In my view the worst American president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. His crimes:
1) In his first act in office, he closed all the banks to stabilize the financial system. Only the largest banks were allowed to reopen. This had the immediate effect of concentrating control of finance capital.
2) He continued Hoover's policies of subsidizing railroads, banks, and mortgage corporations with public money.
3) He cut tens of millions from pensions for veterans of World War I and vetoed a bill to allow them to collect their promised bonuses immediately.
4) He was allied politically with a number of disreputable figures, the most notorious among them including Klansman Senator Theodore Bilbo, Nazi sympathizer Joseph P. Kennedy, appointed by Roosevelt to head the SEC and as ambassador to the UK, and former Klansmen Hugo Black and Harry Truman, who became Supreme Court Justice and vice president under Roosevelt. Charles Coughlin and Huey Long were also his allies before turning against him. Douglas MacArthur became a powerful war chief under Roosevelt and was given a free hand for massacres in the Philippines. In foreign policy, his allies included Laval, Petain, Franco, and Chiang Kai-shek, in addition to Churchill and of course Joseph Stalin.
5) He provided for compulsory arbitration for labor disputes, essentially empowering a board of bureaucrats to outlaw strikes. He worked closely with conservative union leaders such as Daniel Tobin and Walter Reuther to persecute union militants and break strikes.
6) 2 major pieces of social legislation signed by Roosevelt, the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, provided benefits to whites only.
7) He introduced payroll taxes, paid only by the working class and the most regressive form of all taxation.
8) He took an active role in breaking the dockworkers' strike in San Francisco, the auto workers' strike in Toledo, and the teamsters' strike in Minneapolis by deploying military force against them and arresting their leaders. He signed the Smith Act outlawing communism (a violation of the 1st Amendment) and sent 18 teamsters and antiwar activists to prison under it.
9) He censored the federal mail to prevent radical views from being heard.
10) He took steps to prevent private American aid from being used to help the anti-fascist forces in Spain.
11) He attempted to create a pliant Supreme Court by "packing" it with his allies. He was prevented only by his death from serving an unprecedented four terms in office. By these lights alone, the modern imperial presidency began with Roosevelt.
12) He put the economy on a permanent war footing which exists to this day and created the first peacetime draft in history.
13) He created the FBI, reorganizing the Bureau of Intelligence, increasing its powers, and putting in charge another ally, the notorious J. Edgar Hoover. He used the FBI to spy on members of Congress.
14) He created the OSS, precursor to the CIA.
15) He approved research on nuclear weapons.
16) He conducted WWII with the aim of securing American colonies in the Pacific and the control of the U.S.'s puppet Chiang Kai-shek in China. He helped British, French, and Dutch empires regain control of their former colonies. He provided only inadequate and shoddy equipment for defense of the Soviet Union and charged exorbitant prices for this material in both monetary and diplomatic terms. He ordered attacks on civilian targets in Germany and Japan, including the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden (in collaboration with the Churchill regime) as well as the attack on Tokyo which was the deadliest bombing raid in history.
17) He refused to bomb supply routes leading to German death camps, thereby disrupting the progress of Germany's Final Solution. He maintained strict quotas on Jewish immigration that prevented an estimated 3 million Jews from escaping death in the Holocaust.
18) He maintained racial segregation of the military and refused to push for an anti-lynching law for fear of alienating his segregationist allies.
19) He officially encouraged the rise of price-fixing cartels as part of his economic program.
20) He signed an executive order confining hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and some Italian-Americans in what he himself termed "concentration camps."
To me, whatever good he did is far outweighed by this truly awesome monument to evil.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sudan for beginners
Sudan and South Sudan seem like interesting places to start a discussion about world politics today. It has a recent history of violence involving some of the major powers both in East Africa and internationally. In previous centuries, this violence stemmed mostly from 3 related sources--the Nile River trade, the Ottoman/Arab slave trade, and the wars of cattle herders. P
erhaps the cattle wars are the simplest. For centuries, the main form of wealth for the patriarchs of the mostly Nilotic people living in the wetlands, savannas, and riverine areas of east Africa was cattle. It was and continues to be common for tribes to be locked into conflicts involving cattle raids, and often these conflicts have involved complex alliances among tribes. The addition of automatic weapons in the 20th century have increased the stakes of these conflicts and made them much deadlier. Warfare over cattle has also intermingled with the other wars in the region.
The taking of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East and Indian subconginent dates back centuries before the European slave trade, but it was not until the 18th or 19th century--when a backward form of capitalism was triumphant in the Ottoman Empire--that slavery became the major factor in Sudan's economy. The major powers of the time--Darfur, Sennar, the Azande kingdom--both sold slaves on a wholesale basis to Arab emirates nominally loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and incorporated slaves into their armies. Slave labor continues to be used, especially by armies.
The Nile River trade brought guns and gold to the upriver region, intensifying the deadly competition for access to the river. Besides slaves, the main export was for a long time ivory, usually carried by teams of enslaved porters.
Such was the situation in the 19th century when the khedive of Egypt, seeking land, gold, and slaves with which to carve out a European-style empire, invaded Sennar. A centerpiece of Egyptian policy at the time was the planned Suez Canal, which would allow for direct trade between the Mediterranean and India. The people of Sudan were heavily taxed to pay for the canal.
As Egypt, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire, fell on hard times, the British began taking an increasingly direct role in Egyptian affairs, including the canal from which the British would benefit the most. This was the situation when the Mahdi Army rose up against British rule.
A Sufi man claiming to be the Mahdi--a role similar to a messiah in some forms of Islam--and saying he was preparing the way for the 2nd coming of Issa (Jesus as the Islamic prophet) organized a major rebellion against Turkish-Egyptian rule. Building a modern army with its own factories for manufacturing guns--the first such in African history--he captured Khartoum, the ancient city where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge. The movement he began, the Ansar, continued to be involved in Sudanese politics into the 20th century.
Islam is a relatively recent import to Sudan. For centuries, the upper Nile basin was a stronghold of Christianity, specifically the Oriental Orthodox Christianity practiced by the Nubian kingdoms established in the wake of the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Meroe. These kingdoms were protected by geography and military organization from the conquests of early Islam. However, as Islam became established in Egypt to the north, the powerful and long-lasting Kanem-Bornu Empire to the west, and powerful Red Sea trading ports like Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar to the east, and in less powerful states in their cultural orbit, and as Muslim traders became frequent visitors to Nubia, conversion to Islam spread from the periphery to the centers of power. By about the time of the height of Ottoman power (15th century), the rulers of the 3 major Nubian kingdoms, along with most of the powerful tribes, had converted to Islam, often foollowing civil wars between Christian and Muslim factions. The rise of Darfur and Sennar, who had adopted Islam from their neighbors in Nubia, Kanem-Borni, and Wadai, also helped spread the Islamic faith while killing or selling into slavery many of the remaining Christians of northern Sudan.
Ironically, the Nilotic, Central Sudanic, and Ubangian people of South Sudan, who are most likely to be Christian today, were mostly Christianized after Christianity had long been practiced, and later abandoned, farther north. Missionaries concentrated on this area partly because the natives were less hostile to Christianity here than farther north (they were less organized politically, they had little history of conflict with Christian powers, despite some slave trades by Christian Ethiopia, and the Nilotic people's traditional religion worshipped a single male sky god, creating a fertile ground for conversions), and partly because missionaries believed that by Christianizing the people who lived in the heartland of the Arab slave trade, they would help stamp that trade out.
Christians and other non-Muslims resented the Mahdi's attempt to impose shari'a law. After the British and their Egyptian lackeys regained control with the help of a large army equipped with repeater rifles, Britain consciously pitted Muslim north Sudan against Christian/"animist" south Sudan, setting the stage for civil war once Sudan gained its independence.
The three-way Cold War among the U.S., USSR, and China, and the shifting positions of powerful neighbors (Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kinshasa regime) in this war, as well as the destabilizing conservative pressures from the Ansar on the side of the conservative Muslim establishment, and Israel on the side of the resistance, helped turn the struggle against shari'a law into a series of bitter factional fights involving repeated massacres in South Sudan. Cattle raiding helped intensify these fights, as did the discovery of large oil deposits in South Sudan.
A leftist resistance force based in the South, the Sudanese People's Liberation ARmy, was expertly maneuvered by the U.S. from a revolutionary force seeking nationwide power, an end to shari'a, and social equality, into a secessionist movement by southerners. A peace agreement reached in 2006 led to the referendum in which South Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence this year, which they achieved just recently. This independence will make it easier for the U.S. to control South Sudan's oil.
In the meantime, the SPLA, hoping to open up a 2nd front in the northwest, encouraged the Fur and Saharan people of the Darfur region to rise up against the government. Some initial successes by the Darfur rebels were impressive, but they were largely unable to capitalize on their victories because of infighting among the major tribes (conflicts stemming partly from opposing attitudes toward shari'a law and partly because of political conflicts in Chad and other countries that have spilled over into tribal conflicts in Darfur). Many Arab mercenaries have also assisted the government in putting down the rebellion.
The role of the Arabs in Darfur has been much misrepresented. First, although there is often conflict between "Arabs" and "Blacks," there is a substantial Arab component in some rebel factions (in fact, anti-Arab sentiment is one cause of infighting among the rebels). More interesting is that the "Arabs"--although they speak Arabic, keep alive Arabic cultural traditions, and trace their ancestry to patriarchs from the Arab world--are as Black in color as the "Blacks" who are culturally identified with a sub-Saharan tradition and speak an African language. Second, the Arab janjawid militias have been represented as murderous, genocidal maniacs in oversimplified presentations of the conflict by pro-interventionist parties. Certainly the lure of weapons supplied by Khartoum has tickled the avarice of a few Arab leaders, and certainly there have been too many acts of brutality by the janjawid. But it is wise to recall that most of Darfur is a desert, that pastoral Arab herders are among its poorest residents, that Arabs had long been accustomed to water their herds at some of the few oases in Darfur, and that the first attacks of the janjawid began after rebel leaders, involved in their own tribal faction fight, cut off access to the most important of these oases. It is also often alleged that the Arab Muslims are oppressing the Black Christians in Darfur. This misconception probably comes from a confusion of the Darfur conflict with the Sudanese Civil Wars in South Sudan. In fact, Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a powerful pre-modern Islamic sultanate.
The 2010 peace agreement in Darfur was transparently the result of American pressure to sign any agreement irrespective of the roots of the conflict. It was signed by only 1 of the 3 major rebel movements, namely the Justice & Equality Movement dominated by the Zaghawa tribe--notably the only one of the three to support shari'a law and to be allied with the ultra-Islamist opposition to Sudan's Islamist president Omar al-Bashir. The agreement would increase the influence the most powerful Darfurian Black tribes have in Khartoum, but make no steps toward autonomy or independence, the avowed goal of the JEM. The JEM has recently repudiated this agreement as rival groups have gained territory. The latest development here, though, is the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya which was the main source of military support for the rebels in Darfur. This, as well as the apparent stabilization of the situation in the south and the east (where an Eritrean-backed insurgency allied with the Nilotic and Darfurian rebels has reached a peace agreement as part of a general agreement between Sudan and Eritrea), can be expected to strengthen the government's brutal fist in Darfur.
The discovery of oil also prompted a major highway construction project overseen by none other than Saudi billionaire industrialist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was also allegely major shareholder in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was the main supplier of medicine (for war injuries, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and other endemic diseases for all of east Africa and the source of 90% of Sudan's pharmaceuticals including all its anti-tuberculosis medication. This plant was destroyed by an American missile attack in response to the U.S. embassy bombings. The U.S. claimed that nerve gas was being manufactured there, but blocked Sudan's demand for a chemical analysis of the site by UN-appointed experts. Sudan's government continues to enjoy friendly relations with al-Qaeda and allied groups.
As we look to the future, there is still an unresolved border dispute between Sudan and South Sudan; nearly a dozen armed rebel groups jockeying for influence within South Sudan; the ongoing conflict in Darfur; and 2 visible problems on the horizon. The first is the plan announced by Ethiopia to dam the Blue Nile, source of 2/3 of the Nile's total flow, which could wreak havoc on Egyptian and Sudanese irrigation. This could potentially draw Sudan into a war with Ethiopia, which has one of the world's largest tank armies, is already engaged in propping up an allied government in Somalia, and has a long-standing border dispute with Eritrea, which has recently become increasingly friendly toward Sudan.
The 2nd problem I mentioned is the depradations of the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. The LRA is a militant group of Acholi (a Nilotic tribe) nationalists seeking to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments. It is known for atrocious massacres and abduction of child soldiers. It was supported by the al-Bashir regime in Sudan, a long-time enemy of Uganda where the LRA is most active and where the entire Acholi population was recently forcibly relocated, and it carried out attacks (slave raids) on SPLA-allied tribes such as the Dinka during the 2nd Sudanese Civil War. More recently, South Sudanese leaders at the national as well as tribal and village levels have allegedly paid ransoms to the LRA to prevent attacks. Now the U.S. is sending forces to the area of LRA strength--also a border region that is home to the ongoing Ituri conflict between farmers and herders, to displaced armies from the Second Congo War and the race wars in Rwanda and Burundi, and also not coincidentally a major source of both oil and rare metals with high-tech industrial applications (e.g., coltan)--resources coveted not only by the U.S. and the French who already have forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring nation to which the U.S. is also committing special forces--but also to China, which is already heavily invested in Africa, a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, and poised to build a navy capable of effectively projecting Chinese power in Africa. Incidentally, the main U.S. base and the main French base in Africa are both in Djibouti, on the borders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Yes, Sudan and South Sudan seem likely flashpoints for the earliest battles of the coming great war.
erhaps the cattle wars are the simplest. For centuries, the main form of wealth for the patriarchs of the mostly Nilotic people living in the wetlands, savannas, and riverine areas of east Africa was cattle. It was and continues to be common for tribes to be locked into conflicts involving cattle raids, and often these conflicts have involved complex alliances among tribes. The addition of automatic weapons in the 20th century have increased the stakes of these conflicts and made them much deadlier. Warfare over cattle has also intermingled with the other wars in the region.
The taking of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East and Indian subconginent dates back centuries before the European slave trade, but it was not until the 18th or 19th century--when a backward form of capitalism was triumphant in the Ottoman Empire--that slavery became the major factor in Sudan's economy. The major powers of the time--Darfur, Sennar, the Azande kingdom--both sold slaves on a wholesale basis to Arab emirates nominally loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and incorporated slaves into their armies. Slave labor continues to be used, especially by armies.
The Nile River trade brought guns and gold to the upriver region, intensifying the deadly competition for access to the river. Besides slaves, the main export was for a long time ivory, usually carried by teams of enslaved porters.
Such was the situation in the 19th century when the khedive of Egypt, seeking land, gold, and slaves with which to carve out a European-style empire, invaded Sennar. A centerpiece of Egyptian policy at the time was the planned Suez Canal, which would allow for direct trade between the Mediterranean and India. The people of Sudan were heavily taxed to pay for the canal.
As Egypt, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire, fell on hard times, the British began taking an increasingly direct role in Egyptian affairs, including the canal from which the British would benefit the most. This was the situation when the Mahdi Army rose up against British rule.
A Sufi man claiming to be the Mahdi--a role similar to a messiah in some forms of Islam--and saying he was preparing the way for the 2nd coming of Issa (Jesus as the Islamic prophet) organized a major rebellion against Turkish-Egyptian rule. Building a modern army with its own factories for manufacturing guns--the first such in African history--he captured Khartoum, the ancient city where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge. The movement he began, the Ansar, continued to be involved in Sudanese politics into the 20th century.
Islam is a relatively recent import to Sudan. For centuries, the upper Nile basin was a stronghold of Christianity, specifically the Oriental Orthodox Christianity practiced by the Nubian kingdoms established in the wake of the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Meroe. These kingdoms were protected by geography and military organization from the conquests of early Islam. However, as Islam became established in Egypt to the north, the powerful and long-lasting Kanem-Bornu Empire to the west, and powerful Red Sea trading ports like Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar to the east, and in less powerful states in their cultural orbit, and as Muslim traders became frequent visitors to Nubia, conversion to Islam spread from the periphery to the centers of power. By about the time of the height of Ottoman power (15th century), the rulers of the 3 major Nubian kingdoms, along with most of the powerful tribes, had converted to Islam, often foollowing civil wars between Christian and Muslim factions. The rise of Darfur and Sennar, who had adopted Islam from their neighbors in Nubia, Kanem-Borni, and Wadai, also helped spread the Islamic faith while killing or selling into slavery many of the remaining Christians of northern Sudan.
Ironically, the Nilotic, Central Sudanic, and Ubangian people of South Sudan, who are most likely to be Christian today, were mostly Christianized after Christianity had long been practiced, and later abandoned, farther north. Missionaries concentrated on this area partly because the natives were less hostile to Christianity here than farther north (they were less organized politically, they had little history of conflict with Christian powers, despite some slave trades by Christian Ethiopia, and the Nilotic people's traditional religion worshipped a single male sky god, creating a fertile ground for conversions), and partly because missionaries believed that by Christianizing the people who lived in the heartland of the Arab slave trade, they would help stamp that trade out.
Christians and other non-Muslims resented the Mahdi's attempt to impose shari'a law. After the British and their Egyptian lackeys regained control with the help of a large army equipped with repeater rifles, Britain consciously pitted Muslim north Sudan against Christian/"animist" south Sudan, setting the stage for civil war once Sudan gained its independence.
The three-way Cold War among the U.S., USSR, and China, and the shifting positions of powerful neighbors (Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kinshasa regime) in this war, as well as the destabilizing conservative pressures from the Ansar on the side of the conservative Muslim establishment, and Israel on the side of the resistance, helped turn the struggle against shari'a law into a series of bitter factional fights involving repeated massacres in South Sudan. Cattle raiding helped intensify these fights, as did the discovery of large oil deposits in South Sudan.
A leftist resistance force based in the South, the Sudanese People's Liberation ARmy, was expertly maneuvered by the U.S. from a revolutionary force seeking nationwide power, an end to shari'a, and social equality, into a secessionist movement by southerners. A peace agreement reached in 2006 led to the referendum in which South Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence this year, which they achieved just recently. This independence will make it easier for the U.S. to control South Sudan's oil.
In the meantime, the SPLA, hoping to open up a 2nd front in the northwest, encouraged the Fur and Saharan people of the Darfur region to rise up against the government. Some initial successes by the Darfur rebels were impressive, but they were largely unable to capitalize on their victories because of infighting among the major tribes (conflicts stemming partly from opposing attitudes toward shari'a law and partly because of political conflicts in Chad and other countries that have spilled over into tribal conflicts in Darfur). Many Arab mercenaries have also assisted the government in putting down the rebellion.
The role of the Arabs in Darfur has been much misrepresented. First, although there is often conflict between "Arabs" and "Blacks," there is a substantial Arab component in some rebel factions (in fact, anti-Arab sentiment is one cause of infighting among the rebels). More interesting is that the "Arabs"--although they speak Arabic, keep alive Arabic cultural traditions, and trace their ancestry to patriarchs from the Arab world--are as Black in color as the "Blacks" who are culturally identified with a sub-Saharan tradition and speak an African language. Second, the Arab janjawid militias have been represented as murderous, genocidal maniacs in oversimplified presentations of the conflict by pro-interventionist parties. Certainly the lure of weapons supplied by Khartoum has tickled the avarice of a few Arab leaders, and certainly there have been too many acts of brutality by the janjawid. But it is wise to recall that most of Darfur is a desert, that pastoral Arab herders are among its poorest residents, that Arabs had long been accustomed to water their herds at some of the few oases in Darfur, and that the first attacks of the janjawid began after rebel leaders, involved in their own tribal faction fight, cut off access to the most important of these oases. It is also often alleged that the Arab Muslims are oppressing the Black Christians in Darfur. This misconception probably comes from a confusion of the Darfur conflict with the Sudanese Civil Wars in South Sudan. In fact, Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a powerful pre-modern Islamic sultanate.
The 2010 peace agreement in Darfur was transparently the result of American pressure to sign any agreement irrespective of the roots of the conflict. It was signed by only 1 of the 3 major rebel movements, namely the Justice & Equality Movement dominated by the Zaghawa tribe--notably the only one of the three to support shari'a law and to be allied with the ultra-Islamist opposition to Sudan's Islamist president Omar al-Bashir. The agreement would increase the influence the most powerful Darfurian Black tribes have in Khartoum, but make no steps toward autonomy or independence, the avowed goal of the JEM. The JEM has recently repudiated this agreement as rival groups have gained territory. The latest development here, though, is the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya which was the main source of military support for the rebels in Darfur. This, as well as the apparent stabilization of the situation in the south and the east (where an Eritrean-backed insurgency allied with the Nilotic and Darfurian rebels has reached a peace agreement as part of a general agreement between Sudan and Eritrea), can be expected to strengthen the government's brutal fist in Darfur.
The discovery of oil also prompted a major highway construction project overseen by none other than Saudi billionaire industrialist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was also allegely major shareholder in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was the main supplier of medicine (for war injuries, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and other endemic diseases for all of east Africa and the source of 90% of Sudan's pharmaceuticals including all its anti-tuberculosis medication. This plant was destroyed by an American missile attack in response to the U.S. embassy bombings. The U.S. claimed that nerve gas was being manufactured there, but blocked Sudan's demand for a chemical analysis of the site by UN-appointed experts. Sudan's government continues to enjoy friendly relations with al-Qaeda and allied groups.
As we look to the future, there is still an unresolved border dispute between Sudan and South Sudan; nearly a dozen armed rebel groups jockeying for influence within South Sudan; the ongoing conflict in Darfur; and 2 visible problems on the horizon. The first is the plan announced by Ethiopia to dam the Blue Nile, source of 2/3 of the Nile's total flow, which could wreak havoc on Egyptian and Sudanese irrigation. This could potentially draw Sudan into a war with Ethiopia, which has one of the world's largest tank armies, is already engaged in propping up an allied government in Somalia, and has a long-standing border dispute with Eritrea, which has recently become increasingly friendly toward Sudan.
The 2nd problem I mentioned is the depradations of the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. The LRA is a militant group of Acholi (a Nilotic tribe) nationalists seeking to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments. It is known for atrocious massacres and abduction of child soldiers. It was supported by the al-Bashir regime in Sudan, a long-time enemy of Uganda where the LRA is most active and where the entire Acholi population was recently forcibly relocated, and it carried out attacks (slave raids) on SPLA-allied tribes such as the Dinka during the 2nd Sudanese Civil War. More recently, South Sudanese leaders at the national as well as tribal and village levels have allegedly paid ransoms to the LRA to prevent attacks. Now the U.S. is sending forces to the area of LRA strength--also a border region that is home to the ongoing Ituri conflict between farmers and herders, to displaced armies from the Second Congo War and the race wars in Rwanda and Burundi, and also not coincidentally a major source of both oil and rare metals with high-tech industrial applications (e.g., coltan)--resources coveted not only by the U.S. and the French who already have forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring nation to which the U.S. is also committing special forces--but also to China, which is already heavily invested in Africa, a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, and poised to build a navy capable of effectively projecting Chinese power in Africa. Incidentally, the main U.S. base and the main French base in Africa are both in Djibouti, on the borders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Yes, Sudan and South Sudan seem likely flashpoints for the earliest battles of the coming great war.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
And hello to oblivion
The guy who came into The Book Exchange today, bought a book about how Middle Easterners are scary (and nothing else), and insisted on putting it in a plastic bag seems particularly oblivious to me.
Monday, July 11, 2011
war on terror
The modern war on terror may have begun with the attack on the al-Shifa plant in Khartoum. To a large extent it grew out of the war on drug users and the Cold War. The war on drug users prepared the U.S. and other imperialist countries for it by eroding search & seizure protections, presumption of innocence, and a market free from confiscations; while this war and the Cold War contributed to the refinement of terror methods in Italy, Germany, the Philippines, S. America, etc. The use of suicide bombings, invented by Russian nihilists, was adopted and popularized by the oppressed Tamils of Sri Lanka and India. This method epitomized the goals of bourgeois "resistance" leaders--not to organize a broad working class movement to struggle for power, but to pressure capitalist forces through spectacular acts of violence into reaching a backroom deal.
Al-Qaeda used religion as part of a substitute nationalist narrative. Its fighg had little in common with the Iranian mullahs, who used religion to stifle the revolution and impose capitalism and conservatism on it, and more in common with the populist nationalism of the Fulani jihad and the Mahdi Army. Its greatest success was the capture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a popular action that resulted in expansion of democratic breathing-space in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda was enriched by the fight against the Soviets, subsidized by the U.S. on behalf of landlords of Afghanistan, and by construction contracts in Sudan, which meanwhile under Cold War and internal political pressure had become increasingly conservative and theocratic.
Emboldened by the defeat of the Soviets and by the U.S.'s retreat under pressure by Iran- and Syria-backed Hizballah in Lebanon, and al-Qaeda-allied militias in Somalia, and seeing their social position slip as a result of repression in Muslim countries and popular revulsion at their thuggish tactics, al-Qaeda struck American embassies in E. Africa and troop positions in Saudi Arabia. The bombing of the al-Khifa plant was the U.S.'s response.
The plant was partly owned by al-Qaeda, which was among other things a business empire operating major "legitimate" businesses around the world. U.S. intelligence may have feared chemical weapons' being developed there--although this was shown not to be the case, and regardless it was a war crime and crime against peace--but it behooved the U.S. to deal a commercial blow to al-Qaeda regardless. The timing of the attack, too, was probably indeed affected by Clinton's wish to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky "scandal." At any rate, the destruction of the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan created a profound social crisis resulting in perhaps 2 million direct deaths, and intensified the desperatiom of impoverished Arab and African tribes. Sudan responded by seeking to get back into the U.S.'s graces by reaching a deal with the dominant S. Sudanese tribes and the SPLA, which would give the U.S. more reliable access to oil. Coming largely at the expense of the east and west, this peace deal ironically contributrd to the rise of fighting in Darfur. The recent squeeze on Gadhafi, the main backer of Darfur's rebels, will probably shift the balance in the government's favor, allowing them to defeat Darfur's tribal, secular, and religious militias and ensure peaceful acquiescence in the poverty imposed thereby.
Meanwhile the 9/11 attacks succeeded spectacularly (in killing) partly as a result of the coincidental removal of American safeguards for training, failure to follow other procedures, I.e., incompetence of the Bush administration, the firing of thousands of veteran, competent air traffic controllers under Reagan, and the disregard for building codes by the mob-linked construction companies that built the WTC. But after years of the war on terror, the top leadership of al-Qaeda is dead, command and control is disrupted, and al-Qaeda (as well as nmost of its allies) are less popular among Muslims today than in 2001, much less 1979.
Meanwhile, NATO invaded Afghanistan, increasing the encirclement of Russia, sharpening the disputes among NATO powers, and seizing control over oil & gas and heroin. Then there was the war on Iraq, prompted partly by the desire to stop Iraq from developing nuclear weapons, at least a theoretically realistic possibility; partly by the desire for oil; and mostly for a strategic location bordering Iran, Saudi Arabia, and (almost) Russia. This war lessened the U.S.'s dependence on Israel, and since then the U.S.'s pro-Israel tilt has decreased considerably.
More than that, the "war on terror" has blurred the boundaries between overseas wars and wars at home, with the U.S. government openly targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. It has legitimized torture, Orwellian "memory hole" b.s. (are we at war with Sunni extremists or Shi'ite extremists in Iraq? Depends what day of the week it is). And meanwhile the imperialist powers are increasingly at odds over strategy, material interests, and now depression and trade wars are more and more creating conditions for WW3.
Next in this series: military goals of the major powers.
Al-Qaeda used religion as part of a substitute nationalist narrative. Its fighg had little in common with the Iranian mullahs, who used religion to stifle the revolution and impose capitalism and conservatism on it, and more in common with the populist nationalism of the Fulani jihad and the Mahdi Army. Its greatest success was the capture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a popular action that resulted in expansion of democratic breathing-space in Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaeda was enriched by the fight against the Soviets, subsidized by the U.S. on behalf of landlords of Afghanistan, and by construction contracts in Sudan, which meanwhile under Cold War and internal political pressure had become increasingly conservative and theocratic.
Emboldened by the defeat of the Soviets and by the U.S.'s retreat under pressure by Iran- and Syria-backed Hizballah in Lebanon, and al-Qaeda-allied militias in Somalia, and seeing their social position slip as a result of repression in Muslim countries and popular revulsion at their thuggish tactics, al-Qaeda struck American embassies in E. Africa and troop positions in Saudi Arabia. The bombing of the al-Khifa plant was the U.S.'s response.
The plant was partly owned by al-Qaeda, which was among other things a business empire operating major "legitimate" businesses around the world. U.S. intelligence may have feared chemical weapons' being developed there--although this was shown not to be the case, and regardless it was a war crime and crime against peace--but it behooved the U.S. to deal a commercial blow to al-Qaeda regardless. The timing of the attack, too, was probably indeed affected by Clinton's wish to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky "scandal." At any rate, the destruction of the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan created a profound social crisis resulting in perhaps 2 million direct deaths, and intensified the desperatiom of impoverished Arab and African tribes. Sudan responded by seeking to get back into the U.S.'s graces by reaching a deal with the dominant S. Sudanese tribes and the SPLA, which would give the U.S. more reliable access to oil. Coming largely at the expense of the east and west, this peace deal ironically contributrd to the rise of fighting in Darfur. The recent squeeze on Gadhafi, the main backer of Darfur's rebels, will probably shift the balance in the government's favor, allowing them to defeat Darfur's tribal, secular, and religious militias and ensure peaceful acquiescence in the poverty imposed thereby.
Meanwhile the 9/11 attacks succeeded spectacularly (in killing) partly as a result of the coincidental removal of American safeguards for training, failure to follow other procedures, I.e., incompetence of the Bush administration, the firing of thousands of veteran, competent air traffic controllers under Reagan, and the disregard for building codes by the mob-linked construction companies that built the WTC. But after years of the war on terror, the top leadership of al-Qaeda is dead, command and control is disrupted, and al-Qaeda (as well as nmost of its allies) are less popular among Muslims today than in 2001, much less 1979.
Meanwhile, NATO invaded Afghanistan, increasing the encirclement of Russia, sharpening the disputes among NATO powers, and seizing control over oil & gas and heroin. Then there was the war on Iraq, prompted partly by the desire to stop Iraq from developing nuclear weapons, at least a theoretically realistic possibility; partly by the desire for oil; and mostly for a strategic location bordering Iran, Saudi Arabia, and (almost) Russia. This war lessened the U.S.'s dependence on Israel, and since then the U.S.'s pro-Israel tilt has decreased considerably.
More than that, the "war on terror" has blurred the boundaries between overseas wars and wars at home, with the U.S. government openly targeting U.S. citizens for assassination. It has legitimized torture, Orwellian "memory hole" b.s. (are we at war with Sunni extremists or Shi'ite extremists in Iraq? Depends what day of the week it is). And meanwhile the imperialist powers are increasingly at odds over strategy, material interests, and now depression and trade wars are more and more creating conditions for WW3.
Next in this series: military goals of the major powers.
Communism doesn't work
Communism doesn't work, and the capitalists have spent billions of dollars and killed millions of people to make sure it'll be thus. Just to give the most notorious examples: 1) perhaps 100,000 Native Americans were killed in the effort to uproot the primitive communist property relations shared by most tribes and establish private ownership; 2) the French abandoned their resistance to the Prussian invasion because they needed Prussia's help slaughtering thousands of communist and anarchist rebels in Paris; 3) after the Russian revolution, the Russians had major rebellions on three fronts, all funded to some degree and one funded almost entirely by foreign powers; 4) Russia also faced a total trade embargo by every other country in the world that lasted more than 10 years, something no other country in the globalized epoch has faced; 5) the major imperialist countries including the U.S. collectively executed, imprisoned, and banished tens of thousands of radicals during this period; 6) Mussolini and Hitler went on to imprison or kill leftists on a much larger scale; 7) the Spanish Republican (Popular Front) government enlisted the help of the KGB to kill tens of thousands of anarchists, centrists, and Trotskyists (that is, communists on the Bolshevik-Leninist tradition); 8) however, because this Popular Front included the Socialist and Communist Parties and had won the election, Franco's forces inaugurated a brutal war against it and its allies in the Basque and Catalan communities. This war was notorious for killings of civilians both in mass shootings and in bombings such as the German bombing of Guernica; 9) meanwhile, Chgiang Kai-shek's government ordered the mass slaughter of 150,000 communist party members after breaking his alliance with them, and during the civil war in China would kill 450,000 more; 10) Germany and its allies then invaded the USSR, with 20 million killed on the Soviet side alone (including massacred Jews and Romany). The date of Germany's invasion of the USSR marks the only day in history that the Dow Jones Industrial Average doubled; 11) when Truman bombed Hiroshima, killing another 150,000, his stated reason was to gain an advantage over the USSR in the Cold War he intended to start; 12) the capitalists killed thousands more in bloody wars in Yugoslavia and Greece to prevent the workers' parties backed by the majority from taking power. In greece, as in Spain, this resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship notorious for torture and murder of political opponents; 13) more bombs were dropped on Korea during the Korean war than by all parties during world war two. The bombing only ended because U.S. forces ran out of targets to bomb, including huts. Biological weapons were also used against Korea. 100,000 bodies have been recovered from mass graves of people killed by the U.S.-backed south Korean government, also long notorious for torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and murder; 14) 1 million members of the Communist Party were slaughtered by Suharto); 15) another bloody war with villages napalmed, resulting again in a brutal dictatorship, was waged against Lumumba's forces in Congo-Kinshasa; 16) the Vietnam War killed at least 3 million and featured bombings of dikes, warfare against the environment resulting in permanent pollution, chemical warfare, mass bombings and strafings of civilians, torture, murder of leftists by every successive government of S. Vietnam; 17) meanwhile in Cuba, there were 3 separate incidents in different decades of biological warfare attacks--by Kennedy against sugar crops, by Carter against pigs, and by Clinton against civilians; 18) there were also several literacy volunteers lynched by U.S.-backed mercenaries; 19) a French ship carrying weapons to Cuba--legally purchased--was blown up by the U.S.; 20) Cuban sugar fields were bombed, hotels and beaches were machine-gun attacked in an effort to stop people from other countries from investing in tourism, there was a 40-year embargo as well as a full-fledged naval blockade during the October crisis, and of course there was the attack on the Bay of Pigs; 21) the CIA spent millions of dollars illegally to prevent a communist candidate from winning an election in Lebanon; 22) a bombing carried out with CIA support killed hundreds of people on a Cuban civilian jet liner; 23) the U.S. intervened to have the democratically elected leaders of Guatemala and Chile; between these nations and El Salvador, which waged a brutal war against rebel forces backed by the majority, perhaps 400,000 were killed; 24) meanwhile, France's war against a communist-led anticolonial movement in Algeria was notorious for the use of torture and mass reprisals; 25) the U.S. backed the bloody Khmer Rouge government, which created not a workers's state but more a national Auschwitz, because it was fighting against Vietnam. The Thai government, as brutal in its own way against communist rebels as the Khmer Rouge, also supported the Khmer Rouge; 26) meanwhile, Portugal's fascist dictatorship waged bloody wars against leftist anticolonial movements in its former African colonies; when Portugal's government was overthrown, the U.S. backed a bloody civil war in Mozambique that lasted about 15 years, included vicious attacks on villages, and spilled over into zimbabwe, where it continues today. Meanwhile in Angola, the U.S. with its cold war allies in Mobutu's Zaire and apartheid S. Africa organized attacks on villages and infrastructure and laid down a huge number of land mines; 27) the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua killed 1 in 6 Nicaraguans mostly in attacks on schools, hospitals, factories, and government offices; 28) meanwhile, the CIA trained ten times as many people for guerrilla warfare in Tibet as in Nicaragua; 29) the U.S. also mined civilian harbors in Nicaragua, for which it was found liable by the World Court but has neglected to pay its $90 million fine; 30) the U.S. has repeatedly intervened to overthrow democratic governments in Haiti and the dOminican Republic, as well as in Iran with untold consequences, giving as its reason the friendliness of those countries' governments with communist regimes; 30) similarly, the U.S. intervened recently against the elected president of Honduras; 31) and of course there were three separate attempts--the coup, the bosses' strike, and the constitutional attempt--against the elected president of Venezuela; 32) the COINTELPRO and other Red Squad programs, and the McCarthy-Nixon witch hunt, killed some Americans and put hundreds more behind bars; 33) and of course there's the U.S. intervention against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, often portrayed as a response to the Soviet invasion, but actually begun before the Soviet invasion; 34) the U.S.'s intervention against Soviet-backed governments in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya created a legacy of wars and famine; 35) all this was accompanied by a massive and expensive intelligence-gathering and disinformation campaign not to mention the U.S.'s development of an arsenal unparalleled in history and increasingly coming with a price in high taxes and cuts in infrastructure and social programs.
Why? The State Department's explanation of the need to invade tiny Grenada is revealing. Grenada was dangerous, they said, because it had a Black majority that spoke English. If oppressed Blacks in the U.S. saw a successful communist country a few miles away, and heard what their leaders had to say, it could be dangerous to the power structure here at home.
Now the workers' states have had their setbacks, of course. Partly this has been human error, partly the result of corruption (and Zinoviev's analysis of the origins of opportunism, which can be verified by reference to countless empirical cases, shows that repression and corruption facilitate each other). Partly, however, they were the result of war, terror, sabotage, and economic warfare.
Even so, it was capitalism that gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the first concentration camps, industrial-level slavery, apartheid, the bloody partition of India, fascism, , genocide against the Indians, two world wars and countless others, 2 billion underfed, 1 billion without access to clean water, 200 million homeless, 2 billion illiterate, and I don't know how many premature deaths each year from preventable diseases. Meanwhile the workers' states for all their problems can boast world-record economic growth rates (#1, China; #2, USSR); the highest rates of citizens with advanced educations and of women with advanced educations; land reform; first country in space (USSR); world's 2nd-largest economy (USSR); massive engineering projects; aid to liberation forces and in humanitarian crises throughout the capitalist world; etc. E. Germany was the first country to eradicate homelessness, a feat later duplicated in Cuba. Cubav went in 3 years from 1 in 3 illiterate to virtually no illiteracy. N. Korea has the highest literacy rate in the world. The USSR was the 3rd country in the world to have woman suffrage. It also played a major role in bringing down Hitler, while Cuba played an even bigger role against apartheid. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had important parts in the civil rights movement, and the USSR and its Anmerican allies are largely responsible for the NAACP, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and CIO. The USSR introduced the 5-year plan while Cuba did the first gall bladder transplant. Vietnam forced pOl pot from power. China had a lower literacy rate than India in 1949; now it is almost 70% higher. Cuba, a very poor country, has a health care system that compares to the U,S.'s. Cuba was also first to sign the international convention against terror and has an unparalleled record fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has an all-time world record incarceration rate and is openly torturinbg people in Afghanistan.
Failure is in the eye of the beholder. Hannah Arendt suggests that one feature of totalitarianism s to insulate people at the top of a hierarchy from everyone but the (more radical) layer above them and the (less zealous) layer under them so that they are blinded to how their decisions affect and are seen by the majority, while they see themselves as occupying a moderate poaition in comparison. But of course this is a social function of money and it blinds most of us to the realities of capitalist success.
Why? The State Department's explanation of the need to invade tiny Grenada is revealing. Grenada was dangerous, they said, because it had a Black majority that spoke English. If oppressed Blacks in the U.S. saw a successful communist country a few miles away, and heard what their leaders had to say, it could be dangerous to the power structure here at home.
Now the workers' states have had their setbacks, of course. Partly this has been human error, partly the result of corruption (and Zinoviev's analysis of the origins of opportunism, which can be verified by reference to countless empirical cases, shows that repression and corruption facilitate each other). Partly, however, they were the result of war, terror, sabotage, and economic warfare.
Even so, it was capitalism that gave us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the first concentration camps, industrial-level slavery, apartheid, the bloody partition of India, fascism, , genocide against the Indians, two world wars and countless others, 2 billion underfed, 1 billion without access to clean water, 200 million homeless, 2 billion illiterate, and I don't know how many premature deaths each year from preventable diseases. Meanwhile the workers' states for all their problems can boast world-record economic growth rates (#1, China; #2, USSR); the highest rates of citizens with advanced educations and of women with advanced educations; land reform; first country in space (USSR); world's 2nd-largest economy (USSR); massive engineering projects; aid to liberation forces and in humanitarian crises throughout the capitalist world; etc. E. Germany was the first country to eradicate homelessness, a feat later duplicated in Cuba. Cubav went in 3 years from 1 in 3 illiterate to virtually no illiteracy. N. Korea has the highest literacy rate in the world. The USSR was the 3rd country in the world to have woman suffrage. It also played a major role in bringing down Hitler, while Cuba played an even bigger role against apartheid. The USSR, China, and Cuba all had important parts in the civil rights movement, and the USSR and its Anmerican allies are largely responsible for the NAACP, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and CIO. The USSR introduced the 5-year plan while Cuba did the first gall bladder transplant. Vietnam forced pOl pot from power. China had a lower literacy rate than India in 1949; now it is almost 70% higher. Cuba, a very poor country, has a health care system that compares to the U,S.'s. Cuba was also first to sign the international convention against terror and has an unparalleled record fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has an all-time world record incarceration rate and is openly torturinbg people in Afghanistan.
Failure is in the eye of the beholder. Hannah Arendt suggests that one feature of totalitarianism s to insulate people at the top of a hierarchy from everyone but the (more radical) layer above them and the (less zealous) layer under them so that they are blinded to how their decisions affect and are seen by the majority, while they see themselves as occupying a moderate poaition in comparison. But of course this is a social function of money and it blinds most of us to the realities of capitalist success.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
odds & ends
I really like the rhyme I learned recently which was inspired by the orientation of the statue of Brigham Young in Salt Lake City:
There sits Brigham, like a bird on a perch:
His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.
I just became aware of the owl on the dollar bill. My friend called me a conspiracy theorist just for showing it to her. I say, if you have empirical confirmation, that's as value-neutral as it gets. Now, if you want to speculate as to why it's there ... I have to say as an innocent evocation of wisdom. Texe Marrs blames it on Satan but is clearly batshit insane.
But speaking of pseudo-pagan symbolism, I only just realized how much the statue of liberty resembles the poppy-headed goddess of ancient Crete. Holy junkies!
Ayn Rand, criticizing the proliferation of welfare programs, suggests that if shoes had been provided by the state, and a conservative proposed to take away the entitlement, indignant leftists would accuse conservatives of wanting the poor to go barefoot. For its force, this argument depends on our ignoring the fact that millions of poor people do go barefoot (including 't afford shoes.
Some conservatives say the U.S. can't be a bastion of racism today because we have a Black president. By that logic, 16th-century England under Elizabeth I was a model of women's rights.
I saw Jesse Jackson on TV during the 2000 election criticizing Bush's heartless decision to execute a mentally retarded man. Too bad he hadn't spoken up when Clinton did the same thing during the 1992 campaign season.
There sits Brigham, like a bird on a perch:
His hand to the bank, and his back to the church.
I just became aware of the owl on the dollar bill. My friend called me a conspiracy theorist just for showing it to her. I say, if you have empirical confirmation, that's as value-neutral as it gets. Now, if you want to speculate as to why it's there ... I have to say as an innocent evocation of wisdom. Texe Marrs blames it on Satan but is clearly batshit insane.
But speaking of pseudo-pagan symbolism, I only just realized how much the statue of liberty resembles the poppy-headed goddess of ancient Crete. Holy junkies!
Ayn Rand, criticizing the proliferation of welfare programs, suggests that if shoes had been provided by the state, and a conservative proposed to take away the entitlement, indignant leftists would accuse conservatives of wanting the poor to go barefoot. For its force, this argument depends on our ignoring the fact that millions of poor people do go barefoot (including 't afford shoes.
Some conservatives say the U.S. can't be a bastion of racism today because we have a Black president. By that logic, 16th-century England under Elizabeth I was a model of women's rights.
I saw Jesse Jackson on TV during the 2000 election criticizing Bush's heartless decision to execute a mentally retarded man. Too bad he hadn't spoken up when Clinton did the same thing during the 1992 campaign season.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Scientific integrity threatened
I had a friend who was taking an advanced chemistry class, and she told me that she ans other students in her class routinely falsified lab results to make them conform more closely to predicted values. When I tried to point out that falsification is a gross breach of scientific ethics, not least because it fails to produce the anomalous results that spur scientific 'revolutions', she explained that it was only because in her class one would get a lower grade if one's lab results weren't within a specified range, adding that obsolete and degraded equipment in her lab precluded accurate measurement even by the most conscientious experimenters.
Of course, when her class graduates to go to work for monitoring agencies, research institutions, and other laboratories that are highly susceptible to funding cutoffs, they will come under even GREATER pressure to get the "right" results, while the equipment used in some cases will be worse than at a state university.
My friend assured me that she would never falsify results in the real world, only in the classroom where it had no practical effects beyond her own career. However, the situation as she describes it constitutes training to disregard scruples in the pursuit of personal reward; training that well serves, say, the snake-oil peddlers at Merck and the Mayo Clinic.
First and foremost, a bright student should not be punished for running an experiment correctly but getting anomalous results. Although it may mean more work for an already overburdened class, this should be a starting point for a hypothesis explaining the unexpected results (perhaps the lab equipment is to blame) and an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. On the assumption that the experiment confirms this particular hypothesis, it would serve to spur demands that the university provide students with the equipment vital to scientific education, and combined with statistical analysis of lab results it would help expose a culture of cheating.
My final thought on this: science is a particular method of testing hypotheses by means of open inquiry. If a university department teaches you to ignore empirical results that don't correspond to predetermined ideal results, that department is not teaching science; in fact, it is actively destroying the scentific part of your mind and replacing it with dogmatism.
Of course, when her class graduates to go to work for monitoring agencies, research institutions, and other laboratories that are highly susceptible to funding cutoffs, they will come under even GREATER pressure to get the "right" results, while the equipment used in some cases will be worse than at a state university.
My friend assured me that she would never falsify results in the real world, only in the classroom where it had no practical effects beyond her own career. However, the situation as she describes it constitutes training to disregard scruples in the pursuit of personal reward; training that well serves, say, the snake-oil peddlers at Merck and the Mayo Clinic.
First and foremost, a bright student should not be punished for running an experiment correctly but getting anomalous results. Although it may mean more work for an already overburdened class, this should be a starting point for a hypothesis explaining the unexpected results (perhaps the lab equipment is to blame) and an experiment designed to test this hypothesis. On the assumption that the experiment confirms this particular hypothesis, it would serve to spur demands that the university provide students with the equipment vital to scientific education, and combined with statistical analysis of lab results it would help expose a culture of cheating.
My final thought on this: science is a particular method of testing hypotheses by means of open inquiry. If a university department teaches you to ignore empirical results that don't correspond to predetermined ideal results, that department is not teaching science; in fact, it is actively destroying the scentific part of your mind and replacing it with dogmatism.
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