February 27, 2015

The Ideology of the American Media is That it Believes That It Doesn’t Have any Ideology William Blum Feb 27-Mar 01, 2015


The Ideology of the American Media is That it Believes That It Doesn’t Have any Ideology

by WILLIAM BLUM

So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.
In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”
In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”
Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.
Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:
PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?
PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?
PIRO: Yes.
PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?
For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”
I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.
In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War IIRogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power . His latest book is: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

February 24, 2015

Syriza and the eurogroup agreement Andrew Taylor 02 24 15

For those starry-eyed idealists who represented Syriza's victory as "revolutionary" or "a new dawn" for Greece the Tsipras governments' agreement with Euro-group finance ministers is a bitter wake-up call . Lessons must be taken on the capacity of social-democracy to enact fundamental change against the dictate of Capital..

As the Communist Party of Ireland has stated in response to the Syriza accord with European Capital:

"One of the lessons [learned] must be that the treaties governing the European Union have in effect outlawed not only a radical people-centred solution but have effectually outlawed even tame Keynesian policies, and that the controlling forces are determined to solve the crisis of capitalism at the expense of the working people.

A second thing is clear: that people can vote at the national level for whoever they like, but this is not decisive, as the European Union will impose TINA (“There is no alternative”) and the economic and political straitjacket of what is in the interests of capitalism."
http://bit.ly/1zEe4P2

For those of us who recognised the limitations of Syriza's programme and class-base but yet hoped against hope that a failed re-negotiation of the Debt would not provoke mass despair and the rise of Greek and European reaction, the new accord's astonished reception/dismissal by leading Syriza members points to grave political instability ahead.

Syriza has agreed to “refrain from any rollback of measures and unilateral changes to the policies and structural reforms” previously agreed to by ND and PASOK administrations. PASOK and the other centrist parties point out that Syriza is continuing their policies of austerity with some domestic concessions.

The small and relatively peripheral marxist and 'communist' fractions within Syriza were hit the hardest by the Syriza accord with the Euro-group Finance ministers.

Whither Greece in light of the apparent inability of Syriza to halt the continuance of Austerity's exactions on its own?

Will part of that section of the working class which voted for Syriza party now turn to the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) which predicted the failure of any intra-EU-NATO 'solution'?
Will the wavering "middle class" continue supporting the recently elected party in hopes of igniting a Europe-wide revolt against the Troika ? The answer to these questions is vital: without the mass uprising of the peoples of the hardest-hit EU nations against the troika cutbacks, the Syriza anti-austerity project cannot succeed. And that will affect us all.

February 23, 2015

Toronto Star Supports the Perpetrators of War Crimes in Ukraine by ROGER ANNIS 02 20 15

source: counterpunch

The three conglomerates that dominate print media in Canada—Torstar, which publishes the Toronto Star, the country’s largest daily newspaper; Woodbridge, which publishes The Globe and Mail, the largest national daily; and Postmedia, which controls the daily newspapers of most cities in English Canada–speak on Ukraine as though they all attended the same indoctrination sessions. Viewed through their prism, Ukraine is topsy-turvy and bears little resemblance to reality. Human rights, moral standards and the concerns of the people of the east of the country are given no standing, no voice and no sympathy.

Among the three, the Star has distinguished itself in that three of its writers have used their column and article space to vaunt the fundraising projects of Ukraine’s extreme-right parties and militias and the Ukraine army. These are forces which have been shelling towns and cities in eastern Ukraine and otherwise committing countless war crimes for the better part of the past year.

I raised a hue about the fundraising in an article dated January 30. It was published in CounterPunch and Rabble.ca, drawing attention to two articles in the preceding six weeks, including one by seasoned Star Foreign Affairs Reporter Olivia Ward, which promoted pro-war fundraising. I accused the Star of “running with the extreme right in Ukraine”.

Earlier, on December 29, I published a letter responding to a December 23 article by Star writer Tanya Talaga which first introduced Star readers to ‘Patriot Defense. Its campaign, I explained, funds ‘first aid’ kits and training “being provided to members of the special Battalions, the National Guard, the Army and the Border Service and other security agencies. We are working together with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence”. Note the “working together” language indicating this is a straight-up effort of the rightist battalions (which tolerate Ukraine’s elected institutions at the best of times and are known to threaten to overthrow them if the extreme right is not given its political way). I complained to the writer and to the Star editors, to no avail.

Counterpunch and Rabble.ca are widely read, so I thought it safe to assume that my January 30 article came to the attention of the Star‘s editors, if not its writers. In point of fact, for the past year, I have sent many e-mails and copies of articles to Star editors and columnists, pointing out the newspaper’s one-sided and simplistic ‘blame Russia’ interpretations of events in Ukraine.

So how did the Star respond to my January 30 article? Why, it came back with two more fundraising appeals!

On January 31, it published an article promoting a stage play in Toronto which is raising funds for the ‘Patriot Defense’ fundraising campaign of extremist battalions. Star writer Leslie Ferenc provided a description of the play and the seemingly noble and heroic aims of ‘Patriot Defense’. She cited the playwright’s description of the origin of the political conflict and war in Ukraine as “an atrocity against humanity which became a full-blown Russian invasion”.

On Saturday, February 7, the Star published a front-page article by Olivia Ward which advocates fundraising for ‘SOS Army’ in Ukraine. This outfit has been providing arms and equipment to the Ukraine army, to the Ukrainian National Guard (which is largely composed of volunteers from the extremist parties in Ukraine), and to the battalions that are the militias of the extreme right.

The most shocking part of the Olivia Ward riposte is that among the items funded by ‘SOS Army‘ is technology for improved artillery sighting.

The Ukraine army and militias have been conducting war crimes against the civilians of eastern Ukraine during the past nine months through indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks against towns and cities. These are the war crimes of which the mainstream media dares not speak or write. The crimes have included the use of cluster weapons, as documented by the New York Times, by Human Rights Watch and, most recently, by the observer mission in Ukraine of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Human Rights Watch has been obliged to speak out a second time against the use of cluster weapons because it was ignored by Kyiv the first time. That was in October, when the rights agency and the Times published separate investigations, each concluding that Kyiv is using cluster weapons. Human Rights Watch returned to the subject on February 4, 2015 because, it says, the Ukraine government failed to explain itself back in October and, worse, continues to use the weapons. Cluster weapons are banned in an international treaty, but Ukraine and the United States are among the countries that have refused to sign it. (Canada has signed the treaty but has failed to adopt an implementation process. Treaty statuses by country here.)

A Ukrainian language blog report encourages financial donations to ‘SOS Army’ by describing the benefits of more accurate artillery shelling. “For the price of a few sleepless nights, a computer technology team created an artillery sighting calculator that allows to quickly calculate and fire. Ballistic tables for all types of weapons help our gunners immediately calculate and adjust their shooting, dramatically improving their accuracy and avoiding mistakes.

“Fighters in the front are very pleased to no longer lug around bulky books, heavy iron plates and old topographic maps.”

It’s hard to know what “mistakes” this promotion material is citing. There have been way too many—tens of thousands—of artillery strikes in eastern Ukraine in the past nine months on houses, apartment buildings, workplaces, buses, hospitals, schools and kindergartens, among other locations, to believe for a nanosecond that any of these are cases of “mistakes”.

Another improvement for artillery against enemy fighters, not to speak of civilians and infrastructure, is provided by drone technology. Here too, SOS Army fundraising helps to equip the Ukraine army, not to speak of fascist paramilitary battalions. Here is a YouTube video promoting that effort.

And for a donation to ‘SOS Army’, you, too, can have your very own t-shirt carrying the stirring message, ‘Putin is a fucker’.

The blog report claims that SOS Army is a registered charitable foundation in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain.

So let’s pause here to see if we have this right. Canada’s largest newspaper, the only one still known to employ many writers and columnists with liberal and socially progressive views, is somehow caught up in fundraising for the armed forces of a neo-conservative government in Ukraine and its allied fascist extremists, who are bombing and shelling civilians in the east of the country. How could this be?

Sadly, the direction comes from the top. The Toronto Star has vigorously editorialized in favour of the war–oops, pardon me, I should say the ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, as Kyiv calls it—in eastern Ukraine since it was launched last April. No dissenting voice from that course is permitted in the newspaper’s pages. Its fundraising pitches on behalf of the war date back to at least September 11 of last year when the right-wing Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) staged a gala fundraising event featuring Prime Minister Stephen Harper and professional hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. The Star wrote a glowing review of that event (timed on the anniversary of the world’s most publicized terrorist attack, and I don’t mean Hiroshima or Nagasaki). It took place only a few weeks after the Star ignored the news, reported on the CBC and some other mainstream outlets, of the UCC-organized Ukraine Independence Day event in Toronto that was attended by a federal cabinet minister and the premier of the province. It prominently featured a fundraising booth of the Right Sector fascist paramilitaries of Ukraine.

The latest Star editorial gives voice to the continued war course, saying, “Russian President Vladimir Putin has been the aggressor all along and, if this latest effort at peace fails, it’s important that he pay an escalating price for his deadly bellicosity.” But it goes further than sanctions by holding out the option of military escalation:

In the run-up to the latest round of peace talks, both U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper held open the possibility of supplying Ukraine with high-tech defensive weapons. That option requires further analysis given that key allies, including Merkel and France’s President François Hollande, remain opposed.

But it may soon prove necessary if Putin remains immune to arguments based on reason, economic pressure, and simple decency.

It is shocking to think that the ideological heirs in today’s Ukraine of the dark forces of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes of that era are today’s heroes in the pages of the likes of the Toronto Star.[1] All the more shocking when one considers that NATO’s threats and escalations in eastern Europe raise the nightmare specter of a horror some may mistakenly believe no longer haunts humanity—nuclear war.

There is an urgency in Canada as well as in other NATO countries of seizing the occasion of the ceasefire in Ukraine to promote more discussion and debate about the high stakes in the Ukraine war. Antiwar protest is needed. Indeed, a wholesale rejuvenation of an antiwar movement is in order, including to oppose the economic sanctions against Russia. Sanctions serve to set the stage for escalating military threats.

Following the encouraging victory of the Syriza Party in the recent Greek election, and with the climate emergency becoming ever more urgent, this is not the time to be leaving the destiny of the Earth in the hands of crazed warmongers.

Roger Annis is a frequent writer on the war in Ukraine. He is an editor of the website New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond. The website publishes daily news and analysis by its editors and contributors and it reprints articles from other sources.

Notes:

1.
To be fair to the Star, it is not alone in covering up the role of the extreme right in Ukraine and otherwise disseminating confusion and disarray. The Globe and Mail editors are just about as bellicose (stopping short of calling for arms shipments to Kyiv in their Feb. 13 editorial). And last December, the Globe and Mail‘s European correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, wrote a substantial article summing up the situation in Ukraine. He expressed befuddlement over Ukraine’s painful experience during World War Two, specifically the collaboration of large numbers of right-wing Ukrainians with Nazi Germany. I wrote a rejoinder to his article at the time. MacKinnon described the deeply divisive historical debate in Ukraine over the war as “an angry argument about whose grandfathers were on the right side of the Second World War, when Hitler fought Stalin in Ukraine”. Aha, it seems that in light of more recent events, World War Two was not a war against fascism after all, as I was taught in my school years in Canada and as my family members who served in the war believed. It was a war where, in Ukraine at least, “Hitler fought against Stalin”. And Germany did not invade the Soviet Union and kill upwards of 20 million people; no, “Hitler fought Stalin”. (By the way, this reads like a version of the rising, revisionist “double genocide” school of World War two history which posits that Hitler’s crimes may be explained, at least in part, by equal, or perhaps worse, crimes attributed to the leaders of the Soviet Union.)

 

February 18, 2015

A Review: Sam Webb and the politics of outrage, Andrew Taylor 02 18 15

'Obama and the politics of outrage'
by: Sam Webb
February 15 2015
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/obama-and-the-politics-of-outrage/

In this piece Sam Webb, former Chair of the Communist Party USA, makes the point he has consistently emphasized in his articles over the years - the unevenness and contradictions of the class-struggle demand an allegiance to the US Trade Union leaderships and to The Democratic Party. It certainly is true that officials of the mass organizations in America know  it is important to have the president on board with their cause. Long-term strategy and tactics are vital in defeating neoliberalism, monopoly and capitalism.

But if strategic and tactical thinking and a tone of respect is to be used in our alliances with the ruling-class parties, ought we not use the same with the actual Left in America? Just with regard to his pejorative comment in this article on Howard Zinn and those who think like him,  it is clear that Sam Webb never tires of slamming the US popular Left. After all, whose books are selling and what authors are discussed among progressive left wing Americans if not Howard Zinn and a few others who take a similar critique of the depradations of capitalism, colonialism and American imperialism?

In sum: if there remains any interest within the cpusa leadership in attempting to reach the despised left ~ Sam Webb's tone gets it wrong. He is all-or-nothing, unnuanced and crass.

American Sniper: hero worship and the rewriting of history, by Michael T Fenn 02 18 15

source: http://www.socialist.ca/node/2642

“’Terrorism’ is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; 'war' is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it”
--Sydney J Harris

“This is the problem with veteran narrations about their war experience—they are often told through an emotionally charged, ideological filter that reflects the misinformation told to them by their leaders. And as a society we do nothing to correct these inaccurate accounts of America’s wars. Instead, we eat them up, celebrate them as truth, and feed them to the next generation of Americans who are doomed to make the same mistakes Chris and I made.”
--Ross Caputi, Former Marine who participated in the 2nd Siege of Fallujah

“Chris Kyle didn’t view Iraq like me and Garett, but neither of us have attacked him for it. He’s not the problem. We don’t care about the lies that Chris Kyle may or may not have told. They don’t matter. We care about the lies that Chris Kyle believed. The lie that Iraq was culpable for September 11. The lie that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The lie that people do evil things because they are evil.”
--Brock McIntosh; former Afghanistan veteran and anti-war advocate, who has been active, along with other veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, in support groups for returning soldiers.

“While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
--Fyodor Dostoevsky


There is little doubt that American Sniper will go down as one of the most effective pieces of propaganda—justifying America’s wars—ever to come down the Hollywood pike. It has been a huge box office success, grossing close to $200 million and achieving the second most successful R rated opening since the The Matrix. This popularity seems unfathomable (and disconcerting) given the odious justifications for the 2003 Iraq War have long been proven false, and despite the disaster the “war on terror” has been. Its timing seems suspicious fortuitous, given the new terror threat that has surfaced in Iraq (ISIS), in which American leaders are once again clamouring for more war and intervention in the Middle East.

Hero worship
The film begins dramatically, with our hero Chris Kyle—the real life sniper whose exploits in Iraq (based on his best-selling auto-biography) are the inspiration for the film—in middle of a combat mission in Iraq where he is faced with “radical evil.” He kills a boy, and his mother presumably, who are being used as a “human shields” to deliver a grenade to an advancing infantry and tank convoy.

The film then cuts to Chris as a young boy attending church with his parents and younger brother, as a southern Texas Baptist minister gives a sermon about how “God’s plan will seem a mystery to us”. From there the scene switches to the young boy hunting with his father, the father sternly admonishes his son for leaving his rifle in the dirt, but then praises the boy’s marksmen skills, saying that he has a gift (by god no doubt), and will be a great hunter someday.

Then we find ourselves at the family dinner table where his father gives the boys a speech about how so many people refuse to believe that any evil exists in the world. And that if “it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know what to do about it”. Apparently the boys have been in a schoolyard fight in which Kyle comes to his little brother’s aid. His father then gives his own sermon on how there are three kinds of people in the world; wolves, who are violent, cruel, and prey on the weak (the sheep); and lastly sheep dogs- who despite their “gift of violence” uses it to defend the sheep from the wolves. He then says, as he slams his belt on the table, that he has no intention of raising any wolves.

Clearly, screen writer Jason Hall and director Clint Eastwood has constructed a sort of American “Greek Tragedy”, informed by a conservative, militaristic, Christian American culture. One that is designed to dramatically canonize Chris Kyle (the hero sniper in the film) and his fellow American soldiers. It is a pure hero worship—in which manly virtues (“gifts” for violence and bravery) are valorized.

The only problem is that to make this hero worship effective—as propaganda, or as an art form that might actually make some money at the box office—is that its makers must distort both the war and the nature of the insurgency. They therefore cannot avoid the criticism that their film was intended to be “political” (ideological) with the claim that it was merely supposed to be a “character study”. Because they must validate their hero’s view of the world, which was highly political: that he was defending America against “terrorists” and or selflessly liberating Iraqi’s (referred to by Kyle, and his fellow soldier, both in his memoirs and the film, as “despicable” “savages”) from a tyrant. And that the insurgents were just a bunch of evil religious fanatics who hate and want to kill American’s simply because of their “perverse interpretation of religion”.

Otherwise our hero, and his fellow heroes (US soldiers) who shared these attitudes and beliefs, no longer seem “heroic” but rather as tragic victims of their own ignorance and prejudice—which was of course spoon fed to them by both the military and the media, including Hollywood. In this context our hero/heroes appear more like sheep, whom, tragically were unable to discern real evil when it did happen to darken their doorsteps. 

War crimes and resistance
Such distortion is set from the very first scene, which, ironically, depicts the second siege of Fallujah. The real life scene of one of the most notorious crimes committed by the US occupation. Despite the inhabitants desire to negotiate a cease fire, American military leaders simply ignored it, and then proceeded to blanket the city with poisonous phosphorus (an illegal weapon of mass destruction) killing 4000- 6000 civilians, and displacing 200, 000. This was also where the US army attacked a hospital (which was also a war crime under the Geneva Convention), dumping patients on the floor, beating up and detaining doctors, for supposedly spreading “propaganda” on the number of civilians that were wounded and killed.

As mentioned earlier this was the scene where our hero came face to face with what he would describe as “radical evil”. He has to kill an innocent boy who has been handed a grenade by a stoic emotionless Iraq women wearing a burqa, urging the boy toward an infantry convoy entering the city. The women then picks up the grenade to finish the job and is immediately shot dead by Chris. The woman was working at the behest of an evil terrorist named the “butcher” (because he dispatches his victims (informants) with a drill), which we later learn in the film is the right hand man of a foreign Al Qaeda Sunni extremist named Zarqawi.

This completely rewrites history and claims that extremist groups were the cause—rather than the consequence—of the Iraq War. It also justifies the murder of Iraqis, while dismissing that they had any reason for armed resistance against the US, which had invaded their country and brought untold misery and death. The insurgency was a perfectly legitimate exercise of self defense against a foreign aggressor and occupying power denying them the right to self-determination.The Iraq War and occupation killed a million people, stole billions in Iraqi oil money, gutted public sector jobs, created an unemployment rate of 70 per cent, and allied with a sectarian government that fomented civil war. It was the Iraq War, not resistance to it, that led to ISIS, but now the US is using this new threat to justify further military intervention—with help from this film.

The point here is not to blame the soldiers, who are also victims of hero worship. What American Sniper should teach us rather is just how powerful the cult of the hero is, which provides a cover for war and muzzles all criticism of it. It causes us to not notice the wolf that has clothed itself in the sheepdog’s image.

Michael Hudson: The Ukraine-IMF debt negotiation~ International finance as war, CounterPunch 02 16 2015

source: http://bit.ly/1LdRMuP

The fate of Ukraine is now shifting from the military battlefield back to the arena that counts most: that of international finance. Kiev is broke, having depleted its foreign reserves on waging war that has destroyed its industrial export and coal mining capacity in the Donbass (especially vis-à-vis Russia, which normally has bought 38 percent of Ukraine’s exports). Deeply in debt (with €3 billion falling due on December 20 to Russia), Ukraine faces insolvency if the IMF and Europe do not release new loans next month to pay for new imports as well as Russian and foreign bondholders.

Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko announced on Friday that she hopes to see the money begin to flow in by early March.[1] But Ukraine must meet conditions that seem almost impossible: It must implement an honest budget and start reforming its corrupt oligarchs (who dominate in the Rada and control the bureaucracy), implement more austerity, abolish its environmental protection, and make its industry “attractive” to foreign investors to buy Ukraine’s land, natural resources, monopolies and other assets, presumably at distress prices in view of the country’s recent devastation.

Looming over the IMF loan is the military situation. On January 28, Christine Lagarde said that the IMF would not release more money as long as Ukraine remains at war. Cessation of fighting was to begin Sunday morning. But Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh announced that his private army and that of the Azov Battalion will ignore the Minsk agreement and fight against Russian-speakers. He remains a major force within the Rada.

How much of Ukraine’s budget will be spent on arms? Germany and France made it clear that they oppose further U.S. military adventurism in Ukraine, and also oppose NATO membership. But will Germany follow through on its threat to impose sanctions on Kiev in order to stop a renewal of the fighting? For the United States bringing Ukraine into NATO would be the coup de grace blocking creation of a Eurasian powerhouse integrating the Russian, German and other continental European economies.

The Obama administration is upping the ante and going for broke, hoping that Europe has no alternative but to keep acquiescing. But the strategy is threatening to backfire. Instead of making Russia “lose Europe,” the United States may have overplayed its hand so badly that one can now think about the opposite prospect. The Ukraine adventure turn out to be the first step in the United States losing Europe. It may end up splitting European economic interests away from NATO, if Russia can convince the world that the epoch of armed occupation of industrial nations is a thing of the past and hence no real military threat exists – except for Europe being caught in the middle of Cold War 2.0.

For the U.S. geopolitical strategy to succeed, it would be necessary for Europe, Ukraine and Russia to act against their own potential economic self-interest. How long can they be expected to acquiesce in this sacrifice? At what point will economic interests lead to a reconsideration of old geo-military alliances and personal political loyalties?

The is becoming urgent because this is the first time that continental Europe has been faced with such war on its own borders (if we except Yugoslavia). Where is the advantage for Europe supporting one of the world’s most corrupt oligarchies north of the Equator?

America’s Ukrainian adventure by Hillary’s appointee Victoria Nuland (kept on and applauded by John Kerry), as well as by NATO, is forcing Europe to commit itself to the United States or pursue an independent line. George Soros (whose aggressive voice is emerging as the Democratic Party’s version of Sheldon Adelson) recently urged (in the newly neocon New York Review of Books) that the West give Ukraine $50 billion to re-arm, and to think of this as a down payment on military containment of Russia. The aim is old Brzezinski strategy: to foreclose Russian economic integration with Europe. The assumption is that economic alliances are at least potentially military, so that any power center raises the threat of economic and hence political independence.

The Financial Times quickly jumped on board for Soros’s $50 billion subsidy.[2] When President Obama promised that U.S. military aid would be only for “defensive arms,” Kiev clarified that it intended to defend Ukraine all the way to Siberia to create a “sanitary cordon.”

First Confrontation: Will the IMF Loan Agreement try to stiff Russia?

The IMF has been drawn into U.S. confrontation with Russia in its role as coordinating Kiev foreign debt refinancing. It has stated that private-sector creditors must take a haircut, given that Kiev can’t pay the money its oligarchs have either stolen or spent on war. But what of the €3 billion that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund loaned Ukraine, under London rules that prevent such haircuts? Russia has complained that Ukraine’s budget makes no provision for payment. Will the IMF accept this budget as qualifying for a bailout, treating Russia as an odious creditor? If so, what kind of legal precedent would this set for sovereign debt negotiations in years to come?

International debt settlement rules were thrown into a turmoil last year when U.S. Judge Griesa gave a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the pari passu clause with regard to Argentina’s sovereign debts. The clause states that all creditors must be treated equally. According to Griesa (uniquely), this means that if any creditor or vulture fund refuses to participate in a debt writedown, no such agreement can be reached and the sovereign government cannot pay any bondholders anywhere in the world, regardless of what foreign jurisdiction the bonds were issued under.

This bizarre interpretation of the “equal treatment” principle has never been strictly applied. Inter-governmental debts owed to the IMF, ECB and other international agencies have not been written down in keeping with private-sector debts. Russia’s loan was carefully framed in keeping with London rules. But U.S. diplomats have been openly – indeed, noisily and publicly – discussing how to “stiff” Russia. They even have thought about claiming that Russia’s Ukraine loans (to help it pay for gas to operate its factories and heat its homes) are an odious debt, or a form of foreign aid, or subject to anti-Russian sanctions. The aim is to make Russia “less equal,” transforming the concept of pari passu as it applies to sovereign debt.

Just as hedge funds jumped into the fray to complicate Argentina’s debt settlement, so speculators are trying to make a killing off Ukraine’s financial corpse, seeing this gray area opened up. The Financial Timesreports that one American investor, Michael Hasenstab, has $7 billion of Ukraine debts, along with Templeton Global Bond Fund.[3] New speculators may be buying Ukrainian debt at half its face value, hoping to collect in full if Russia is paid in full – or at least settle for a few points’ quick run-up.


The U.S.-sponsored confusion may tie up Russia’s financial claims in court for years, just as has been the case with Argentina’s debt. At stake is the IMF’s role as debt coordinator: Will it insist that Russia take the same haircut that it’s imposing on private hedge funds?

This financial conflict is becoming a new mode of warfare. Lending terms are falling subject to New Cold War geopolitics. This battlefield has been opened up by U.S. refusal in recent decades to endorse the creation of any international body empowered to judge the debt-paying capacity of countries. This makes every sovereign debt crisis a grab bag that the U.S. Treasury can step in to dominate. It endorses keeping countries in the U.S. diplomatic orbit afloat (although on a short leash), but not countries that maintain an independence from U.S. policies (e.g., Argentina and BRICS members).

Looking forward, this position threatens to fracture global finance into a U.S. currency sphere and a BRICS sphere. The U.S. has opposed creation of any international venue to adjudicate the debt-paying capacity of debtor nations. Other countries are pressing for such a venue in order to save their economies from the present anarchy. U.S. diplomats see anarchy as offering an opportunity to bring U.S. diplomacy to bear to reward friends and punish non-friends and “independents.” The resulting financial anarchy is becoming untenable in the wake of Argentina, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other sovereign debtors whose obligations are unpayably high.

The IMF’s One-Two Punch leading to privatization sell-offs to rent extractors           

IMF loans are made mainly to enable governments to pay foreign bondholders and bankers, not spend on social programs or domestic economic recovery. Sovereign debtors must agree to IMF “conditionalities” in order to get enough credit to enable bondholders to take their money and run, avoiding haircuts and leaving “taxpayers” to bear the cost of capital flight and corruption.

The first conditionality is the guiding principle of neoliberal economics: that foreign debts can be paid by squeezing out a domestic budget surplus. The myth is that austerity programs and cuts in public spending will enable governments to pay foreign-currency debts – as if there is no “transfer problem.”

The reality is that austerity causes deeper economic shrinkage and widens the budget deficit. And no matter how much domestic revenue the government squeezes out of the economy, it can pay foreign debts only in two ways: by exporting more, or by selling its public domain to foreign investors. The latter option leads to privatizing public infrastructure, replacing subsidized basic services with rent-extraction and future capital flight. So the IMF’s “solution” to the deb problem has the effect of making it worse – requiring yet further privatization sell-offs.

This is why the IMF has been wrong in its economic forecasts for Ukraine year after year, just as its prescriptions have devastated Ireland and Greece, and Third World economies from the 1970s onward. Its destructive financial policy must be seen as deliberate, not an innocent forecasting error. But the penalty for following this junk economics must be paid by the indebted victim.

In the wake of austerity, the IMF throws its Number Two punch. The debtor economy must pay by selling off whatever assets the government can find that foreign investors want. For Ukraine, investors want its rich farmland. Monsanto has been leasing its land and would like to buy. But Ukraine has a law against alienating its farmland and agricultural land to foreigners. The IMF no doubt will insist on repeal of this law, along with Ukraine’s dismantling of public regulations against foreign investment.

International finance as war

The Ukraine-IMF debt negotiation shows is why finance has become the preferred mode of geopolitical warfare. Its objectives are the same as war: appropriation of land, raw materials (Ukraine’s gas rights in the Black Sea) and infrastructure (for rent-extracting opportunities) as well as the purchase of banks.

The IMF has begun to look like an office situated in the Pentagon, renting a branch office on Wall Street from Democratic Party headquarters, with the rent paid by Soros. His funds are drawing up a list of assets that he and his colleagues would like to buy from Ukrainian oligarchs and the government they control. The buyout payments for partnership with the oligarchs will not stay in Ukraine, but will be moved quickly to London, Switzerland and New York. The Ukrainian economy will lose the national patrimony with which it emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, still deeply in debt (mainly to its own oligarchs operating out of offshore banking centers).

Where does this leave European relations with the United States and NATO?

The two futures

A generation ago the logical future for Ukraine and other post-Soviet states promised to be an integration into the German and other West European economies. This seemingly natural complementarity would see the West modernize Russian and other post-Soviet industry and agriculture (and construction as well) to create a self-sufficient and prosperous Eurasian regional power. Foreign Minister Lavrov recently voiced Russia’s hope at the Munich Security Conference for a common Eurasian Union with the European Union extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok. German and other European policy looked Eastward to invest its savings in the post-Soviet states.

This hope was anathema to U.S. neocons, who retain British Victorian geopolitics opposing the creation of any economic power center in Eurasia. That was Britain’s nightmare prior to World War I, and led it to pursue a diplomacy aimed at dividing and conquering continental Europe to prevent any dominant power or axis from emerging.

America started its Ukrainian strategy with the idea of splitting Russia off from Europe, and above all from Germany. In the U.S. playbook is simple: Any economic power is potentially military; and any military power may enable other countries to pursue their own interest rather than subordinating their policy to U.S. political, economic and financial aims. Therefore, U.S. geostrategists view any foreign economic power as a potentially military threat, to be countered before it can gain steam.

We can now see why the EU/IMF austerity plan that Yanukovich rejected made it clear why the United States sponsored last February’s coup in Kiev. The austerity that was called for, the removal of consumer subsidies and dismantling of public services would have led to an anti-West reaction turning Ukraine strongly back toward Russia. The Maidan coup sought to prevent this by making a war scar separating Western Ukraine from the East, leaving the country seemingly no choice but to turn West and lose its infrastructure to the privatizers and neo-rentiers.

But the U.S. plan may lead Europe to seek an economic bridge to Russia and the BRICS, away from the U.S. orbit. That is the diplomatic risk when a great power forces other nations to choose one side or the other.

The silence from Hillary

Having appointed Valery Nuland as a holdover from the Cheney administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined the hawks by likening Putin to Hitler. Meanwhile, Soros’s $10 million on donations to the Democratic Party makes him one of its largest donors. The party thus seems set to throw down the gauntlet with Europe over the shape of future geopolitical diplomacy, pressing for a New Cold War.

Hillary’s silence suggests that she knows how unpopular her neocon policy is with voters – but how popular it is with her donors. The question is, will the Republicans agree to not avoid discussing this during the 2016 presidential campaign? If so, what alternative will voters have next year?

This prospect should send shivers down Europe’s back. There are reports that Putin told Merkel and Holland in Minsk last week that Western Europe has two choices. On the one hand, it and Russia can create a prosperous economic zone based on Russia’s raw materials and European technology. Or, Europe can back NATO’s expansion and draw Russia into war that will wipe it out.

German officials have discussed bringing sanctions against Ukraine, not Russia, if it renews the ethnic warfare in its evident attempt to draw Russia in. Could Obama’s neocon strategy backfire, and lose Europe? Will future American historians talk of who lost Europe rather than who lost Russia?

Notes.

[1] Fin min hopes Ukraine will get new IMF aid in early March – Interfax, http://research.tdwaterhouse.ca/research/public/Markets/NewsArticle/1664-L5N0VN2DO-1

[2] “The west needs to rescue the Ukrainian economy,” Financial Timeseditorial, February 12, 2015.

[3] Elaine Moore, “Contrarian US investor with $7bn of debt stands to lose most if Kiev imposes haircut,” Financial Times, February 12, 2015.

AJAMU BARAKA: Obama’s Legacy: Permanent War and Liberal Accommodation? 02 18 15

source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/18/obamas-legacy-permanent-war-and-liberal-accommodation/



The announcement by the Obama administration that it will seek congressional authorization to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine did not generate the kind of muscular opposition and sense of urgency that one would expect from the anti-interventionist liberals and significant sectors of what use to be the anti-imperialist and anti-war left.

Outside of a few articles written by some of us confined to the marginalized and shrinking left, the reports that the administration was considering both of these courses of action were met with passing indifference. It is as if the capitalist oligarchy’s strategy of permanent war has been accepted as a fait-accompi by the general public and even significant numbers of the left.

The fact that the U.S. President could launch military attacks in Syria, supposedly a sovereign state and member of the United Nations, for six months without any legal justification and not face fierce criticism in the U.S. and internationally demonstrates the embrace of lawlessness that characterizes the current epoch of Western imperialist domination.

And the acquiescence of much of the left in the U.S. and Europe on the issue of Syria and the U.S. supported coup in Ukraine reveals the moderating and accommodating forces within the faux left that attempts to bully and intimidate anti-imperialist critics.

To oppose the dismemberment of Syria or criticize the dangerous collaboration between the U.S. and racist neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine was reduced to the silly and intellectually lazy arguments that one was “pro-Assad” or a dupe for Putin!

However, the current ideological environment did not evolve by accident or by the particular confluence of historical events. The disappearance of anti-imperialism among the cosmopolitan left in the U.S. and Western Europe is reflective of a monumental ideological accomplishment by the propagandists of empire. The professional propagandists of empire and Western dominance were able to adroitly “introject” into the center of the radical world-view and consciousness a liberal ideological framework that privileged “anti-authoritarianism over anti-imperialism.

The political consequence of this shift in consciousness has been disastrous for oppositional left politics throughout the West but particularly in the U.S. As the U.S. increasingly turned to lawless violence to advance its interests over the last seven years of the presidency of Barack Obama, “leftists” in the U.S. objectively aligned themselves with the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination through their silence or outright support in the name of opposing authoritarian regimes.

The human consequence of this collaboration with U.S. and Western militarization by progressive forces in the U.S. and Europe has translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq. Along with the escalations of direct military interventions, economic warfare and subversion directed at the state and people of Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and other progressive states in Latin America has resulted in the unnecessary suffering of millions.

And while the left and millions of Europeans will mobilize to condemn the 17 lives lost in the incident in Paris and defend “Western values,” there is no massive moral outrage from the Western public for the millions that have died at the hands of Western imperialism and the death and destruction that is promised with policies being considered for Syria and the Ukraine by the ruling elite in the U.S.

Fortunately, despite the political confusion of many leftists and the moral duplicity of liberals, signs of growing opposition to U.S. war-mongering are emanating from a historically familiar place – African American young people.

Similar to what occurred in the 1960s when opposition to the Vietnam war was catalyzed by the student organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) working on the frontlines of struggle in the deep South, “Black Lives Matter” activists and the many other formations and tendencies crystalizing out of the Ferguson and anti-police violence movements are making the connection between violence and militarization in the internal colonized areas of the U.S. and the state violence being waged by the U.S. state beyond its’ borders.

Resistance to the logic of white supremacist colonialist/capitalist domination on the part of these young activists is leading them to a resolute anti-imperialist and anti-war stance, just like the young black activists of SNCC some fifty years ago.

Alicia Garza one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement offers a welcomed lesson to the faux left:

“There is absolutely a link between the militarization and the use of force to police black communities in the US and the role of the military to police people of color and Black people in the global South. In both scenarios, the police and the military are used to protect private property and the interests of the elite, but are also used to dampen and or eliminate any resistance to the status quo.”

The experiences of these activists in the U.S. and their increasing connections with struggling peoples’ throughout the world is making it clear to them that the slogan “to protect and serve – capital, ” not only applies to the occupation forces that police the racialized colonies inside the U.S. but also the role of the U.S. military abroad.

“Black against empire,” is not only a title to a book; it also captures the radical stance that conscious black radicals in the U.S. must assume.

The systemic degradation that characterizes the social experiences of African American workers, the marginalized poor, and working class of all of the oppressed and colonized nations and peoples’ by the U.S. empire, strips away the pretense of a benevolent hegemon. The lived experience of oppression means that African American radicals – unlike many white radicals – cannot afford the luxury of being unclear about the nature and interests of the white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial/capitalist order. It is and will be the primary enemy.

On Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the attack in New York city and before it was clear what forces were behind the attack, neoconservative pundits revealing the pre-determined strategy that was to guide U.S. policy in the 21st century, were forcefully arguing that the U.S. must be prepared to use force in the world and in the immediate period to declare war on “militant Islam.” The counties identified for immediate attack included Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, with China thrown in as well.

Permanent war and lawless gangsterism to protect and advance U.S. global economic and political interests was codified in the National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002.

And while the pursuit of that strategy made President Bush the symbol of U.S. arrogance and generated vociferous liberal and progressive opposition, Barack Obama has faithfully carried out that very same neocon strategy becoming the smiling brown face of U.S. polices as morally repugnant as his predecessor – but without progressive, popular opposition.

The lack of moral outrage and political opposition to the reactionary policies of Barack Obama is changing and will change even more rapidly as the new generation of black activists shift the center of oppositional politics back to the radical black tradition.

When/if that happens, there will be a much needed rebirth of the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement and radical activism in the U.S. will take a qualitative leap forward.
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (Counterpunch Books, 2014). He can be reached at info.abaraka@gmail.com and www.AjamuBaraka.com

February 17, 2015

Russia, U.S. and the crisis in Ukraine, By John Beacham 02 13 15

source: http://www.liberationnews.org/russia-u-s-crisis-ukraine/   

For the last year, a bloody civil war has raged in Ukraine. In the past month, the anti-government fighters have repulsed a government offensive and now have an upper hand in the fighting. Europe is scrambling to stop the fighting. The U.S. is threatening to arm Kiev.

The United States and the government in Ukraine have blamed the conflict on Russian “aggression.” Russia blames the U.S. and the West for instigating the crisis and backing a new anti-Russian and partially “fascist” government in Kiev.

The conflict was sparked by a coup, led by neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists, that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych. The new government, composed predominantly of pro-Western business men, ultra-nationalists and fascists, has been rejected by much of the population in the east of the country.

The Ukrainian roots of the conflict: On one side of the country, predominantly in the west, there is a popular and longstanding orientation toward Europe and nationalism that has manifested itself most forcefully in a right-wing, anti-communist and fascist political tradition. On the other side, predominantly in the east, there is significant orientation toward Russia, especially among ethnic Russians, and a deep mistrust of the resurgent Ukrainian nationalist movement, whose historical roots are wound up in collaboration with the Nazis and U.S. imperialism.

While the United States and Russia are not at each others throats, the confrontation between the two major powers is clearly growing increasingly heated and it is always possible that it could escalate rapidly—even get out of hand.

What are the aims of Russia and the United States in Ukraine?

Washington and Moscow are not friends. This is mostly Washington’s fault. At no time since the collapse of the Soviet Union has Moscow sought to go on an offensive against the United States. The same cannot be said of Washington. The United States destroyed Yugoslavia, helped overthrow governments in Georgia and Ukraine (on Russia’s borders) and is threatening Russia with a coordinated missile system on its borders—and these are merely three examples out of a truly wide-reaching campaign to weaken Russia’s influence.

In fact, a significant part of the U.S. ruling establishment, represented by people like Sen. John McCain, want not only Ukraine in the European Union and NATO, but they also want to bring Russia to its knees if possible. Ukraine is a resource-rich, highly developed country with large geographical portions literally surrounded by Russia. McCain and others actually participated in the anti-government and anti-Russian protests that led to the establishment of the new pro-European government in Kiev—a government that included fascists in prominent positions and which tried to remove Russian as an official language.

Can you imagine what Washington’s response would be if a top figure in Russian politics traveled to Mexico or Canada to participate in demonstrations that were threatening the very existence of those governments—demonstrations that had a visible and violent anti-U.S. component?

For Russia, a Ukraine that establishes an economic and military “partnership” with the West—which in reality would mean the subordination of Ukraine to the West under a European/U.S. puppet regime—can only be understood as a threat. Even more than that, Russia is rightly concerned that the current Western-reliant regime in Kiev could lose credibility in the eyes of Ukrainians in the west of the country and give way to a purely fascist regime. Fascist and semi-fascist organizations are deeply popular in the European-oriented parts of the country.

Again, it’s very important to keep in mind that for the last few decades the United States has sought to encircle and isolate Russia.

It is the United States that has called for and worked for the overthrow of Russia’s president, not the other way around. Full of arrogance, the United States claims for itself the right to unilaterally meddle, invade and overthrow governments. But if Russia annexes Crimea, which was clearly popular among the predominately Russian-speaking population of the peninsula, or comes to the aid of ethnic Russians in a bordering country, that’s aggression!

One has to completely distort the facts to see Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as anything other than primarily a defensive response to U.S.-supported events. Russia could overrun Ukraine easily—only a full-scale military intervention by the United States could stop them. But that has never been their goal. Their goal has clearly been to stop the government in Kiev, an increasingly pro-U.S. government, from subduing the largely ethnic Russian independence fighters and establishing control over the entire country. Russian intervention has been largely predicated on keeping an extremely hostile government—buoyed by ultra-nationalist armed groups—from taking control of all of Ukraine.

Biden’s speech

On Feb. 7, Vice President Biden gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that was devoted to attacking Russia. He argued that the U.S. is taking action against Russia over Ukraine “because Russia sought to block Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union.” Biden continued, “That agreement—locking in Ukraine’s European future—was nonetheless signed and ratified by many of you in this room.”

Two things:

(1) It was the Ukrainian government that, strapped for cash like so many other countries in Europe, rejected the association agreement and the onerous loan agreements that were tied to formalizing a relationship with the EU.

Ukraine’s rejection of the EU agreement was based on the severe austerity it would have imposed. Straight up: Europe saw a chance to cash in on Ukraine’s fiscal woes. They gave Ukraine an ultimatum. To join the EU, you have to carry out privatizations of industry and reduce government subsidies and controls that will allow U.S. and European finance capital to swoop in and basically seize the economy. Yanukovych’s government said no—not out of any anti-EU orientation—and instead accepted a Russian loan that had no austerity strings attached and would have reduced the cost of natural gas. That decision prompted large-scale protests against the government that ultimately led to the coup.

In other words, it was the aggressiveness of European and U.S. bankers—their “hand over your economy or else” approach—that played a central role in sparking the current conflict.

(2) Ukrainians in the east of the country have taken up arms precisely because they don’t want to be ruled by Kiev and “locked in” to the EU. Not to be deterred by this obvious truth, in his speech, Biden called the anti-government fighters, “Russia’s thugs.”

I wonder what we should call the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting for Kiev under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Andriy Biletsky, a member of parliament and a 2014 recipient of the Order for Courage from the Kiev-based government? Are they democrats and freedom fighters? Has Biden somehow magically separated out from the equation the fascists at the center of the coup when he remarked: “I’ve sat down with the men and women who braved the snipers’ bullets in Maidan, as many of you did. Their courage has given Ukraine a chance to leave behind its history and recent history of corruption and finally build a genuine democracy.”

Then Biden went on to repeat what the U.S. supports: “And I’ll say it again: inviolate borders, no spheres of influence, the sovereign right to choose your own alliances. I cannot repeat that often enough.” Does Biden include ethnic Russians who don’t want to live under a government that gave a medal to a fascist like Biletsky—a fascist who won 34 percent of the vote in a district in Kiev in the September 2014 elections? Nope. To him they’re Russian thugs.

This is from the same United States, the defender of “borders” and “sovereignty” that spent the 1990s ruthlessly carving up Yugoslavia, the same United States that murderously destroyed Iraq, leading it to be split up into three different entities, the same United States that led the destruction of Libya only to see the country descend into civil war, the same United States that funds the colonial-settler state of Israel and the same that waged war on Mexico in 1846-1848 and took half the country.

Biden went on to outright threaten Russia: “And let me state as clearly as I can what is not our objective. It is not the objective of the United States—I repeat—it is not the objective of the United States of America to collapse or weaken the Russian economy. That is not our objective. But President Putin has to make a simple, stark choice: Get out of Ukraine or face continued isolation and growing economic costs at home.”

Let’s strip off the veils in Biden’s remarks: “If you don’t do what we say in Ukraine, we will wreck your economy!” That’s a very serious threat.

Lavrov’s speech at Munich

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also spoke at the Munich Security Conference to defend Russia’s position. Below is a quote from his speech. It’s very important to read his speech to get a better understanding of the situation. I’m not advocating for Russia in the conflict, but Russia is clearly not in the U.S.-led imperialist club and is being unjustly attacked through sanctions, threats, demonization campaigns and other means.

Lavrov said: “As for the Ukraine, unfortunately, at each stage of the development of the crisis our American colleagues, and under their influence the European Union, took steps leading to escalation. This happened when the EU refused to discuss with Russia the consequences of activating the economic bloc of the association agreement with Ukraine, and then directly supported the coup, and before that the anti-government riots. This happened when our Western partners have repeatedly issued indulgences to Kiev authorities, who instead of fulfilling the promises of starting a national dialogue, began a large-scale military operation, declaring their own citizens “terrorists” for disagreeing with the unconstitutional change of government and a rampage of ultra-nationalists.

“It is very difficult to explain why, in the minds of many of our colleagues, the universal principles of settlement of internal conflicts do not apply to Ukraine, involving, primarily, the inclusive political dialogue between the protagonists. Why in cases such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Mali, South Sudan, our partners urge the government to negotiate with the opposition, the insurgents, in some cases even with extremists, and in relation to the Ukrainian crisis act differently, actually supporting the military operation in Kiev, up to attempts to justify the use of cluster munitions.

“Unfortunately, our Western colleagues are apt to close their eyes to everything that is said and done by the Kiev authorities, including inciting xenophobic sentiments. Let me quote: ‘Ukrainian social-nationalism considers the Ukrainian nation a blood-racial community.’ And further: ‘The question of total Ukranization in the future social-nationalist state will be resolved within three to six months with strict and prudent state policy.’ The author is a deputy of the Ukrainian Verkhovnaya Rada, Andrey Biletsky, the commander of the regiment ‘Azov’, which actively participates in the fighting in Donbass. For ethnically pure Ukraine, the annihilation of Russians and Jews was repeatedly publicly called by the other figures, who broke into politics and power in Ukraine, including Yarosh, Tiagnybok, and leaders of the Radical Party of Lyashko, represented in Verkhovna Rada. These statements did not cause any reaction in Western capitals. I do not think that today’s Europe can afford to ignore the danger of the spread of the neo-Nazi virus.

“The Ukrainian crisis cannot be resolved by military force. This was confirmed last summer, when the situation on the battlefield forced to sign the Minsk agreements. It is confirmed now, when another attempt to win a military victory is drowning. But despite this, in some Western countries increasingly there are calls to strengthen support for the course of the Kiev authorities for militarization of society and the state, to ‘pump’ Ukraine with deadly weapons and pull it into NATO. The growing opposition in Europe to such plans gives hope, as it may only exacerbate the tragedy of the Ukrainian people.

“Russia will continue to seek to establish peace. We consistently advocate for the cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, the beginning of direct negotiations of Kiev with Donetsk and Lugansk about specific ways to restore the common economic, social and political space within the territorial integrity of Ukraine.”


February 16, 2015

Obama Plays Hardball with Israel? By Mark H. Gaffney ICH

Obama Plays Hardball with Israel?


By Mark H. Gaffney

Finally. After many years of official hypocrisy, a US president appears to be playing hardball with Israel. The other day, the
US government declassified a 1987 report documenting Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/02/12/nuc%20report.pdf

I have been a critic of President Obama, but one has to admire the timing of the release which I suspect was ordered by the White House. Next month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak before Congress, at the behest of House speaker Boehner, and the topic of Netanyahu’s address reportedly will be Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. The fact that neither Speaker Boehner nor the Israeli government first cleared the speech with the White House has become controversial, and for good reason. Several prominent members of Congress, among them Senator Leahy, have already indicated they will boycott the speech, which will be a transparent attempt at an end run around the president.

Israeli PM Netanyahu is a smooth talker, but he is in no position to lecture Iran or any other state about nuclear weapons. The just-declassified report shows up Netanyahu for what he is, a liar.

All sixteen US intelligence agencies agree there is no hard evidence that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. As a signatory of the nuclear non proliferation treaty, Iran’s nuclear power program is fully safeguarded by IAEA inspections. Israel by contrast is a rogue state that secretly developed nukes while thumbing its nose at the world. Israel has long refused to sign the NPT.

The declassified 1987 report indicates that from the 1980s on the US was well-informed about Israel’s hidden nuclear agenda. Israel’s nuke program is evidently a carbon copy of the US program.

We know that Israel smuggled nuclear technology (triggers, known as krytrons) out of the US, highjacked a ship on the high seas loaded with uranium ore, deceived US inspectors, and much more, all the while lying about its true intentions.

It also appears that Israel provided the IAEA with phony documents about Iran’s nuclear program.
http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/Israel-Provided-IAEA-with-Fake-Documents-on-Iran-s-Nuclear-Program.htm

Timing is everything in politics. With the report now public, Obama will be in a stronger position to apply pressure on Israel to sign the NPT and open its nuclear sites to IAEA inspectors; or face the prospect of losing US economic and military aid. Why? Because a US law (the Symington amendment of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act) bars the US from giving aid to nations that engage in clandestine nuclear weapons proliferation. For many years, the US chose to ignore the law. But now that Netanyahu plainly intends to stir up trouble for Obama in Congress over Iran, the president has apparently decided to take off the kid gloves. If Obama follows through, and I hope he does, it will the smartest policy move of his presidency. The president deserves all the support that we the people can give him on this issue.

The timing of the 1987 report was no coincidence either. No doubt it was occasioned by a three-page expose that appeared in the London Sunday Times in 1986, based on evidence provided by an Israeli whistleblower named Mordechai Vanunu. The stunning Times expose featured inside photos and details about Israel’s top-secret plutonium separation plant buried 80 feet below the Negev desert. For years, Israel had claimed that its Dimona nuclear plant was peacefully generating electricity. But Vanunu showed this was a deception.

For his courage Vanunu suffered a fate worse than death. Kidnapped by Israeli agents, he was taken back to Israel in chains and convicted of treason in a kangaroo court. The man of conscience spent 18 years in Ashkelon prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement, during which time he endured terrible abuse by his Israeli handlers. Though Vanunu was released in 2004, he remains under house arrest in Israel to this day; a shocking example of double jeopardy.

I want to personally thank Mordechai Vanunu for the incredible courage he has shown over many years, which now finally appears on the verge of bearing positive fruit. Never doubt that one brave man can change the world. Vanunu did. He will be remembered for his strength in the service of truth, while Netanyahu may well become notorious as the dissembler who destroyed Israel’s credibility.


Mark H. Gaffney is the author of Dimona: the Third Temple (1989), a pioneering study of Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

Canadian troops in Ukraine? The Minsk II Agreement says they need to be pulled out right now. Feb 16, 2015

By David J. Climenhaga, published on Rabble.ca, Feb. 16, 2015
source:  http://bit.ly/1vQHa1F


Are Canadian troops still serving in Ukraine? If so, they are now in direct violation of the Minsk II Agreement brokered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande and signed by the Ukrainian and Russian presidents on Feb. 11.

Either way, Canadians deserve to know whether our soldiers remain in Ukraine.
Then-Canadian Minister of National Defence Rob Nicholson (L) meets Ukrainian counterpart Stepan Poltorak in Kyiv on Dec. 8, 2014, photo by Sergei Supinsky, AFP

Then-Canadian Minister of National Defence Rob Nicholson (L) meets Ukrainian counterpart Stepan Poltorak in Kyiv on Dec. 8, 2014, photo by Sergei Supinsky, AFP

If they do remain, Defence Minister Jason Kenney has only one proper course of action, and that is to immediately pull them out in the cause of peace and respect for “the most basic humanitarian, legal and, indeed, moral norms of international conduct,” as former external affairs minister John Baird put it in an only slightly different context not so long ago.

Under Point 10 of the 13-point German-French-brokered ceasefire agreement, the signatories agreed to: “Pullout of all foreign armed formations, military equipment, and also mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under OSCE supervision.”

This was presumably intended as a reference to the 10,500 Russian troops the Ukrainian government and its Western supporters say are operating in the country’s Russian-speaking eastern regions. For its part, Russia insists this is not true and has called on the powers backing the Ukrainian government to produce satellite photos or other evidence to support the claim.

Nevertheless, there are known to be U.S. and other western troops — presumably still including the tiny group of about 10 Canadian soldiers — in the country, and the ceasefire agreement says what it says.

Back in December 2014, by which time the situation in Ukraine had deteriorated into a full-scale fight that had strong characteristics of a civil war, then-defence-minister Rob Nicholson announced that Canada was immediately sending the Canadian soldiers to Ukraine to train Ukrainian troops.

Rather typically of the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Nicholson made the announcement in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, not anywhere in Canada.

In the Globe and Mail’s account of that announcement, Nicholson was quoted as saying the small unit of Canadian military police troops arrived in Ukraine on Dec. 8 and immediately set to work training Ukrainian soldiers.

“Russia has flagrantly violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine and continues its efforts to intimidate and undermine the democratically elected government in Kiev,” said a joint declaration issued that day by the Canadian and Ukrainian governments.

This may or may not be a fair description of the facts, given both the strong popular support for reunification with Russia in the disputed territory of Crimea, which by then was already under full Russian control, and the way the government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to power in February 2014.

The latter has been described as a coup and was certainly in violation of the country’s constitution. What’s more, Ukrainian tactics in the U.S.-backed military actions that followed — which lately have not been going Ukraine’s way — have created a rift in the country that is likely to be permanent, according to the conservative Financial Times, and reduced support for the war in all parts of Ukraine, according to the New Yorker magazine.

It is true, though, that Ukrainian parliamentary elections took place in October 2014, although how fair they were or whether they took place in all parts of the country remain the subject of competing claims.

Meanwhile, whether or not the Canadian troops now remain in Ukraine is unclear. The time and duration of their mission was not explained when the announcement was made by Nicholson, who was appointed minister of foreign affairs after Baird’s sudden resignation on Feb. 3.

The Dec. 8, Globe and Mail story left the impression, without quite stating it, that the number and role of the Canadian troops arriving that day would grow. However, not much more about that seems to have been said by the Canadian government. Nor has there been any announcement the Canadian troops have been pulled out.

Yesterday, Kenney made an ambiguous statement in which he promised Canadians would not be on the front lines, but left it unclear whether they are in the country now, or, if they are, how many. “Our men, should they be deployed to the [U.S.-led training] mission would be far out of harm’s way,” Kenney was quoted as saying in a Global News story. (The awkward parenthetical explanation is from Global.)

If Canada fails to follow through on the logistically easy task of removing its tiny unit of military police troops, as well as any other military personnel that may have followed them to Ukraine, it will certainly appear to be an effort by Canada to deliberately sabotage the ceasefire — a policy that is un likely win us many friends in Europe, including in Germany and France, which brokered the agreement because they are desperate to avoid a dangerous war so close to their borders.

Of course, if the Minsk II deal falls apart, as is considered likely by many observers, and assuming that the Canadian Government wishes to continue its belligerent policy in Ukraine, as also seems likely, it would be logistically easy for the unit to be sent back then.

Just the same, if we’re going to behave like a proper member of the community of nations — as we’ve been lecturing certain other countries to do — we need to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk. At this particular moment in that particular location, the direction of that walk needs to be to the west!

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.




February 14, 2015

Nuclear Specter Returns 'Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War' 02/13/15

Nuclear Specter Returns': Threat of War Is Higher than in the Cold War'

Spiegel Online by Markus Becker in Munich

The Ukraine crisis has dramatically worsened relations between NATO and Russia. With cooperation on nuclear security now suspended and the lack of a "red telephone," experts at the Munich Security Conference warn any escalation in tensions could grow deadly.

The scientists had no idea that their experiment could spell the end of civilization. On Jan. 25, 1995, Norwegian and American researchers fired a rocket into the skies of northwestern Norway to study the Northern Lights. But the four-stage rocket flew directly through the same corridor that American Minuteman III missiles, equipped with nuclear warheads, would use to travel from the United States to Moscow.
The rocket's speed and flight pattern very closely matched what the Russians expected from a Trident missile that would be fired from a US submarine and detonated at high altitude, with the aim of blinding the Russian early-warning system to prepare for a large-scale nuclear attack by the United States. The Russian military was placed on high alert, and then President Boris Yeltsin activated the keys to launch nuclear weapons. He had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to issue the order to fire.
Yeltsin left the Russian missiles in their silos, probably in part because relations between Russian and the United States were relatively trusting in 1995. But if a similar incident occurred today, as US arms expert Theodore Postol warned recently, it could quite possibly lead to nuclear catastrophe.

Deep Mistrust

"Five or six minutes can be enough time, if you have trust, if you have communication and if you can put this machinery immediately to work," former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said on the sidelines of last weekend's Munich Security Conference. Unfortunately, he argued, this machinery works very poorly today, and there is great mistrust.
When asked what would happen today if the 1995 missile incident happened again, Ivanov responded, "I cannot be sure if the right decision would be taken."
Deep mistrust has developed between the West and Russia, and it is having a massive effect on cooperation on security matters.
In November 2014, the Russians announced that they would boycott the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in the United States. In December, the US Congress voted, for the first time in 25 years, not to approve funding to safeguard nuclear materials in the Russian Federation. A few days later, the Russians terminated cooperation in almost all aspects of nuclear security. The two sides had cooperated successfully for almost two decades. But that is now a thing of the past.
Instead, Russia and the United States are investing giant sums of money to modernize their nuclear arsenals, and NATO recently announced that it was rethinking its nuclear strategy. At the same time, risky encounters between Eastern and Western troops, especially in the air, are becoming more and more common, a report by the European Leadership Network (ELN) recently concluded.
"Civilian pilots don't know how to deal with this," explains ELN Chair Des Browne, a former British defense minister. "One of these incidents could easily escalate. We need to find a mechanism in which we can talk at the highest level."
Brown, together with Ivanov and former US Senator Sam Nunn, a veteran of international disarmament policy, published an analysis in early February. The trio recommends "that reliable communication channels exist in the event of serious incidents." In other words, these channels currently do not exist. Recently Philip Breedlove, the head of NATO Allied Command Operations in Europe, even called for a new "red telephone," alluding to the direct teletype connection established in 1963 between the United States and the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis. A direct line had been set up between NATO and the Russian military's general staff in February 2013, but it was cut as a result of the Ukraine crisis.

'A Very Dangerous Situation'

"Trust has been eroded to the point of almost being destroyed," said Nunn. "You got a war going on right in the middle of Europe. You got a breakdown of the conventional forces treaty, you got the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty under great strain, you got tactical nuclear weapons all over Europe. It's a very dangerous situation."
In late January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its "Doomsday Clock" to three minutes to midnight. The last time it was set to that time was in 1983, "when US-Soviet relations were at their iciest point," as the group of scientists explained. The only other time when the situation was even worse was in 1953, when the clock was set to two minutes to midnight. Unchecked climate change and the "nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals" pose "extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," the group's statement read.
The current rhetoric coming from the rivals in the East and West seems poorly suited to reducing the threat. "The Russian aggression is a direct threat to NATO," British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said at the Munich Security Conference.
The situation is made more complicated by the fact that Russia's actions in Ukraine are difficult to define. With camouflage, trickery and deception, the Russians are applying the full arsenal of so-called hybrid warfare, from propaganda to cyber warfare and funding the separatists right up to clandestine military operations.
In Munich, Norwegian Defense Minister Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide demanded that Russia's aggression should be clearly identified as such. "And it goes without saying," she said, "that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty applies to such aggression." This means that if Russia were to attack a NATO member, in the way it is now intervening in Ukraine, all other member states would be required to enter the war to defend that country.
Higher Risks with Hybrid Warfare
"It (hybrid warfare) makes everything more dangerous," said Nunn, "It makes tactical nuclear weapons more dangerous, and it makes weapons material more dangerous." It is common knowledge that some of these weapons are also stationed in Germany. Up to 20 B61 aerial bombs, now being updated at great expense, are stored at the Büchel Air Base in the Eifel region of western Germany. They are under US command, but German Tornado fighter jets would drop the bombs in the event of a war.
When asked if hybrid warfare could raise the danger of nuclear weapons being used, US diplomat Richard Burt -- who, in his role as chief negotiator, helped put together the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, between the United States and the Soviet Union -- answered in the affirmative. "The simple answer is yes. Both American and Russian nuclear arms are essentially on a kind of hair-trigger alert. Both sides have a nuclear posture where land-based missiles could be authorized for use in less than 15 minutes." In the situation of hybrid warfare, he warns, "that is a dangerous state of play."
"In the Cold War, we created mechanisms of security. A huge number of treaties and documents helped us to avoid a big and serious military crash," says former Foreign Minister Ivanov. "Now the threat of a war is higher than during the Cold War."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

February 10, 2015

Communist Party of Venezuela The Struggle of PCV against Opportunism 7/16/14





 


source: http://www.iccr.gr/en/news/Communist-Party-of-Venezuela-The-Struggle-of-PCV-against-Opportunism/



I

In its 80 years of existence, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), like many other communist and workers' parties of the world has faced in more than one occasion both right opportunism and left opportunism. The celebration of our First National Conference in August 1937 was already marked by this struggle, which was expressed on that occasion as the conflict between those who defended the need to give the party its own organizational structure and show themselves to the country as a proletarian organization with an independent programme and action, and those who unsuccessfully proposed, from an right-wing opportunist  position, to abort the formation of the Party and dissolve it within the liberal-bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political organizations of the time [1980-a ].


From 1941 to 1945, the Venezuelan Communists suffered a new right-wing opportunist deviation which promoted class collaboration and was strengthened in 1943 with the adoption of the liquidationist doctrine internationally known as 'Browderism'. The influence and spread of this doctrine, that had very serious repercussions in several Latin American countries, was favoured in Venezuela due to the closeness to the government of the time (presidency of Isaías Medina) of diverse progressive and revolutionary sectors since 1942 and the division that existed then in the Communist ranks. This picture was essentially solved by the celebration, in December 1946, of our First Congress, called "Unity", which managed to unite most of the communist groups of the time under the name that our Party has always had, and issued a stern censorship to 'Browderism' and class collaboration [1946].


Opportunism, in its most general sense, can be defined as any alteration of the policy, program or theoretical conceptions of revolutionary parties or labour movements, arising from the influence of events and circumstances at the time, that objectively moves them away from  the historical interests and own strategic needs of the working class and, instead, leads them to coincide with the interests and needs of non-proletarian strata and classes of society (particularly of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie). As has already been pointed out by several authors, the different varieties of opportunism differ from each other mainly because of the layers and sectors of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie where it comes from and behind which they aim to drag the workers' and revolutionary movement [1924].


In Venezuela, this rule has been met with remarkable regularity, and since over the years various petty bourgeois, intellectual and professional sectors have had very strong presence in the composition of the ranks of our party, not surprisingly we have experienced repeated outbreaks of opportunism, both right-wing and left-wing. The most severe and damaging episode of left opportunism occurred throughout the 1960s and resulted in the split of our Party that gave rise to the so-called Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), to which we devote a few paragraphs.


But right-wing opportunism has also appeared in our organization and in its periphery, not only, as we saw, at the Conference of 1937 and in the 1940s, but also on other occasions, most recently in 2006-2007 when we confronted and defeated a new liquidationist outbreak that claimed once again, as on that historic Conference, to dissolve the party and add it to another multi-cass organization with a petty bourgeois orientation, but managed only to cause us a relatively minor detachment. We will also devote special attention to this recent episode, not so much for its quantitative importance, but for its importance in the interpretation and analysis of the current national political situation.


We will also discuss, albeit briefly, some other manifestations of opportunism that we have fought and continue to fight against in other supposedly "revolutionary" or "progressive" organizations, and whose denunciation and unmasking are necessary to avoid ideological confusion and  political disorientation of the working class and the people in general.



`                                                                  II

In our country the 1960s began in an atmosphere full of opportunities and threats. After the overthrow of the military dictatorship in January 1958 as a result of the successful and courageousd PCV alliance policy that led to a genuine popular uprising, the political situation was rapidly decomposing. The hopes aroused by the popular triumph over dictatorship were almost immediately betrayed by the so-called "landmark pact" by which the right-wing parties (the Social-Democrat AD and COPEI Christian Democrat, with URD's complicity as junior partner) agreed the exclusion of Communists and other progressive and popular forces of the new government. This pact later resulted in the formation of a two-party system for the preservation of the interests of imperialism and the local bourgeoisie associated to it.


Between 1962 and 1967, the PCV developed the tactics of armed struggle in response to unpatriotic and unpopular governments that emerged from that covenant. Without discussing the mistakes made by the Party in the series of political decisions that led to the armed struggle, nor committed during those war years both in the military direction of the actions and especially their political leadership, in 1965 it was quite clear that there were no conditions in the country for the successful development of such tactics, and our Central Committee was well aware of that. At that time the possibilities for a military withdrawal and and organized reintegration of our Party in the national political life were debated [1971-a: 88].


But this debate was hampered by the rise in our ranks of a factional outbreak that sought the autonomy of the military wing and the supremacy of the latter on the collective political leadership. The personal ambitions of some of the military commanders (especially Douglas Bravo), fed by the left adventurist positions of some others who insisted on the viability of a military victory (Teodoro Petkoff, Freddy Muñoz), created a very complex situation in our Party, which took over two years for the final decision of the military withdrawal.


From left petty-bourgeois positions, typical of a radicalized intelligentsia, the opportunists of the time promoted in our ranks the cult of the Cuban guerrilla experience as an example to follow, but in the abstract, without taking into account the specific conditions prevailing in Venezuela, and more importantly, without organic connection with the wide sections of the people and especially the working class. It is symptomatic that simultaneously with militarist deviation, a process of almost complete abandonment of Party work in the labour front and contempt for the work of peasant organization in everything that did not have to do directly with military activity was also developed:



“...the leadership of the Party was seized by a disdain for the trade union work and it came to the conclusion that, in practice, it was not worth to devote material nor human resources to the trade union organizations or, in general, to any non-armed mass oriented work



In some years of the 60s the trade union leaders of the PCV were considered like pariah, unnecessary elements for the revolutionary victory that was expected to be obtained exclusvely by the armed struggle” [1971-a: 97-98].



Worst of military diversion was settled with the expulsion of Bravo and others, who then founded the party called Venezuelan Revolutionary Party (PRV), already disappeared. However, other elements in our ranks continued feeding leftist adventurism and attacking the unity of our organization. The extension of that state of affairs created the conditions, the "breeding ground" for the development of new factionalism that would emerge at the end of the decade.


The decision of military withdrawal was finally taken by the 8th Central Committee Plenum of  Emergency in April 1967, which set the general guidelines of PCV on armed struggle, since then ratified again and again, incorporated since 1980 to the Party program and valid until today. We claim and honor the heroic sacrifice of the hundreds of activists who gave their lives in those years and the thousands more who suffered prison, torture and persecution, and recognize the legitimacy of the use of armed tactics by people when conditions demand it, but we will always endeavor to promote the development of our strategic objectives in the least traumatic way possible and  winning the broadest popular support for that goal:



“The PCV will devote its efforts so the anti-imperialist, anti-monopoy, anti-oligarchic, democratic and popular transformations, and the passage of Venezuela to socialism, take place with as few sacrifices as possible. Therefore we will be sustained by the workers' organization, adding all possible forces in order to express our people's will, making the enemy impotent and avoiding provocations, but we will not hesitate in using the highest forms of struggle in order to obtain the workers' and people's victory, to defend the social and political conquests if the dominant classes use fraud or counter-revolutionary and fascist violence in their selfish interests to distort the people's will” [1980-b: 74-75].



Throughout 1969, as the process of preparation and discussion of the 4th National Congress of the Party began, those who had more strongly encouraged opportunistic positions in the previouse years  finally announced their break with the PCV. The "dissidents", rather than explain and defend their views in the different organs during the discussions that were beginning just launched a public campaign of attacks against the Party, against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, against Leninism [1970, 1976, 1979].


Several weeks before the celebration of the 4th National Congress in January 1971, Pompey Marquez, Petkoff, Eloy Torres and Alfredo Maneiro Muñoz, among others, had left our ranks and initiated the organization of a new party, MAS, which was initially presented as a defender of the genuine communist positions, and even claimed the name of "Venezuelan Communist Force." Due to the prestige that these leaders had reached, especially among our younger or less experienced members, the damage caused by this desertion was very large, particularly in the ranks of the Communist Youth of Venezuela (JCV), which were significantly decreased, and between intellectual and professional sectors [1971-b].



The 4th National Congress of the PCV and the Central Committee elected in that event, immediately sparked a counter-offensive that sought to expose the true character of the new organization, whose ideological vacillation, composition, structure and internal dynamics inexorably condemned it to drift and move further away from their intended left positions: 



“There is nothing new nor original in all formulations made [by the dissidents]. And all that discourse, that alleged “new way of being socialist” is nothing else but a smoke screen to hide what is actually a right-wing scattering. Their practice since 1970 shows that this is the path they have chosen. And that path only leads to a fatal precipice” [1976: 106].



The subsequent development of events has vindicated our Party: Throughout the years, the alleged “new Communists” first decried the “real socialism”, almost immediately renounced Leninism (and the nickname “Communist Force”), then what they termed as “orthodox Marxism”, later to all Marxism, and finally to any form of genuine socialism. Today, the old MAS is just a name, increasingly incongruous with their actual political practice that has even led them to an alliance with the fascist right-wing in their efforts to derail the process of national liberation in progress in our country since 1999.


During the rest of the 1970s and the first half of 1980s, our Party had to face several other outbreaks of opportunism, but none of them as serious and damaging as those already mentioned. Between 1971 and 1974, the remnants of factional groups that had lagged behind in our ranks, and other elements that were consistent with those in practice, encountered an internal environment of greater discipline, a stronger organic life and a Party frankly decided to amend and re-proletarianize, in compliance with the agreements of the 4th Congress:



“...the latest crisis proves the need to proletarianize more and more our leadership, so it is indispensable to promote a higher number of wokers and peasants to the category of PCV leaders […] as the best guarantee for this Party to keep vigilat in order to reject the ideological and organizational smuggling from those who, coming from other social classes, usually come to the leadership of the PCV not to help the working class, but to modify its course...” [1971-a: 100].



Under such difficult internal conditions that made it difficult to disrupt again the life of the organization, the stragglers went away individually or in small groups, with relatively minor consequences. Other smaller groups left our Party and Youth in the mid-1980s (just before and just after our 7th National Congress, 1985), with even less relevant consequences.





III



The weakening and decline of PCV from 1988 to 1998 was mainly caused by external causes to our Party and our country. These were the years of the crisis and subsequent collapse of the socialist bloc in Central Europe and Eurasia, and particularly the Soviet Union, the main reference for our Party from the very moment of its foundation in 1931.


However, the PCV was active and hoisted the banner of Marxism-Leninism, even in the darkest moments of the crisis, when there was great pressure from national and international opportunist forces to transform our party into an “post-communist” organization similar to those which actually appeared in those years in other countries. Although shrinking and cornered, after our 9th National Congress in 1992 we launched, with great courage and conviction, the slogan “Socialism is still the hope of the people!”, in a moment when global capitalism theoreticians celebrated the “end of history” and the alleged final victory of the exploitation system.


We managed to get our of that decline thanks to the bankruptcy of the two-party system and the neo-liberal economic model in our country. The development of national history had shown that after all our warnings against neo-liberalism and our strong opposition to the two-party system over four decades had been correct. The process of national liberation led by Hugo Chavez began in 1999, on par with the gradual recovery of our Party. But at that moment a new round of fighting against our left-wing and right-wing deviations, both inside and outside our ranks, began.


The PCV was, by order of our 10th National Conference in 1998, the first Party that officially endorsed the presidential candidacy of Chavez, and is now the only member of the original alliance (in which participated MAS and other former communist individuals and organizations splitted from our Party during the above mentioned episodes) that continues to support him. But this support has not been, nor it is, uncritical or mechanic: since the beginning of President Chávez's government, our Party has exposed, with care and warmth but firmly, political and ideological deviations of the President himself and those around him.



Initially propeller of a generic and vague nationalism, the President has fluctuated over the years between the alleged “third way”, a misunderstanding Bolivarianism, some elements of social Christianity, the leftist Social Democrats and several other varieties of reformism, until 2005 (and ever since then) when he coincided with our party in that socialism is the only way to the future of humanity. However, there are still conceptual and political confusions that hinder the effective progress in that way.


In this sense, the 14th National Congress of the PCV, in August 2011, confirmed the diagnosis  already done by our Central Committee on several occasions, at least since 2007, about the nature and content of the process headed by President Chávez:



“...among the personalities and government members who seem interested in advancing towards socialism there is a predominant and heterogenous mixture of idealist and petty bourgeois conceptions about the new society and the ways to advance towards its construction. As there is no scientific conception of socialism, consistent and firmly based on the principles of historical materialism, in the highest ranks of the political leadership, the process of changes has no clarity in the key definition in order to lever up its advance in the right direction” [2011].



In the same opportunity, our Party also identified the concrete historical cause of such deviations:



“...on one hand, the social subject that has leaded the process until now corresponds to the middle sectors and the petty bourgeoisie, not the working class, who is the true social subject that is historically called to build socialism; on the other hand, the working class itself and the working people from town and country in general have not already reached in our country the necessary level of consciousness, organization, clarity of programme and mobilization that allows them to impose their class hegemony and modify the course of events in the right direction”. [2011].







IV



The friendly but firm ideological confrontation we have had over the years with President Chavez and his environment, reached a climax when in 2006-2007 the President, unilaterally and without consultation, gave all parties and organizations that supported him then the instructions to dissolve  and join the new political organization he was building, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).


This situation worsened some tensions that had been developing within our Party between a majority proposing to deepen and strengthen PCV's own and independent profile as a class organization who was an ally but was not submitted to the President, and a minority who had been showing deviations which were inappropriate in a proletarian party, both in the language and the ideas as in political practice and working methods. The Central Committee took the wise decision to convene a National Congress in extraordinary session, just five months after the conclusion of our previous Congress, so it was this high body of our organization who debated and decided the situation posed by the presidential order.


Our 13th National Congress (Extraordinary) was held between January and March 2007, a result of which we approved the Thesis on the Party of the Revolution, which accurately exposes the conception of the Party held byt the revolutionaries of the world: a Party with clearly defined class orientation, with the ideology and program of the working class, internationalist-minded, with a collective leadership and an inner life emanating from the principles of democratic centralism and absolute independence against the bourgeoisie and its instrument, the bourgeois state. [2007-a].


This definition of the revolutionary Party was and is incompatible with the proposals that had been made for the construction of the PSUV, which was foreshadowed from the beginning as a multi-class organization, with a strong influence of the petty bourgeoisie and state officials, and no defined ideological profile, so the vast majority of PCV rejected the instructions issued by President Chavez. The 13th Congress, consistently, also adopted the Political Resolution, which distinguished between the need to move, together with President Chavez and his new party and other forces, in building a broad front to develop the anti-imperialist struggle currently underway in our country, and the parallel need to strengthen and develop a strong and genuinely class Party as an instrument for the future task of socialist construction:



“The widest unity of the political and social forces is need at a national, continental and world level in order to achieve victory in the anti-imperialist struggle. At the same time, the advance towards socialism demands the construction of a revolutionary party that gathers the cadres who express the most consistent positions of the classes and social layers which have been historically committed to revolution and socialism; a party that is built in the ideological, political and organizational vanguard, a party that organizationally, collectively and unitedly leads the creative effort of the masses in order to destroy the capitalist state and assume the tasks of the construction of the People's Power; a party that promotes values, principles and behaviours directed to overcome the bourgeois cultural hegemony still dominating. This political organization must express, in its theory and social practice, our people's historical and struggle traditions, which have a deep Bolivarian grass roots, and the Marxism-Leninism applied to the concrete conditions of our homeland” [2007-b: 98].



Thus, the outbreak of liquidationism was quickly and decisively defeated. However, just over a third of the members of our Central Committee, as well as important but isolated groups of regional leaders, local and grassroots activists in Caracas and several other regions of the country, disobeyed the decisions of the 13th Congress and “migrated” to the new president's party.


In some cases this “migration” was the result of disloya pressure exerted from the government against communist militants who were state employees and who were virtually forced to give up our ranks or their jobs. In other cases, young or uinexperienced militants gave up, confused by the undisputed leadership of the President and the affection that his figure awakens in our party and in broad sectors of the Venezuelan people. In others, it was the result of personal ambitions of command and leadership that were not welcome in our organization and sought other spaces for their realization, and finally, in some key cases, it was result of the right-wing opportunist temptations born from the closeness that had been rowing between  the positions of certain leaders of our Party and the petty-bourgeois sectors that dominate the process of change currently underway in Venezuela.


In the latter sense, it is very significant that, several years before the mentioned episode, some of our leaders had been adopting in their analysis and speeches certain categories and formulas alien to Marxism-Leninism and very characteristic of the confusing amalgam of ideas from the petty-bourgeois sectors in government. Notable examples of this include the use misleading and unscientific category of “empire” in place of “imperialism”, which mystifies the nature of the highest stage of capitalism and hinders its proper understanding and analysis, the adoption of the phrases "Fourth Republic" and "Fifth Republic" to refer to the governments before and after 1999, ignoring the fact that the class essence (bourgeois) of the Venezuelan state apparatus has not been altered, and therefore from the standpoint of historical materialism there has been continuity in substance, or the overly optimistic use of the term "revolution" and "revolutionary government" to refer to the process of change led by President Chavez, whose genuinely revolutionary character is still under observation. We must admit self-critically that traces of this style of language and analysis even managed to leak some of the documents that we adopted at our 12th National Congress of 2006, which reveals the depth and seriousness that this deviation had reached.


Just six months after the completion of the 13th Congress (Extraordinary), we conducted our 11th National Conference, in order to complete the restoration of our leading bodies and definitely overcome the aftermath of the crisis that began the previous year. This Conference established the principles that would govern (and continue to govern) relations between our Party and the PSUV as allies in building broad anti-imperialist front, in a framework of mutual respect and non-interference in the internal life of each organization also established some guidelines for the PCV relations with our former militants who had "migrated" (this was the term used then) to the ally Party:



“Despite the fact that their behaviour was distant from the internal rules of PCV, [the “migrated”] should not be considered as defectors or traitors, for they have decided to join an organization that is not counter-revolutionary; on the contrary [...] this new Party is objectivelly our ally in the tasks towards the national liberatory revolution” [2007-c: 125].



Although somewhat numerically weakened by such “migrations” our Party emerged from this episode refined and reinvigorated on the ideological level. Since then we have tried to exercise greater care in the scientific rigor of our analysis and in the correct and precise use of Marxism-Leninism categories.


At the same time, we have seen how former communists who began their ideological degeneration in the years 2005-2007, have continued outside our Party slipping on the path of opportunism towards increasingly distant positions from revolutionary science, reaching in recent times to distort fundamental postulates of Marxist political economy or challenge the character of the working class as a key driver of the future socialist revolution. Following that way, we repeat it now as we said in the 70s about who founded MAS, you can only get to “a fatal precipice”.



V



The case of parties and organizations who, although objectively currently collaborating with national and transnational right-wing in their efforts to restore the status quo before 1999, insist to call themselves “progressive” or “left”, deserves special attention. We refer in particular to the degenerate remnants of old organizations that achieved their peak in previous decades with a progressive and even revolutionary speech and style, but have been unmasked by history as the product of opportunistic outbreaks without real revolutionary substance.


The most tragic of them, but probably not the most important by their numbers or influence, is called Bandera Roja (BR). This is a group with roots in the movements that persisted in the tactics of armed struggle after the military withdrawal of PCV in 1967, and is the result of successive splits and recombinations of the defunct Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR, result in turn of a division of Social-Democrat AD), plus various adventurous groups of heterogeneous origin who were adding to it over the years. In its ideological composition we could identify elements of Maoism and Guevarism (doctrine called “focalism”).


Since the mid 1970s, isolated from the working-class background and virtually unconnected to any important mass movement, the main arena of political action BR was the student movement, where it had a certain influence and where it recruited most of its cadres. Our Party and our youth repeatedly censored opportunism and adventurism of the actions of BR, and sought wherever possible to engage in political debate with their leaders.


During the 1980s, increasingly isolated, cornered and infiltrated by state security forces, BR and its surrounding suffered severe blows at the hands of the police and military repression that caused them heavy casualties, particularly in the so-called “massacres of Cantaura and Yumare”, denounced at the time by our Party as State crimes against humanity. Since then, dismantled its military wing, BR retreated to exclusively student university scenarios, were it starred in  provocative actions of great courage but without constructive political content, which were almost unanimously rejected by the population.


From far-left opportunism, BR went to far-right in the late 90s, on the imminence of the election victory of President Chavez. Some of its cadres then broke with the organization and joined the political project of the President (and now occupy important positions in the PSUV and the government), while others were declared in opposition to the new government and became, in the practice, the shock troops at the service of those who had persecuted and killed them in previous decades.


We must also consider the case of an organization called the Radical Cause (La Causa-R or LCR). Founded around 1972 as a result of disagreements and conflicts between the renegade leadership expelled from our ranks in 1971 (especially Maneiro on the one hand, and Petkoff, Marquez and Munoz on the other), LCR was during his early years an organization in the shadow of the MAS, which was much bigger.


Taking advantage of the void left by the Communists in the labour movement during the armed struggle (error from which we have not managed to completely recover), LCR grew rapidly in the trade unions during the 1970s and 1980s, and managed to achieve important influence especially among the workers of large metallurgical industries in the Guayana region. There the opportunistic nature of LCR showed up again and was then in evidence which was to be their political fate: their particular practice at the forefront of the union movement was increasingly workerist and demanding and increasingly remote from the genuine class unionism.


The degeneration of the LCR-controlled unions led them even to openly corrupt practices and the progressive deterioration of their influence. In the early 90's, LCR had a brief heyday as a national political party, in their own or supporting individual right-wing figures, but their lack of ideological and political coherence prevented them from further growth and led to their decline almost immediately. They were part of the alliance that supported the presidential candidacy of Hugo Chávez in 1998, but in the early years of the new government they broke with the President and joined the opposition, where it remains today.


An important group of their leaders chose to stay with President Chavez and formed a new organization, the party Patria Para Todos (PPT), which after at least two splits, has finally joined LCR in the ranks of the opposition. Some of those who were part of the PPT decided in 2007 to join the PSUV and today remain beside the President.


MAS and its derivatives, with BR and LCR and their descendants, now claim to use their remote left-wing past to hoist allegedly “progresive” flags and pose as the “left wing” of the opposition to President Chávez. This maneuver, another demonstration of the opportunistic nature and classless nature of such elements, tries to confuse some sectors of the working class and the wide people, and therefore should be denounced and unmasked.



VI



Time to close with some conclusions and lessons to be learned from our history of struggle against opportunism. The first and foremost is the confirmation on our own experience of Lenin's assertion as to the origin and nature of opportunism as an expression of the inescapable presence in the ranks of the revolutionary parties of petty bourgeois layers, with their own conceptions and trends:



“...in every capitalist country there are always wide layers of petty bourgeoisie, of small owners, side by side with the proletariat [...] So it is very natural that the petty bourgeois conceptions of the world burst once and agains in the ranks of the big workers' parties” [1908: 26-27].



Each petty bourgeois layer present in our Party with enough force automatically tends, unless it is stopped in time, to develop their own variety of opportunism, in accordance with their characteristics, interests and profiles. Radicalized university intellectuals tend to left opportunism, as officials, professionals and other relatively established and prosperous sectors, tend to the right-wing variety.


From this diagnosis the prophylaxis and medicine for the disease is clear without too much effort: comprehensive proletarianization of our Party. We do not refer only to the deep assimilation of the views and proletarian ideology of Party members not originally coming from the working class, but especially to the effective and dominant presence of worker cadres in the Party leadership bodies in such high proportion as circumstances permit. The latter is what Comrade Alvaro Cunhal called the “golden rule”:



“An important guarantee for the class policy of the Party is the determinant participation of working class militantes in the leadership, i.e., a party leadership with a working class majority.



[...] The most frequent (and the general rule) is that bourgeois ideology has more influence in the intellectuals than in the workers and therefore the determinant participation of workers in the leadership guarantees more solidness in the principles than the determinant participation of comrades from a different social origin” [1985: 62].



And such a rule, as we have seen, was precisely the medicine that PCV prescribed to himself in the 4th National Congress of 1971. In this sense, our 13th and 14th Congresses, and our 11th Conference, have insisted in recent years on the need to increase the proletarian presence in the ranks of our Party, and have prioritized and worked among the working class as first task of the PCV. But we must recognize that, although we have recently had some major successes in this regard, our Party today is still not able to fully comply with that golden principle.


The second major lesson from our experience is that implacable dialectic of history, sooner or later, is imposed on all opportunists, even against their will, and eventually pushes them to the camp of the bourgeoisie; ie, all opportunism always ends up being right-wing, regardless of the forms and slogans initially adopted. And this is because they all have in common a central element: their rejection or ignorance of the point of view of the proletariat, leaving them unable to appreciate the historical perspective of the overall development of societies [1924].


Indeed, as Lenin himself says, all opportunism, one way or another, with varying theorizing emphasis, with varying degrees of subtlety, always “falsifies Marxism amputating everything that the bourgeoisie can not accept” [1918: 490]. And of course, the first thing to be maimed in our doctrine to win acceptance of the bourgeoisie, is precisely the class analysis, center and cornerstone of all Marxism.


It is therefore imperative to exercise the utmost vigilance in terms of theoretical and conceptual rigor in our analysis, and the use of accurate scientific categories of Marxism-Leninism. Experience shows that outbreaks are usually announced with opportunistic deviations or “innovations” in the level of discourse and analysis, even before they become visible in the field of practical action.


This does not mean in any way that we dogmatically resist the legitimate and necessary development of revolutionary science, or that we should close ourselves to the natural healthy debate and exchange of ideas both inside and outside our ranks.O n the contrary, it means that we address all debate and all potential doctrinal development with the utmost seriousness and rigor. Science can and must grow and develop, but it is our obligation to exercise critical vigilance so, among the legitimate innovations there is no infiltration of ideological smuggling that denatures the tested foundings of Marxism-Leninism, especially in what has to do with class analysis.


Finally, we note that our battles against liquidationism have reaffirmed us in the importance of maintaining the independence and the organizational and programmatic autonomy of the political party of the working class. As demonstrated by the subsequent development of events, giving in to liquidationist pressure, however powerful and seductive it was at the time, would have been a catastrophic failure, which would have left the working class politically disarmed, and in an even higher level of distress and disruption in face of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces and positions.


We make our own, in this sense, the words of Comrade José Carlos Mariátegui:



“...the vanguard of proletariat and the conscious workers, faithful to the action in the field of the class struggle, reject all tendency meaning the merger with the political forces or organisms from other classes. We condemn as opportunistic all policy that promotes the temporary renounce of proletariat to its programme and activity independence, which must be integrally safeguarded at all times” [1930: 201].



Today, once the positions that wanted to liquidate our Party have been defeated and the influences that aspired to dilute or distort our class profile and get us away from the Marxist-Leninits ideology have been submitted, the PCV grows stronger with new energy, and the compass pointing firmly into the perspective of socialist revolution and communist future.



References

1908.      Vladimir I. Lenin. «Marxismo y revisionismo». En: Obras escogidas. Moscú: Editorial Progreso, 1974: 20-27.

1918.      ----------. «La revolución proletaria y el renegado Kautsky». En: Obras escogidas. Moscú: Editorial Progreso, 1974: 400-494.

1924.      Gyorgy Lukács. Lenin: Estudio sobre la coherencia de su pensamiento. Buenos Aires: La Rosa Blindada, 1968.

1930.      José Carlos Mariátegui. «Sobre un tópico superado». En: Ideología y política. Caracas: Ediciones del Ministerio de Comunicación e Información, 2006: 199-201.

1946.      Partido Comunista de Venezuela. El Congreso de Unidad de los Comunistas. Caracas: Comisión Nacional de Educación y Propaganda.

1970.      Pedro Ortega Díaz y Antonio García Ponce. Las ideas antisocialistas de Teodoro Petkoff. Caracas: Editorial Cantaclaro.

1971-a.   4o Congreso Nacional del PCV. «Informe del Comité Central (A cargo de Jesús Faría)». En: 4o Congreso Nacional del PCV. Documentos y Resoluciones. Caracas: Gráfica Americana: 77-112.

1971-b.   ----------. «Resolución de expulsión del grupo fraccional renegado (Declaración del 4o Congreso sobre la reciente deserción)». En: 4o Congreso Nacional del PCV. Documentos y Resoluciones. Caracas: Gráfica Americana: 211-223.

1976.      Rafael José Cortés. «¿Proceso a la izquierda o desbandada hacia la derecha?». En: El MAS, desbandada hacia la derecha. Caracas: Ediciones Centauro, 1979: 75-106.

1979.      ----------. En defensa del socialismo (Respuesta a las «Conversaciones»). Caracas: Gráficas Río Orinoco.

1980-a.   Fernando Key Sánchez. Fundación del Partido Comunista de Venezuela. Caracas: Fondo Editorial Carlos Aponte.

1980-b.   6o Congreso Nacional del PCV. Programa del PCV. Caracas: COTRAGRAF.

1985.      Álvaro Cunhal. O Partido com paredes de vidro. Lisboa: Editorial Avante, 2006.

2007-a.   13o Congreso Nacional (extraordinario) del PCV. «Tesis sobre el Partido de la Revolución». En: Documentos fundamentales del Partido Comunista de Venezuela. Caracas: Departamento Nacional de Educación e Ideología del PCV, 2009: 99-112.

2007-b.   ----------. «Resolución Política». En: Documentos fundamentales del Partido Comunista de Venezuela. Caracas: Departamento Nacional de Educación e Ideología del PCV, 2009: 97-98.

2007-c.   11a Conferencia Nacional del PCV. «Informe Central». En: Documentos fundamentales del Partido Comunista de Venezuela. Caracas: Departamento Nacional de Educación e Ideología del PCV, 2009: 117-130.

2011.      14o Congreso Nacional del PCV. «Línea Política». [En proceso de publicación].

Featured Story

Dejemos que la izquierda de Estados Unidos tenga cuidado! por Andrew Taylor 23.06.2021

La Administración Biden ha habilitado una nueva "Iniciativa contra el terrorismo doméstico" para defender "The Homeland"...