By Alexander Tarasov
SUGGESTED BY SENIOR EDITOR GAITHER STEWART
Scepsis.ru

Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh—father of Indochina’s revolution. An idealist with the will of a mythological titan. The world is currently lacking his kind.

The Return to a Global Revolutionary Strategy Based on the Experience of the 20th Century

Preface to the English Edition

“The World Revolution 2” is an old text; it was written before the global economic crisis, in the late 2005—early 2006. So it happened that Hungarian was the language this text was first published in, in the journal Eszmélet in 2006 (http://www.eszmelet.hu) because the article was based on a paper delivered at Budapest in October 2005. It was only at the end of 2009 that I managed to have the text published in Russian, in the journal Levaya Politika. Then, in 2010, there was a Ukrainian version published in the journal Vpered. That means that the facts of the global crisis are neither analysed, nor even mentioned in the very article.

Nonetheless, they speak for themselves and perfectly prove that the theses and analysis contained in the article are justified. Since this is a preface to the English version, let me focus primarily upon some episodes related to the First World, although I have to be brief.

Firstly, please note that the current crisis is the first truly global economic crisis coming after WWII. It was quite predictable: as soon as the worldwide confrontation between the two systems (the Cold War, that is the World War III which de facto forced the capitalist economy to work as a military one because of the arms race and the impact the fact of confronting the “external enemy” had upon the internal situation) came to an end, the functioning mechanisms of the capitalist economy, well known to us from the Marxist political economy classics, restarted working without distortion again.

Secondly, let me point out that the economic crisis has hit the capitalist periphery the hardest: it is where the UN and FAO have recorded 1 billion hungry people (the figure unprecedented in the world history!); it is where we have witnessed classic revolts of the hungry in Egypt, Bangladesh, Haiti, etc.; it is where the crisis has destabilized the political structures which appeared to be stable, or were successfully stabilized not so long ago (Thailand, Mauritania, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Honduras, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire).

But, typically for a global economic crisis under capitalism, the current crisis started not in the periphery but in the capitalist metropolis. And it is in the metropolis (which accumulates most capital and other wealth!) where the ruling classes tried to do their best to solve the economic problems at the expense of the workers, at the expense of the wage earners. Banks and corporations on the brink of collapse were everywhere saved with cash from the budget (from budgetary funding to direct nationalization, and nobody is making a secret of the act that it is temporary nationalization), i.e. at the expense of the ordinary taxpayer unable to conceal his income by resorting to the “rightsizing” accounting techniques or placing it offshore. The next step was to introduce, under the pretext of “anti-crisis measures”, aggressive neoliberal methods of “cost saving” that is to initiate a new round of counterreforms aimed at dismantling the welfare state.

So how did wage workers of the metropolis respond to this offensive? The attack on their earnings and rights was so blatant and gross, wasn’t it? One could hardly come up with a better test of the revolutionary potential of the broadest masses of workers of the First World.

If one looks through leftist periodicals, whether anarchist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Stalinist, or of smaller tendencies, published in the countries of the metropolis, overoptimism leaps to one’s eye. “The workers got up for their rights!”, “Mobilization unseen in many years”, “General strike, the first one for… (a number of years follows)”, “All trade unions were unanimous for the first time in… (a number of years again)!”, “Revival of the working class spirit!”, etc., etc. Though the tone is quieter and optimism contained in the countries where mass mobilizations and large-scale strikes took place not so long ago. The French left, for example, on the one hand, are boasting of their achievements but, on the other, are already looking for those responsible for the failure (although the struggle seemingly is not over).

It’s clear why. General strikes (especially in the countries which hadn’t seen those for decades) and multi-million demonstrations are impressive, of course, but the result is always the same: the ruling class quietly spits at them and continues their neoliberal counterreforms everywhere. We can see it in Greece, and in Italy, and in France, and in Spain, and in Portugal, and in Germany, and in Britain, and in Ireland. Elections, which do not change anything, serve as a bone tossed to the embittered people: Labour may take over from the Conservatives (in Britain), and vice versa the Conservatives (neoliberal radicals) may replace the Socialists (in Greece) that does not matter; whoever forms the government, it keeps pursuing (and even intensifying) the same policy of counterreforms despite the widest and most impressive protests of the population.

Why is it happening? Because participants of the mass protests in the metropolis, who are wage earners, representatives of the middle class, make no attempt at the founding principles of the System. These classes, which have been for decades bribed with a share of the super profit extracted by monopolies from the Third World and distributed among the general population, are quite satisfied with capitalism, and all they want is to have capitalism with a “human face”. And they are completely unaware of the fact, or rather prefer not to hear about it because it is an unpleasant fact, that such a “human face” in the metropolis can be made possible only by way of looting and overexploiting the periphery. That means their protest is purely defensive (and even conservative where it comes to preserving the vanishing welfare state under capitalism), they think in terms of conformism and reformism.

All the scandalous electoral successes of the ultra-right in various countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Austria and even Greece, go with the above-said phenomena. The successes are diverse in scale but all are thought-provoking.

Let us recall what was the first response of British workers to the crisis? It was “wildcat” strikes and pickets by energy sector workers clamouring against the employment of foreigners (i.e. their class brothers!), those protests being spontaneous, not organized and not inspired by any right-wing groups, parties, publications.

In fact it is already at this point that the British left should have asked themselves what have they been doing all these decades? Was the failure of the grandiose anti-Iraq war protests, which they were so proud of, an accident?

This is not a question of right/false ideologies, of correct/false tactics. As always in cases like this, this turn of events is rooted in economic causes. In this case, the transformation of the metropolis (the First World) into the collective exploiter of the periphery (the Third World), a collective parasite, is the cause. Exploiters and parasites don’t make revolutions. And if they do, those turn out to be “conservative revolutions”.

Let us compare today’s behaviour of the wage workers of Western Europe with their truly revolutionary behaviour in Europe in the past. Take, for example, the Spain of the early 20th century. A vast number of specialized studies and a larger number of memoirs show us that the Spanish workers (first of all workers, later joined by, among others, rabassaire peasants), when they were coming out for grand strikes and demonstrations comparable in size to the current ones (and even much smaller!), were setting themselves a direct and express task of overthrowing capitalism. But they saw strikes and demonstrations merely as a first stage, as a necessary step on their way to the said end. And even if it was struggle for higher wages or shorter working hours, everyone knew–this is not the real goal, this is only an interim, tactical goal, the real goal is a social revolution, destruction of the power of capital. Therefore, every such manifestation, every such strike could easily escalate into armed hostilities and armed uprising (and even into the proclamation of a workers’ and peasants’ republic as was the case in Asturias in October, 1934). It’s true that anarchists used these tempers for their adventurous ends but it’s only because of this militancy that the struggle of the Spanish workers led in the 1930’s to a revolution, the destruction of achievements of which (that is eventually keeping Spain within the capitalist world) required combined efforts of all three major fascisms of the time: Franco, Nazism and Italian fascism.

The same specialized studies and memoirs (plus statistics) also show us why the workers of Spain behaved the way they did, in a revolutionary, not in a reformist manner. Because they lived under the very conditions, under which the workers of the Third World live today. This is exactly what explains why the masses opened their hearts to the revolutionary organizations’ calls for social revolution.

To put it otherwise, it’s not simply because today the European left, afraid of direct political repression, at best talk of the need to “transcend” capitalism in general, in some distant future but do not call for immediate struggle, including armed struggle, for social revolution. There are those (although few in number and weak in influence) and who do. But somehow their calls fail to ring the bell with wide, and even narrow, masses of the workers.

And the situation will not change as long as the ruling classes of the First World will afford to corrupt, more or less generously, the general population with a share of the excess profits they derive from exploiting the Third World. It is only when this source of profit is minimised, if not liquidated altogether, the ruling classes of the First World will be forced to take such a measures against the workers of the metropolis that will inevitably blow up the class peace, i.e. to refuse to limit the working day, to terminate the dole system, to actually eliminate the social infrastructure, to crack down on protests (for there will be no more money to buy effective compromises). And these circumstances will inevitably lead to the class organizations of workers (such as trade unions) radicalizing, to the capitalist society betraying its class nature, to the general public opening up to the revolutionary propaganda, and consequently, to the class struggle reviving in its original, violent and ruthless form, and then to a social revolution.

And however strong the class enemy can be, the social revolution in the metropolis will have a chance to win because it will take place in favourable circumstances –in the circumstances when it will have a powerful rear base and strong support in the form of a revolutionary Third World, and this revolutionary Third World will act as a material checking, restraining and demoralizing factor in relation to the forces of counterrevolution in the metropolis.
2-5 December 2010
Preface
I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that this article was written between October 2005 and January 2006, that is, almost four years ago. Therefore, all comparative dates in the text (for example, “15 years ago”) should be understood as from the perspective of when the article was written. This also applies to all statistics and other examples in the text.
To my surprise, I initially failed to find a single publisher- either paper or electronic, including those who consider themselves to be on the far-left who would agree to publish the text. For some reason the article provoked shock and seemed to many to be “too radical” (in general, or because of the “current climate”).

Therefore, when the opportunity arose to publish it I decided in principle not to change a single word, and to leave it just as it was four years ago. I did so in order to give the reader the opportunity to also ponder the question: just what is it about this text that other editors have found to be so seditious?

However, I could, of course, offer a number of examples of sedition. Take, for instance, the example of the elections in Guatemala where Rigoberta Menchú confidently won in districts where the population speak K’iche’ Maya, not Spanish. She lost, however, in an almost identical social environment where the Spanish speaking population proved unable to resist the subtle pre-election populism of the bourgeois parties. Or, the example of Nepal where, after coming to power the Maoists decided to translate their entire literature and propaganda into English. Consequently, experts and specialists from India (and the U.K., and probably the U.S.A.) were able to make use of this newly translated information in order to quickly develop strategies for their agents in Nepal. This in turn has created serious problems for the Maoists. Or, consider the example of Colombia, which is, as far as I know, the only country where not the right but the left (FARC-EP) have tried to destroy infrastructure by exploding oil pipelines and power lines, etc. In response, other leftists stigmatized or mocked them (depending on their degree of sympathy for the FARC struggle), and they finally managed to persuade FARC to abandon such tactics on the grounds that they were ‘alien’ to the class. Meanwhile, before the start of this campaign FARC could scarcely count on 4.5 thousand supporters, yet towards the end of it they had twelve thousand. This testifies the correctness of their materialist approach to politics (and let us not forget that politics ultimately boils down to economics). Finally, I could write about the frenzied demand of the U.S. administration which, at the end of the George W. Bush era, decided to automatically use military force against any country which tried to limit U.S. access to hydrocarbon resources. That is to say, the experience of the past hundred years has shown us time and time again that the right (i.e. the capitalists) have, in practice, been even more materialist than the left! The left will have no victories to celebrate unless this situation changes, and unless they stop opposing armed resistance from a moral perspective. Concealed idealism will ultimately come back to haunt you.

Aleksandr Tarasov
3-7 September 2009

The world-historic defeat of the Soviet Bloc in the Third World War (i.e. the Cold War) gives us the opportunity to finally return to the topic of a global anti-bourgeois revolutionary strategy.

During the 20th Century such a strategy (i.e. one based on a global vision and a class approach) presented itself on two occasions: the first was offered to the Bolsheviks, who knew very well that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on a world revolution, and that the “building of socialism in one country” was impossible. Hence, they quite deliberately prepared for world revolution, and to this end, the Comintern was created.

Originally, world revolution conceived itself as a revolution in various European countries, yet the Bolsheviks soon moved their attention to the countries of the Third World, and primarily to the colonial and semi-colonial Asian countries.

This strategy was rejected after the Stalinist counter-revolutionary Thermidorian coup. The petty bourgeoisie which came to power in the U.S.S.R. during this period (more specifically they were the bureaucracy, but their social background was mostly rural petty-bourgeois) were not interested in continuing the revolution, the revolutionary struggle, of the risks associated with it. Like any bourgeoisie, it strove to achieve stability (and the fact that in the specific Soviet context the bureaucracy was only a virtual petty bourgeoisie does not change a thing, for stability is a category of social psychology, social action). The revolutionary strategy of class conflict was replaced with the counter-revolutionary strategy of Realpolitik. The class position was replaced by a state one, that is, oppositional classes and their political representatives were replaced with oppositional states, and later, military-political blocs (i.e. NATO against the Warsaw Pact, the West against the East, etc.). This served to return to a classical politics, which always creates for states in the international arena the foundations of class exploitation.

The establishment of social order in the U.S.S.R. (and later in its satellites) was a form of superstatism (for more on superstatism see my article “superstatism and Socialism” in Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1996, №12), based on the combination of an industrialized mode of production with public ownership of the means of production. This formed an alternative capitalism (alternative in the true sense of the word, meaning a choice between two or more equals) in the singular framework of an industrialized mode of production. Its objective was for a peaceful inclusion in the capitalist world economy, and it was not geared towards an all-out military struggle.

Of course, from the period of Stalinism onwards the Soviet elite were ready to give up their confrontation with the bourgeois world. However, they were unable to do so because of the nature of the bourgeois world itself: the ruling classes of the capitalist world were so shaken by the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of the means of production that the cessation of the conflict between the U.S.S.R. and capitalist countries could only be achieved by returning all expropriated property to its former owners and by imprisoning the Bolshevik expropriators. Understanding this, the Stalinist and also the post-Stalinist leadership decided to continue their statist, militaristic and ideological confrontation with the West. Yet the more they did so, the more their leadership came to be legitimised solely by appeals to the slogans of October 1917.

However, the strategy of state opposition was from the outset doomed to failure: to those familiar with the history of exploitative class societies, it was a typical and familiar strategy based on state mobilization, i.e. in the long run the mobilization of material, technical forces in opposition to monetary finance and its material and technical forces and resources (including military and manpower). Evidently, the U.S.S.R. (even with its satellites in tow) was weaker than the rest of the world (i.e. the capitalist world), for it had fewer resources. In addition, unlike the West the U.S.S.R. was unable to openly loot and exploit the countries of the Third World. This was due to reasons of an ideological nature: basically the Soviet superetatist elite were forced to make reference to a socialist ideology which in essence was alien to them. It was a façade, a cover.

Consequently, the defeat of the U.S.S.R. and its allies in this global confrontation was simply a matter of time. This defeat occurred 15 years ago—before our very eyes—soon after the volume of capitalization of some of the Western TNCs had become greater than that of the U.S.S.R. It is essential to understand that in the world economy the Soviet Union acted as a huge monopoly. It was compelled—unlike Western monopolies—to (1) compete with all kinds of products, and (2) waste a huge portion of its profits on the maintenance of its armed forces and social services. Class conflict, unlike the state, is now developing according to different laws and is based upon a different principle: it is not a struggle between various countries and blocs, or between opposing forces ready to wage total war and wipe out entire populations, economies and territories. Rather, it is the struggle of opposing class forces for the same thing: national-economic objectives (and resources). Neither side in this struggle is interested in the destruction or annihilation of these objectives and resources. Not even the most reactionary right winger would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on his own factories if the workers took control of them. This provides real scope for a victory for revolutionary forces, even when their opponent is objectively stronger.

The second time a global revolutionary strategy presented itself in the 20th Century was in Ernesto Che Guevara’s famous “Message to the Tricontinental”. If we recall, Che declared the U.S. to be the enemy of mankind, and called for establishment of “two, three, many Vietnams” in the countries of the Third World. He did so in order to 1) undercut the basis of imperialism by wrestling the commodities, energy sources and economies of the Third World away from the imperialist countries, and to 2) engage imperialism in a number of local military conflicts in the capitalist periphery so as to cause it to economically stretch itself to the limit. In fact, Che proposed a global strategy of guerrilla war within the territory of the First World itself so that the enemy could not rest even in the capitalist metropolis, and so that it would be compelled to carry on the armed struggle on its own turf, and finally, so that this struggle would compound its economic and political problems by inevitably pushing the First World towards open class conflict.

Che proposed this strategy to all opponents of imperialism including, of course, the Soviet leadership. Although he held no illusions about the U.S.S.R., Che understood that objectively speaking the USSR was—despite the will of the Soviet nomenclature—an opponent of Western imperialism. However, as Che no doubt anticipated, the counterrevolutionary Soviet leadership rejected his strategy as a form of “adventurism”. Indeed the label “adventurist” was assigned to all supporters of Che Guevara’s strategy. What is clear is that by the end of 1960s and the start of the 1970’s the Soviet nomenclature – like a social collectivity – was already preparing to become not only leaders but owners. That is, they were prepared to renounce their socialist ideology (which was alien to them anyway) and include the countries of the Eastern Bloc in the world capitalist system. Even the “oil crisis” of the 1970s, which clearly demonstrated the correctness of Che’s position, did not influence the stance of the Soviet nomenclature.

Meanwhile, the imperialists themselves actually came to appreciate the strategy proposed by Che Guevara. It is no coincidence that Zbigniew Brzezinski later cynically confessed that during Reagan’s era, the strategy of “two, three, many Vietnams” was consciously adopted by Washington against the Soviet Union: the USSR was forced, to varying degrees, into a number of conflicts around the world (in Afghanistan, Poland, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, Nicaragua) to ensure that the Soviet economy would stretch itself beyond its capabilities. Che’s strategy, as one might expect, was successful.

What is more, features of this strategy were actively used by the U.S. to destabilize leftist regimes. For example, during the period of Allende a de facto guerrilla war was deployed by the ultra-rightists in Chile to purposefully destroy national-economic facilities and infrastructure (this included blowing up bridges, roads, power lines, power plants, mines and so forth). This quickly created extraordinary economic problems, which in turn provoked dissatisfaction with Allende’s regime to the extent that a significant part of the population successfully prepared the military coup of September 11, 1973.

The practice of economic embargos, which intentionally aim to deprive regimes of resources and commodities, is still widely used by the United States in order to destabilize those regimes which it considers to be objectionable.

The transferring of hostilities to opponent’s territories (“the exportation of counterrevolution”) was tested with success in Afghanistan (from Pakistan’s territory), Mozambique (from the territory of South Africa), Angola (from the occupied territories of Namibia, South Africa), and Nicaragua (from the territory of Honduras).

At the same time, in no cases did the opponents of imperialism try to use their own territory as a rear base for an active guerrilla war so that the forces of revolution could systematically and successfully attack the class enemy. Nowhere did they carry out the mass strategy of destroying infrastructure in order to destabilize the economy. No one tried to block, paralyse or destroy the traditional means in which the material resources of the Third World are expropriated by the First World. Nobody even tried to cause damage to the stock exchange by hacking into its computer systems (even though this is quite easy to do!) and so on and so forth. On the contrary, those weaknesses are forced weaknesses because of limitations in the people and in the means. Attempts to carry the war to the metropolis, attempts which made revolutionaries in the First World, exposed the Soviet leadership as counter-revolutionaries. Yet the Soviet elite threw labels at the revolutionaries such as “provocateurs” and “CIA or Beijing agents”, and in doing so the Soviet elite, with great satisfaction, took the logic of their political enemies in Washington by equating revolutionary armed struggle with terrorism.

But if Che Guevara’s analysis was correct in the late 1960’s, it is even more so today. In the last decades of the 20th Century – and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc – the industrial sites of the First World have, with increasing frequency, been either indefinitely or temporarily closed down whilst industrial production has been transferred to the Third World. Indeed the tactic was later employed of actively curtailing industrial production in the First World in order to transfer industrial production to the countries of the Third World. This means that metropolises are in fact materially dependent upon the periphery, and as such they are becoming ever more vulnerable to the strategy of global guerrilla war.

If we compare the data from six different international economic reference books pertaining to the period from 2000—2002, we can quite clearly see the dependence of the capitalist metropolises (including Australia, New Zealand and Israel) upon the periphery:

>> energy – 52% (and if we take only hydrocarbons, then that figure rises to 79%);

>> metals – 81%;

>> raw materials for chemical industry – 89%;

>> raw materials for food industry and agricultural products – 46%;

>> raw materials and finished products for light industry – 67%.

However, this dependence is actually even greater for official statistics do not reveal a complete picture. Take, for instance, the example of maquiladoras. Mexican maquiladoras are divided into three categories depending on their legal status. As it turns out, production of the third category of maquiladoras (using the right of exterritorialy) is not included in Mexican statistics, whereas it is included in the U.S. statistics; though these factories are located outside the U.S.A., and their workers are not U.S. citizens but Mexicans (whom the North American statistics surely do not count). Thus, we arrive at the situation when by recording the products of American companies made in maquiladoras, the U.S. official statistics not only exaggerates the total production output of U.S.A. but also overstates the productivity of American workers’ labour.

There are plenty of particular examples that prove the discrepancy between the official statistics and the actual situation. For instance, once upon a time I had a computer brought from the U.S.A. According to all the documents, it was a “white produce” PC manufactured in the Silicon Valley. When the computer broke down and was dissembled it was found out that the Silicon Valley had produced only the motherboard while all other components had been made in Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and South Korea. Although, doubtlessly the statistics had already counted that computer as one made in the U.S.A. Here is another example: one of my former students, who lives in Munich now, bought her husband a suit for solemn occasions in a store that sold only expensive German menswear. According to all documents, the suit appeared to have been produced by a well-known and reputable German company. It was only at home, when she was ironing the trousers from the inside, did she discover a tiny tab hidden in a seam which read the suit had been actually sewn in Orsha, Belarus. Once again, there is no doubt, that this product was counted by the statistics as produced in Germany.

In other words, the capitalist metropolis (the First World) has turned into a collective exploiter of the capitalist periphery (the Third World). Thanks to superprofits extracted by the western monopolies from the Third World, a massive bribery, through the redistribution of income in the tax system, of the public is going on in the First World that extends to the broad masses of workers. That means that the metropolis is assuming increasingly more visible attributes of a parasitic formation, just like the metropolis of the Roman Empire which lived at the expense of exploiting and robbing the provinces and neighbouring lands.

The ruling strata and classes’ corrupting the workers is not new: this phenomenon had long been described by classic Marxian authors illustrated by the “labour aristocracy”. What is special today is that the enormity of superprofits makes it possible to extend this strategy to broader masses of population.

Moreover, the ruling strata and classes of the capitalist metropolitan states having taken warning by the Bolshevist and other revolutions, consciously pursue the policy aimed at reducing the number of the working class (and first of all the industrial proletariat) to a minimum in the countries of the First World in order to change the class structure of their populations, increasing the number of small owners and individuals employed in services and entertainment, individuals directly dependent on the interests of the ruling classes and often belonging to the parasitic or semi-parasitic social groups. Shopkeepers, lackeys, prostitutes and clowns displace those who with their labour produce material wealth—the foundation of any civilization.

That means that the traditional working class orientation of the left in metropolitan countries is doomed to failure: firstly, because the corrupted working class cannot be revolutionary; secondly, because the working class itself is rapidly diminishing that obviously leads to the decline of its influence in the society. The fact that social-democrats and labourites had degraded to neoliberals is not accidental at all and surely is not a product of somebody’s evil will: it is a natural response to the social changes underway in Western Europe.

Hence it appears that there are no perspectives for a revolution in the countries of the First World (parasites and exploiters never become revolutionaries), and that revolutionary centres have shifted to the countries of the Third World. The left in the First World countries have no future provided, of course, one does not accept a repetition of the disgraceful way of the European social-democrats and labourites, who have betrayed their ideals and turned into an instrument of big capital, as their “future”. It is highly demonstrative that the contemporary left of the metropolitan countries have failed to offer strategies for the struggle other than reformist ones: struggle for minorities’ rights, for women’s equality, for the rights of immigrants and homeless, defending the environment and so on, that is they have offered actions aimed at improving capitalism partially (which helps to make capitalism more attractive to a greater number of people and thus decreases the number of socialist fighters) not at destroying it. And certainly all this does not pose any threat to the rule of capital.

As does not the so called antiglobalism, all the more so in its cynically reformist form preached by ATTAC (taxing financial transaction implies worrying about the prosperity and expansion of the same transactions), and in its carnival disguise which the Western left like so much (carnival by definition is not a struggle but a spectacle; as Metternich used to say, unless people stop dancing they are not dangerous.

As far as organization is concerned, the strategy proposed by the “antiglobalists”—mass movements instead of “totalitarian” strictly-centralized organizations—is dead-end because firstly, these movements are transparent to the class enemy and its secret services; secondly, the political adversary has already found and practically tested a remedy against this strategy: it has learned to create, resorting inter alia to bribery, mass public movements of counterrevolutionary, reactionary character. The experience of “colour revolutions” in Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Georgia (and less known affairs in Bulgaria and Romania) have demonstrated it.

The contemporary Western left have exposed their pettiness when they failed to head, let alone organize, a single event of massive radical counteraction against the neoglobalism politics in the countries of the First World, from the street fights between fishers and dockers, and the police in Spain to with the riots in French HLM’s.

Nonetheless, there is a chance to save their reputation for those of the First World left who consciously spend all their time and efforts, give all their life to the revolutionary struggle in the countries of the Third World. Actually, some Western left of the 1960’s and 1970’s furnished relevant examples already in the 20th century—those French, Spanish, Italian comrades who joined the guerrilla in the countries of the Third World; those North American left who decided it was necessary to come to Venezuela to serve advisors to the government of Hugo Chavez, and those who (like RAF in West Germany) openly declared themselves armed agents of revolutionary forces of the Third World in the First World.

Generally speaking, the viewpoint which Moscow imposed on the world left movement during the soviet period and according to which the most developed capitalist countries stand closest to a socialist revolution, is not a Marxist point of view, not dialectical, and not scientific but positivist. Marx himself was a dialectician and understood well that social progress in class, exploitative societies takes place outside of the positivist schemes but is implemented by those forces which have previously fallen a prey to this progress, and explicitly wrote so in “The Poverty of Philosophy”.

The only promising global revolutionary strategy today is the strategy of creating revolutionary focuses in countries of the Third World, establishing horizontal ties between those pockets that would ignore the First World and its primary imperial cultural institutes and languages, and subsequently raising the arms, organizing riots, creating “liberated areas” and seizing power in separate countries which then must consciously become logistical bases of the world revolutionary process.

It was impossible to implement this strategy in the early 20th century: the superetatist revolutions similar to the Bolshevist revolution, de-facto solved the tasks of bourgeois revolutions (industrialization, resolving the agrarian question, and cultural revolution), therefore the countries of the then periphery and semi-periphery (where strictly speaking the anti-bourgeois revolutions broke out) were forced to learn from the metropolitan countries, borrow their culture and technology. Furthermore, the horizontal links, because communications and information technologies had not been developed yet, and nations of the world were isolated, between the revolutionary forces of the periphery countries were extremely difficult to establish (that is why, for example, revolutionaries of the colonies of the British Empire had to communicate via the metropolis and in the metropolitan language).

Globalization removes those obstacles. Moreover, there is no need to turn to the culture of the modern West as this is a culture of degradation: since the 1970’s the culture and human sciences of the metropolitan states corrupted by post-structuralism and post-modernism, have not presented any major achievements to the world; and by the way this is typical of parasitic societies. In the early 20th century, capitalism was on the rise, the bourgeoisie—if one looks at it not from national perspectives but from a planetary point of view—still was a rising class first of all associated with the real material production. However, today capitalism has reached the limits of its qualitative growth continuing to develop only in quantity, predatorily exhausting the planetary resources, and the bourgeois class is connected first and foremost with the sphere of finance—and even within this sphere primarily with speculative, virtual capital. The capitalism of today has no experience that would be worth borrowing by the anti-capitalist forces.

The victory of mass culture in arts and literature, the victory of post-modernism and the rejection of the scientific approach in human sciences, the victory of “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” in social life, the victory of obscurantism, religious fundamentalism and neoliberalism in the ideology of the contemporary West is not accidental but logical and is explained by the parasitic nature of metropolis. The art and literature, philosophy and humanities of the modern West no longer has any progressive social value (this equally applies to the Western left; one can simply compare the outright mass-culture Tony Negri’s bestsellers “The Empire” and “Multitude”, which are within an ace of gutter press, with his really serious and truly pioneering works of the 1960-70’s). We have finally made it to the day when we need not and should not learn culturally from the developed capitalist countries (there is nothing we can learn there) but should instead develop independently on the basis of the opposition to the bourgeois “culture”.

Unfortunately, the technical superiority of the First World cannot be ignored. This concerns not only the military superiority but, first and foremost, the superiority in the field of surveillance of the political and public scene, of organizations and individuals, control of social behaviour and social actions. Imperialism actively develops and implements, with the help of secret services that have received exclusive rights and powers (this is exactly what the “antiterrorist” hysteria was unleashed for), methods and mechanisms of total surveillance and total control and, consequently, total suppression.

That means that generally only those revolutionary forces, which will not be transparent to imperialism. will be able to survive, hold on and create revolutionary pockets of resistance In other words, the revolutionary forces require areas of autonomy. The experience of the 20th century showed that the organizational forms, which had ignored the laws and will of the class and political enemy and which the class and political enemy had failed to influence because of the lack of information about the situation in the areas, could be the effective areas of autonomy. So are, for example, underground or partisan parties.

The class and the political enemy imposes its rules through the state as a machinery of direct class suppression and through the “civil society” as a duplicating system of class suppression (formally independent from the state). It was Gramsci who once noted that exactly because there is this duplicating repressive system, the “civil society”, under capitalism, the revolutionary forces will be able to win only if confront the institutes of the bourgeois “civil society” with institutes of its own anti-bourgeois “counter-civil society”, that is if they create such a social sphere that will be opaque for the enemy and closed which it cannot enter. The experience of the 20th century demonstrated that such were the territories of revolutionary culture and institutes of revolutionary “civil society” most completely implemented in the practice of guerrilla (the experience of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua).

And all the attempts to play at somebody else’s ground, in the bourgeois “civil society”, suffered an inevitable defeat as they were made in pursuance of the strategy of legal activity on the enemy’s terms, inside this society (with an illusionary aim of “seizing the hegemony”) instead of the strategy of demolishing, eliminating the bourgeois “civil society”.

It would be correct strategically not to duplicate the institutes of the bourgeois “civil society” and bourgeois cultural institutes but to reject them, replace them with different institutes—the institutes, which are required to perform the tasks of the world revolution. It was no accident that the U.S.S.R. after the 1920’s and the Eastern Bloc countries were very bourgeois in their cultural (and lifestyle)—they were not revolutionary countries. Conclusions should be drawn from this grievous experience, and mistakes of the Soviet Union and other superetatist states should not be repeated. To put it otherwise, one must already today to study thoroughly (and critically, of course) the early revolutionary cultural and social experience of Soviet Russia of the 1920’s, the first revolutionary years of Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan and other revolutions.

Finally, rejecting the major languages of the world imperialism, first of all English, is an essential prerequisite for victory. The U.S. as the world policeman quite consciously impose English as the international language upon the whole planet: it facilitates controlling the planet. It is not accidental that all recent achievements of radical antibourgeois forces, even though local, were made possible where these forces ignored the English language (and tried to avoid using other languages of the world imperialism such as French and German): Chiapas where revolutionary propaganda was conducted in Maya languages; Ecuador and Bolivia where revolutionary propaganda was carried out mainly in Quechua and Aymara languages; Nepal and India where the Maoist rebels are conducting the propaganda in local languages (and in the last resort in Hindi and Nepali). In other words, the world imperialism has made a muff of those pockets of resistance exactly because of its imperial overconfidence: it believed that all important documents would surely be translated into English.

The boycott on the metropolitan languages (on English mandatory) in horizontal links between the revolutionary forces of the periphery, accompanied with studying of each other’s languages, will make these forces far less transparent to imperialism and, therefore, much more dangerous for it.

The strategy of the world revolution as a world guerrilla war coming from the Third World is a long-term strategy (even for local actions). The experience shows that preparing any armed resistance focus requires much time: it took 20 to 25 years to get ready for the uprising in Chiapas; 20 years for the preparation of the guerrilla of Sendero Luminoso in Peru; the Maoist guerrilla in Nepal and India was started by organizations created in the underground (or gone underground) in the late 1960’s; the victorious massive street riots in Ecuador and Bolivia were organized by unions of the Indians created in mid 1970’s. Hence it follows that this strategy has nothing to do with the notorious “putschism”, “making a revolution in 24 hours” which our and Western “academic left” eagerly speak about (and criticize). These “academic left” with this criticism simply mask their own cowardice, their own inability to struggle actively, and their own vested interest in maintaining the status quo: they are more or less well-lodged within the bourgeois society and are afraid of losing what they have as a result of some “abrupt movements”. Holding “scientific conferences” is the favourite activity of the “academic left” (at their loose hours when they are free from duty in the bourgeois academic institutes and writing academic papers for the bourgeois academic journals). But the world history does not know any single case when scientific conferences would bring about a social revolution!

One can predict in advance that since the revolutionary centres have shifted to the capitalist periphery, the countries of the “New Periphery” (countries of the former Eastern Bloc) as countries belonging to, or claiming the status of, the semi-periphery, will be the last to join the revolutionary struggle. Some of them—those which will actually manage to become semi-periphery countries (so far Slovenia alone has clearly managed to do so)—will be the last by virtue of the very status of the semi-periphery. The remaining one because two prerequisites must be met for a successful development of the revolutionary movement in these countries (and it requires a lot of time):

(1) alternation of generations must occur: the “Soviet” generation, obviously lost for the revolution, must step down, and the generation of those who have been indoctrinated by unbridled anti-communist propaganda soaked up in adolescence, the generation of those who have cheered the coming of capitalism, must follow suit;

(2) the tradition of independent radical left opposition destroyed under the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy rule, must come about.

At last one needs to understand that territories liberated from capitalism by the revolutionary forces, and it also applies to entire countries, cannot be anything but rear bases for the world revolution. The experience of the U.S.S.R. shows that any other approach, other strategy are suicidal. Objectively there are no conditions today for carrying out a socialist revolution: nowhere in the world the productive forces have developed enough to go beyond the economic formation and the industrial mode of production. (All the tales about a “post-industrial” society are ravings originated by the parasitic nature that the First World has assumed. If one follows this logic then the richer districts of capitalist cities have always lived in a “post-industrial” society). Therefore, one should distinguish the concept of antibourgeois revolution from the concept of socialistic revolution in order not to deceive oneself and others. The upcoming anti-bourgeois revolutions will necessary be superetatist, and the societies brought up by these revolutions will be egregiously imperfect, superetatist, and they are justified because they will become the areas of social and economic, and cultural experiments (during which new, post-bourgeois culture, psychology and social relations will take shape by the method of selection) and will serve bridgeheads for revolutions in other countries, revolutions a chain of which will in the end do away with world capitalism.

In this sense, the negative experience of the superetatist countries (the U.S.S.R. and others) is invaluable as it allows for forming a clear picture of the dangers that objectively threaten the victorious anti-bourgeois revolutions, in advance.

A socialist revolution, which can only be worldwide and which will not run in the same pattern common for the bourgeois and superetatist revolutions, is a matter of the distant future. However, our contemporaries will witness, and may join, antibourgeois revolutions. And, lastly, one should keep in mind that the future is open, and if this strategy is not implemented for any reason by the left, some other adversary of the First World can realize it, for example, Islamist radicals can, who today act as a force regionally resisting the Western imperialism but who, if the left continue to be passive, may become a global force (and this very anti-imperialistic potency makes Islamic radicalism so attractive in the world; it is not accidental that every year in Germany 10,000 Germans get converted to Islam)

10 October, 2005-18 January, 2006

Published in The Future Present (L.). 2011. Vol. 1. N 1.

_____________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander Nikolaevich Tarasov is a Soviet and Russian left-wing sociologist, politologist, culturologist, writer and philosopher

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Lily Pad Roll: Journey to the Outposts of the Empire
by Gaither Stewart
Also available in electronic format at $6.99

Belgrade in flames, after US/NATO bombing, June 1999. A reluctant lily pad?

Reviewed by Branford Perry, Hipographia

I just finished a second reading of Gaither Stewart’s explosive and highly disturbing new novel, Lily Pad Roll, volume two of the Europe Trilogy.

At the end of such a novel I like to sit in silence, in semi-obscurity if possible, and let the atmosphere sweep over me in order to feel the sum effect of my reading and the residue and the mood I know I will feel come over me each time I think of the work in the future.

In this case the sensation is one of unease caused by both this well-told story of major aspects of American imperialism related by a master story-teller, but, above all in particular, of the enmity towards and the fear of the Russian bear on the part of the American eagle, whose evil presence overshadows Lily Pad Roll like Predator drones—because of America’s terrible and terrifying arms sufficient to destroy many times over the entire planet Earth, its highly trained special forces and aggressive policies supported by a chain of vassal states and satraps such as no other aspirant for world dominion has ever possessed. Neither Napoleon nor Hitler could have dreamed of such military power. Nor of commanding a nation-people standing so solidly behind their Fuehrer, a people filled with a sense of Exceptionalism and destiny tailored by God for world dominion, reminiscent of the “Manifest Destiny” of these transplanted Europeans to exterminate whatever stood in their path, even if it meant the extermination of the great indigenous nations of North America. (The “manifest” part would soon extend well beyond America’s continental limits to embrace much of the globe, apace with its growth in industrial might and military muscle.)

Nor were either of the conquerors and invaders of Russia so sick with the fear of Russia and its messianism as is the USA today with already half the world under its control and much of the rest already targeted, or sanctioned or cordoned, many a nation terrified that it may find its way onto the list of peoples destined for, as the author calls it, America’s “humanitarian intervention” or an imported dose of its pseudo-democracy.

The author of Lily Pad Roll spells out this fear of Russia and its Socialism from the very birth of Socialism in Russia exacerbated by the post-World War Two terror of Russian occupation of all of Europe (the image of Cossacks watering their horses at the Vatican City fountains in Rome) and the spread of its messianic Communism throughout the rest of the world. Readers are right to feel disturbed. That major foreign policy aspects, almost the raison d’état of the world’s most powerful nation, are based on fear should not sit comfortably with anyone.

A major character in the novel, the Serb agent, Ilya Milanica explains the perplexity of many like-minded East Europeans. “We are trying to understand what your crazy America is up to. What does it want from us? What does it want from the world? We are starting to think America is little different from Nazi Germany. It too wanted the world … and with a no less crazy ideology, if you can call American thinking today ideology. America has gone too far. Every conqueror in history had its limits. America has now overreached … exceeded the limits.”

I personally wandered around East Europe for years in my journalistic activities especially in the cultural field and share the author’s remarks that in general “East Europeans—whether in elegant Prague and Budapest or in the cultural backwaters of Chisinau and Tiraspol in Europe’s poorest nation—have a natural quality of universality about them. We in the West have lost that … if we ever had it. In comparison to their largeness of spirit, I think, we are the provincials. Our Eurocentrism is too powerful.”

I have essayed here in these few words to prepare the curious reader for the fearsome alternative world he is about to enter when he opens the first page of Lily Pad Roll, just as he did when he read The Trojan Spy, the first volume of the Europe Trilogy, and consequently—or so one can reasonable expect—when one delves into the already announced volume three, Time of Exile. In Stewart’s world, torture is still called torture, and war is war, blood and slaughtered old men, women and children. The reader should also be prepared to enter the most unexpected, dark and relatively unknown corners of our world: beer-splashed tables in the Frankfurt rail station café; Kosovo province stolen from Serbia by the USA-NATO, rendered independent, and converted into a major military base where the USA shares rule with the Kosovo-Albanian drug traffic-mafia militia called the Kosovo Liberation Army; a darkened bar on a U.S. military base in eastern Bulgaria, the hangout of professional DIA killers; lonely tourist hotels on the scary Black Sea; lost cities of East Europe like Chisinau and Tiraspol; a little known Russian-language newspaper in the even less known maverick breakaway republic of Transnestr from the largely Russian-speaking breakaway nation of Moldova that most Westerners continue to call Moldavia (the shadow of Hollywood I presume? Wasn;t that famous prisoner of something not originally from Moldavia? Or was that a Marx Brothers’ republic?); the great staircase entrance to the Russian-speaking Ukrainian city of Odessa, the scene of Sergey Eizenstein’s famous film, Battleship Potemkim; secret meetings in carpet shops inside the maze of the gigantic Istanbul bazaar;the huge darkened cellar archives run by an ancient “cellar mouse” in the German Embassy in Moscow; the cobblestone streets of independent, NATO-linked Riga, Latvia bordering with Russia in the West; and in a surprise ending inside Iran itself bordering on Russia’s underbelly.

As Paul Carline notes in his Preface, “Pad Roll takes us into the world of the inexorable spread of American and NATO bases around the world, and in particular in those countries which form a kind of crescent surrounding Russia on its south-western, southern and south-eastern borders. The exact number of such bases is unknown (except presumably to the Pentagon and the White House), estimates varying from around 740 to over 1000, with new bases continually being created or older ones extended – such as those on the Yemeni island of Socotra and the Omani island of Masirah, both situated strategically at the southern exit of the Strait of Hormuz, within easy striking distance of Iran. The base on Masirah is (with a sense of irony perhaps) called Camp Justice.

In the novel’s preliminary pages the author explains the reasons for the odd title of Lily Pad Roll. “The giant water lily, victoria amazonica, is the world’s biggest lily pad, up to four feet, and can support the weight of several people at once…. The lily pad is quiet. It lies tranquilly on the pond water, offering rest for the frog. The American military jargon has adopted the lily pad to mean an outpost, an advance camp, a foreign base, or staging area, only one in a series of stops, a scaled down military facility with theoretically little permanent personnel, often used as a staging ground for Special Forces and Intelligence operations. Soldiers may then leapfrog from one lily pad to the next. The outpost aspect of the military lily pads however follows in the footsteps of the multiplying lily pads and especially giant water lily leaf: they not only multiply but also grow in size and tend to become permanent military bases encircling the world. Afghanistan is a giant lily pad, permanent, a place to move out from, a place from which soldiers go out to kill other people around that part of the world.”

Already back January of 2004, Chalmers Johnson—author of Blowback, a bestseller after 9/11 wrote a piece entitled “America’s Empire of Bases.” He said:

“Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire—an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.”

From my home base today in London I look back across the Channel and extend my vision to Serbia, then northwards and eastwards toward Russia and sum up the physical, moral and cultural devastation wrought by the lily pad philosophy of strategy of dominion and cannot but marvel that the whole East has not already turned its back on the West. I can hardly believe my ears when I hear that the European Union considers as anti-democratic and anti-European leaders like Ukraine’s pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych who continues to win popular elections and dares name Russian the official language of East Ukraine where Russian has been almost forever the de facto dominant language.

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was “sold” as a response to 9/11—despite the total absence of any Afghan involvement in that crime (even the FBI has formally admitted that it has “no hard evidence” linking Osama bin Laden to 9/11)—reminds the reader that the present fear that another false-flag event will be staged to ‘justify’ an attack on Iran, with the current attempt at regime change in Syria intended to open up that country to further “Lily Pads”.

I’m afraid that until Americans realise what is really going on in the world—an almost insuperable task given the scandalous distortions and lies peddled every single day by the American media—nothing will stop this sinister force from acquiring more victims until the ultimate tipping point is reached. Those who make the wounds, as the great Norman Bethune once said, need to be exposed. This was never so urgent as today, when the Big Lie wraps itself in everything that is noble and good.

It may sound terribly hackneyed but at this point only the truth can save humanity from itself.

Hipographia.  He also serves as The Greanville Post‘s Assistant Editor for literary matters. Something of a recluse, he now makes his home near London.
ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH EDGAR

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Also on sale at Barnes & Noble, Powell’s and other leading bookstores.

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Crimes against humanity, and of planetary scope, are being planned and discussed in practically broad daylight—with the passive assent of the American public.

The Obama brand: Possibly the most lethal form of demagoguery to arise in modern times.

Editor’s Note: This may be one of the most important pieces of news commentary you will read this year or any other year. Reflect upon what the author is saying. We’re literally on the brink of the abyss.

Still, while the utterly prostituted American media pledges support or remains characteristically silent about the criminally irresponsible behavior of Western leaders, busily whitewashing every felonious policy advanced by Washington, not everyone sees the spreading Syrian conflict through the same lens.  Corroborating what Stephen Lendman is warning us about, both China and Russia have filed opinions deeply divergent from the official US line. See our addendum for a sampling of these views.—PG

By Stephen Lendman

Risking Nuclear Armageddon

Irresponsible leaders risk the unthinkable. Media scoundrels cheerlead mindlessly. So do neocon think tanks. Ordinary people are more concerned about mundane trivia than survival.   Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned. The violin wasn’t invented for another 1,500 years. Today’s officials go where earlier ones wouldn’t dare. They risk regional or global disaster. War on Syria and/or Iran may ignite more than leaders bargain for.

Imagine blowing up the world to control it. Imagine forces able to stop it staying sidelined. Imagine the unimaginable. Imagine it before it’s too late to matter.

World War II weapons were toys compared to today’s. Before war ended, tens of millions died. Estimates range from 50 – 70 million. No one knows for sure. Preventing war would have saved them. Hoped for never again became perpetual conflicts.

Obama replicates hardline neocon extremism. He did what supporters thought impossible. He surpassed the worst of Bush. Imagine what’ll do in a second term.

He’s risking the unthinkable. He’s lurching toward potential nuclear war. He’s mindless about likely consequences.

Only America used nuclear weapons. It’s not working to avoid potential catastrophe. It wants advantageous geopolitical positioning and dominance. Mutually assured destruction so far worked. Fail safe days may be ending.

Attacking Syria risks Russian and perhaps Chinese intervention. War on Iran entails that risk and more. Washington’s arsenal includes weapons too dangerous to use.

One around for several years is called “the Mother of All Bombs (massive ordinance penetrator, or MOP).” At 30,000 pounds, it’s able to penetrate 200 feet of concrete before exploding. It’s America’s most powerful non-nuclear weapon. Use will cause horrific casualties and destruction.

Tactical nuclear weapons may also be used. Called bunker busters, their explosive power ranges from less to more than bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Using them assures retaliation. Prime targets include Israel’s nuclear sites, US bases, and America’s nuclear armed vessels. Imagine the potential consequences. Armageddon is risked. The unimaginable may become reality.

Plans have been in place for years. Washington and Israel have them. Perhaps coordinated strikes are planned. Russian and Chinese intervention ups the catastrophic odds.

Dangerous signals are increasing. On August 19, Obama promised US military intervention if Syria repositions or uses chemical or other nonconventional weapons. At a White House news conference he said:

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.”

“That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

At the same time, Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) said US, UK and French special forces are positioned in Israel, Jordan and Turkey. They’re on standby to seize Syrian chemical weapons.

Doing so means invasion. DF said they’ll “engage Syrian troops attempting to” reposition nonconventional weapons. Allegedly it’s to prevent them from falling into insurgent hands or supplying them to Hezbollah.

David Cameron (UK) and François Hollande (FR)— junior but eager partners of Washington in its global criminality.

Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, and France’s Francois Hollande “wrap(ped) up the details of their combined operation….” They plan direct intervention. Air strikes are involved.

DF said “American reconnaissance teams are already on the ground, marking out landing sites and setting up bridgeheads for the incoming US, British and French special forces.”

Direct US intervention began. Stepped up actions will follow. Obama’s acting on his own. Congress remains on summer recess until early September. Republicans hold their national convention from August 27 – 30. Democrats have theirs the following week.

All’s quiet on the home front. What better time perhaps for more war. National attention will be minimal. Perhaps Obama thinks he can wrap things up and declare victory before most people notice. He hasn’t been able to do it for over 18 months.

No end of conflict is imminent. Attacking Syria may involve Hezbollah, Iran, Russia and China. Imagine then what follows. All-out war repercussions can’t be predicted. Embroiling the entire region and beyond is possible.

Syria won’t use chemical weapons except in self-defense. It won’t give Washington pretext to intervene. Its statements left no ambiguity. On August 24, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said:

“We, for our part, have already worked with the Syrian government and have raised this issue. We have been given very strong assurances that everything possible will be done to stop it happening. Guarantees were also given that the chemical weapons will remain in their current place.”

“They assured us that very serious control is being exercised over the safety of these weapons, and there is no threat today that something could happen to them or the situation could get out of control.”

At the same time, Gatilov expressed concern about Washington perhaps instigating insurgent nonconventional weapons use blamed on Assad. Doing so gives America pretext for war.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France will help enforce no-fly zone authority. Doing so without Security Council approval is lawless. It also involves bombing Syrian air defenses and command and control sites.

Libya 2.0 may be imminent. Imagine the horrific casualty count and devastation. War with Syria assures it. Planners, of course, say nothing. Media scoundrels suppress what everyone needs to know.

Another nonbelligerent nation is on America’s target list for total destruction. Imagine public inattention while it’s happening.

Attacking Iran may follow or occur simultaneously. On August 24, Haaretz headlined “Heading for an iceberg called Iran,” saying:

Netanyahu/Barak want support to attack. Cabinet members are evenly split pro and con. Shimon Peres went public. He’s concerned about something too dangerous to risk. Unfortunately he thinks so only if Israel acts unilaterally  He calls going solo potentially suicidal. Alone or otherwise is madness.

Fourteen ministers comprise Israel’s security cabinet. Eight have most say. Currently Netanyahu/Barak favor war. Two others support them – Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. Four others are opposed.

Netanyahu/Barak need one more on their side. How all cabinet members feel is important. Six want war. Another six don’t, and two remain undecided. Decisions this grave should be no-brainers. Mindless officials risk possible armageddon Haaretz spelled out as follows:

Though unlikely, if Israel goes it alone, Washington will be “furious. The price of oil soars. Thousands of missiles strike Tel Aviv, Haifa, Dimona and other Israeli cities. The economy collapses.”

“Hundreds are killed, thousands wounded. A mass flight of Israelis abroad. Tent cities. In this scenario, a senior figure in the ruling party said this week, Netanyahu will certainly lose the next election. Not even avowed Likudniks will vote Likud.”

Does Netanyahu know the risks? “Of course,” said a senior unnamed source. “He is not stupid.” He just acts that way. “He sees the whole picture and all its parts.”

Will that give him pause? “No. He believes that this is his reason d’être in life.” That’s why he was elected, he thinks. He and Barak are committed. Others are worried for good reason.

Haaretz downplayed potential disaster. At issue is irradiating Israel, causing vast destruction, killing thousands, injuring many more, and putting the entire population and others in neighboring countries at risk.

Nightly anti-war demonstrations target Barak’s home. Former adviser Eldad Yaniv participates. He said Yitzhak Rabin made a mistake allowing them weekly where he lived. They affected public opinion.

Yaniv thinks if he and others persist nightly, they’ll become “permanent fixture” enough perhaps to prevent war. He and other believe it’s too important not to try.

Hawks say waiting ups the dangers. Inflammatory reports lacking credibility and/or designed to enlist public support circulate.

On August 23, Reuters headlined “Iran expands nuclear capacity in underground bunker – sources,” saying:

More underground uranium enrichment ability “potentially pav(es) the way for a significant expansion of work the West fears is ultimately aimed at making nuclear bombs.”

Doing so “de(fies) international demands to curb its nuclear program.”

Unnamed sources lack credibility. Inflammatory reports advance the ball for war. Reuters shares guilt with other media scoundrels.

On August 23, The New York Times ran the same story in more detail with more deception. Writer David Sanger’s been waging war on Iran. Instead of truth and full disclosure, he features pro-Western misinformation.

He calls Iran’s peaceful nuclear program “a direct threat to the US.” He lied but won’t admit it. He’s at it again stoking fear instead of allaying it.

IAEA head Yukiya Amano will soon report more on Iran. He’s a pro-Western tool. Washington got him installed to serve its interests. He’ll say what Obama officials want to hear. He’ll stoke more baseless Iranian threats.

He’ll stop short of saying Iran decided to produce nuclear weapons. Perhaps he’s saving this type punchline for a later time. Claiming it doesn’t wash. It won’t deter him saying anything to debase Tehran unjustifiably.

Nonetheless, he’ll likely “renew the debate over Iran’s intentions at a time when Israeli officials are stepping up their warnings that the window to conduct a preemptive military strike is closing.”

His views may affect US voters in November. In July, Romney said Obama wasted time negotiating. Iran took full advantage, he claimed.

Inflammatory reports make negotiated solutions less likely. Sanger and others like him increase chances for war. They’d feel otherwise if bombs fell on them. They’re brain-dead about human costs of war. Proliferating propaganda only matters.

Amano plays the same dirty game. He’ll say Iran made substantial enriched uranium progress. They’ve got enough to produce five or more bombs.

Ordinary people have enough power with their bare hands to inflict harm. Few go around doing it. Headline stories don’t suggest they might. Spurious reports mischaracterize Iranian intentions.

Amano’s bottom line is how close is Tehran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons? Every nation operating commercial reactors can do so if they wish. Only Iran is called threatening. Accusers have other fish to fry.

At issue is regime change. Pretexts are easy to contrive. Repetition stokes fear. Public support for what’s unthinkable may follow. Imagine a worst case scenario. Imagine leaders risking it.

Imagine fears becoming reality. At that point it’s too late to matter. What better reason to stop potential catastrophe before it happens.

Obama’s bully pulpit can prevent it. Instead, he’s furthering belligerence, not deterring it. On March 7, House Congressional Resolution (HCR) 107 was introduced. It was referred to committee. No further action was taken.

It “(e)xpress(es) the sense of Congress that the use of offensive military force by a President without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor under Article II, section 4 of the Constitution.”

It states:

“The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

What greater crime than aggressive war. Obama and other US leaders are guilty. Invoking constitutional power more than ever is urgent to prevent the unthinkable. If saving humanity isn’t reason enough, what is?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”  http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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

ADDENDUM

Chinese Media: Obama’s Syria Warning An Excuse For Military Intervention

(RTTNews) – Chinese state media on Wednesday alleged that the US President’s earlier warning over the possible use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is just an excuse for a militarily intervention in the conflict-torn Middle East country.

The Chinese media response came two days after President Barack Obama cautioned that the United States might intervene militarily in the ongoing conflict if the Syrian regime headed by resident Bashar al-Assad uses chemical or biological weapons against the rebels.

Moscow and Beijing were stoutly opposed to a forced regime change in Syria and were also against imposing UN sanctions on the regime. The two nations want the crisis to be resolved by diplomatic means. The two nations, along with the Syrian regime, accuse the West and their Arab allies of escalating the Syrian conflict by arming the rebels. But, the west has rejected the allegations.

Currently, fighting continues between government forces and armed rebels opposed to the regime across Syria. More than 18,000 people, mostly civilians, are believed to have been killed and tens of thousands displaced since anti- regime protests broke out in Syria in March 2011. The conflict is now viewed as a civil war by most of the international community.

Original source: RTT News

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Shakespeare & Company, a venerable Parisian bookstore, has this to say about our senior editor and novelist Gaither Stewart’s ONCE IN BERLIN:

“Gaither Stewart has written a wonderful collection of stories that leaves an indelible mark in the back of the mind. Berlin is not only the setting of these stories but also one of the most important characters. There is an intelligent subtlety to how Berlin invades the collection. The city’s ties to the West and ties to the East are beautifully woven into the characters’ personalities. It is a fantastic collection and a great incite into a city that is unsure of itself.”

Sample this excerpt, the title story from Stewart’s collection ONCE IN BERLIN, and, if you will, tell us what you think.
—The Editors

ONCE IN BERLIN

By Gaither Stewart

Karl Friedrich Strack was standing on the upper level exit of the Benjamin Franklin Hospital holding a bunch of red roses. His father had just died. He lifted his eyes toward the late afternoon skies and dispassionately observed the flow of formations of soundless birds, masses of specks dotting the leaden late winter sky. They seemed to be passing over Pankow in the northern part of the city.

Men are always gazing upwards at the birds, he thought, envying them. He wondered about their arrivals and departures. Probably only the birds knew what they were doing, swooping and gyrating, swelling and contracting, surging and receding like the tide. It seemed strange that humans flew to the moon but didn’t know for sure what the birds were doing up there in the heavens. They must be lonely, he thought. It was their silence. Probably not even the creator knew what it meant.

It was March. The northeastern wind from the Baltic Sea was cold. The trees were still heavy with rain. The twinkling of lights in the distance must be the television tower at Alexander Platz. It occurred to him that the birds were perhaps returning from Italy or Tunisia. Maybe their sudden return was an augury. Were it not such a sorrowful moment, he would have thought it enchanting. In another time, the silence, the sudden chill of the afternoon in melancholy Brandenburg, and the brief coalescing of man and nature would have meant beauty.

Dieter Wilhelm Strack was dead. In calendar years his life was longer than average. Er ist aufeinmal gestorben, Karl thought. Aber mit welchem Recht? He had no right to die so early.

Karl’s father was the chief reason he had moved back to Berlin. Now he would never get to know him. He wondered what he was to do now. There was only one thing he really knew in this moment: his life would never again be as it was before. Everything had changed. Everything was incomplete but everything was changed. And nothing was finished.

Holding the red roses against his chest he boarded the 118 bus. Rote Rosen! For whom had they been intended?

His father was now an even greater mystery. Dieter was only 80. Much too young, Karl kept telling himself, as he had been doing during the twenty-four hours that his father spent dying. Eighty years of miracles, he reminded himself … but still too few years. But were the years ever enough? And then only one day to die! Though Dieter’s life had been full and consistent, he seemed to be one of those who died without ever really beginning to live. Without even knowing how he wanted to live.

In the hospital, the Turkish nurse had put the red roses in a vase of water.

Karl thought how strange it was to see his father with his eyes closed.

At Botanischer Garten, Karl transferred to the S-Bahn and returned to Schöneberg. His apartment was as empty as was his brain. Uta was gone too. Einfach weg! Their story too was incomplete. Berlin was lonely. Maybe as lonely as the ghost city his father had described when he’d returned here at war’s end.

Carefully, Karl trimmed the roses and put them in a vase.

A voice seemed to speak to him. It told him an epoch had ended. He wondered if it meant that he, too, had to separate. Did his father’s departure mean Abschied for him too? Or would Dieter’s exit signify for him a new arrival in a new world? A new start? A new life? He’d never been his father’s son. He’d never been able to accept his father’s world or the things for which he had stood. Dieter, his father, was steadfast, a rock, unmoveable in his ethical life. He’d never once surrendered, not even when the world he believed in turned inside out.

The doorbell sounded. Karl opened. It was William, his friend from downstairs, William.

“Dieter just died,” Karl said.

“Died?” William said, lifting his long leg and pulling his sock straight. He was wearing running pants and athletic socks. A sweatshirt hung loosely on his thin frame. Again Karl noted his friend had the same dreamy expression in his eyes as had Dieter. He’d often thought he and Dieter were spiritual brothers.

Karl watched the expressions on his friend’s gaunt face change from dismay to incredulity, still uncertain whether he was joking.

“Moskovskaya!” Karl added.

“Moskovskaya?”

“Red roses?” William echoed.

“The flowers he bought … they carried them to the hospital with the ambulance.” Karl still felt numb. He wondered what he was supposed to feel. He wondered when the pain would begin.

“Just like him to go to Karl Liebknecht Strasse to buy roses,” William said. He tentatively laid a hand on Karl’s shoulder.

“Faithful to the end,” Karl said, for the first time feeling his eyes watering. “The most consistent person I’ve ever known … the older he got the further he moved to the left.”

“Fate must have taken him to that street!” William exclaimed.

“Not fate! He never for one minute in his life believed in destiny,” Karl said. “Born in Berlin in nineteen twenty-four, died in Berlin in two thousand four. That’s pretty consistent.”

“Enough to know he died a disillusioned man. But still steadfast.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’d been saying there was nothing else for him to do. He got over Russia’s betrayal of Socialism but he couldn’t bear the degeneration today of the whole social idea … into globalization.”

“He had good reason to be demoralized,” William said.

Karl flopped on the couch and looked at his American friend with misty eyes. Yes, William was more Dieter’s political son than was he. William was naïve like Dieter. He also thought men were better than they were.

Darkness was invading the balcony outside his Dachgeschoss apartment. His eclectic furnishings were now meaningless. On the tongue of memory Karl perceived his words: ‘When I go, let my ashes fly away on the northeastern winds.’ In the eyes of memory he saw Dieter’s face, thin-lipped, blue eyes under heavy brows, thick blonde-gray hair, and heartbreak and ambiguity concealed in his expression—the man who in such a short time had re-shaped his life. Tall like himself, and slightly bent, Dieter had always dominated the space around him. His apparent attentiveness to others had made him beloved by everyone. Yet another part of him seemed to be wandering among the stars—an aura of unrequited adventure in his eyes, an aura of the steppes and the seas, which suggested he was not yet done with life. Karl heard in memory Dieter’s peculiar speech—he could switch from Berlin dialect to High German marked by a slight off-key cadence as if he had just returned from a long sojourn in distant lands. And though he claimed to be a man of the people, he had a way of detaching himself, as if both accepting his persona, his nation, his language, while simultaneously allowing his real self to declare universality.

Yet despite his ambivalence and the mystery surrounding his father, Karl realized that he was one of the fortunate few who understood their place in the world. That made him extraordinary.

“At the hospital they said they would take care of things. Father would be disappointed but not furious at the arrangement.” Karl was aware that he’d just referred to him as father, as he never had before. As long as he remembered he’d called his father Dieter—he was too much a stranger to be a father.

“They have space for him in the Zentralfriedhof,” he said, now walking around the room and rearranging objects in their places. Dieter had found the apartment for him when he decided to move back to Berlin. “Out Karl Marx Allee!”

“Politics?” Karl said, “I never thought of his beliefs as politics … they were his life.”

“And his life was exile.”

Karl gazed fondly at his German-American friend’s profile. The wanderer, William Schokmiller, liked to say that exile was his weapon. Like his silences, an expression of freedom.

“It’s a mystery how you resemble so much my father who was always shouting that there was everything to be said.”

“And so little time to say it.”

Karl went out onto the balcony and leaned over the parapet, feeling slightly the dizziness of vertigo. Darkness had fallen. The streets of this part of Schöneberg were quiet and empty. He had never gotten used to the stillness of Berlin as compared to bustling Munich.

“He told me about his responsibility for the streets of the city,” William said, leaning far over the railing beside him and grinning up mischievously at nervous Karl. “I’ll never forget. Seven thousand kilometers of streets in Berlin to be cleaned of the snows,” he bragged—seven times the distance from Berlin to London.”

“When he was boy he dreamed of becoming a chimney sweep,” Karl said. He loved the Schornsteinfeger dressed in black with black faces riding around on a bicycle and cleaning up things … always wanted to clean!”

“He told me he’d rather have been a street cleaner,” William said, “wearing their orange suits. Even nearer to the working class!”

“Nearer the heart of things, he said … yet he never understood the realities of life.”

“I thought he did,” William said softly. “He just didn’t like to talk about them.”

“You know I was a little jealous of your relationship with him … you seemed closer to his ideas of … of the good life.”

“If you knew my father in New York, you would understand why—for him freedom was stepping over everyone else’s body to get ahead. No rules. No limits. Survival of the fittest. That’s my Dad! In general people are no good, he still believes, sitting there in his chair, counting his dollars and railing against the Communists. Nuclear weapons and permanent war are his version of progress.”

“I still thought of him as a man of his times,” William said.

“It was a whole century, William. The hopes and myths of a century. All preserved in his memories—the Communism of his youth in the shadow of Rosa Luxemburg. That was betrayed! Then war. Six years of prison camps in Russia. His return to the ghost of Berlin. Reawakened hopes. Social Democracy. Again disillusionment.”

“Yet he didn’t live in despair. He drove his trams over the streets of Berlin and looked toward the future.”

 

A brilliant mid-morning sun had turned the winter grass to gray. One felt it was almost spring. Karl and William stood alone on one side of the grave in the deepest part of the sprawling cemetery and watched the men from the funeral service lower the casket. It was now closed. Across from them stood the same three men who had looked down into Dieter’s face in the cemetery chapel and touched his casket in the reverent way simple people do. They were dressed in faded suits and ties.

“Former colleagues,” Karl whispered.

The silence about the trio was so ingenuous they seemed noble. Karl felt embarrassment come over him and wondered if he should speak a few words. Nothing occurred to him. After all he’d hardly known the man.

Slightly taller than the other two, the old man in the center had a pallid face and a thin moustache. His head tipped upwards and bent to one side, a thoughtful mien on his face, almost a smile. He gazed into the distance as if in acceptance of what life handed out. At one moment he put a hand on the arm of each of his companions flanking him. His touch seemed to comfort them. His face bore an expression of kindliness. Karl stared back at him, aware that he too was absorbing the comfort the old man emanated.

All three of the old men radiated the same tender quality that Karl realized had distinguished his father. Like Dieter, all three had full heads of hair. Something about Berliners, he thought. You don’t see many bald people. It must be our protection against the cold winters.

Karl felt a sense of equilibrium come over him. He thought it was a gift from his dead father. It was the balance contained in the Rublev icons Dieter had so loved. Suddenly, for the first time, the strange harmony of Dieter’s life stood there visible to him on the other side of the grave.

The sun was now directly overhead. There were no shadows. Just the harmonious figures of the three men and the gray-silver light of the winter sun on the grass. The sky above, the men’s scrubby suits, and William silent beside him expressed his father’s life. Their colors, like his, were all hues, a harmony of nature’s hard colors.

The tallest of the trio stepped to the side of the grave.

“I knew Dieter from the time he came back from Russia,” he said toward Karl and William, speaking simply in a thick Berlin accent. “Today Berlin’s loss is great. For Dieter was a giant. And he had a wonderful life … a full life. He had time for everyone. He loved people. He never forgot anyone.”

He paused, again looking toward the East, as if searching for an elusive metaphor. Then: “The thing about Dieter was he loved everyone the same.

“But Berliners were his family. The streets of Berlin were his home. He especially loved our long winters under our gray skies. Dieter said he was like salt, the salt that defends the city streets against winter’s ice and snow.

“Not many people took notice of him,” the tall man said, now looking over their heads and gazing around at the vacant cemetery, “Many said he was foolish. But Dieter made a mark on all our lives.”

“My mother said he was a fool,” Karl whispered to William.

The one-armed man threw the red roses onto the casket.

The other man lifted his cane.

At that moment a hearse drove slowly along a nearby lane. A line of cars followed. Karl looked after them vaguely and blandly, then felt a sudden irritation. The heavy silence of the alien procession clashed with the serenity of Dieter’s companions, the old man’s words, the sunrays turned silver and the red roses on the casket.

 

He and William and the old men walked slowly down the footpath toward the exit. Here and there, back under the trees in the direction of Marzahn, banks of mist still resisted the sun, and wafted and swirled near thick shrubbery or close to the stonewalls. Gardeners with wheelbarrows and small carts passed nearby, ignoring the mourners, smiling and quietly joking among themselves.

They introduced themselves. The man who had spoken was Helmut. His companions were the one-armed Günther and Klaus with the cane. Karl invited them to lunch.

Karl watched fair-haired William talking quietly with them … he had their same easy tranquil manners. The same as Dieter. Karl had to hold himself in. He felt his dark features cloud … whether in anger or imminent melancholy and depression, he did not know. He looked at William and the others and envied them their stillness. He felt his pain. As he tried to intellectualise the pain, his loneliness washed over him—a gnawing hollowness somewhere in his belly. He recalled recent studies showing that the ache of melancholy was located in the mind. In a small area along the lateral ventricle of the brain called the hippocampus. This mysterious place stores memories and simultaneously fashions and guides the emotions that throw depressives into confusion.

The crazy thing was that the confusion of depression and melancholy—and the pain over Dieter—could be viewed with special instruments … and then medicated. No wonder, he thought, we feel more and more like computers.

 

Their table was on an elevated level near a bow window looking onto the Spree, the river narrow and unimpressive at this point. The weather had changed, the wind had returned and the sun disappeared behind fast moving clouds from the Baltic.

Günther had just said that Karl was fortunate to have had such a father and that he looked just like him. Karl had nodded and admitted that he hardly knew him. He had been with his mother all those years after she left Dieter and returned to school teaching in Munich. The three old men looked at each other.

“Who else but your father would have lived so many lives in one,” Helmut said. “He came back from Russia tired but fired up to live.” He became a Social Democrat, studied art history and politics at Humboldt University and began driving streetcars. He met Karl’s mother, Ursula, married her, and had a son. But for years he rejected firmly white-collar job offers. Streetcars were fine with him.

Helmut moved a thin shrunken hand in the air over the table as if in rhythm with his praise for their dead companion.

“But streetcars didn’t provide for my mother,” Karl said.

“No,” Klaus said, tapping the floor with his cane and smiling the same quiet smile as Dieter. “He was sad when she took you away but he said he had no choice. He had work to do here. That’s the kind of man he was. Unshakeable!”

“But how did he withstand the shock of the Wall?” Karl asked. “It must have dashed all his hopes.”

“But unlike politicians he never gave up his hopes for Wiedervereinigung,” Klaus said. “Reunification was his life goal … yet he celebrated the fall of the Wall with mixed emotions.”

“Let Helmut tell the story,” Klaus said. “He knows more than anyone … it was because of his brother-in-law.”

It had become dark in the restaurant and wall lamps came on. Rain was now falling on the Spree. Ducks swam toward the far banks near the library as if seeking shelter.

“My sister’s husband, Rainer, deserted the army in Lithuania sometime in 1943. He joined the anti-Nazi resistance there but a year later was captured by the SS, tortured and imprisoned. By some mix-up he survived and came back to Berlin after the war. He never really found himself again. He became an alcoholic.”

“Like many of us in those times,” Klaus said, tapping nervously his cane.

“There are worse things,” Helmut resumed. “Like my sister. Times were hard. She was alone. First raped by Soviet soldiers, then by life. She drifted into easy relationships with soldiers of any nation. By the time Rainer got back and met her she was, well … she was used to that life. They married, she brought in the money and he drank. But he loved her, and he was jealous. Poor man! In the late sixties the inevitable happened! On his fiftieth birthday. He came home to their apartment in Friedrichhain, not far from here, and found her with a man. He couldn’t take it anymore. He went into a drunken rage and stabbed her to death with a pair of scissors.”

“My God” Karl said. “Your sister!”

“Still, Rainer was a good man. Your father knew that. He used his streetcar contacts and somehow not only got into the East again but also argued his case to some sympathetic Communist judges. Rainer, he said, was both hero and victim. They let him go and Dieter brought him back to West Berlin.”

“No one in America would’ve believed such a thing possible,” William said.

“Nothing was ever what it seemed,” Helmut said. “Everything was forbidden and anything possible.”

“So what happened to Rainer?” Karl asked.

“He hung on a couple years … but he … well, in the end he hanged himself.”

“Berlin!” Klaus said.

“Life is complex, Dieter always said,” added Helmut. “He was always crying for more space. More room for life, he said. He was like a writer friend of his who demanded more spacious forms to write in. Your father recognized the existence of good and evil but he tried to go beyond it. He rejected scientific views of life … religious views too. He always talked about being human.”

“He told me that after Nazism and the Holocaust God had to be dead,” William said, “but that he believed in Him anyway. I never understood that.”

A moment of silence followed.

Then: “It was because of the Lord’s Prayer,” Helmut said. “He rejected those lines, Thy will be done on earth. He said God died because of those inhuman words … but I think he believed in Him anyway.”

 

Karl found a great surprise when he came home from school the next afternoon. A man and a woman and child were camped in his living room. He stood uncertainly in the threshold, wondering if he was on the wrong floor. The man leapt to his feet, a big grin on a fat red face.

“I told the house manager I was your brother from Russia,” he said in heavily accented English. “Naturally he let us in. So now! Welcome home! How about a hug for your brother?” he said opening his arms and moving toward Karl.

“Brother?” Karl said, stepping backwards and stumbling over an array of suitcases and shopping bags. He looked down and read the label, KaDeWe. Yes, they were Russians.

“Your russky brat! Your brother Dmitri! You mean our father never told you about me? Oh, that man! Never was a good father, was he? Come, come, let’s drink to our arrival. We must celebrate our new life. Ah, Russia already seems so far away!”

Karl didn’t say a word. He let the plump man pull him into the room. The woman half stood up and smiled tipsily. “Irina,” she said, holding out her hand. “Vy govorite po russki?”

“And that’s Seryozha,” the man said, pointing at the boy of about ten, fat and puffy-cheeked like his father, dressed in new jeans and sneakers. “Say hello to your uncle,” he said to the boy who just stared at Karl blankly.

Bottles and glasses and plates of food were spread across the coffee table. Two bottles of vodka were opened, a six-pack of beer, a brand new portable radio, some playing cards, an opened carton of cigarettes. Karl stared fixedly at a bottle of pickles.

“This is so good. The family finally together,” the fat man said. “And such a big apartment,” he added, gazing toward the small balcony. “Which is our room? Of course we waited for you to decide.”

He poured a liberal portion of vodka and pushed it toward Karl. “You must eat something! Oh, that gourmet shop at the KaDeWe—certainly the best in the world. And you must not worry, the three of us can sleep comfortably in the bedroom. I see this couch opens to a bed. Or do you have a wife?”

The woman cut a slice of salami, ate it and a pickle, and took a drink of beer. “Seryozha!” she said, pointing at a plate of cake in the middle of the table.

The kid leaned forward, grabbed a piece of cake, and stuffed in his mouth, still staring at Karl.

The woman and the fat kid began speaking in Russian while the man continued his monologue about their new life. Karl shut his ears. What pigs! he thought. Like the money-grabbing Russians you see around Berlin markets. This was a bordel scene from Dostoevsky or a session of madness in Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s drinking room.

Carefully he placed his glass on the table, examined closely the orange-haired mother in the tight dress and fat boy, turned toward their baggage near the door, and decided.

Slowly he stood up. The aliens fell silent and watched him. He walked to the door, opened it, and said in a low voice, “I want you to take your things, all your things, and get out of my house!”

“What? What …” began the man.

“Out! Get out of my house. Brother or no brother, get out of my house. Or I will call the police now.”

“But Brother, the immigration papers!” the man said. “Our father signed for us. You are my brother. This is a family reunion. Fa-mi-ly re-un-i-on! Finally … all of us together.”

“My father is dead!” Karl said coldly. He felt he was behaving differently from the way Dieter would have. “I know nothing about yours.”

“You mean you know nothing about your father’s Russian family? My mother, Dasha, is your father’s Russian wife! His only legal wife! Your father, Dieter Wilhelm Strack, is my father. I am Dmitri Dieterovich Strack!”

Karl stared at him in disbelief.

“How?” he murmured. “When? He’s always been in Berlin.”

“The usual reasons, I’m sure!” he said, now almost gleefully. “He met my mother in a hospital … in Smolensk. She was a nurse. They married. And here I am with you in Berlin. Your half brother!”

“He died three days ago … an accident,” Karl said.

The usual reasons, the man had said. Yes, his father had boasted he’d been a secret Communist then. Was that the reason? But being a German Communist in Stalinist Russia was certainly no protection. In fact it meant certain death. He was a German. A soldier. A prisoner of war. They didn’t just let them go. Unless … he hated to think it. Unless what? Unless Dieter was an informer? Was that what he meant? But he was only twenty-two when he went to war. His father, a traitor? Could he have become an informer in the POW camp? A spy against his own people?

“Dead? He’s dead? He sponsored our immigration. He gave this address. And you, Karl Friedrich Strack as co-sponsor. Your signature is on the documents. You are a teacher, you earn well, and you generously agreed to guarantee for us.”

Karl felt he was going mad. What was happening couldn’t be happening in reality. This was pure folly. He was surrounded by unreality. His father’s folly. A forged signature. First abandoning one family, then the other. His mother had been right. She sensed something was wrong. She always said he was falsch und trügerich. A phony! Karl had thought it was just spurned woman reactions. But it had been more. So that’s what Dieter meant when he said, “things are never what they seem.”

And Helmut and Günther and Klaus? Had they never understood him? In all those years. And William too! But William was an American! Naïve. How could he grasp these German matters, things of the soul, concealed somewhere in our mysterious language and mystical culture. In a culture capable of Einstein and Marx and Hegel and Nazism and extermination technology? No, William could never grasp the nuances of Dieter’s world.

He looked over the shambles of his living room, shrugged and without a word walked downstairs to William’s apartment. Maybe they would understand and simply leave. His brother!

That evening William went upstairs to check. He reported party noises from his apartment, loud music and laughter and dancing. Karl decided to stay away.

 

Early the next morning, after listening at the door to the foreign noises coming from inside his apartment, he sighed and started down the stairs for his school. If he wished to he could tell his literature students some real Berlin stories. Oh, how innocent they were! How theoretical! How far removed from real life! He could tell them unbelievable stories that covered a century. But, he thought, the truth would only be more fiction to their ears. Better stick to Goethe.

Karl stepped out onto the sidewalk and bumped into a man running his finger down the names alongside the doorbells. He said he was looking for Karl Strack.

“Ich bin Strack,” Karl said. “And there’s no need to ring that bell.” Crazily he was tempted to blab the wild story to the first stranger who came along.

The man was about Karl’s age. A journalist. His name was Horst Zimmerman.

“I read about your father’s accident,” he said, handing Karl his business card. “Please accept my condolences. It’s about him that I wanted to speak with you. Maybe it’s still too early.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Karl said, thinking that getting it all off his chest with a journalist would be more effective than a shrink. “But in thirty minutes I have my first class. What about this afternoon?”

 

Horst Zimmerman was famous in his way. An investigative journalist at the Berliner Tagespost, he had made a career studying the obituaries. His interest was Dieter’s generation. The generation of his own father. He wanted to pinpoint the individuals of that generation and dissect them. He wanted the truth about actual people—he wanted to establish what individual persons had really done during the bad times.

His system was simple. In the years since reunification secret files of the former DDR had become public. Dry details in bureaucratic language about who did what in Germany arrived from the archives of the former East German secret police, the STASI.

He checked the names of a dying generation against available STASI lists … and then spoke with their surviving relatives. Astounding stories emerged. He was writing a new history of Berlin.

 

Potsdamer Strasse that afternoon looked and sounded like Turkey. Karl tried reading aloud the signs on the shops and the newspaper headlines at the newsstand. People passed him, entered the shops, bought the newspapers. They were all speaking Turkish. He understood nothing. Whole city districts were Turkish. As far as he could see up and down the avenue everything was Turkish. After Istanbul, Berlin must be the biggest Turkish city in the world.

Yet either they or he were segregated one from the other. Or were they all isolated, new and old Berliners, alienated one from the other? Was multiethnicity only a meaningless sociological word? Was this the new world?”

In the Turkish coffee house the journalist asked what his father had done during the war. Karl told him about the Russians occupying his apartment—about his father’s Russian family.

“It’s not as incredible as you might think,” the journalist said. “Our soldiers were so young. Most soldiers are so young. But they were men too. For most of them Russians were not the enemy. They just wanted to live. How long was your father there … in Russia? Seven years? Eight years? That can be a lifetime at that age.”

“Do you think it’s that simple?” Karl said. “Dieter Strack was different. He was an idealist. Could he … could he become an informer? Just to survive?”

“I think to live. It’s like you said, he wanted to live many lives. It’s not the same thing. Maybe he too regretted it later. On the other hand maybe he was more consistent than you imagined,” Zimmerman said.

Then he told Karl about Dieter Strack’s name in STASI’s files—he was listed there as an informer in Germany too.

Karl held his breath. Confirmation! He first felt disgust, then hate rise up from his guts. In a flash, years of happenings, pain, unknowing, abandonment, crossed his mind. A lifetime as an informer! While he had put on such airs! He told Zimmerman about Dieter’s friends who adored him, about his funeral, about his dedication to his city, about his social involvement, about his boasts of special contacts to go in and out of East Berlin, about his relationship with William. And how he abandoned his families and wore his silly tram driver’s uniform and preached about the rights of the people—

“DasVolk! Das Volk! Always what was best for das Volk.”

“Yes, but Karl, he was an unpaid informer. That changes things, doesn’t it? It’s written in his files—idealist. I’ve learned that intelligence people trusted idealists less. They never knew when they might change their minds. They preferred to pay them. That’s the way their world works.”

“So was he hero or scoundrel? For his sacred ideals maybe he was a hero. But for my mother, for his Russian family, too, he will always be a scoundrel. How did his dedication help us? How did his dedication and commitment to the people help those he informed on.”

“I’ve encountered incredible behaviors in the most ordinary people … but the Dieter Strack you describe is not an ordinary person. He was capable of extraordinary acts. Some people last century committed the most hellish crimes. But sometimes even those same people performed superhuman acts of goodness … near godlike acts. Your father seems to have been one of those who believed everyone is right. He was no judge. Listening to these stories over the years I have come to suspect that transcendence happens often in the trenches.”

“But Dieter Strack was a traitor to himself and to his people,” Karl said.

“Was he? The question is, who were his own people? You told me he loved everybody the same. Maybe he did. Was that a crime? Or a sin? What was his real crime? That’s what we want to know.”

“I once thought his libido drove him from home and his wife and child to Munich … and to do the things he did. But I was wrong. It was something incurable. Maybe his overweening pride. An excess of his German Stolz. After his first taste of pride there was no turning back. After turning informer, how could he ever be innocent again? I don’t know if his pride was the result of the life he lived or if the life he lived was a result of his self-assured pride. Did he become that way when he felt for the first time his power?”

“I’m a journalist, not a psychologist. But I know how hard it is to understand the real motives of others. And Karl, what do you think was his overall purpose?”

“I once thought it was simply to promote his city … Berlin. But then there was his ideal of the planetary community, as he called it. But it was even more than that. Maybe it was a war against evil. For him the ruins of Berlin were the incarnation of that evil. But all the time I had the sensation he didn’t really see evil when it stood before him.”

“Maybe he stood above particular evils.”

“I think so. Above good too. He never felt inferior to the French as we Germans do, nor superior to the Slavs. His standard answer to life was simply that ‘man is man.’”

“What do you think he meant?”

“He asked me once—he looked perplexed when he said it as if he hoped someone would give him the answer—he asked which is best: life in a society where each is free to do as he likes and yet which ignores the welfare of the unfortunates? Or a society that feeds you and takes care of you and keeps you warm in the winter … but that demands total conformity?”

 

Karl continued to live downstairs with William while waiting for the bureaucracy to evict the Russian squatters from his apartment. The warranty to which Dieter had forged Karl’s name was serious business. Handwriting experts had mixed opinions. Immigration officials favored first Karl’s version, then the uprooted Russians. Police and immigration and housing officials were meanwhile disappointed when Dmitri signed a statement that he and his wife were Russians … had they been Russian Jews the decision in their favor would have been simpler. Yet because of Dmitri’s German father—not completely established because Dieter had left that point cloudy—they had preferences as German Russians seeking resettlement in the fatherland.

William instead had begun thinking of his return to New York. Afternoons, walking together over their favorite parts of the city, their thoughts returned to Dieter and his city. Some places they felt his presence strongly. At others he was predictably absent. His spirit accompanied them uneasily from Potsdamer Platz to Pariser Platz at the Brandenburg Gate, down Unter den Linden and through the Tiergarten to Schloss Park. More at ease up and down Friedrichstrasse, Dieter then delighted in the hike to the top of Prenzlauer Allee and back down Schönhauser. William noted Dieter’s miffed absence as they walked through the former West Berlin center out Kurfürstendamm. But he returned in all his pride to visit the old and new rail stations, the landmarks of the public transportation that also fascinated William—Anhalter Bahnhof, Bahnhof am Zoo, Lehrter Bahnhof, and the Ostbahnhof—formerly the station for Paris-Berlin-Moscow trains, now the terminus for ICE high speed trains—and Karl’s favourite, Alexander Platz Station.

One warm day in May they were sitting at a sidewalk table at the Cafè Istanbul that Karl had begun frequenting since the interview with Zimmerman. He felt an inexplicable belongingness among the people speaking a language of which he didn’t understand a word. He had begun thinking he would take a total immersion course in Turkish—he wanted to know who these people were.

“Spring is finally here,” William said, “and the mosquitoes will soon return.”

“William, how many times do I have to tell that there are no Mücken in Berlin?” Karl chuckled, aware that his friend could go on for hours about the mosquito threat. The summer before he had actually used a mosquito net, right in Berlin.

“That’s a fiction … propaganda spread by tourism and city PR people. What do you think I do with all my sprays and ointments.”

“Well, I’ve never seen a mosquito in Berlin.”

“You’re like your father in that. He bragged there were no mosquitoes west of the Oder River. He claimed they were as big as birds in Russia.”

“He exaggerated a bit in that.”

Karl enjoyed speaking about his father, about his quirks and strange convictions, more than he had speaking with him in life. But he had concluded that on a moral level there was no restoration for Dieter. No rehabilitation. His life was over. Finished. Dieter was wrong. And Zimmerman was wrong too. For there was a basic human element common to all. An ethical instinct. A limit you didn’t surpass. Dieter had. Though his father had seemed to live in accordance with some self-imposed monastic rule, he had in reality lived a carefree life—‘capering and cavorting outside the walls of the City.’ What buffoonery, his life! His determination to live diverse lives! Who did he think he was?

And poor William, his spiritual brother. Karl had thought of him as Dieter’s true son.

 

Some days later Zimmerman telephoned to tell Karl he shouldn’t worry—the majority of the names in STASI lists resulted from denunciations by others. Everybody in those years, he said, was denouncing everybody.

Karl sighed and whispered to himself that for Zimmerman too it was a case of ‘if everyone was guilty then no one was guilty.’ Precisely what Dieter had opposed.

Karl felt Dieter’s and his own severity rise up in his belly. The journalist’s escape clause was too easy. Yet he knew he would never condemn his father.

Dieter’s planetary community would never work. It was too intellectual, it always went wrong, some people would always believe they were better than others … and that conviction led to Auschwitz.

Karl and William agreed that Dieter’s unexpected truth was that ‘man is man.’ Yet neither of them understood how he had acquired such humanism in the generation when it was considered good to kill your enemies.

Dieter Wilhelm Strack, his son Karl said, was a son of Berlin. And a victim of his epoch.

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