Back issue
No 1388 5th June 2011
Escalating war-blitz in Libya and the Middle East is the real depravity not sick Hague show-trial Goebbels lies about non-existent “genocide” in Srebrenica or Benghazi. But decades of fatuous “even-handed” human rights moralising, built on the social-pacifist delusions of Moscow revisionism from Stalin onwards, and Trotskyist anti-revolutionary poison, play right into imperialism’s hands, “justifying” its NAZI NATO counter-revolutionary stunts to head off and intimidate the Arab Spring revolts. Worse, they fail to warn the working class of the deeper world war purpose of now constant militarism, to “solve” the unsolvable unrolling capitalist Slump catastrophe. Leninism urgently needed
The West will soon be running out of “villains” to blame for the now non-stop escalated warmongering which it has been imposing on the planet for over a decade in order to distract attention from its desperate and unstoppable crisis collapse into world Slump disaster.
The absurd and lying pretence of “fighting for freedom and justice” and “self-sacrificingly defending downtrodden peoples against brutal dictators” has always been a Goebbels nonsense.
But it is now so badly compromised by the contradictions and hypocrisy of the selective (illegal) NATO blitzkrieging in the Middle East – and simultaneous support of murderous suppression and oppression of the Arab revolution from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, – that the West has had to revive some very hoary old lies from Yugoslavia to bolster its cynical campaign and distract attention from these failing distractions.
While the Washington dominated invasion ramps up the destruction of Tripoli (contrary to the bribed and herded UN’s figleaf “legality” motions), imperialism is recycling some of the old big lie Srebrencia “genocide” hysteria used to keep the anti-communist and imperialist plundering Balkans war going.
Conveniently who should pop up but bogeyman Bosnian Serb nationalist general Ratko Mladic for yet another farcical and sanctimonious “war crimes” show-trial in the Hague.
It is this story which has underpinned the even more non-existent and totally phantom “massacre of Benghazi” around which the entire demonisation of Gaddafi pivots.
Not only did this supposed “atrocity” never happen but it only “exists” at all because the Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy imperialist triumvirate declare that it “might” have happened – if they had not launched a massive war.
This hypothetical “phantom” genocide is a convoluted hypothetical “justification” for the very real and deadly NATO blitzkrieg of such breathtaking chutzpah that Joseph Goebbels himself will be squirming with delight in his grave.
The Mladic story is equally fraudulent.
He has been living openly in Serbia for years it emerges, under his own name, and even went to hospital in Belgrade two years ago, again under his own name – so that he could have been picked up at any time (and the presence of a Western occupation officialdom with UN and NATO forces in the country since 1999, rules out any notions that he was “hidden away by the Serbs”).
He has been kept “in reserve” for when it suits imperialism to play this card.
Now is the moment, because its threadbare pretences of “protecting ordinary people” and “responding to their cries for help” as one deluded Stop the War “pacifist” has just regurgitated, to justify a craven about-turn conversion to class collaboration with ruling class war – (since when have genuine revolutionaries called on US imperialist bombs for help???) – these pretences are nearer to total exposure than ever before in the Middle East.
So the compliant and opportunist anti-communist stooge “government”, which NATO installed in Belgrade anyway post-Milosovec, is given a nudge to suddenly “discover” Mladic’s presence (probably with some background bribery to do with joining the EU and gaining access to its lavish subsidies and development funds) behind which can be dredged up the luridly painted allegations of “genocide” in Srebrenica all over again, reporting wild exaggerations and outright lies as fact, and with extreme posturing front-page condemnations.
This ploy, it is calculated, will help to point shallow petty bourgeois heads away from growing doubts about the mayhem and destruction being wreaked on Libya by increasingly brutal Nazi NATO blitzkrieging, which more and more obviously is simply an extension of the destructive “punishment” shock-and-awe imposed by bankrupt US-led imperialism on Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinians (endlessly), increasingly Pakistan, on Lebanon and threatened against Iran, Syria, and others, to maintain its bankrupt dominance in the face of catastrophic failure and debt crisis.
The aim is to keep feeding shallow “justifications” to the (willingly) gullible “liberal” and pacifist petty bourgeoisie who have swallowed wholesale the ruling class story of just fighting to “make the world a better place” ever since 9/11.
This class-influenced collusion with capitalism has been further lubricated by the layers of foetid Trotskyist fake-“left”s who have gone far beyond even these “freedom” and “democracy” pretences to poisonous hatred, helping imperialism put the boot in to Gaddafi, and other scapegoated victims, most notably Syria at present.
The bilious hatred felt by the Trots for the reality of the workers states over six decades (because of the disruption actual resistance to capitalism would mean for the comfortable armchair lives followed by the fake-“left” poseurs within capitalism) has largely been transformed into a hostility to all actual Third World rebellion since revisionism’s stupidities liquidated the Soviet Union.
But however painfully, messily and slowly, it is the Third World which is challenging world capitalism’s endless tyrannical exploitation more and more, and pushing forwards what will eventually be its total overthrow and replacement by world communism, the necessary and only possible future for mankind.
When it comes to it, the petty bourgeois fake-“left”, full of bold theoretical words about how supposedly progressive people ought to live their lives (political correctness prescriptions) and long-winded academic accounts of how perfect revolution should be done (despite never having led one or ever going to), recoil from the rough-edged and often confused beginnings of anti-imperialist revolt, “condemning” the shock to imperialism of 9/11 as nothing but “terrorism”, or the anti-imperialist resistance of Iran and others as “reactionary Islam”, foully and treacherously declared to be “worse than imperialism”.
The Trots have equally denounced Gaddafi and the obvious majority support he has from the Libyan masses (which even the Western media lie machine has been unable to hide completely) giving themselves a slippery excuse for lining up with imperialism’s war machine.
But the glaring contradictions of the Middle East are becoming clearer.
Imperialism’s every action has been to suppress and head off the genuine rebellions which erupted in January and February: in Tunisia and Egypt abandoning the stooge gangster dictators which Washington supported and heavily financed for so long, but only in order to manipulate, bribe and manoeuvre to keep in place the old regimes, or at least imperialist influence, behind a thin façade of “supporting democracy” (because it has no other option); in Bahrain, and Oman and Yemen, turning a blind eye to the endless killing, violence and torture which have seen massive intimidation with hundreds shot down dead and thousands injured; in Saudi Arabia arming and even training and assisting the repressive forces of one of the most backward social structures on earth, not just reactionaries, but a residue of tribal monarchism that even predates the feudalism which the bourgeoisie overturned 300 years ago in Europe.
And all this is so blatant and obvious that even the sophisticated bourgeois media like machine cannot hide it (see cuttings further on).
Most blatant of all is the war destruction of Libya where the energy has already left the anti-Gaddafi movement set going by the Western intelligence agencies, because it never had anything to do with a genuine “Arab Spring”.
Libya was a completely artificial counter-revolution taking advantage of the overall turmoil and ferment around to stampede a civil war by provoking violence and mayhem with arson attacks etc on government buildings, using secret sniper fire and the like (– exactly as is now underway in Syria).
But though the fascist-minded petty bourgeois opposition has almost given up against the resilience which even Gaddafi’s partial, bizarre and non-Marxist anti-imperialism has shown, the West needs to keep the war going, to spread maximum confusion, to intimidate the genuine mass movements in countries either side, and to deal finally with the long-term thorn in the side of Gaddafi’s 40 year-long overturn of past colonialism (which, erratic and confused though it is, is still hated by Washington and London).
A key element in the weeks of demented Goebbels propaganda, full of specious, unproven, unverified allegations about alleged torture, killings, gang rape etc etc which stampeded the world into a war which is now steadily reducing the whole country, and its civilians’ lives, to rubble, was the completely nonsensical lie that there was “about to be” a “cold-blooded” massacre in Benghazi.
It was based on a deliberate misrepresentation of Gaddafi’s threat to deal vigorously and firmly with the uprising in Benghazi (see past EPSRs), made after the point which Western media stampeding had already successfully got it going, threatening all-out civil war insurrection against Gaddafi laced with fascist intimidation and reactionary monarchism and completely in cahoots with imperialism.
Though Marxist leadership would not have phrased things just so, his remark was nothing to do with a “blood-curdling” demonic intention to slaughter the population in cold-blooded revenge, but an assertion of the determination to find and fight the counter-revolution, in the face of endless western disinformation that Gaddafi had “gone on the run” etc.
US imperialism thinks this shyte will be swallowed because it is the normal behaviour for its own fascist stooges, like the Nazi, bullying, Zionist land-thieving occupiers in Palestine, which issue endless fascist promises to “hunt down terrorists” (meaning anyone who tries to fight back) to the ends of the earth etc etc where they will be killed in cold blood (and exactly as Obama gloatingly watched with his Pentagon generals when the unarmed suspected Bin Laden was shot on the spot in an illegal vigilante raid into someone else’s country, with no pretences of a trial or “rule of law”).
It is Washington which issues constant threats to bomb and blitzkrieg anyone who dares think about challenging its world supremacy, and even promises a “bomb down the chimney” for computer hackers if they are even suspected, let alone proven, to be making “cyber-war”.
To bolster the preposterous Benghazi lie, the alleged “Srebrenica” massacre was cited as a “precedent” to “be prevented from happening again”.
As if US dominated post-war capitalism itself has ever been anything but an endless round of terrorising, manipulation, coups, wars, torture and death-squads massacres anyway.
But Srebrenica too is a massive fraud, the top of layer upon layer of Goebbels lies pumped out non-stop throughout the imperialist triggered break-up of Yugoslavia.
There no more was “genocide” or “cold-blooded massacre” in Bosnia than in Libya, Zimbabwe, Tian an Men, Tibet, Mayanmar, or any of the other fantasy “totalitarian tyrannies” regularly painted by Western propaganda.
In the middle of a vicious civil war, with confusion and chaos all around (not helped by the revisionist failure of former Yugoslavian “communist” leadership to give a clear class-based revolutionary lead to the working class) there was fighting, there were deaths and casualties and there were almost certainly some sporadic atrocities.
But no such “massacre” has ever been proven, nor any evidence adduced for one, even after a decade of total western control of Serbia and the swamping of the ground with forensic investigators, police, hi-tech devices, in a decade of hunting for alleged “mass graves”, let along anything like “systematic” genocide and the “worst slaughter since Nazi Germany” which the Western media and politicians ludicrously pour out.
Yet currently every western press account of Mladic talks of “8000 Muslim men” being systematically killed, overcoming the issue of no evidence at all by declaring that “the bodies have not been found yet”. After 10 years!!!!
Mladic is no saint, and even less a Leninist, and there is no question of Marxism supporting his nationalism, or the revisionism still running Belgrade at the time, but his contempt for the Hague courtroom circus is entirely justified.
Rational and logical accounts can be found all-over the Internet of the facts around the Srebrenica incident (and plenty of other objective evidence too on the Serbian demonisation, such as footage made at the same time as the notorious ITN film from early in Balkan war, the edited down version of which when transmitted, left the world with the impression of horribly starved prisoners in a “concentration camp” when the full footage indicates no such thing.)
(Such is the lying fraud of Western “freedom of speech” and its vaunted “free press” that all criticism of this film has been ruthlessly suppressed by major libel case intimidation by the wealthy ITN and no attempt has ever been made to show it in full, so that the public could make up its own mind. Such documentaries and studio discussions are commonplace, so it would be quite easy to do, and the film itself lasts only five minutes. But some notion of the issue is found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5In0nTxlQ4.)
Meanwhile some of the facts about Srebrenica:
Nebojsa Malic, July 10, 2010: In February 1991, Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic declared, “I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina.” He was true to his word; his government’s declaration of independence in March 1992 sparked off a civil war, pitting Bosnia’s ethnic communities — Serbs, Muslims, and Croats — against each other over the following three and a half years.
The timing of Izetbegovic’s statement was particularly interesting, and often overlooked. He was promising a war to get an independent Bosnia at the moment the U.S.-led coalition was launching Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invaders. Initial reluctance of the Western public to back the operation was transformed into an eagerness to “get Saddam” through reports of Iraqi atrocities, such as the one of babies being thrown out of incubators and killed. Though it turned out much later that the story was a complete fabrication, it had already served its purpose.
This lesson was not lost on Izetbegovic, who hired the same PR agency that launched the “incubator babies” hoax, and decided to fight the war not in the trenches, but on CNN. The goal was simple: through real, imagined, or exaggerated suffering, the Muslims would attract external military intervention. Just like in Kuwait. So the manufacturing of myths began.
One after another, the claims came in: the war was “aggression” from Serbia, intent on “genocide.” There were Serb “death camps” in western Bosnia. Serbs were systematically raping Muslim women. The siege of Sarajevo was worse than Leningrad and Stalingrad combined. Some 300,000 Muslims alone had been killed by 1993. Izetbegovic’s Foreign Minister, Haris Silajdzic, and UN Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey tirelessly repeated whichever message of the day was on the agenda, to whoever would listen. Bereft of an enemy in the aftermath of the Cold War, the West ate it up. So did Islamic militants, after the end of the Afghan jihad.
Eventually, however, the myths were exposed. The total death toll of the war was just under 100,000, and included many Serbs and Croats. The war in Sarajevo, however brutal, was exaggerated and manipulated for propaganda purposes. There was no evidence of mass rape, let alone its alleged systematic nature. The “death camps” were a hoax.
In 1993, the Izetbegovic regime sued Serbia before the International Court of Justice, alleging aggression and genocide. Francis Boyle, the American lawyer who wrote the lawsuit, asserted in 1995 that, “the claims of the Bosnian People for genocide will be vindicated for the entire world to see and for all of history to know.” Yet in 2007, the ICJ rejected every single claim from the lawsuit.
The sole exception was Srebrenica, where the ICJ took for granted the decision by its bastard cousin, the ICTY, that “genocide” had been committed there. Srebrenica thus became the last remaining myth of the Bosnian War, and the foundation on which the entire war “narrative” came to rest.
The story officially espoused by the Muslim government is that, following the capture of Srebrenica in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces separated men and boys from the civilian refugees and summarily executed them. The exact number of victims is never specified, ranging from 7,000 to “over 8,000.” Though vague and riddled with inconsistencies, this story has been accepted unquestioningly by the Western media and the ICTY, and is repeated ad nauseam.
When the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, they did so unopposed. Some 5,500 Muslim soldiers, members of the 28th Division of the Bosnian Army, had abandoned the town — and their families — and set off on a march towards Muslim-controlled Tuzla. The civilian population sought shelter at the UN compound in the hamlet of Potocari. Serb forces provided them with food and water, then commandeered buses and trucks from the surrounding Serb areas to evacuate them to Muslim-held territory. Today the Dutch UN peacekeepers are accused of “complicity” while the Serbs allegedly massacred Muslims before their very eyes. But nothing of the sort happened. UN investigator Henry Wieland, who in July 1995 spent a week interviewing the Muslims evacuated from Potocari, reported, “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.”
That the “genocide” memorial and cemetery were built on the site of the UN compound in Potocari is an act of supreme cynicism and manipulation.
Advocates of the official story point to a number of verdicts by the ICTY, thousands of bodies found in mass graves, and the confessions of executioners, and demand that the entire world accepts the Srebrenica “genocide” as “judicial fact.” This type of approach is typical for PR, where what matters is what people believe. In law, however, what matters is what one can prove. Yet when it comes to proof, both the ICTY and the advocates of the official story consistently come up short.
The crown witness, on whom the entire case hangs, is a liar. Other witnesses have been exposed as serial perjurers. The ICTY’s own forensic evidence, gathered over the past fifteen years, has yielded 3,568 autopsy reports, but fewer than 2,000 actual bodies. Only 442 bodies in the mass graves have ligatures and/or blindfolds, strongly suggesting execution. The DNA evidence allegedly collected by the International Commission for Missing Persons (a quasi-NGO run by the U.S. government) has not been shown to anyone — including the ICTY prosecutors and judges! Even so, DNA evidence can only identify the bodies; it cannot prove the manner of death. Yet the ICTY maintains that the DNA evidence collected by ICMP somehow “proves” these people were executed.
Genocide is defined by a 1948 UN Convention as actions “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such” (emphasis added).
No proof of such intent was ever produced by the ICTY. Instead, the intent was inferred based on the bodies recovered, whose final number itself was inferred back from the alleged genocidal intent. If this sounds like circular logic, that’s because it is.
But who are the dead, then? Overwhelmingly, members of that 28th Division column mentioned earlier, who abandoned their families and set forth towards Tuzla. Reports and testimonies of those who survived, along with the combat logs of Bosnian Serb units, paint a picture of a harrowing trek through minefields, under artillery fire, and constant skirmishes with Bosnian Serb units pursuing them or seeking to bar their path. Some people just gave up and died of heat exhaustion, hunger, and exposure. And as the forensic evidence mentioned indicates, a number of them were captured, bound, and shot. This was clearly a war crime, and should be prosecuted as such. But to call it genocide requires stretching the definition of the act beyond recognition.
Even this defensiveness does not really expose the Goebbels reality of capitalism’s war drive.
Its Muslim-blaming analysis, and limited Serb nationalist perspective fails to pick up the real driving force of the Yugoslavian chaos and war, which was the imperialist manoeuvring to break up and plunder the remnants of the former workers state once the nonsensical 1989 Gorbachevite capitulation to illusions in the “free-market” had dismantled the Soviet state defences (dictatorship of the proletariat expressed through the KGB, Red Army etc) and, with it, the stability of eastern Europe.
Imperialism stirred the dirtiest and most savage repressive Nazism in Yugoslavia in order to lever apart its revisionist/nationalist remnants, with German and assorted European imperialisms fighting it out for plundering interest, while making sure that it stamped on any memories of the former workers state still remaining.
Most obvious was the encouragement of the “independence” breakaway of Slovenia and then rich Croatia (with the best tourism and natural resources) and the revival of its Ustashe chequered-flag fascism which famously outdid even the German SS in its Second World War barbarity and concentration camp repression, against both the Jews and the Tito communist partisans who finally threw out the Nazis and established socialism.
This same Croatian nationalism initiated the horrific “ethnic cleansing” attacks of the Balkans long before Serbian nationalism was pitched into civil war, and long before Srebrenica (and the equally non-existent Racek “massacre” which NATO used to begin its warmongering in 1999, which has gone on effectively non-stop ever since).
Bitter hatreds and hostility which fed years of tragic civil war fighting were created.
So foul was this imperialist provoked violence and brutality that at least some token efforts have had to be made to keep up the credibility of the “War Crimes Tribunal” racket in the Hague by “even-handedly” prosecuting a couple of Croatian generals (letting most of them off scot- free).
It gets reported only on the back pages (again to keep up the pretence of a ”free press”) but with none of the vitriolic publicity reserved for imperialism’s scapegoats. Just the opposite, this bourgeois press account is almost apologetic in its “sorry but we have to do this chums” tone:
Two Croatian commanders of the 1990s war against the Serbs have received lengthy jail terms for war crimes in a landmark verdict that incriminated the entire Zagreb political leadership of the time for waging a campaign of terror, bombing and murder aimed at ridding the country of its large Serbian minority.
Judges in The Hague found Ante Gotovina and Mladen Marka, guilty on eight of nine counts for commanding operations that included the shelling of civilians, the torching of Serbian homes in south-west Croatia, the murder of hundreds of elderly Serbs and the forced exodus of at least 20,000 from the Serbian minority rooted in the Dalmatian hinterland for centuries.
It represents the most damning verdict on Croatia’s conduct of the 1991-95 war in 17 years of investigations by the international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Gotovina commanded the August 1995 operations that ended a four-year Serbian insurgency and partition of Croatia and effectively won the war for Zagreb. He was given a 24-year jail sentence. Marka, who commanded police paramilitaries in the same Operation Storm, was jailed for 18 years.
A third accused, Ivan Cermak, was acquitted.
The verdicts were met with outrage in the cities of Croatia where thousands of former fighters rallied to watch the trial outcome transmitted from The Hague on giant screens.
The result represents a disaster for Croatia and a triumphant vindication for Serbia. The Croats have been told that the decisive victory of the war, sealing their independent statehood, was a war crime.
The judges went further than finding two former generals guilty, ruling that the regime of the late President Franjo Tudjman planned a campaign of systematic violence to empty south-western Croatia of its Serbian minority in order to resettle the region with ethnic Croats.
The current government in Zagreb was stunned by the sweeping verdict.
“Having learned that [the tribunal] has found that the Croatian state leadership acted in a joint criminal enterprise, I must declare that to the government of Croatia this is unacceptable,” said Jadranka Kosor, the prime minister. “Our view of the operation is absolutely clear: it was a legitimate military and police action to liberate Croatian state territory from occupation.”
President Ivo Josipovi described the verdict as “shocking”.
The outcome of the three-year trial creates major problems for Kosor. She is squeezed on one side by a nationalist backlash supported by a recalcitrant and powerful Catholic church, and on the other side by pressure from Brussels to be more proactive on war crimes and the treatment of minority Serbs as Croatia aims to conclude its negotiations to join the European Union. Kosor is also seeking re-election later this year.
In the most telling findings, the panel of judges found that the 1990s regime, led by the hardline Tudjman, plotted and then carried out the policy of shelling, torching and killing to force a Serbian exodus.
Almost 200,000 Serbs fled Croatia in the summer and autumn of 1995.
“Croatian forces committed acts of murder, cruel treatment, inhumane acts, destruction, plunder, persecution and deportation. There was a widespread and systematic attack directed against this Serb civilian population, [creating] an environment in which those present there had no choice but to leave,” the judges found.
While focused on Gotovina and two fellow accused, the trial has been the main opportunity for probing the strategy and conduct of the wartime leadership of Croatia. The key political leaders such as Tudjman, the defence minister Gojko Šušak and the army chief Janko Bobetko all died before having to face the courts. The Gotovina case has served as a proxy trial.
A former French legionnaire who returned to Croatia when the war erupted in 1991, Gotovina commanded the central operations that won the war for Croatia in August 1995, retaking the strategic town of Knin in the Dalmatian hinterland. Knin was the seat of the four-year-old Serbian rebellion that left Croatia crippled. Gotovina was indicted for war crimes in 2001. Previously tipped off by contacts in the Croatian government, he went on the run for four years until arrested in a Tenerife hotel at the end of 2005. For years the Croatian government blocked attempts to locate him until it performed a U-turn to unlock its EU negotiations.
For many Croats, especially on the right, Gotovina is a national hero. Catholic bishops this week denounced the tribunal, accusing it of deliberately confusing victim and aggressor.
Operation Storm was prosecuted at lightning speed, highly successfully with strong American backing. It represented the denouement to the four-year war.
Following the Croatian rout of the Serbian rebels, the war was over and Croatia’s independence secured. Bosnia’s fragile peace pact was struck three months later.
In the wake of the victory Croatian forces went on the rampage, torching the homes of elderly Serbs who did not flee and murdering hundreds.
The sideways mention of the Catholic Church’s reactionary complicity has recently been expanded too, this time deliberately conflating the mistakes of the harassed Red Cross with the aid given the Nazis by the Catholic Church (excused because it was “to stop communism”!!):
The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war....
Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The documents include Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis in the postwar chaos.
They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies.
By comparing lists of wanted war criminals to travel documents, Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.
The documents – which are discussed in Steinacher’s book Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s henchmen fled justice – offer a significant insight into Vatican thinking, particularly, because its own archives beyond 1939 are still closed. The Vatican has consistently refused to comment.
Steinacher believes the Vatican’s help was based on a hoped-for revival of European Christianity and dread of the Soviet Union. But through the Vatican Refugee Commission, war criminals were knowingly provided with false identities.
The Red Cross, overwhelmed by millions of refugees, relied substantially on Vatican references and the often cursory Allied military checks in issuing travel papers, known as 10.100s.
90% of ex-Nazis fled via Italy, mostly to Spain, and North and South America – notably Argentina.
Former SS members often mixed with genuine refugees and presented themselves as stateless ethnic Germans to gain transit papers.
No-one has bombed the Vatican with 2000lb “bunker busters” (“precision targeted” naturally to avoid the Cardinals). No sanctions have been imposed on Croatia, even though its entire government is saturated with Second World War Nazi traditions.
The reactionary Zionists, who are usually so ready to raise the hue and cry of “anti-Semitism” as a diversionary flak whenever their own fascist atrocities and non-stop (and truly genocidal) colonialist oppression of the Palestinians are denounced, have kept total silence for a decade and a half on the hero-welcomes given by Zagreb to assorted WW2 criminal leaders, generals and returning concentration camp managers, who have as vicious a history of Jew-baiting persecution as any part of the Third Reich, including the nastiest of the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian post-Soviet fascist regimes who regularly hold celebratory parades for SS stormtroopers.
No-one has bombed, imposed sanctions on or demonised the feudal sheikhs and lords either who have been shooting down “their own people” as the emotive catch phrase pumped out of the Western intelligence agencies’ propaganda rooms constantly accuses Gaddafi, and the Syrians.
But avoiding the massive upheavals which the very poorest are now making (and possibly succeeding with in Yemen now that armed struggle has erupted) is impossible in a modern world of electronic communications. So much pours out only a sample of the cuttings is possible:
Bahraini authorities have conducted a systematic campaign of attacks and arrests against medical workers who treated injured protesters during months of unrest in the Gulf kingdom, according to a US-based medical group.
Physicians for Human Rights claims doctors and nurses have been targeted because they have “evidence of atrocities committed by the authorities, security forces and riot police” in the crackdown on Shia dissent in the Sunni-ruled island nation, which has been placed under martial law.
The report by the group is the second to accuse Bahrain’s authorities of abuses in the medical system. Earlier this month, the international humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders called Bahrain’s hospitals “places to be feared” and claimed officials were arresting protesters who sought treatment.
The military took over the main Salmaniya medical centre in Manama last month, and doctors and patients said soldiers and police had conducted interrogations and detentions inside the complex.
Physicians for Human Rights said at least 32 healthcare professionals had been detained since Bahrain declared martial law last month to quell anti-government demonstrations by the country’s Shia majority demanding greater freedoms and equal rights.
The report details attacks on physicians, medical staff and patients “with weapons, beatings and teargas”.
“These attacks violate the principle of medical neutrality and are grave breaches of international law,” it says, adding that “high-velocity weapons and shotguns” have been used to fire birdshot, rubber bullets and teargas at unarmed civilians.
About 1,500 troops from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are in Bahrain to help the ruling monarchy. Sunni leaders around the Gulf fear gains by Bahrain’s Shias could open the way for greater influence by Shi’ite powerhouse Iran in the strategic nation, which is home to the US navy’s 5th Fleet.
At least 30 people have died and hundreds of demonstrators, opposition leaders, activists and Shia professionals such as doctors and lawyers have been detained since anti-government protests started 14 February.
Clashes between demonstrators and security forces have again broken out in Bahrain on the day martial law was lifted by a ruling monarchy battling to restore its image.
Today’s demonstrations were quickly scattered by the same means used to douse protests earlier in the year. Security forces moved into Shia neighbourhoods where people had taken to the streets and dispersed them with tear gas and bird shot. Human rights activists said those wounded were too scared to go to hospital and instead treated their injuries at home.
The kingdom had cast today as a watershed after 11 weeks of heavy crackdowns on Shia demonstrators that had drawn condemnation from the US and Europe.
King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa this week made a fresh bid for a national dialogue aimed at bringing the Sunni establishment and the Shia majority population together. However, rights groups say 21 opposition activists arrested under emergency laws remain detained. Numerous Shiite mosques have been destroyed during security sweeps and four people have died while in custody. The violence claimed at least 24 lives, including four security officers.
At issue throughout the 11-week crisis has been the insistence of Shiite demonstrators, who account for roughly 70% of Bahrain’s population, that they are disenfranchised by a regime that is deeply suspicious of their loyalties.
Dozens of doctors and nurses were arrested during the security crackdown ordered in mid-March after a failed attempt by Bahrain’s crown prince to broker discussions with the main opposition group, al-Wafaq.
The fate of many of them remains unknown. The government accused medical staff of using one of Manama’s main hospitals, the SMC medical centre, of using the site for political activities and blockaded the hospital with the help of Saudi forces and troops from the gulf states, who had been invited into Bahrain to help quell the dissent.
Fewer activists than before are now willing to talk about the stalled protest movement. There are reportedly fewer checkpoints in Manama or security sweeps through Shia neighbourhoods. However, those who would speak to the Guardian today said they feared continued repression if they stayed involved as activists. The roundabout that was used as a focal point for demonstrations was demolished in March and turned into a crossroads. It was renamed the Farouq junction in reference to an Islamic leader reviled by many Shias.
At least 41 people have been killed in shelling and street battles between government forces and opposition fighters in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.
The skirmishes come amid growing signs of disarray in president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s military.
Fighting raged until 5am, and witnesses said presidential guard units shelled the headquarters of an army brigade responsible for guarding sensitive government institutions.
Army officers who have defected to the opposition say the government suspected the brigade commander was about to join forces with the movement to oust Saleh.
Opposition army officers, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with army rules, said the armoured brigade commander, Brigadier General Mohammed Khalil, was neutral and without political affiliation but had apparently angered Saleh.
The dead included combatants from both sides of the conflict, said the medical officials, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals.
The fighting engulfed the Hassaba neighbourhood that contains the family compound of influential opposition tribal leader Sheik Sadeq al-Ahmar, and to the north of that district where republican guard units protect Saleh’s former residence.
The units, led by one of Saleh’s sons, and special forces wearing uniforms of government security troops attacked but failed to recapture the Hassaba administrative building from tribal gunmen.
On Tuesday, Saleh imposed collective punishment on the Hassaba neighbourhood by cutting water supplies and electricity.
A resident who lives close to the fighting and would only give his first name, Zaher, said columns of smoke and fire billowed from Khalil’s brigade headquarters and explosions could be heard.
Britain is training Saudi Arabia’s national guard – the elite security force deployed during the recent protests in Bahrain – in public order enforcement measures and the use of sniper rifles. The revelation has outraged human rights groups, which point out that the Foreign Office recognises that the kingdom’s human rights record is “a major concern”.
In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in “weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training”. The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier.
The MoD response, obtained yesterday by the Observer, reveals that Britain sends up to 20 training teams to the kingdom a year. Saudi Arabia pays for “all BMM personnel, as well as support costs such as accommodation and transport”.
Bahrain’s royal family used 1,200 Saudi troops to help put down demonstrations in March. At the time the British government said it was “deeply concerned” about reports of human rights abuses being perpetrated by the troops.
Analysts believe the Saudi royal family is desperate to shore up its position in the region by preserving existing regimes in the Gulf that will help check the increasing power of Iran.
“Last year we raised concerns that the Saudis had been using UK-supplied and UK-maintained arms in secret attacks in Yemen that left scores of Yemeni civilians dead,” said Oliver Sprague, director of Amnesty International’s UK Arms Programme.
Defence minister Nick Harvey confirmed to parliament last week that the UK’s armed forces provided training to the Saudi national guard. “It is possible that some members of the Saudi Arabian national guard which were deployed in Bahrain may have undertaken some training provided by the British military mission,” he said.
Jonathan Edwards, a Plaid Cymru MP who has tabled parliamentary questions to the MoD about its links to Saudi Arabia, said he found it difficult to understand why Britain was training troops for “repressive undemocratic regimes”. The MoD’s response was made in 2006, but when questioned this week it confirmed Britain has been providing training for the Saudi national guard to improve their “internal security and counter-terrorism” capabilities since 1964 and continues to do so.
Members of the guard, which was established by the kingdom’s royal family because it feared its regular army would not support it in the event of a popular uprising, are also provided places on flagship UK military courses at Sandhurst and Dartmouth. In Saudi Arabia, Britain continues to train the guard in “urban sharpshooter” programmes, the MoD confirmed.
Last year, Britain approved 163 export licences for military equipment to Saudi Arabia, worth £110m. Exports included armoured personnel carriers, sniper rifles, small arms ammunition and weapon sights. In 2009, the UK supplied Saudi Arabia with CS hand grenades, teargas and riot control agents.
Labour MP Mike Gapes, the former chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said British military support for Saudi Arabia was about achieving a “difficult balance”.
There is nothing “difficult to understand” as mealy mouthed parliamentary opportunism mumbles in this last piece; imperialism is doing what it has always done to sustain and bolster its world plundering dominance by whatever ruthless means it can get away with, propping up backward feudalism or gangster stooges where it can, backing off and playing the “democracy card” when the fascist monstrosity of its rule provokes too much revolt, as the abrupt about turn on Egypt’s torturing monster Hosni Mubarak made clear earlier this year.
Imperialism now makes a feint to pretend that it is supporting the “democratic aspirations” of ordinary people but is immediately manoeuvring to head them off, as one less stampeded commentator notes:
In the lead-up to the annual summit in Deauville, President Obama said: “We do not want a democratic Egypt to be saddled by the debts of its past.” The Deauville Partnership was unveiled to international acclaim, enshrining “the common values of freedom and democracy, and founded on the respect for the sovereignty of states and peoples”. However sceptical we may be of this kind of language emanating from the very states that have done most to prop up the dictators of the Middle East, surely such sentiments can be applauded by all?
Unfortunately, few commentators thought to read the G8 declaration – or, if they did, they didn’t bother to decipher its language.
The G8 statement is littered with demands for Egypt and Tunisia to implement “free market” economic policies. The G8 calls on these countries to “reap the benefits of globalisation” through “integration”. It wants to see “investment integration” by improving the “business climate” (in other words, “make it easier for our companies to make and take money out of your countries”). The G8 leaders say they will support countries in the region that move towards not just democracy but also a “market economy”.
Ever since Peter Mandelson became trade commissioner for the EU in 2004 (he served until 2008), Europe has been trying to get southern Mediterranean countries such as Egypt, Tunisia (and Libya) to sign free trade agreements. And indeed, the G8 reels off a list of free trade agreements it wants signed, where governments reduce taxes on trade and remove regulations on foreign businesses.
Europe’s own 2007 impact assessment found that EU free trade agreements with Egypt and Tunisia would lead to the two north African countries’ manufacturing sectors shrinking by two-thirds, with jobs losses of 1.5 million and 100,000 respectively. Furthermore, it found EU free trade agreements in the north Africa region would have negative impacts on progress towards the millennium development goals on poverty, hunger, health and education.
The G8 countries retain significant leverage on these economies, precisely because they supported the previous regimes for so long. Both Tunisia and Egypt have been left with billions of dollars of debts from the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes. Yet rather than cancelling this unjust debt, the G8 wants to saddle the two countries with even more. Before elections have been held in either country, their future governments are being tied into heavy debt repayments and the restructuring of their economies.
This is the “shock doctrine” at work again – as is evidenced from the first line of the G8 statement, which says the Arab spring has “the potential to open the door to the kind of transformation that occurred in central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall”. This is the same economic transformation that has left Latvia with the worst depression since that experienced by the US in the 1930s, while in Russia a recent study has found that the richest 20% of society may have doubled their wealth in the past two decades while the poorest 20% are only half as well off as they were. Central and eastern European economies contracted by an average of 5% a year from 1991 to 1995.
Observant though this item is, correctly identifying the fraud of capitalist “freedom” manoeuvring and duplicity, and exposing the fake-”left” and revisionist cheerleading for “democratic progress” in Cairo and Tunisia, (when what is required is even more vigorous assertions of the need for revolutionary theory), it does so only from yet another layer of fake-“left” posturing, to head off understanding yet again.
The fly in the ointment is the conclusion citing the shallow anti-communist defeatism advanced in the “shock capitalism” theory from the arch-reformist academic Naomi Klein – a topsy-turvy pseudo-leftism from a master of sneaky “left” reformist confusion whose last book suggests that the ruling class can barely wait for the catastrophic disasters hitting the world in order to “take advantage“.
But capitalism has never had to await disasters to “take advantage” – it has always done so anyway and as ruthlessly and brutally as it can, and that is its very nature.
Why did they ever tangle themselves in all the controls and reforms that have prevented them “taking advantage” up until now is the question???
Because they had to in order to make stick the pretences of “freedom and democracy” that the dictatorship of the ruling class and its big capital hides behind.
And why did they need such pretences???
Because the raw exploitation of capitalism was already stimulating a huge revolutionary hatred and turmoil in the working class 200 years ago (long before Karl Marx and Frederich Engels began putting socialism on a scientific footing).
The development of “universal suffrage” etc (which took major revolutionary battles to achieve in themselves from the Chartist movement of the 1840s onwards), and token reforms and “improvements” to workers’ lives, was one of the cleverest pieces of ruling class trickery ever (way beyond Rome’s “bread and circuses” though that is still used too) because of its false illusions that the “people are in charge” when only big money and its masters make the important decisions in the world.
It costs a huge amount of energy and some concessions in the richer countries (which have corrupted layers of chauvinist and petty bourgeois influenced workers with anti-communism and shallow consumerism for a century or more).
It changes nothing essential of ruling class exploitation and oppression.
But it forms tangles around the feet of the ruling class when the time comes to fight all out class war, like now against the rebellion in the Middle East.
The reality is that the Middle Eastern “Arab Spring” has caused the greatest panic imaginable in imperialist circles with its powerful evidence of the growing discontent of an ever more sophisticated downtrodden mass.
This is not as Klein’s trickiness implies, a world in which the bosses and masters can barely wait for the chaos, sitting in rows of predatory big capital and corporate vultures, ready to fly in.
Such shallow defeatism (deliberately) misses the point that capitalist catastrophic disaster, on a historically epoch ending scale, is unfolding.
The world faces growing revolt, which is why capitalism is desperate to escalate the warmongering savagery against Tripoli (and plenty more to come).
But long years of pretence cannot be thrown away overnight (and still have huge value in fooling the working class - not least because of the deluded and fatuous reformism and pacifism still being pumped out non-stop by Stalinist revisionism.)
Hence the tangle of lies used to escalate the missile and bombing destruction, and to hide the reality that US imperialism, and its British and French sidekicks (for the moment) set the whole thing going and are its main driving force, now openly putting troops on the ground.
Overnight the slightly weird and erratic thorn-in-the-side-of-capitalism antics of Libya’s bourgeois nationalist leadership, which had taken power against backward monarchic and stooge colonialist reaction, became painted as the greatest evil since Lucifer dropped from the skies.
It was a characterisation which had escaped the attention of the suddenly-concerned “international community” for the last ten years, which had been doing various diplomatic and commercial deals with Libya with not a murmur about the alleged intolerable regime which “must go - and go now!” as the pompous and arrogant fascist-tone posturing of William Hague, Sarkozy and Washington declares.
Such is the confusion caused by decades of anti-communist brainwashing in the West bolstered by the soft-headed revisionist “left” illusions that “democracy” and “peace struggle” and the “rule of law” actually mean something, that this ludicrous Goebbels pretence was swallowed hook line and sinker, and by none more than the fake-“left” Trotskyists who could not wait to pour out the abuse and lies against Tripoli.
But it was immediately clear to anyone with even a smattering of understanding about the class nature of the world (kindergarten Marxism) that the entire stunt was a provocation around whatever assorted reactionaries, monarchists, petty bourgeois elitists, and West-leaning stooges could be stampeded into a revolt, mobilising long readied plans for just such a “revolution” which the Western intelligence agencies had long prepared (as they have done all over eastern Europe and the fringes of the former Soviet Union, around China and throughout South America for decades).
Bullying bomb-runs and terrorising slaughter have been escalated constantly under the lying pretence of “fighting for freedom” because capitalism has no other way out of its historic failure than war, soon enough to degenerate all the way once more into world consuming conflict and destruction:
The US has been giving the impression that it has backed away from the bombing campaign in Libya. It has now emerged that while the initial intensity of the high-altitude air strikes and cruise missile attacks has diminished, the US has not let up. In a dramatic and significant escalation of the assault on Gaddafi’s forces, the US has deployed low-flying, heavily-armed aircraft against Libyan armour.
It is a deployment far removed from the initial concept of a “no-fly” zone.
The Pentagon has revealed that AC-130 gunships and A10 tankbusters, of the kind used in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been deployed in Libya. “We have employed A10s and AC-130s over the weekend,” Vice-Admiral Bill Gortney, said.
The aircraft are better suited than high-flying fighter bombers to attack targets in built-up areas without so much risk of civilian casualties, defence officials say.
However, their sheer firepower can lead to civilian deaths as their attacks on the Iraqi city of Falluja after the 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated.
The AC-130 gunship is a heavily modified Hercules transport plane armed with 20mm, 40mm and 105mm cannons. The A10 “thunderbolts” conducts close-range attacks, notably against tanks and armoured vehicles. It is equipped with a multi-barrelled 30mm cannon which can fire a devastating almost 4,000 rounds a minute.
The use of the close air support aircraft has fuelled claims that the US is actively co-ordinating tactics with the rebels.
Aware of the controversy any such admission could unleash, Gortney, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US actions were in support of the UN-backed resolutions to protect Libyan civilians. “We’re not in direct support of the opposition, that’s not part of our mandate, and we’re not co-ordinating with the opposition,” he added.
A Nato air strike has killed Muammar Gaddafi’s youngest son and three of his grandchildren, a Libyan official in Tripoli said, while accusing the alliance of trying to assassinate the Libyan leader. It was the first time someone from Gaddafi’s inner circle has been killed in six weeks of Nato air strikes.
Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, 29, was “martyred” in the attack on his villa in Tripoli, where his father had been staying the night. Saif al-Arab, described by Ibrahim as a student who had studied in Germany, is one of Gaddafi’s less prominent sons. He is said to have had only a minor role in the country’s power structure.
“[Muammar Gaddafi] is in good health. He wasn’t harmed,” Ibrahim told a news conference, shortly after foreign journalists were shown the site of the attack. “His wife is also in good health.” He added: “This was a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country.”
“What we have now is the law of the jungle,” Ibrahim said. “We think now it is clear to everyone that what is happening in Libya has nothing to do with the protection of civilians.”
David Cameron told the BBC that Nato targeting policy in Libya was clear and “in line” with the UN resolution. “It is about targeting command and control rather than particular individuals,” he said. “The targeting policy has been very closely followed, these things are very carefully put together.”
Nato forces are permitted, under UN resolution 1973, passed in March, to use “all necessary measures” to protect civilians from pro-Gaddafi forces, but Nato leaders have repeatedly insisted that directly targeting Gaddafi is not a goal.
A Nato statement said: “Nato continued its precision strikes against regime military installations in Tripoli overnight, including striking a known command and control building in the Bab al-Aziziyah neighbourhood shortly after 6pm GMT Saturday evening.”
Ibrahim added: “This is not permitted by international law. Nato does not care to test our promises, the west does not care to test our statements. Their only care is to rob us of our freedom.”
Reports said the complex of one-storey buildings appeared to have been hit by at least three missiles. The roof had completely caved in in some areas, exposing mangled steel rods and hanging chunks of concrete.
A table football machine stood outside in the garden of the house, which was in a wealthy residential area of Tripoli. The blasts were heard across the city late last night.
Gaddafi had seven sons and one daughter. He also had an adopted daughter who was killed in a 1986 American airstrike on his Bab al-Aziziya residential compound.
Rifle fire and car horns rang out in Benghazi, the rebel stronghold in eastern Libya, as news of the attack spread. Just hours earlier, Gaddafi had delivered a rambling, defiant speech on state television, in which he declared that he was “more sacred [to Libyans] than the emperor of Japan is to his people”, and called for talks with Nato. “The door to peace is open,” he said. “You are the aggressors. We will negotiate with you. Come, France, Italy, UK, America, come, we will negotiate with you. Why are you attacking us?”
American involvement in the Libyan crisis appeared to be deepening on Friday following the announcement that US Predator drones would be deployed and praise from an influential senator for the “heroes” of the rebel opposition.
John McCain, the most senior Republican on the Senate armed services committee and a strong advocate of intervention in the Libyan civil war, visited the rebel opposition leadership in its eastern stronghold of Benghazi for an “on the ground assessment” of the situation.
“These are my heroes,” he said, referring to the rebels. McCain has pushed for the US to arm the opposition as part of a drive to force Muammar Gaddafi from power, and has criticised America’s decision to take a back seat in the international military action against Libyan government forces.
However, the announcement on Thursday night of the US deployment of armed Predator drones over Libya indicates a renewed effort to relieve the siege of Misrata and force a breakthrough in the deadlocked conflict in the east.
Predator drones – controversial because of their use against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which civilians have been killed – were expected to be deployed over Misrata immediately. However, the first mission, armed with Hellfire missiles, was forced to turn back because of bad weather.
The Libyan government said their use would result in the deaths of “more civilians” and was “illegitimate”. The authorities claim many civilians have been killed by Nato airstrikes, although they have failed to provide evidence to foreign media based in the west of the country.
The deployment of Predators follows the despatch of military advisers from Britain, France and Italy, plus the allocation of an expected $25m (£15.15m) worth of “non-lethal” equipment from the US to the rebel opposition.
The leaders of the international alliance against Libya claims such steps are within the remit of the UN security council resolution allowing action to protect civilians, but some countries have warned against mission creep.
Notice the arrogant assumption that the “Western media” is to be judge and jury of whether ceasefires are “genuine”, and alone decide whether it is “proven” that “civilians have been killed” against an entirely unjustified background innuendo that any such claims must be lies (an innuendo which will be cited a “proof” later to justify further slanders about the alleged “untrustworthiness of dictators” etc in a complete circle).
Turkey-shoot slaughter of hundreds of government soldiers (ie humans) trying to maintain order against the monarchist pro-Western rebellion (which was always a fascist stunt), with $tens of millions worth of high-tech weaponry deployed by a joint force with a population of over 500 million against the tiny 4 million or so in western Libya does not get a mention at all.
What proof is needed anyway that hundreds and hundreds, including civilians, are being killed when the huge bombs and missiles are raining down?
What happens elsewhere when the West claims to be using “precision” targeting? Dozens of civilians are routinely “collaterally damaged” is the answer, hundreds of thousands in Iraq, in Pakistan and in Afghanistan right now:
International forces in Afghanistan were caught in a new row over civilian casualties on Sunday after reports that 14 civilians, including up to 12 children, had been killed in a coalition air strike in the southern province of Helmand.
Afghan TV showed images of casualties being taken into hospitals and bereaved relatives cradling the bodies of several young children wrapped in bloody sheets.
The exact number of casualties in the incident, which occurred late on Friday night in the Nawzad district, was unclear.
A spokesman for the provincial governor said at least four children and a woman were confirmed dead.
“There were some joint forces [international and Afghan troops] who came under attack and fought back and killed these people,” said Daoud Ahmadi. Several more people were injured, he added.
Reports suggest an air strike was called in after US marines operating alongside Afghan soldiers were attacked by insurgents. Bombs destroyed two houses where families were living.
On Sunday night, the commander of the Nato-led force Isaf in south-west Afghanistan apologised for the deaths of the civilians, saying troops had unwittingly targeted a home because insurgents were using it as a base. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai called it a “big mistake”.
Nawzad has been a focus of coalition efforts in recent years but continues to see fierce fighting. Taliban fighters often hide in buildings used by civilians or deliberately draw fire on villagers, but this does not appear to be the case in this incident.
One resident, Noor Agha, told Reuters: “My house was bombarded in the middle of the night and my children were killed ... the Taliban were far away from my home; why was my house bombed?” The incident comes amid a surge of anti-western sentiment in Afghanistan and days after mass protests against a “night raid” by Nato special forces in the north of the country in which four people died, invcluding two women.
Such night-time special forces operations target insurgent commanders and are a key element of the counterinsurgency strategy pursued by General David Petraeus, the overall commander of Nato troops in Afghanistan. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, opposes the raids.
Twelve people died during the violent protests in usually peaceful northern Takhar province and more than 80 were wounded. There were also reports over the weekend of civilians killed in fighting and air strikes in the eastern Nuristan province.
Apart from its desperate fire-fighting role for imperialism to try and intervene in the crucially important Middle East, the war in Libya is a straight line continuation of the Pentagon’s long declared “endless war” which was posited under Bush and which the fake-“left” and liberals’ darling Barack Obama’s black nationalism and feminism has not only continued but has escalated.
It is part of bullying the world into paying continuing tribute to the Empire, feeding it natural resources and the wealth produced by endless factory and plantation wage-slave labour in return for ever more worthless paper dollars and hollow electronic credits, the neocon plan for a “New American Century” continued.
Even more, the warmongering is readying the world to accept the even greater destruction and turmoil that its Slump collapse will soon lead to as vicious trade and currency war reaches all out cutthroat levels.
A Third World War is approaching as the financial and economic conflicts of the slump heat up all the way to inter-imperialist shooting war.
The destruction of the “surplus” capital and production clogging the world markets, which found its crisis expression in the great banking credit collapses three years ago (and still unstoppably unravelling in massive inflation, sovereign debt defaults, further bank failure and endless Stock Market jitters which can only lurch into much worse catastrophe yet), is the only way out that the tiny minority but all-powerful and all-consuming ruling class can find to solve these built-in endlessly recurring crises of the profit system.
An alternative would be to give up their wealth, power and privilege, abandoning forever the historically defunct profit system in favour of socialist common ownership of production in rational planned economies that can provide more than enough for the entire human race to live well and develop the enormous capacity of the entire planet of 6 billion people for rational and scientific existence in cooperation and community.
That for certain is not going to happen, except when it is forced to do so by conscious revolutionary upheaval by the world’s masses.
No ruling class in history has ever willingly let go of delicious power, wealth and privilege, including the delights of trampling all over everyone else.
The spontaneous rebellions will continue to grow as crisis disaster hammers already desperate lives but will have to develop a conscious scientific leadership - Leninism - to finally change the world.
Until then capitalism will plunge onwards on a path to total mayhem, deliberately escalating the war mood.
But the world’s masses were wary enough in 1939 of heading back into the agony, pain and horror of worldwide destruction endured and suffered in 1914-18 to absolute breaking point (which triggered the first great revolutionary offensive of the working class to finally throw this exploitation off its back forever).
They were only dragooned into war again eventually by the ten-year long 1930s theatrical build-up of German Nazi aggression and Japanese feudal nationalism (egged on by the whole of the West) and even then only because of a huge element of pro-communist solidarity with the USSR which the West was hoping Hitlerism would destroy.
After the hundred times greater horror and depravity of capitalism’s Second World War, the entire planet is even more suspicious of war and all the associated baggage of chauvinism, racist scapegoating, hate-campaigns and torture that goes with it.
Only the promise of “never again” and an allegedly changed world “better for all” headed off the post-war revolutionary mood which swept the world.
So it has taken imperialism a long, slow warming-up to get the world ready again for the non-stop blitzkrieg, killing, and destruction that it needs to “level the ground” (literally) and clear out the clutter of unprofitable production (which the world poverty-bound masses are desperate for) so it can return profitability to whatever capital investments, and whatever few ruthless bosses, are left standing after the great shoot-out.
Constant wars are acclimatising the public mood to militarism, “overseas” interventions, “our boys” chauvinism and flag waving.
But even then the great lie of “democracy and freedom” is still crucial to keep the momentum going.
An unprecedentedly complex world propaganda of dissembling and play-acting concern about “human rights” and “justice” has been pumped out for decades, firstly as Cold War brainwashing against the workers states and communism and lately to serve this warmongering purpose.
It is shallow nonsense that has only stuck because of the complete abandonment of class war perspectives and understanding by revisionist political retreat from revolution (begun by Stalin’s Moscow leadership) and the swamping of the world with illusions in “Stop the War” peace struggles, the “democratic way” and “slow steady change”.
It culminates in the current “celebration” of 50 years of Amnesty-style “even handed” protest against “nastiness”, possible only in a world of complacent middle-class illusions that we could all “rub along together” if only a few “totalitarians” were denounced.
It is a birthday party only for those who can sit in a comfortable armchair somewhere with a comfortable living being made and face none of the brutal realities of sweatshop near slavery, desperate poverty, hunger, lack of housing and sanitation and eternal humiliation on top of a hopeless perspective of no chance whatever to fulfil even the most basic human capacities, let alone develop the full range of skills and talents that every human has.
Amnesty International’s hands-in-the-air squeamishness about the realities of class and nationalist struggles on the planet, which in their early desperate stages particularly are inevitably crude and even indiscriminate, taps an essentially opportunist class position, which wriggles and squirms at the actual and vital developing rebellion on the planet, denouncing anything which is labelled violence or “terrorism”.
Its sometimes useful exposés of imperialist torture, repression, imprisonment and oppression are largely negated by its moralising “even handed” denunciations of violent struggle by downtrodden masses, and against the workers states and anti-imperialist struggles of the world.
Of course the revolutionary triumph of the working class in power will repress, imprison and even terrorise, if necessary, the counter-revolutionary moves of the fascist ruling class remnants, with prison, death sentences and as much firmness as is needed to ensure that the minority tyranny of wealth and private ownership over the masses can never be restored.
What other way is there to stop the all-out violence and class-war of the capitalist fascist reaction, except by imposing the dictatorship of the working class???
And that can be relaxed as fast and as permanently as possible once the old influences and unfairness and oppression are relegated to history, as a new society of fairness and rationality is able to develop under the majority rule of a working class guided by scientific revolutionary philosophy –until there is no need for any repression whatsoever.
But to suggest that the dictatorship should let go beforehand or eschew such discipline as needed is just fatuous nonsense (and Gorbachevite liquidationism), a pacifist pipedream which lets go of the central understanding that the world is in the most brutal class war, not because the working class wills it, but because it is imposed on them by the exploitation and tyranny of big capital via its big money intimidation and the reality behind that of class violence for anyone who tries to resist.
Or inhuman treatment even if they don’t resist but just happen to be “in the way”:
Whatever joy Bernadette Dugasse felt about returning to the island she last saw as a toddler 52 years ago shrivelled the moment she saw the remnants of the coconut plantation.
“There was nothing there. It was all gone – only the big house where the manager used to live is there. And the church and the prison,” she said. “I felt sad and depressed as if I wanted to shout, but I just cried.”
The scene behind the white-painted walls of the plantation house was bleaker still. “Inside it was filthy and disgusting and broken everywhere. The roof is coming off, the kitchen is rusted and broken and there’s an old broken wardrobe in there. You have to be careful where you put your feet otherwise you might have an accident.The chapel was filthy with pigeon poo.”
Dugasse’s parents met and married on one such plantation and, in the tumbledown house on Diego Garcia, their daughter, who is now 54 and lives in Surrey, saw what she considers to be the physical confirmation of a decaying promise.
The British government made assurances that the plantations – once the social and economic lifeblood of the Chagos archipelago – would be looked after following the eviction of the people who worked on them, but the islanders say not enough is being done to preserve them. Dugasse, who visited the archipelago last month, suspects they are being left to rot back into the tropical vegetation because the UK and US have no intention of ever letting the Chagossians return home.
“The British government say they are taking care of it and there are two people working there but I don’t know what they’re doing there,” said Dugasse. “The British government are frankly liars: they tell you things, but it’s not like they are telling you. You have to see with your own eyes.”
The islanders were evicted 40 years ago to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia as part of a political and diplomatic process that saw the archipelago taken from the control of Mauritius before it gained independence and declared the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Some Chagossians settled in Mauritius and the Seychelles; others came to the colonial mother country to begin again in places such as Crawley and Manchester. Over the past decade, they have embarked on a Sisyphean legal struggle for the right to return home.
But their plight has been frustrated by the increasingly strategic importance of the islands: Diego Garcia has served as a refuelling stop and a base for air strikes – most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq – and as a centre for the rendition of terror suspects.
Although the high court ruled 11 years ago that the Chagossians could go back to the islands – except Diego Garcia – they lost their bid after a highly unusual use of the royal prerogative in 2004. Three years ago, the law lords overturned the high court’s decision and the matter is now before the European court of human rights.
Perhaps the biggest setback, however, came in April 2010 when the Labour government declared that most of the archipelago – excluding Diego Garcia with its strategically important base – would become a marine protected area (MPA) with a blanket ban on fishing. Its creation, the Foreign Office was careful to point out, was “without prejudice to the outcome of the current, pending proceedings before the European court of human rights”.
The designation delighted some environmentalists but angered human rights activists. However, the controversy deepened last December when a leaked WikiLeaks cable revealed that a senior Foreign Office official had told his American counterparts the MPA would, “in effect put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents”.
The official, identified as Colin Roberts, the director of overseas territories, noted that the UK’s “environment lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians’ advocates” and added that the British government felt there should be “no human footprints” or “Man Fridays” on any of the BIOT islands apart from Diego Garcia.
The WikiLeaks revelations prompted the Mauritian government to accuse the UK of having a “policy of deceit”. It lodged a document with an international tribunal stating Britain was violating the UN convention on the law of the sea. Mauritius asserts that the UK cannot establish the MPA since it is not a “coastal state” in the region and Mauritius alone has the right to declare an “exclusive zone” around the archipelago.
The Mauritian government has also written to the Pew Charitable Trusts, a US-based not-for-profit trust which lobbied for the creation of the MPA, asking for a meeting to discuss the situation. , one of many environmental groups to push for the MPA, has made “significant and positive” contributions to marine conservation, they accuse the organisation of helping to undermine the Chagossians’ right of return.
“It appears that the trusts have chosen to put the interests of purported conservation above the rights of Mauritius and the fundamental human right of forcibly displaced persons,” the Mauritian ambassador to the UN wrote in a strongly-worded letter. “We regret that the trusts also appear to have chosen to lend their support to a last vestige of colonialism in the Indian Ocean.”
Pew declined the offer of meeting, saying the marine reserve was “a diplomatic matter” between the UK and Mauritius.
Alistair Gammell, the director of the Pew Environment Group’s Chagos campaign, told the Guardian that sovereignty and the Chagossians’ right to return were political and diplomatic, rather than environmental, issues.
“We don’t take a position on the right of return of the Chagossians,” he said. “That is a question which is for the military and for the [British] government to answer and deal with. We don’t say they either should return or shouldn’t return.”
...Some of the other conservation groups that supported the creation of the MPA have also pointed out that their backing for the reserve should not be taken as an endorsement of the British government’s treatment of the Chagossians.
Richard Page, an oceans campaigner for Greenpeace, said that, while the contents of the WikiLeaks cable were “shameful”, the organisation could not see how the creation of the MPA was the chief stumbling block to the islanders’ return.
“The UK government evicted the Chagossian people and has kept them out for the intervening decades on account of the Diego Garcia military base. It is completely within the powers of the UK government to decide to right the historic wrong and agree for the right of the return to the Chagossian people,” he said.
If that were to happen, he added, the UK could commit to a joint management plan allowing the returning Chagossians to carry out “sustainable subsistence fishing” in agreed areas.
The legal charity Reprieve has profound concerns over the use of the base on Diego Garcia in the rendition of those accused of terrorism.
“Each revelation about the UK’s dealings with Diego Garcia is more disgraceful than the last, and still the cover-up continues,” said Clare Algar, the charity’s executive director.
The Foreign Office has refused to comment on the leaked cable, but continues to oppose the return of the Chagossians because : “The arguments against allowing resettlement on the grounds of defence security and feasibility are clear and compelling.” It admitted the plantations and buildings had “deteriorated”, but said they were tended by volunteers and employees from the BIOT administration, while the British Marine contingent cleared graveyards and cemeteries of vegetation.
Condemnation or repudiation of the methods used by the mass of the planet turning to struggle is an opportunist sellout.
Their fight may be crude, and even arbitrarily damaging given the limited means and methods which are used to begin with but it is a fight, and the beginning of resistance to capitalist tyranny, now taking the planet down a path to utter destruction.
Billions grinding through their daily agony are only too clear that there are no Queensbury rules or Geneva conventions in the appalling and savage oppression, degradation, deprivation and starvation forced upon them.
What are the Palestinians supposed to do for example locked into their giant inhuman, inhumane concentration camp of the Gaza strip and routinely starved, economically and socially strangled, blitzed and shelled constantly???
To quote a former EPSR:
to join the filth of American warmongering imperialism in CONDEMNATION of such peoples’ rights to fight back against Western neocolonial exploitation and warmongering TYRANNY however they can, - at this unique moment in history when SPONTANEOUS Third World revolt is breaking out everywhere, but everywhere struggling to find out HOW BEST to fight, because of the rotten collapsed legacy of Third International Revisionism, - yet already having begun with THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT OF ALL, namely the WILL to fight all the way, and completely end all deference to the “Western-way-of-life” status quo (i.e. monopoly capitalism, degenerately and deservedly on its way to the historical exit) ---- such “condemnation” has got to rank with the most treacherous scumbaggery in the whole international anti-imperialist movement’s history. [EPSR 19th January 2000]
However much narrow-minded self-righteousness can still be scraped from the bottom of the complacent petty bourgeois barrel in the privileged West – fed on decades of plundered super-profits from the labour forced out of the Third World at the cost of billions of ruined lives, – it will never be enough to save the capitalist system.
The world’s masses are in revolt and the economic and war turmoil being created by the capitalist crisis can only feed the flames, however confused and naïve the rebellions are to start with.
Capitalism is heading for a historic reckoning.
Build Leninist understanding and the revolutionary party to do it.
Don Hoskins
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