General Conclusions:
Written by International Communist Seminar
The Communist Parties facing the deepening of the capitalist systemic crisis. The consequences of the economic crisis and the intervention of Communist parties.
I. The deepening of the crisis of the system
1. The Declaration of the 2009 ICS made the following observation: The capitalist system is confronting the most serious crisis since the depression of 1929. We are not speaking of a transitory and cyclical recession but of a generalized crisis of the capitalist system, with its roots in the sphere of production. This crisis will be long and deep, and we are merely at the beginning of it. This prospect has been confirmed by facts. A crisis on all levels continues to hit the entire planet, the main imperialist centres (US, EU, Japan) as well as the majority of other countries, particularly the developing countries. This way, capitalist globalisation is showing its downside: it also brings about globalisation of capitalist crises, and in a much faster and more global way than in the 1930s.
2. It is a characteristic of capitalism to restore the rate of profit by cutting wages and boosting unemployment. We are in the midst of a period of restructuring, delocalisation, closures and lay-offs. By means of this restructuring, the industrial and banking monopolies reconstitute their funds and restore their profit margins. In times of crisis, more than ever, the larger monopolies strengthen themselves at the expense of the smaller ones. Millions of industrial and agricultural workers lose their job and salaries are slashed. On a global level, 50 million workers have been dismissed and the number of 'working poor' is rising very fast. In the OECD countries, the rise of unemployment particularly hits the youth that were employed in unstable, super-flexible jobs. In the Euro zone 20 percent of the youth under 25 years of age are looking for a job, with a record figure of 40 percent in Spain. The crisis and the offensive of capital particularly underscores the exploitation of women. Many single women, with or without children, live below the poverty threshold because of unstable, part-time or temporary jobs. Women workers are strongly represented in sectors with low-paying, contractual and feminized jobs.
3. Throughout the world, the crisis has deepened the gap between rich and poor. The countries from the South are the first victims of a crisis that is generated and managed by the imperialist centres. Most of these countries are dependent on the production of raw materials and agricultural products for export and only a few have some manufactures and semi-manufactures for export. IMF, WTO, US and EU dictates have destroyed their local industries and agriculture and brought their economies increasingly under the control of transnational corporations. This has made them dependent on the economic trend in the developed world. They are now in dire straits as demand for their exports has fallen drastically, export prices are plunging while prices of imported goods rise and the conditions of international creditors have tightened. Their vulnerability will push them once more in a cycle of borrowing, growing debt and new imperialist dictates. The workers and poor and middle peasants are confronted with rapidly worsening conditions of unemployment, poverty and exclusion. The Millennium Development Goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 is actually being reversed: for 2009 the United Nations report 90 million more human beings living in extreme poverty than before the crisis, and more than one billion people suffering from hunger (as against 840 million in 1990). In India, an "emerging economy", 77 percent of the population — or 836 million people — have to make do with a daily income of less than 20 rupees (0,5 Euro). In 2009, the number of India's dollar billionaires has doubled. There are 52 of them, with a joint fortune of 276 billion dollar, or 1/4th of the country's GDP.
4. The most devastating effects can be seen in most of the African countries. Due to the weakness of the progressive, popular and resistance forces, the imperialist powers are not in the least inhibited to impose their draconian measures. Whatever the imperialists had conceded to the compradore bourgeoisie in the 1960s has been eroded, and countries are once more put under tutelage. State subsidies for the prices of basic necessities are eliminated, prices are skyrocketing, education and health care are abandoned by the State and left to be privatized. Wars that are supposedly ethnic in character, are in reality wars of rape by imperialist transnational corporations, wanting to put their hand on the immense natural resources, particularly energetic resources.
5. A major difference with the financial collapse of 1929 is the immediate and massive state intervention. Almost 3,000 billion dollar has been disbursed by the states of the imperialist world in order to stop the disintegration of the financial system, and the same amount in state guarantees has been accorded to the banks. Equally dizzying amounts have been handed out to industrial monopolies in the form of recovery plans. This way, a downslide into a period of deflation has temporarily been avoided. As a consequence, the capitalist states are now in the eye of the storm of the economic and financial crisis. Several states show budgetary deficits surpassing 5 percent or even 10 percent of GDP, and the level of indebtedness of most capitalist states has grown rapidly.
6. The Greek crisis has developed to a global risk for the capitalist world because it can lead to a new widespread financial crisis. It might expand to other European states: Spain and Portugal in the first place; Ireland, Italy, Great Britain and Belgium may follow, and even France. If the contagion would spread, it can become a threat to the survival of the European currency.
The crisis has widened the gap between the strong and more powerful states of the EU and the weakest from Southern and Eastern Europe. A nationalist reflex is sharpening the contradictions. The German government was facing a dilemma: refusing any assistance to states in trouble would be tantamount to endangering the Euro, whose fall would also affect German domination in the EU. Germany finally accepted the founding of a 750 billion stabilisation fund, put together by the EU and IMF to support failing European states. It shows that the common interests of the European monopolies still prevail. They need the European Union and the euro for their struggle against American, Japanese and Chinese competitors. They need the euro as a straitjacket to impose restrictive discipline in the participating countries.
But the contradictions have not vanished. The German government refuses to review its extremely aggressive policy of pay cuts that benefits German monopolies and allows it to remain the world's first or second largest exporter. Hence the Merkel government continues the policy of its social democratic predecessor, Schroeder, at the risk of causing the disintegration of the Euro zone or even the EU. To avoid this scenario, the German government imposes strict anti-social policies on the whole EU, demands that the Stability Pact and the Maastricht criteria would come into effect again, including sanctions for non-appliance.
Hardly two months after the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, has it become clear what the expanded powers of the European institutions are meant for. The Treaty was hailed by social democracy as a victory for democracy. Today, it proves to be an instrument to impose more discipline to member states and to impose austerity dictates upon the workers. It is the intensification of European policy's realignment with the interests of financial capital in the name of rescuing the Euro.
7. Currently, Greece is the European Union's anti-workers laboratory. The extremely severe attacks that have been launched against the Greek workers by the social democratic PASOK government mean, on average, a 30 percent loss of income for the workers. They include drastic cuts for government employees, the reduction of retirement benefits and extension of the retirement age, the increase of direct and indirect taxes, flexibility and new advantages for the employers in the name of unemployment, anti-people reforms with regard to financing of health care and education, and faster privatization of the public sector. The social democratic party (PASOK) is serving monopoly capital as the most suitable party to ensure that the draconian social setbacks will pass. If they will, they will make the Greek people suffer hard. The same range of anti-social measures is on the agenda in all countries. They aim to intensify exploitation and to rescue monopoly capital at the expense of the workers. While the people are suffering, speculative funds and financial institutions who are thanking their survival to the generous intervention by the states, are now unscrupulously speculating against these very states. This shows how these financial vultures are given absolute liberty, in spite of all the catastrophes they have already brought about. It clearly demonstrates the capitalist system is rotten to the core.
8. The worldwide crisis of overproduction is far from solved. The contradiction between the development of the productive capacity on the one hand, and the relative decrease in purchasing power of the masses on the other, is at the origin of the crisis of overproduction. This contradiction inevitably reproduces itself under capitalist relations of production, as it is a small minority that owns the means of production and enriches itself by exploiting the labour force of the big majority. The crisis lies in the nature of the system. Its root cause lies in the contradiction between the social character of production and the private appropriation of its products, due to the private ownership of the means of production.
For capital, the way out of the crisis lies in the massive destruction of the means of production and in the intensified exploitation of the labour force. That is what the workers all over the world are facing now. In a crisis as deep and global as the current one, this phase can take a long time, because the 'solutions' of capital create internal contradictions. The massive increase of unemployment, the wage cuts and the dismantling of social protection undermines any perspective of stimulating the purchasing power of the toiling masses. Most probably, the anti-social offensive will even worsen the crisis of overproduction and can still lead to deflation in the years to come. A switch to 'Keynesian' recipes of state investments would only have a very limited effect. Moreover, this room to manoeuvre is even more reduced than during the thirties because of the generalized crisis of public finance, due to the massive bailouts of the financial sector. Besides, it was not the 'new deal' that put an end to the crisis of the thirties but the war production and the Second World War.
9. There is a major political lesson to retain from the actual crisis. Massive state intervention has smashed the social-democratic myth that capitalist globalisation would have rendered the capitalist state 'powerless'. The succession of liberal and interventionist policies responds to the objective needs of capitalist monopolies in a given period. According to need, the social democrats may become market prophets, as we have witnessed the last decades, or the liberal parties may become furious interventionists as we witness since 2008. Their common loyalty to the capitalist system dictates the orientation, in line with the needs of capital. Whether a social-democratic or liberal party is in power (or both), the aim of capital always remains the same: to remedy the fall of the rate of profit and to secure the extensive reproduction of capital. Marx and Lenin are proven right more than ever: the real centres of power in the bourgeois states are the big monopolies.
10. The economic crisis also provokes a political crisis among the ruling class. To impose the dictatorship of the monopolies, a fascisation of bourgeois regimes develops. Faced with the growing revolt of the working masses in Greece, Portugal, France,... the European Union is developing its plans for repression and surveillance. In order to impose this dictatorship of the monopolies, the bourgeois democratic regimes are continuously taking anti-democratic measures. It is now clear that the 'war against terrorism' has served primarily to fight the enemy within. The achievements of 1945 are systematically undermined and dismantled, while racism and nationalism are spreading. Therefore the capitalist state is focusing increasingly on its most essential role, its role as the last bulwark against popular revolt. Violations of the right to strike, emergency laws, and violations of basic democratic rights are becoming the rule. The anti-communist campaigns waged against several Communist Parties in Central and Eastern Europe and the attempts to rewrite history through a web of lies about the Second World War complement the anti-people policies pursued by imperialism. Rewriting history and claiming that communism and fascism share responsibility for the millions of deaths during war serves today as a pretext to legitimize anti-labour, xenophobic and militaristic policies, all of which had been expressed in their most extreme forms under fascism. These attacks come from the traditional parties, particularly the social democratic parties. On the other hand, provocative attacks by opportunistic groups of the right, but also of the 'left', are increasing.
11. The crisis sharpens the contradictions between major imperialist forces and accelerates long term changes in the correlation of forces of the international imperialist system. The imperialist powers are competing in a struggle for the re-division of the world. They compete to control the sources of raw materials and cheap labour, markets, investment opportunities, spheres of influence and strategic areas. The European exporting countries derive some temporary benefit from the weakening of the Euro, but this widens the contradictions with the United States. The main weakness of the US is the large trade deficit, a time bomb under the position of the dollar and global monetary relations. The crisis also leads to sharpening contradictions between the major centres of Western and Japanese imperialism on the one hand, and emerging powers on the other, such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa.
Nevertheless, where their fundamental common interests and the prevailing capitalist and imperialist world disorder are at stake, imperialist powers still find common ground. They are one in oppressing the peoples and nations of the world and in passing on the burden of the crisis to them. Moreover, the aggressive NATO block is aligning itself with Russia in their fight against national liberation movements under the pretext of the so-called 'fight against international terrorism'.
The United States is struggling to keep its position as a superpower and make use of NATO to include its allies in its strategy of world domination. The NATO summit in November this year will formally approve the new strategy of extending the organization's range of intervention to the entire planet. At the same time, member countries will be obliged to increase their military spending.
12. The crisis reinforces militarization; war factors accumulate. The US continues its military strategy in the Middle East, for total control of the largest oil reserves in the world - which also helps to control energy resources of major competitors, primarily China. The US administration and the Pentagon are concentrating more and more military equipment close to Iran, including the Island of Diego Garcia, where thousands of conventional bombs are stocked that can penetrate deep into the ground to destroy underground facilities. The scenario is similar to that which led to the attack on Iraq: Iran is accused of intending to produce nuclear weapons, without any evidence whatsoever. The US continues to support and protect the Zionist Israeli state and is putting strong pressure on Syria to abandon its anti-imperialist role in the region.
The Latin American countries are concerned because of the increasing number of military bases and US warships in the region. The US aims to control the economic resources and the markets. The US opposes the social development that results from anti-imperialist initiatives for regional integration, like ALBA. This way, it is a permanent threat for the peace and stability in the region.
Africa's enormous wealth is still the object of the imperialist powers' greed. The US is reinforcing its military presence and seeks to establish the AFRICOM command in Africa.
The US position on the denuclearisation is hypocritical from beginning to end. It got rid of a thousand obsolete ballistic missiles - yet it still has about 8,000 of them. Washington refuses to commit never to be the first to use nuclear weapons or never to use them against countries that do not possess nukes, because it makes exceptions (Iran, the DPRK, ...). Meanwhile Obama allocates more funds to the modernization of the operational nuclear weapons, and the production of mini-nukes is continuing. His goal: to preserve US supremacy in military matters (45 percent of global military spending), especially when it comes to weapons of mass destruction. Weakened from the economic point of view, the United States - with its NATO allies - is strengthening its military capacity.
13. The depth of the generalized crisis we are living, is pushing the vast majority of the world population deeper in intolerable situations. Given the rapid deterioration of the imperialist system and the increasing misery of the peoples of the world, the only viable alternative is a socialist society. The capitalist system cannot be spruced up by some reforms, by a bogus regulation or by some other social democratic accents. The capitalist society knows only one law: that of maximum profit for capital. Its very foundations have to be turned upside down through revolution. This revolution involves the abolition of capitalist ownership through the socialization of the basic and most concentrated means of production, and the submission of the economy to central planning, run by a socialist state which is in the hands of the workers. The socialist economy takes care of distributing the wealth that is produced equitably and justly, and ensures that the services that meet people's needs, such as public health, the education system, social security are free and exclusively public. This economy is based on another power which will overthrow the power of monopolies and build new popular institutions. On this basis can develop international cooperation.
14. The socialist countries in the world, who do not bear any responsibility for the worldwide crisis of the capitalist system, continue to grow at a steady pace. Even if they face complex and difficult conditions (like the US blockade) they are able to minimize the impact of the crisis on their population. This shows in a convincing way the superiority of socialism over capitalism. The progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other Latin American countries head the challenge of proving that their anti-imperialist policies and regional cooperation continue to generate a social surplus, even in this period of crisis.
15. The proletariat and peoples of the world are rising up to wage various forms of struggle in response to the worsening conditions of global economic and financial crisis and the escalation of imperialist plunder and wars of aggression.
In the imperialist countries, the monopoly bourgeoisie is waging a ferocious class struggle against the proletariat and is pushing the proletariat to fight back. The level of discontent and protest is rising because of the increasing rate of unemployment, the erosion of social benefits and the deterioration of the living conditions.
The peoples in the oppressed countries, subjected to ever rising levels of exploitation and oppression, are waging various forms of resistance against the imperialist powers and their local puppets.
The conditions of crisis, while also fraught with dangers and further attacks from reactionaries, create favourable objective conditions and opportunities that Communist Parties must seize in order to advance the cause of the proletariat and other toiling masses, to advance the struggle for a better world, free from oppression and exploitation.
II. The Communist Parties in action
1. The generalized crisis of the system forces Communist Parties to fully assume their role as vanguard of the working class. This means taking up their responsibility to mobilise, organise and orient the exploited masses. It also means unveiling the roots of the growing misery, and helping the masses advance on the road of socialist revolution.
2. In order to assume these tasks, communists must seize the opportunities that present themselves. For this, any spirit of routine needs to be cast away. There are opportunities to develop, consolidate or build Bolshevik parties. It is in the heat of class struggle that such parties accumulate experience and become steeled by fire.
3. Being fully submerged in class struggle offers an excellent opportunity to train new generations of cadres. A major part of today's youth, and certainly the generation that has known the anticommunist wave since 1989, has never experienced a crisis of the current magnitude or seriousness. It is today that this generation is preparing itself to take up its revolutionary role for the coming decades.
4. Every Communist Party is faced with the challenge to acquire a profound knowledge and a Marxist analysis of the systemic crisis. The writings of Marx and Lenin are astonishingly relevant today to understand the profound origins of the current crisis and to formulate a socialist alternative.
5. Today, Communist and workers' Parties have an excellent occasion to strengthen their links with the masses. Marxist-Leninist theory has to be a guide for practice. It depends on the work of the communists among the masses, particularly in the class struggle, to what extent the conscientisation of the masses broadens and deepens. This means that first and foremost, they have to be present and active in every struggle, to support the demands put forward by the workers themselves. Communists must propose a complete package of demands, based on the workers' needs. The class in power has accumulated its wealth on the back of the workers and they continue to enrich themselves during this very crisis. For the struggle to advance, it is important to formulate demands that put the burden of the crisis on the side of the big fortunes and the big capitalists.
6. Throughout these struggles, the perspective of socialism must be made clear. Communists must bring forward demands for which the workers are willing to fight today, while orienting them towards socialism. The Communist Parties must advance demands that break with the logic of capitalism, that enhance political consciousness and that forge class unity. It is of the highest importance that this struggle is politicised, allowing people to understand that more fundamental changes in the balance of power are necessary in order to enjoy the wealth that they themselves produce. Every struggle must serve to broaden class solidarity, to build alliances, to counter division, racism, bourgeois nationalism and yellow trade unionism. The yellow trade unions accept the governments' plans for social destruction in the name of the 'salvation of the nation'. In reality, there is no common interest the working class and the bourgeoisie.
7. It is important to support the troops' morale. We must have a feeling for the issues the masses are ready to mobilise for and to obtain small victories. We must continuously fight for immediate demands, for concrete measures that cushion the gravity of the problems and offer some relieve. They must be imposed through the power of the movement. Nevertheless, under capitalism these gains will be temporary and precarious. The militancy of the working class will be intensified as long as the struggle maintains the perspective of overcoming the capitalist framework and challenging the bourgeois power.
8. For the Communist Parties, parliamentary work serves to better develop the struggle. Any fundamental change depends on the mobilisation of the masses. In the capitalist system, there can only be victories through the development of class struggle. We should not count on parliaments but develop extra-parliamentary movements.
9. Strengthening the Parties as such deserves particular attention. We must recruit new members, convince and organise them. The role of the communist newspaper is irreplaceable and an important tool for the mass work. In addition, it is necessary to make better use of the new technologies for our propaganda work and to broaden the contacts.
10. The work among the masses requires a reinforced commitment in the trade unions and the other mass organisations of the working class.
11. An important task for the communist movement is to draw lessons from the experience of socialist construction in the Eastern European countries, defending socialist construction and its timeless necessity. Communists will not remain silent against the anti-communist campaigns that go hand in hand with the attempts to re-write history with lies. Communist Parties will defend the historical gains of the 20th century experiences of socialism by all means, while debunking the lies of imperialism to slander these experiences and to suppress the communist movement.
12. Communist Parties must launch themselves in all fronts against imperialist anti-people aggression. Particularly the expanding role of NATO should be challenged, and the increasing military threats that will be put in a more aggressive 'strategic framework' in this organization's upcoming summit.
13. Time is ripe to advance in the development of international campaigns, which will require more collaboration of Communist Parties on an international level. In case of struggles, active solidarity must be developed. We must actively search for common slogans. We must actively participate in campaigns like those to free the Cuban five, for the withdrawal of the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Signatories of the General Conclusions
1. Afghanistan, United Party of Afghanistan
2. Albania, Communist Party of Albania
3. Algeria, Parti Algérien pour la Démocratie et le Socialisme (PADS)
4. Bangladesh, Communist Party of Bangladesh
5. Belarus, For the Union and the Communist Party of the Union
6. Belgium, Workers' Party of Belgium
7. Brazil, Partido Comunista do Brasil (PcdoB)
8. Brazil, Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB)
9. Brazil, Partido Patria Livre
10. Bulgaria, Party of Bulgarian Communists
11. Canada, Communist Party of Canada
12. Congo, Democratic Republic of, Congolese Communist Party
13. Costa Rica, Partido Vanguardia Popular
14. Cuba, Partido Comunista de Cuba
15. Denmark, Communist Party of Denmark
16. Denmark, Danish Communist Party
17. Denmark, Communist Party in Denmark
18. El Salvador, Partido Comunista de El Salvador (PCS)
19. France, PRCF - Pôle de Renaissance communiste en France
20. France, URCF - Union des Révolutionnaires-Communistes de France
21. Greece, Communist Party of Greece
22. Hungary, Hungarian Communist Workers' Party
23. Italy, Rete dei Comunisti
24. Lao, People's Democratic Republic, Lao People's Revolutionary Party
25. Latvia, Socialist Party of Latvia
26. Lebanon, Parti Communiste Libanais
27. Luxemburg, Parti Communiste du Luxembourg (KPL)
28. Malta, Communist Party of Malta
29. México, Partido Popular Socialista de México
30. Morocco, Voie Démocratique
31. Netherlands, New Communist Party Netherlands (NCPN)
32. Pakistan, Communist Party of Pakistan
33. Palestine, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
34. Peru, Partido Comunista Peruano
35. Puerto Rico, Refundación Comunista
36. Russia, Communist Party of the Russian Federation
37. Russia, Russian Communist Workers' Party – Revolutionary Party of Communists
38. Russia, Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
39. South Africa, South African Communist Party
40. Spain, Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España
41. Sweden, Communist Party (KP)
42. Syria, Syrian Communist Party
43. Syria, Communist Party of Syria
44. Taiwan, Chinese Province of Taiwan, Lao Dong Dang (Labour Party)
45. Tunisia, Parti du Travail patriotique et démocratique de Tunisie
46. Turkey, Communist Party of Turkey (TKP)
47. Ukraine, Union of Communists
48. United Kingdom, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
49. USA, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)
50. Venezuela, Partido Comunista de Venezuela
51. Vietnam, Socialist Republic of, Communist Party of Vietnam
As of June 17, 2010; open to further endorsements.
19th International Communist Seminar
Brussels, 14-16 May 2010
www.icsbrussels.org , ics@icsbrussels.org
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July 30, 2010
July 29, 2010
Greek Government issues emergency order forcing Strikers back, guardian.co.uk , 29 July, 2010
Greek truck drivers clash with riot police in Athens Greek truck drivers clash with riot police in Athens. Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters
Government issues emergency order as fuel shortages strand tourists and disrupt food and medical supplies
The stand-off between striking truck drivers and authorities in Greece intensified today hours after the government issued an emergency order to force protesters back to work.
With fuel shortages stranding thousands of tourists and disrupting supplies of food and medicines nationwide, prime minister George Papandreou resorted to emergency legislation, more usually used at times of war or great natural disaster, to end the walk-out.
But hopes of a return to normal were quickly dashed when riot police fired tear gas at thousands of truckers gathered outside the transport ministry this morning.
"The order is coming through to [drivers] but I have no idea how they are going to react to it," said Giorgos Stamos, a member of the truck drivers' union. "It is highly unusual that after just three days of going on strike we should be mobilised in this way."
The ruling socialists called for the mobilisation – the fourth time since the collapse of military rule in 1974 that such an order has been issued – as it became clear that Greece was facing a public health crisis because of the strike.
On islands, where fuel supplies have totally run out, tourists could be seen abandoning rented cars by the side of the road while yachts remained docked in harbours or drifted out at sea.
Under the order – which followed a plea by the Greek Tourist Association to stop the strike – authorities were given the go-ahead to requisition vehicles and services, with the owners and drivers of trucks being told they had to resume work or face stiff fines.
"To allow the strike to continue would threaten the normal functioning of health and welfare services and public order," the government announced.
The mayhem began on Monday when some 33,000 licensed truck drivers walked off the job in protest at government plans to open up the freight industry, one of many 'closed–shop' professions blamed for keeping the Greek economy isolated and uncompetitive.
The debt-stricken country is under intense pressure from the EU and IMF to make the changes – a condition of the €110bn (£92bn) of emergency loans it received from eurozone nations and the Washington-based body in May.
With officials from both organisations visiting Athens to prepare a first assessment of the progress made under the €30bn austerity program that the government has also been forced to implement, the Greek finance minister insisted that "every closed profession" would soon be opened up.
In the case of truckers, the first group to be tackled, it will mean that new licences will be issued at lower costs and in greater number. The sector wants the government to delay the introduction of a bill to allow for more talks with the industry.
The truckers have shown this week that such reforms will not be easy.
In a culture where workers' rights are seen as sacred, militant unionists have reacted furiously to the mobilisation.
"The government is aiming to smash every striker's right," Rizospastis, the newspaper of the KKE communist party proclaimed on its front page. "There is nothing but to gather forces and fight."
The strike has further dented tourism – widely seen as the linchpin of the country's economic recovery this summer. With one in five Greeks working in the sector, tourism accounts for almost 20% of GDP.
The trucker's strike "is a huge problem for bookings that our country needs, to cover part of the losses that have occurred in recent months," said Andreas Andreadis who heads the Greek Hotel Federation.
July 25, 2010
Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of Secret files exposes truth of Occupation,Nick Davies and David Leigh, guardian.co.uk, Sun 25 July 2010
• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
US soldier in Afghanistan The war logs reveal civilian killings by coalition forces, secret efforts to eliminate Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, and discuss the involvement of Iran and Pakistan in supporting insurgents. Photograph: Max Whittaker/Corbis
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and over 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US navy sailors captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
The war logs also detail:
• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of its roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."
The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents. Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests in the past, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers. At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, although this is likely to be an underestimate because many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.
Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.
Questionable shootings of civilians by British troops also figure. The American compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in the streets of Kabul within the space of barely a single month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the killing of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation is controlled by the British. We not able [sic] to get the complete story."
A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in the ferociously contested Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."
Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and NATO forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening. Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way US and NATO do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians."
The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war. Most of the material, although classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication in the Guardian because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, also says it redacted harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its own "uncensorable" series of global servers.
Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them.
Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the war logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks has not been involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.
July 24, 2010
ILPS Condemns US and ROK FOR Anti-DPRK Provocations As Attack on Korean Sovereignty and Peace in East Asia, July 24, 2010 By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
Bulatlat http://www.bulatlat.com/main
URL to article: http://www.bulatlat.com/main/2010/07/24/ilps-condemns-us-and-rok-for-anti-dprk-provocations-as-attack-on-korean-sovereignty-and-peace-in-east-asia/
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) hereby condemns in the strongest terms the US and its South Korean puppet government for a crescendo of provocations against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). These provocations constitute an attack on the national sovereignty of the Korean people and threaten the peace in East Asia and the whole world.
The sinking of the Cheonan was obviously perpetrated by the US in order to stem the tide of popular opposition in Japan against US military bases and to justify a series of hostile actions of the US and its South Korean puppet government against the DPRK and the national sovereignty of the Korean people and the just position of the DPRK for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and reunification of the Korean people.
The hostile actions of the US and the puppet Republic of Korea (ROK) include the baseless accusations against the DPRK for the Cheonan sinking, the announced holding of joint US-ROK military exercises against the DPRK and the adoption of new sanctions against DPRK in relation to its program of nuclear research and development for national defense, pursuit of peace and economic development.
The US is an old hand at fabricating incidents in order to justify US aggression, such as the February 4, 1899 incident in the Philippines, the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident and similar incidents in Asia and elsewhere. It is obvious that the US staged the Cheonan sinking several months ago in order to justify and escalate US military presence in East Asia, to generate new tensions in the region, to prepare for a bigger act of aggression against DPRK and divert attention from US military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US and ROK are poised to undertake a series of largescale military exercises. The first one called Invincible Spirit is meant to humiliate DPRK, force it to take the blame for the US criminal act of sinking the Cheonan and accept talks on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles under US terms. The next military exercise called Freedom’s Guardian would immediately ensue. It is planned to be more aggressive and more challenging even to China.
The forces being mobilized for Invincible Spirit include the USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group and ROK Navy ships, aircraft fleet from the US Seventh Air Force, the George Washington Air Wing, the new F-22 Raptor aircraft, the ROK air force and ROK anti-submarine aircraft. In the meantime, the US and ROK forces are escalating psychological warfare along the 38th parallel as complement to the war preparations.
The sanctions being prepared by the US will aggravate and expand the existing financial, commercial and travel sanctions already imposed on the DPRK. Additional categories of DPRK personnel, assets and transactions will be banned or frozen. Even the diplomatic privileges of DRKP personnel will be curtailed. More aggressive actions are being planned against DPRK ships and planes.
In view of the extremely hostile actions and war plans of the US, the DPRK is fully justified in developing its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in order to counter the longrunning nuclearization of South Korea by the US and the continuous military and nuclear threats from US military bases in East Asia and the Pacific. The Korean people can never forget how the US collaborated with Japan to allow the latter to colonize Korea in the first half of the 20th century and how the US murdered more than three million Koreans in the US war of aggression against Korea from 1950 to 1953.
The people of East Asia have suffered so many gross acts of brutality and violations of human rights unleashed by US imperialism. These include the killing of 1.4 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American War, the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands in the US atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the killing of millions of Chinese by the US-supported Guomindang in the Chinese civil war, the killing of more than three million Koreans, the killing of more than six million Vietnamese and other Indochinese and the massacre of three million Indonesians by the US-supported Suharto fascist clique.
It is a gross act of hypocrisy and malice for the US to be prating about peace and stability in East Asia while it casts false accusations against the DPRK in order to obscure a long history of US aggression in East Asia, to justify continued US military presence in the whole region and to push forward a new plan of aggression against the DPRK and the Korean people.
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle stand in solidarity with the Korean people of both north and south in their struggle against US imperialism and its renewed acts of aggression against them and against the DPRK. We call on the people of the world, the member organizations and allied forces of the ILPS to make manifest their support for the national sovereignty of the Korean people, condemn the aggressive presence of US imperialism in the Korean peninsula and demand its withdrawal.
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
Bulatlat http://www.bulatlat.com/main
URL to article: http://www.bulatlat.com/main/2010/07/24/ilps-condemns-us-and-rok-for-anti-dprk-provocations-as-attack-on-korean-sovereignty-and-peace-in-east-asia/
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) hereby condemns in the strongest terms the US and its South Korean puppet government for a crescendo of provocations against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). These provocations constitute an attack on the national sovereignty of the Korean people and threaten the peace in East Asia and the whole world.
The sinking of the Cheonan was obviously perpetrated by the US in order to stem the tide of popular opposition in Japan against US military bases and to justify a series of hostile actions of the US and its South Korean puppet government against the DPRK and the national sovereignty of the Korean people and the just position of the DPRK for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and reunification of the Korean people.
The hostile actions of the US and the puppet Republic of Korea (ROK) include the baseless accusations against the DPRK for the Cheonan sinking, the announced holding of joint US-ROK military exercises against the DPRK and the adoption of new sanctions against DPRK in relation to its program of nuclear research and development for national defense, pursuit of peace and economic development.
The US is an old hand at fabricating incidents in order to justify US aggression, such as the February 4, 1899 incident in the Philippines, the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident and similar incidents in Asia and elsewhere. It is obvious that the US staged the Cheonan sinking several months ago in order to justify and escalate US military presence in East Asia, to generate new tensions in the region, to prepare for a bigger act of aggression against DPRK and divert attention from US military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US and ROK are poised to undertake a series of largescale military exercises. The first one called Invincible Spirit is meant to humiliate DPRK, force it to take the blame for the US criminal act of sinking the Cheonan and accept talks on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles under US terms. The next military exercise called Freedom’s Guardian would immediately ensue. It is planned to be more aggressive and more challenging even to China.
The forces being mobilized for Invincible Spirit include the USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group and ROK Navy ships, aircraft fleet from the US Seventh Air Force, the George Washington Air Wing, the new F-22 Raptor aircraft, the ROK air force and ROK anti-submarine aircraft. In the meantime, the US and ROK forces are escalating psychological warfare along the 38th parallel as complement to the war preparations.
The sanctions being prepared by the US will aggravate and expand the existing financial, commercial and travel sanctions already imposed on the DPRK. Additional categories of DPRK personnel, assets and transactions will be banned or frozen. Even the diplomatic privileges of DRKP personnel will be curtailed. More aggressive actions are being planned against DPRK ships and planes.
In view of the extremely hostile actions and war plans of the US, the DPRK is fully justified in developing its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in order to counter the longrunning nuclearization of South Korea by the US and the continuous military and nuclear threats from US military bases in East Asia and the Pacific. The Korean people can never forget how the US collaborated with Japan to allow the latter to colonize Korea in the first half of the 20th century and how the US murdered more than three million Koreans in the US war of aggression against Korea from 1950 to 1953.
The people of East Asia have suffered so many gross acts of brutality and violations of human rights unleashed by US imperialism. These include the killing of 1.4 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American War, the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands in the US atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the killing of millions of Chinese by the US-supported Guomindang in the Chinese civil war, the killing of more than three million Koreans, the killing of more than six million Vietnamese and other Indochinese and the massacre of three million Indonesians by the US-supported Suharto fascist clique.
It is a gross act of hypocrisy and malice for the US to be prating about peace and stability in East Asia while it casts false accusations against the DPRK in order to obscure a long history of US aggression in East Asia, to justify continued US military presence in the whole region and to push forward a new plan of aggression against the DPRK and the Korean people.
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle stand in solidarity with the Korean people of both north and south in their struggle against US imperialism and its renewed acts of aggression against them and against the DPRK. We call on the people of the world, the member organizations and allied forces of the ILPS to make manifest their support for the national sovereignty of the Korean people, condemn the aggressive presence of US imperialism in the Korean peninsula and demand its withdrawal.
US Professors Raise Doubts About Report on South Korean Ship Sinking, by Akiko Fujita, Voice of America, Tokyo, 09 July 2010
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/asia/US-Professors-Raise-Doubts-About-Report-on-South-Korean-Ship-Sinking--98098809.html
Photo: AP
South Korean Internet-savvy citizens, such as bloggers, Twitter users and online media reporters, who are invited by the Defense Ministry, visit the wreckage of a warship that the government claims was sunk by a North Korean torpedo in March, at the Second Fleet Command of Navy in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul, South Korea, 08 Jul 2010.
A new study by U.S. researchers raises questions about the investigation into the sinking of a South Korean navy ship. International investigators blamed a North Korean torpedo, raising tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Researchers J.J. Suh and Seung-Hun Lee say the South Korean Joint Investigation Group made a weak case when it concluded that North Korea was responsible for sinking the Cheonan.
Speaking in Tokyo Friday, the two said the investigation was riddled with inconsistencies and cast "profound doubt" on the integrity of the investigation. "The only conclusion one can draw on the basis of the evidence is that there was no outside explosion," Suh said. "The JIG completely failed to produce evidence that backs up its claims that there was an outside explosion."
Suh is an associate professor in international relations at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where he runs the Korean studies program.
International investigators said in May that an external explosion caused the South Korean ship to sink last March, killing 46 sailors. The report said a North Korean-made torpedo caused the explosion.
Suh and Lee the cracked portion of the bottom of the ship does not show the signs of a large shock that are usually associated with outside explosions. They add that all the ship's internal parts remained intact and few fragments were recovered outside the ship.
"Almost all parts and fragments should've been recovered within about three to six meters within where the torpedo part was discovered," Lee says, "The fact that only the propeller and the propulsion part was discovered doesn't make any sense to me."
Lee is a professor of physics at the University of Virginia in the United States. Lee also points to a blue mark on a fragment of the torpedo to question the validity of the study. South Korean scientists say that part of the torpedo was marked "number one" in Korean, with a blue marker.
Suh and Lee say the writing would not have survived the intense heat of an explosion. "This can not be taken as evidence. Because any Korean, North and South, can write this mark," Suh said. "Also, it does not make sense that this blue ink mark could survive so freshly when the paint all around was all burned at the explosion."
Both researchers say their findings do not prove that North Korea did not sink the Cheonan. But they say it is irresponsible for the South Korean government to reach its conclusions based on an inconclusive study.
They are calling for a new international investigation to re-examine the Cheonan's sinking. They also want the United Nations Security Council to pressure the South Korean government and request an "objective and scientific" report before the council deliberates on the in
July 23, 2010
The Lies That Bind: The Myth of America, and the Murderous Reality, Friday, 23 July 2010 04:57
The Lies That Bind: The Myth of America, and the Murderous Reality
Friday, 23 July 2010 04:57
Preview :
The Lies That Bind: The Myth of America, and the Murderous Reality
Friday, 23 July 2010
Friday, 23 July 2010 04:57
The Lies That Bind: The Myth of America, and the Murderous Reality
Friday, 23 July 2010
Friday, 23 July 2010
© 2010 - World Can't Wait
Preview :
The Lies That Bind: The Myth of America, and the Murderous Reality
Friday, 23 July 2010
July 22, 2010
Internationally renowned Chilean Communist dies aged 93, ITAR-TASS News Agency, 21.07.2010, 19.08
BUENOS AIRES, July 21 (Itar-Tass) – One of the most widely known leaders of the Communist movement in Latin America, former Secretary General of the Chilean Communist Parry Luis Corvalan has died in Santiago at the age of 93, Chilean radio said Wednesday.
He died early morning Wednesday in his private house.
Corvalan joined the Communist Party of Chile in 1932 soon after the fall of dictatorship of Carlos Ibanez del Campo. He was fifteen years old at the time.
Upon receiving higher education as a teacher, Corvalan became a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1952, and he held the post of the Secretary General from 1958 through 1989 got.
After the bloody military coup of September 11, 1973, which brought to power General Augusto Pinochet’s junta, Corvalan immediately went underground and stayed for 16 days in a safehouse.
The forces loyal to the new dictatorship arrested him September 27, 1973. He was first kept in a prison cell and then transferred to a concentration camp on the Dawson Island.
He was the most known political prison of the Pinochet era after the murder of the internationally popular leftwing singer and actor Victor Jara.
In 1976, following a recommendation by Dr Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet leadership swapped Corvalan for the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.
He first lived in Berlin and then moved to Moscow where he continued active efforts for the restoration of civilian rule in Chile.
Corvalan returned to his homeland in October 1978, five months after the reverting of state power there to civilian rule. He had resigned from the post of the Communist Party’s Secretary General by then.
In 1995, he published a book on the disintegration of the USSR, in which he described the event as a tragedy for the world Socialist movement.
July 21, 2010
Jewish Challenges to Zionism on the Rise in the US, Written by Gabriel Ash, Emily Katz Kashawi, et. al. , Electronic Intifada
In June 2010, two opposite ends of the Jewish political spectrum will vie for one historical moment. As Israel and the Zionist movement struggle to maintain their century-long pull on Jewish minds, a new project is emerging to rechart the course away from Zionism and toward embracing a renewed commitment to a shared humanity.
On 19-22 June, just prior to the US Social Forum, North American Jews will gather in Detroit to challenge racism, colonialism and imperialism — first and foremost by contributing to efforts to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid (www.jewsconfrontapartheid.org), comes at a time when there is great urgency to build on recent successes of the Palestine solidarity movement, and as United States corporations and the government continue to commit grave injustices in Palestine — not to mention in its own communities.
This event follows on the heels of the 36th Congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to be held in Jerusalem that same week. The WZO was founded in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress to serve as the umbrella organization for the Zionist movement. At this upcoming gathering, the Congress will no doubt reassert and refocus its strategies for defending Israel's legitimacy against growing condemnations, attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes, and the successes of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
The WZO is both a symbol and a founding institution of Zionist political thought and action that brought us to this current historical moment. One finds an illustration of this disastrous trajectory in the press releases the WZO published during Israel's 2008-09 winter invasion of Gaza. For example, on 12 January, by the time most of the horrible facts of the massacre were already public knowledge, the WZO opposed UN Security Council Resolution 1860 calling for an immediate ceasefire, labeling it "anti-Israel," and criticized it for failing to demand "humanitarian assistance" to Israel. Many leading Zionist organizations echoed similar positions, whereas "softer" Zionist organizations waffled and fumbled. Reading their expressions of apology, support and indeed even encouragement for unconscionable crimes, it is painful to imagine that a beating heart was linked with the hand that typed them.
Likewise, on 31 May of this year, a monumental effort to break the illegal and crippling siege on Gaza was recently thwarted by the Israeli government. A flotilla comprised of six boats, 700 peace and solidarity activists from more than 40 countries delivering 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid was attacked by the Israeli navy and taken control of by killing and injuring people on a boat flying a Turkish flag in international waters. The inhumanity and illegality of these acts are undeniable and increasingly in the public eye. As awareness of Israel's moral and political bankruptcy is growing worldwide, so does the authoritarianism, violence and self-righteous fanaticism of the Israeli authorities and of growing sections of the Israeli public.
Overcoming Zionist ideas and practice is crucial, first and foremost, because of the impact of its institutionalized racism and colonialism on the people of Palestine and the broader region. This impact manifests in the demand for political, legal and economic power for Jews and European people and cultures over indigenous people and cultures. This racism is also the cause of the extensive displacement and alienation of Mizrahi Jews (Jews of African and Asian descent) from their diverse histories, languages, traditions and cultures and in the marginalization and economic exploitation of its Mizrahi population and migrant workers within Israeli society.
Zionism is also anti-Semitic in its rejection of Jewish cultures and histories — including both Jews who are "other" than European and the European Jewish "victim" which it attempted to distance itself from in the creation of the "new Jew." While rejecting the feminized Jewish victims of Christian Europe, it then uses their memory to justify and perpetuate European racism and colonialism and a militarized Jewish state. Likewise, Zionism promotes Islamophobia in Palestine, the broader region, the US and around the world. And the resentment and anger toward Jews living in Israel and elsewhere, aroused by Israeli violence and military domination, is used to justify further Zionist violence.
Zionism perpetuates Jewish exceptionalism and tells a version of Jewish history that is disconnected from the history and experiences of other people. By exceptionalizing the Nazi genocide, Jews are set apart from the victims and survivors of that and other genocides instead of being united with them. As such, Zionism implicates us in the oppression of the Palestinian people and in the debasement of our own heritages, struggles for justice and alliances with our fellow human beings.
The strategy to promote an understanding of Israel as an apartheid state is having increasing success, particularly in its explanation of why boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel are justified. Advances in this arena are rattling Zionist organizations in Israel and around the world. However, Zionist institutions like the WZO, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, B'nai B'rith and others in the US and elsewhere have access to millions of dollars to spend on shielding Israel from accountability for its apartheid policies and its accelerating war crimes, and for furthering the colonization, ethnic cleansing and the theft and destruction of Palestinian land.
The confluence of interests between the Israeli state, global capitalist interests, especially that of weapon manufacturers, "post-conflict" construction and security companies and the oil industry is going strong. Islamophobic reactions in Western Europe, the US and Canada and general xenophobia seeks to use Muslims and immigrants as the scapegoats for the universal crisis of capitalism and excuses for perpetual war and occupation.
US and Israeli military aggression in the region support and reinforce each other. Despite American concerns that Israeli policy damages the image of the US, Israel's economic and military power in the region is deemed vital by Washington. As a corollary, it is ever more apparent that pro-Israel lobbies in the US are opposed to anti-war efforts. The Zionist organizations and the Israeli lobby increasingly align with the neoconservatives in the US and share their investment in the agenda of war, occupation and/or sanctions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria.
Anti-Zionist Jews in the US can play a role in asserting to the anti-war movement that meaningful headway will not be possible without confronting the role Israel plays in provoking and justifying the US's war agenda. After decades of debate and hesitation, Palestine is still a point of contention in the American anti-war movement. Challenging the US funding of Israel is avoided out of concern that it will detract from critiques of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Contrary to this concern, placing Palestine squarely in the center of an anti-war agenda in the US is the key to a more fundamental shift in US policy and practice of which war is a necessary strategy. In turn, through building with the anti-war movement, we can contribute to efforts to reduce the isolation of the Palestinian struggle, advance challenges to Islamophobia, and directly challenge the mutually beneficial relationship shared by the US and Israel.
Accountability of Israeli, US government and international Zionist support for Israel will not come from a shift in US policy but through shifting American public opinion and debate, fomenting popular movement, using international and US legal sanctions and supporting the Palestinian call for BDS. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews seeks to contribute to these efforts and reflects a significant departure from Zionism that has been building since the second Palestinian intifada broke the stranglehold of the Oslo accords. It has continuity with a long history of Jewish participation in struggles for human emancipation. Ours are among the growing voices of Jews who seek a departure from the course that Zionism has been and continues down — a course that is a betrayal of our humanity as it simultaneously denies that of Palestinians.
Jews have an independent case against Zionism, and we are also part of a solidarity movement. When Jews aren't clear — either about their own confrontation of Zionism, or about the precedence of the demands of the Palestinian grassroots struggle — Jewish participation threatens to muddle rather than clarify and strengthen the Palestine solidarity movement. We must be cautious to not presume that our commitment and investment in overcoming Zionism suggest "equality" in the struggle; overstepping our actual role in the movement undermines Palestinian leadership in their own struggle, thus reinforcing the centralization of Jewish voices that Zionism promotes and racism suggests. Likewise, equating the need for Palestinian liberation and safety with safety of most Jews in contemporary Western countries is inaccurate.
The Assembly will be a chance to reflect on ourselves as a part of US and international movements for justice and bring clarity to our politics and practices so that we can increase our effectiveness. Jewish anti-Zionism is not an identity, but a politic to develop and actualize and a location from which to challenge Zionism. Organizing to gain the approval of — or legitimacy in relationship to — Jewish popular opinion, liberal Zionist organizations, or US public opinion undermines our ability to be in solidarity. Likewise, in the long-run, rewriting Palestinian demands (e.g. excluding the right of return from BDS campaigns) to fit agendas that reinforce peace as a strategy for maintaining an exclusive Jewish state does not challenge the foundations of Zionist policies and principles. However, in the short-run any participation that advances BDS is useful in delegitimizing Israel. It is the development and sharing of distinctions such as these that will deepen and increase the possibility of a real alternative to Zionism and the ability of Jews to contribute to a powerful and effective Palestine solidarity movement. These are the issues that we hope to raise and explore with Jews and our partners in struggle at the 2010 US Assembly of Jews.
Our commitment to confronting Zionism is part of our commitment to cutting the threads of racism, anti-Semitism, elitism, fascism, colonialism and imperialism that have nourished Zionism and were institutionalized in the apartheid structures of Israel. Instead, we build continuity with the historic and current movements for human emancipation, class struggle, equality, democracy and justice. These threads have always existed in Jewish histories, against histories of Jewish collaboration with those that seek to oppress.
Gabriel Ash is an activist, writer and a core member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN). He writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not.
Emily Katz Kashawi is an activist, communications professional and a mother of twins.
Mich Levy is an activist, educator and an international organizer with IJAN.
Sara Kershnar is an activist and an international organizer of IJAN.
June 14, 2010
Source: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11337.shtml
Organization referenced in article: www.jewsconfrontapartheid.org
July 20, 2010
Proletarian issue 36 (June 2010) Greece: Capitalism on the back foot, July 20, 2010
Militant communist leadership is an example to proletarians throughout Europe.
With social-democratic opportunism from PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, Greece’s ruling party) and the reformist union federations suffering exposure in mass practice, and every prospect that Papandreou’s government will be ground ever more mercilessly between the rock of proletarian resistance and the hard place of IMF-imposed austerity measures, Greece is looking increasingly like the weakest link in the chain of European imperialism.
The demonstrations and strikes that have thrown Papandreou’s austerity budget back in his face have a significance that goes beyond their gigantic size, impressive though that is. No less important than this ferocious rebuff administered by the Greek proletariat to the plans of the bourgeoisie and their international imperialist backers has been the rapid exposure, on a mass basis, of the political bankruptcy both of the social-democratic PASOK government and of social-democratic influence within the workers’ movement.
At every stage in the escalating struggle, the forces of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and of those PAME militants who unite in action behind the party’s lead have demonstrated the strength, discipline and clarity of perspective needed for the proletariat to advance, whilst at the same time demonstrating in practice the absence of those qualities in the PASOK left-bourgeois line.
PAME
PAME (All Workers Militant Front) was founded in 1999 by trade unionists who felt it necessary to challenge the corrupt careerists of the GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) and ADEDY (the Greek public sector workers’ union). Now, as the struggle has escalated, PAME’s potential role as the embryo of a nationwide popular front has come increasingly to the fore. KKE General Secretary Aleka Papariga spelt this out in her statement issued on 12 May.
“The time has come for a social-popular front for political and mass action to take shape, to take on distinct form, developed from the existing militant forces that must be multiplied; that is, the militant forces of the workers-employees in the private and public sectors, of the poor self-employed small businesses, the poor farmers, with a strengthening of the participation of the youth, children of working-class and low-income families, especially those that study and work, are in training programmes, women and immigrants, fighters in the fields of science, art and culture.
“For this reason joining forces with KKE is necessary, regardless of whether working people agree with KKE on everything, or if they have questions or different viewpoints on socialism.
“The beginnings of such a front exist today as shown by All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME), ?ll Greek Antimonopoly Rally of the Self-employed and the Small Tradesman (PASEVE), All Peasants’ Militant Rally (PASY), Students’ Militant Front (MAS) and other formations of the movement.”
PAME has shown itself to be innovative and flexible as it has developed. Many card-carrying members of the numerically larger GSEE and ADEDY, even many people who voted for PASOK, also function as PAME supporters, as do many members of left groups other than the KKE.
A KKE comrade told us that for the first time other small, trade-specific unions are coming closer to PAME, and all kinds of PAME union branches are popping up in different industries (hotel workers in Athens, factory workers in Crete, etc) and different work places (eg, Starbucks!) PAME exercises a growing political sway in the workers’ movement, to the alarm of those opportunist union leaders who fear the Bolshevisation of their own membership.
The April strikes: PAME comes to the fore
On 21 and 22 April, tens of thousands of workers in both the private and the public sectors went on strike and staged mass demonstrations in 69 cities. Leadership came from the PAME, but embracing within its ranks much wider circles. The KKE noted that the union federation that represents the private sector, the GSEE, effectively “aided the intimidation campaign launched by the plutocracy along with the media” by refusing to join in calling a strike.
Despite this, they report that “Since the daybreak of 21 April, thousands of workers picketed factory gates and other workplaces and paralysed for 48 hours big multinational companies, big industries, department stores, hotels, the port of Piraeus (the biggest port in the country) and other workplaces as well.”
Just as with BA cabin crew before Christmas and Network Rail engineers before Easter, the seamen who promised to close down Piraeus were banned from doing so by a bourgeois court, declaring such a strike to be illegal and abusive. Yet in Greece the outcome was somewhat different. Undaunted by the legal ban, the strike went ahead. We are told that “not even for a single moment did the decision of the court bend the seamen who guarded their strike for 48 hours”.
There can be no doubt that their resolve was stiffened by the strength of the political lead given by the organisers. Aleka Papariga insisted that the welfare of workers was not to be confused with the welfare of capitalism, pointing out that the “recovery of the economy”, which capitalism hopes to achieve by loans or by cuts (in practice, both), only really means “recovery of the profit-making and the plutocracy”. She said that the Greek government was stuck in a dilemma: “either we take a loan and people lose all their rights or we do not take any and people lose everything as well”. But the workers must reject this dilemma, she said, and resist the capitalist offensive against their rights.
May Day and after
Resistance continued on May Day. Whilst GSEE and their no less reformist counterpart in the public sector, ADEDY, felt obliged to go through the motions, leading marches through Athens, PAME took the line of direct political confrontation, mustering thousands of people outside the parliament building itself.
Riot police used tear gas on demonstrators outside the finance ministry. Piraeus harbour was closed down again, and up north in Thessaloniki there were further clashes between demonstrators and riot police. Resistance intensified with the subsequent two-day general strike, with angry demonstrations in Athens and the mass occupation of the Acropolis, where on 4 May communist workers unfurled banners calling upon the peoples of Europe to rise up in solidarity.
On 5 May, the struggle escalated into a nationwide general strike. Strikes paralysed factories, building sites, shops, ports, airports, universities and schools. From early in the morning, pickets ringed workplaces to enforce the strike, and as the day progressed, PAME led demonstrations of tens of thousands in Athens and in 68 other cities.
In the heat of one demonstration, a bank in central Athens was firebombed, resulting in the death of three bank workers. It is clear, however, that ultimate responsibility for all casualties in this bitter and necessary struggle of the classes lies at the door of the capitalists, whose determination to make workers starve in order to save the capitalist system leaves the proletariat no choice but to defend itself by any means necessary, unless it is prepared to eke out a miserable existence under ever worsening conditions.
As PAME leader Giorgos Perros put it, “No more sacrifices for the bankers, for the industrialists, for the monopolies. We will make sacrifices so as to defend, all together and united, our rights, our life; so as to defend the life of our children, not hand them over to the most brutal exploitation bound hand and foot. We do not give up our gains ... We will become stronger as long as we build our front, our own alliance. And once we will have built our own people’s front we will not be merely strong, we will be almighty; because we will have created the body of our own state power; we will have created the tool in order to plan and produce according to our needs; we will have created the basic mechanism in order to stop the minority of parasites who plunder our wealth, who live off our labour, which is sufficient to build our life, the life of our children and the next generation.”
The struggle continues
The struggle has since continued to build with no sign of abatement. Around a hundred thousand workers turned out for a PAME-led rally in Athens on 15 May and a further strike called on 20 May.
Confronted with this stubborn resistance, the state is increasingly turning to naked repression, dragging union activists through the criminal courts on trumped up charges. It is being helped in this by a torrent of anti-communist and anti-worker abuse issuing from the capitalist media, which have long been baying for the prosecution of the seamen who shut down the port of Piraeus on 21 and 22 April, in defiance of a court ban and despite attempts by the government and ship owners to use strike-breakers.
PASOK has led the anti-communist charge, fulminating against supposed breaches of the constitution by workers in struggle. The KKE’s Aleka Papariga rose to the challenge, pointing out that there has never been a bourgeoisie in history that abided by its own constitution.
Furthermore, those who so piously defend the existing constitution are in reality defending “the right of the capitalists to exploit the wealth that the people produce, to possess the most important commodity, namely the labour force, the ability of man to work. You defend the supreme law, the law of surplus value.”
In her 12 May statement, Comrade Papariga identified two basic tasks facing the Greek working class and their progressive allies – something in the nature of a minimum and a maximum programme.
The first task is to resist the austerity budget: “The first is the struggle which includes resistance, attrition, and undermining of the barbaric measures that the government and its allies are trying to push through.”
The second, in the view of the KKE, is to press forward to the “socialisation of the monopolies, the formation of popular cooperatives in sectors where socialisation is not possible, nationwide planning with working people’s control from the bottom up”.
We wish the Greek workers every success in fulfilling these vital aims. Let British workers learn from their example what can be achieved when we organise and take collective action.
Long live the Greek working class!
With social-democratic opportunism from PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, Greece’s ruling party) and the reformist union federations suffering exposure in mass practice, and every prospect that Papandreou’s government will be ground ever more mercilessly between the rock of proletarian resistance and the hard place of IMF-imposed austerity measures, Greece is looking increasingly like the weakest link in the chain of European imperialism.
The demonstrations and strikes that have thrown Papandreou’s austerity budget back in his face have a significance that goes beyond their gigantic size, impressive though that is. No less important than this ferocious rebuff administered by the Greek proletariat to the plans of the bourgeoisie and their international imperialist backers has been the rapid exposure, on a mass basis, of the political bankruptcy both of the social-democratic PASOK government and of social-democratic influence within the workers’ movement.
At every stage in the escalating struggle, the forces of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and of those PAME militants who unite in action behind the party’s lead have demonstrated the strength, discipline and clarity of perspective needed for the proletariat to advance, whilst at the same time demonstrating in practice the absence of those qualities in the PASOK left-bourgeois line.
PAME
PAME (All Workers Militant Front) was founded in 1999 by trade unionists who felt it necessary to challenge the corrupt careerists of the GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) and ADEDY (the Greek public sector workers’ union). Now, as the struggle has escalated, PAME’s potential role as the embryo of a nationwide popular front has come increasingly to the fore. KKE General Secretary Aleka Papariga spelt this out in her statement issued on 12 May.
“The time has come for a social-popular front for political and mass action to take shape, to take on distinct form, developed from the existing militant forces that must be multiplied; that is, the militant forces of the workers-employees in the private and public sectors, of the poor self-employed small businesses, the poor farmers, with a strengthening of the participation of the youth, children of working-class and low-income families, especially those that study and work, are in training programmes, women and immigrants, fighters in the fields of science, art and culture.
“For this reason joining forces with KKE is necessary, regardless of whether working people agree with KKE on everything, or if they have questions or different viewpoints on socialism.
“The beginnings of such a front exist today as shown by All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME), ?ll Greek Antimonopoly Rally of the Self-employed and the Small Tradesman (PASEVE), All Peasants’ Militant Rally (PASY), Students’ Militant Front (MAS) and other formations of the movement.”
PAME has shown itself to be innovative and flexible as it has developed. Many card-carrying members of the numerically larger GSEE and ADEDY, even many people who voted for PASOK, also function as PAME supporters, as do many members of left groups other than the KKE.
A KKE comrade told us that for the first time other small, trade-specific unions are coming closer to PAME, and all kinds of PAME union branches are popping up in different industries (hotel workers in Athens, factory workers in Crete, etc) and different work places (eg, Starbucks!) PAME exercises a growing political sway in the workers’ movement, to the alarm of those opportunist union leaders who fear the Bolshevisation of their own membership.
The April strikes: PAME comes to the fore
On 21 and 22 April, tens of thousands of workers in both the private and the public sectors went on strike and staged mass demonstrations in 69 cities. Leadership came from the PAME, but embracing within its ranks much wider circles. The KKE noted that the union federation that represents the private sector, the GSEE, effectively “aided the intimidation campaign launched by the plutocracy along with the media” by refusing to join in calling a strike.
Despite this, they report that “Since the daybreak of 21 April, thousands of workers picketed factory gates and other workplaces and paralysed for 48 hours big multinational companies, big industries, department stores, hotels, the port of Piraeus (the biggest port in the country) and other workplaces as well.”
Just as with BA cabin crew before Christmas and Network Rail engineers before Easter, the seamen who promised to close down Piraeus were banned from doing so by a bourgeois court, declaring such a strike to be illegal and abusive. Yet in Greece the outcome was somewhat different. Undaunted by the legal ban, the strike went ahead. We are told that “not even for a single moment did the decision of the court bend the seamen who guarded their strike for 48 hours”.
There can be no doubt that their resolve was stiffened by the strength of the political lead given by the organisers. Aleka Papariga insisted that the welfare of workers was not to be confused with the welfare of capitalism, pointing out that the “recovery of the economy”, which capitalism hopes to achieve by loans or by cuts (in practice, both), only really means “recovery of the profit-making and the plutocracy”. She said that the Greek government was stuck in a dilemma: “either we take a loan and people lose all their rights or we do not take any and people lose everything as well”. But the workers must reject this dilemma, she said, and resist the capitalist offensive against their rights.
May Day and after
Resistance continued on May Day. Whilst GSEE and their no less reformist counterpart in the public sector, ADEDY, felt obliged to go through the motions, leading marches through Athens, PAME took the line of direct political confrontation, mustering thousands of people outside the parliament building itself.
Riot police used tear gas on demonstrators outside the finance ministry. Piraeus harbour was closed down again, and up north in Thessaloniki there were further clashes between demonstrators and riot police. Resistance intensified with the subsequent two-day general strike, with angry demonstrations in Athens and the mass occupation of the Acropolis, where on 4 May communist workers unfurled banners calling upon the peoples of Europe to rise up in solidarity.
On 5 May, the struggle escalated into a nationwide general strike. Strikes paralysed factories, building sites, shops, ports, airports, universities and schools. From early in the morning, pickets ringed workplaces to enforce the strike, and as the day progressed, PAME led demonstrations of tens of thousands in Athens and in 68 other cities.
In the heat of one demonstration, a bank in central Athens was firebombed, resulting in the death of three bank workers. It is clear, however, that ultimate responsibility for all casualties in this bitter and necessary struggle of the classes lies at the door of the capitalists, whose determination to make workers starve in order to save the capitalist system leaves the proletariat no choice but to defend itself by any means necessary, unless it is prepared to eke out a miserable existence under ever worsening conditions.
As PAME leader Giorgos Perros put it, “No more sacrifices for the bankers, for the industrialists, for the monopolies. We will make sacrifices so as to defend, all together and united, our rights, our life; so as to defend the life of our children, not hand them over to the most brutal exploitation bound hand and foot. We do not give up our gains ... We will become stronger as long as we build our front, our own alliance. And once we will have built our own people’s front we will not be merely strong, we will be almighty; because we will have created the body of our own state power; we will have created the tool in order to plan and produce according to our needs; we will have created the basic mechanism in order to stop the minority of parasites who plunder our wealth, who live off our labour, which is sufficient to build our life, the life of our children and the next generation.”
The struggle continues
The struggle has since continued to build with no sign of abatement. Around a hundred thousand workers turned out for a PAME-led rally in Athens on 15 May and a further strike called on 20 May.
Confronted with this stubborn resistance, the state is increasingly turning to naked repression, dragging union activists through the criminal courts on trumped up charges. It is being helped in this by a torrent of anti-communist and anti-worker abuse issuing from the capitalist media, which have long been baying for the prosecution of the seamen who shut down the port of Piraeus on 21 and 22 April, in defiance of a court ban and despite attempts by the government and ship owners to use strike-breakers.
PASOK has led the anti-communist charge, fulminating against supposed breaches of the constitution by workers in struggle. The KKE’s Aleka Papariga rose to the challenge, pointing out that there has never been a bourgeoisie in history that abided by its own constitution.
Furthermore, those who so piously defend the existing constitution are in reality defending “the right of the capitalists to exploit the wealth that the people produce, to possess the most important commodity, namely the labour force, the ability of man to work. You defend the supreme law, the law of surplus value.”
In her 12 May statement, Comrade Papariga identified two basic tasks facing the Greek working class and their progressive allies – something in the nature of a minimum and a maximum programme.
The first task is to resist the austerity budget: “The first is the struggle which includes resistance, attrition, and undermining of the barbaric measures that the government and its allies are trying to push through.”
The second, in the view of the KKE, is to press forward to the “socialisation of the monopolies, the formation of popular cooperatives in sectors where socialisation is not possible, nationwide planning with working people’s control from the bottom up”.
We wish the Greek workers every success in fulfilling these vital aims. Let British workers learn from their example what can be achieved when we organise and take collective action.
Long live the Greek working class!
July 14, 2010
POEM: A Complaint by a new-times progressive about Leninists, or "You're a Bolshevik Charlie Brown!" by: Andy Taylor, Wed. July 14, 2010
(Based on a corrupt following of "A Clergyman in Black" by S.J. Forrest)
I never, never like to see
A communist whose Red
It betokens dark disloyalty,
And is not labor-led;
And smacks of the regrettable errors
Of our (heroic) Dead.
This "ultra-leftism" shows
The errors of The Greeks,
An aping of the Soviets,
Or militancy at the least;
That makes a communist appear
To be a Marxist Beast.
Though our "new thought" mob are difficult
To really sift and query
I find the communists the worst
To dump old discarded theory;
And the truly red are normally
Unwilling to see clearly.
(A social-dem in designer jeans
Or mixed and matched in tweed,
Will generally drop their case,
And readily accede;
Their chuminess and soundness,
Are wholly guaranteed.)
So let us warn our cadre
Of 20th century excess,
And only pass the devotees
Who eagerly express;
A variegated progressiveness,
In broad and varicoloured dress.
July 13, 2010
Unprecedented police brutality at occupied East Jerusalem protest, C.P. of Israel, 12 July 2010
Source: http://www.maki.org.il
Communist Party of Israel
Unprecedented police brutality at occupied East Jerusalem protest
Ten activists were detained and held for questioning over blocking roadways at a protest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem yesterday, late Friday (July 9, 2010).
The Palestinian district is the site of weekly demonstrations against the takeover of local residents' homes by Israeli settlers. The demonstrations are frequently attended by Israeli peace activists among them several Hadash (Democratic Front for Equality and Peace – Communist Party of Israel) militants.
Some 300 peace and left-wing activists arrived in the neighborhood to rally against the evacuation of Arab families in favor of Jewish residents. The protestors attempted to enter the "Simeon the Just" compound, claiming a court had given them permission to do so, but were stopped by police and Border Guard officers.
Activists who clashed with the police said the officers used violent means against them despite a passive protest. Well-know author David Grossman and former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair attended the rally as well. Grossman was also pushed by the police.
"We have wanted to protest inside the neighborhood with the Palestinians for the past nine months. We have a court approval," said one of the protestors, Shir Sternberg. "We demanded to enter in a non-violent manner, and the police pushed us."
Some six weeks ago, several hundred Hebrew University students and lecturers marched from the Mount Scopus campus in Jerusalem to Sheikh Jarrah in protest over the settlers' takeover of local residents' homes. The protest march included such prominent professors as Ze'ev Sternhell, Yaron Ezrahi, Ariel Hirschfeld and others.
The protesters carried signs calling for and end to settlements in East Jerusalem. "Democracy stops at Sheikh Jarrah," some signs said, while others read "Stop ethnic cleansing."
Communist Party of Israel
Unprecedented police brutality at occupied East Jerusalem protest
Ten activists were detained and held for questioning over blocking roadways at a protest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem yesterday, late Friday (July 9, 2010).
The Palestinian district is the site of weekly demonstrations against the takeover of local residents' homes by Israeli settlers. The demonstrations are frequently attended by Israeli peace activists among them several Hadash (Democratic Front for Equality and Peace – Communist Party of Israel) militants.
Some 300 peace and left-wing activists arrived in the neighborhood to rally against the evacuation of Arab families in favor of Jewish residents. The protestors attempted to enter the "Simeon the Just" compound, claiming a court had given them permission to do so, but were stopped by police and Border Guard officers.
Activists who clashed with the police said the officers used violent means against them despite a passive protest. Well-know author David Grossman and former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair attended the rally as well. Grossman was also pushed by the police.
"We have wanted to protest inside the neighborhood with the Palestinians for the past nine months. We have a court approval," said one of the protestors, Shir Sternberg. "We demanded to enter in a non-violent manner, and the police pushed us."
Some six weeks ago, several hundred Hebrew University students and lecturers marched from the Mount Scopus campus in Jerusalem to Sheikh Jarrah in protest over the settlers' takeover of local residents' homes. The protest march included such prominent professors as Ze'ev Sternhell, Yaron Ezrahi, Ariel Hirschfeld and others.
The protesters carried signs calling for and end to settlements in East Jerusalem. "Democracy stops at Sheikh Jarrah," some signs said, while others read "Stop ethnic cleansing."
Castro: War on Iran 'imminent', by Tom Mellen, Morning Star Online, Tuesday 13 July 2010
Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro warned on Monday that a US-Israeli attack on Iran is "imminent" and predicted that this could trigger a global nuclear war.
In a special appearance on state-run television for the first time in nearly a year, the Communist leader described US and Israeli sabre-rattling over Iran's civil nuclear energy programme as "the most serious crisis" on the international scene because "the Iranian government will not retreat."
"The Iranians have been preparing themselves for 30 years, and have acquired all the Russian and Chinese aeroplanes and weapons necessary for their defence," Mr Castro said.
"They are training all people between the ages of 12 and 60 - just the Guardians of the Revolution have a million members," he added.
And Mr Castro insisted that the US sank the South Korean Cheonan warship in order to justify an attack on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
He said that "in the face of a massive attack against Iran, North Korea will not wait to be attacked, and a nuclear war will also break out in that zone.
"When they decide to attack Iran, one war after the other will be unleashed," he declared.
The veteran Communist spoke out at a delicate time politically for Cuba, as it begins releasing 52 prisoners under a landmark deal brokered with Spanish officials and the Catholic church last week.
The men were all arrested in a crackdown on US-backed subversion in 2003.
In a special appearance on state-run television for the first time in nearly a year, the Communist leader described US and Israeli sabre-rattling over Iran's civil nuclear energy programme as "the most serious crisis" on the international scene because "the Iranian government will not retreat."
"The Iranians have been preparing themselves for 30 years, and have acquired all the Russian and Chinese aeroplanes and weapons necessary for their defence," Mr Castro said.
"They are training all people between the ages of 12 and 60 - just the Guardians of the Revolution have a million members," he added.
And Mr Castro insisted that the US sank the South Korean Cheonan warship in order to justify an attack on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
He said that "in the face of a massive attack against Iran, North Korea will not wait to be attacked, and a nuclear war will also break out in that zone.
"When they decide to attack Iran, one war after the other will be unleashed," he declared.
The veteran Communist spoke out at a delicate time politically for Cuba, as it begins releasing 52 prisoners under a landmark deal brokered with Spanish officials and the Catholic church last week.
The men were all arrested in a crackdown on US-backed subversion in 2003.
July 12, 2010
The Source of Wars, written by Fidel Castro Ruz, in: cubadebate, 12 Julio 2010
http://www.cubadebate.cu/fidel-castro-ruz/2010/07/12/the-source-of-wars/
On July 4, I said that neither the United States nor Iran would give in: “one, prevented by the pride of the powerful, and the other because it has the capacity and the will to fight oppression, as we have seen so many times before in the history of mankind.”
In nearly every war, one party wishes to avoid it and, sometimes, the two parties do. This time it will happen although one of the parties does not wish it. That was the case of the two World Wars of 1914 and 1939, only 25 years one from the other.
The carnage was awful in both wars, which would not have erupted had it not been for previous miscalculations. Both defended imperialist interests and believed they could accomplish their goals without the exceedingly high price finally paid.
In the case in question, one of the parties involved advocates absolutely fair national interests. The other pursues illegitimate and coarse material interests.
An analysis of every war fought throughout the recorded history of our species shows that one of the parties has pursued such goals.
It’s absolutely wrong to entertain the illusion that this time such goals will be attained without the most dreadful of all wars.
In one of the best articles ran by the Global Research website, on Thursday July 1, signed by Rick Rozoff, the author offers plenty of indisputable arguments, which every well-informed person should be aware of, about the intentions of the United States.
According to the author, the United States believes that “…you can win if the adversary knows that it is vulnerable to a sudden and undetectable, appalling and devastating strike that it has no possibility to respond to or to defend from.”
“…a country with the aspiration of continuing as the only one in history with full military predominance all over the Earth, in the air, the sea and in space.”
“A country that keeps and expands military bases and troops as well as fighting-groups of aircraft carriers and strategic bombers on practically every latitude and longitude, and which does so on a record war budget after World War II amounting to 708 billion dollars next year.”
It was also “…the first country to develop and use nuclear weapons…”
“…the United States has deployed 1,550 nuclear warheads while keeping 2,200 in storage (or 3,500 according to some estimates) and a triad of ground, air and submarine delivering vehicles.”
“The non-nuclear arsenal used to neutralize and destroy the air and strategic defenses, and potentially all the major military forces of other countries, will consist in intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and hypersonic bombers, and super-stealth strategic bombers that can avoid radar detection and the ground- and air-based defenses.”
Rozoff enumerates the numerous press conferences, meetings and statements given in the past few months by the chiefs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior executives of the US administration.
He explains the NATO commitments and the reinforced cooperation with the Near East partners, meaning Israel in the first place. He says that “the US is also intensifying the space and cyber war programs with the potential to paralyze other nations’ military command and surveillance, control, communication, information and intelligence systems rendering them helpless except in the most basic tactical field.”
He refers to the signing by the US and Russia, on April 8 this year, in Prague, of the new START Treaty, “which contains no restriction as to the actual or planned potential for a US conventional prompt global strike.”
He also reports a number of news on the issue and offers a most striking example of the US objectives.
He indicates that “…the Defense Department is currently examining the entire range of technologies and systems for a Conventional Prompt Global Strike that could offer the president more credible and technically adequate options to tackle new and developing threats.”
I sustain the view that no president –and not even the most knowledgeable military chief– would have a minute to know what should be done if it were not already programmed in computers.
Rozoff proceeds undisturbed to relate what Global Security Network states in an analysis from Elaine Grossman under the title, The Cost of Testing a US Global Strike Missile Could Reach 500 Million Dollars.
“The Obama administration has requested 239.9 billion dollars for research and development of the prompt global strike by US military services in fiscal year 2011…if the level of funds remains as anticipated for the coming years, by the end of fiscal year 2015 the Pentagon will have spent 2 billion dollars in prompt global strike, according to budget documents introduced in Congress last month.”
“A comparable terrifying scenario of the effects of a PGS, in this case of the sea version, was described three years ago in Popular Mechanics:
“An Ohio-type nuclear submarine emerges in the Pacific ready to execute the President’s order for launching. When the order comes, the submarine shoots to the sky a 65-tons Trident II missile. Within 2 minutes, the missile is flying at 22,000 km/h. Over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it speeds for thousands of kilometers.
“At the top of its parabola, in space, the four warheads of the Trident separate and start descending on the planet.
“The warheads flying at 21,000 km/h are full of tungsten rods with twice the resistance of steel.
“Once on target, the warheads explode and thousands of rods fall on the area, each carrying 12 times the destructive force of a .50 caliber bullet. Everything within 279 square meters of that whirling metal storm is annihilated.”
Then Rozoff explains the statement made this year, on April 7, by the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General Leonid Ivashov, under the headline Obama’s Nuclear Surprise, where he refers to the US President remarks in Prague last year with the following words: “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War,” and about the signature of the START II in that same city on April 8, the author points out:
“In the history of the United States during the past century, there is not one example of sacrifice of the US elites for humanity or for the peoples of other countries. Would it be realistic to expect that the arrival of an African-American president to the White House might change the political philosophy of that nation traditionally aimed at achieving global domination? Those who believe that something like that could happen should try to understand why the US –the country whose military budget exceeds that of all the other countries of the world combined– continues spending huge amounts of money in war preparations.”
“…the concept of Prompt Global Strike envisions a concentrated attack with the use of several thousand conventional precision weapons that within 2 to 4 hours would destroy the crucial infrastructure of the targeted country and force it to capitulate.”
“The concept of Prompt Global Strike is aimed at ensuring the US monopoly in the military field and to widen the gap between that country and the rest of the world. In combination with the defensive deployment of missiles that should supposedly preserve the US from retaliatory attacks from Russia and China, the Prompt Global Strike initiative will turn Washington into a global dictator of the modern era.”
“Essentially, the new US nuclear doctrine is part of the new US security strategy that could more adequately be described as a strategy of complete impunity. The US increases its military budget, gives free rein to NATO as a global gendarme, and plans exercises in a real situation in Iran to prove the efficiency of the Prompt Global Strike initiative.”
In substance, Obama intends to mislead the world talking about a world free of nuclear weapons that would be replaced with other extremely destructive weapons designed to terrorize the leaders of other States and to accomplish the new strategy of complete impunity.
The Yankees believe that Iran will soon surrender. It is expected that the European Union will inform about a package of its own sanctions to be signed on July 26.
The latest meeting of 5 plus 1 was held on July 2, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated that “his country will resume the talks by the end of August, with the participation of Brazil and Turkey.”
A senior EU official warned that “neither Brazil nor Turkey will be invited to the talks, at least not at this point.”
“Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki remarked that he is in favor of challenging international sanctions and proceeding with the upgrading of uranium.”
Since Tuesday July 5, and in view of the European insistence in promoting additional measures against Iran, this country has responded that it will not negotiate until September.
Thus, with every passing day there are fewer possibilities to overcome the insurmountable obstacle.
What will happen is so obvious that it can be exactly foreseen.
As for me, I should be self-critical since I made the mistake of affirming in my Reflections of June 27, that the conflict would break out on Thursday, Friday or Saturday at the latest. It was known that Israeli warships were moving toward their target alongside the Yankee naval forces. The order to search the Iranian merchant ships had been issued.
However, I lost sight of a previous step: Iran’s continued refusal to allow the inspection of a merchant ship. In the analysis of the Security Council’s intricate language to impose sanctions on that country, I overlooked the detail of that previous step for the inspection order to be enforced. It was the only required step.
The 60-days period assigned by the Security Council on June 9, to receive information on the implementation of the Resolution, will expire on August 8.
But something more unfortunate still was happening. I was working with the latest material on the issue produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba and the document did not include two crucial paragraphs which were the last of said Resolution and which literally read:
“It requests that, in a 90 days period, the Director General of the IAEA submits to the IAEA Board of Governors and, simultaneously, to the Security Council for its examination, a report indicating whether Iran has carried out the complete and sustained suspension of all the activities mentioned in Resolution 1737 (2006), and if it is implementing every measure demanded by the IAEA Board of Governors and observing the remaining provisions of Resolutions 1737, 1747, 1803 and the current Resolution;
“It affirms that it will examine Iran’s actions in the light of the report mentioned in paragraph 36, which shall be submitted in a period of 90 days and that a) it will suspend the implementation of the measures provided that Iran suspends every activity related to upgrading and reprocessing, including research and development, and while the suspension stands, the IAEA will verify, to allow the celebration of negotiations in good faith to reach a prompt and mutually acceptable result; b) it will cease to implement the measures specified in paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 12 of resolution 1737, as well as in paragraphs 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of resolution 1747, in the paragraphs 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of Resolution 1803 and in paragraphs 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 and 24 of the current resolution, as soon as it determines, after receiving the report mentioned in the previous paragraph, that Iran has fully observed its obligations in compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions and the requisites of the IAEA Board of Governors, a determination to be confirmed by the Board itself; and c) in case the report indicates that Iran has failed to abide by the provisions of Resolutions 1737, 1747, 1803 and the current resolution, it will adopt, in accordance with article 41 of chapter vii of the UN Charter, other appropriate measures to persuade Iran to do as provided in said resolutions and the requisites of the IAEA, and underlines that other decisions shall be adopted if such additional measures were necessary…”
Apparently, after many hours of hard work making copies of every document, somebody at the Ministry fell asleep, but my eagerness to seek information and exchange views on these sensitive issues enabled me to detect the omission.
From my viewpoint, the United States and its NATO allies have said their last word. Two powerful states with authority and prestige failed to exercise their right of vetoing the perfidious UN Resolution.
It was the only possibility to gain time in order to find a formula to save peace, an objective that would have given them more authority to continue struggling for it.
Today, everything hangs by a thread.
My main purpose was to warn the international public of what was developing.
I have done so partly watching what was happening as the political leader that I was for many long years facing the empire, its blockade and its unspeakable crimes. I’m not doing it for revenge.
I do not hesitate to take the risk of compromising my modest moral authority.
I shall continue writing Reflections on the subject. There will be others after this one to continue delving in the issue on July and August, unless an incident occurs that sets in motion the deadly weapons that are today aiming at each other.
I have greatly enjoyed the final matches of the Football World Cup and the volleyball matches, where our brave team is leading its group in the World League.
Fidel Castro Ruz
July 11, 2010
8:14 PM
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