Stephen Gowans is a Canadian blogger. You can find much thought-provoking material at:

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/

 

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Ignatieff’s mea culpa

 

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/ignatieff%e2%80%99s-mea-culpa/

 

Even in apologizing for backing the war, Ignatieff defends “imperialism lite”

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

Former Harvard professor and now Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff is admitting he made a mistake in backing the 2003 US invasion of Iraq (1). But not because the invasion was based on a fraud, but because the humanitarian goals he and others attributed to the invasion have not been achieved.

 

Ignatieff’s mea culpa comes on the heels of an Oxfam report that paints a grim and disturbing picture of an Iraq that has become a shocking charnel house, where four million are displaced, infrastructure remains in a shambles, and poverty is rampant. More than Darfur, Iraq is a humanitarian disaster; it is an acute embarrassment for those who plumbed for war on humanitarian grounds, promising the ouster of Saddam Hussein would usher in an era of peace, prosperity and the flowering of human rights between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

 

That doesn’t mean that Igantieff is backing away from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention he and others championed to justify the “imperialism lite” that has wrought such misery in Iraq. On the contrary, his mea culpa is a defense of the thinly disguised justification for military imperialism left-liberal public intellectuals have promoted since Yugoslavia to elevate wars of conquest waged on behalf of the corporate elite to human rights crusades.

 

Ignatieff says his support for the war grew from the moment he “saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds (2).” It was at that point he became convinced that Saddam Hussein had to go, and that a war to remove him could be justified on those grounds alone. Others, including Noam Chomsky, also believed the Iraqi leader was a menace whose forced removal from power would constitute a major gain for humanity, though, to be sure, not all of those who shared this view backed the war. With hundreds of thousands dead as a result of the invasion, and a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since WWII, one wonders how many of those who invested the war with moral gravitas by demonizing the Iraqi leader, regret their craven pandering to Washington’s propaganda requirements. I suspect few do.

 

That doesn’t mean, however, that a few soft-left public intellectuals are not squirming in embarrassment. Ignatieff, for one, can no longer leave unaddressed the uncomfortable gulf between the reality of what the invasion has created and the promises of the war’s ameliorative effects the humanitarian interventionists inveigled the public into accepting.

 

Ignatieff’s error, he says, was in letting his good intentions cloud his judgment. He didn’t realize it would be so difficult to hold Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites together without “Saddam’s terror” or that it would be impossible to build a “free state” on the foundations of “35 years of police terror.” What’s more, his revulsion at Saddam’s repression of the Kurds (apparently one he doesn’t feel for the Turk’s repression of the same people, at least not enough for him to plead for a war on Turkey on humanitarian grounds) left him blinded to the reality that just “because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo (didn’t mean) it had to be doing so in Iraq.”

 

Ignatieff’s mea culpa has enough references to “Saddam’s terror” to make plain he still regards the invasion as justifiable on moral grounds (as in, it’s all right to kill 600,000 to depose one man from power, especially when he keeps giving away all the oil concessions to the wrong countries.) Moreover, his claim that US intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo represented a defense of human rights and freedom genuflects to the myths upon which the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is built. Ignatieff isn’t apologizing for “imperialism lite”; he’s defending it.

 

The United States no more defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo than it is doing today in Iraq and Afghanistan, except for the rights of those who own income-producing property and the freedom of US corporations, banks and investors to secure profitable investments, i.e., rights that are against the interests of you and me but are dearly held by those who give Ignatieff high-profile academic posts, open the op-ed pages of the New York Times to him, and encourage him with money and advice in his bid to become Canada’s prime minister.

 

Ignatieff speaks the language of the bamboozler. It is enough, he knows, to invoke the terms human rights and freedom, without in any way indicating whose rights he’s talking about and what referent he’s pairing freedom with (free to achieve what or be free from what?) to get people to at least acquiesce to the idea of war. This, George Bush, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown also know. And so, in his mea culpa, human rights and freedom get star billing. Ignatieff wants us to believe his intentions, like those of America, were good; it’s just that his zeal to promote human rights and freedom kept him from seeing that Saddam had poisoned the soil in which the US government has so painstakingly tried to plant the seeds of democracy.

 

It’s impossible to take Ignatieff seriously. His self-appointed role is to justify the US ruling class’s naked pursuit of its class interests by dressing them up in the galvanizing language of humanitarianism to bring the rest of us onboard. His job is to enlist you and me to be the dupes who will sign up to fight in, promote, or acquiesce to, wars Bechtel, Exxon-Mobil, Lockheed-Martin, Chase Manhattan and scores of wealthy investors will profit from.

 

For this he is amply rewarded with high-profile academic positions, a pulpit in high-circulation establishment newspapers, and financial backing for his dalliances with electoral politics. Were he a German in Hitler’s Germany he would be on Goebbels’s payroll, putting a humanitarian gloss on the Fuehrer’s aggressions; in Mussolini’s Italy he would be demonizing Haile Selassie, pleading for an Abyssinian invasion; and in Tojo’s Japan, he would be calling for the invasion of China to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

 

Like the sophists who hired out their forensic skills to the highest bidder, Igantieff is an intellectual whore who trades his credentials and skills of persuasion to shape public opinion in support of his patron’s wars for profits. His mea culpa is no apology; it is simply an attempt to save face now that the humanitarian disaster of Iraq has become an embarrassment that can no longer be ignored.

 

(1) Michael Ignatieff, “Getting Iraq Wrong”, The New York Times, August

5, 2007.

(2) Ignatieff’s deep feelings of humanitarian solidarity extend only to ethnic minorities whose plights Washington uses as a pretext to intervene in the affairs of other countries. Ignatieff feels sympathy for the Muslim community of Bosnia and ethnic Albanian Kosovars, but not for Palestinians or Lebanese. During the summer, 2006 Israel re-invasion of southern Lebanon, Ignatieff dismissed deaths of Lebanese civilians by Israeli forces as something “he wasn’t losing sleep over.” Globe and Mail, August 31, 2006.

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Divide et Impera

 

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/divide-et-impera/

 

The US is using a hoary imperial tactic dating back to the Romans to dominate Iraq and to justify a long-term military presence in the country

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

A US-financed program to build a Sunni paramilitary Guardian organization in Iraq, and US proposals for a soft partition of the country, are the latest steps in a divide and rule strategy the US is pursuing to keep Iraqis fighting among themselves so they won’t fight the occupation. Sectarian strife also provides the US with the pretext it needs to establish a long-term military presence in the country.

 

The US occupation authority has made ethnicity and religion salient in Iraq, where once it was a matter of little moment in the daily political lives of Iraqis. The US organized elections and the army along sectarian lines. It decided which parties could run in elections, favoring those that emphasized religious affiliations (Sunni vs. Shia) and ethnicity (Arab vs. Kurd), while banning the largest non-sectarian party, the Baath party. Key government positions were doled out along sectarian lines. The interior ministry was turned over to the Badr Brigade, a sectarian Shia paramilitary organization. From head to toe, Iraq has been transformed from a secular society into one in which religious and ethnic identity matter. Imagine the Department of Homeland Security being turned over to the KKK, the Pentagon to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, while the Democrat and Republican parties are banned and replaced by religious and ethnic parties. If ever there was a recipe to get people fighting among themselves, this is it.

 

The most recent manifestation of the US divide and rule policy is a program to create a Sunni paramilitary Guardian force whose mandate is to protect Sunni neighborhoods (1). Imagine Washington creating a Black paramilitary Guardian force, a White paramilitary Guardian force, and a Hispanic paramilitary Guardian force in the US. The effect in sparking racial tension would be the same.

 

Now, some US policy makers are talking about partitioning Iraq into Kurd, Sunni and Shia regions. Leading advocates include senior politicians and US ruling class foundations. Joseph Biden, chairman of the US Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination endorses “soft” partition, as does Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (2). Last year, the two put together the Biden-Gelb plan, which calls for a “soft” partition of Iraq. Soft partition would see Iraq divided into three distinct ethno-religious regions: Kurdistan, Shiastan and Sunnistan, held together by a weak federal government.

 

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues the “time may be approaching when the only hope for a more stable Iraq is soft partition (3).” The Brookings Institution, associated with the Rockefellers, is one of the most influential US ruling class policy-making organizations.

 

Western politicians portray Iraq as a country whose simmering sectarian tensions were held in check by the brutal repression of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who ruled on behalf of the Sunni population and its political vehicle, the Baath party. It’s only now that Mr. Hussein’s tyranical rule has ended that sectarian conflict has slipped its restraints and come to the surface. At least, that’s the favored US view. Trouble is, it’s a crock of shit. When “the Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy government posts,” 66,000 of them turned out to be Shiites (4). And anyone who cared to check the deck of cards used to list the 55 top Iraqi officials the US invasion force wanted dead or alive, would discover that half were Shiite, and the remainder a mix of Sunnis, Christians and Kurds (5).

 

The former Ottoman territory that is now Iraq was governed as a single territory before 1880. The three provinces that were pieced together in 1921 to form modern Iraq had no “clear sectarian identities (6).” “For much of Iraq’s history, the two communities (Shia and Sunni) co-existed peacefully (7).”

 

Partitioning the country would be no mean feat. “The geographic boundaries do not run toward partition. There is no Sunnistan or Shiastan.” On the contrary, conditions are “highly commingled” with people “totally intermixed, especially in the major cities (8).” Five million Iraqis would have to be moved were the country to be divided into homogeneous ethno-religious slices (9).

 

More importantly, most Iraqis don’t want their country partitioned. “Apart from the Kurds in the north, there is no unanimous, popular demand for federalism or soft partition or any partition at all (10).”

 

The 1920 Revolution Brigades, one of three resistance groups to form the political office of the Iraqi resistance, rejects the idea of a sectarian division in Iraq. “Our position,” says its spokesman, “is that there are two kinds of people in Iraq: not Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab, Muslim and Christian, but those who are with the occupation and those who are against it (11).” Sectarian divisions in Iraq have been amplified, he says, “as part of the ‘British imperial tactic of divide and rule (12).’”

 

The British employed the Roman principle of divide et impera to enslave colonial peoples. The US has taken up the tradition. “Our endeavour,” remarked Lieutenant-Colonel Coke, Commandant of Moradabad during the middle of the nineteenth century, “should be to uphold in full force the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions and races, not to endeavour to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the principle of Indian government (13).” Lord Elphinstone, Governer of Bombay, seconded the motion. “Divide et impera was the old Romon motto, and it should be ours (14).”

 

Adumbrating US imperial tactics in Iraq, the British devised a system of separate electorates in India and separate representation by religion, caste and ethnicity. Sound familiar? “The effect of this electoral policy,” observed one commentator, was “to give the sharpest possible stimulus to communal antagonism (15).” Prior to British rule in India there was no trace of the type of Hindu-Muslim conflict that later emerged under British rule (16).

 

“There is no natural inevitable difficulty from the cohabiting of differing races or religions in one country (17).” Mulsim and Hindu lived side-by-side peacefully until the British arrived in India; Sunni and Shiite commingled peacefully before the US imposed its occupation on the country. “The difficulties arise from social-political conditions. They arise, in particular, whenever a reactionary regime is endeavouring to maintain itself against the popular movement (18).”

 

In the USSR, diverse religions and races lived together amicably. Germans and Jews lived together peacefully under Germany’s Weimar Republic. It wasn’t until the Nazis emphasized national identity to weaken growing working class consciousness that systematic persecution of Jews began.

 

The strategy is simple. The last thing an occupying power wants is for the people it’s dominating to recognize their common situation and interests. Were they to do that, they might mobilize their energies to fight their common enemy. So occupied countries are organized by their occupiers along color, religious and ethnic fault-lines. Iraqis mustn’t think of themselves as Iraqis, but as Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, locked in a struggle with each other for access to resources.

 

The same is true within imperialist countries. People who work for a living mustn’t identify with their class, but with their ethnic, religious or racial cohorts, or must be imbued with patriotism, so that they equate their personal interests with those of their ruling class. In this way, Americans and Britons who have nothing to gain personally from their country’s occupation of Iraq, and much to lose, are bamboozled into supporting the war. Likewise, employees who have much to gain from coming together as a class are diverted by racism, religion and patriotism.

 

Another thing the US divide et impera tactic provides is an excuse to maintain a military presence in Iraq, and therefore, the continued domination of Iraq by Washington. For liberals, the argument that the US can’t leave Iraq now, otherwise a full-scale civil war will erupt, is decisive. But what this view ignores is that the possibility of a full-scale civil war is the product of the occupation itself. Had the US not fomented ethnic and religious divisions, the possibility of a civil war would never have arisen. On the other hand, were the US to cease efforts to pit Iraqi against Iraqi, the occupation – already greatly challenged by the resistance, despite US divide and rule tactics – would surely be defeated, an outcome the US will never willingly consent to. Soft partition, then, seems to those seeking both sectarian peace and US withdrawal, to be the answer. But slicing the country up into Sunnistan, Shiastan and Kurdistan, won’t set the stage for a US pull-out. On the contrary, “senior military planners caution that should partition become American policy, withdrawal almost certainly wouldn’t. Partition would require a stabilization force – code for American military presence – of 75,000 to 100,000 troops for years to come (19).” Heads I win, tails you lose. No matter what, the US figures to be hanging around Iraq for a long time, using sectarian tensions as the justification for its ongoing presence. What will foil these plans are non-sectarian groups, like the 1920 Revolution Brigades, that recognize there are only two kinds of people in Iraq: those who are with the occupation and those who are against it.

 

1. New York Times, August 19, 2007.

2. The CFR brings together CEOs, government and military officials and scholars, to recommend policy to the US State Department. The policy recommendations are typically responses to problems identified in corporate boardrooms, or exclusive clubs catering to the ultra-wealthy. The State Department relies on very little internal expertise, and uses the ruling class funded, directed and staffed think tanks and foundations to suggest policy. The CFR is the most important and influential of these organizations in matters of US foreign relations. See G. William Dumhoff, Who Rules America? McGraw-Hill, 2005.

3. New York Times, August 19, 2007.

4. Workers World, February 11, 2007.

5. Ibid.

6. Reidar Visser, who studies Iraq’s sectarian issues at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, quoted in New York Times, August19, 2007.

7. New York Times, March 26, 2006.

8. Joost Hilterman, deputy director of Middle East programs for the International Crisis Group, quoted in New York Times, August 19, 2007.

9. New York Times, August 19, 2007.

10. Hilterman.

11. Guardian (UK), July 19, 2007.

12. Ibid.

13. R. Palme Dutt, The Problem of India, International Publishers, New York, 1943, p. 98.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 101.

16. Ibid. p. 97.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. New York Times, August 19, 2007.

 

Update

 

According to a December 19, 2007 Washington Post article (All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows) “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.”

 

“D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces…showed in a survey conducted in September the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by military focus groups: that a US departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.”

 

“Few focus group participants mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems.”

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Faith in UN Intervention in Darfur Misplaced

 

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/faith-in-un-intervention-in-darfur-misplaced/

 

 

August 7, 2007

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

Many Western activists have rallied around calls for sanctions on Sudan and UN intervention in Darfur. But a review of recent Western interventions in the world’s trouble spots suggests their faith is misplaced. While the US and its allies, and the UN Security Council, point to lofty goals as the basis for their interventions, the true goals are invariably shaped by the economic interests of the corporations and investment banks that dominate policy making in Western countries. Worse, intervention has typically led to the deterioration of humanitarian crises, not their amelioration.

 

Conflict as Pretext

 

The United States and other imperialist powers look for conflicts, or provoke conflicts, in countries they do not dominate politically. They use these conflicts as pretexts to intervene in other countries in multiple ways: militarily, through proxies (which may include the UN), by funding an internal opposition, or by some combination of these means. The goal is to exploit these countries economically. Political control, through a strongman or puppet government, allows great nations to protect and enlarge the investments of their corporations and banks and to open doors to their exports. That is, the United States and other imperialist powers are engaged in a relentless pursuit of political domination of countries they do not currently dominate, in order to exploit their resources, assets and markets, by creating or looking for conflicts that provide pretexts for intervention.

 

In Yugoslavia, the US, Germany and the UK encouraged secessionists to unilaterally declare independence from the Yugoslav federation and helped ethnic Albanian Kosovars wage a guerrilla war to establish Kosovo as an independent country. The ensuing conflicts with the federal government were used as a pretext by NATO to intervene militarily to bring the conflicts to an end. The secessionist governments and KLA guerrillas were portrayed by the Western media as the victims while the federal government, which was reacting to the provocations, was portrayed as the instigator. The result was that Yugoslavia was re-balkanized and brought under the control of the US and Germany, who have since imposed a neo-liberal tyranny and whose corporations, banks and wealthy investors have bought up the former federation’s state- and socially-owned assets. (1)

 

In Iraq, the US uses the conflict between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as a pretext to remain in the country as an occupying force. Were troops withdrawn too early, we’re told that an all-out civil war would ensue (as if a state of all-out war, sustained by the presence of US and British troops, does not already exist.) Likewise, we’re assured that if troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan, al Qaeda will resume its use of the country as a base for its operations, leading to a string of 9/11s. More than a decade ago, the US provoked a conflict in the Gulf – or at least allowed one to go ahead – when Iraq wasn’t turned down by the US ambassador, April Gillespie, after it sought permission to invade Kuwait. Iraq was thereby entrapped into undertaking an invasion Washington used as a pretext to launch the Gulf War. The effect was to begin the process of bringing Iraq, and its considerable petroleum resources, under the control of the US. (2)

 

Sudan is not today under US political control, and like Iraq, is a source of immense oil reserves and the potential for gargantuan petroleum profits to be reaped by foreign oil companies. The Bush administration complains that the Sudanese government interferes in Sudan’s petroleum and petrochemical industries. Khartoum is not, then, a partisan of the three freedoms that matter most in Washington: free trade, free enterprise and free markets. This, from Washington’s point of view, is a threat to US foreign policy (i.e., corporate) interests. If Sudanese policy prevents US oil companies from exploiting the country’s oil resources, Sudan is a threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States. Accordingly, it must be treated as an enemy. And indeed it is an enemy – but only an enemy of the class of corporate board members, hereditary capitalist families and investment bankers in whose interest free trade, free enterprise and free markets are promoted and enforced. Sudan, its people, and the economically nationalist policies of its government are not, however, enemies of the bulk of Americans. (3)

 

There are existing conflicts in Darfur which the US and its allies have used to argue for Western intervention. There is a conflict over water and land between sedentary and nomadic peoples, made worse by desertification. There is a conflict between rebel groups, which have attacked government installations, and the government itself. And there is a conflict among rebel groups. These conflicts are used by the US and its allies as pretexts to impose sanctions and to argue for intervention. But the US is no more interested in resolving these conflicts than it was in resolving conflicts in Yugoslavia. It’s interested in dominating Sudan politically, so that US and British oil companies can amass huge profits from Sudan’s vast petroleum reserves.

 

A record of deception

 

There was no genocide in Kosovo. When forensic pathologists went looking for the scores of thousands of bodies NATO said were hidden throughout Kosovo, they found two thousand – a number that was consistent with a small scale guerrilla war, not a campaign of genocide. But after NATO intervened militarily with a 78-day bombing campaign, thousands fled, bridges, factories, schools and hospitals were destroyed and hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians were killed. What was a low intensity guerrilla war was turned into a humanitarian crisis by NATO. (4)

 

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But after the US and Britain invaded, some 600,000 Iraqis died as a result of violence provoked by the invasion, four million fled their homes, poverty became rampant and infrastructure destroyed by US and British bombs remained in a state of disrepair. A once modern country that had used its oil revenues to develop itself economically and to build a robust system of social welfare was turned by the US and Britain into an almost peerless humanitarian disaster. (5)

 

According to the UN commission appointed to investigate Washington’s charges that the Sudanese government is pursing a policy of genocide, the accusations have no foundation. It’s true, the commission found, that Khartoum has responded disproportionately to attacks on government forces by rebel groups, and it’s true that Khartoum is implicated in war crimes, but the commission found no evidence the Sudanese government is engaged in the project of seeking to eliminate an identifiable group, the defining characteristic of a policy of genocide. As far as humanitarian disasters go, the disaster in Iraq is far worse. So who would trust the perpetrators of that disaster – who, after all lied about there being a genocide in Kosovo and banned weapons in Iraq -- to intervene in Darfur to resolve the humanitarian crisis there? That would be like giving your car keys to a known thief and pathological liar. (6)

 

Ignoring conflicts

 

The other side of the coin is that there are countries the United States already dominates in which terrible humanitarian disasters and human rights violations occur about which very little is said. When conflicts occur in these countries, the conflicts are ignored by the Western media, because they’re not needed as a pretext for intervention by Western governments. In fact, it’s in the interests of Washington that these conflicts not be brought to the attention of the public.

 

In Ethiopia, for example, thousands of members of the opposition were imprisoned after elections were disputed. Recently, the government threatened to execute dozens of opposition leaders on treason charges. Foreign reporters and human rights groups have been expelled from the country. Because Ethiopia is politically dominated by the US, there’s no reason to bring its deplorable record to the public’s attention. There is no need to build a case for intervention. Ethiopia is already under the US thumb. Accordingly, few people know anything about what’s going in the country because Ethiopia is off the Western media’s demonization radar screen. But they are likely to know about Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, who many believe has committed all the crimes Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, has committed. Except Mugabe hasn’t arrested thousands of members of the opposition or threatened to execute the opposition’s leaders. The difference between Zenawi and Mugabe is that Zenawi is a US puppet and Mugabe isn’t. For opposing imperialist meddling in southern Africa and seeking to indigenize Zimbabwe’s economy, Mugabe is in the dead center of the West’s demonization radar screen. (7)

 

There are about half a million people displaced in Somalia as a result of an invasion by Ethiopia, undertaken at the behest of the US government. This is a humanitarian disaster created by a US proxy. There is no Save Somalia Campaign. (8)

 

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is a conflict provoked by the former intervention of US proxies Rwanda and Uganda that has led to the deaths of four million people since 1997. The 200,000 deaths in Darfur (80 percent from starvation and disease; 20 percent from violence) are dwarfed by the millions of deaths in DR Congo. But while there’s a Save Darfur campaign, there is no Save Congo campaign. (9)

 

The solution to Darfur

 

If UN intervention in Darfur isn’t a solution – and it isn’t -- what is? While it sometimes seems that the UN is a neutral body that democratically decides how to resolve conflicts, that’s not what the UN really is. The UN, in all important respects, is the UN Security Council, a small group of mainly imperialist powers who do what imperialist countries do: try to divide the world up among themselves. The United States, the dominant member of the Security Council, has no interest in resolving the conflict in Darfur. It’s interested in establishing a permanent military presence to wrest control of Sudan’s oil from the Sudanese government. If the US can induce other countries to commit troops to carry out its objectives, so much the better. Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a UN military mission to secure the US goal of bringing Sudan under US domination is a welcome development in Washington.

 

It should be clear that the record of UN and NATO interventions is one in which small conflicts are turned into humanitarian disasters. Gordon Brown, the prime minister of Britain, says Darfur is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster. There are 200,000 dead in Darfur but there are probably 600,000 dead in Iraq. There are four million refugees in Iraq and far fewer in Darfur. (10)

 

Liberal public intellectuals like Michael Ignatieff, the former Harvard professor and now aspirant to the job of Canadian prime minister, said a war needed to be waged on Iraq because of what Saddam did to the Kurds. US military intervention under the authorization of the UN was supposed to deliver peace, prosperity, human rights and democracy between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. What it delivered was something far worse than when Saddam was around. (11)

 

The solution to Darfur is to stop pressuring the US government to intervene in Sudan and start pressuring the one rebel group that won’t sign a peace accord to do so. Khartoum has sat down with the rebel groups to work out a peace deal and one group has refused to even participate in the talks. Conflicts cannot be resolved if one side is uninterested in peace. Nor can they be resolved if powerful forces are using the conflicts as pretexts to invade and impose sanctions.

 

If pressure is imposed on the hold-out rebels to arrive at a peace with Khartoum, and peace ensues, what then? Will the activists who agitated for Western intervention in Darfur turn their attention to rescuing the Congo from its humanitarian crisis? Will grassroots pressure be brought to bear on Ethiopia to withdraw from Somalia? And what of Iraq? Will the same people who worked themselves up into high moral dudgeon over Darfur demand immediate withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq? Shouldn’t they demand this first? After all, the dimensions of the Iraq disaster are worse than those of the Darfur disaster, and it is the activists’ own governments that have authored the larger disaster. One would think Americans and Britons would give priority to working for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, rather than channelling their energies into pressing the governments that lied about and created tragedies in Yugoslavia and Iraq to intervene in yet another oil-rich country. Activists have an obligation to understand the institutional patterns of behaviour of their own governments, to inquire into the forces that shape those patterns, and to prevent emotion from undermining reason and analysis. It does no good to allow our own governments and media to mobilize our energies to work on behalf of imperialist goals, while diverting us from projects that are legitimately in the interests of the bulk of humanity.

 

(1) Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation, Verso, 2002; Elise Hugus, “Eight Years After NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’: Serbia’s new ‘third way’”, Z Magazine, April 2007, Volume 20, Number 4.

(2) David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, 2005.

(3) Nativdad Carrera, “U.S. imperialists increase efforts to recolonize Sudan,” Party for Socialism and Liberation, November 3, 2006, http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5949

(4) Parenti; Stephen Gowans, “Genocide or Veracicide: Will NATO's Lying Ever Stop?” Swans, July 23, 2001, http://www.swans.com/library/art7/gowans02.html

(5) Stephen Gowans, “The Unacknowledged Humanitarian Disaster,” What’s Left, August 1, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/the-unacknowledged-humanitarian-disaster/

(6) Stephen Gowans, “Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and the Politics of Naming,” What’s Left, July 9, 2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/ethiopia-zimbabwe-and-the-politics-of-naming/

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) The Unacknowledged Humanitarian Disaster

(11) Stephen Gowans, “Ignatieff’s Mea Culpa,” What’s Left, August 5,

2007, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/ignatieff%e2%80%99s-mea-culpa/

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Sicko By Stephen Gowans

 

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/sicko/

 

 

July 12, 2007

 

Michael Moore’s Sicko is an entertaining and emotionally compelling film. It exposes the harshness of profit-based healthcare to the majority of Americans, and does so in the film-maker’s accustomed engaging way. There is no one as deft in connecting on issues of concern to the left and ordinary people with as large an audience as Moore. On this, he has no peer.

 

While the film has been labelled controversial by the US media, it is anything but. Few Americans would disagree with the thesis of the film – that for them a program of universal healthcare would be far better than the current profit-based system.

 

What controversy the film has generated has been confined to those in whose interest universal healthcare is inimical: insurance companies whose profits would suffer grievously were universal healthcare adopted; banks, investors and corporations, who have an interest in shrinking the commons, not seeing it expanded; and the media, which – owned by the same class -- reliably promotes its interests.

 

Media pundits accuse Moore of fudging the facts, warn Americans that Canada, France, Britain and Cuba (countries whose healthcare systems are highlighted in the film) are not healthcare paradises, and stress that free healthcare for all is not free, but comes with crushing taxes. (It is not pointed out, however, that the taxes are mainly shouldered by those most able to pay, i.e., the same people sounding the alarm about universal healthcare.)

 

For a Canadian who knows something about the single-payer health insurance plan Moore idolizes, the US media campaign against Moore’s film is a transparent propaganda offensive whose goal it is to discredit Moore and universal healthcare. It’s true the Canadian system has flaws – fatal ones if you believe the US media spin -- but the flaws US scare-mongers cite have nothing whatever to do with the system itself, and everything to do with what Canadian politicians have spent the last two decades doing: under-funding the system to make Canadians increasingly dissatisfied so they’ll demand the wonders of the US for-profit system CNN is always touting and investors privately clamor for.

 

The fact of the matter is that the US spends considerably more per capita on healthcare than Canada does, and yet healthcare outcomes for ordinary people are better in Canada. The US spends infinitely more than Cuba does, but only manages to place a few notches higher on healthcare rankings. That the richest country in the world only manages to edge out a Third World country – and one it has spent the last four and half decades trying to strangle economically -- says (1) much for Cuba’s system, (2) unless your wealthy, the US for-profit system sucks and (3) the Cuban system in an industrialized country would -- by comparison to what’s available today -- be the “healthcare nirvana” the US media warns doesn’t exist.

 

While Moore has cogently exposed the deep flaws of the US for-profit healthcare system, his comments to the media on what Americans should do to secure a better system are less compelling.

 

In a testy exchange with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Moore suggested that “the people (who) have gone to my movie, the people that are concerned about this issue … write to Mrs. Clinton and say, please, universal healthcare that’s free for everyone who lives in this country.”

 

In response to the charge that the government is incapable of competently administering healthcare, Moore counters that there’s nothing wrong with the government, only with the people who get elected.

 

The implied solutions are straight out of Moore’s high school civics class textbook. Vote, write letters, be informed. If we press for universal healthcare, and elect the right people, we’ll get what we ask for.

 

But a deeper analysis would ask two questions:

 

Why is it that the “right” people rarely, if ever, get elected?

 

Why did Hilary Clinton’s proposal for healthcare reform die 14 years ago?

 

Contrary to what Moore and others learned in their high school civics classes, the US political system is not democratic, but plutocratic. It is minimally responsive to the interests of the majority of people, but maximally responsive to the interests of the slim minority that owns and controls the economy, and is able, by virtue of its ownership and control position, to command the resources that allow it to tilt the playing field decidedly in its own favor. Sure, there are elections, and most everyone is free to vote. But those who have money – and lots of it -- can dominate the system. And who has lots of money?

 

Money power plays an overwhelming role in selecting candidates to stand for election, and not surprisingly, those candidates who are best able to command the considerable financial backing needed to get elected lean towards looking after the interests of the wealthy people and corporations cutting the checks. As a Canadian prime minister once said of politicians elected in capitalist democracies, “You dance with the one who brought you to the dance.”

 

Moore himself points to the subversive role money plays in politics. Hilary Clinton, who has reconciled herself to the monstrosity of the US healthcare system, is one of the largest recipients of insurance industry backing. Moore’s website calls her a leading “Sicko for Sale.”

 

So why does the film-maker think that people writing letters to beseech a co-opted Clinton for free healthcare is going to make a difference, especially when, as Moore acknowledges, 14 years ago the insurance industry “went after her” and “stopped her cold”? What has changed in 14 years to deny the insurance industry the power to stop (or co-opt) champions of universal healthcare?

 

Moore also genuflected to the nonsense he learned in high school civics classes when he scolded Wolf Blitzer and the US media for not doing their job in acting as an unofficial opposition, not safeguarding the public interest, and “not bringing the truth to (Americans) that isn’t sponsored by some major corporation.”

 

Like other liberals, Moore is aggrieved that the US and its institutions don’t live up to their rhetoric, believing that through pressure and moral suasion, politicians, CEOs, and the media can be forced to hew to civics textbook ideals.

 

But where, outside of the nonsense kids are force-fed in school, does it say the media have to be an unofficial opposition? And where does it say the media have to behave in a manner that puts the mission of informing the public ahead of their first and only obligation – to make profits for their owners?

 

CNN, FOX, The New York Times and other major media are under no obligation to ask tough questions of US leaders, to act in the public interest (is there a public interest that reconciles the conflicting interests of class?) or to “tell the truth to Americans that isn’t sponsored by some major corporation.” As businesses, their only obligation is to their owners, and their owners’ interests are decidedly at odds with those of the people who go to Moore’s films.

 

Call it a class-issue. If you deploy capital to generate profits, you have interests opposed to those of Moore’s audiences: war for oil profits versus not dying as a grunt in Iraq; the profits to be secured from private healthcare versus the security of free healthcare; a media that instils an ideology congenial to your profit-making interests versus one that challenges it.

 

Notwithstanding Moore’s complaints, Blitzer and other journalists haven’t failed to do their jobs. They’ve performed remarkably well. What Moore hasn’t figured out is that there isn’t a public interest for Blitzer to serve, only class interests. And since it’s not white and blue collar workers who own CNN, but the owners of Time-Warner who do, Blitzer isn’t working for us. He’s working for people who have an interest in private, for-profit healthcare, an aggressive foreign policy that’s good for business, and any other policy that takes money, wealth, labor and sweat from you, me, Iraqis, Venezuelans, Cubans and so on, and gives it to them.

 

Moore has also shown a certain blindness when it comes to Canada. On Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Moore pointed favourably to Canada for not invading other countries and for operating a healthcare system Moore believes the US should adopt.

 

Canada’s healthcare system, while preferable to that of the US, still comes up short against Cuba’s. Moore explored the relative merits of the US, Canadian and Cuban healthcare systems in a “healthcare Olympics” segment of his former TV program TV Nation. While network censors forced Moore to declare Canada the winner, the film-maker admitted that Cuba had really won. If Cuba’s system is better (and it is) why endorse Canada’s?

 

As to Moore’s lionizing Canada for not invading other countries, he’s under the spell of an illusion.

 

• Canada took part in the UN “police action” in Korea in the 50s, which saw a US-led coalition invade the Korean peninsula to put down a national liberation movement operating in both the north and south.

 

• Canada is part of a force that invaded Haiti after its president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was ousted by US intrigues.

 

• Canadian troops are occupying Afghanistan. Since US forces kicked down the door, and were never invited in, Canada’s occupation – which frees up US military resources to concentrate on the occupation of Iraq -- is in any practical sense an invasion.

 

It might also be pointed out that Canada doesn’t play in the same league as the US and Britain when it comes to invading other countries, not because Canadians are peace-loving, but because Canada doesn’t have the military heft to mimic its neighbour to the south. Canada is driven by the same profit-making imperatives that impel US and British policy makers to use force, subversion, economic pressure, diplomacy and civil society to secure export and investment opportunities in other countries. Had Canada its neighbor’s military muscle it would just as ardently use bombers, missiles and tanks to kick down foreign doors.

 

Moore’s film, Sicko, is to be commended for the entertaining and engaging way it addresses an important issue. But the film-maker’s high-school civics class understanding of system, and his naïve illusions about Canada, leave much to be desired.

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Will Sudan be Re-Colonized?

 

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/will-sudan-be-re-colonized/

 

 

June 14, 2007

 

Filed under: Darfur, Humanitarian Intervention, Sudan

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

The United States is maneuvering to introduce a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur, as a first step to securing control of the region’s vast supply of oil. US control of Darfur’s petroleum resources would deliver highly profitable investment opportunities to US firms, and scuttle China’s investment in the region, thereby slowing the rise of a strategic competitor whose continued industrial growth depends on secure access to foreign oil. Washington is using highly exaggerated charges of genocide as a justification for a UN intervention it would dominate, while at the same time opposing a workable peacekeeping plan acceptable to the Sudanese government that would see the current African Union mission in Darfur expand.

 

While Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is often presented as obstinately opposing the introduction of peacekeepers into Darfur, Sudan has already accepted an AU force, urges the strengthening of the current AU mission, but opposes its replacement by Western troops. Bashir’s fear is that a Western military presence will become permanent, and that Sudan — the first country south of the Sahara to gain independence — will be the first country to be re-colonized.

 

His fears can’t be dismissed.

 

There is no shortage of turmoil in Darfur for Western trouble-makers to exploit. Conflicts over water and grazing land have raged for decades between sedentary farmers and nomadic tribes. And now there’s a new flashpoint: who will reap the benefits of the region’s new found oil resources?

 

In other places, the practice of the United States, Britain, Germany and other Western powers has been to inflame tensions within countries whose resources and cheap labor make them attractive targets for economic take-over, or whose public policies block or impose conditions on foreign investment and trade. The turmoil is often used as a pretext for intervention. While the real reasons for intervention are inextricably bound up with profit-making opportunities, the stated reasons are invariably presented as being related to selfless humanitarianism. This was as true of the Nazis, who said they were intervening militarily in countries across Europe to rescue oppressed German minorities and to save the continent from communism, as it is of the United States today, which, we’re expected to believe, can’t afford to provide healthcare to all its citizens, but can spend countless billions on wars to deliver democracy and freedom to non-citizens half way across the globe.

 

Consider Yugoslavia. There the United States and Germany encouraged secessionism, and then used the ensuing conflicts as justification to establish a permanent NATO military presence, followed by the sell-off of the dismembered federation’s publicly- and socially-owned assets. While the secessionist conflicts were real, the consequences were often grossly exaggerated to justify intervention on humanitarian grounds. The tens of thousands of bodies NATO spokesmen warned would be found scattered throughout Kosovo after the 1999 78-day NATO terror bombing campaign — like the weapons of mass destruction used to justify another war – were never found. Heaps of bodies thrown to the bottom of the Trepca mines, like Iraq’s banned weapons, were inventions.

 

True to form, Washington declares the conflict in Darfur to be a genocide (another invention), a finding that compels international action, but Washington quietly reveals its true motivations in an executive order to strengthen sanctions on Sudan, which cites “the pervasive role played by the government of Sudan in Sudan’s petroleum and petrochemical industries.” Washington then declares Sudan’s control of Sudanese petroleum resources to be a threat to “U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.”

 

Two realities suggest that it is US foreign policy interests (which is to say, the interests of the banks, corporations and hereditary capitalist families which dominate policy-making in Washington), and not genocide, that shapes US policy on Sudan.

 

First, while there has unquestionably been a large number of violent deaths in Darfur, there has never been a genocide. This is not to say that Khartoum isn’t guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may be just as securely ensconced in the club of war criminal countries as the US, Britain and Israel. But on the matter of genocide, the UN Commission on Darfur was quite clear: there has been no genocide in Darfur, notwithstanding Washington’s allegations. What there has been is a disproportionate response by Khartoum to attacks by rebel groups on police stations and government buildings, and while that response has targeted entire groups, it has not been aimed at eliminating them.

 

The response of the public in the West – one based on uncritical acceptance of the genocide alarm raised by a notoriously untruthful Bush administration – speaks volumes about the power of Western governments, the media and ruling class foundations and think-tanks to selectively galvanize support for interventions in some countries, while effacing all recognition of comparable or greater levels of violent conflict and avoidable tragedy elsewhere. The number of violent deaths in Darfur (in the hundreds of thousands) is modest by the standards of other African conflicts. Fighting has claimed four million lives in the Congo since 1998. Were there ever Save Congo marches, as there were Save Darfur marches worldwide last September? Some 600,000 Iraqis are dead as a result of the US and British invasion of Iraq. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 3.7 million Iraqis are displaced, the largest refugee crisis since 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from ex-Mandate Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948. There will be no US or British-sponsored Save Iraq or al-Awda campaigns.

 

Second, Washington has systematically undermined the peacekeeping efforts of the African Union in Darfur. The AU force was raised by funds provided by the US and EU. Washington and the Europeans had struck a deal with the African Union a decade ago to underwrite interventions in the continent’s hot spots by African troops, but their promises have never been completely delivered upon. Midway through 2006, Washington announced funding would be withdrawn for the AU force in Darfur and that a stronger UN force needed to take its place. The AU force, it was lamented, had too few troops to be effective. A stronger UN force was needed. But if so, why had the US and EU not spent the money necessary to maintain an effective AU force in the first place? And why not spend the money that would go to building a larger UN force on strengthening the existing AU force? This would be acceptable to the Sudanese government. It’s happy to endorse a bulked-up AU force, but is frightened a UN force, made up of Western troops, will be used to bring about regime change and force Sudan back under a Western colonial heel.

 

A chess match is now been played out between pro-intervention members of the Security Council (the US and Britain), those opposed (China), and Khartoum, whose approval is required before UN troops can be deployed. From Khartoum’s and China’s point of view, an outright rejection of a UN mission is undesirable because it could hand Washington and London a pretext to assemble a coalition of the willing to invade Sudan. Both countries, then, have an interest in compromising on a UN peacekeeping mission, so long as it is held in check by significant AU participation. The US and Britain, on the other hand, are angling to give UN authorities as much influence as possible. These considerations can be seen in a tentative June 12 deal which would see the creation of a new peacekeeping force made up mostly of African troops, with an AU commander given operational authority, while overall authority resides with the UN. The AU commander would make decisions on the ground but UN authorities could over-ride his decisions if they disagreed. Considering the US’s history of trying to change the Sudanese government, its defining of Sudanese state control of the oil industry as a threat to US foreign policy interests, and its strategic interest in sabotaging China’s access to Darfur’s oil, it would not be long before the UN found a reason to disagree with the AU commander’s decision, and assumed full control of the mission.

 

There is indeed a very real risk that Sudan could be brought back under Western colonial domination, with a UN peacekeeping force setting the stage. The ideology of humanitarian intervention will, as has always been the case when imperialist powers seek to use force to advance the interests of their economic elites, provide the pretext.

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Another US Military Intervention

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2007/01/another-us-military-intervention.html

 

 

Thursday, January 11, 2007

 

Add Somalia to the long list of countries in which the US has intervened militarily.

 

When US-trained Ethiopian forces, accompanied by US advisers (New York Times, January 13, 2007) swept into Somalia to oust the Islamic Courts Union, they did so with the help of battlefield intelligence supplied by Uncle Sam (New York Times, December 26, 2007), with the US Fifth Fleet enforcing a naval blockade (New York Times, January 3, 2007), and with unconfirmed reports of US Marines deployed along Somalia’s border with Kenya (Globe and Mail, January 6, 2007.) Not long after, US AC-130 gunships, operating out of Djibouti, struck targets within Somalia.

 

US General John P. Abizaid flew to Ethiopia midway through December to meet with the country’s prime minister Meles Zenawi, and, one would imagine, to issue Zenawi his marching orders. Zenawi told the US proconsul that his forces could “cripple the Islamist forces ‘in one to two weeks.’” (New York Times, December 14, 2006.) Ethiopia began slipping its forces into Somalia last July, with US approval (New York Times, December 29, 2006.)

 

Abizaid is said to have responsibility for US military interests in Africa. Given that the United States lies nowhere near Africa, the idea that it has interests on the continent is a curious idea from the standpoint of geography and democracy. It is, however, perfectly understandable from the standpoint of imperialism.

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Advocating Mass Murder

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2007/01/advocating-mass-murder.html

 

 

Thursday, January 11, 2007

 

Last September, Michael Coren, a newspaper columnist for the Toronto Sun, made the case for mass murder by calling upon the US to nuke Iran (“We should nuke Iran,” The Toronto Sun, September 2, 2006).

 

No one can produce a shred of evidence to show Iran has built, is building, or wants to build nuclear weapons, but that doesn’t deter the nuclear war-mongers.

 

Still, even if there were evidence Iran was secretly working on a bomb, would a nuclear strike be justified? If Israel, India, Pakistan – to say nothing of the US, Russia, Britain, France and China – can have nukes, why not Iran?

 

According to The New York Times (January 7, 2007), the United States is planning to spend a king’s ransom to replace the warheads in its vast arsenal of nuclear WMD, despite a study that says the country’s existing warheads can be expected to work reliably for a century or more.

 

The effort “to replace the nation’s existing arsenal of aging warheads” has an “overall bill estimated at more than $100 billion.”

 

Ever since the Great Depression a mountain of surplus capital has had to be plowed into military spending to help keep the US economy afloat.

 

That’s probably why when the “main justification for the program vanished in November when a secretive federal panel known as Jason found that… many nuclear warheads aged far better than expected, with some able to work reliably for a century or more” Washington decided to go ahead with the replacement project anyway.

 

The Bush administration simply invented new reasons to justify the Brobdingnagian expenditure, an echo of its past practice of inventing new reasons to launch a land invasion of Iraq just as soon as the old reasons were refuted as nonsense.

 

Russia and China are also said to be working on new warheads to replace their existing arsenals.

 

Clearly, none of the big powers is planning on disarming, even gradually, although they’re obligated to under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which India, Pakistan and Israel, unlike Iran, refuse to sign onto.

 

Coren hasn’t paid a penalty for advocating mass murder. Instead, he continues unhindered in his mission to poison public opinion, secure in the conviction that respect for press freedoms and the voicing of opinions that mesh nicely with the current zeitgeist of overt US military imperialism will reap the reward of approbation in high places.

 

Had he advocated the bombing of the US, matters would have been very different. Consider the case of Umran Javed, “a British Muslim who led a crowd in chants of ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA’” after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons offensive to Muslims. Presumably, the chant “Bomb, bomb” alluded to small-scale terrorist bombings, which, while capable of producing considerable carnage, would not be as nearly devastating as nuclear strikes. Yet for the crime of advocating a nuclear strike on Iran in a newspaper with a circulation of tens of thousands, Coren was found guilty of nothing. Umran Jayed, on the other hand, is paying a heavy price. For the crime of advocating the bombing of Denmark and the US at a rally of a few hundred people, Jayed was found guilty by a British court of incitement to murder (Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2007.)

 

posted by Stephen Gowans at 6:03 PM

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Iraq’s Sovereignty?

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2007/01/iraqs-sovereignty.html

 

Thursday, January 11, 2007

 

When Iraq’s prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “decided to go ahead with the hanging (of Saddam Hussein) the Americans said they made no further attempts to stop it, having concluded that they could advise the Iraqis against the execution, but not prevent it if the Iraqis persisted, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty” (my italics, New York Times, January 3, 2007).

 

Given that Washington’s respect for Iraqi sovereignty hasn’t prevented an invasion, occupation and installation of a puppet government, it seems curious that respect for Iraqi sovereignty should suddenly stay Washington’s hand.

 

Libya plans to erect a statue depicting Saddam Hussein in the gallows, along with a monument to Omar Mukhtar, the religious teacher who led a two decades-long resistance to Italian colonialism early in the last century. Mukhtar was the subject of the Moustapha Akkad film, Lion of the Desert, with Anthony Quinn in the role of the resistance leader. Like Hussein, Mukthar was hanged for being on the wrong side of an imperialist power bent on outraging another nation’s sovereignty.

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Enemy to 9/10ths of Humanity Dies

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/2006/11/enemy-to-910ths-of-humanity-dies.html

 

 

Friday, November 17, 2006

 

Milton Friedman, who was instrumental in providing the intellectual justification capitalist classes needed to claw-back the reforms they had conceded to labor in the post-WWII period, has died.

 

Friedman’s neoliberalism – the idea that enterprises and markets must be free, and if they’re not, governments must intervene to make them so -- has two bookends.

 

The first is Chile, following the other 9/11 – September 11, 1973. That was the date Augusto Pinochet, backed by US companies, the CIA and Henry Kissinger, overthrew the leftist government of Salvador Allende.

 

Friedman’s intellectual janissaries, the Chicago Boys, a group of class warrior economists from the University of Chicago where Friedman taught, rushed to Chile to advise the new military government on the harsh-to-the-poor-indulgent-to-the-rich economic ideas of Friedman and his intellectual cronies Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

 

Nationalizations were reversed, public assets were sold off, natural resources were opened to untrammeled exploitation, and social security was privatized. Foreign firms were courted, indulged and guaranteed the right to repatriate profits.

 

Thirty years later neo-liberalism was brought to Iraq, also by the gun. On September 19, 2003, Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, imposed Friedman’s ideas on a country that had been brought under US suzerainty by force.

 

Bremer defined a bill of rights for foreign capital, including the right: to buy Iraq’s public enterprises; to own Iraqi businesses; to repatriate profits; to own Iraqi banks; to be free from barriers to trade and investment; and to pay little tax. To ensure foreign capital would also have the right to cheap labor, Bremer banned strikes in key sectors and severely restricted unionization.

 

Neoliberalism promised to stimulate economic growth, but failed miserably. Ever since neoliberal ideas became ideologically hegemonic in the late 70s, economic growth has slowed globally, not increased.

 

But what neoliberalism has succeeded in doing quite spectacularly is to reduce inflation (by increasing unemployment) and to distribute wealth upward. In other words, neoliberalism hasn’t made the world wealthier, but it has made those at the top richer.

 

Was Friedman an enemy to nine-tenths of humanity? In a way. But it’s not as if his ideas changed the world.

 

On the contrary, Friedman’s neoliberal ideas were plucked from obscurity (the ideas were developed in the 30s and remained on the fringes for decades) because they were congenial at a particular moment in time to the interests of the hereditary capitalist families, corporate directors and bankers whose political and economic interests were being eroded by the growing social welfare Keynesianism of the 70s.

 

Rampant inflation was reducing the value of their assets, muscular unions and progressive tax-supported social welfare programs, were cutting into their bottom lines, and colonial liberation was undermining overseas profits.

 

In boardrooms and private clubs, it was clear something had to be done.

 

Social welfare Keynesianism, which had been made possible by the high growth rates of the post war era (the growth had been stimulated by the pent-up demand from the war years, the development of the automobile industry and its multiplier effect in stimulating allied industries, and the heavy military spending of the cold war and space program) had run its course.

 

Neoliberalism offered an attractive veneer to policies capitalist class-dominated governments would pursue anyway. If Friedman didn’t exist, he would have been invented, which is to say, someone else, with similar views, would have been plucked from obscurity and thrust into the limelight, celebrated as an intellectual giant, just as he was.

 

To elevate his views to respectability, Friedman, and Hayek too, were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. The award wasn’t part of the other (the real) Nobel Prizes, but was handed out by the Swedish banking elite, a group, which, for obvious reasons, smiles fondly on anyone who says they, and those who share the same class interests, should be indulged.

 

That neoliberalism was only a veneer, a stalking horse behind which plunder and trickle up policies were pursued, is clear in the abandonment of neoliberal policy wherever it conflicted with capitalist class interests.

 

Ronald Reagan, who styled himself a champion of neoliberalism, didn’t follow neoliberal tenets of reducing the public sector or bringing down taxes.

 

(Nor does George Bush, who rhapsodizes about free trade while maintaining a program of subsidies and tariff barriers to protect the US steel industry, as well as the agricultural, aerospace, biomedical and military sectors.)

 

To be sure, Reagan supported Paul Volker’s neoliberal policies at the Fed, crushed unions, and took a wrecking ball to labor relations policy.

 

But while he slashed taxes for the top 20 percent of income earners, he increased taxes for the remaining 80 percent – the greatest tax increase for the greatest number of people in peacetime ever.

 

He did this to fund a massive increase in the public sector through a military buildup -- also debt-financed, fueling a colossal growth in public sector debt.

 

Investment bankers who held government bonds and war contractors like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and General Electric reaped the bonanza of growing government orders for bombers, cruise missiles and other expensive gadgetry of war. Everyone else picked up the tab.

 

Rather than being neoliberal, Reagan’s policies were pragmatically pro-capitalist – a mix of Keynesian militarism and monetarism put together to meet the challenges the capitalist class faced at the time. Neoliberalism, in its pure form, was to be a doctrine applied in practice to the Third World alone, where its emphasis on free markets, free trade and free enterprise would benefit investors and transnational corporations based in the West.

 

John Williamson, one of Friedman’s intellectual children, acknowledged that the neoliberalism “the US government promotes abroad, the US government does not practice at home.”

 

The day after he died, my morning newspaper ran a photograph of Friedman on the front page, under the headline “A staunch champion of freedom.”

 

While he may have been a staunch champion of freedoms that reached beyond free enterprise and free markets alone, Friedman’s ideas became a convenient justification for the pursuit by rich families, corporations and investment banks of capitalist freedom: the freedom to plunder and exploit.

 

For more on neoliberalism I recommend Vincente Navarro’s “The Worldwide Class Struggle” and David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” Oxford University Press, 2005.

 

To be notified of updates, send an e-mail to sr.gowans@sympatico.ca with “subscribe” written in the subject line.

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A Pious Wish: The Anti-Imperialism of Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow

 

http://gowans.blogspot.com/

 

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

May 13, 2006

 

"For how can people, when they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?"(1)

 

Former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer's latest book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" makes the case that regime change has been a regular feature of US foreign policy for decades, and is not a recent innovation cooked up one afternoon by neo-cons over barbecued ribs and Budweiser at the Bush ranch.

 

"Regime change," Kinzer's book tells us, "did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush but has been an integral part of American foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the entire twentieth century and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to topple governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals."

 

While this is a welcome debunking of the myth that regime change comes from a Bush-cabal-inspired hijacking of a mythical noble US foreign policy, Kinzer founders in his analysis of why US governments regularly seek to depose foreign regimes, and in the process, manages to reinforce liberal myths about the nature of US society and the possibilities of change within it.

 

There's nothing particularly shocking about Kinzer's argument. Examine US history with an eye to doing more than simply singing the usual hosannas to American ingenuity, selflessness and sacrifice, and read the daily newspapers carefully, and you can't help but trip over US regime change policy.

 

What was the Democrat-backed war on Yugoslavia, but an instance of regime-change? Granted, regime change in Serbia was widely regarded in NATO countries as being motivated by humanitarian concerns, but it did succeed in toppling a government that stood in the way of US, British and German economic goals. Take a look at who owns the place now, and who owned it before NATO bombs, sanctions and foreign intervention in elections drove Milosevic out. (Strangely, this seems to have escaped Kinzer's notice, whose book has no reference to Yugoslavia, Serbia or Milosevic.)

 

Belarus offers another example, a current one, though not as high profile as regime change efforts directed at the "axis of evil" countries.

 

Belarus has a largely state-owned economy that offers little room to Western corporations to rake in large profits. US, British and EU efforts to replace a president who hangs onto a Soviet-era economy with their own candidate -- he promises to hold a fire sale of state-owned assets just as soon as the project is complete -- doesn't look so much like regime change as much as backing the country's "democratic" opposition.

 

Still, regime change it is.

 

 

(clip)

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Hail the Reds

 

http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/reds.html

 

 

October 19, 2004

 

By Stephen Gowans

 

Over the seven decades of its existence, and despite having to spend so much time preparing, fighting, and recovering from wars, the Soviet Union managed to create one of the great achievements of human history: a great industrial society that eliminated most of the inequalities of wealth, income, education and opportunity that plagued what preceded it, what came after it, and what competed with it; a society in which health care and education through university were free (and university students received living stipends); where rent, utilities and public transportation were subsidized, along with books, periodicals and cultural events; where inflation was eliminated, pensions were generous, and child care was subsidized. By 1933, with the capitalist world deeply mired in a devastating economic crisis, unemployment was declared abolished, and remained so for the next five and a half decades, until socialism, itself, was abolished. The Communists produced social security more robust than provided even by Scandinavian-style social democracy, but achieved with fewer resources and a lower level of development and in spite of the unflagging efforts of the capitalist world to see to it that socialism failed. Soviet socialism was, and remains, a model for humanity -- of what can be achieved outside the confines and contradictions of capitalism. But by the end of the '80s, counterrevolution was sweeping Eastern Europe and Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the pillars of Soviet socialism. Naively, blindly, stupidly, some expected Gorbachev's demolition project to lead the way to a prosperous consumer society, in which Soviet citizens, their bank accounts bulging with incomes earned from new jobs landed in a robust market economy, would file into colorful, luxurious shopping malls, to pick clean store shelves bursting with consumer goods. Others imagined a new era of a flowering multiparty democracy and expanded civil liberties, coexisting with public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, a model that seemed to owe more to utopian blueprints than hardheaded reality.

 

Of course, none of the great promises of the counterrevolution were kept. While at the time the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was proclaimed, not least by leftist intellectuals in the US, as a great victory for humanity, more than a decade later there's little to celebrate. The dismantling of socialism has, in a word, been a catastrophe, a great swindle that has not only delivered none of what it promised, but has wreaked irreparable harm, not only in the former socialist countries, but throughout the Western world, as well. Countless millions have been plunged deep into poverty, imperialism has been given a free hand, and wages and benefits in the West have bowed under the pressure of intensified competition for jobs and industry unleashed by a flood of jobless from the former socialist countries, where joblessness once, rightly, was considered an obscenity. Numberless voices in Russia, Romania, East Germany and elsewhere lament what has been stolen from them -- and from humanity as a whole: "We lived better under communism. We had jobs. We had security." And with the threat of jobs migrating to low-wage, high unemployment countries of Eastern Europe, workers in Western Europe have been forced to accept a longer working day, lower pay, and degraded benefits. Today, they fight a desperate rearguard action, where the victories are few, the defeats many. They too lived better -- once.

 

But that's only part of the story. For others, for investors and corporations, who've found new markets and opportunities for profitable investment, and can reap the benefits of the lower labor costs that attend intensified competition for jobs, the overthrow of socialism has, indeed, been something to celebrate. Equally, it has been welcomed by the feudal and industrial elite of the pre-socialist regimes whose estates and industrial concerns have been recovered. But they're a minority. Why should the rest of us celebrate our own mugging?

 

Prior to the dismantling of socialism, most people in the world were protected from the vicissitudes of the global capitalist market by central planning and high tariff barriers. But once socialism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with China marching resolutely down the capitalist road, the pool of unprotected labor available to transnational corporations expanded many times over. Today, a world labor force many times larger than the domestic pool of US workers -- and willing to work dirt cheap -- awaits the world's corporations. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the implications are for American workers and their counterparts in Germany, Britain and other Western countries: an intense competition of all against all for jobs and industry. Inevitably, incomes fall, benefits are eroded, and working hours extended. Predictably, with labor costs heading south, profits grow fat.

 

Already, growing competition for jobs and industry is forcing workers in Western Europe to accept less. Workers at Daimler Chrysler, Thomas Cook, and other firms are working longer hours, and in some cases, for less pay and without increases in benefits, to keep jobs from moving to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and other former socialist countries -- which, under the rule of the Reds, used to provide jobs to all. More work for less money is a pleasing outcome for the corporate class, and turns out to be exactly the outcome the fascists of Germany and Italy engineered for their countries' capitalists in the '30s. The methods, to be sure, were different, but the anti-communism of Mussolini's and Hitler's followers, in other hands, has proved just as useful in securing the same retrograde ends. Nobody who has to subject themselves to the vagaries of the labor market – including workers in the United States -- should be glad communism was abolished.

 

Maybe some us don't know we've been mugged. And maybe some of us haven't been. Take the radical American historian Howard Zinn, for example, who, along with most other prominent Left intellectuals, greeted the overthrow of communism with glee 1. I, no less than others, have admired Zinn's books, articles and activism, though I've come to expect his ardent anti-communism as typical of left US intellectuals. To be sure, in a milieu so hostile to communism, it should come as no surprise that conspicuous displays of anti-communism become a survival strategy for those seeking to establish a rapport, and safeguard their reputations, with a larger (and vehemently anti-communist) audience.

 

But there may be another reason for the anti-communism of those whose political views leave them open to charges of being soft on communism, and therefore of having horns. As dissidents in their own society, there was always a natural tendency for them to identify with dissidents elsewhere – and the pro-capitalist, anti-socialist propaganda of the West quite naturally elevated dissidents in socialist countries to the status of heroes, especially those who were jailed, muzzled and otherwise repressed by the State. For these people, the abridgement of civil liberties anywhere looms large, for the abridgement of their own civil liberties would be an event of great personal significance. By comparison, the Red's achievements in providing a comfortable frugality and economic security to all, while recognized intellectually as an achievement of some note, is less apt to stir the imagination of one who has an income, the respect of his peers, and plenty of people to read his books and attend his lectures. He doesn't have to scavenge discarded coal in garbage dumps to eke out a bare, bleak, and unrewarding existence. Some do.

 

Karol, 14, and his sister Alina, 12, everyday trudge to a dump, where mixed industrial waste is deposited, just outside Swietochlowice, in formerly socialist Poland. There, along with their father, they look for scrap metal and second grade coal, anything to fetch a few dollars to buy a meager supply of groceries. "There was better life in communism," says Karol's father, 49, repeating a refrain heard over and over again, not only in Poland, but also throughout the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. "I was working 25 years for the same company and now I cannot find a job – any job. They only want young and skilled workers." 2 According to Gustav Molnar, a political analyst with the Laszlo Teleki Institute, "the reality is that when foreign firms come here, they're only interested in hiring people under 30. It means half the population is out of the game." 3 That may suit the bottom lines of foreign corporations – and the overthrow of socialism may be a pleasing intellectual outcome for well-fed, comfortable intellectuals from Boston – but it hardly suits that part of the Polish population that must scramble over mountains of industrial waste – or perish. Under socialism "there was always work for everybody." 4 And always a place to live, free schools to go to, and doctors to see, without charge. So why is Howard Zinn glad communism collapsed?

 

That the overthrow of socialism has failed to deliver anything of benefit to the majority is plain to see. More than a decade after counterrevolution swept through Eastern Europe, 17 former socialist countries are immeasurably poorer. In Russia, poverty has tripled. One child in 10 – three million Russian children – live like animals, ill-fed, dressed in rags, and living, if they're lucky, in dirty, squalid flats. In Moscow alone, 30,000 to 50,000 children sleep in the streets. Life expectancy, education, adult-literacy and income are in decline. A report by the European Children's Trust, written in 2000, revealed that 40 percent of the population of the former socialist countries -- 160 million people – lives in poverty. Infant mortality and tuberculosis are on the rise, approaching Third World levels. The situation, according to the UN, is catastrophic. And everywhere the story is the same. 5, 6, 7, 8

 

In Russia, the Kremlin passed a new labor code in 2001 that critics denounced as Dickensian – for good reason. Aimed at creating a climate conducive to profit-making, Soviet-era union guarantees were abolished, maternity leaves shortened, the minimum wage slashed, and the working day lengthened to a "voluntary" 12 hours. 9 "Life was better under the Communists," concludes Aleksandr. "The stores are full of things, but they're very expensive." Victor pines for the "stability of an earlier era of affordable health care, free higher education and housing, and the promise of a comfortable retirement - things now beyond his reach." 10 That Aleksandr and Victor are now free to denounce the new government in the strongest terms, if they wish, hardly seems to be a consolation.

 

Ion Vancea, a Romanian who struggles to get by on a picayune $40 per month pension says, "It's true there was not much to buy back then, but now prices are so high we can't afford to buy food as well as pay for electricity." Echoing the words of many in Romania, Vancea adds, "Life was 10 times better under (Romanian Communist Party leader) Ceausescu." 11

 

Next door, in Bulgaria, 80 percent are worse off now that the country has transitioned to a market economy. Only five percent say their standard of living has improved. 12 Mimi Vitkova, briefly Bulgaria's health minister for two years in the mid-90s, sums up the decade following the overthrow of socialism: "We were never a rich country, but when we had socialism our children were healthy and well-fed. They all got immunized. Retired people and the disabled were provided for and got free medicine. Our hospitals were free." But things have changed, she says. "Today, if a person has no money, they have no right to be cured. And most people have no money. Our economy was ruined." 13

 

In East Germany a new phenomenon has arisen: Ostalgie, a nostalgia based on the old regime's full employment, free health care, free education through university (with living expenses covered by the State), cheap rents, subsidized books and periodicals and dirt cheap public transportation. During the Cold War era, East Germany's relative poverty was attributed to public ownership and central planning – sawdust in the gears of the economic engine, according to anti-socialist mythology. But the propaganda conveniently ignored the fact that the eastern part of Germany had always been less developed than the west, that it had been plundered of its key human assets at the end of World War II by US occupation forces, that the Soviet Union had carted off everything of value to indemnify itself for its war losses, and that East Germany bore the brunt of war reparations to Moscow. 14 On top of that, those who fled East Germany were said to be escaping the repression of a brutal regime, and while some may indeed have been ardent anti-Communists fleeing repression by the State, many were economic refugees, seeking the embrace of a more prosperous West.

 

Today, nobody of an unprejudiced mind would say that the riches promised East Germans, if only they would restore capitalism, have been realized. Unemployment, once unheard of, runs at 25 percent, rents have skyrocketed, and nobody goes to the doctor unless they can pay. The region's industrial infrastructure – weaker than West Germany's during the Cold War, but expanding -- has now all but disappeared. And the population is dwindling, as economic refugees, following in the footsteps of Cold War refugees before them, make their way westward in search of jobs and opportunity. 15 "We were taught that capitalism was cruel," recalls Ralf Caemmerer, who works for Otis Elevator. "You know, it didn't turn out to be nonsense." 16 As to the claim that East Germans have "freedom" Heinz Kessler, a former East German defense minister replies tartly, "Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security." 17 Still, Howard Zinn is glad communism collapsed. But then, he doesn't live in east Germany.

 

So, who's doing better? Otto Jelinek, a Czech whose family fled to Canada after the Red Army booted the Nazis out and helped install an antifascist government, became a cabinet minister in Canada's conservative, pro-Reagan Mulroney government in the 80s. Today he lives in Prague, one of "many individuals in positions of high influence, in politics, in business who have moved back to the country." 18 What brings Jelenik, and his fellow movers and shakers back? "These people understand that they better than almost anyone help our nation make the transition to a market economy," says the director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague, Oldrich Tuma, 19 another way of saying that owing to their connections, they, more than others, know there's a buck to be made and how to make it. And, of course, there's the lure of restitution—getting back property, some of it which can be pressed into service as a rent-bearing asset, they, and their families, used to own. Jelinek didn't recover his old family home. It's an embassy, and hence would have proved to be a spacious, comfortable abode for the Jelinek family in its day, but the Czech government "did return 20 acres of real estate outside of Prague." 20

 

Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright turned President, comes from a prominent, vehemently anti-socialist Prague family. Havel's father was a wealthy real estate tycoon, who developed a number of Prague properties. One was the Lucerna Palace, "a pleasure palace…of arcades, theatres, cinemas, night-clubs, restaurants, and ballrooms," according to Frommer's. It became "a popular spot for the city's nouveau riche to congregate," including a young Havel, who, raised in the lap of luxury by a governess and chauffeured around town, "spent his earliest years on the Lucerna's polished marble floors." Then, tragedy struck – at least, from Havel's point of view. The Reds expropriated Lucerna and the family's other holdings, and put them to use for the common good, rather than for the purpose of providing the young Havel with more servants. Four decades later, Havel, as president -- and now celebrated throughout the West as a champion of intellectual freedom -- presided over a mass return of nationalized property, including Lucerna and his family's other holdings. As a business investment, Havel's anti-communism proved to be quite profitable. Is he a champion of intellectual freedom, or the formerly pampered scion of an establishment family who had a material stake in seeing socialism overthrown?

 

The Roman Catholic Church is another winner, which may explain, in part, why the Vatican takes such a dim view of communism. The pro-capitalist Hungarian government has returned to the Roman Catholic Church much of the property nationalized by the Reds, who placed the property under common ownership for the public good. With recovery of many of the Eastern and Central European properties it once owned, the Church is able to reclaim its pre-socialist role of parasite -- raking in vast amounts of unearned wealth in rent, a privilege bestowed for no other reason than it owns title to the land. Hungary also pays the Vatican a US$9.2 million annuity for property it has been unable to return. 21

 

The Church, former landowners, and CEOs aside, most people of the former socialist bloc aren't pleased that the gains of the socialist revolutions have been reversed. Three-quarters of Russians, according to a 1999 poll 22 regret the demise of the Soviet Union. And their assessment of the status quo is refreshingly clear-sighted. Almost 80 percent recognize democracy as a front for a government controlled by the rich. A majority (correctly) identifies the cause of its impoverishment as an unjust economic system (capitalism), which, according to 80 percent, produces "excessive and illegitimate inequalities." 23 The solution, in the view of the majority, is to return to the status quo ante (socialism), even if it means one-party rule. Russians, laments the anti-Communist historian Richard Pipes, haven't Americans' taste for multiparty democracy, and seem incapable of being cured of their fondness for Soviet leaders. In one poll, Russians were asked to list the 10 greatest people of all time, of all nations. Lenin came in second, Stalin fourth (Peter the Great came first.) Pipes seems genuinely distressed they didn't pick his old boss, Ronald Reagan, and is fed up that after years of anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda, Russians remain committed to the idea that private economic activity should be restricted, and "the government needs to be more involved in the country's economic life." 24

 

So, if the impoverished peoples of the formerly socialist countries pine for the former attractions of socialism, why don't they vote the Reds back in? In some countries, reconstituted Communist parties have received popular mandates to govern. And in Russia, Unity and Fatherland, the party that has become the parliamentary extension of the president, Vladimir Putin, has tapped into a deep well of nostalgia for Soviet socialism. "They've managed to create a new party of power, which in fact is replacing the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," says Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Moscow-based Institute of Globalization Studies. "It functions like the old Communist Party; it looks like the old Communist Party; it behaves like the old Communist Party." 25

 

But socialism can't be turned on with the flick of a switch (not that the Unity and Fatherland party would, if it could.) The former socialist economies have been mostly privatized and placed under the control of the market. Those who accept the goals and values of capitalism have been recruited to occupy pivotal offices of the State. And economic, legal and political structures have been altered, to accommodate private production for profit. True, there are openings for communist parties to operate within the new multiparty democracy, but the pillars of socialism – public ownership, central planning, and the lead role of the working class – have been dismantled and carted away, tossed, we're told, into the dustbin of history. Getting them back will take something more than returning Reds to parliament.

 

Of course, no forward step will be taken, can be taken, until a decisive part of the population becomes disgusted with and rejects what exists today, and is convinced something better is possible and is willing to tolerate the upheavals of transition. That something better is indeed possible – not a utopia, but something better than unceasing economic insecurity, private (and for many, unaffordable) health care and education, and vast inequality – is plain. It has been reality in the Soviet Union, in China (for a time), in Eastern Europe, and today, hangs on in Cuba, despite the incessant and far-ranging efforts of the United States to smash it.

 

It should be no surprise that Vaclav Havel, as others whose economic and political supremacy was, for a time, ended by the Reds, was a tireless fighter against socialism, or that he, and others, who sought to reverse the gains of the revolution, were cracked down on, and sometimes muzzled and jailed by the new regimes. To expect otherwise is to turn a blind eye to the determined struggle that is carried on by the enemies of socialism, even after socialist forces have seized power. The forces of reaction retain their money, their movable property, the advantages of education, and above all, their international connections. To grant them complete freedom is to grant them a free hand to organize the downfall of socialism, to receive material assistance from abroad to reverse the revolution, and to elevate the market and private ownership once again to the regulating principles of the economy. Few champions of civil liberties argue that in the interests of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, that Americans ought to be free to replace their republican form of government with a pro-British monarchy, or, more to the point, that Germans ought be allowed to hold pro-Nazi rallies, establish a pro-Nazi press, and organize fascist political parties, to return to the days of the Third Reich. To survive, any socialist government, must, of necessity, be repressive toward its enemies. This is demonized as totalitarianism by those who have an interest in seeing anti-socialist forces prevail, regard civil and political liberties (as against a world of plenty for all) as the summum bonum of human achievement, or have an unrealistically sanguine view of the possibilities for socialist survival.

 

Where Reds have prevailed, the outcome has been far-reaching material gains for the bulk of the population: full employment, free health care, free education through university, free and subsidized child care, cheap living accommodations and inexpensive public transportation. Life expectancy has soared, illiteracy has been wiped out, and homelessness, unemployment and economic insecurity have been abolished. Racial strife and ethnic tensions has been reduced to almost the vanishing point. And inequalities in wealth, income, opportunity, and education have been greatly reduced. Where Reds have been overthrown, mass unemployment, underdevelopment, hunger, disease, illiteracy, homelessness, and racial conflict have recrudesced. Communists produced gains in the interest of all humanity, achieved in the face of very trying conditions, including the unceasing hostility of the West and the unremitting efforts of the former exploiters to restore the status quo ante. What they achieved surpassed anything achieved by social democratic struggle in the West, where the advantages of being more advanced industrially, made the promises of socialism all the more readily achievable – and to a far greater degree than could be achieved elsewhere in the world. Hidden, or at best, acknowledged but quickly brushed aside as matters of little significance, these are achievements that have been too long ignored in the West – and greatly missed in the countries where they were reversed in the interests of restoring the wealth and privileges of a minority.

 

1. Howard Zinn, "Beyond the Soviet Union," Znet Commentary, September 2, 1999.

 

2. "Left behind by the luxury train," The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2000.

 

3. "Support dwindling in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland," The Chicago Tribune, May 27, 2001.

 

4. Ibid.

 

5. "An epidemic of street kids overwhelms Russian cities," The Globe and Mail, April 16, 2002.

 

6. "UN report says one billion suffer extreme poverty," World Socialist Web Site, July 28, 2003.

 

7. Associated Press, October 11, 2000.

 

8. "UN report....

 

9. "Union leader tastes McVictory," The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2001.

 

10. "In Post-U.S.S.R. Russia, Any Job Is a Good Job," New York Times, January 11, 2004.

 

11. "Disdain for Ceausescu passing as economy worsens," The Globe and Mail, December 23, 1999.

 

12. "Bulgarians feel swindled after 13 years of capitalism," AFP, December 19, 2002.

 

13. "Bulgaria tribunal examines NATO war crimes," Workers World, November 9, 2000.

 

14. Jacques R. Pauwels, "The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War," James Lorimer & Company, Toronto, 2002. p. 232-235.

 

15. "Warm, Fuzzy Feeling for East Germany's Grey Old Days," New York Times, January 13, 2004.

 

16. "Hard lessons in capitalism for Europe's unions," The Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2003.

 

17. New York Times, July 20, 1996, cited in Michael Parenti, "Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism," City Light Books, San Francisco, 1997, p. 118.

 

18. "Jelinek: 'There's no looking back'," The Globe and Mail, April 15, 2002.

 

19. Ibid.

 

20. Ibid.

 

21. U.S. Department of State, "Summary of Property Restitution in Central and Eastern Europe," September 10, 2003. www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/or/2003/31415.htm

 

22. Cited in Richard Pipes, "Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.

 

23. Ibid.

 

24 Ibid.

 

25. "Putin's party echoes the Communist past," The Globe and Mail, December 6, 2003.

___________

 

 

 

 

USA: REGIME CHANGE, OR SYSTEM CHANGE?

 

By Jacques Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002

 

 

That the USA is entangled in a vicious war in Iraq is not the fault of President Bush, but of America’s economic system. Without wars, America’s unbridled brand of capitalism can no longer function properly. Every tenant of the White House is aware of this and must act accordingly, and it does not matter at all if his name is Bush or Clinton, or if his party affiliation is Republican or Democrat.

 

In the United States, everything revolves around the economy. Theoretically, the economy may be defined as the aggregate of all activities which purport to meet the material needs of human beings. But in the American economic system it is the other way around: the economy is not there for the benefit of people, people are there for the benefit of the economy. What, then, is the purpose of the American economy? To make super-rich Americans (like Bush) even richer and, more specifically, to make it possible for US corporations to achieve ever-greater profits. This is not a simple task, and therefore the state must do something. (Yes, the state, and this in the promised land of laissez-faire!) The American state’s principal role is in fact nothing else than the facilitation of the “accumulation process,” i.e. the maximization of profits. Here are some, but by no means all, of the ways it can do so: by providing American industry with easy access to sources of vitally important raw materials such as oil, and by minimizing the cost of these materials, typically at the expense of the inhabitants (and the environment) of Third World countries which are “blessed” with such resources; by keeping labour costs as low as possible; by “priming the pump” of economic demand by means of gigantic state orders, thus maintaining production, prices, and ultimately profits at high levels; by redistributing the wealth of America to the advantage of the super-rich and to the disadvantage of all other Americans; and finally, by keeping the latter as ignorant and as meek as possible, so that they do not understand, and thus possibly challenge, the system.

 

In order to achieve these objectives, the state uses a plethora of instruments. Warfare has revealed itself to be eminently useful, and even indispensable, in this respect; it is simply the nec plus ultra in terms of instruments for accumulation purposes. That wars are very good, even wonderful for business, is demonstrated dramatically by the present conflict in Iraq. First, this aggression put the huge Mesopotamian petroleum resources at the disposal of the American oil trusts. Second, the Iraqi market has been pried open to American export products such as Coca-Cola and Marlboro cancer sticks. Third, the Iraqis now have the opportunity to slave away, in return for low wages, for the benefit of the US corporations for whom the country’s state-owned enterprises are being privatized – in flagrant violation, incidentally, of all principles of international law. Fourth, in the USA itself employment opportunities will shrink, thus driving wages down even further, as large firms will be able to have their commodities produced by cheap labour in sweatshops on the banks of the Tigris. (Yet another case of “outsourcing”!) Fifth, the war has brought about an explosion of present and future military state expenditures, and supplying the Pentagon with pricey martial toys is guaranteed to be a bonanza for the giants of the American armaments industry; armament is now more than ever before the most profitable of all sectors of the US economy. Sixth, the war also yields plentiful “spin-off” orders. in connection with the “reconstruction” of Iraq’s infrastructure, conveniently wiped out by American bombs. The lucrative contracts will be shared with countries that were willing accomplices in the American attack on Iraq, but American corporations such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton are of course receiving the lion’s share. Seventh, while the super-rich owners and managers of America’s biggest enterprises will pocket the abundant profits made possible by the war, ordinary Americans will pay with their taxes for the costs of the war. The costs of the war are thus socialized, while the profits are privatized: a perverse redistribution of the wealth of America in favour of that tiny percentage of the population which already owns m