From the Archives: Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities, By Robert Parry, Feb 6, 2011

Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities By Robert Parry February 6, 2011

When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw, shucks" manner.

After all, the true measure of a president shouldn’t be his style or how he made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.

Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan’s centennial birthday and lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many parts of the world.

Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just small necessities in Reagan’s larger success “winning the Cold War” – even though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth.”]

Yet, Reagan’s Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing “death squads” and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment to make the forces even more lethal.

For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina’s dictators were inventing a new state-terror program called “disappearances” – the unacknowledged murders of dissidents – Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter administration.

At the time, Argentina’s security forces were rounding up tens of thousands of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane’s door, like sausage links.

However, since Argentina’s rightists were devout Catholics, they had a special twist when the prisoners were pregnant women. The expectant mothers would be kept alive until they reached full term and then were subjected to either induced labor or Caesarian sections.

The babies were handed out to military families and the new mothers were loaded aboard the death planes to be dumped out over the sea to drown. The children were sometimes raised by their mothers’ murderers. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist” or “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]

As ghastly as Argentina's “dirty war” was, it had an ardent defender in Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy Carter’s human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the Argentine junta.

Reagan joshed that Derian should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Sympathizing with Torturers

So, there was good reason for the right-wing oligarchs and their security services to celebrate when Reagan was elected president in November 1980. They knew they would enjoy a new era of impunity as they tortured, raped and murdered their political opponents.

Even before Reagan took office, four American churchwomen in El Salvador were kidnapped by elements of the right-wing Salvadoran military. Because the women were suspected of harboring leftist sympathies, they were raped and executed with high-powered bullets to their brains, before their bodies were stuffed into shallow graves.

The incoming Reagan administration was soon making excuses for the Salvadoran killers, including comments from Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. 

The brutal Argentine generals also got a royal welcome when they visited Washington. Kirkpatrick feted them at an elegant state dinner. 

More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel force created to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.

Torture was also on the Reagan’s administration’s menu for political enemies. A 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, examining the CIA’s abusive “war on terror” interrogations under President George W. Bush, noted the spy agency’s past “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.”

The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching these techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.” The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.

Euphemisms aside, the CIA Inspector General cited a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual.” In 1984, the CIA also was faced with a scandal over an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras.

While the IG report’s references to this earlier era were brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. Arguably, the worst of these “dirty wars” was inflicted on the people of Guatemala.

Genocide in Guatemala

After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo that Carter had imposed on Guatemala for its wretched human rights record. Yet even as Reagan moved to loosen up the military aid ban, U.S. intelligence agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.

In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said.

According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that 'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants."

Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.

Confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.

According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before – that the repression will continue."

Human rights groups saw the same grisly picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods," inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro. 

More Massacres

Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people, U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of government-sponsored massacres.

One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province. 

“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed."

The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed." 

When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. …

“The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

In March 1982, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Official Washington with his piety. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity."

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called "rifles and beans." The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles."

In October 1982, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations, internal U.S. government cables revealed.

Defending Rios Montt

Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance, the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign."

Reagan personally took that position in December 1982 when he met with Rios Montt and claimed that his regime was getting a "bum rap" on human rights.

On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala, authorizing the sale of $6 million in military hardware, including spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations.

State Department spokesman John Hughes said the sales were justified because political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved, too.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies.

CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the "Archivos" the previous October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."

Despite these ugly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala.

"The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated.

A different picture – far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government – was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass cited proof that the government carried out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]

‘Positive Changes’

Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face.

On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes" in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.

Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill anyone deemed a subversive or a terrorist. 

When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights.

In late November 1983, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.

By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.

In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's image than in improving its human rights."

Other examples of Guatemala’s “death squad” strategy came to light later. For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala – and for torturing and burying prisoners.

At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated.

The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. 

Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for “disappearance” were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the 1970s.

The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties," the DIA report said.

‘Perception Management’

Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency and paramilitary operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts. 

Deception of the American public – a strategy that the administration called “perception management” – was as much a part of Reagan's Central American activities as the Bush administration’s lies and distortions about weapons of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.

Reagan's falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported Contras in Nicaragua.

Angered by the revelations about his beloved Contras, Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."

Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the Contras. At one point in the Contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the Contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua.

Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey, can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A Spy for All Seasons.]

On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. 

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

Mayan Exterminations

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter "genocide." 

Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” Tomuschat said.

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.

"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said.

Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was “wrong” -- and the evidence of a U.S.-backed “genocide” might have been considered startling -- the news was treated mostly as a one-day story in the U.S. press. It prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows that were then obsessed with Clinton’s personal life.

But there was another factor in the disinterest. By the late 1990s, Ronald Reagan had been transformed into a national icon, with the Republican-controlled Congress attaching his name to public buildings around the country and to National Airport in Washington.

Democrats mostly approached this deification of Reagan as harmless, an easy concession to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship. Some Democrats would even try to cite Reagan as supportive of some of their positions as a way to protect themselves from attacks launched by the increasingly powerful right-wing news media.

The Democratic goal of looking to the future, not the past, had negative consequences, however. With Reagan and his brutal policies put beyond serious criticism, the path was left open for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to return to the “dark side” after the 9/11 attacks, authorizing torture and extrajudicial killings.

Now, Reagan’s “greatness” is being sealed by the elaborate celebrations in honor of his 100th birthday, including a special homage paid during the Super Bowl. In recent days, commentators, like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, have scrambled to position themselves as Reagan’s admirers, all the better to protect their careers.

But amid all the extravagant hoopla and teary tributes to the late president, perhaps some Americans will stop and think of all the decent people in Latin America and elsewhere who died horrible and unnecessary deaths as Ronald Reagan cheerily defended their murderers.

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking, Jackson Lears, London Review of Books, Vol. 40 No. 01 · 4 January 2018

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Jackson Lears   London Review of Books, Vol. 40 No. 01 · 4 January 2018

American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy. Responsibility for the absence of debate lies in large part with the major media outlets. Their uncritical embrace and endless repetition of the Russian hack story have made it seem a fait accompli in the public mind. It is hard to estimate popular belief in this new orthodoxy, but it does not seem to be merely a creed of Washington insiders. If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility – even from old friends. This has all been baffling and troubling to me; there have been moments when pop-culture fantasies (body snatchers, Kool-Aid) have come to mind.

Like any orthodoxy worth its salt, the religion of the Russian hack depends not on evidence but on ex cathedra pronouncements on the part of authoritative institutions and their overlords. Its scriptural foundation is a confused and largely fact-free ‘assessment’ produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of unanimity, given that only three of the 16 US intelligence agencies contributed to the report. And indeed the assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were unassailable fact, allowing journalists to assume what has yet to be proved. In doing so they serve as mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, or at least for those ‘hand-picked’ analysts.

It is not the first time the intelligence agencies have played this role. When I hear the Intelligence Community Assessment cited as a reliable source, I always recall the part played by the New York Times in legitimating CIA reports of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s putative weapons of mass destruction, not to mention the long history of disinformation (a.k.a. ‘fake news’) as a tactic for advancing one administration or another’s political agenda. Once again, the established press is legitimating pronouncements made by the Church Fathers of the national security state. Clapper is among the most vigorous of these. He perjured himself before Congress in 2013, when he denied that the NSA had ‘wittingly’ spied on Americans – a lie for which he has never been held to account. In May 2017, he told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the Russians were highly likely to have colluded with Trump’s campaign because they are ‘almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’. The current orthodoxy exempts the Church Fathers from standards imposed on ordinary people, and condemns Russians – above all Putin – as uniquely, ‘almost genetically’ diabolical.

It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials.

Trump is committed to continuing his predecessors’ lavish funding of the already bloated Defence Department, and his Fortress America is a blustering, undisciplined version of Madeleine Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’. Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the official position of the Democratic Party. What is unprecedented about Trump is his offensive style: contemptuous, bullying, inarticulate, and yet perfectly pitched to appeal to the anger and anxiety of his target audience. His excess has licensed overt racism and proud misogyny among some of his supporters. This is cause for denunciation, but I am less persuaded that it justifies the anti-Russian mania.

Besides Trump’s supposed uniqueness, there are two other assumptions behind the furore in Washington: the first is that the Russian hack unquestionably occurred, and the second is that the Russians are our implacable enemies. The second provides the emotional charge for the first. Both seem to me problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that the NSA ‘probably knows quite well who the invaders were’. And yet ‘it has not presented any evidence, although I suspect it exists. The question is: why not? … I suspect it discovered other attackers in the systems, maybe there were six or seven groups at work.’ The NSA’s capacity to follow hacking to its source is a matter of public record. When the agency investigated pervasive and successful Chinese hacking into US military and defence industry installations, it was able to trace the hacks to the building where they originated, a People’s Liberation Army facility in Shanghai. That information was published in the New York Times but, this time, the NSA’s failure to provide evidence has gone curiously unremarked. When The Intercept published a story about the NSA’s alleged discovery that Russian military intelligence had attempted to hack into US state and local election systems, the agency’s undocumented assertions about the Russian origins of the hack were allowed to stand as unchallenged fact and quickly became treated as such in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, there has been a blizzard of ancillary accusations, including much broader and vaguer charges of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It remains possible that Robert Mueller, a former FBI director who has been appointed to investigate these allegations, may turn up some compelling evidence of contacts between Trump’s people and various Russians. It would be surprising if an experienced prosecutor empowered to cast a dragnet came up empty-handed, and the arrests have already begun. But what is striking about them is that the charges have nothing to do with Russian interference in the election. There has been much talk about the possibility that the accused may provide damaging evidence against Trump in exchange for lighter sentences, but this is merely speculation. Paul Manafort, at one point Trump’s campaign manager, has pleaded not guilty to charges of failing to register his public relations firm as a foreign agent for the Ukrainian government and concealing his millions of dollars in fees. But all this occurred before the 2016 campaign. George Papadopolous, a foreign policy adviser, has pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his bungling efforts to arrange a meeting between Trump’s people and the Russian government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy that routinely occurs during the interim between one administration and the next. It is not a sign of collusion.

So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds, there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election. Meanwhile serious doubts have surfaced about the technical basis for the hacking claims. Independent observers have argued it is more likely that the emails were leaked from inside, not hacked from outside. On this front, the most persuasive case was made by a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, former employees of the US intelligence agencies who distinguished themselves in 2003 by debunking Colin Powell’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, hours after Powell had presented his pseudo-evidence at the UN. (There are members of VIPS who dissent from the VIPS report’s conclusions, but their arguments are in turn contested by the authors of the report.) The VIPS findings received no attention in major media outlets, except Fox News – which from the centre-left perspective is worse than no attention at all. Mainstream media have dismissed the VIPS report as a conspiracy theory (apparently the Russian hacking story does not count as one). The crucial issue here and elsewhere is the exclusion from public discussion of any critical perspectives on the orthodox narrative, even the perspectives of people with professional credentials and a solid track record.

Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the theft of their emails. Alperovitch is also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian Washington think tank. In its report Crowdstrike puts forward close to zero evidence for its claim that those responsible were Russian, let alone for its assertion that they were affiliated with Russian military intelligence. And yet, from this point on, the assumption that this was a Russian cyber operation was unquestioned. When the FBI arrived on the scene, the Bureau either did not request or was refused access to the DNC servers; instead it depended entirely on the Crowdstrike analysis. Crowdstrike, meanwhile, was being forced to retract another claim, that the Russians had successfully hacked the guidance systems of the Ukrainian artillery. The Ukrainian military and the British International Institute for Strategic Studies both contradicted this claim, and Crowdstrike backed down. But its DNC analysis was allowed to stand and even become the basis for the January Intelligence Community Assessment.

The chatter surrounding the hack would never have acquired such urgency were it not for the accompanying assumption: Russia is a uniquely dangerous adversary, with which we should avoid all contact. Without that belief, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s meetings with Russians in September 2016 would become routine discussions between a senator and foreign officials. Flynn’s post-election conversations with the Russian ambassador would appear unremarkable. Trump’s cronies’ attempts to do business in Russia would become merely sleazy. Donald Trump Jr’s meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would be transformed from a melodrama of shady intrigue to a comedy of errors – with the candidate’s son expecting to receive information to use against Clinton but discovering Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about repealing sanctions and restarting the flow of Russian orphans to the United States. And Putin himself would become just another autocrat, with whom democracies could engage without endorsing.

Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes – like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections – they are not retracted even after they have been discredited. These stories have been thoroughly debunked by French and German intelligence services but continue to hover, poisoning the atmosphere, confusing debate. The claim that the Russians hacked local and state voting systems in the US was refuted by California and Wisconsin election officials, but their comments generated a mere whisper compared with the uproar created by the original story. The rush to publish without sufficient attention to accuracy has become the new normal in journalism. Retraction or correction is almost beside the point: the false accusation has done its work.

The consequence is a spreading confusion that envelops everything. Epistemological nihilism looms, but some people and institutions have more power than others to define what constitutes an agreed-on reality. To say this is to risk dismissal as the ultimate wing-nut in the lexicon of contemporary Washington: the conspiracy theorist. Still, the fact remains: sometimes powerful people arrange to promote ideas that benefit their common interests. Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy or merely special privilege hardly matters. What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society. Even if much of that society is indifferent to or suspicious of the official common sense, it still becomes embedded among the tacit assumptions that set the boundaries of ‘responsible opinion’. So the Democratic establishment (along with a few Republicans) and the major media outlets have made ‘Russian meddling’ the common sense of the current moment. What kind of cultural work does this common sense do? What are the consequences of the spectacle the media call (with characteristic originality) ‘Russiagate’?

The most immediate consequence is that, by finding foreign demons who can be blamed for Trump’s ascendancy, the Democratic leadership have shifted the blame for their defeat away from their own policies without questioning any of their core assumptions. Amid the general recoil from Trump, they can even style themselves dissenters – ‘#the resistance’ was the label Clintonites appropriated within a few days of the election. Mainstream Democrats have begun to use the word ‘progressive’ to apply to a platform that amounts to little more than preserving Obamacare, gesturing towards greater income equality and protecting minorities. This agenda is timid. It has nothing to say about challenging the influence of concentrated capital on policy, reducing the inflated defence budget or withdrawing from overextended foreign commitments; yet without those initiatives, even the mildest egalitarian policies face insuperable obstacles. More genuine insurgencies are in the making, which confront corporate power and connect domestic with foreign policy, but they face an uphill battle against the entrenched money and power of the Democratic leadership – the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons and the DNC. Russiagate offers Democratic elites a way to promote party unity against Trump-Putin, while the DNC purges Sanders’s supporters.

For the DNC, the great value of the Russian hack story is that it focuses attention away from what was actually in their emails. The documents revealed a deeply corrupt organisation, whose pose of impartiality was a sham. Even the reliably pro-Clinton Washington Post has admitted that ‘many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.’ Further evidence of collusion between the Clinton machine and the DNC surfaced recently in a memoir by Donna Brazile, who became interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the wake of the email revelations. Brazile describes discovering an agreement dated 26 August 2015, which specified (she writes)

that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.

Before the primaries had even begun, the supposedly neutral DNC – which had been close to insolvency – had been bought by the Clinton campaign.

Another recent revelation of DNC tactics concerns the origins of the inquiry into Trump’s supposed links to Putin. The story began in April 2016, when the DNC hired a Washington research firm called Fusion GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The Clinton campaign tried to persuade established media outlets to publicise the Steele dossier, but with uncharacteristic circumspection, they declined to promote what was plainly political trash rather than reliable reporting. Yet the FBI apparently took the Steele dossier seriously enough to include a summary of it in a secret appendix to the Intelligence Community Assessment. Two weeks before the inauguration, James Comey, the director of the FBI, described the dossier to Trump. After Comey’s briefing was leaked to the press, the website Buzzfeed published the dossier in full, producing hilarity and hysteria in the Washington establishment.

The Steele dossier inhabits a shadowy realm where ideology and intelligence, disinformation and revelation overlap. It is the antechamber to the wider system of epistemological nihilism created by various rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was stripped of my clearance and later honourably discharged when I refused to join the Sealed Authenticator System, which would have authorised the launch of those allegedly non-existent nuclear weapons. The tree of smoke has only grown more complex and elusive since then. Yet the Democratic Party has now embarked on a full-scale rehabilitation of the intelligence community – or at least the part of it that supports the notion of Russian hacking. (We can be sure there is disagreement behind the scenes.) And it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society.

I thought of these ironies when I visited the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which featured the work of black American artists from the 1960s and 1970s, when intelligence agencies (and agents provocateurs) were spearheading a government crackdown on black militants, draft resisters, deserters and antiwar activists. Amid the paintings, collages and assemblages there was a single Confederate flag, accompanied by grim reminders of the Jim Crow past – a Klansman in full regalia, a black body dangling from a tree. There were also at least half a dozen US flags, juxtaposed in whole or in part with images of contemporary racial oppression that could have occurred anywhere in America: dead black men carted off on stretchers by skeletons in police uniform; a black prisoner tied to a chair, awaiting torture. The point was to contrast the pretensions of ‘the land of the free’ with the practices of the national security state and local police forces. The black artists of that era knew their enemy: black people were not being killed and imprisoned by some nebulous foreign adversary, but by the FBI, the CIA and the police.

The Democratic Party has now developed a new outlook on the world, a more ambitious partnership between liberal humanitarian interventionists and neoconservative militarists than existed under the cautious Obama. This may be the most disastrous consequence for the Democratic Party of the new anti-Russian orthodoxy: the loss of the opportunity to formulate a more humane and coherent foreign policy. The obsession with Putin has erased any possibility of complexity from the Democratic world picture, creating a void quickly filled by the monochrome fantasies of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open for business. This view is difficult to challenge when it cloaks itself in humanitarian sentiment. There is horrific suffering in the world; the US has abundant resources to help relieve it; the moral imperative is clear. There are endless forms of international engagement that do not involve military intervention. But it is the path taken by US policy often enough that one may suspect humanitarian rhetoric is nothing more than window-dressing for a more mundane geopolitics – one that defines the national interest as global and virtually limitless.

Having come of age during the Vietnam War, a calamitous consequence of that inflated definition of national interest, I have always been attracted to the realist critique of globalism. Realism is a label forever besmirched by association with Henry Kissinger, who used it as a rationale for intervening covertly and overtly in other nations’ affairs. Yet there is a more humane realist tradition, the tradition of George Kennan and William Fulbright, which emphasises the limits of military might, counselling that great power requires great restraint. This tradition challenges the doctrine of regime change under the guise of democracy promotion, which – despite its abysmal failures in Iraq and Libya – retains a baffling legitimacy in official Washington. Russiagate has extended its shelf life.

We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking. For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voters. Nor are they talking about the trillion dollar defence budget that pre-empts the possibility of single-payer healthcare and other urgently needed social programmes; nor about the modernisation of the American nuclear arsenal which Obama began and Trump plans to accelerate, and which raises the risk of the ultimate environmental calamity, nuclear war – a threat made more serious than it has been in decades by America’s combative stance towards Russia. The prospect of impeaching Trump and removing him from office by convicting him of collusion with Russia has created an atmosphere of almost giddy anticipation among leading Democrats, allowing them to forget that the rest of the Republican Party is composed of many politicians far more skilful in Washington’s ways than their president will ever be.

It is not the Democratic Party that is leading the search for alternatives to the wreckage created by Republican policies: a tax plan that will soak the poor and middle class to benefit the rich; a heedless pursuit of fossil fuels that is already resulting in the contamination of the water supply of the Dakota people; and continued support for police policies of militarisation and mass incarceration. It is local populations that are threatened by oil spills and police beatings, and that is where humane populism survives. A multitude of insurgent groups have begun to use the outrage against Trump as a lever to move the party in egalitarian directions: Justice Democrats, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a host of local and regional organisations. They recognise that there are far more urgent – and genuine – reasons to oppose Trump than vague allegations of collusion with Russia. They are posing an overdue challenge to the long con of neoliberalism, and the technocratic arrogance that led to Clinton’s defeat in Rust Belt states. Recognising that the current leadership will not bring about significant change, they are seeking funding from outside the DNC. This is the real resistance, as opposed to ‘#theresistance’.

On certain important issues – such as broadening support for single-payer healthcare, promoting a higher minimum wage or protecting undocumented immigrants from the most flagrant forms of exploitation – these insurgents are winning wide support. Candidates like Paula Jean Swearengin, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia who is running in the Democratic primary for nomination to the US Senate, are challenging establishment Democrats who stand cheek by jowl with Republicans in their service to concentrated capital. Swearengin’s opponent is Joe Manchin, whom the Los Angeles Times has compared to Doug Jones, another ‘very conservative’ Democrat who recently won election to the US Senate in Alabama, narrowly defeating a Republican disgraced by accusations of sexual misconduct with 14-year-old girls. I can feel relieved at that result without joining in the collective Democratic ecstasy, which reveals the party’s persistent commitment to politics as usual. Democrat leaders have persuaded themselves (and much of their base) that all the republic needs is a restoration of the status quo ante Trump. They remain oblivious to popular impatience with familiar formulas. Jess King – a Mennonite woman, Bard College MBA and founder of a local non-profit who is running for Congress as a Justice Democrat in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – put it this way: ‘We see a changing political landscape right now that isn’t measured by traditional left to right politics anymore, but bottom to top. In Pennsylvania and many other places around the country we see a grassroots economic populism on the rise, pushing against the political establishment and status quo that have failed so many in our country.’

Democratic insurgents are also developing a populist critique of the imperial hubris that has sponsored multiple failed crusades, extorted disproportionate sacrifice from the working class and provoked support for Trump, who presented himself (however misleadingly) as an opponent of open-ended interventionism. On foreign policy, the insurgents face an even more entrenched opposition than on domestic policy: a bipartisan consensus aflame with outrage at the threat to democracy supposedly posed by Russian hacking. Still, they may have found a tactical way forward, by focusing on the unequal burden borne by the poor and working class in the promotion and maintenance of American empire.

This approach animates Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, a 33-page document whose authors include Norman Solomon, founder of the web-based insurgent lobby RootsAction.org. ‘The Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people,’ Autopsy announces. But what sets this apart from most progressive critiques is the cogent connection it makes between domestic class politics and foreign policy. For those in the Rust Belt, military service has often seemed the only escape from the shambles created by neoliberal policies; yet the price of escape has been high. As Autopsy notes, ‘the wisdom of continual war’ – what Clinton calls ‘global leadership’ –

was far clearer to the party’s standard bearer [in 2016] than it was to people in the US communities bearing the brunt of combat deaths, injuries and psychological traumas. After a decade and a half of non-stop warfare, research data from voting patterns suggest that the Clinton campaign’s hawkish stance was a political detriment in working-class communities hard-hit by American casualties from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Francis Shen of the University of Minnesota and Douglas Kriner of Boston University analysed election results in three key states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – and found that ‘even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.’ Clinton’s record of uncritical commitment to military intervention allowed Trump to have it both ways, playing to jingoist resentment while posing as an opponent of protracted and pointless war. Kriner and Shen conclude that Democrats may want to ‘re-examine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war’. If the insurgent movements within the Democratic Party begin to formulate an intelligent foreign policy critique, a re-examination may finally occur. And the world may come into sharper focus as a place where American power, like American virtue, is limited. For this Democrat, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished. It’s a long shot, but there is something happening out there.

The right of nations to self-determination, following the independence referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia. REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY

Claims and facts about the right of nations to self-determination,following the independence referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia.

Arif KOŞAR

Following the independence referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia, the right of nations to self-determination has become a popular debate. Here are some of the claims and facts about this right:
Claim 1. Defending the right of nations to self-determination ignites separatism
The right of self-determination is a way of respecting a nation’s right to live the way it chooses to. Lenin states that this right applied even to the most ‘extreme’ options, including the ‘right to secession’. For this reason, the right of nations to self-determination forms the ‘right to establish a separate state’. This means that even if a majority of a nation now calls to ‘break off from’, i.e. ‘secession’, this right must be recognised. However, Lenin did not want this right because he wanted a separation, but because he wanted to advocate a genuine fraternity and unity among peoples. According to the programme of the Bolsheviks, the solution to the national question was to recognise the right of self-determination, and through this, removing all national privileges under a single state framework as a voluntary union based on equal rights. In order for the peoples to live together, the ‘right to secession’ must be recognised. Prohibition of this right encourages separation. For example, the more the demand of Turkey’s Kurds to have autonomous life is repressed, the more the Kurdish people gain a sense of need for ‘separation’. Therefore, the right of nations to self-determination does not mean to advocate separation but to defend the removal of national privileges and the conditions of voluntary unity.
2. The national question has already been resolved in Iraq. Language, cultural freedoms and autonomy have been provided. The Kurds are no longer an oppressed nation. The referendum serves the interests of Barzani, the President of Kurdistan Regional Government.
It is true that the recent independence referendum is linked with Barzani’s political interests. However, reducing the national question to the issue of language and culture is a liberal approach. For example, why has the national question in Catalonia not been resolved? They have their language, culture, local government and own parliament, but the national question still was not resolved. There is a similar situation in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdish question in Turkey. Even if we assume that language and cultural equality were to be provided, the Kurdish question would not be resolved without the demands of the Kurds for autonomy being met. The national question cannot only be seen as a cultural rights issue. The problem will continue as long as the Kurds request for autonomy is interfered with and prevented from the outside. In the final analysis, the national question is the rejection of the right of a nation to self-determination. In some cases, this will include matters such as language, culture and so on (just like the situation in Turkey for instance) and not in others (Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan). And so the national question can not be solved without the recognition of the right to self-determination. For this reason, Turkey’s left’s refusal of this right in ‘good faith’ opens the way to the nationalism of the oppressor nation.
3. To defend the right to a referendum that will clearly lead to separation is to support separatism through the rhetoric of ‘principles’ and ‘rights’.
A socialist from Turkey cannot handle this issue abstractly without taking into consideration the historical context as if they were living in Australia. In Turkey, the nationalism of the oppressor nation is institutionalised and is highly effective among the working people. This nationalism is based on anti-Kurdishness and therefore there is a hysterical hostility to a possible Kurdish state. Establishing a state is seen as a privilege that the Turks hold and therefore a Kurdish state is not deemed appropriate. This is why socialists of Turkey firstly have the duty to help the working people gain an internationalist consciousness and to oppose all national privileges.
The question is as follows: How will an equal friendship-fraternity relationship be established between the Turkish workers and the Kurdish workers? How will the common struggle be achieved? If socialists of Turkey will not respect the will of the Kurds demanding independence in Iraqi Kurdistan, can equality and fraternity even be considerable? The only way to establish trust, fraternity and equality between the nations in the medium term so that a common way of fighting is achieved is through the recognition of the right to self-determination.
4. Those who support the right to self-determination do not care about the common struggle of the peoples.
For the common struggles and fraternity of peoples and show to them that we are brothers, it is necessary to respect their preferences in order to break the prejudices of a people who have been massacred for centuries. This is the foundation of voluntary unity. The right to self-determination is not only a defence of an abstract principal but also a compulsory principle to provide for the fraternity, common struggle and voluntary unity of the peoples.  As Lenin says “Humanity ... can only achieve the inevitable union of nations by going through a transition period when all oppressed nations are liberated, i.e. when they have the freedom of secession from the oppressor nation.”
5. Kurdish parties did not support the referendum. Therefore, the referendum does not reflect the will of the Kurdish nation.
It is true that there are differences between the Kurds and their parties. However, the objection of Kurdish parties is not to the referendum itself, but to Barzani’s desire to make the referendum an instrument to serve his own political future. Nearly all Kurdish parties criticized this and called for a ‘yes’ vote the day before the referendum. There will always be division and political infighting within a national movement; their existence does not invalidate the right of people to self-determination; especially for the socialist of another country.
6. In the age of imperialism, the right of people to self-determination is invalid. It is not possible. Small countries get annexed to imperialism.
This is exactly the content of Lenin's polemics with Luxemburg on the right of people to self-determination. Lenin naturally defends the right of people to self-determination as the solution to the national question. As the right of people to self-determination does not solve patriarchy, press freedom or lowered wages problems, nor does it solve the problem of imperialist economic hegemony.
In his polemic with Luxemburg, Lenin argued this democratic principle not as a solution to all the problems in the world but as an idea to put an end to the national oppression in a multinational country. Of course, this country will be united with the struggle against imperialism and its stance under revolutionary conditions, i.e. progressive or socialist party leadership of the nation. This is the call of the III International and we defend it. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan.
7. While the concept of the right of people to self-determination is the revolutionary concept of yesterday, this question cannot be discussed 'idealistically' unless the concept of imperialism in others dependent on itself is seen today.
Imperialism wants to use the right of people to self-determination to serve its own interests. This was done in Yugoslavia. This, however, requires the socialist not to reject the right of people to self-determination, but the perspective to struggle against and combat imperialism. Big monopolies may suggest control of unregistered employment, in part due to the fact that it is an element of "unfair competition". As seen in WTO meetings, some representatives of imperialist countries may oppose low pay in countries like Bangladesh, in fear of competition. Imperialist countries such as the USA and Russia may fight against ISIS. All this does not require socialists to give up on these claims and defend ISIS. However, it requires one to struggle and act in a revolutionary context. Therefore, apparent defence of this principle by imperialists in some cases cannot be an excuse for socialists to give up. As Lenin expressed in the then current circumstances, “Just as in the example of Latin countries, conditions, where people were lied to with republican slogans and these were used by financial oligarchy for financial pillage cannot be a reason for social-democrats to give up on republicanism; in the same way, in the fight for freedom against the imperialist state, the condition that this could be used by another ‘bigger’ imperialist state for imperialist intentions of same order, cannot be a reason for social-democrats to reject the right of people to self-determination”.
8. If the national movement is collaborationist or bourgeois-led, the right of people to self-determination cannot be defended.
If a national movement was not led by the bourgeoisie, there would be no debate on the right of people to self-determination. The reason for the debate is the bourgeois nature of national movements. Thus, the right of people to self-determination is valid under conditions of bourgeois-led national movements; or even co-operation with imperialism. Socialists recognize it but fight against the nationalist exercise of this right. For example, some in the Turkish left opposition to the referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan openly reject the right of people to self-determination. The referendum is to be respected. The fact that the referendum was brought about by Barzani for various reasons is an internal problem for the people of Kurdistan. When these internal problems are dealt with, there will be no such thing as the right of people to self-determination. Excuses such as "Talabani is a compromiser", "Goran is a nationalist", "PKK is nationalist" etc. to deny the right of people to self-determination will never cease to exist. Because an immaculate national movement in human history can never be found. Therefore, it is not the referendum that we should oppose. What we should criticise is Kurdish support for Barzani. And our friendly call to Kurdish workers and labourers is thus: "Do not support Barzani, the representative of the Kurdish co-conspirator bourgeoisie, take your fate into your own hands, do your own politics. Do not let independent Kurdistan become a toy for imperialism." This call is a sign of our friendly, revolutionary support and solidarity, not a "lecture". The right of people to self-determination and support for Barzani are two separate things. This is what separates internationalists from Kurdish nationalism.
9. For Lenin, the right of people to self-determination was not a principle but a tactic.
It was beyond a dilemma of whether it was tactics, principles or strategy. It was all of them; tactical principle and strategic principle. Along with being a democratic principle, it was the only way to safeguard the unity of the working class. From this point of view, it had an unbreakable connection with socialist goals. By his statement; “Wherever we see ties relating to international oppression – without preaching for the need to separate – we will vigorously defend the right to self-determination and the right to separation for each nation. To defend, recognise and side with this right means: to defend equal rights between nations; to resist oppression; to fight against national privileges of any nation; and hence, to develop the class struggle between workers of every individual country”.
10. Independent Kurdistan will be a second Israel in the region.
The basis of this thesis is clearly the traditional bourgeois-nationalist sensitivity to an independent Kurdish state. If it remains in Barzani’s leadership, Kurdistan will indeed be an important figure in US imperialism, and therefore Israel's anti-Iran strategy. It will be a co-conspirator state. However, it will not be a second Israel because there is no Palestine in Kurdistan, there is no Zionism. As a co-conspirator administration to imperialism, it will look more like Turkey than Israel. However, with its size, population and economic dependency it will probably be a weaker partner than Turkey.
11. Kurdistan will be an advanced outpost of imperialism.
It seems likely to be so under the collaborator Barzani administration. At the referendum, the decision was for independence. It must be implemented in accordance with the right of people to self-determination. However, there is great opposition amongst Kurds too. Perception of an independent Kurdistan as an "unchanging, collaborator country" is also linked to the nationalist hysteria of hate against the Kurds. Barzani can be overthrown, independent Kurdistan can advance in a popular, anti-imperialist and democratic line. This popular option is not blocked by independence. In other words, Kurdistan does not have to be an imperialist outpost just because it is Kurdistan. Kurdish people harbour a vigorous vein of opposition in their collective historical memory that advocates the opposite.
12. Independent Kurdistan will trigger a war in the region.
Independent Kurdistan is not a disaster. In fact, Kurdish autonomous region operates like an independent country already. The administration is now a collaborator of imperialism. For that reason, unless war originates from hostility to Kurds; it should be seen as a disaster for the region. Disaster can only happen when politics of Kurdish hate leads to a war, started by reactionary countries in the region. In that case, it is not the Kurds demanding independence, but the reactionary states of the region that should be blamed and fought against.
13. 'Socialists' on Turkish left that reject the right of the people to self-determination are fascists.
Of course, rejection of the right of people to self-determination is a step in support of oppressor state nationalism. However, some parties that reject this right on a theoretical level defend recognition of the results of the referendum and oppose military action or oppression against Kurdistan. These parties and movements cannot be accused of fascism. What we see is the result of being influenced by a deviation to the right and oppressor state nationalism.
14. Lenin defended the right of revolution to self-determine, not right of people to self-determination.
Lenin's perspective was undoubtedly revolutionary. He addressed the solution of every problem with a revolutionary perspective. For this reason, he unfalteringly defended the right of people to self-determination. He did not point to a tautology of "right of revolution to self-determine" because revolution cannot be expressed in terms of a right; it is a matter of power. When sufficient power is gained, neither counter-revolution nor revolutionary forces will be trapped in an abstract notion of right. Revolution does not take place by rights but by the force. However, the right of people to self-determination is defensible and defended as a right and principle.
15. Independence of Iraqi Kurdistan will also open Turkey's borders to debate.
It is a pity that this argument came from the 'left'. Of course, the struggle cannot be carried out without considering existing borders. However, today's borders were drawn by imperialists on the basis of oppression and division of Kurdish peoples. It is the duty of socialists to defend their unity on the basis of equal rights and not act as "border guards" in a geography where peoples are oppressed and massacred, and in order to do this unfailingly, they must recognize the right of people to self-determination.
16. The father of the right of people to self-determination is US President Wilson. Lenin quickly adopted this principle to gain the support of colonial peoples against Wilson.
This principle entered socialist agenda long before Wilson expressed it. This principle was included in the decisions of the Second International Congress held in London in 1896. It has been in the program of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) since its first Congress.
17. Lenin defended this principle not in the era of imperialism but in the era of socialist revolutions.
The right of people to self-determination was the subject of a further four comprehensive discussions for Lenin and the Bolsheviks after being re-admitted into the 1903 program. First; In 1913, the right of people to self-determination was defended against the Austrian national-socialist Otto Bauer's "national cultural autonomy" formulation and its reflections in Russia. In 1914, Lenin defended the right of people to self-determination in the Bolshevik Party against rising national movements, and in opposition to those who claimed it will inflame apartheid. In 1916, Lenin again explained in detail the right of people to self-determination against the Bukharin and Kievsky thesis that "the right of people to self-determination cannot be realized in the era of imperialism" and that "it will serve imperialism"; he described their opposition as "Marxism’s cartoon" and "imperialist economics". Finally, it was proposed by Lenin in the Third International, expanding the scope of the formulation of the struggle against the imperialism of the colonial countries.
https://www.evrensel.net/daily/335922/the-claims-and-facts-about-the-right-of-nations-to-self-determination

Expert Exposes US Biological Warfare During Korean War October 23, 2017 Erin Fiorini PORTSIDE

“U.S. engaged in shameful tactics employing many kinds of weapons whose use was banned by international law” by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and later the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention."

October 23, 2017 Erin Fiorini TELESUR/PORTSIDE

TeleSUR spoke with retired Prof. Stephen Endicott about his definitive book on the U.S. use and cover up of biological warfare during the Korean War.

“You may rest assured that I stand by every word of 'The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets of the Early Cold War and Korea',” Stephen Endicott told teleSUR about his 1999 book co-authored by the late Edward Hagerman. The book looks in-depth at the U.S. military’s use and coverup of banned biological weapons against the Korean and Chinese people during the Korean War of 1950-53.

For Endicott, the United States' use of germ warfare during its war against Korea is both personal and professional. He told teleSUR his father, James G. Endicott, a Canadian and former missionary in China, “witnessed the American germ war campaign during a return visit to the country in 1952. The Canadian government threatened to try him for treason for his report affirming the charges made by China and North Korea that the U.S. had engaged in biological warfare.” This was the impetus to his academic research on the topic.

Endicott and Hagerman conducted extensive archival research and interviews with Chinese, U.S., Canadian, Japanese, and British officials and civilians. The authors were the firsts to gain access to declassified U.S. records regarding the Korean War, which Endicott says showed the “U.S. engaged in shameful tactics employing many kinds of weapons whose use was banned by international law” by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and later the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

With the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan and the end of WWII, the U.S. took over Japanese territories in Asia, including redrawing Korea, splitting it into the northern and southern regions at the 38th latitudinal parallel. In the south, the United States occupied and set up a military base, which has remained to this day, while the Soviet Union sent troops to the north.

Workers' Party of Korea leader Kim Il-sung had Soviet support and was well-equipped, quickly taking over all but a small portion of the peninsula’s southeast tip. Left-wing movements were mounting in the region and Endicott says, the “United States was determined to turn back the tide of change and revolution in East Asia.”

The United States sent troops to prop up its Korean allies in the south and China sent troops to support forces under Il-sung. By late 1951 the Chinese/North Korea alliance was gaining the upper hand. The United States answered by using germ warfare, among other tactics.

In the winter of 1952 Chinese military members in the north reported, “American aircraft were dropping strange objects” including live spiders, flies, bees, snakes, fleas, ticks, dead rats, and mosquitos encased in U.S. military tubes. Even dropping pork, dead crow and chicken feathers.

Endicott told teleSUR the U.S. military created a policy of using “a secret covert channel as well as on overt channel for conducting biological and chemical warfare … whenever it was militarily advantageous and without regard to precedent.”

A follow-up report the authors released in 2016 detailed how 46 Chinese medical experts investigated the creatures and found fleas with bubonic plague, unprecedented in Korean history. Sixteen Chinese troops contracted the disease. Civilians were diagnosed with smallpox and typhus. Korean military documents Endicott and Hagerman uncovered show that 44 Korean troops contracted encephalitis and meningitis and 16 died, while three died of cholera. The U.S. military was crafting these very pathogens at the U.S. Biological Warfare laboratories.

Some 20 military personnel died suddenly of “acute diseases” after the presence of the odd objects and insects in the area. The very presence of such animals, insects and diseases were unheard of during snowy Korean winters. Additionally, several times during the winter of 1952, the U.S. bomb-shelled the Chinese and Korean military forces with “poisonous gas shells” immediately killing several troops in each instance.

A book published by the Beijing Academy of Military Science in 1982 found that “384 Chinese soldiers were infected” with a variety of diseases across several northern Korean provinces during the war, while 126 of them died.

Endicott and Hagerman revealed U.S. military documents from August 1953 where U.S. military leaders wanted to continue “the operational use of biological agents, perhaps putting GB (nerve gas) agents into the munitions mix." What's more disturbing than the U.S. use of banned warfare is that the military was seemingly disappointed with the results.

The U.S. military told its “Canadian and British partners they were unable to achieve a ‘highly lethal, stable, viable, easily disseminated, low cost" agent. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford lamented that the campaign against the north, “suffered from over-optimism and consequent attempts to get a job done quickly.”

Endicott told teleSUR there have been few revelations since he and Hagerman first published their book almost 20 years ago. However, Endicott noted that “shortly before his death,” retired CIA agent Norman Cournoyer who worked in the Biological Warfare Center in Fort Detrick “broke his oath of secrecy to the government” for a 2002 documentary titled, "Code Name Artichoke," revealing, “There were people who had biological weapons and they used them. I won't say anything more than that. They used them.”

Endicott said that despite the evidence, “The United States government continues to make every effort to cover-up, deceive and deny its criminal use of biological weapons in the Korean War,” adding, “One of the defenses of the U.S. was that the Chinese scientists (who investigated the matter in 1952) were poorly trained and not able to properly identify what was happening. In fact, many of the Chinese scientists were highly trained. A number of them had been trained in the West, including the U.S., or studied at the Rockefeller funded Beijing Medical College. They were well qualified to carry out the investigations and draw valid conclusions.”

Additionally, Endicott said some “U.S. airmen who carried out the attacks” admitted to using germ warfare after being captured by the Chinese. When they returned home, U.S. military leaders alleged the soldiers “were forced to confess to something that they did not do, but that what actually happened is that when they returned home to the U.S., they were threatened with court martial (including possible death sentences) if they did not repudiate the confessions that they gave to their Chinese captors.”

Despite the official coverup, G. Cameron Hurst, head of the East Asia Department at the University of Pennsylvania called the authors' expose book “far and away the most authoritative writing on the subject.”

Endicott concluded, “This was a shameful episode in American history.” The U.S. military remains immune and unaccountable for the deaths it caused of Chinese and Korean military as well as civilians during the Korean War, only adding insult to injury by covering up its germ and biological warfare campaign.