criteria for attendance. However, clearly: that particular oligarchic organization doesn’t even make a pretense at representing any aristocracy outside of the U.S. and Western Europe. Like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, and a few other such oligarchic organizations, the Bilderberg meetings have provided opportunities for aristocrats from more than merely a single nation to get to know each other and transact business together personally, outside the reach of the NSA, KGB, or any of the “news” media (most of which are themselves owned by oligarchs). The fates of the publics everywhere, and of war and peace, might be more determined by such meetings as these, than by “democratic” “elections” in any single country. Democracy, within nations as well as internationally, is so strongly “influenced” by aristocrats, so that it might be a PR sham to merely “legitimize” rank exploitation. Nobody outside the inside can possibly know. The very existence of such an “inside,” appears to be inconsistent with any authentic democracy existing anywhere. Putin himself expressed publicly at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos his view of the 2008 economic crash, and it clearly rejects the view that Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Eric Holder, Barack Obama, and the entire Obama Administration, have put into practice to deal with that crash and to prevent a recurrence of it. Only time will tell whether Russia under Vladimir Putin and his successors, whomever they will be, will perform better or worse than the U.S. under its oligarchs. The only news-medium that devoted any attention to the 2014 Bilderberg meeting was Britain’s Guardian.

In this context, the current civil war in Ukraine can be understood; but western “news” media present it as being instead a result of Putin’s supposed aggressive expansionist agenda for Russia, even though it was actually started by Barack Obama (backed up by Christine Lagarde of the IMF just a day before the May 2nd massacre in Odessa against the supporters of independence from Kiev). Putin has struck back against the fascism of Obama and the IMF, by making serious arrangements with China to ditch the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — their own assertion of independence from the West’s fascists. The movement for independence isn’t just within Ukraine, but is now (after the May 2ndmassacre) an international independence movement.

Here is how the great economist (one of the only two-dozen economists in the world who predicted in advance the economic crash of 2008and who explained what would cause it to occur) Michael Hudson described the Ukraine situation: “Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.”

This article is being submitted to all news-media; the ones whose owners (who hire the editors) don’t want the public to know the information it contains won’t publish it. (Those editors will reject it.) To find out which “news” media those are, just google the title of this article, “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War,” and it’ll be all the “news” media that don’t come up. Any that come up in such a search are informing the public about reality, not keeping them ignorant of it — because this article is about the reality, not about any mere myth. The subject here is the world as it actually is. It’s news, not propaganda.

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They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Liu’s Nobel Prize for Capitalism: Insights on today’s China

THREE VIEWS on Tiananmen and the nature of Chinese society
A DOSSIER / Third viewpoint

with 9 comments

By Stephen Gowans, Founding editor, What’s left
( Originally posted October 12, 2010)

Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has been hailed as a champion of human rights and democracy. His jailing by Chinese authorities for inciting subversion of the state is widely regarded as an unjust stifling of advocacy rights by a Chinese state intolerant of dissent and hostile to ”universal values”. But what Western accounts have failed to mention is that Charter 08, the manifesto Liu had a hand in writing and whose signing led to his arrest, is more than a demand for political and civil liberties. It is a blueprint for making over China into a replica of US society and eliminating the last vestiges of the country’s socialism. If Liu had his druthers, China would: become a free market, free enterprise paradise; welcome domination by foreign banks; hold taxes to a minimum; and allow the Chinese version of the Democrats and Republicans to keep the country safe for corporations, bankers and wealthy investors. Liu’s problem with the Communist Party isn’t that it has travelled the capitalist road, but that it hasn’t traveled it far enough, and has failed to put in place a politically pluralist republican system to facilitate the smooth and efficient operation of an unrestrained capitalist economy.

Liu taught literature at Columbia University as a visiting scholar, but decamped for his homeland in 1989 to participate in the Tiananmen Square protests, bringing with him the pro-imperialist values he imbibed in the United States. For his role in the protests—which ultimately aimed at toppling Communist Party-rule and promoting a US-style economic and political system–he served two years in prison.

Liu is committed to a pluralist political model and untrammelled capitalist system of the kind he witnessed firsthand in the United States. Charter 08, the Nobel committee, the US government, and the Western media have all anointed free markets, free enterprise, and multi-party representative democracy as “universal values”. The aim is to discredit any system that is at variance with capitalist democracy as being against universal values and therefore doomed to failure.

Liu served more jail time in the 1990s for advocating an end to Communist Party-rule and conciliation of the CIA-backed Dalai Lama, the once head of a feudal aristocracy who owned slaves and lived a sumptuous life on the backs of Tibetan serfs, before the People’s Army put an end to his oppressive rule.

Liu’s latest run-in with Chinese authorities happened in December, 2008 after he signed Charter 08, a manifesto he helped draft. The charter was published on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Freedoms (UDHRF) and is a reference to Charter 77, an anti-communist manifesto issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia. While the UDHRF endorses economic rights (the right to work and to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control), the only economic rights Charter 08 endorses are bourgeois privileges. In that respect, it is hardly in the same class as the UDHRF and, significantly, is emblematic of the kind of truncated human rights protocol favored in the United States.

On June 24 of last year Liu was charged with agitation aimed at subversion of the Chinese government and overthrowing the socialist system. He was convicted and is now serving an 11-year sentence.

The Western press describes Charter 08 as a “manifesto calling for political reform, human rights and an end to one-party rule”, but it is more than that. It is a manifesto for the untrammelled operation of capitalism in China.

The charter calls for a free and open market economy, protection of the freedom of entrepreneurship, land privatization, and the protection of property rights. Property rights, under the charter’s terms, refer not to the right to own a house or a car of a toothbrush for personal use but to the freedom of individuals to legally claim the economic surplus produced by farmers and wage laborers—that is, the right, through the private ownership of capital, to exploit the labor of others through profits, interest and rents.

While capitalism thrives in China, it does not thrive unchecked and without some oversight and direction by the Communist Party. Nor is China’s economy entirely privately owned. Many enterprises remain in state hands. The drafters of Charter 08 have in mind the elimination of all state ownership and industrial planning–in other words, the purging of the remaining socialist elements of the Chinese economy. At the same time, the Communist Party as the one mass organization with a programmatic commitment to socialism (if only to be realized in full in a distant future) and which zealously preserves China’s freedom to operate outside the US imperialist orbit, would be required to surrender its lead role in Chinese society. Political power would pass to parties that would inevitably come to be dominated by the Chinese bourgeoisie through its money power. (1) Rather than being a country with a mix of socialist and capitalist characteristics presided over by the Communist Party, it would become a thoroughly capitalist society with bankers and captains of industry firmly in control, their rule governed by the need to enrich their class, not make progress toward a distant socialism by raising standards of living and expanding the country’s productive base.

The charter also calls for the implementation of “major reforms in the tax system to reduce the tax rate”, and to “create conditions for the development of privately-owned banking.”

The US State Department itself could have written a manifesto no more congenial to corporate and financial interests.

Charter 08’s champions gathered 10,000 signatures before Beijing blocked its circulation on the Internet. While the Western media cite this as evidence of a groundswell of support for the charter’s demands (though 10,000 represents an infinitesimally small fraction of a population of one billion), the ANSWER Coalition in the United States has collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to letters calling for the lifting of the US blockade on Cuba, a level of opposition to US policy that dwarfs Charter 08’s support. Yet ANSWER’s collection of signatures in opposition to a policy aimed at promoting the interests of US capital is virtually ignored in the Western media, while a smaller movement that would benefit US capital is presented as having widespread backing. This, of course, is not unexpected. The Western media quite naturally represent the interests of the class of hereditary capitalist families and financiers from whose ranks its owners come. The class nature of capitalist society and patterns of ownership within it mean that the mass media construct a reality congruent with their owners’ interests.

Likewise, the Nobel Prize, founded by a Swedish chemist and engineer who amassed a fortune as an armaments manufacturer, is not free from politics. The Nobel committee, a five-person committee selected by the Norwegian parliament, has strayed quite a distance from Alfred Nobel’s original intentions. In his will, Nobel set out conditions for establishing and awarding the prize. “The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” While arguments may be made on either side of the question of whether Liu’s actions are praiseworthy, there is no question that trying to organize the transformation of People’s China into a replica of the United States of America, and getting arrested for it, amounts in no way to working for fraternity between nations, abolishing standing armies, or the holding of peace congresses.

A further double standard is evident in the condemnation of China’s crackdown on anti-communist dissent—one of the goals of awarding Liu the Nobel Prize (the others: to legitimize Charter 08 and demonize Communist Party-rule in China.) The reality is that any revolutionary society, if it is to successfully defend itself against counter-revolution, must limit the rights that would be used to organize the revolution’s reversal. To place political and civil liberties ahead of the preservation of the revolution, where the revolution is aimed at improving the economic condition of Chinese peasants and workers, would be to declare political rights to be senior to economic rights. Liu has clearly worked toward a counter-revolution that would push economic rights to the margins and bring the rights of the owners of capital to organize society exclusively in their interests to the fore. Allowing Liu to freely organize the overthrow of the current system and to replace it with one modelled on the US political and economic system would be to set political liberties above goals of achieving independence from imperialist domination and building the material basis of a communist society.

Other societies—including those which trumpet their credentials as liberal democracy’s champions—have freely violated their own pluralist and liberal principles to counter individuals, movements and parties which have threatened the capitalist mode of property ownership. The history of Western capitalist democracy is replete with instances of states running roughshod over their own supposedly cherished liberal democratic values, from the persecution, harassment and jailing of labor, socialist and communist militants to the banning of strikes and left political parties to open fascist dictatorship. Whenever militant leftists have seriously threatened to disrupt the tranquil digestion of big business profits, their freedom to openly advocate, organize and act has been abridged. Think of the Palmer raids in the United States, jailing of anti-WWI activists, the purge of communists from the civil service and Hollywood, the banning of the Socialist Workers Party, and the suppression of the Black Panthers. Similar practices were replicated in many other capitalist countries. In Italy and Germany, strong workers’ movements were suppressed by fascist dictatorship.

This is a pattern of behaviour so recurrent as to have the status of a social scientific law. The state, whether in capitalist or revolutionary societies, almost invariably violates rights of advocacy, free association, and the press, in order to preserve the dominant mode of property ownership wherever it is seriously under threat.

As a matter of politics, restrictions on the rights of individuals, movements and parties to openly advocate and organize the overthrow of the current economic system are good or bad depending on what one’s politics are. Nationalists in liberated countries will approve restrictions on the rights of foreigners and colonial settlers to own productive property unchecked; measures to prevent movements from encroaching on capitalist interests will be deemed warranted restrictions by capitalists; and communists will oppose the right of individuals and groups to openly organize a capitalist restoration within socialist societies, just as republicans opposed the right of individuals and groups to openly organize the restoration of monarchies within republican societies.

While Liu is cleverly portrayed by the Western media as a fighter for human rights and democracy, his organizing for low taxes, call for the jettisoning of the remaining elements of China’s socialism, and promotion of a robust capitalism, have received virtually no Western media attention. It is difficult to persuade people that capitalism is “a universal value”, and Liu’s commitment to making over China into a replica of the United States—with its economic crises, bail-outs for wealthy financiers and mass unemployment for the rest—is hardly the kind of thing that is going to marshal much popular support. Hence, the Western media have wisely (from their point of view) dwelled on Beijing’s seemingly unjustified crackdown on dissent and failed to elaborate on Charter 08’s implications for China, while playing up Liu’s advocacy of the pleasant sounding terms, democracy and human rights, pushing his commitment to free markets, free enterprise and low taxes into the shadows. Carrying out all the charter demands would almost certainly result in China being sucked into the US imperialist orbit, and whatever chances the country has of achieving socialism, would be forever dashed.

For anyone concerned with the promotion of economic rights, or the weakening of US imperialism, or with the chances that socialism might one day flourish in the world’s most populous country, the Nobel committee’s attempt to lend credibility to Charter 08 by conferring its peace prize on Liu Xiaobo is hardly to be welcome. It is as inimical to the interests of peace and the welfare of humanity as was last year’s awarding of the prize to US President Barack Obama, who has expanded the number of countries in which the US is waging war, and has tried to create the illusion that the continuing US combat mission in Iraq has ended by renaming it. Likewise, Liu has done nothing to advance the welfare of humanity. His remit, as that of last year’s peace prize winner, is to expand the interests of the owners of capital, particularly those based in the United States. He deserves no support, except from the tiny fraction of the world’s population that would reap the benefits of Charter 08’s demands. Instead, it is Beijing’s action to preserve its freedom and independence from outside domination, and to maintain elements of a socialist economy, that deserve our support.

1. The Chinese Communist Party has, with justification, rejected “Western-style elections …(as)a game for the rich.” As a party representative explained: “They are affected by the resources and funding that a candidate can utilize. Those who manage to win elections are easily in the shoes of their parties or sponsors and become spokespeople for the minority.”

Edward Wong, “Official in China says Western-style democracy won’t take root there,” The New York Times, March 20, 2010

See also Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “Do supporters of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo really know what he stands for?” The Guardian (UK), December 15, 2010.

SELECT COMMENTS

Of interest:
On the website of the National Endowment for Democracy, there is this information in relation to 2009 activities: “in China, Endowment programming supported further strides in civil society development while countering the political constriction generated in response to these advances. Several NED grantees participated in the drafting and promotion of Charter 08…”
So, NED financed several individuals and organizations involved in writing and promoting Charter 08. Did NED also, perhaps, also help direct the writing or the promotion that document? What part did U.S. interests play beyond financing? One wonders. Usually, when one pays out money – and quite significant sums of money, if one persuses how much each Chinese grantee received – one expects something in return.

Greg Elich

October 12, 2010 at 11:20 pm

You only need to look at two demands of Charter 08 to see how putting it in practice would be disastrous for China.

First, it calls for the establishment of a “federal republic”. Local-level corruption is already out of control in China. At least Hu Jintao and the left wing of the CCP has been earnestly fighting these corrupt officials by outlawing excessive rural taxes, requiring mine bosses to go underground with workers, and even executions for extreme crimes (as in the case of the corrupt head of the state food safety administration). Breaking down the central government is only going to give more power to corrupt officials and the millionaires behind them. The danger of civil war is very real too. Guangdong and Hunan provinces already came very close to border skirmishes a few years ago over access to eastern ports. There is already too much tension between ethnic groups too, as shown by the riots in Tibet and Xinjiang (not to mention the neo-Nazi movement across the border in outer Mongolia, as unbelievable as that sounds). A “Federal Republic of China” is only going to create more openings for exploitation and conflict between different regions.

Second, it calls for abolition of the Hukou system of urban/rural citizenship registration. The policy as it is now makes it hard for migrant workers to get full urban benefits and leaves openings for super-exploitation in the urban labor market, but getting rid of the policy overnight is not a better solution. You only need to look at the overcrowded, hellish slums of other developing countries to see that the result would be worse than what exists now. The real alternative is more investment in China’s rural areas and rebuild the social safety net, which is exactly the the New Socialist Countryside program implemented in 2006 is meant to do. China Study Group had a good piece on the topic a while ago:
http://chinastudygroup.net/2010/03/left-critique-of-liberal-calls-for-hukou-reform/

Guan Hanqiang

October 13, 2010 at 3:21 am

I am very wary of these so-called “dissidents” in China or anywhere else that the US supports and sympathizes with.
Taking into consideration the nefarious activities of the US in the world, such dissidents are most likely fakes anyway. No true dissident would ever want to sell his country out to the US considering what the US has done. Hasn’t Mr. Liu Xiaobo been paying attention to what is going on in the world? To what the US has been up to?
His desire to see a US-style system in China is a testament that he does not have China’s best interests at heart. He should be ashamed of himself!
The fact alone that the US supports him says enough about the man’s true intentions.

Paul

October 13, 2010 at 3:26 pm

Good article.

The American and Western agenda is to destabilize and balkanize any nation that stands in the way of their New World Order (i.e. Western capitalist exploitation and imperial dominance).

As noted above, the oh-so-helpful advice promoted by the West’s new darling Liu Xiaobo (with some help from the CIA perhaps) would be disastrous for China.

This is of course by design.

And “federalism” in particular is a favorite American political weapon that it imposes on other nations to subjugate them. The case of Iraq is a good example, where an America-designed federalism has been implanted there.

How’s “federalism” working out for the Iraqi people–where sectarian conflict, bombings, and killings are a defining feature of everyday life?

As for American/Western sponsored “Dissident Darlings,” these people are middle-class elites who are opportunists to the core. They are funded, sponsored, supported, or even indoctrinated… I mean educated, by American agencies (like the NED), universities, and media.

Indeed, what is also revealing about Liu’s Nobel Propaganda Prize is the fawning reaction not only of the Western Free Press but also the “alternative” media like Pacifica Radio’s _Democracy Now_ or _The Nation_.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

The same American agencies that most likely sponsor Mr. Liu are also sponsoring “progressive” media in the USA.

They are called the Left Gatekeeper media.

What Purpose Does the Nobel Prize Serve?
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/10/what-purpose-does-the-nobel-prize-serve/

Nobel Politics
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/10/nobel-politics/

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA’s FORD FOUNDATION?
http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html

AR

October 14, 2010 at 12:10 am

This certainly reminds me of the 22 Senior party members in the CPC who called for “freedom of speech”, and were called ‘heroic dissidents’ by the Western Media. These were the same people who were in the GPCR(Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution) so I am not throughly suprised that they would side with the right wing, if not throughly apart of the, of the party. This calling for ‘freedom of speech’ is pratically what the beaucrats called the people to do agaisnt school teachers (The Red Guards were sometimes children of the beuacrats, this led to many factional conflicts frm ultra left, to rightist, to those in the party to try and survive.)

But its mainly the same, calling for ‘freedom of speech’ might be a way to call out agaisnt the jailing of Liu, since he’ll have his ‘right of speech’ and spread counter-revolutionary virus as the CIA did with the Student movement in China. We must’nt forget how the “Hundred Flowers” Campaign went, how liberalization crept in. Or how the “Democracy wall” was first a way to honor those who died in the GPCR to Anti-Mao,Anti-Socialist, and Anti-party propaganda used by the liberals of China. (From “Continuning the Revolution is not a Dinner party, FRSO.org)

But anyways, nice article. Though I’d like an article on how we can view the Chinese state as a mix between capitalist and socialist relations, since althought 58% of ownership type is state owned/co-operative/joint work there’s still 28% that is privately owned (the other 14% is self employed). That and I do not know of much how Deng Xiaopeng allowed this to happen, or how he did really.

PolishSoviet

October 19, 2010 at 2:17 am

Reply

More articles that support the analyses above concerning the cynical geopolitical machinations of the West’s (or should I say, America’s) decision to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Liu.

The Geopolitical Agenda behind the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167396.html

What the Nobel Prize jury didn’t tell us
Who is Liu Xiabobo?
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167356.html

The Nobel Peace Prize at the service of imperialism
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167228.html

A Military Mentality: Nobel’s Pro-Military Agenda and the Future World Order
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21512

AR

October 25, 2010 at 9:11 pm

Liu served more jail time in the 1990s for advocating an end to Communist Party-rule and conciliation of the CIA-backed Dalai Lama, the once head of a feudal aristocracy who owned slaves and lived a sumptuous life on the backs of Tibetan serfs, before the People’s Army put an end to his oppressive rule.. I really didnt know that.Thanks

CivilEngineeringSociety

December 2, 2010 at 10:00 pm

Yes! China is a revolutionary state! Im so sick of hearing people like Chomsky assert that China is now just another exploiting capitalist beast. Such utopian views of development need to be confronted to protect the incredible process that China has only JUST BEGUN. Everyone is not going to get raised out of poverty immediately, but 600 million so far is nothing to sneeze at.

ProgressiveMilwaukee

January 4, 2011 at 2:01 pm

It’s hard not to see the Urumqi and Tibetan uprisings as well as calls for the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ as an attempt by Western agitators to destabilize China at its core. They seek to undo China’s progress and put in place a puppet leader that is at Washington’s beck and call. All because of fear of China’s rising power!

It is my hope that Chinese citizens stand up against these CIA funded agitators. China must never go back to being that subservient nation that was stepped on by foreign powers!

JCP2011

May 30, 2011 at 3:16 am

Why Are Russia and China (and Iran) Paramount Enemies For the U.S. Ruling Elite?

The Faux Cry for Democracy

by JOHN V. WALSH

Does it not seem strange that, with the Cold War long over, the Paramount Enemies of the United States remain Russia and China? That is not a bad question to ponder with Vladimir Putin’s visit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

And there is no doubt that Russia and China hold this pariah status in the eyes of the U.S. imperial elite. In the last months we have watched the U.S. try to push Russia East and tear it apart. At the same time Obama traversed East Asia trying to stitch together an anti-China military and economic alliance in the Western Pacific with Japan as the linchpin. In fact it is striking that the U.S. has allied itself with neo-Nazism in Ukraine and Japanese militarism on the other side of Asia. This is happening despite the considerable changes that have taken place in both Russia and China, neither of which would any longer claim to be interested in an anti-capitalist crusade. The only country that comes close in the opprobrium heaped upon them by the West is Iran. Why do these countries, especially Russia and China, remain the enemies of the West? With the struggle against Soviet-style Communism long over, the reason is certainly not ideological.

This riddle finds its answer in a suggestion by Jean Bricmont in hisHumanitarian Imperialism. He observes that the main political development of the last 100 years was not the defeat of fascism nor the fall of Soviet style Communism, but the battle against Western colonialism. And this battle is far from over, for most of the world is still subject to total or partial domination by the West, a condition that Sartre and Nkrumah dubbed neocolonialism. The colonized peoples of the world, the overwhelming majority of humanity, still live under the worst of material conditions. Originally Nkrumah described neocolonialism thus:

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.

In the post Cold War world, the domination of the West has increasingly taken the form of direct military action by the U.S. with its Empire of Bases, subversion of defiant governments or “integration” of their military with the West, as is proceeding apace in Africa now.

How do Russia and China fit into this sweep of history?

Before the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin saw WWI as a war between the great European colonial powers, pitting England and its allies against Germany and its allies, for colonial spoils and imperial power. Or as has been said, England owned the world and Germany wanted it. That inter-imperial war precipitated the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, with the simple call for “Bread, land and peace,” and also a German Socialist Revolution which failed, forcing the Bolsheviks to turn inward.

The Bolsheviks were deadly serious. They took Russia and then the rest of the USSR out of the Western orbit, out of the ambit of the Western colonial powers, and they brought industrial development to their backward land. The failure of a revolution in Europe and the post WWI military assault on Russia by the West, including the U.S., meant that the USSR could no longer look to the West for advancement toward “socialism.” And because of Lenin’s view that the colonized nations needed to rebel against imperialism to advance and develop, the Bolsheviks also took up the cause of anticolonialism – from Africa to Latin America to Asia and, most importantly, to China.

In the end Russia became a great power and it remained out of the orbit of the West for over 70 years, almost three generations. Socialism and Communism were certainly not achieved, whatever one might mean by them. And that is a thing that disturbs most Left wing or “progressive” Western intellectuals to this day, most notably the Trotskyites and their ideological fellow travelers mired in the past. That outlook, however, misses the essential point in light of the struggle against colonialism. A proud independence, an escape from poverty and a severing of almost all institutional and economic ties with the West became accomplished facts in Russia. Few Russians studied abroad and few Westerners studied in Russia. There were no old school ties between the two.

Then came WWII, an attempt by Germany to conquer Europe and to destroy the Soviet Union. Out of this war came another great revolution, the Liberation of China. China had tried many things to escape the humiliation imposed on it by the West, including an attempt by Sun Yat-Sen and his followers to set up a Chinese democracy, Western style. One of those followers was Mao Zedong. With the failure of Sun and the victory of Lenin, Mao saw his chance, and he too adopted a Leninist Party structure but with emphasis on the peasantry. As Mao himself put it in July, 1949, “The Russians made the October Revolution … and the revolutionary energy of the…laboring people of Russia, hitherto latent and unseen by foreigners, suddenly erupted like a volcano, and the Chinese and all mankind began to see the Russians in a new light. Then, and only then, did the Chinese enter an entirely new era in their thinking and their life.”

By 1946 China had defeated Japan and by 1949 the Chinese Communist Revolution secured victory. And then China closed the door to the West and established its independence. Ties with the West were severed decisively for nearly two generations. With its independence secured by Mao and baseline development achieved, China could “open the door” but from a position of strength. Deng’s reforms turned China into a great economic power. China today is the second most powerful nation on the planet, once again interacting with the West – but on its own terms, as does Russia.

So the Communists of Russia did not achieve Communism. But they did achieve independence and great economic and military power. Surely China’s achievement was the greatest blow against colonialism in the wake of WWII and the greatest anticolonial victory in history. Western Europe and the U.S. did all they could to defeat the Chinese Communists, and they failed. They were on the wrong side of history – the colonial side, the side of domination and humiliation of entire peoples.

So today we find these two great powers, Russia and China, recently driven into one another’s arms by the endless crusades of the West to undermine them. Together they constitute a great power center outside the control of the U.S. Empire. Bent on global domination, the U.S. cannot tolerate such a defiant and alternative center of power. The reason is that such a center provides an alternative for others who would gain their independence from the West. Such an organization as BRICS would not exist, or if it did would not mean much, without the “R” and the “C.”

But the battle against colonialism has not ended. Certainly India, most of Latin America, much of East Asia and most of Africa have yet to break free of the West and develop their full economic potential. (They certainly have not escaped underdevelopment while in the embrace of the West.) In some places governments defiant of the U.S. have emerged as in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Where once the U.S. fought battles against insurgent liberation movements, now it fights to bring down defiant governments or leaders, another insight of Bricmont. That is also a feature of neo-imperialism. Some, like Mossadegh, Allende and Chavez, were genuine democrats who wished to bring their people out of poverty. Others have not been so democracy minded, but defiance of the West has been the common denominator for those whom the West seeks to destroy. As the world knows by now, “democracy” and “human rights” have nothing to do with U.S. neo-imperial strategy. The two cross paths only by accident.

Let us be clear about this outlook. This view is not intended to be a paean to the Communist nature of the great 20^th Century revolutions. In fact these revolutions were failures in terms of the goals that they set themselves. They did not achieve an egalitarian society at any point. But they did find the road to independence and development and now to advanced development, which they are still undertaking today. And they serve as an alternative to the West – a powerful one. In this sense they might be termed accidental revolutions. Little in history goes according to script no matter who writes it. It can be said, though, that in terms of the great struggle against colonialism and for human development the Russian and Chinese revolutions were on the right side of history. And they were the major steps in that battle in the 20^th Century.

Finally, Iran is the third of the big three Paramount Enemies of the U.S. and the West. Interestingly, Iran followed the same course as China and Russia. After the overthrow of the duly elected social democrat and nationalist Mossadegh by the CIA and the imposition of a brutal dictator, the Shah, a revolution, led by clerics in this case, and a peaceful one at that, overthrew the Shah and cut ties with the West. The clerical establishment played the same role in Iran that the Communist Parties of China and Russia played there. They led a revolution for independence and development and they have kept Iran largely outside the orbit of the West for 35 years. They will engage the West now largely on their own terms, just as China and Russia have done. The form of organization to break free is not critical nor is the ideology. It can range from Communism to Islam and other ideologies and organizations may serve as well. Perhaps we are witnessing some new forms of organization in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. The resolve and intelligence with which the break is carried out and the degree to which the common people support and benefit from it are the crucial factors.

But for those on the Left, religious antiwar activists and Libertarians who have campaigned over the years against the wars of the West, this is good news. Those who have fought against Western “interventionism” have been on the right side of history – wittingly or more often unwittingly. Given the different ideologies that the anticolonial movements in the West have adopted, it might well be that the core motivation is the side of us which is humane, perhaps our inner Bonobo versus our inner Chimpanzee.

Now, unfortunately, the dominant “progressive” strain in the West has largely abandoned an anticolonial stance. The world is no longer viewed through the lens of the far from finished anticolonial struggle but through the dubious categories of “human rights” and “real, true democracy.” The likes of Pussy Riot have replaced Mao in the eyes of the Western “progressives.” And all too many progressives, Juan Cole and Amy Goodman among them, for example, cheered for the Obama/Hillary war on Libya as Gaddafi was crushed. It went unmentioned in such “progressive” circles that Gaddafi gave Libya the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa, stood in the forefront of the struggle against U.S.-backed Apartheid, both in South Africa and Israel, and advocated a Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism that would make for independence from the West.

In sum the “progressives” of the West are now viewing events on the world stage through the wrong lens, the same one used by their rulers when it suits them. It is time to return to the proper way of looking at what is going on in the world. Only then will the anti-colonial and anti-interventionist movement be restored on the Left.

For the genuine libertarians the matter is simpler. They have always held to the view that our government has no business interfering in the life of other nations. For them the emphasis has been on the other side of neocolonialism, neo-imperialism. They simply do not want their government intervening abroad, do not believe it is moral, and do not want to pay for it, a bit of good solid Ayn Randian self-interest. If progressives pull free of the faux cry for democracy and human rights peddled to them, the door is open for a very broad antiwar, anti-Empire movement. And the need for such cooperation is essential lest we stumble into a world conflagration.

This article originally appeared in The Unz Review.

John V. Walsh is a contributor to Antiwar.com, CounterPunch.com, DissidentVoice.org and Unz Review. He can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com

Why War Is Inevitable

OpEds
By Paul Craig Roberts

US and Israeli foreign policy rests on violence alone.

Washington tells countries to do as Washington says or be “bombed into the stone age.” Israel declares all Palestinians, even women and children, to be “terrorists,” and proceeds to shoot them down in the streets, claiming that Israel is merely protecting itself against terrorists.

Simulpost with Paul Craig Roberts

Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war.

Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don’t want the deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorious deeds performed by noble soldiers fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Patriotic speeches tell us how much we owe to those who gave their lives so that America could remain free.

The speeches are well-intentioned, but the speeches create a false reality that supports ever more wars. None of America’s wars had anything to do with keeping America free. To the contrary, the wars swept away our civil liberties, making us unfree.

President Lincoln issued an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of northern newspaper reporters and editors. He shut down 300 northern newspapers and held 14,000 political prisoners. Lincoln arrested war critic US Representative Clement Vallandigham from Ohio and exiled him to the Confederacy. President Woodrow Wilson used WWI to suppress free speech, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt used WWII to intern 120,000 US citizens of Japanese descent on the grounds that race made them suspect. Professor Samuel Walker concluded that President George W. Bush used the “war on terror” for an across the board assault on US civil liberty, making the Bush regime the greatest danger American liberty has ever faced.

Lincoln forever destroyed states’ rights, but the suspension of habeas corpus and free speech that went hand in hand with America’s three largest wars was lifted at war’s end. However, President George W. Bush’s repeal of the Constitution has been expanded by President Obama and codified by Congress and executive orders into law. Far from defending our liberties, our soldiers who died in “the war on terror” died so that the president can indefinitely detain US citizens without due process of law and murder US citizens on suspicion alone without any accountability to law or the Constitution.

The conclusion is unavoidable that America’s wars have not protected our liberty but, instead, destroyed liberty. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

Southern secession did pose a threat to Washington’s empire, but not to the American people. Neither the Germans of WWI vintage nor the Germans and Japanese of WWII vintage posed any threat to the US. As historians have made completely clear, Germany did not start WWI and did not go to war for the purpose of territorial expansion. Japan’s ambitions were in Asia. Hitler did not want war with England and France. Hitler’s territorial ambitions were mainly to restore German provinces stripped from Germany as WWI booty in violation of President Wilson’s guarantees. Any other German ambitions were to the East. Neither country had any plans to invade the US. Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor hoping to remove an obstacle to its activities in Asia, not as a precursor to an invasion of America.

Certainly the countries ravaged by Bush and Obama in the 21st century — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen posed no military threat to the US. Indeed, these were wars used by a tyrannical executive branch to establish the basis of the Stasi State that now exists in the US.

The truth is hard to bear, but the facts are clear. America’s wars have been fought in order to advance Washington’s power, the profits of bankers and armaments industries, and the fortunes of US companies. Marine General Smedley Butler said, “I served in all commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

It is more or less impossible to commemorate the war dead without glorifying them, and it is impossible to glorify them without glorifying their wars.

For the entirety of the 21st century the US has been at war, not war against massed armies or threats to American freedom, but wars against civilians, against women, children, and village elders, and wars against our own liberty. Elites with a vested interest in these wars tell us that the wars will have to go on for another 20 to 30 years before we defeat “the terrorist threat.”

This, of course, is nonsense. There was no terrorist threat until Washington began trying to create terrorists by military attacks, justified by lies, on Muslim populations.

Washington succeeded with its war lies to the point that Washington’s audacity and hubris have outgrown Washington’s judgment.

By overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine, Washington has brought the United States into confrontation with Russia. This is a confrontation that could end badly, perhaps for Washington and perhaps for the entire world.

If Gaddafi and Assad would not roll over for Washington, why does Washington think Russia will? Russia is not Libya or Syria. Washington is the bully who, having beat up the kindergarden kid, now thinks he can take on the college linebacker.

The Bush and Obama regimes have destroyed America’s reputation with their incessant lies and violence against other peoples. The world sees Washington as the prime threat.

Worldwide polls consistently show that people around the world regard the US and Israel as the two countries that pose the greatest threat to peace. See here and here.

The countries that Washington’s propaganda declares to be “rogue states” and the “axis of evil,” such as Iran and North Korea, are far down the list when the peoples in the world are consulted. It could not be more clear that the world does not believe Washington’s self-serving propaganda. The world sees the US and Israel as the rogue states.

The US and Israel are the only two countries in the world that are in the grip of ideologies. The US is in the grip of the Neoconservative ideology which has declared the US to be the “exceptional, indispensable country” chosen by history to exercise hegemony over all others. This ideology is buttressed by the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines that are the basis of US foreign policy.

The Israeli government is in the grip of the Zionist ideology that declares a “greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates. Many Israelis themselves do not accept this ideology, but it is the ideology of the “settlers” and those who control the Israeli government.

Ideologies are important causes of war. Just as the Hitlerian ideology of German superiority is mirrored in the Neoconservative ideology of US superiority, the Communist ideology that the working class is superior to the capitalist class is mirrored in the Zionist ideology that Israelis are superior to Palestinians. Zionists have never heard of squatters’ rights and claim that recent Jewish immigrants into Palestine — invaders really — have the right to land occupied by others for millenniums.

Washington’s and Israel’s doctrines of superiority over others do not sit very well with the “others.” When Obama declared in a speech that Americans are the exceptional people, Russia’s President Putin responded, “God created us all equal.”

To the detriment of its population, the Israeli government has made endless enemies. Israel has effectively isolated itself in the world. Israel’s continued existence depends entirely on the willingness and ability of Washington to protect Israel. This means that Israel’s power is derivative of Washington’s power.

Washington’s power is a different story. As the only economy standing after WWII, the US dollar became the world money. This role for the dollar has given Washington financial hegemony over the world, the main source of Washington’s power. As other countries rise, Washington’s hegemony is imperiled.

To prevent other countries from rising, Washington invokes the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines. To be brief, the Brzezinski doctrine says that in order to remain the only superpower, Washington must control the Eurasian land mass. Brzezinski is willing for this to occur peacefully by suborning the Russian government into Washington’s empire. “A loosely confederated Russia … a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.” In other words, break up Russia into associations of semi-autonomous states whose politicians can be suborned by Washington’s money.

Brzezinski propounded “a geo-strategy for Eurasia.” In Brzezinski’s strategy, China and “a confederated Russia” are part of a “transcontinental security framework,” managed by Washington in order to perpetuate the role of the US as the world’s only superpower.

I once asked my colleague, Brzezinski, that if everyone was allied with us, who were we organized against? My question surprised him, because I think that Brzezinski remains caught up in Cold War strategy even after the demise of the Soviet Union. In Cold War thinking it was important to have the upper hand or else be at risk of being eliminated as a player. The importance of prevailing became all consuming, and this consuming drive survived the Soviet collapse. Prevailing over others is the only foreign policy that Washington knows.

The mindset that America must prevail set the stage for the Neoconservatives and their 21st century wars, which, with Washington’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine, has resulted in a crisis that has brought Washington into direct conflict with Russia.

I know the strategic institutes that serve Washington. I was the occupant of the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, for a dozen years. The idea is prevalent that Washington must prevail over Russia in Ukraine or Washington will lose prestige and its superpower status.

The idea of prevailing always leads to war once one power thinks it has prevailed.

The path to war is reinforced by the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative intellectual who formulated US military and foreign policy doctrine, wrote among many similar passages:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere [China], that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

In the Wolfowitz Doctrine, any other strong country is defined as a threat and a power hostile to the US regardless of how willing that country is to get along with the US for mutual benefit.

The difference between Brzezinski and the Neoconservatives is that Brzezinski wants to suborn Russia and China by including them in the empire as important elements whose voices would be heard, If only for diplomatic reasons, whereas the Neoconservatives are prepared to rely on military force combined with internal subversion orchestrated with US financed NGOs and even terrorist organizations.

Neither the US nor Israel is embarrassed by their worldwide reputations as the two countries that pose the greatest threat. In fact, both countries are proud to be recognized as the greatest threats. The foreign policy of both countries is devoid of any diplomacy. US and Israeli foreign policy rests on violence alone. Washington tells countries to do as Washington says or be “bombed into the stone age.” Israel declares all Palestinians, even women and children, to be “terrorists,” and proceeds to shoot them down in the streets, claiming that Israel is merely protecting itself against terrorists. Israel, which does not recognize the existence of Palestine as a country, covers up its crimes with the claim that Palestinians do not accept the existence of Israel.

“We don’t need no stinking diplomacy. We got power.”

This is the attitude that guarantees war, and that is where the US is taking the world. The prime minister of Britain, the chancellor of Germany, and the president of France are Washington’s enablers. They provide the cover for Washington. Instead of war crimes, Washington has “coalitions of the willing” and military invasions that bring “democracy and women’s rights” to non-compliant countries.

China gets much the same treatment. A country with four times the US population but a smaller prison population, China is constantly criticized by Washington as an “authoritarian state.” China is accused of human rights abuses while US police brutalize the US population.

The problem for humanity is that Russia and China are not Libya and Iraq. These two countries possess strategic nuclear weapons. Their land mass greatly exceeds that of the US. The US, which was unable to successfully occupy Baghdad or Afghanistan, has no prospect of prevailing against Russia and China in conventional warfare. Washington will push the nuclear button. What else can we expect from a government devoid of morality?

The world has never experienced rogue states comparable to Washington and Israel. Both governments are prepared to murder anyone and everyone. Look at the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and the dangers thereof. On May 23, 2014, Russia’s President Putin spoke to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a three-day gathering of delegations from 62 countries and CEOs from 146 of the largest Western corporations.

Putin did not speak of the billions of dollars in trade deals that were being formalized. Instead Putin spoke of the crisis that Washington had brought to Russia, and he criticized Europe for being Washington’s vassals for supporting Washington’s propaganda against Russia and Washington’s interference in vital Russian interests.

Putin was diplomatic in his language, but the message that powerful economic interests from the US and Europe received is that it will lead to trouble if Washington and European governments continue to ignore Russia’s concerns and continue to act as if they can interfere in Russia’s vital interests as if Russia did not exist.

The heads of these large corporations will carry this message back to Washington and European capitals. Putin made it clear that the lack of dialogue with Russia could lead to the West making the mistake of putting Ukraine in NATO and establishing missile bases on Russia’s border with Ukraine. Putin has learned that Russia cannot rely on good will from the West, and Putin made it clear, short of issuing a threat, that Western military bases in Ukraine are unacceptable.

Washington will continue to ignore Russia. However, European capitals will
have to decide whether Washington is pushing them into conflict with Russia that is against European interests. Thus, Putin is testing European politicians to determine if there is sufficient intelligence and independence in Europe for a rapprochement.

If Washington in its overbearing arrogance and hubris forces Putin to write off the West, the Russian/Chinese strategic alliance, which is forming to counteract Washington’s hostile policy of surrounding both countries with military bases, will harden into preparation for the inevitable war.

The survivors, if any, can thank the Neoconservatives, the Wolfowitz doctrine, and the Brzezinski strategy for the destruction of life on earth.

The American public contains a large number of misinformed people who think they know everything. These people have been programmed by US and Israeli propaganda to equate Islam with political ideology. They believe that Islam, a religion, is instead a militarist doctrine that calls for the overthrow of Western civilization, as if anything remains of Western civilization.

Many believe this propaganda even in the face of complete proof that the Sunnis and Shi’ites hate one another far more than they hate their Western oppressors and occupiers. The US has departed Iraq, but the carnage today is as high or higher than during the US invasion and occupation. The daily death tolls from the Sunni/Shi’ite conflict are extraordinary. A religion this disunited poses no threat to anyone except Islamists themselves. Washington successfully used Islamist disunity to overthrow Gaddafi, and is currently using Islamist disunity in an effort to overthrow the government of Syria. Islamists cannot even unite to defend themselves against Western aggression. There is no prospect of Islamists uniting in order to overthrow the West.

Even if Islam could do so, it would be pointless for Islam to overthrow the West. The West has overthrown itself. In the US the Constitution has been murdered by the Bush and Obama regimes. Nothing remains. As the US is the Constitution, what was once the United States no longer exists. A different entity has taken its place.

Europe died with the European Union, which requires the termination of sovereignty of all member countries. A few unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels have become superior to the wills of the French, German, British, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese peoples.

Western civilization is a skeleton. It still stands, barely, but there is no life in it. The blood of liberty has departed. Western peoples look at their governments and see nothing but enemies. Why else has Washington militarized local police forces, equipping them as if they were occupying armies? Why else has Homeland Security, the Department of Agriculture, and even the Postal Service and Social Security Administration ordered billions of rounds of ammunition and even submachine guns? What is this taxpayer-paid-for arsenal for if not to suppress US citizens?

As the prominent trends forecaster Gerald Celente spells out in the current Trends Journal, “uprisings span four corners of the globe.” Throughout Europe angry, desperate and outraged peoples march against EU financial policies that are driving the peoples into the ground. Despite all of Washington’s efforts with its well funded fifth columns known as NGOs to destabilize Russia and China, both the Russian and Chinese governments have far more support from their people than do the US and Europe.

In the 20th century Russia and China learned what tyranny is, and they have rejected it.

In the US tyranny has entered under the guise of the “war on terror,” a hoax used to scare the sheeple into abandoning their civil liberties, thus freeing Washington from accountability to law and permitting Washington to erect a militarist police state. Ever since WWII Washington has used its financial hegemony and the “Soviet threat,” now converted into the “Russian threat,” to absorb Europe into Washington’s empire.

Putin is hoping that the interests of European countries will prevail over subservience to Washington. This is Putin’s current bet. This is the reason Putin remains unprovoked by Washington’s provocations in Ukraine.

If Europe fails Russia, Putin and China will prepare for the war that Washington’s drive for hegemony makes inevitable.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

here. His latest book, How America Was Lost, has just been released and can be orderedhere.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/