New Syrian Force: U.S. abject failure or secret aid to ISIS

American meddling in the Middle East—going back now almost a whole century—and made infinitely more toxic and hypocritical in the last 40 years—is largely a house of mirrors with false images for public consumption in almost all aspects of its deployment.

Al-Nusra Front: The Frankenstein Washington ceated, and which it contiues to use as a pretext to maintain its lethal grip over the Middle East, amidst expanding chaos.

Al-Nusra Front: The Frankenstein Washington created, and which it cynically continues to use as a pretext to maintain its lethal grip over the Middle East, amidst expanding chaos. Most Americans, brainwashed by the “war on terror” propaganda, fail to see that the supposed target of the war—al Qaeda—is often a tool of the American government.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he U.S. policy in the Middle East has proved unsustainable once again. Pentagon’s first attempt to train Syrian opposition to fight ISIS ended in “an abject failure”, CBS News reported in the early August. The contingent of 54 fighters was trained by the U.S. military at a base in Turkey and sent across the border into Northern Syria. But instead of facing ISIS, they unexpectedly came under attack by Al-Nusra Front. As a result, the American-trained rebels scattered. Some were captured, some fled to Turkey, others were simply missing or likely turned the side and joined the Islamic State.

That was clear from the very beginning that the costly program to train ‘good’ rebels to fight ‘bad’ ones was doomed to failure. The Pentagon planned to spend half a billion dollars on the program. The U.S. has already faced misfortunes like that in its history. As we know, Washington took part in the creation of Al-Qaeda, the largest terrorist organization in the world until now. But as soon as the fighters got stronger they turned their weapons against the Americans.

The same situation is developing around the so called New Syrian Force. Returning to Syria the Pentagon-trained rebels joined the organization they were supposed to struggle.

It is hard to escape a conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t learn from its own mistakes. But the situation may be much more complex. Given the Pentagon’s great experience in covert operations it may appear that the U.S. special services planned the rebels would turn the side beforehand. To cover this fact the U.S. defense and state departments usually very sophisticated in concealing or justifying their failures were easy to accept their mistake this time.

The Islamic State that was supposedly also created by Washington has been in great need of qualified personnel of late to operate the U.S. weapons and equipment lost or intentionally left by the Iraqi forces retreating from Mosul in June 2014.

Haider al-Abadi, the new Iraqi prime minister, announced in the early June 2015 that terrorists had captured a great number of U.S.-made weaponry including 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition. The U.S. mass media wrote that “the U.S. has armed ISIS”.

Several dozen people that joined the ISIS would hardly change the situation in Syria but they evidently were not supposed to. They may become instructors and train Islamic State fighters to use American weapons.

However, the U.S. is playing very dangerous games with terrorists. The Washington’s model of controlled chaos in the Middle East may go out of order at any moment and hit the Americans back. In that case thousands people would pay with their lives for all those covert operations.

George Koplan is affiliated with the National University of Ireland.

END OF AD

“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center)

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD, HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO. EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS.

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A Brief History of Serbian Socialism, Part I

By Stevo M. Lapchevich – translated from Serbian by Novak Drashkovic & edited by Joaquin Flores

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he development of socialist ideas in the Balkans is closely tied to the political life of Serbia in the second half of the 19^th century. Arising in a tributary country semi-independent from the occupying Ottoman Empire, in a land of lords and impoverished peasants living on the edge of survival, Serbia is a land of a people that was the first one in Europe to liberate itself from feudalism in the fourth decade of the 19^th century. We should recall here that Serbian prince Miloš Obrenović I issued a decree according to which arable land could only be owned by the people that farmed it, as opposed to the rising Serbian aristocracy. Serbian socialist idea, unlike almost any other at that point in time, strived not only for the creation of a socially just, but also nationally independent and free state that would on the basis of self-government and self-determination unify the entire Serbian people.

In that regard, the first Serbian socialists that emerged from 1865 to 1885 interpreted the popular, anarchist (Bakuninist), and later Marxist ideas exclusively through a national lens, so the theoretical conflict between the workers and the capitalists was nothing more to them than the conflict between the oppressed Serbian people (the proletariat) and its Austrian and Ottoman oppressors – the owners of the means of production.[1]

Marx (l) and Bakunin (r)

The main method of the struggle was to be an armed uprising; a unique “internal” (social) revolution directed against the developing bourgeoisie, and external (national) revolution directed against the occupying forces of Istanbul and Vienna that still held great parts of Serbian ethnic space under their control. The state to be created was, in theory, founded not on the principles of government centralism, but on the principles of self-government decentralization, on autonomous units: municipalities on the political level, and zadrugas (co-ops)[2] on the economic level, i.e. communes that would enable Serbia to skip the phase of capitalism and transit from a pre-capitalist society directly into agrarian socialism.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n the geopolitical plane, Serbian socialism fought to create a unified Balkan (con)federal state that would be able to resist not only the influence of Germany, Austro-Hungary, France or any other Western power, but also of Russia, who was often (and with good reason) regarded as using the pan-Slavic feelings of orthodox Slavs for its own imperialist purposes. In that regard, the Balkan geopolitical idea included first and foremost Serbs and Bulgarians, as the two closest peoples in the peninsula, and through them Romanians, Greeks, and only later Croats and Slovenes, but also Turks who were considered welcome if they would renounce their imperialist tendencies.

Up to 1934 or 1935 the Serbian (and later Yugoslav) socialist idea was strictly republican and more or less atheistic and progressivist. Only with the creation of the Yugoslav National Movement, Zbor, did a religious, national, conservative, and monarchical socialism enter the Serbian and Yugoslav political scene, much like the Romanian Iron Guard to which it was ideologically connected, though more complex and all encompassing.

However, the 50-year long rule of Tito’s communist, Trotskyist regime[3] , that was hostile towards the Serbian national interest, enabled it, through reinterpretation of teachings and practical works of former Serbian socialists, to divert the Serbian national idea, show it as “backward” and distant from socialist ideas, and leave it as such to be forgotten by history, highlighting the Titoist ( Austro-Hungarian and anti-Soviet ) form of Marxism as the only authentic socialist thought.

By doing just the opposite, and wishing to introduce the international community to the history of Serbian national and socialist thought, we bring to you this short historical review of Serbian socialism.

Through national freedom to social equality: Zivojin Zujovic

Zujovic

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his 112^th book of “The Chronicle” for the 1867-1869 period, Matica Srpska – in its time one of the most influential scientific institutes of the Serbs – published a text under the title “Of wages: A passage from political and economic studies” by the young author Zivojin Zujovic.

Thanks to this work, for the first time in Serbian history “a new period” characterized by the ideal of social equality and justice, and “a new man” as its main proponent, was agitated for. As it is rightly noted by one of the founders of Serbian social democracy, Dragisa Lapcevic, in his book “The history of Socialism in Serbia”, Zujovic was the first proponent of socialist thought among the Serbian people.

Believing that man has only one goal in life towards which he should enthusiastically strive, regardless of obstacles, Zujovic along with his successors, left a huge collection of papers, reports, letters, analytic writings and propaganda materials that represent the basis for a modern study of early Serbian socialist thought.[4]

Zujovic did not learn his socialism from the disempowered German workers, but from Russian populists and by the example of the struggle of Russian peasantry, liberated from the iron grip of the country’s nobility. Given the fact that Serbia of his time was an agrarian country, it is only natural for Zujovic to direct his thought at fixing the position of Serbian farmers, noting that a minimal private possession of land should be kept and that joining into communities should occur upon voluntary and spontaneous basis.

In terms of solving the national question of Serbs divided by two empires and three faiths, Zujovic was a proponent of a national and social revolution that would not only unite the entire Serbian ethnic space, but also seek to create a unified Balkan geopolitics that would be able to resist both the West and the East, under the slogan of “(Return) the Balkans to its peoples”.

Accordingly, Zujovic was actively involved in the opening of Serbian schools in today’s Macedonia, while in terms of dealing with Vienna he focused on resisting the destructive operations of the Jesuits who, by converting the orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism, sought to turn them into political Croats, traditionally loyal to the Dual Monarchy. To this issue he dedicated one of his best political works titled “On conversion to Roman Catholicism in Herzegovina”, which is in turn the first extensive writing on the destructive pro-zealotist influence of Austrian Jesuits on Serbian soil.

The Worker

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he socialist seed planted by Zujovic would give its richest fruits during the sixth and seventh decade of the 19^th century when the political scene of Serbia and the entire Balkans would be taken by Svetozar Markovic (1846-1875) , the founder of the first socialist paper (“The Worker”, started in June of 1871.) and the biggest figure of our socialism to this day.

Two freedoms – national and social: Svetozar Markovic

Markovic

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring his lifetime of less than 30 years, Svetozar Markovic wrote hundreds of works for the most influential Serbian magazines of the day, “Work of the People” [Narodno Delo, in Serbian, in connoting the ongoing ‘mission’ and accomplishments of the people – ed.] as the correspondent for Serbia and the Balkans for the Russian section of the First International. He started a couple of socialist papers, for which he spent some time in Serbian prisons, he held close ties with Bulgarian socialist, nationalist and revolutionary émigrés, he prepared the Serbian people of Bosnia and Herzegovina for an uprising against the Ottomans that would, in his mind, lead not only to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and Austria, but also liberal Serbia, and rather would incorporate it into a federation of Balkan socialist states.

Fighting for the economic emancipation of the Serbian people, together with his friends with whom he, still a student in Zurich, founded a Socialist party, he established several economic communities, thus proving to Serbian liberals that a business could be successfully conducted without amassing enormous profits. In trading, he gave the advantage to domestic products arguing that a high demand for Austrian and German products would lead to the destruction of still underdeveloped domestic production.

Holding the position that the foundation of Serbian socialism lies with its farmers, like Zivojin Zujovic, he argued against the breakup of zadruga communities and for keeping the traditional collective ownership of farmlands and the means of production. On the political level he argued for communitarian cooperation through municipalities, holding that the state should represent their unity, instead of a separate centralist government that would not allow them to prosper. In that regard he was an ardent opponent of Serbian bureaucracy which he held as being irresponsible to anything but its own good, for which it was willing to sacrifice anything, including its people.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his writings, Markovic stood up in defense of the 1871 Paris Commune, praised Young Italy, supported the ideal of people’s self-determination, praised the work of the International, worked on the enlightenment of his people, fought against the rise of capitalism in Serbia believing, like Zujovic, that the country could skip that phase on its road to a better tomorrow. For all that, he holds the title of “the founder of Serbian socialism”, while Zujovic is usually considered its “forerunner”.

In 1872, in the time of the preparation of the Serbian people of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the upcoming uprising, he wrote his most significant work, titled “Serbia in the East”, which was set as a unique guide for future revolutionaries, revealing one of the best ideas for the outlook of the future Serbian state.

As the main goal of the national policy, “Serbia in the East” proclaims the creation of a unified Serbian state, allied primarily with Bulgaria in a unique Balkan geopolitical space. The creation of such a space that would, according to Markovic, be able to set itself free from all foreign influence, lies not only in achieving national, but also social freedom. Such a project called for fundamental reforms at all levels of society.

Speaking of the Serbian ethnic space, Markovic, unlike the latter Tito’s Austro-Marxists, states that Serbs comprise the majority of the population in Serbia, Old Serbia (today’s Kosovo and Metohija and Macedonia), Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Austrian Frontiers, as he called them (today part of Serbian Vojvodina and former Republic of Serbian Krajina, occupied by Croatia in 1995), and therefore states that all these areas, according to the will of its people, have the right to join Serbia in a single state.

Serbian freedom, Markovic stated clearly, could only be achieved through the freedom of the entire Balkans and the life in that freedom is purely dependent upon the unity of small Balkan nations, mutually similar in spiritual and cultural ways. Accordingly, he argued against the idea of “Greater Serbia” which in the time comprised not only the Serbian, but also Bulgarian and Greek parts of the Balkans, labeling it as nothing more than an instrument of Serbian liberal bureaucracy aimed only at expanding its own rule.

Although Titoist historians tried to portray Markovic as being keen on the idea of cooperating with the Croats, the founder of Serbian left nationalism stated that the Croats only had one goal, that being to spread their religio-ethnicity at the expense of the Serbian people.

Markovic also feared the totalitarian Croatian spirit and doubted that Croats, as a nation raised to serve Vienna, would be able to accept the true values that socialism entails, one of those being tolerance for other peoples, in this case the Serbs. Summarizing the characteristics of Croatian elites, he states that they are preoccupied with balls, dances, parties, singing, “fine” arts, gossip, “fine” literature, and of course, Greater Croatia.

Let us recall, the unification of ethnic Serbia with other free states of the Balkans was, according to Markovic, possible only through revolutionary action that would, as he wrote, “break the shackles that divide and subdue the Serbian people”. For him, the revolution was not only the end of the old, but also the beginning of the new. “Starting from the specific historical conditions and possibilities, Markovic holds every revolution in the Balkans to be a mix of national and social liberation, without blindly copying foreign concepts unadjusted to the specific conditions of the Balkans for ‘there’s no other solution than the revolution in the Balkan peninsula, a revolution that would end in destruction of all the current states that prevent their peoples from uniting as free men and equal workers, unified through municipalities and states as they please.’”

Unfortunately, Svetozar Markovic didn’t see the start of the Serbian uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He died in Trieste in February of 1875, at the age of 28, from tuberculosis, only a few months before the first shots were fired in Herzegovina. In spite of that, his socialist pupils were among the most prominent leaders of the uprising, and it’s worth noting that socialist thinkers Manojlo Hrvacanin (a prominent associate and a personal friend of Bakunin) and Vladimir Ljotic ( Marx’s[5] appointed trustee in The International and the first translator of the Communist party manifesto to Serbian) brought the prince and future king of Serbia, Petar Karadjordjevic, to the uprising where he fought under his nom de guerre, Petar Mrkonjic.

End Part I

In the next installment, we will further develop the history of Serbian socialism as it moves into the 20th century. The 20th century inherits the 19th, but brought significant change, and increased polarization in the movement for national sovereignty and socialism. The strains of Christian Narodnik Anarchism would play an influential role in the further development of Serbian socialism and Radicalism, and had a distinctly ‘Eastern Character’ and was somewhat less inclined to be influenced by changes in Europe and with that the rise of the Second International, with its later figures like Bernstein and Kautsky, et al.

If we produce the planned third installment, we will move forward to the Russian Revolution of 1917 that would shake the world, and the creation of the Third International would have a tremendous influence on the developments in Serbian political life. The distinctly secular and at times anti-religious character of Western European socialism would further alienate many in Serbia from those developments, contributing to this polarization between Christian Anarcho-Socialism and Syndicalism, and Marxian Socialisms of the West. 1917 would entirely reconfigure this. With this we conclude part I of our series, which will come in several installments. – J. Flores

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Editor’s note: The Center for Syncretic Studies has begun this historical research project in connection with two upcoming projects in Serbia which we will be involved in. The first involves collaboration with Serbian Eurasianists, Socialists/Communists, Anarchists and Nationalists of the left and right, as well as with researchers in parallel public think tanks in Serbia, to develop a syncretic ideology for Serbia. Its roots already lay in the history of Serbian socialism and it will require little in the way of ‘reinventing the wheel’.

A major difference between syncretic ideology in former Soviet space and former Yugoslavia is that in the Soviet case, there are two major differences: The Russian Revolution is seen by and large as a ‘native’ revolution to Russia (excepting the ‘Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy’ believer segment of society), whereas Marxism-Leninism and later Titoism in Yugoslavia is often considered to be a matter of importing the histories of others. For Russia it came by revolution, for Yugoslavia, by tanks. One strength in former Soviet space today is the more or less successful integration and reconciliation of Leninist conceptions and symbolism with both nationalist, pre-revolutionary, ancient, and religious symbolism and viewpoints. The Austro-Marxist nature of the Tito era in socialist Yugoslavia has made a similar development much less appealing or feasible.

***

**
NOTES

[1] Because of that, Serbian socialists vigorously supported the struggle of the Paris Commune in which they saw not only the struggle of the socially oppressed, but also a national struggle of the Paris proletariat against the Prussian invader at a point in time when monarchist France abandoned the fight.

[2] A zadruga refers to a type of rural community historically common among Serbs. Originally, generally formed of one extended family or a clan of related families, the zadruga held its property, herds and money in common, with usually the oldest (patriarch) member ruling and making decisions for the family, though at times he would delegate this right at an old age to one of his sons.

Because the zadruga was based on a patrilocal system, when a girl married, she left her parents’ zadruga and joined that of her husband. Within the zadruga, all of the family members worked to ensure that the needs of every other member were met.

The zadruga eventually went into decline beginning in the late 19th century, as the largest started to become unmanageable and broke into smaller zadrugas or formed villages. However, the zadruga system continues to color life in the Balkans; the typically intense concern for family found among South Slavs even today is partly due to centuries of living in the zadruga system. Many modern-day villages in the Balkans have their roots in a zadruga, a large number of them carrying the name of the one that founded them.

Villages and neighbourhoods that originated from zadrugas can often be recognized by the patronymic suffixes, such as -ivci, -evci, -ovci, -inci, -ci, -ane, -ene, etc., on their names.

This type of traditional, village style cooperation is very similar to a late 19th-century Russian system called obshchina.

[3] “The Soviets and their satellite states often accused Yugoslavia of Trotskyism and social-democracy, charges loosely based on Tito’s samoupravljanje (self-management) and the theory of associated labor (profit sharing policies and worker-owned industries initiated by him, Milovan Đilas, and Edvard Kardelj in 1950). In these, the Soviet leadership saw the seeds of council communism or even corporatism.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titoism#Ideology.

In addition to this are two other matters to contemplate – Trotskyism is here viewed similarly to the ‘leftist’ Communism of Rosa Luxemburg who opposed national self-determination. Secondly, is the view that Trotskyism is compared with both crypto-fascism and openness with the West, which Tito in his own way is often accused of by ‘anti-revisionist’ Marxist-Leninists.

[4] As the first Serbian socialist, Zujovic will share a lot with his successors. Like Svetozar Markovic and Dimitrije Cenic, he died in the prime of his life, leaving his work unfinished. Also, it’s worth noting that he came from a poor family and that he gained his first serious intellectual experiences in the East (In Kiev and Saint Petersburg), only later moving to the West (Zurich and Munich).

[5] It’s worth noting that first Serbian socialists interpreted the works of Marx in a nationalist manner, viewing his struggle for peoples self-determination and against imperialism as the best instrument for accomplishing the Serbian national interest, conflicted with Turkish and Austro-Hungarian imperialism, and the struggle of the proletariat for its rights as the struggle of the impoverished Serbian peasantry against its corrupt liberal bureaucracy and emerging bourgeoisie.

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“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center)

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The Spectacle of American Violence and the Cure for Donald Trump

Capitalism uber alles: Eighty families in the world control as much as half the world’s population.

Giroux

Chuck Mertz: We’ve talked about so many ways that neoliberalism adversely affects us and our world on This is Hell! radio podcast that you’d think we would have touched on them all by now. Nope! That’s the thing. Neoliberalism is the disaster that keeps on destroying.

by HENRY GIROUX – CHUCK MERTZ

Here to tell us about the violence unleashed on society by neoliberalism: one of our very favorite guests, educator and public intellectual Henry Giroux. Henry is co-author of the new book Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle.

Henry, let’s start with this: you write, “Under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it appears banal.”

What’s an example of neoliberalism’s unjustified, unaccountable, arbitrary, thoughtless yet limitless violence that appears banal?

Henry Giroux: Hi Chuck, good to hear your voice.

I think we can see it in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system’s body politic.

We see it in the way a certain kind of lawlessness has crept over the society. We see it in a president who has a kill list—unconstitutional and semi-fascistic in its effects—and the media barely blinks about it. We see it in a police force all around the country that is not just militarized but appears to operate on a logic in which they can basically hunt minorities whenever they want—kill them, arrest them, put them in prison—and be completely immune from any consequences.

This violence is so pervasive. We see it in our schools, where we have more security guards now than teachers. We see it in California where more prisons are being built than colleges. It goes on and on. We see it in a trillion-dollar war budget, politics becoming an extension of war rather than vice versa.

This violence is like a fog. It covers everything. As a result it becomes so normalized that people barely blink when they see it, unless it becomes so shocking that it becomes literally impossible to ignore—the choking of Eric Garner, played over and over again; the killing of Tamir Rice; the Sandra Bland case.

CM: You mentioned President Obama’s unconstitutional kill list, and the lack of media attention on it’s being unconstitutional. One of the theories within the media is that chasing ratings, in a sense, reflects democracy, because they’re giving the public what it wants.

Is this what we want? Does the United States want a media that doesn’t point out that President Obama has an unconstitutional kill list? Does this reflect the way we want the world presented to us?

HG: That’s such an insane myth. I don’t think the media is a reflection of anything. The media is an active political and pedagogical force that shapes reality. If the media were a reflection of anything, then we’d have to raise the question of why it’s in the hands of basically six corporations.

The media is about power. It’s not about responding to the wishes of people. All you have to do in the United States is turn on the national news at six-thirty, and watch big pharma intervene between the news stories, trying to tell people what drugs they should buy. That’s not a reflection of anything. That’s an attempt to promote a particular kind of consumer logic that basically abuses people.

It’s much better to talk about the media as a system of propaganda and abuse, of manufactured consent, than it is to claim it’s some kind of democratizing force that is not responsible for what it does. The notion that the media simply reflects reality is an argument that justifies its flight from responsibility.

But the media is very smart. The media understands that it’s not about entertainment alone. It’s a pedagogical force. They need to make something meaningful in some way to establish points of identification. And the great educators, in the worst sense, are the advertisers. This goes right back to the 1920s and 30s, when they realized that the educational force of culture has enormous potential for shaping consciousness, for mobilizing desires, for producing particular kinds of agents. What we see in television is that they have the ability to tap into the deepest needs and desires that people feel, and to mobilize those desires.

At the same time I’m not arguing that there’s a direct relationship between what the media says and how people act. This stuff gets mediated. But it gets mediated within a very narrow framing mechanism that’s almost entirely about consumption. It’s almost entirely about defining the subject, defining the citizen, as one of three things: a consumer, a threat (in this new age of surveillance), or as utterly disposable. Excess.

CM: You write: “Violence, with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior. It has become fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut possibilities for authentic democracy.”

You describe neoliberalism as a facet of capitalism. Isn’t neoliberalism just capitalism? What’s the difference between neoliberalism and capitalism?

HG: It’s an important question. I think that when we look at liberalism in the past, liberal capitalism, one of the things that defined it was that there had to be political concessions on the part of the rich towards workers and others, because they really believed if those concessions didn’t work, there was the chance of revolt. There might be resistance. There was the shadow of Communism, with its emphasis on equality—economic, political and social equality. All those ideals were a threat to liberalism.

Neoliberalism represents a very different animal in a number of ways. First of all, under neoliberalism we no longer have a traditional state. We have an economic state. Economics now drives politics. This gives us a system in which the relationship between power and politics is no longer fused. Power is global. We have an elite that now floats in global flows. It could care less about the nation-state, and it could care less about traditional forms of politics. Hence, it makes no political concessions whatsoever. It attacks unions, it attacks public schools, it attacks public goods. It doesn’t believe in the social contract.

This has a number of byproducts. We have massive forms of inequality developing because there are no longer any concessions. There’s a war being waged on democracy and all social spheres and institutions that tend to defend it.

Secondly, under neoliberalism society has become increasingly militarized, meaning that as all aspects of the social state are eliminated, a police state is rising in its place. All problems that in the past were seen as social problems, and hence required social solutions, now acquire police solutions.

Our behavior is increasingly criminalized. If you’re poor, that’s a crime. If you’re homeless, that’s a crime. If you’re a young person who’s in trouble, that’s a crime. If you violate a minor law, there’s a chance that you could be killed. If you look a police officer in the eye, as Freddie Gray did, there’s a chance that you could be put in the back of a van and tortured.

Casino capitalism destroys those institutions that generate the capacity for critique, dissent, thoughtfulness and collective struggles. In its place, it has erected a series of cultural apparatuses that revel in idiocy, celebrity culture, conformity and infantilization. Fox News is the new party organ, only dumber. Ninety-five percent of talk radio is controlled by right-wing ideologues spewing out an endless tirade of racist, sexist, hate-filled discourse, parading as innocent escapism. Hollywood almost exclusively embraces big-budget films whose worth is defined largely through the aesthetics of hyper-violence and the number of people slaughtered graphically, often in slow motion. The mainstream media does not produce violence directly: it simply legitimates it as a form of public pedagogy, parading as innocent entertainment. This is the pedagogy of infantilism — an unacceptable obscenity of the stupid and arrogant trading in violence, spectacles, common sense, and, ultimately, repression. —H. Giroux (Radical democracy against cultures of violence).

It seems to me that as economics drives politics and money markets set policies, what we have is an enormously powerful emergence of both a police state on the one hand and an incredible culture of cruelty on the other. All of the sudden, shared hopes are replaced by shared fears.

Any form of dependence whatsoever that is inconsistent with radical individualism is now viewed as a weakness. It’s viewed as dishonorable. Care for the other is now seen as a scourge. This helps explain, as you well know, endless commentaries by right-wingers about how people on welfare are moochers. People who can’t imitate the one percent are somehow lazy. Workers who don’t have jobs in an economy where there are no jobs are people we shouldn’t trust, because they don’t really care about work. And on it goes.

CM: You write, “Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters, and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalism’s discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that poverty is a deserved condition.”

But Henry, that is only if poverty even exists in the eyes of the wealthy. There’s a new study out this week called Why Wealthier People Think People Are Wealthier, and Why It Matters at the journal of the Association of Psychological Science. It states, “The present studies provide evidence that social sampling processes lead wealthier people to oppose redistribution policies. In samples of American internet users, wealthier participants reported higher levels of wealth in their social circles. This was associated in turn with estimates of higher mean wealth in the wider US population, greater perceived fairness of the economic status quo, and opposition to redistribution policies.

So does neoliberalism dispose of the poor by believing that they simply do not exist?

HG: Increasingly, we are seeing a market that is so segregated that it becomes impossible for rich people to even see the other. These people live in gated communities. I don’t simply mean a gated community like you would see in Florida. I mean they live in places so removed from everybody else, they operate in circles so incestuous and so closed, they’re off on islands. To try to understand their indifference is to understand also their separation from the rest of society.

They have the wealth such that they don’t have to immerse themselves in any places where they’re going to confront poverty, or “criminal” behavior, or the lawlessness of the police, or where they would have to worry about being under surveillance because they hold views at odds with what the American government and major corporations believe.

We have never seen the isolation of the rich to the degree that we see it now. They’re global. They travel all over the world. They’re not in any way—it seems to me—committed to any one place. So it’s easy for them to say, “We don’t see this. We don’t see poverty. We don’t think it’s that bad. We think wealth is really being distributed in ways that are fair.”

Trump, like that canary in the coalmine, makes clear what elements of fascism are really like…The racism, the ignorance, the stupidity, the baiting, the great-man affect, this notion that he exists in a circle of certainty that can’t be doubted, this kind of perverse hatred of the other…

All you have to do is look. Look at the money these hedge fund managers make. When you look at the Koch brothers, who make three million dollars an hour on their dividends alone, you begin to get a sense of what we’re talking about. The estimates now are that the upper 1% control something like 40% of all wealth. Eighty families in the world control as much as half the world’s population. These figures are being produced every day.

We need to put a human face to these figures. We need to make clear that something is being taken from the vast majority of people, and is causing an enormous amount of suffering. Half the population of young schoolchildren in the United States now lives below the poverty line. You can’t use the argument that people are simply not picking themselves up by their bootstraps when you’re talking about children.

To go back to something I said earlier, it’s really about the swindle of fulfillment. It says anybody can make it, because we’re all on a level playing field. But we’re not on a level playing field. That ‘s precisely the point, and that’s what the rich don’t want to look at. They don’t want to recognize that they’re not producing wealth at all. They’re hoarding wealth. That’s different.

In hoarding it, they’re assuming power and exercising it in ways that make it very, very clear—as that recent Princeton study said—that they hate democracy. They hate democracy. Democracy is an evil to these people.

CM: In a recent article at Truthout on Donald Trump, you write, “Trump provides a more direct and arrogant persona that produces the ugliness of a society ruled entirely by finance capital and savage market values, one that prides itself on the denigration of others as well as of justice, passion, and equality.

“Trump is the hyperventilating yellow canary in the coal mine reminding us all that social death is a looming threat. He is emblematic of a kind of hyper-masculinity that rules dead societies. He is the zombie with the blond wig holding a flamethrower behind his back. He is the perfect representation of the society of spectacle, with the perverse grin and the endless discourse of shock and humiliation.

“Trump’s hysterical rants are, as Frank Rich once argued, ‘another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.’”

Henry, what is the cure for Donald Trump?

CM: You write, “Trump is the unfiltered symbol of the new authoritarianism, emblematic of a kind of boots-on-your-face politics nurtured by an economic and cultural system that combines the endless search for capital with the unceasing production of violence. Trump is the living embodiment of the main character in the film American Psycho, a symbol of corporate domination on steroids, an out-of- control authoritarian parading and performing unknowingly as a clown, and as a symbol of unchecked narcissism and a bearer of a suffocating culture of fear. He is the symbol of a failed sociality and a declining social order.”

So in other words, he embodies everything that’s wrong with the US. And the US loves him. Why, Henry?

HG: They love him because of the degree to which they have been so depoliticized, so removed from the public sphere, so taught to believe that the only thing that matters any longer is excessive shock and the spectacle of humiliation and violence, that he actually becomes attractive. In a culture as depoliticized as this, where entertainment becomes the only modality that matters, all of the sudden Trump garners a lot of respect. He garners attention.

But I also think there’s something else. We have to recognize that there’s an element in the population that he speaks to, around questions of racism, militarism, violence, nationalism, and around the notion the state should be inhabited largely by white Christians. He’s mobilizing the fascist base that has been associated with elements of the Republican party for the longest time. He’s making visible what many people wanted to deny even exists.

Sean Patrick Hannity, the rabid Irishman n Fox's payroll, is one of the nation's most rabid attack dogs for the fascist right.

Sean Patrick Hannity, the bullying Irishman on Fox’s payroll, is one of the nation’s rabid attack dogs for the fascist right, and a splendid exponent of excremental radio.

They often say that he “speaks the truth,” right? But I think what really is happening is he’s become a symbol of the kind of cynicism the American public feels towards politicians. He embodies, and he’s mobilizing, that cynicism. Because people have no faith in politics anymore. People actually believe that politics is dead, because it’s bought and sold.

But at the same time they don’t have an alternative narrative by which they could embrace that same understanding to mobilize social movements, to mobilize political formations that would take the question of democracy seriously rather than believing that the only route to politics is through Hitler-like fascist politicians who mobilize the crudest, most racist and most base sentiments of what it means to feel something.

I really believe it’s crucial to talk about this guy as really symptomatic of the rise of a very dangerous kind of authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt said that at the base of fascism, at the base of totalitarianism, is a kind of engineered thoughtlessness. The inability to think, to allow things to become normal that should be viewed with horror. Trump erases the ability to recognize suffering and to try to understand the conditions that produce it, the ability to become a moral witness in the face of injustices. Trump erases that. Trump appeals to a population in which that becomes irrelevant. And that is so dangerous, at this particular time.

Look at the Republican candidates all around him now, all falling into line. Doing things like stomping on their telephones, or taking out saws and trying to cut through the tax code. They all of the sudden take on the notion of the spectacle as a reasonable way to address a population that is seduced by it.

CM: You mentioned mobilizing social movements. There are all these protests against police violence. There are protests for the Fight for Fifteen. But are all of these protests missing the target in that they should be protests against neoliberalism?

HG: I think they should be protests with a comprehensive understanding of the various elements that make up the new authoritarianism. They should build capacity to both protest specific elements of this kind of horror, this kind of terror and violence, and also be able to bring these together into a more comprehensive view of politics.

And I think that might happen. The situation in the United States, Chuck, has become so extreme. I don’t know if you’ve seen this figure: two outlets, the Washington Post and the Guardian, are now tracking police violence in the United States, and from January to July of this year the police have killed three people a day. Three people a day.

You couple that with the attack on various social programs that we see happening. It’s going to produce two kinds of resentment. It’s going to produce the kind of resentment that we see as cynical about politicians, that moves towards Trump, or it’s going to produce a radical revolutionary movement that is going to have to redefine what democracy means outside of the boundaries of capitalism.

Capitalism, in my estimation, is not about democracy. I think we’re beginning to see an understanding of this. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement. We see it among black youth who are now struggling and trying to make connections internationally with other groups and trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and the ways things like police violence and systemic violence all come together under neoliberalism.

The world can no longer exist globally under a neoliberal ethic in which entire countries like Greece can be subordinated to capital in a way in which the entire population suffers. The entire population. Fifty percent of all youth in Greece have no jobs, they’re unemployed. We’re talking about closing down the future for generations of young people all over the world today.

I think we need a different model, and I think people are searching for that model. I would like to think that this is about a patient impatience. A willingness to say, okay, we don’t have that movement in the way we’d like to see it now, but we see elements of these movements emerging, using a language we’ve never seen before, and for that I’m hopeful.

CM: Henry, thank you for coming on This is Hell! again.

HG: It’s my favorite program. Thank you, Chuck, for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This is a transcript from the August 1, 2015 episode of This is Hell! Radio podcast (Chicago). Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com. Chuck Mertz is the host of This is Hell! Radio in Chicago.

“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center)

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US Imperialism’s Corporate Media Circus: Lions, Rap Beefs, and the Psychology of Oppression [1]

Social media, like conventional print and broadcast media, are tools in the hands of the owning class. Consumers of these media are distracted and miseducated with lies, irrelevant nonsense and phony battles between highly paid minstrels like Drake and Meek Mill, both of whom “play for the same corporate team.”

by Danny Haiphong
WITH EDITORIAL COMMENT BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

“The corporate media must keep its musical minstrel show as far away from the truth as possible.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he end of the 20th century and onward was titled the “age of information” due to the mass expansion of the internet. Corporate press and bourgeois reporters described the internet as a tool that would democratize the media and give people of all social positions the same access to important information. What the experts didn’t mention was the role the internet would play within the already existing social order of the US imperialist empire. The internet’s function, as is the case for any tool that disseminates media, cannot be separated from the social system that controls it. The past few weeks alone have verified the centrality of the internet’s master, the corporate media, in the reproduction of the imperialist system’s rule of the rich.

Engagement with the corporate media is a psychological act, and the ruling class knows it. This is why monopoly corporations like Comcast have fought hard to deregulate the internet through the elimination of network neutrality [3] and why these same corporations have historically lobbied to end all regulations [4] of the media under the FCC. A corporately controlled media, ruled by no more than five corporations, has meant that access to the power of information and how that information is disseminated is in the hands of the wealthy few. The ruling class uses the corporate media to spread a psychology of oppression. Psychological conditioning is a key component to the ruling class’s efforts to misrepresent and align oppressed people to the racist, capitalist system that dominates much of the planet.

“The internet’s function cannot be separated from the social system that controls it.”

The past few weeks have placed a spotlight on various ways the media conducts psychological warfare. Whether one observed it by Twitter, television, or radio, the dominant media stories had very little to do with the lives of the majority of humanity. Cecil the Lion and his brother Jericho became instant household names after being murdered by foreign hunters in Zimbabwe. Rap celebs Drake and Meek Mill found themselves entangled in a twitter war of words that eventually led to back and forth exchanges of diss tracks. Although these developments seem trivial and unimportant to the politically aware and involved, the sheer volume of space each issue received from the corporate media reveals the ruling system’s ultimate agenda.

Editor’s comment

Cecil with family.

“…the dominant media stories had very little to do with the lives of the majority of humanity. Cecil the Lion and his brother Jericho became instant household names after being murdered by foreign hunters in Zimbabwe.”

READ THE REST OF THIS EDITORIAL COMMENT BELOW. CLICK ON THE BAR.

[learn_more] [dropcap]M[/dropcap]any on the left, and Haiphong probably too, believe the problem is merely with the abominable values and dynamics of capitalism, a cancerous system based on generalized selfishness, but the actual problem runs deeper. Capitalism only exacerbates it. In this context, Haiphong, while correctly calling the killing of Cecil the lion a murder, decries nonetheless the “irrelevant nonsense” surrounding his demise, despite the obvious fact that this animal’s murder did not concern solely “one” or “two” animals, but a whole class of crimes committed by humans for millennia, with complete impunity, and conveniently ratified by religious doctrines of “dominionism”.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s most of us are aware these crimes continue to this day, and have been transformed into a gigantic, ruthless, and hydra-like, profitable industry whose re-examination at the societal level is long overdue. In that sense, therefore, media attention to Cecil’s fate was a good thing for everyone, and that means humanity as a whole, since our species, no matter how often we may want to forget, or even deny it, is inextricably embedded in the web of life. The same cannot be said for the media’s over-attention to the petty squabbles of rappers, or the latest idiocy from the lips of our preternaturally corrupt politicians. That is indeed a complete waste of precious media time.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut there’s more to this supposedly “frivolous” over-attention by the normally deceitful corporate media on Cecil the Lion, or the innumerable comments and passionate expressions of outrage we have seen on social media. This animal’s murder is also rooted and easily traceable to an old tradition of white-led exploitation, pandemic poverty and desperation, not to mention widespread political corruption left in place and still enforced by white colonialists and their allies throughout the African continent. In that sense, again, attention to Cecil’s case is not itself a sin, but merely the fact that the coverage was largely superficial, leaving untouched Africa’s horrendous underlying social and political conditions that make such occurrences possible if not inevitable with alarming frequency (we’re also witnessing the extinction of elephants, rhinos and other great species as we write these lines due to direct human activity, long with massive global die-offs resulting from climate change).

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]heres also something else. Such degree of media attention is new, and represents not just another trick in the media’s almost endless arsenal of lies and distractions, but a breakthrough in the way major media report on human atrocities toward nature—especially living nature. While the media noise about the internal conflicts of rappers or any other celebrity, whatever their niche or color, is indeed, as previously stated, irrelevant, stupid, and ultimately criminal given the conditions of crisis we face at this point, Haiphong and other leftists or identity politics supporters who denounce any attention to animal issues as a waste of media resources, many taking umbrage at the thought that such prioritization implicitly equates them with “animals” is not only wrong but invidious and politically misguided. It is a mindless transposition of the old nonsense about different layers of the poor and disenfranchised fighting over crumbs from the table of the rich and powerful instead of fighting the real oppressor—upstairs. Further, over-fixation on identity politics of any kind —no matter how deeply the issues are perceived at the personal level—is a betrayal of true revolutionary focus, since wedge issues, from feminism, gay politics, or even race—should never be allowed to trump class, the chief category that pushes back against all systemically-enforced evils. It is no accident that the Democratic party, the plutocracy’s chief instrument for faux-progressivism, has been a welcoming home for the struggles of bourgeois feminists, gays, and blacks for generations (the latter to this day receiving only promises and empty rhetoric, since eliminating racism would really entail a revolutionary shift in American society.)

Final remarks

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he claim that in a world as problem-riddled as ours we should always prioritize “human struggles” is inherently untenable. Considering the sheer grotesque dimension of systemic crimes, just cleaning up injustices against Black people—or other oppressed humans in general—could necessitate dedicating all of humanity’s attention and media time to such struggle alone, till the end of time, while atrocities derived from capitalism in other areas, especially those concerning the capitalist/industrialism’s assault on nature and animals would go unheeded and postponed indefinitely.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut when the entire planet’s ecosystems are finished and nothing stirs on the face of the earth—neither birds nor mammals of any kind —not even many insects we take for granted, what will we have? Nothing but billions of disenfranchised humans drifting from crisis zone to crisis zone, in many cases running away from anthropogenic natural disasters that could have been prevented, or at least rendered manageable through serious administration of political pressure. Thus, taken to its logical conclusion, the argument we must concentrate on “human issues” before we turn our attention to “non-human” issues—an illusory category— is a recipe for planetary catastrophe and massive injustice. As previously stated, to wait to do something until all human problems are eradicated is a virtual impossibility given the gravity of the challenges facing us, and an automatic death and lifetime slavery sentence on countless creatures unfortunate enough to share this planet with our species, a breed that has no peer in the art of brutal tyrannization.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]adly, one would hope that victims of institutionalized oppression —among all human constituencies—would show the most sympathy toward animal struggles and not the opposite. Non-human animals are not something peripheral to the web of life we all inhabit—something, incidentally, most Africans recognize in their culture even if we do not. They are an integral biological and moral component of our referent universe, fully consistent with the notion that true justice is always indivisible, and that species preferentialism is not supportable due to its inherent immorality. Too many people involved in social justice struggles forget that compassion, while not organically linked to justice itself, is often one of its most effective causative factors. And compassion, too, when deeply felt, is an indivisible quality. There are no easy answers to the dilemma posed by Haiphong and his colleagues. Personally I believe activists should learn to pick their battles carefully and, following Mao’s legendary advice, learn to “walk on two legs” at once. It’s tough, but opponents of injustice can do no less. —Patrice Greanville[/learn_more]
ARTICLE BY DANNY HAIPHONG CONTINUES HERE

This agenda has two components: social conditioning and miseducation. The former refers to the corporate media’s reproduction of the social relations imbedded in white supremacy and capitalism. Corporate rap, as reflected by the Drake and Meek Mill rap “beef,” represents one of the most pervasive forms of this process. In this scenario, no mention was made of how Warner Brothers Records has at one time carried the rights to both Meek Mill and Drake’s music. Warner Music Group, its parent corporation, happens to be one of just a handful of monopolies [5] that control much of the rap industry in the US today. So despite recent tensions between them, Drake and Meek Mill play for the same corporate team. They are paid an exorbitant amount of money to perform a narrative of Black existence that is both apolitical and infatuated with the false promises of Empire. Listeners are expected to emulate their desires, all of which enrich media corporations and stabilize white supremacy.

“Neither Drake nor Meek Mill creates music or culture independently of the corporate hip-hop power structure.”

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]eek Mill and Drake are two rappers of many whose corporately controlled lyrics and lifestyles are designed to reproduce the colonial position of Black Americans. Their paychecks are dependent on the successful promulgation of a corporate (white) culture and the destruction of the culture of the oppressed. When Drake and Meek Mill got in a “beef” over the integrity of Drake’s lyrics, they should have been immediately questioned on their overall integrity as artists. Neither Drake nor Meek Mill creates music or culture independently of the corporate hip-hop power structure. And in this power structure, profits are the objective and the reproduction of Black people’s exploitation is the anchor that supports it.

The latter component of the corporate media’s agenda, miseducation, supports the careers of corporate hip-hop entertainers and the industry at large. In order to condition oppressed and exploited people effectively, the corporate media must keep its musical minstrel show as far away from the truth as possible. “News” and political commentary that emanate from the corporate media is no more substantive than the entertainment. Every story is filled with distortion, untruth, and distraction. The Cecil the Lion hysteria is the most recent corporate media distraction masqueraded as a legitimate political headline.

“Profits are the objective and the reproduction of Black people’s exploitation is the anchor that supports it.”

Cecil the Lion was ironically murdered by an American-based dentist who had no business in Zimbabwe. Yet the corporate media coverage of the lion’s death oozed with sensationalized sympathy that was by no means random. Such a circus act is meant to distract viewers from real, substantive matters that actually affect the everyday lives of struggling people. CNN, Fox News, and corporate “local” news agencies provide additional support for these distractions to thrive. Corporate “news” agencies act as mouthpieces for imperialism’s political and economic agenda. Cecil the Lion’s death, while tragic on the surface, represents much more than a gruesome hunting expedition. Its propagation further embeds the psychology of oppression into whomever it touches. Dead lions not only matter more than imperialism’s victims (“collateral damage”), but also create a convenient distraction away from the system that creates war and exploitation of humanity in the first place.

The corporate media is a critical tool in the ruling class’s war on the consciousness of oppressed people. The enormous profits gained from the corporate media’s expansion add to its value and creates a direct relationship between the psychology of oppression it promotes and the overarching goal of the power structure. Without the minstrel shows of Drake and Meek Mill and the distractions of Cecil the Lion, the false narratives of the corporate media would not have as much room to avoid popular scrutiny. It would be undoubtedly easier for masses of people to question the torture of Muammar Gaddafi’s brother [6] and its link to the US imperialist destruction of Libya and relate Obama’s paternalistic words toward Kenya to the US militarization of the continent [7]. The absence of the corporate media’s circus show would also leave room for expanded political debate on Obama’s actual criminal justice policies [8] rather than his token gestures [9] of recent weeks.

“Corporate ‘news’ agencies act as mouthpieces for imperialism’s political and economic agenda.”

Imperialism needs the corporate media because without it, the ruling class would not have the means to condition and mislead the exploited into acceptance of its rule. This is the ultimate goal of the corporate media’s psychology of oppression. The oppressed must not be allowed to question developments such as the “left” identity of the Democratic Party or the legitimacy of a system that enriches the few at the expense of entire peoples and nations. Oppressed people, especially Black Americans and working class communities, are thus taught to perform their role and digest imperial narratives. An organized left in the US imperialist nation-state must continue to develop independent media that can promote the interests of oppressed people wherever they are. The expansion of a peoples’-centered and led media, in conjunction with a revolutionary movement, is central to neutralizing the impact of the Drakes, Meek Mills, and Cecil the Lions of the corporate media circus.

Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com [10] and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.co [11]

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/imperialism_media_circus

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/imperialism_media_circus

“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center)

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Never again—Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s 70th Anniversary Commemoration

To this day the United States remains the only nation to have used an atomic weapon on civilian populations, and the only government to have threatened their use repeatedly since these artifacts’ creation.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] holocaust began on this day in 1945 and has continued to the present. Some 30 million people have been sacrificed. It was then Korea, Indo-China, Central and South America, Panama and Grenada. And for the past 24 years the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and much of Africa.

And now all of the military hubris, waste, murder, torture and rape must be put aside and channeled into saving our common home . . . this tiny grain of sand called planet Earth.

Hiroshima boy, calcinated by the bomb.

Never has there been a greater danger of nuclear holocaust than today. The United States and Israel are certainly the most apt to use these biocidal weapons. There is not now nor has there ever been any value in what was called deterrence. There is only crisis.
Blase Bonpane at the Hiroshima 70th Anniversary Event

The United States does not obey the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and Israel is not even a member, but both point the finger at a nation which is open to inspection and is a member and yet has no nuclear weapons . . . Iran.

Let’s talk for a moment about Nagasaki. There is a book review in the New York Times by Ian Buruma. The book is called Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard. Mr. Buruma points out that there is good reason to write a book about the atom bombing of Nagasaki. Most people have heard of Hiroshima. The second bomb, dropped by an Irish-American pilot almost exactly above the largest Catholic Church in Asia, which killed more than 70,000 civilians is less well known.

Nagasaki victim.

The book gives us some idea of what it must have been like for people who were unlucky enough not to be killed instantly. General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which had developed the atom bomb, testified before the United States Senate that death from high-dose radiation was “without undue suffering” and indeed “a very pleasant way to die”. Many survivors died later, always very unpleasantly, of radiation sickness. Their hair would fall out, they would be covered in purple spots, and their skin would rot. And those that would survive longer after the war had a much higher than average chance of dying of leukemia or other cancers even decades later.

Cataract caused by the explosion.

The American Administration occupying Japan at the time made it even worse for Japanese doctors to treat their patients by censoring information about the bomb and its effects. This policy was in place until the early 1950’s. Readers were shocked by John Hershey’s description of the Hiroshima bomb in The New Yorker in 1946. The ensuing book was banned in Japan. Films and photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as medical data, were confiscated by American authorities.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd let’s talk for a moment about lying . . . A new study by Army War College found that not only is lying common in the military, the armed forces themselves may be encouraging it. Matthew Hoh, a State Department whistleblower, said: “The culture of lying that is endemic and systemic in the Army, as found by researchers with the Army War College, finds its expression in America’s pointless wars, a one trillion dollar-a-year, pork-filled and inauditable national security budget, chronic veteran suicides, an expanded and more globally robust international terrorist movement, and untold suffering of millions of people and political chaos throughout the Greater Middle East perpetuated by our war policies….”

Listening to our military leaders, and the politicians who adore and deify them rather than oversee them, America’s wars and its military have been a great patriotic success. This report is not a surprise for those of us who have worn the uniform, nor should it be surprising to those who have watched and paid attention with a modicum of critical and independent thought to our wars these past thirteen plus years. The wars are failures, but careers must prosper, budgets must increase and popular narratives and myths of American military success must endure, so the culture of lying becomes a necessity for our Army at a great physical, mental and moral cost to our Nation.”

Whitewashing the atom bomb.

Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, previously directed the Afghanistan Study Group, a collection of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and on U.S. Embassy teams in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

And let’s look at the final declaration from the Kyoto International conference on Space and Peace which just ended this week. (Note: Dr. Bonpane’s talk at the Hiroshima event only quoted the 4th paragraph of this declaration beginning Missile defense systems . . .).

The United Nations was established in 1946 after the Second World War to ‘Save the succeeding generations from the scourge of wars, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to humankind”. The UN visualized establishing a New International Order. But the US and the European colonial countries have joined together and instead of a New International Order, they have brought a “New International Disorder”.

MAIRANAS ISLAND -- Boeing B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay" landing after the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima, Japan. (U.S. Air Force photo)

MARIANAS ISLANDS — Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay” landing after the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima, Japan. (U.S. Air Force photo)

The entire 20th Century witnessed wars, aggressions, and assassinations in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The imperialist countries formed the NATO military alliance which is being used to indulge in attacks on sovereign nations and committing war crimes which go unpunished. Even the UN is being side tracked as NATO expands its mission as the primary resource extraction service for corporate globalization.

Instead of allowing an alternative social order to capitalism to be developed the US engaged the USSR in a nuclear arms race. US has established approximately 1,000 military bases throughout the world. It was largely responsible for boosting global military expenditures to more than 1.75 Trillion US Dollars. Along with allies like Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies the US has over the years fostered the growth of Taliban, Al-Qaida and terrorism throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of Africa.

Missile defense systems, key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning, have been deployed around Russia and China. This has helped deal a death blow to hopes for global nuclear disarmament as both those nations have repeatedly warned that they cannot afford to reduce their nuclear retaliatory capability at the same time the US deploys the ‘shield’ on their doorstep.

The NY Daily News reports the bombing with its typical mix of chauvinism, arrogance and ignorance.

The NY Daily News reports the bombing with its typical mix of jingoism, arrogance and ignorance.

At the beginning of the 21st Century the United Nations made another attempt to herald a “new International Order” by adopting the “Millennium Declaration” and the Millennium Development Goals. All UN members have accepted to eschew violence and follow peaceful co-existence ushering disarmament and development. But again the US and many European partners have created a “new International Disorder”.

Lies have been spoken in the governments of US & Britain and also in the UN Security council about the non-existent nuclear weapons in Iraq. War in Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, attacks on Libya, and drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other nations have led to the killing of many innocent people.

Having directed a coup d’état in Ukraine the US has helped create a deadly civil war on Russia’s borders that appears designed to destabilize the government in Moscow. NATO has been extended up to the borders of Russia violating post-Cold War promises to the former Soviet Union that the western military alliance would not move ‘one inch’ eastward. The US_NATO are today sending troops and heavy military hardware to NATO members Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia all along or near the Russian border. These provocative developments could be the trigger for WW III.

CONSIDER THE TRUE HORRIFIC FACE OF A NUCLEAR BLAST ON A HUMAN BEING. CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW.

[learn_more]

Surviving the blast was as awful as dying, perhaps more so.

[/learn_more]

The US refusal to negotiate a ban on weapons in space at the UN has left the door open for continued development of offensive and destabilizing space technologies like the military space plane and Prompt Global Strike systems. US military satellites offer global surveillance to the Pentagon and allow for targeting of virtually any place on Earth.

The recently announced Obama ‘pivot’ of US forces into the Asia-Pacific is intended to give the Pentagon the capability to contain and control China. More airfields, barracks, and ports-of-call are needed for US military operations in the region thus we see expansion of existing bases, or construction of new bases, in places like South Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Philippines, Australia and more. We stand in solidarity with those local and national movements that resist the US base expansions.

Particularly as we meet in Kyoto, Japan we declare our strong opposition to the US deployment of a “missile defense” X-Band radar system in the local prefecture that is provocatively aimed at China.

This Kyoto Conference declares our opposition to the dangerous spread of global militarization, on behalf of corporate domination, which cannot be allowed to continue as we see the coming ravages of climate change and growing global poverty. We must all work to realize the UN ideal to “save the succeeding generations from the scourge of wars”. This can only happen with a powerful and unified global movement for peace, justice and environmental sanity.

We call for the conversion of the global war machine so that all life on our spaceship Earth may live and flourish in the years to come. We recognize the need for bold and determined action now to ensure that another world may in fact be possible.

All energy, support and war making must be channeled into saving our common home – The Planet Earth.

Friends, we have the power to save the planet it will not be done by our pathetic Congress and Administration it can only be done by a people mobilized in protest and leading the way to a new internationalism which is capable of ending the war system . . . creating a peace system and saving our common home. To this we must pledge our fortune and our lives.

Blase Bonpane is the director of the Office of the Americas in Los Angeles, California, which he co-founded with his wife Theresa in 1983. He works on human rights issues, and identification of illegal and immoral aspects of United States government policy.

SPECIAL COMMENT—original thread

# newell 2015-08-23 06:24

“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center)

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