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.
Monday, July 4, 2011
long may it stand
Happy independence day. Turns out the U.S.'s national anthem is set to the tune of a British drinking song. Who knew?
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Drive to War
War has, of course, been a feature of civilization since its birth; but the post-Cold War period shares a number of features not found in previous wars, among them the decline of American economic and political power, the reversal of the bipolar or tripolar alignment of the Cold War, the growing privatization/denationalization of killing, the triumph of the volunteer army, and the advent of modern ways of killing. But the basic logic governing war, the logic of finance capital, is the same as it was in Lenin's time.
The modern war drive can be said to begin with the Gulf War. Iraq's belligerency against Kuwait was the proximate cause of the war. Iraq, at the time, boasted one of the largest and best-supplied armies in the world, having received massive material aid from the U.S. and USSR during the war with Iran (this betrayal on the Soviet part, a consequence of years of playing big-power politics at the expense of supporting world revolution, prefiguring the post-Cold War alignment). Presuming on the confidence of the imperialist and social-imperialist powers, calculated that it could take over Kuwait's oil and port, weakening the U.S.'s alliance with Saudi Arabia and cementing Iraq's position as a regional power broker. Most importantly, the material and psychological benefits of an easy victory would undo the humiliation of the stalemate with the poorly equipped Iranians, and shore up the senile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But,like any leader of a poor country who counts on his friendly relations with the wealthiest coubntries, Saddam Hussein was betrayed.
The U.S. led the way in assembling an international coalition against Saddam Hussein for a variety of reasons that are symptomatic of the country's bipartisan drive to war today. First, the 1987 stock market crash had exposed the vulnerability of the world financial system and (as has been the case since World War 2) war was the stimulus program of first resort. In fact, the U.S. has never had economic growth during peacetime since before WW2, and its economic stability today depends heavily on permanent war. During the Reagan administration, I think, the official unemployment rate was recalculated to include members of the military among the employed, instead of out of the labor force, one of many steps taken by Reagan, Clinton, and Obama to hide the true extent of economic devastation. Besides this, the U.S. was actively preventing the rise of a strong Iraq, as it would similarly prevent the rise of a strong Brazil or S. Korea, to protect its hegemony from being challenged and reassure its client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With its resounding defeat in Vietnam, and France's temporary defection from NATO, as well as the exposure of American atrocities and war crimes, the U.S. is no longer the political power it was during the Truman era; and American economic power, tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system as a whole, has been in free fall since 1987. But the U.S. is still by far the strongest military power in the world. President Carter, envisioning this situation, inaugurated a major militarization drive, ramped up later under Reagan and Clinton. Since then, the U.S.'s mainstrategy in world affairs has been to use its military power to reverse its declining economic and political fortunes.
Other countries joined the coalition against Iraq for a variety of reasons--Saudi Arabia to preserve its own regional hegemony, the USSR in exchange for backdoor deals in Afghanistan, trade concessions, etc., Syria in hopes of repairing its relations with the U.S., European powers to get a piece of the military contracts. China, preoccupied by student revolt, chose not to take on the world's biggest powers by exercising its veto power. The UK, Australia, and New Zealand all are politically dependent on the clout that comes from their "special relationship" with the U.S. and are usually reliable military allies of the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel was pressured into not retaliating for Iraqi rocket launches, in a humiliating diplomatic comeuppance, for fear of alienating American allies.
The war was an open massacre of largely unarmed, often fleeing Iraqis--partly because Hussein reserved his best military forces to use against his own people. Hussein set afire Kuwaiti oil wells causing senseless environmental destruction, while coalition forces destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, planning for a containment strategy that would reap big profits for oil speculators, lawyers, and arms dealers while leaving Iraqis with poor access to medicine, clean water, and electricity for years. In the aftermath, Palestinians were massacred in Kuwait, Shi'ites in Iraq, and Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.
The next major war was in Bosnia, the largest war on European soil since WWII. Above all else, this war, ostensibly between rival gangs spawned from Yugoslavia's ruling Stalinist party, exposed the fragility of the NATO and EU alliances that had assembled coalitions against Iraq. Germany, eager to get out from under the U.S.'s shadow and create a 4th Reich where German industrial capital monopolized European production, early backed the Croatian Tudjman faction. France, jealous of German power, found itself supporting Karadzic's Serb forces, in alliance with Russia, which sought a reunification of Yugoslavia under a corrupt Chetnik pro-Russian regime. As it happened, the Serb and Croat militias, in that order, were responsible for most of the atrocities of that war. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia being carved up into rival spheres of influence, began backing the Bosniak Muslim forces just enough to keep the Serb forces from dominating, while military strategy pushed Serb and Croat forces toward alliance. Meanwhile, the U.S. let its rivals in Europe bleed their treasuries for months, while lives were lost in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, until it saw its political fortunes served by intervention which would humiliate its rivals and create a new Balkan regime that, while it did little directly for the U.S., preserved a balance of power among its European rivals.
Liberals like to say, "When Clinton lied, no one died." In fact, his lies about the length of the Bosnian intervention paved the way for a war that cost thousands of lives and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe.
Around the same time as this war was Russia's bloody war on Chechnya, demonstrating that the Russian rulers had kept Stalinism's brutal murder machine while discarding its verbal commitment to the oppressed. The use of chemical weapons and spies in this war helped pave the way for the war on Afghanistan, and the scapegoating of Muslims prefigured the "war on terror" of countless powers.
Russia's successful war against Chechen children and peasants also was symptomatic of the defeats of guerrillas around the world--the IRA, ETA, PLO, Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, CPN (Maoist), Communist Party of the Philippines, and EZLN have all been dealt major blows by the governments they fought, usually after years of alienating themselves by their thuggish ways, and after a strategy focused on permanent war, not the conquest of power, kept them from capitalizing on their victories. Often in the wake of defeat they've been drawn into an appearance of sharing power (Maoists in Nepal, Sinn Fein in N. Ireland) at the cost of compromising on the very issues that impelled them to war in the first place. The biggest success of guerrilla warfare recently, the S. African revolution, was unlike most of these an urban-led movement with mass support in urban and rural areas in S. Africa and tremendous popular sympathy around the world, largely the fruit of correct political decisions by the ANC, COSATU, and the Communist Party.
Central Africa and the Sudan region also presented us with a spectacle of the horrors of modern war, complete with genocide, mass rape, and cannibalism. One of the most notorious examples is in Rwanda, where in a case of the plunge of rightist politics toward the gutter, the racist Hutu government was overthrown by an even more virulently racist Hutu faction. The Hutu/Tutsi divide , created by the Belgian colonizers but also roughly reflecting the historical rivalry between mostly Hutu farmers and mostly Tutsi herders, erupted in carnage in this impoverished country which notably also has one of the world's highest population densities. France and Belgium, hopeful of using the warfare to reassert their control, essentially endorsed the rampage of the dominant Hutu forces, as did the Catholic church which had several powerful Hutu archbishops and a vested interest in reasserting Hutu power. The U.S. didn't intervene, simply enough, because its interests were adequately served by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans seen as "taking up space" and the embarrassment of its European rivals.
Tutsi refugees led the popular movement to overthrow wealthy, corrupt, CIA-connected dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but ongoing struggles between farmers and herders, rising demand for central African resources, the Cold War proliferation of militia groups supplied by the great powers, and and the absence of a proletarian movement in central Africa, resulted in a bloody, atrocious free-for-all struggle for cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, aluminum, coltan, and other resources that would eventually kill more people than any other war since WWII. This scramble dragged in half a dozen neighboring governments, and, although the highest-intensity conflict ended with the military defeat and exhaustion of Rwanda, it spawned violence that continues today. Imperialist powers largely ignored the war, both because they didn't care much which militia sold goods to them if the prices were OK, and because rival industries supported different parts of the country and the militias based there.
The war on Sudan has older roots, dating back to the Soviet Union's support for Khartoum when Egypt and Ethiopia were U.S.-dominated, and the U.S.'s support when Ethiopia and Libya were dominated by the Soviets. The Sudanese leaders sought to use their war chests, anti-Christian demagogy, and rivalries between southen tribes of cattle herders and smugglers to establish firm control over S. Sudan's oil fields and establish itself as a regional power. This war fed into and was fed by similar major wars in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, but has received more attention partly for the largely Christian composition of the resistance vs. A Muslim government, partly for the media savvy of the rebels, partly owing to the large al-Qaeda presence in Sudan in the 1990s, and partly for Sudan's oil wealth, central location, and sheer size. Early in the war, Sudan was heavily subsidized by the U.S., still thinking in terms of its Cold War rivalry with the USSR. The Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia meanwhile aided the rebels in hopes of keeping a strong rival from building up on the border. So did Israel, at that time hopeful of building up a power center in E. Africa, and Uganda, which hoped to seize S. Sudan for itself. When Eritrea gained independence and was fighting its own bloody war with Ethiopia, it bribed the rebels to turn on the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, villages, tribes, and language communities in S. Sudan were wiped out with systematic ruthlessness by Khartoum and allied militias.
The S. Sudanese rebels financed propaganda and provocations designed to drag disaffected people in Darfur into war against Sudan, thus relieving pressure on the south. (They did similar things in E. Sudan). Many people conflate the two Sudanese conflicts, believing for example that most Darfurians are Christian, when in fact Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a slave-trading sultanate in early modern times. These conflicts intensified when starving Arabs, excluded from traditional grazing grounds by considerations of rebel military strategy, were recruited as mercenaries against the mostly "Black" tribes fueling the rebellion. (In fact, the Arabs, of mixed Black-Arab ancestry, would in most contexts also be identified as Black by most Americans.) Sudan was aided primarily by Eritrea, which as a result of spillover from the war on the eastern front had become enemies with tribes that were also fighting the Sudanese, while Libya, always alert for opportunities to expand its power southward, and Chad, serving as Libya's proxy, backed the Darfur rebels. Indeed, Chad helped precipitate the rebellion by funding incursions aimed at Sudanese targets.
Next in this series: the American strike on the al-Shifa plant and its aftermath.
The modern war drive can be said to begin with the Gulf War. Iraq's belligerency against Kuwait was the proximate cause of the war. Iraq, at the time, boasted one of the largest and best-supplied armies in the world, having received massive material aid from the U.S. and USSR during the war with Iran (this betrayal on the Soviet part, a consequence of years of playing big-power politics at the expense of supporting world revolution, prefiguring the post-Cold War alignment). Presuming on the confidence of the imperialist and social-imperialist powers, calculated that it could take over Kuwait's oil and port, weakening the U.S.'s alliance with Saudi Arabia and cementing Iraq's position as a regional power broker. Most importantly, the material and psychological benefits of an easy victory would undo the humiliation of the stalemate with the poorly equipped Iranians, and shore up the senile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But,like any leader of a poor country who counts on his friendly relations with the wealthiest coubntries, Saddam Hussein was betrayed.
The U.S. led the way in assembling an international coalition against Saddam Hussein for a variety of reasons that are symptomatic of the country's bipartisan drive to war today. First, the 1987 stock market crash had exposed the vulnerability of the world financial system and (as has been the case since World War 2) war was the stimulus program of first resort. In fact, the U.S. has never had economic growth during peacetime since before WW2, and its economic stability today depends heavily on permanent war. During the Reagan administration, I think, the official unemployment rate was recalculated to include members of the military among the employed, instead of out of the labor force, one of many steps taken by Reagan, Clinton, and Obama to hide the true extent of economic devastation. Besides this, the U.S. was actively preventing the rise of a strong Iraq, as it would similarly prevent the rise of a strong Brazil or S. Korea, to protect its hegemony from being challenged and reassure its client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With its resounding defeat in Vietnam, and France's temporary defection from NATO, as well as the exposure of American atrocities and war crimes, the U.S. is no longer the political power it was during the Truman era; and American economic power, tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system as a whole, has been in free fall since 1987. But the U.S. is still by far the strongest military power in the world. President Carter, envisioning this situation, inaugurated a major militarization drive, ramped up later under Reagan and Clinton. Since then, the U.S.'s mainstrategy in world affairs has been to use its military power to reverse its declining economic and political fortunes.
Other countries joined the coalition against Iraq for a variety of reasons--Saudi Arabia to preserve its own regional hegemony, the USSR in exchange for backdoor deals in Afghanistan, trade concessions, etc., Syria in hopes of repairing its relations with the U.S., European powers to get a piece of the military contracts. China, preoccupied by student revolt, chose not to take on the world's biggest powers by exercising its veto power. The UK, Australia, and New Zealand all are politically dependent on the clout that comes from their "special relationship" with the U.S. and are usually reliable military allies of the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel was pressured into not retaliating for Iraqi rocket launches, in a humiliating diplomatic comeuppance, for fear of alienating American allies.
The war was an open massacre of largely unarmed, often fleeing Iraqis--partly because Hussein reserved his best military forces to use against his own people. Hussein set afire Kuwaiti oil wells causing senseless environmental destruction, while coalition forces destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, planning for a containment strategy that would reap big profits for oil speculators, lawyers, and arms dealers while leaving Iraqis with poor access to medicine, clean water, and electricity for years. In the aftermath, Palestinians were massacred in Kuwait, Shi'ites in Iraq, and Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.
The next major war was in Bosnia, the largest war on European soil since WWII. Above all else, this war, ostensibly between rival gangs spawned from Yugoslavia's ruling Stalinist party, exposed the fragility of the NATO and EU alliances that had assembled coalitions against Iraq. Germany, eager to get out from under the U.S.'s shadow and create a 4th Reich where German industrial capital monopolized European production, early backed the Croatian Tudjman faction. France, jealous of German power, found itself supporting Karadzic's Serb forces, in alliance with Russia, which sought a reunification of Yugoslavia under a corrupt Chetnik pro-Russian regime. As it happened, the Serb and Croat militias, in that order, were responsible for most of the atrocities of that war. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia being carved up into rival spheres of influence, began backing the Bosniak Muslim forces just enough to keep the Serb forces from dominating, while military strategy pushed Serb and Croat forces toward alliance. Meanwhile, the U.S. let its rivals in Europe bleed their treasuries for months, while lives were lost in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, until it saw its political fortunes served by intervention which would humiliate its rivals and create a new Balkan regime that, while it did little directly for the U.S., preserved a balance of power among its European rivals.
Liberals like to say, "When Clinton lied, no one died." In fact, his lies about the length of the Bosnian intervention paved the way for a war that cost thousands of lives and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe.
Around the same time as this war was Russia's bloody war on Chechnya, demonstrating that the Russian rulers had kept Stalinism's brutal murder machine while discarding its verbal commitment to the oppressed. The use of chemical weapons and spies in this war helped pave the way for the war on Afghanistan, and the scapegoating of Muslims prefigured the "war on terror" of countless powers.
Russia's successful war against Chechen children and peasants also was symptomatic of the defeats of guerrillas around the world--the IRA, ETA, PLO, Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, CPN (Maoist), Communist Party of the Philippines, and EZLN have all been dealt major blows by the governments they fought, usually after years of alienating themselves by their thuggish ways, and after a strategy focused on permanent war, not the conquest of power, kept them from capitalizing on their victories. Often in the wake of defeat they've been drawn into an appearance of sharing power (Maoists in Nepal, Sinn Fein in N. Ireland) at the cost of compromising on the very issues that impelled them to war in the first place. The biggest success of guerrilla warfare recently, the S. African revolution, was unlike most of these an urban-led movement with mass support in urban and rural areas in S. Africa and tremendous popular sympathy around the world, largely the fruit of correct political decisions by the ANC, COSATU, and the Communist Party.
Central Africa and the Sudan region also presented us with a spectacle of the horrors of modern war, complete with genocide, mass rape, and cannibalism. One of the most notorious examples is in Rwanda, where in a case of the plunge of rightist politics toward the gutter, the racist Hutu government was overthrown by an even more virulently racist Hutu faction. The Hutu/Tutsi divide , created by the Belgian colonizers but also roughly reflecting the historical rivalry between mostly Hutu farmers and mostly Tutsi herders, erupted in carnage in this impoverished country which notably also has one of the world's highest population densities. France and Belgium, hopeful of using the warfare to reassert their control, essentially endorsed the rampage of the dominant Hutu forces, as did the Catholic church which had several powerful Hutu archbishops and a vested interest in reasserting Hutu power. The U.S. didn't intervene, simply enough, because its interests were adequately served by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans seen as "taking up space" and the embarrassment of its European rivals.
Tutsi refugees led the popular movement to overthrow wealthy, corrupt, CIA-connected dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but ongoing struggles between farmers and herders, rising demand for central African resources, the Cold War proliferation of militia groups supplied by the great powers, and and the absence of a proletarian movement in central Africa, resulted in a bloody, atrocious free-for-all struggle for cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, aluminum, coltan, and other resources that would eventually kill more people than any other war since WWII. This scramble dragged in half a dozen neighboring governments, and, although the highest-intensity conflict ended with the military defeat and exhaustion of Rwanda, it spawned violence that continues today. Imperialist powers largely ignored the war, both because they didn't care much which militia sold goods to them if the prices were OK, and because rival industries supported different parts of the country and the militias based there.
The war on Sudan has older roots, dating back to the Soviet Union's support for Khartoum when Egypt and Ethiopia were U.S.-dominated, and the U.S.'s support when Ethiopia and Libya were dominated by the Soviets. The Sudanese leaders sought to use their war chests, anti-Christian demagogy, and rivalries between southen tribes of cattle herders and smugglers to establish firm control over S. Sudan's oil fields and establish itself as a regional power. This war fed into and was fed by similar major wars in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, but has received more attention partly for the largely Christian composition of the resistance vs. A Muslim government, partly for the media savvy of the rebels, partly owing to the large al-Qaeda presence in Sudan in the 1990s, and partly for Sudan's oil wealth, central location, and sheer size. Early in the war, Sudan was heavily subsidized by the U.S., still thinking in terms of its Cold War rivalry with the USSR. The Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia meanwhile aided the rebels in hopes of keeping a strong rival from building up on the border. So did Israel, at that time hopeful of building up a power center in E. Africa, and Uganda, which hoped to seize S. Sudan for itself. When Eritrea gained independence and was fighting its own bloody war with Ethiopia, it bribed the rebels to turn on the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, villages, tribes, and language communities in S. Sudan were wiped out with systematic ruthlessness by Khartoum and allied militias.
The S. Sudanese rebels financed propaganda and provocations designed to drag disaffected people in Darfur into war against Sudan, thus relieving pressure on the south. (They did similar things in E. Sudan). Many people conflate the two Sudanese conflicts, believing for example that most Darfurians are Christian, when in fact Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a slave-trading sultanate in early modern times. These conflicts intensified when starving Arabs, excluded from traditional grazing grounds by considerations of rebel military strategy, were recruited as mercenaries against the mostly "Black" tribes fueling the rebellion. (In fact, the Arabs, of mixed Black-Arab ancestry, would in most contexts also be identified as Black by most Americans.) Sudan was aided primarily by Eritrea, which as a result of spillover from the war on the eastern front had become enemies with tribes that were also fighting the Sudanese, while Libya, always alert for opportunities to expand its power southward, and Chad, serving as Libya's proxy, backed the Darfur rebels. Indeed, Chad helped precipitate the rebellion by funding incursions aimed at Sudanese targets.
Next in this series: the American strike on the al-Shifa plant and its aftermath.
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