Back issue
No 1383 25th February 2011
Trotskyists soil themselves in foul complicity with Western CIA stunts to topple Gaddafi’s anti-imperialism, exposing yet deeper the monstrous anti-communism that underlies their “rank-and-file” pretend revolutionism. But revisionist opportunist failure to develop world revolutionary perspectives is equally exposed by the mass confusion which has let Western subversion whip up a near civil war atmosphere in Libya, taking advantage of genuine revolt in Egypt to stir a counter-revolutionary pretence. But the glaring monarchist reaction being whipped up will backfire on imperialism as it teaches the world deeper lessons about imperialist subversion and the fake - “left” as well. Leninism crucial
Western intelligence agencies have been working overtime to muddy the waters in the Middle East and elsewhere following genuine revolution in Egypt.
As increasingly elsewhere since the 1980s, the main weapon is yet more alleged “people’s revolt”, this time deliberately provoked and stirred-up against its long-time demonised hate-and-scapegoat figures like Muammar Gaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and a far-flung and desperate “colour-revolution” attempt on the Internet in China.
None of it will succeed in saving rotten and collapsing imperialism in the long term, but for the moment the Western intelligence fed media is making the running pouring out the lurid stories to try and stampede the masses, aided and abetted by the foulest fake-“left” Trotskyist complicity, stirring in its own two-pennyworth of bilious hatred against Libya (another valuable lesson for the world’s working class about the stinking rot of this pretend “revolutionism” and its complete lining-up with imperialist capitalism at all crucial moments in history).
The CIA and other agency paid and/or compliant reactionary provocateurs have already fallen flat on their face in Iran, where the efforts to stimulate the “green movement” petty bourgeois “democrats” have failed to stir up even so much of a pretend revolt among the pro-American middle class as the BBC World Service and Voice of America-fed stirrings managed last year (which in turn came nowhere near the previous year’s election “demonstration” stunts against Ahmadinejad which the West managed to create for a couple of weeks with its pumped in propaganda).
In China the desperate “Jasmine Revolution” calls of a week ago, which miraculously and coincidentally started up alongside Libya’s events, have so far proved only that the Chinese state security is still relatively effective against counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois elements, even if the existence of the middle class conspirators at all, and the relatively crude ways of suppressing their reactionary nonsense, further underline the disastrous failure of Beijing revisionism to clarify and develop its population in socialist and revolutionary understanding (a point rammed home by Beijing’s UN Security Council cravenness over Libya also).
Even some of the more subtle Trotskyists, though steeped in hostility to the remaining workers states like China, and who endlessly tail-end the West’s carefully stunted “popular” revolts, beginning with the CIA/Vatican-funded Pilsudski-fascist loving Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980, would have trouble talking-up yet another hue of the “colour revolutions” which the entire world and its dog have long ago seen through as nothing but CIA (or other Western intelligence agency) stunts.
But true to form the Trots have immediately fallen for the foul Western intrigues against Gaddafi’s erratic anti-imperialism, repeating uncritically all the bourgeois press “rumours” and unverified, alleged “eye witness accounts”, full of wild and exaggerated Goebbels stories of supposed Libyan state repression, all designed to be pumped in by the Western TV and radio “world services” to whip up hysteria and violence on the streets, larded with stunted-up propaganda defeatist assertions that the “regime is about to fall” amidst “mass defections” (two junior diplomats when this was being punted out firstly), and inflammatory descriptions of events as “massacres” and – ludicrously – even as “genocide”, (a demented insanity and hypocrisy of especial foulness when stood alongside the West’s decades long blind-eye to actual genocidal attacks by Zionism’s constant fascist blitzkriegs on the heroic and persecuted Palestinian section of the Arab people).
The West has got some momentum going in Benghazi and now moving beyond, tapping into, and feeding-off the genuine regionally-begun ferment in Egypt and Tunisia which is now infecting the masses across the region held down by the stifling, primitive and backward feudal Western-sustained reactionaries in the Gulf, like Bahrain, and potentially Saudi Arabia.
By tapping this movement with civil war provocations and all the turmoil and emotion that violent incident creates, the provocateurs are duping and fooling the masses in Libya.
It is at such times that the crucial need to see just what forces and class elements are involved in the upheavals is absolutely paramount.
The crucial importance of a Marxist world-spanning and long view historical perspective is confirmed a million times over therefore by the counter-revolutionary chaos being unleashed now by imperialist provocations.
Tragically Gaddafi’s own insistence on an oddball and individualistic ideology of oil-funded partial “socialism”, rejecting the long scientific legacy of Marxism and Lenin’s further development of it, (and the enormous practical lessons of over a century of heroic and mass sacrificing struggles, from the Soviet Union to China, from Vietnam and Korea to Africa and Latin America), has left him wide open to the manipulations and subversion of the West and its intelligence agencies.
Gaddafi-ism has failed to build the crucial dictatorship of the proletariat and the equally important guiding science of revolutionary Marxism that alone begins to provide the framework for building a full socialist society and economy, and defending it from imperialist subversion and constant undermining intrigue.
There never has been an “easy road” to socialism via “rational and peaceful” change, not in Gaddafi’s “Green Book” thoughts and principles (even if they do contain useful elements such as local defence committees and peoples’ decision making) any more than in the latest “21st Century” Bolivarian version of alleged democratic-road socialism from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, (which are eerily similar to Gaddafi’s and, not coincidentally, also funded by lavish oil revenues and, equally, as confused, rejecting the need for all-out class struggle, and relying on defensiveness and the following of fanciful “democratic” principles.)
It is a confusion fed by decades of soft-brained revisionism worldwide and its “peace struggle” idiocies to “contain imperialism”, shading into the nonsense of the “peaceful road to socialism” and still being inspired and encouraged by world revisionism with not a word of criticism (especially from nearby Cuba for example but from all the “official communist” parties world wide).
Most especially this is disastrous for mass grasp and understanding in the epoch of the complete collapse of the monopoly capitalist class order in catastrophic historic failure, and the desperate turn to Nazi warmongering which is the only solution capitalist class rule knows to its problems.
The Western intelligence agencies have seen their chance to use all this failure of understanding in the middle of the latest genuine upheaval, which has been building explosive pressure beneath the surface for decades, playing with it to begin a long-prepared provocation in Libya which it hopes will cause enough turmoil and chaos to create civil war and leave a vacuum for it to move into, seizing the oil and other resources there.
Simultaneously they hope to disrupt, confuse and put maximum pressure on the still great uncertainty in Cairo and Tunis, aiming to manipulate it, or force it, away from mass democracy and back under Washington control.
The West is also desperate to play down its ever-escalating difficulties from the giant economic crash of its profit system, and its failing grip on the planet underlined by the rising tide of hatred and hostility which has boiled over in Tunisia, Egypt and now Bahrain, after decade after decade of barbaric oppression and imperialist exploitation (against which the original Libyan revolt was made by Gaddafi).
It is desperate to divert world attention away from these genuine mass uprisings against Mubarak, Ben Ali and the medieval Gulf dictatorships and prevent the billions everywhere taking heart and motivation from them; and its is desperate to simply confuse and disorientate the masses everywhere throughout the bankrupt West facing accelerating Slump cuts, and the squeezed Third World but particularly in Egypt and Tunisia themselves (with a view to getting counter-revolution going there too).
In other words the Cairo ferment, which has yet no clear leadership and understanding of where it is going, and of the catastrophic world imperialist crisis which has driven it to the surface, is being ridden by imperialism to create maximum chaos and simultaneously if possible bring down selected thorns in its side, particularly if they have oil and resources like Libya.
Events in Libya are very different from those in Cairo and Tunis, a fact glossed over by the triumphant petty bourgeois crowing of the shameful Trots like the viciously anti-communist CPGB Weekly Worker for, example as it lauds supposedly “the first armed uprising” in the Arab world.
Possibly so, but uprising by who?
Armed from where??
And led by what class elements????
They have nothing to do with socialism and the working class.
This is deliberate counter-revolutionary anarchic chaos.
The character of the “revolt” has been glaringly clear from the first hours, with an aggressive hostility and deliberate destructiveness instigated from the beginning, in complete contrast to the steady mass outpourings onto the street, dogged democratic demands and essentially peaceful character of the Tunisian and Egyptian events.
Attacks were made, police stations burned, and arms mysteriously appeared including heavy machine gun weaponry, in the hands of the “spontaneous” revolt within hours, not the days of the others.
The street riots were rapidly escalated to deliberately provoke and push the Libyan state forces, hoping to stampede them into, or make necessary, a forceful response that could then be fingered as alleged “state violence” to be inflated and luridly coloured-in by a compliant Western media.
And exactly such hysteria has been mounted by the Western press in complete contrast to the “measured” and “considered” reporting of the Egyptian events.
Wild stories have proliferated of ludicrous proportions such as the BBC’s interview with a “doctor” on Sunday morning recounting alleged “masses” shot down with “the kind of guns they use for aircraft” (a careful phrasing instead of “anti-aircraft guns” to give verisimilitude) – a story which having done its prodding work, has disappeared from view again, to be replaced with dozens of other accounts, all utterly unverified, and un-cross-examined, from mysterious, and effectively unidentified, single-sources, with no video footage, no evidence and just wild speculation (all excused by the ludicrous notion that it is “impossible to get in”).
Demented accounts of alleged “foreign snipers”, (though Western paid chaos using its own snipers is not ruled out) and wildly exaggerated stories of “hundreds dead” have been non-stop with the all-purpose and totally unjustified rider “and possibly very many more” (yes? - according to what objective source??) as Channel Four News’ John Snow was saying on Monday for example.
A constant stream of deliberate demoralisation propaganda has been mixed into accounts to suggest, on the basis of one bribed junior diplomat at the UN that there are “mass defections” from the regime, or that the navy has all gone to Malta, that “Gaddafi himself has fled” (completely untrue), or that wild “mercenaries” have been shooting indiscriminately (Gaddafi has support from African revolutions that he has aided in the past such as Ghana).
These are all accounts that sometimes are discredited just hours later but which have already helped feed the chaos as they are intended to do, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of chaos and turmoil in which yet more inflammatory accounts can be mixed, of alleged “airforce” bombings of “the people” (again unverified but even if a tenth of it were true still leaving the question standing of “which people? people doing what? and with what intent???”
Who starts and provokes the violence is always ignored by this propaganda blitzing.
This is exactly the pattern used over and over again by imperialism’s stunts, as it was before the invasion of Grenada’s little revolution in the 1980s (claiming anarchy, “threats” to American students etc; in the 1989 counter-revolutions which moved to fill the revisionist vacuum left in East Europe and the liquidated USSR; in the attempted overturn of the Chinese workers state with the US Statue of Liberty petty bourgeois “democracy” stunts in Tian an Men and their frenzied, deliberate, martyrdom-seeking “there should be blood” provocations against the Chinese army and police; in the stream of “colour revolutions” against the remnants of the workers states in East Europe, as the West keeps harrying the unstable new capitalist rival Russia, playing on the Nazi-minded individualism of the middle class which comes out as backward reaction and the foulest of racist Waffen SS nostalgia in places like Latvia, Poland etc.
It is notable that the “Orange” colour revolution attempts to turn over Ukraine were accompanied by a current of background and consciously made threats to the old revisionist officialdom, as the capitalist press eventually disclosed, to unleash violence and riots if they did not capitulate, which the cravenness of the “peaceful way” revisionists promptly gave in to.
All this in Libya is accompanied by an onslaught of Western media hate-language and sneering which is in glaring contrast to the language and pace of the Western coverage of the Egyptian events, as is the political commentary and diplomatic manoeuvring by Western politicians.
Ludicrously one of the obligatory “exiled foreign experts” (which means counter-revolutionary bourgeois) was even delivering the black-is-white inanity on one TV discussion that Egypt had a “relatively free press” (before Mubarak’s overthrow!!!!!) and a “thick layer of societal mechanisms” compared to Libya.
For the first fortnight of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations there was a resounding silence from Barack Obama and from Washington in general only the most muted comments to keep up the “democracy” pretences.
But no demands for Mubarak to leave, as constantly made against Gaddafi; no calls for intervention, no “condemnation” except to murmur politely about “not going too far”, when the glaring Nazism of Mubarak was too obvious on the streets as in the only real violence seen in the unprovoked attack of the Mubarak “supporters” with swords, camels, guns and other weaponry on the peaceful demonstrators.
And there were no demands for “war crimes” arraignments as the sanctimonious and priggish Foreign Secretary William Hague was making against Libya on the Radio 4 Today programme, barely a four days into the Libyan events.
There was no concerted coordinated campaign by the “international community” (meaning the US, the US dominated UN, the rich European imperialists, and assorted stooges and fascist pocket dictators) for economic sanctions to force Mubarak to leave.
Yet in contrast to all the “estimated” or obscure “unconfirmed reports” repeated verbatim as if fact by the Western media (and the foulest class-collaborating sections of the poisonous Trotskyists) there is plenty of properly witnessed evidence of the Washington supported and funded Mubarak secret police and military atrocities and torture etc (which have also been liberally used by the CIA for its own “rendition flight” prisoners):
The sickening, rapid click-click-clicking of the electric shock device sounded like an angry rattlesnake as it passed within inches of my face. Then came a scream of agony, followed by a pitiful whimpering from the handcuffed, blindfolded victim as the force of the shock propelled him across the floor.
A hail of vicious punches and kicks rained down on the prone bodies next to me, creating loud thumps. The torturers screamed abuse all around me. Only later were their chilling words translated to me by an Arabic-speaking colleague: “In this hotel, there are only two items on the menu for those who don’t behave – electrocution and rape.”
Cuffed and blindfolded, like my fellow detainees, I lay transfixed. My palms sweated and my heart raced. I felt myself shaking. Would it be my turn next? Or would my outsider status, conferred by holding a British passport, save me? I suspected – hoped – that it would be the latter and, thankfully, it was. But I could never be sure.
I had “disappeared”, along with countless Egyptians, inside the bowels of the Mukhabarat, President Hosni Mubarak’s vast security-intelligence apparatus and an organisation headed, until recently, by his vice-president and former intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, the man trusted to negotiate an “orderly transition” to democratic rule.
Judging by what I witnessed, that seems a forlorn hope.
I had often wondered, reading accounts of political prisoners detained and tortured in places such as junta-run Argentina of the 1970s, what it would be like to be totally at the mercy of, and dependent on, your jailer for everything – food, water, the toilet. I never dreamed I would find out. Yet here I was, cooped up in a tiny room with a group of Egyptian detainees who were being mercilessly brutalised.
I had been handed over to the security services after being stopped at a police checkpoint near central Cairo last Friday. I had flown there, along with an Iraqi-born British colleague, Abdelilah Nuaimi, to cover Egypt’s unfolding crisis for RFE/RL, an American radio station based in Prague.
We knew beforehand that foreign journalists had been targeted by security services as they scrambled to contain a revolt against Mubarak’s regime, so our incarceration was not unique.
Yet it was different. My experience, while highly personal, wasn’t really about me or the foreign media. It was about gaining an insight – if that is possible behind a blindfold – into the inner workings of the Mubarak regime. It told me all I needed to know about why it had become hated, feared and loathed by the mass of ordinary Egyptians.
We had been little more than half an hour after leaving Cairo airport.
Uniformed and plainclothes police swarmed around our car and demanded our passports and to see inside my bag. A satellite phone was found and one of the men got in our car and ordered our driver to follow a vehicle in front, which led us to a nearby police station.
There, an officer subjected our fixer, Ahmed, to intense questioning: did he know any Palestinians? Were they members of Hamas? Then we were ordered to move again, and eventually drove to a vast, unmarked complex next to a telecommunications building.
That’s when Ahmed sensed real danger. “I hope I don’t get beaten up,” he said. He had good reason to worry.
We were ordered out and blindfolded before being herded into another vehicle and driven a few hundred yards. Then we were pushed into what seemed like an open-air courtyard and handcuffed. I heard the rapid-fire clicking of the electric rattlesnake – I knew instantly what it was – and then Ahmed screaming in pain. A cold sweat washed over me and I thought I might faint or vomit. “I’m going to be tortured,” I thought.
But I wasn’t. “Mr Robert, what is wrong,” I was asked, before being told, with incongruous kindness, to sit down. I sensed then that I would avoid the worst. But I didn’t expect to gain such intimate knowledge of what that meant.
After being interrogated and held in one room for hours, I was frogmarched after nightfall to another room, upstairs, along with other prisoners. We believe our captors were members of the internal security service.
That’s when the violence – and the terror – really began.
At first, I attached no meaning to the dull slapping sounds. But comprehension dawned as, amid loud shouting, I heard the electric shock rods being ratcheted up. My colleague, Abdelilah – kept in a neighbouring room – later told me what the torturers said next.
“Get the electric shocks ready. This lot are to be made to really suffer,” a guard said as a new batch of prisoners were brought in.
“Why did you do this to your country?” a jailer screamed as he tormented his victim. “You are not to speak in here, do you understand?” one prisoner was told. He did not reply. Thump. “Do you understand?” Still no answer. More thumps. “Do you understand?” Prisoner: “Yes, I understand.” Torturer: “I told you not to speak in here,” followed by a cascade of thumps, kicks, and electric shocks.
Exhausted, the prisoners fell asleep and snored loudly, provoking another round of furious assaults. “You’re committing a sin,” a stricken detainee said in a weak, pitiful voice.
Craving to see my fellow inmates, I discreetly adjusted my blindfold. I briefly saw three young men – two of them looked like Islamists, with bushy beards – with their hands cuffed behind their backs (mine were cuffed to the front), before my captors spotted what I had done and tightened my blindfold.
The brutality continued until, suddenly, I was ordered to stand and pushed towards a room, where I was told I was being taken to the airport. I received my possessions and looked at my watch. It was 5pm. I had been in captivity for 28 hours.
The ordeal was almost over – save for another 16 hours waiting at an airport deportation facility. It had been nightmarish but it was nothing to what my Egyptian fellow-captives had endured.
Later, I learned that Ahmed, the fixer, had been released at the same time as Abdelilah and me. He told friends we had been “treated very well” but that he had bruises “from sleeping on the floor”. I had flown to Cairo to find out what was ailing so many Egyptians. I did not expect to learn the answer so graphically.
Robert Tait is a senior correspondent with RFE/RL. He was formerly the Guardian’s correspondent in Tehran and Istanbul
Nothing like this has emerged from Libya but it has not stopped the frenzy of hysterical Goebbels accusations pouring out, the Western intelligence, media and politicians hoping that the enough momentum can be created to overturn Gaddafi so that the lies and pretences will all be forgotten in the rush.
A process of escalation has been underway.
On Monday Jeremy Paxman, aggressive frontman for the BBC was doing one of his famous browbeatings on the former Labour foreign minister, demanding that he “condemn” Gaddafi, repeating the question five times over in a monstrous monotonous parody of smug self-“righteousness” asking whether Gaddafi should “go now”.
The cowardly and craven opportunism of the Labourites has no answer to that of course, paralysed with its petty bourgeois determination to prove that it can run imperialism “as well as” the nobs of the ruling class.
But it is still in marked contrast to the soft ride given Hague, with no such “principled and determined” questioning, (a fraud of allegedly refusing to be “fobbed off” by politicians), on show only three weeks ago when Hague (the actual) Foreign Minister refused to call for Hosni Mubarak to go, ludicrously lying about a sudden deep concern that this was a “matter for the Egyptian people” and their “sovereign rights” (which they clearly did not have for the last 40 years of dictatorship funded by Washington and the UK), rights which imperialism respects nowhere else unless its suits its interests, calling for or actually instigating “regime change” in Iraq, Afghanistan etc if its fascist war agenda demands it.
And no such questioning for Hague on Thursday when he was already demanding “war crime” trials for Gaddafi, a threat never once brought up against the West's pet stooge Mubarak, now spirited off somewhere comfortable.
No relentless cross examinations either for the sinister Lord David Owen on the day before on the Radio 4 Today programme, pouring out the abuse against Gaddafi by declaring suddenly (after years of silence) that there “never was a worse despot” in the Middle East (what? – not even Saddam Hussein!!!) and suggesting that “no one knows what biological and chemical weapons he has been developing” and dementedly calling for US bombing and military intervention.
Allegations of weapons of mass destruction are made out of the blue (based on no evidence at all) and posited as a reason to call for US invasion??
Sound familiar???????
Sound like a set-up???
And it is only not quite happening because the US and the rest of imperialism is already stretched to the limit in Afghanistan and elsewhere – but watch this space.
Hague was already bolstering this Thursday morning with talk of “rescuing” British citizens by using “SAS raids”.
An even deeper purpose of the Libyan events begins to take shape.
Warmongering, invasion, and military intervention, exactly the path which crisis ridden imperialism is hell bent on as its only “solution” to the catastrophic historic failure of its profit-making class-based exploitation rule, to pretend the Slump disaster that its system alone has brought the world to, has emerged from “outside factors” and to divert and hide its responsibility.
Because if the world understood that capitalism alone is responsible for all the foulness and collapse, it would overturn it tomorrow.
And that purpose will use any opportunity to escalate the confusion and mayhem.
Specifically the Libyan eruption also serves general imperialist policing and intimidation as it struggles to keep its overlordship of the world in place.
It also surely suits imperialism to put its forces into a country that they have long hated and which, conveniently, lies geographically between the two real revolutionary upheavals which are causing them utter dismay and panic??
And all this history and the differences with Egypt and Tunisia pointed up, between the real and the stunt, are ignored by the small and narrow-minded Trots, glibly parroting every piece of bourgeois disinformation about the “people on the street” and soiling themselves forever with this shaming stoogery.
In the one case a spontaneous mass revolt against the fascist gangster regimes which have been bolstered and financed at great cost (Egypt gets the second largest US subvention in the world after Zionist Israel, massive arms supplies and a constant stream of European Union “development aid” for lavish projects like the Cairo metro).
In the other a completely stunted up and deliberately violent anarchic chaos against an erratic but nevertheless anti-imperialist regime.
Evidence? It lies in the entire history and perspective of the world developments since the turmoil of the last great destructive world war imposed on mankind by the monopoly capitalist rivalries of the world and their ruthless battle to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The huge wave of communist and national liberation revolutions and rebellions, triggered by complete world disgust at that capitalist caused disaster and by the inspiring example of the Red Army fight to survive the Western Nazi onslaught conspiracy (with the “nice” imperialists colluding with, and urging on, the “nasty” Nazis all through the 1930s), has been growing more widespread and coherent and threatening imperialism ever since.
Endless coups, invasions, mercenary operations (they have the cheek to point at supposed “mercenaries in Libya” when Africa has been saturated with “Dogs of War” for 60 years or more, Afghanistan and Iraq are full of “private security” firms and Latin America a hotbed of freelance Nazis) and all-out blitzkrieg wars like Vietnam, not to mention apocalyptic nuclear threats encircling the USSR, China etc to this day, have gone on non-stop to suppress this revolt and keep the world cowed for the ruthless exploitation and appropriation of virtually all it produces, to feed the indolent wealth and power of the mighty US and the tiny band of rich countries which share a little of the spoils.
But the growing revolt has grown ever more mature until even Egypt has exploded.
Imperialism will continue losing its grip and the world will increasingly turn to such rebellion, as it has in Nepal, and Thailand, and Latin America, and the delta of Nigeria, and the Maoist filled centre of India, and the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines, and throughout Africa, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan etc etc etc.
And on a massively accelerating pace now that the full crisis of bankrupt capitalism is imploding everywhere.
But Libya was already part of the anti-imperialist axis, however confusedly and under whatever the bizarre peculiarities of Gaddafi-ism.
And the West has hated it, adding it to their list of “rogue states” for constant victimisation and only relenting when they could force small capitulations.
Reagan and Thatcher bombed it, the US has blockaded it, threatened it and stitched it up in the international courts, whipped up international diplomatic hatred against it at the UN, and of course constantly saturated it with CIA and other intelligence agencies to subvert, bribe and disrupt it.
Gaddafi has always been a prime hate-figure for dominant American imperialism and is particularly again at present as it smarts over his alleged “trickery” in “freeing” the desperately ill man convicted as the Lockerbie bomber, one of the world’s great injustices in the first place via an imperialist stunt in a grossly manipulated and disgraceful travesty of a trial.
The case was so foul a stitch-up that it has stuck for years in the throat of even many of the otherwise anti-communist intelligentsia in Britain, and even some of the relatives, being a particular cause of Private Eye for example which, despite its overall public school cynicism, has produced reams of material debunking the alleged “evidence” in a trial which was clearly a politically expedient manipulation by the US to blame Libya when other anti-Zionist forces had almost certainly pulled off the attack.
Imperialism set out long ago to bring down Gaddafi, hating the potential anti-imperialist example being set in the heart of the crucial Middle East.
For all the bizarre and idiosyncratic “Green Book” ideology and weirdness of Gaddafi and the occasional oddball, zig-zag, policy swings between in-your-face anti-imperialist showmanship and partial capitulation and compromise to Western pressure (dropping nuclear weapons research and withdrawal from alleged support for “terrorists”, such as the perfectly valid, determined and ultimately successful national liberation fight of the Irish Republican armed revolutionary fight against British imperialism) Libya remains a significant anti-imperialist Arab nationalist regime.
Evidence?
On top of that complete perspective it was clear by Monday specifically just what “people” were carrying out the revolt; the purest reactionaries, it was confirmed by the stunted-up “demonstration” outside the Libyan London Embassy where the dissidents and bourgeois “exile” elements working for imperialism, pulled down the Libyan Gaddafi flag and, much more significantly, raised the old monarchical colonialist flag, all approvingly and gushingly reported by the Western TV news and benevolently watched by the metropolitan police who handle the students and other demonstrators with very much rougher hands if they simply enter an office block, let alone someone else’s “sovereign territory” (are you diplomatically protesting Mr Hague?).
And if a London demonstration is not enough, by Wednesday it was clear that the “liberated” areas in Libya itself were also raising the old monarchist/colonial era standard.
But the Trots choose to ignore this too, just as they ignored the old imperial Polish eagle, the pre-war fascist dictator Pilsudski’s personal symbol, when it started appearing on all the Solidarnosc letterheads and statements in the 1980s Vatican funded and CIA organised “people’s revolt” of backward Catholicism and pro-fascist petty bourgeois.
It has remained ever since, as has the reactionary character of Polish counter-revolution dominating the unemployment riddled dismantling of the social and cultural achievements of the former Polish workers state.
This is no “people’s revolt” it is counter-revolution.
And the most reactionary forces know it as the bourgeois press slipped out at the bottom of various stories:
Behind the scenes, according to Libyan and Arab sources, intensive efforts are under way to persuade key tribes to throw in their lot with the uprising, perhaps with the help of funding from Saudi Arabia, whose conservative monarchy has long loathed Gaddafi. In the west an important tribe called the Warfalla live on both sides of the border with Tunisia and the Oulad Ali live in Libya and Egypt.
Tribal leaders and politicians met in al-Bayda in the east to demonstrate a united front against Gaddafi in one of the first signs of organisation by the opposition.
TV pictures showed delegates giving speeches in a conference hall amid loud chants against Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam attacked what he called a “conspiracy by our Arab brothers”, hinting at intervention in Libya’s internal affairs.
What has the plundered oil wealth of the degenerate and corrupt feudal backwardness of the tyrannical Saudi Arabian royalty (where the West’s sudden interest in “democracy” and anti-tyranny does not extend) got to do with “people’s freedom”???
And why is the most privileged middle class of lawyers and other professionals leading this (in contrast to the very mixed character of the revolt in Egypt?):
Benghazi is now being run by a makeshift organising committee of judges, lawyers and other professionals who have sent out young people to direct traffic and restore basic order.
One high court lawyer, Amal Bagaigis, said: “We started just as lawyers looking for our rights and now we are revolutionaries, and we don’t know how to manage. We want to have our own face. For 42 years we lived with this kind of barbarianism. We now want to live by ourselves.”
The Trots are so poisoned with their petty bourgeois small-mindedness and deep-down detestation of working class discipline and state organisation that they can see only the surface; if it moves it must be a “revolution” they willingly accept, buying all the intelligence agency trickery with their utterly superficial rank-and-fileism.
It is a class-poisoned “understanding” that has nothing to do with Marxism and at key moments everything to do with anti-Marxism.
The Workers Power, the SWP and others were all at it in the last few days, uncritically repeating reams of the capitalist press coverage and helping pour out the hatred.
It is the most disgusting display of anti-communist depravity and class collusion since the whole sordid crew universally rose up to “condemn terrorism” after 9/11, writing-off the only means of struggle that much of the Third Wold had managed to find up to that point and demonstrating forever which side they are on – solidly up the arse of imperialism.
Now the world’s masses have advanced another step to mass revolt, they want to poison the well even further.
This is consciously and viciously done, like the sly dagger in the back for Gaddafi slipped out by the “left” intellectual “darling” of the chat shows and the fake-“left” “Stop the War” platforms, Tariq Ali, amidst a cloud of historical misrepresentation, dashing a little dust from Europe’s 1848 bourgeois revolutionary movement in the eyes to intimidate the less knowing with false parallels, intended to deliberately conflate Libya with Egypt (it is all a “wave” of revolution with one single purpose lies Ali).
But every situation demands its own particular analysis and Ali’s deliberate confusion of the current events with something from an earlier time, before the advent of monopoly capitalism, the great world wars and even the heroic Paris Commune which delivered major lessons to Marx and Engels, is done purely to limit understanding, dazzle with supposed erudition and thereby head-off any grasp of the epoch, which is a time of universal dominance of imperialism, and universal struggle against it, erupting here and there for the moment but all part of the same world fight and facing the same needs to understand that only overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism will suffice.
Ali’s hamstringing explanations that it is all about bourgeois “democracy” are pure opportunism.
But there is worse.
Listen to the sinister undertones in this foulness right in the middle of Ali’s “clever” article, damning Gaddafi with a piece of poisonous hearsay – from Saudi Arabia of all places:
The pro-British monarchy was toppled by the 1958 revolution in Iraq, radicals took power in Damascus, a senior Saudi prince attempted a palace coup and fled to Cairo when it failed, armed struggles erupted in Yemen and Oman, and there was much talk of an Arab nation with three concurrent capitals. One side effect was an eccentric coup in Libya that brought a young, semi-literate officer, Muammar Gaddafi, to power. His Saudi enemies have always insisted that the coup was masterminded by British intelligence, just like the one that propelled Idi Amin to power in Uganda. Gaddafi’s professed nationalism, modernism and radicalism were all for show, like his ghosted science-fiction short stories.
It never extended to his own people. Despite the oil wealth he refused to educate Libyans, or provide them with a health service or subsidised housing, squandering money on absurdist projects abroad – one of which was to divert a British plane carrying socialist and communist Sudanese oppositionists and handing them over to fellow dictator Gaafar Nimeiry in Sudan to be hanged, thus wrecking the possibility of any radical change in that country, with dire consequences, as we witness every day. At home he maintained a rigid tribal structure, thinking he could divide and buy tribes to stay in power. But no longer.
What a sly and underhand piece of backstabbing to allow Ali to slide out from exposing capitalism’s degeneracy here, “justifying” the most craven opportunism and allowing him to line up with the reactionary West while pretending “left” credentials.
This is on a par with the demented and ridiculous “CIA did the 9/11 attack” “conspiracy” theories which allowed some of the “lefts” to condemn the Third World while pretending not to “because it was really done by Washington all along”, (and simultaneously helping the pompous middle class to smugly mock the idea that “conspiracy” really is the essence of late imperialism, by subscribing to such pointless convolutions, on a par with UFO mysticism and other rot).
The CPGB Weekly Worker renegade “Revisionists”, now long degenerated into more septic anti-workers state hostility than the Trots can even manage, have equally poured out the poison, repeated Western hearsay and all mingled with garbled and shallow, woodenly-applied, academic “Marxist theory”. There is room only for a sample:
Well, as we can see daily on our TV and computer screens,
(where exactly has anyone SEEN anything???)
the Libyan masses have risen up almost as one against the state...With events unfolding at lightning speed, ...in Libya we are presented with a near textbook or classic revolutionary situation - where the masses refuse to be ruled in the old way, and the rulers are unable rule in the old way.
Determined to overthrow Gaddafi’s cruel dictatorship, which has kept itself in power through terror and intimidation - like the regular showing of public executions on television - the masses initially revolted in Benghazi, Libya’s second city. Inevitably, though Benghazi is separated from Tripoli by hundreds of miles, the revolutionary uprising has yet to spread to the capital.
When Tripoli falls, the Gaddafi regime is dead.
Equally as determined to hang onto power by any means necessary, the regime has unleashed a barbaric salvo of violence against the masses. Heavy machine fire, explosives and missiles have been fired into the protesting crowds - with government snipers firing from rooftops. Even aircraft and helicopters have been deployed against arms dumps. Bands of brutal mercenaries roam the streets like death squads, randomly opening fire on protestors - by all accounts
(!!! by all whose accounts????)
some of these gangsters are from Russia and eastern Europe, as well as sub-Saharan Africa, and are purportedly (!!!) paid huge amounts. The hospitals have filled up with victims of Gaddafi’s terror and when the count is finally done
(they have some powerful sixth sense prescience it seems!!!)
the death toll will be (!!!) in the thousands.
These are all the crazed tactics of a dying regime. Benghazi, and the eastern half of the country as a whole, has been liberated from state control – as even Gaddafi has admitted (although, of course, he does not phrase it in quite that way). It almost goes without saying that virtually all the tribal elders have deserted the regime - they know which side their bread is buttered. The police have been driven off the streets of many Libyan cities and towns, their premises ransacked for weaponry and other potentially useful material for the revolution. More and more sections of the army are refusing to obey orders and are turning against the regime, exemplified by the two fighter pilots who absconded to Malta rather than fire upon their own people.
Indeed, those remaining segments of the military which remain loyal to Gaddafi - for now - have attacked army units which have passed over the side of the people, or at least are perceived to have done so. Ambassadors and diplomats abroad are queuing to denounce their former boss.
Communists - genuine communists, that is - will not weep for Gaddafi and his henchmen, whatever their eventual fate. Good riddance to bad rubbish, frankly. But nor will we forget that his foul regime was courted by all manner of political tendencies - the apologists including sections of ‘official communism’ such as the New Communist Party, Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and, perhaps most infamously, by the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party (which was well rewarded with cash and other subsidies worth at least £500,000).
The wretched WRP professed fealty on countless occasions to the Libyan Jamahiriya - e.g, writing about its “support of the Libyan masses under their leader, Muammar Gaddafi”. That line continues to this day. Hence, the WRP condemns the democratic uprising in Libya. It is led by opportunists who pose “as out-and-out revolutionaries”; that, or contradictorily, it is characterised as “rightwing”, “reactionary” and sponsored by a US-UK imperialism bent on getting hold of the country’s substantial oil reserves. However, albeit at the 11th hour, we hear criticism of Gaddafi. Apparently he was ill-advised not to identify himself with the mass movements in Tunisia and Egypt. Despite that “major mistake” the WRP urges the “Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside colonel Gaddafi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution”. By way of advice the organisation laughably suggests a “national discussion” in Libya designed to see in the “introduction of workers’ control and management of the Libyan economy and society”.
The “wretched” WRP are no better than the CPGB in just about everything they do, and have a long history of anti-Soviet anti-communist confusion and Trotskyist reaction to their name.
Almost by chance, because of the past political opportunism (correctly fingered by the CPGB though for its own squabbling sectarian purposes) they find themselves on the correct side of the fight, though promptly let down by the dire philistinism of their own politics (which informs the reformist reactionary bureaucratic trade Unionism of Scargill’s SLP and the slew of revisionists too).
There is not, and has never, been any question of supporting Gaddafi, any more than there is any question of supporting Chávez, of supporting Saddam Hussein even, to take a more extreme example, or of supporting outright any other maverick anti-imperialism.
Even when, correctly, unconditionally supporting workers states (a different matter entirely because these have a different class base, having overturned capitalism) like Cuba, China, Vietnam or North Korea, the best way to do this is by constantly criticising and exposing the disastrous legacy of revisionism which totally muddles the world (see below on Castro).
There is only the question of being against imperialism, and of understanding that it is the defeat of imperialism by whatever forces, which will push forwards history.
If that means temporarily standing alongside all sorts of confused and even subjectively reactionary elements like weird Islamists, and halfway house anti-imperialists, then so be it.
But just as Lenin’s Bolsheviks fought against the reactionary military putsch attempt of Tsarist fascist general Kornilov in August 1917, to reestablish the old reactionary order, standing alongside the bourgeois anti-communist Kerensky, but made constantly clear to the masses the treacherous nature of Kerenskyism, there is no support implied for the confusion in the world, be they opportunist Russian “democrats” or Gaddafi.
There was no support for revisionist Milosevicism in Serbia, even while standing in the demonstrations against the vicious NATO Nazi bombing in 1998, and no support for Iran’s, or Afghanistan’s leaderships etc.
There is every wish for the imperialist onslaughts everywhere to be thoroughly and soundly thrashed and defeated even if those forces are the ones doing it (though frequently the confusion and opportunism they manifest weakens that fight as the Serbians needed to be warned about Milosevic for example).
The question is to correctly identify the source and reason for the world’s disastrous collapse into ever worsening Slump turmoil, chaos and destructiveness, as imperialism and monopoly capitalist domination alone.
And after that is the need to correctly identify the forms the struggle against imperialism has taken for the moment including halfway confused ideological leaderships.
The question is to follow all the twists and turns in the world class struggle against class tyranny and exploitation, always keeping the proletariat’s eye firmly on the ball of revolutionary struggle and not distracted by feints and calls from the side.
In other words to build the greatest Leninist clarity.
Supporting Gaddafi’s barminess as the answer for the masses in Libya or anywhere else just spreads yet more confusion.
It did over the decades of his rule and it does now, as his desperation emerges in crazy allegations that everything is down to “youth taking drugs” or “Al Qaeda”.
Possibly Western subversion has used various mechanisms to distract the youth and petty bourgeois elements (like the lawyers being cited by the Guardian on Friday as “leading the revolt”).
But everything is down to capitalism, its foulness and its deliberate subversion.
It will continue to confuse everyone until the world wakes up to the need for Leninist clarity, building parties of constant theoretical struggle and polemic to develop the scientific revolutionary understanding that it vital finally to end capitalism and establish world socialist rule, the only way out of crisis.
The great revisionist swamp in the world is even more of a problem than the pestilential anti-communism of the Trots and just as opportunist, refusing to examine the dire mistakes and philosophical retreats of the past and the errors of the first enormous and heroic workers state experiments in history, in the USSR and East Europe, now insanely and futilely liquidated.
The temporary world mass rejection of “communism” (or rather what it wrongly understood to be communism) was caused by the disappointment of the world’s masses in these “failures” of socialism, which were not collapses at all but entirely due to the retreat from revolutionary Leninism begun in Stalin’s time and the subsequent degeneration of this flawed weakness into revisionism’s eventual complete capitulation to bourgeois ideology and “market forces” via the Gorbachevite pointless liquidation of the still viable Soviet economy and society.
It has helped set a complete framework for “other ideas” including Gaddafi’s, for the temporary rise of other militancy such as Islamic fundamentalism (which at least seems to offer a fight and hostility to Western degeneracy and privilege) and for the confusion which now reins everywhere, always vulnerable to manipulation and lies.
The best way to defend the masses everywhere from the ruthless onslaughts and manipulation of imperialism us to constantly battle for clarity and scientific understanding.
But the whole of revisionism and even its “hardest” Stalin-nostalgic wing refuses to take up such challenges, choosing instead to bury the mistakes and difficulties of the first great socialist achievements (titanic) under a mountain of obfuscation and pretence.
Its rank opportunism is then part of the problem and nothing is sorted out and understood by the masses, left open to chaotic manipulation of the non-stop Western subversion and its tidal wave of “freedom and democracy” lies pouring out as they are now against Libya.
The world needs urgently to grasp that capitalism is heading for utter warmongering disaster;that it will only be stopped by the ending of the now rotten ripe class system by the most powerful and organised revolutionary upheavals ever seen, right into the heart of the imperialist powers themselves where the slump is tearing up all the old illusions in democracy, prosperity and progress.
There is only fascist destructiveness on offer and the sooner the world wakes up and build Leninist clarity to end it, the better.
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Cuban medical brigade combating cholera on all fronts
HINCHE must be one of the few cities in the world to have a landing strip on its main thoroughfare, with the alternative function of providing pasture for herds of goats. Such is the unique departmental capital of Centre in Haiti, where the cholera epidemic has become a central cause for concern for its residents and the Cuban medical brigade which is providing its services in solidarity here.
A Cholera Treatment Center has been set up outside the hospital in Hinche, where a joint team of Cubans and graduates from the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) are working alongside nine U.S. doctors from an NGO. These latter have developed a very positive impression of the dedication of this brigade in Hinche.
While members of the brigade were commenting on how the work has been organized, its reinforcement, and the commitment of the doctors’ and nurses’ teams, we noticed the youthful-ness of Dr. Roberto Pardo from Guantánamo province. We had already observed the soundness of arguments presented by other contemporaries of his. It is based on the exceptional experience of having confronted on one mission, the disaster of the earthquake and, now, the epidemic. The commitment made by this young doctor in October of 2005, when he joined the Henry Reeve Internationalist Brigade, presented with the Cuban flag by Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro, is now being reinforced.
Among the ELAM graduates, we came across Ecuadorian, Mexican and Colombian doctors who, when they are not attending to patients in the treatment center, can be found reading books in their rooms, in preparation for their post graduate exams in specialties of Comprehensive General Medicine, courses that they are continuing in Haiti.
Hygiene safety has bee stepped up in the house where the brigades are staying. One can barely hear the footsteps of those entering and leaving, given the consensus to allow those recovering from the rigors of the previous shift to rest. (Taken from CubaDebate) •
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Castro’s thoughts on the fascist purpose of NATO
MANY people feel sickened on hearing the name of that organization.
On Friday, November 19, 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal, the 28 members of that bellicose institution engendered by the United States, decided to create what they cynically describe as “the new NATO.”
The institution emerged after World War II as an instrument of the Cold War unleashed by imperialism on the Soviet Union, the country which paid for the victory over Nazism with tens of millions of lives and colossal destruction.
The United States mobilized against the USSR, together with a healthy part of the European population, the extreme right and the Nazi-fascist scum of Europe, full of hatred and prepared to squeeze every advantage out of the errors committed by the very leaders of the USSR after the death of Lenin.
The Soviet people, with great sacrifice, were able to maintain nuclear parity and support the national liberation struggles of many peoples against the efforts of European states to maintain the colonial system imposed by force throughout the centuries; states that were postwar allies of the Yankee empire, which assumed command of the counter-revolution worldwide.
In just 10 days - less than two weeks - world opinion has received three great and unforgettable lessons: the g20, APEC and NATO in Seoul, Yokohama and Lisbon, in such a way that all upstanding people who can read and write, and whose minds have not been mutilated by the conditioned reflexes of imperialism’s media apparatus, can have a real idea of the problems currently affecting humanity.
In Lisbon, not one word was uttered that could convey hope to the billions of people enduring poverty, underdevelopment, insufficient food, housing, health, education and employment.
On the contrary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the vain character who figures as secretary general of the NATO military mafia, declared in the tone of a little Nazi fuehrer, that the “new strategic concept” was in order “to act in any part of the world.”
It was not for nothing that the government of Turkey was at the point of vetoing his appointment when, in April 2009, Fogh Rasmussen - a neoliberal Dane - in his position as prime minister of Denmark, and using the pretext of freedom of the press, defended the authors of serious offenses to the Prophet Mahoma, a figure respected by all Muslim believers.
More than a few people in the world can recall the close relations of cooperation between the Danish government and the Nazi “invaders” during World War II.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a bird of prey hatched in the skirts of Yankee imperialism, and moreover equipped with tactical nuclear weapons many times more destructive than the atom bomb that erased the city of Hiroshima, has been committed by the United States to the genocidal Afghanistan war, even more complex than the Kosovo adventure and the war on Serbia, where its forces massacred the city of Belgrade and were at the point of suffering a disaster if the government of that country had remained firm, instead of trusting in the institutions of European justice in the Hague.
In one of its points, the inglorious Lisbon Declaration affirms in a vague and abstract manner:
“In the strategically important Western Balkans region, democratic values, regional cooperation and good neighborly relations are important for lasting peace and stability.”
“KFOR is moving towards a smaller, more flexible, deterrent presence.”
Now?
Nor will Russia be able to forget it so easily: the real fact is that when Yeltsin dismembered the USSR, the United States advanced NATO’s borders and its nuclear attack bases into the heart of Russia from Europe and Asia.
Those new military installations also threatened the People’s Republic of China and other Asian countries.
When that took place in 1991, hundreds of SS-19s, SS-20s and other powerful Soviet weapons could reach U.S. and NATO bases in Europe in a matter of seconds. No NATO secretary general would have dared to talk with the arrogance of Rasmussen.
The first agreement on limiting nuclear weapons was signed as early as May 26, 1972, between President Richard Nixon of the United States and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the aim of limiting the number of anti-ballistic missiles (the ABM Treaty) and to defend certain points against nuclear missiles.
In Vienna in 1979, Brezhnev and Carter signed new agreements known as salt II, but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify those agreements.
The new rearmament promoted by Reagan with the Strategic Defense Initiative put en end to the salt agreements.
The Siberian gas pipeline had already been blown up by the CIA.
Instead, a new agreement was signed in 1991 between Bush Sr. and Gorbachev, five months before the collapse of the USSR. When that event took place, the socialist bloc no longer existed. The countries that the Red Army had liberated from Nazi occupation were not even capable of maintaining their independence. Right-wing governments that came to power moved into NATO with their arms and equipment and fell into the hands of the United States. The German Democratic Republic, which had made a great effort under the leadership of Erich Honecker, could not overcome the ideological and consumerist offensive launched from the capital itself, occupied by Western troops.
As the virtual master of the world, the United States increased its adventurist and warmongering policy.
Due to a well manipulated process, the USSR disintegrated. The coup de grace was dealt it by Boris Yeltsin on December 8, 1991 when, as president of the Russian Federation, he declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. On the 25th of that month, the red hammer and sickle flag flying over the Kremlin was lowered.
A third agreement on strategic weapons was subsequently signed between George W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin on January 3, 1993, prohibiting the use of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) with multiple warheads. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate on January 26, 1993, by a margin of 87 votes to 4.
Russia inherited the science and technology of the USSR - which in spite of the war and enormous sacrifice was capable of creating a military power on a level with that of the immense and rich Yankee empire - the victory over fascism, the traditions, the culture and the glories of the Russian people.
The war on Serbia, a Slavic nation, sunk its teeth hard into the security of the Russian people, something that no government could afford itself the luxury of ignoring.
The Russian Duma - angered by the first Iraq war and that of Kosovo in which NATO massacred the Serb people -refused to ratify start II and did not sign that agreement until the year 2000 and, in that case, in an attempt to save the ABM treaty which, by that date, the Yankees weren’t interested in maintaining.
The United States is trying to use its enormous media resources to maintain, deceive and confuse world public opinion.
The government of that country is going through a difficult stage as a consequence of its military adventures. All the NATO countries without exception are committed to the Afghanistan war, as are various others in the world, whose peoples find odious and repugnant the butchery in which rich and industrialized countries such as Japan and Australia, and other Third World nations are involved in to a greater or lesser degree.
What is the essence of the agreement approved in April of this year by the United States and Russia? Both parties have committed themselves to reducing the number of the strategic nuclear missiles to 1,550. Not one word is being said about the nuclear missiles of France, the United Kingdom and Israel, all of them capable of striking Russia. Not one word has been said either about tactical nuclear weapons, some of them with far more power than that which erased the city of Hiroshima. There is no mention of the destructive and lethal capacity of numerous conventional weapons, the radio-electric and other weapons systems into which the United States is channeling its growing military budget, superior to that of all the other nations of the world put together. Both governments know, as many others meeting there do, that a third world war would be the last.
What kind of illusions can the NATO members create? What is the peace for humanity derived from that meeting? What benefit can possibly be expected for the peoples of the Third World, and even for the international economy?
They cannot even offer the hope that the world economic crisis can be overcome, or how much longer any improvement would last. The total public debt of the United States, not only that of central government, but the rest of the country’s public and private institutions, has already risen to a figure that is equal to the world GDP of 2009, which amounted to $58 trillion. Did those meeting in Lisbon maybe think to ask themselves where those fabulous resources came from? Simply, from the economy of all the other nations in the world, to which the United States handed over pieces of paper converted into dollar bills which, for 40 years now, unilaterally ceased having their backing in gold, and now that the value of that metal is 40 times superior. That country still possesses its veto within the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Why wasn’t that discussed in Portugal?
The hope of extracting U.S. troops, those of NATO and their allies from Afghanistan, is an idyllic one. They will have to abandon that country before the defeated hand over power to the Afghan resistance. The United States’ own allies are beginning to acknowledge that dozens of years could go by before that war is over; is NATO prepared to remain there for all that time? Would the very citizens of each one of the governments meeting there allow that? Not to forget that a country with a very large population, Pakistan, shares a border of colonial origin with Afghanistan and a none-too insignificant percentage of its inhabitants.
I am not criticizing Medvedev, he is acting very well in trying to limit the number of nuclear missiles pointing at his country. Barack Obama cannot invent any justification whatsoever for that. It would be laughable to imagine that that colossal and costly deployment of the anti-missile nuclear shield is to protect Europe and Russia from Iranian missiles proceeding from a country which does not even possess a tactical nuclear weapon. Not even a children’s story book could affirm that.
Obama has already admitted that his promise to withdraw U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan could be delayed and that taxes from the wealthiest contributors are to be immediately suspended. After the Nobel Prize one would have to grant him the prize for the “greatest snake charmer “ever to have existed.
Taking into account the W. Bush autobiography, which has already become a bestseller, and which some intelligent editor drafted for him, why didn’t they do him the honor of inviting him to Lisbon? The extreme right, the “Tea Party” of Europe, would have been happy.
Fidel Castro Ruz November 21, 2010 8:36 p.m. •
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