Author: Rupen Savoulian

Aerial warfare, drones and war crimes – time to revoke Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , , ,

The Washington Post, the liberal mouthpiece of the US empire, carried a story in May 2013 detailing a speech by US President Barack Obama in which he declared that a crossroads has been reached in the ‘war on terror’. Obama announced that the terrorist threat to the United States has receded and that it was time to redefine and recalibrate the ‘war on terror’ in order to bring it to an end.

One of the main tactics that the Obama administration has used with escalating intensity is the drone warfare, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), so called Predator drones, to carry out lethal strikes against ostensible terrorist targets, assassinations of individuals deemed security threats to the United States, and for general intelligence-gathering in areas of heavy combat. Obama vigorously defended the use of drones in his May 2013 speech, and while he made a commitment to ending the ‘war on terror’, he made clear that key policies of that war, like the use of drones, will continue unabated. For instance, targeted assassinations with armed drones would continue, Obama insisted.

So while speaking of a general winding down of the ‘war on terror’, Obama is actually redefining its scope and application, and continuing to use the central plank of his administration’s counterterrorism strategy. In July 2013, the Washington Post observed that while the use of drones has decreased in combat hotspots like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the use of drones is being redirected into non-combat areas, and their application is being expanded.

The present author has covered the ever-increasing use of drone warfare by the Obama administration, their utility for corporate profits, and the erosion of democratic safeguards that has accompanied the construction of the scaffolding of a US police state. The expansion of drone spying and warfare into new, non-combat areas indicates an escalation of the US ruling class’ efforts to extend its imperial overreach into new markets and acquire control of new resources at the expense of its competitors.

Obama, the first African-American president, has certainly devoted more attention to Africa, but not exactly for the benefit of its impoverished populations, or to alleviate the scourges of famine, war and disease. Africa is the site of renewed competition between the United States on the one hand, and Russia, China and other powers on the other for resources, markets and clients in that continent. The US has been losing out to its competitors, mainly Chinese investors, from expanding into various African ventures. Obama is countering growing Chinese ‘soft power’ in Africa in two ways; by building and expanding alliances with US clients in the region, such as Uganda’s dictatorial president Youweri Museveni, ignoring Museveni’s horrific human rights record; and secondly by sponsoring the construction of drone bases and launching sites, such as building new secret bases in the Horn of Africa, conducting spying operations on people and political forces in the region that are judged to be opposed to US interests. As Lee Wengraf wrote in the Socialist Worker online magazine:

“IT IS no exaggeration to say that the U.S. is at war in Africa. The continent is awash with American military bases, covert operations and thousands of Western-funded troops, and responsibility for this escalation must be laid squarely on Obama’s doorstep.

Key to the Obama administration global strategy in the post-Iraq era is a shift from “boots on the ground” towards “alliance-building.” The idea is to cement American “indispensability” to African political stability in geo-strategically critical areas–from the Horn of Africa, with its proximity to the Suez Canal and Middle East, to West African nations, with billions of barrels of oil.”

The new drone bases in Africa are part and parcel of this renewed push by American imperialism into the heartlands of that continent. The UAVs are carrying out spying missions across Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mauritania, Mali and scores of other African countries. As the Washington Post reported in June 2012:

The U.S. military has largely kept details of its spy flights in Africa secret. The Post pieced together descriptions of the surveillance network by examining references to it in unclassified military reports, U.S. government contracting documents and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

Further details were provided by interviews with American and African officials, as well as military contractors.

In addition to Burkina Faso, U.S. surveillance planes have operated periodically out of nearby Mauritania. In Central Africa, the main hub is in Uganda, though there are plans to open a base in South Sudan. In East Africa, U.S. aircraft fly out of bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles.

These clandestine intelligence missions and associated lethal air strikes are part of a long history of US intervention in Africa, whether directly or through the arming of proxy forces and US-friendly dictatorships. During the Cold War, the US was concerned about the political and economic independence of African nations, and the increasing role of the Soviet Union in backing anti-colonial, socialist and nationalist groups and forces in the region. The Soviet Union provided an alternative model of economic development, and the East-West rivalry had an impact on the politics and economics of the region.

With the Cold War finished, the US rushed to fill the vacuum created by the withdrawal of Soviet influence. However, intensified rivalry with China, Russia and the economic competition of these contending powers has been driving the US to escalate its involvement in Africa. The Economist magazine reported in June 2012 that responding to the alleged Chinese threat is the main priority for the US administration. The Defence Secretary at the time announced that by 2020 60 percent of American warships would be stationed in the Asia Pacific region, an obvious projection of US military power against China. Trade with Africa involves access to extensive natural resources, and these are a lifeline for US imperialism. Obama’s scramble for Africa, as Nick Turse puts it in a recent article, involves participating in shadow wars and mushrooming intelligence missions.

As Nick Turse elaborates on the US incursion into Africa in his July 2012 article:

Under President Obama, in fact, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: last year’s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and U.S. commando raids; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.  And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

The New York Slimes, the pro-war lapdog of the imperial American empire, reported in July 2013 that a new drone base in the sub-Saharan African country of Niger provides the US military with a foothold in that part of the continent. The story was making the point that new threats, along with the tried-and-true recycled menace of Islamic ‘terrorism’, was compelling the US to rethink its counterterrorism strategy and push for new drone bases in Africa.

The article quotes Michael Shurkin, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative who is now working for the RAND corporation. Shurkin says ““The U.S. is facing a security environment in Africa that is increasingly more complex and therefore more dangerous”; he goes on to state that “Effective responses, moreover, require excellent knowledge about local populations and their politics, the sort of understanding that too often eludes the U.S. government and military.”

Note that the New York Slimes is unconcerned with minor issues like poverty, corruption, famine, and the lack of social services in a country like Niger, or Mali, or other western African countries. Niger has a life expectancy at birth of 55 years, and the Human Development Index ranks Niger 186th out of 193 United Nations member states in terms of human social and educational development. Never matter, the point of the article is to convey the perspective of US imperial empire-builders; new threats in the region require ever-increasing military responses. The Washington Post adopted a similar perspective in its article about the Niger drone base published in March 2013.

Two researchers, Linda Bilmes from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Michael Intriligator from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), have co-authored a research paper entitled “How many wars is the US fighting today?” The authors examine how most Americans, when asked about how many conflicts the United States is engaged in, will usually name Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the reality is much more stark; the US is fighting unannounced and undeclared wars across the globe through the use of drones and strategic aerial firepower.

Bilmes and Intriligator examine those countries where the US is conducting drone strikes but where war has not officially been declared; Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen. They include drone strikes in a long tradition of covert warfare by the US imperial class against Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile and other Latin American countries. Not only is the global scope of US drone and military operations detailed, but the authors also attempt to account for the finance for all these military incursions and network of military bases.

The investigators take specific examples of the allocation of funds for military purposes because, as they point out, “The size of the budget for all these operations is difficult to piece together because Congress appropriates funds to line items for each force, rather than to individual activities. In some cases, however, we can estimate the amounts being spent.”

For instance, the US currently provides the Pakistani government, a US ally in the region, with four billion dollars of direct military assistance. Bilmes and Intriligator explain that this is on top of another four billion dollars-worth of ‘civilian’ assistance, plus the billions the US spends reimbursing the Pakistani military for the expenses incurred by the Pakistani military in assisting US military operations and forces. This is happening all the while in the United States, the major city of Detroit has been forced into bankruptcy, and its citizens will be forced to endure another mass reduction in the quality of life and cuts to badly needed social services. The people of Detroit, already struggling with the consequences of deindustrialisation, are expected to face another assault on their declining living standards and conditions.

Bilmes and Intriligator focus specifically on warfare conducted by UAVs. They note that:

“the US drone program escalated rapidly between 2004 and 2010, with no public debate. There are no international rules of conduct on when it is fair and just to deploy them. Under the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory, member states may defend themselves from an armed attack (Article 51) but Article 2(4) prohibits them from choosing war as a means of settling disputes.”

This raises some pertinent questions about the conduct of the Obama administration. The current US government is using a method of warfare that violates the United Nations charter, something that many consider to be war crimes. These crimes violate the rules that govern, among other things, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. Not only that, but aerial warfare, the doctrine of raining down terror from the skies, is not something new. This doctrine has motivated imperialist states and their policy-makers to carry out war crimes, and crimes against humanity, crimes for which perpetrators have been charged, found guilty and punished.

Writing in the online magazine TomDispatch.com, and reprinted in the Huffington Post, Retired Lt. Colonel Professor William Astore states that drone warfare is neither cheap, nor surgical, nor decisive. The dreams of air power enthusiasts, Astore writes, has been to dominate the skies, bringing down death and destruction on the enemy below, sapping their morale and destroying their capacity to resist. Air strikes by UAVs is the latest incarnation in a long history of terror bombing by various imperialist states. Since the invention of airplanes, imperialist strategists have dreamt of overwhelming the enemy by the use of overwhelming firepower. As Astore relates, this fantasy is contradicted by the history of twentieth century warfare, where colonial powers, in attempting to demoralise their enemy, only succeeded in bringing more wanton cruelty and destruction, and air power failed to break the willpower of those determined to resist.

Astore points out that it was as far back as 1911 when the first modern air raid took place – by Italian aircraft in Libya, as part of the Italian effort at empire-building. One hundred years later, in 2011, NATO air power was a major factor in degrading the Libyan military’s ability to resist the organised contingents of NATO-backed rebels in that country. The other imperialist states, Britain, France, Germany, the United States and so on, were quick to follow suit and develop air war capacities themselves. The first advocate of unrestrained aerial bombing was the Italian Giulio Douhet. In his book, Command of the Air, published in 1921, Douhet advocated industrial-scale bombing that targets the enemy’s industries, using high-tech explosives and poison gas. Civilians were to be included in Douhet’s vision of aerial strategic bombing campaigns.

Such terror bombing, Douhet reasoned, would demoralise the target population, causing social dislocation, chaos thus bringing the war of colonial conquest to a speedy and successful resolution for the imperialist conqueror. One can see the fascist-inspired antecedents of the American 1991 ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign against Iraq. No concern at all for the fate of the people bearing the brunt of such untrammelled bombing from the skies. Today, we can see the tragic consequences of the drone strikes in countries like Yemen, where previously peaceful regions become zones of conflict, resentment against the occupier builds, and a flow of refugees is created. Drone strikes do not change the beliefs of the attacked – indeed, they foment even further opposition to the United States imperialist overreach and provide a fertile ground for extremist groups to recruit new members.

The British heeded the call by Douhet, and took up strategic bombing with enthusiasm. Hugh Trenchard, the founder of the Royal Air Force, adopted strategic aerial bombing as his preferred tactic and elaborated it for the purpose of protecting and extending Britain’s newly acquired possessions in the Middle East. In the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman-Turkish empire, several Arab states, such as Iraq, were passed over to the victorious English. If the people in these states resisted, they were to be met with terror bombing. One British politician at the time, writing in his capacity as Secretary of State for Air, stated that poison gas should be used to pacify uncivilised and rebellious tribes in Iraq and elsewhere, dismissing any ethical concerns about the use of such weapons. That politician was Winston Churchill, and he put the aerial warfare doctrine to good use as prime minister of Britain during World War Two.

The British empire, and their American counterparts, applied the doctrine of aerial warfare with ruthless efficiency in World War Two. Concerns about the civilian casualties of bombing were forgotten in the outpouring of outrage against the German bombings of Guernica, the blitz on Rotterdam, and other German and Japanese war crimes. The combined American-British bombing campaign against Germany was no less devastating – German cities such as Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin itself were reduced to piles of rubble by the thousands of sorties flown by Allied aircraft.

In March 1945, not to be outdone, American Air Force Major General Curtis LeMay led the firestorm bombing of Tokyo city in Japan. The mainly wooden buildings and environs of Tokyo were ‘scored, boiled and baked’ (LeMay’s words) causing the incendiary deaths of 100 000 Japanese people. Sixty further Japanese cities were firebombed in this way, before this destructive campaign culminated with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surely these bombing campaigns convinced the Japanese leadership to surrender, and crippled the German war effort in Europe?

Astore writes that:

“Yet, contrary to the dreams of air power advocates, Germany’s will to resist remained unbroken. The vaunted second front of aerial battle became yet another bloody attritional brawl, with hundreds of thousands of civilians joining scores of thousands of aircrews in death.

Similarly mauled but unbroken by bombing was Japan, despite an air campaign of relentless intensity that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.”

Writing in the Foreign Policy blog, Ward Wilson, historian and research fellow at the British American Security Information Council, argues that the single most decisive factor in convincing the Japanese leadership to surrender was not the destruction of Japanese cities, about which they were unconcerned, but the entry of the Soviet Union into the war. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, having finished the fighting on the German front, turned his attention to the Far East. The heavy battles between the Soviets and Japanese forces in mid-1945 finally persuaded the Japanese war planners that they had no option but to surrender, Japan’s military being incapable of fighting both the encroaching Americans from the south, and the Soviets to their north.

In the 1990s, aerial power advocates refined their vision of strategic victory with fantasies about ‘precision-guided bombs’ and much-ballyhooed ‘surgical strikes’. Targeted aerial power would bring about decisive military victories, and we were invited, by the compliant corporate media, to gaze in admiration at these new-fangled weapons bringing death and destruction. As William Astore writes, let’s not get carried away with these new, laser-guided ‘smart’ bombs:

“In the opening stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, for example, 50 precision “decapitation strikes” targeting dictator Saddam Hussein’s top leadership failed to hit any of their intended targets, while causing “dozens” of civilian deaths.  That same year, air power’s inability to produce decisive results on the ground after Iraq’s descent into chaos, insurrection, and civil war served as a reminder that the vaunted success of the U.S. air campaign in the First Gulf War (1991) was a fluke, not a flowering of air power’s maturity.”

It appears that the more recent acolytes of empire-building and colonialism, namely, the Zionist state of Israel, have adopted the doctrines of aerial bombing, but have similarly failed to absorb any of its historical lessons. The fact that strategic bombing does not produce the intended rapid victory but only heighten the resolve of its targets has been lost on the current Israeli leadership. Two researchers from the University of NSW, Clinton Fernandes and Craig Stockings, co-authored a paper on the subject of aerial bombing and the lack of its efficacy. Their paper “Airpower and the Myth of Strategic Bombing as Strategy” was published in 2006, just as the Israeli military machine concluded its strategic bombing campaign in Lebanon, for the ostensible reason of defeating the Lebanese Shia militia, Hezbollah.

The authors examine the impact of the Israeli bombing campaign on Lebanese society, stating that;

“The Israeli bombing campaign involved the destruction of highways, bridges, factories, sea ports, airports, the telecommunications network, schools, hospitals, petrol stations and military installations. At least 1181 people were killed in Lebanon, while the Israeli death toll was 157.”

What was the end result of this bombing campaign? Stockings and Fernandes write:

“Meanwhile, Hezbollah defied the region’s superpower with a combination of skill, courage, preparation, tactics, and organization. It has emerged from the conflict with its prestige – and that of its leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah – enhanced throughout the Arab world.”

The Obama administration’s policy of drone strikes is only the latest technological application of the old, discredited, nightmarish and criminal practice of strategic aerial bombing. Its enthusiasts have proposed its supposed ‘surgical’ feature, ignoring the mass civilian deaths and casualties that accompany such bombing. This doctrine is an essential tool of the imperialist states in their quest to build and expand economic empires, and has nothing to do with minimising the loss of lives or damage to property. The liberal commentators who are still cheering for Obama, must now realise that the current Obama administration represents a redesigned continuation of empire, not a decisive break with it. Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize must be revoked, because he has continued to apply a predatory, criminal doctrine that violates the very principles upon which international human rights and peace efforts are based. What kind of political and economic system is it, which fails to acknowledge the people that have died as a result of all the aerial bombing campaigns, and then applies the central doctrine of their killers?

Breaking down stereotypes, Islam, and Google Searches

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , , , , ,

The majority of people in Australia, the United States, Britain and other developed capitalist countries rely on the corporate media for information about non-Western regions of the world. News and analyses about Islam and the Islamic world are presented mainly in the broader context of terrorism, political violence, border protection, and values that threaten ‘our way of life’. The Islamic faith, more so than any other monotheistic religion, is presented as a unique and irrational menace, incompatible with our ostensibly rational and democratic underpinnings. Islamic people in Western countries are smeared as a potentially treasonous element, refusing to integrate, and intent on taking advantage of our pluralistic values and democratic mechanisms to sabotage and eventually overwhelm ‘our’ western-liberal democratic values.

There are many examples of Islamic clerics issuing fatwas and condemnations of terrorism, too many to recite here. However, a simple experiment will suffice to bring us to the next point; Google searching has become an indispensable part of writing and blogging in this age of social media and electronic communication. Performing a Google-search of the term ‘Islam and terrorism’ produces 54,200,000 results. A large amount; but consider the following comparison – a Google-search of the terms ‘Islam and science’ produces 216,000,000 results. That’s right – two hundred and sixteen million, as compared to fifty-four million. The quality of the search results can be disputed: some are of doubtful veracity, some are not verified by peer research, some are openly partisan creationist web pages – all that is not in dispute.

The important point here is that the interaction between one of the world’s fastest growing religions and science is of such profound importance, much more so than the purportedly close relation between Islam and terrorism that the corporate media routinely suggests. The conflict between religion and science, its philosophical underpinnings and social implications, is the subject of much scholarly and journalistic research. This research is woefully ignored, swamped by the outpouring of Islamophobia that pervades much of our media and society. The debate between the philosophical platforms of secularism and religion has been poisoned by a political agenda that seeks to marginalise and demonise a segment of the population, with contemptible ridiculing headlines like this one a commonplace occurrence in the mainstream corporate media, in between the sports news and celebrity gossip.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas is without doubt the gambling capital of the world, epitomising the expression of greed, gluttony, drunkenness and fornication. It stands as a towering rebuff to the old-fashioned biblical values of modesty, temperance and frugality. Yet only ten minutes drive from Las Vegas boulevard there is one structure that invites people to turn away from the sinful vanity of American casino-capitalism – the Masjeed-e Tawheed. The latest of four mosques in Las Vegas, it is home to 10 000 Muslims living in the Las Vegas vicinity. The mosque’s founder and leader is ‘Rocky’ – the nickname used by Ahmadullah Rokai Yusufzai, a successful immigrant who calls Sin City his home. After working with the Afghani mujahideen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s, Yusufzai was dismissed from his chosen profession as an engineer in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He now works as a court interpreter, helps train young Marine recruits who are being posted to Afghanistan, and volunteers as a soccer coach for the local team.

The Guardian newspaper covered his story in the article ‘Being Muslim in Las Vegas’, and is a humane portrait of a community struggling with issues of assimilation, identity, and maintaining their dignity in a country where the government agencies and media are hostile to their presence. Yusufzai faces criticism from other Muslims, opposed to the ongoing temptations that may lure people away from the Islamic values into the denizen of sin and corruption that is Las Vegas. As Yusufzai explains:

We are criticised by other Muslims. They’ll say, ‘You’re living in Sin City? You must have a gambling problem. You must be doing this and that.’ And we say, no. That’s what happens on the Strip, but two miles radius of that, there’s no casinos. It’s just suburbia, ordinary families trying to live decent, good lives. Most Muslims stay well away from the Strip. My house is about 15 miles away and it’s a different world. I see the lights way off in the distance

There is one mention of terrorism in the story:

The FBI visits him regularly to check up on what’s going down at the mosque and if he thinks any of the congregation, who range from doctors to taxi drivers, Somalis to Pakistanis, Sunni to Shia, might be terrorists intent on blowing up the nearest titty bar.

“I always tell the FBI guys that if there were, I’d be calling the FBI myself, but they still come by. We are trying to have a better image of Islam. We’re not going to harbour or support anybody who even thinks about that,” Yusufzai says.

Finally, a story about immigrants settling into a western country, a story that humanises its subjects and portrays the ongoing effort of Muslim immigrants to keep their faith while adapting to a frequently cultural inhospitable environment.

Read the whole story of being Muslim in Las Vegas in The Guardian newspaper here.

Science making a comeback

In January 2013, the Economist magazine online edition published a fascinating story, under the headline ‘The Road to Renewal’. It begins with a common accusation, namely, that the Muslim world is lagging behind the West in scientific development, and that this is reflected in the fact that the number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists of Jewish background far outnumbers the Muslim recipients of the Nobel Prize in the sciences:

The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West: the only living one, the chemist Ahmed Hassan Zewail, is at the California Institute of Technology. By contrast Jews, outnumbered 100 to one by Muslims, have won 79.

An interesting comparison, however, the article goes on to provide an overview of how science is making a big comeback, and indeed is an intricate part of, Muslim-majority countries. While it is true that the Islamic faith strongly influences the education system in Islamic countries, it is too simplistic to denounce the alleged scientific backwardness of Muslim-majority countries on the purportedly innately irrational perspective of Islam to scientific investigation. The article then provides a crucial observation:

But look more closely and two things are clear. A Muslim scientific awakening is under way. And the roots of scientific backwardness lie not with religious leaders, but with secular rulers, who are as stingy with cash as they are lavish with controls over independent thought.

The simplistic caricature of backward Muslims impeding scientific inquiry is easily dispelled by a cursory knowledge of Islamic history; the Islamic Golden Age, lasting between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, was a time of unrivaled scientific discoveries, accumulation and extension of mathematical knowledge, and expansion in all areas of science from astronomy to medicine throughout the Abbasid Caliphate, until the Mongol conquest of the centre of intellectual life, Baghdad in 1258. The Islamic empire provided fertile intellectual commerce for the West, while Europe was still languishing in the Christian-dominated Dark Ages. Let us not forget that Moorish Spain was another comparative beacon of light for the peoples of Europe at the time.

What is interesting is that the article in the Economist details the ongoing efforts by scientists and scientific researchers to reinvigorate their areas of expertise in the Muslim-majority countries. All areas of science and technology are experiencing a resurgence. Evolutionary biology is the one area where scientists of Muslim background struggle to reconcile their faith with their scientific work – just like their Christian counterparts. The barriers between scriptural acceptance and evolutionary biology are enormous, but not insurmountable. As the Economist article explains:

Plenty of Muslim biologists have managed to reconcile their faith and their work. Fatimah Jackson, a biological anthropologist who converted to Islam, quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of genetics, saying that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Science describes how things change; Islam, in a larger sense, explains why, she says.

Others take a similar line. “The Koran is not a science textbook,” says Rana Dajani, a Jordanian molecular biologist. “It provides people with guidelines as to how they should live their lives.” Interpretations of it, she argues, can evolve with new scientific discoveries. Koranic verses about the creation of man, for example, can now be read as providing support for evolution.

When looking at the way in which biologists in the Islamic world are grappling with the philosophical and scientific divides between faith-based belief and scientific understanding, one cannot help but see the similarities in the ways that Christians in the West are wrestling with exactly the same philosophical and cultural issues. So why is the Muslim world routinely derided as more fundamentalist, irrational and closed to rational thought that the supposedly more advanced Christian West?

In June 2011, the present author wrote a book review of ‘The Muslim Revolt: A journey through political Islam’ by BBC journalist Roger Hardy. The book examines the various political trajectories and social conflicts of political Islam in a number of Muslim-majority countries. The most officially secular of these countries, Turkey, constitutes a chapter in the book, where Hardy elaborated on the cultural tensions between secular education and Muslim identity. Taking a long quote from my book review, the following illustrates the tension between religious identity and science education that is being played out:

Hardy describes his visit to a state-run school, which is well furnished, adorned by a bust of Kemal Ataturk, and the slogan “Science is the true guide in life”. Hardy asked the biology teacher how she deals with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, who peremptorily responds that it is in the state-approved curriculum, and so she teaches it. Many in the Muslim world (like many Christians) refuse to accept the theory of evolution, and there is strong cultural resistance to it. Hardy then visits another school, known as an imam-hatip school. This type of school was originally intended to produce imams and hatips, religious preachers. Upon asking the head teacher in the second school how it differs from the original state school, Hardy obtains the response that the curriculum is exactly the same, except they add religious instruction.

Hardy persists with his questioning, and asks how they handle the theory of evolution in the school. The head teacher says he disagrees with evolution, but teaches it anyway according to the curriculum. The students in the school then learn about Islamic philosophy, and how God created the world according to religious precepts. This underlying kulturkampf – culture-struggle is the word Hardy uses – is occurring throughout the Muslims world, and has familiar undertones in the West. We are undergoing our own kulturkampf, with the creationist/intelligent design lobby to push for strict biblical inerrancy to be taught in schools. The struggle is far from over. The creation-evolution controversy is hardly confined to the Muslim countries, and is being played out in Turkey paralleling the similar debates in Christian-influenced Europe, Australia and the United States.

Returning to the article from the Economist, there is one area of the life sciences where the Islamic countries are rapidly progressing, while Christian-majority countries are still bogged down in acrimonious debate: stem cell research. According to Islamic precepts, the soul enters the fetus between 40 and 120 days after conception. Embryos discarded before that time period are the source of pluripotent stem cells derived from the blastocyst. Scientists in the Islamic Republic of Iran have been making enormous strides in stem cell research, and have compiled a stem cell database bank. All this medical research is occurring while in the United States, scientists and legislators have had to battle Christian fundamentalist lawmakers and conservative advocates using their political clout to hinder, and in some cases completely ban, research using pluripotent stem cells. Biologists in Iran working on stem cell research do not face any official roadblocks or legislative censure, and are working on finding cures for diseases once considered incurable.

Tim Wallace-Murphy is an English writer and historian, and author of the book ‘What Islam did for us: Understanding Islam’s contribution to Western Civilization’. After exploring the enormous dependence of European culture on the contributions of Islam, the last chapter is entitled ‘A Common Heritage and Future’. Wallace-Murphy makes the observation we must stop regarding the Muslim world as one gigantic petrol station, inhabited by strange people with backward beliefs. He continues:

Our elected representatives in the West are our elected servants and not our masters. They should not have the freedom to initiate wars of aggression without the consent of the people they serve. Nor should they be permitted to prop up repressive regimes purely for commercial advantage. Trade is always to be encouraged, the subsidy of tyranny should be forbidden.

We must go further and denounce the harassment and intimidation of Arab and Muslim Australians. We in Australia must stop normalising relations with repressive regimes and countries that continue to persecute their citizens, or carry out wars of aggression against the Arab and Muslim people. When the current Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, shakes hands with the Burmese President Thein Sein joining the onrush by imperialist nations to develop economic ties with that country, and when newly-reinstalled Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declares that Israel is in his DNA, it sends a clear signal to the world that Australia stands with the imperialist countries in ignoring human rights and joining the oppression of Palestinians, Rohingya Muslims and other marginalised people in the world, in order to extend commercial interests. It is time to make human solidarity the main criterion by which we evaluate our political and economic conduct.

The G8 summit tensions, cooperation on Burma and the fiction of humanitarian intervention

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized ,

The G8 summit, the principal meeting of the leaders of all the world’s imperialist nations and partners, was held in Belfast, Northern Ireland over 17-18 June 2013. While the summit’s main concerns were economic matters such as global trade, tax evasion and greater accountability in economic affairs, the discussions between the imperialist states was dominated by the ongoing Syrian civil war and the attendant humanitarian tragedy.

The main highlight of the G8 summit was the clash between US President Barack Obama, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, about their conflicting plans for Syria. Much of the media coverage involved examining the conflicts between these participants, with Russia continuing to support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, and the United States (joined by its imperialist allies in Europe) supporting the fractured Syrian rebels. The Guardian online newspaper provided a detailed examination of Putin’s opposition to any proposed plans by the US and its supporters for a ‘no-fly zone’ in Syria, and the US has countered by promising to provide increased military aid to the Syrian rebel forces.

The British Prime Minister David Cameron and his officials met privately with President Putin, and stated that while Moscow had no personal commitment to keeping Assad in power and even conceded that Assad might have to resign, it was on the condition that Syria avoid the sectarian conflict and economic breakdown that followed similar imperialist interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. British officials insisted that there is no place for Assad in a post-war Syria, and French President Francois Hollande opened the door for Iran, another solid supporter of the Syrian regime, to participate in future peace talks. Moscow however subsequently rebuked Britain and France, with Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Rybakov stressed that any resolution of the Syrian conflict had to involve Assad, and that all talk of his resignation was impermissible. The official communique issue after the G8 meeting made no mention however, of Assad stepping down, and insisted that Russia’s military aid to the Syrian government would continue.

The ongoing conflicts between the G8 powers is patently obvious to all international observers. The Times of India conveyed a more honest appraisal of the G8 summit, elaborating on the ‘face-off’ between Obama and Putin. What is striking though is the way that the corporate media have portrayed the stance of Moscow as an obstacle to a peaceful settlement in Syria. The underlying assumption of the mainstream media is that Obama is ‘frustrated’ that American power cannot be deployed to resolve an obvious humanitarian catastrophe, in this case, the plight of Syrian refugees. The refugees from the Syrian imbroglio deserve our support and help, and we should avoid playing off one group of victims against another. What is worth examining is the unexplained assumption that US and British policy-makers are motivated by humanitarian concerns, while Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and other nations are only out to protect their own material interests.

Justin Doolittle, a political scientist writing in Counterpunch online magazine, makes three essential observations pertinent to bear in mind about US foreign policy. We must first dispense with the fiction that US military and political leaders make decisions to intervene militarily based on humanitarian considerations. The US makes decisions based on its own material self-interests, and it is the poor and downtrodden who are left by the wayside. The Assad regime is a repressive, capitalist dictatorship, and has caused untold suffering for Syrian people. But the notion that the Obama administration wants to ‘do something’ to alleviate the plight of the Syrian population is ludicrous. As Doolittle explains in his Counterpunch article, almost every modern power has used a humanitarian cover to justify its predatory military interventions, disguising its underlying economic and military calculations with the garb of ‘selfless’ concern.

Secondly, Doolittle observes that another unspoken assumption is that US military intervention reduces the level and intensity of violence in a given conflict and leads to a peaceful resolution. This rather ignorant supposition is based on a willful ignorance of the history of US imperial violence in various parts of the world. An imperialist state, with a record of state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East, its role in demolishing societies like Iraq and Afghanistan, cannot be part of a peaceful solution to any conflict. This childish ‘Saving Private Ryan’ view of US military history, may make for great entertainment but flies in the face of the facts. Such a foreign intervention only escalates the level of violence, and there is no concern for what happens afterwards. We can see the effects of the purported humanitarian intervention in Libya, with armed groups fighting it out in the streets. Leading figures of the British military establishment are currently complaining to David Cameron that sending arms to the Syrian rebels will only make matters worse, leading to a Libyan-style scenario. As the DailyMail Online correspondent put it;

Up to 3,000 surface-to-air missiles have gone missing in Libya since the conflict –  and spy chiefs say the state has become the ‘Tesco’ of the world’s illegal arms trade.

The British government was a vociferous supporter of the NATO-led intervention in Libya, and one of the results of that military adventure is the decision by the British Foreign Office to withdraw some staff from its embassy in Libya because of ongoing political instability. Foreign embassies have come under attacks in recent months, with the most high profile being the assault on the US embassy compound in Benghazi last year, resulting in the murder of then US ambassador J Christopher Stevens. Ironically, the previous Libyan regime of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, having opened up to foreign capital in the 2000s, had excellent relations with former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The third and final premise that remains unexamined when speaking of ‘humanitarian interventions’ is the widespread assumption that the US is the only honest broker and best placed to carry out an imperial intervention. There is no discussion of the international bodies, such as the United Nations, and its role in brokering peace settlements and getting the relevant parties to agree on an acceptable formula. The UN is dismissed as an ineffectual body, paralysed by interminable debates and quarrels, and incapable of decisive action. The United Nations is an imperfect body, reflecting the balance of forces between the imperialist states. But it is also the only international forum where the majority of the world’s countries, and the majority of the world’s people, can have their input into international decision-making. The UN General Assembly is the meeting place where all of the world’s poorest countries, incorporating the majority of the world’s population, takes decisions that are frequently vetoed by the overriding Security Council. The US has consistently violated international laws and conventions agreed to at the United Nations, behaving like a rogue state. Blocking the decisions of the UN General Assembly has produced deadlock, a situation for which the US bears at least partial responsibility. US intervention in the Middle East has resulted in blowback because its impact on that region has been toxic and stirred up sectarian fratricidal conflicts.

A study in contrasts

There was another international forum held over June 5 to 7, 2013 in city of Naypyidaw, the capital of Burma, formally known as Myanmar. The World Economic Forum on East Asia (WEF) brought together political leaders, business partners, CEOs of various transnational corporations, academics and civil society advocates from around the world. In contrast to the G8 summit, there was no bickering or squabbling, only cooperation between the representatives of the various nations on how to exploit the energy-and-mineral-rich country of Burma, tap into its vast energy reserves and make a profit-bonanza from an area of the world previously closed off by US-supported economic sanctions.

The business executives from multiple transnational corporations were there to discuss the many lucrative opportunities for foreign investment, including Australian energy giant Woodside Petroleum, eager to invest in Burma’s oil and gas reserves. Coca-Cola was also there for the WEF, as well as the Anglo-Dutch corporation Unilever.

The World Economic Forum in East Asia meeting sent a signal to the world – that Burma and its military-dominated regime are rehabilitated into the international community. Such a meeting of political officials and business executives would have been absolutely impossible to contemplate two years ago. But since the Obama administration came to office, US foreign policy has adopted a ‘pivot to Asia’, to use the phrase US officials coined to signify greater competition with the rising powers of China and India. Burma, located right between India and China, established close relations with Beijing over the last few decades. The Burmese military rulers, having gone through the sham of ‘elections’ and making cosmetic changes to the political process, are now normalising relations with the US, Europe and other imperialist states, pushing back against Chinese influence.

The official change of Burma from pariah, rogue regime to a flourishing capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has involved the major powers ignoring a frightful and ongoing humanitarian crisis in that country, a crisis for which the Burmese regime bears direct responsibility; the pogroms and ethnic cleansing against the Muslim Rohingya population in that country. The Rohingya minority have been subjected to killings, torture, pogroms at the hands of nationalist Buddhist gangs rampaging through Muslim villages, and exile into impoverished refugee camps. Since 2012 Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian writer, journalist and editor of the Palestine Chronicle online magazine, has been documenting the plight of the Rohingya Muslim population and the cursory attention given to this problem by the international community. This ongoing exclusion and ethnic cleansing program has not deterred the imperialist states from rushing to establish profitable trading relations with the current Burmese regime.

Baroud has written in the online journal Dissident Voice that;

One fails to understand the unperturbed attitude with which regional and international leaders and organizations are treating the unrelenting onslaught against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, formally known as Burma. Numbers speak of atrocities where every violent act is prelude to greater violence and ethnic cleansing. Yet, western governments’ normalization with the Myanmar regime continues unabated, regional leaders are as gutless as ever and even human rights organizations seem compelled by habitual urges to issue statements lacking meaningful, decisive and coordinated calls for action.

The Rohingya people, currently numbering between 800,000 and one million, do not have any legal rights as citizens in Burma. They live mostly in the province of Arakan, also known as Rakhine, and are officially regarded as ‘Bengali immigrants’ and thus not entitled to full citizenship in Burma. Sectarian violence perpetrated by the Buddhist Arakenese against the Muslim Rohingya erupted in June 2012 and has largely continued unabated. The Burmese authorities have done next to nothing to halt the violence. Indeed, in many cases, they have encouraged it. Forced to live in displacement camps in squalid conditions, the Rohingya have been forced into a live of poverty and desperation. Rohingya families have been driven out of their homes and their lands burned, attacked with machetes, and their mosques have been reduced to ashes. All the while, the alleged reformist President of Burma, Thein Sein, has advocated confining the Rohingya to displacement camps, or deporting them en masse. While the quasi-civilian government is formally in charge, the real power still lies with the all-encompassing military.

These human rights violations, and the humanitarian tragedy spawned by this ethnic cleansing, means nothing to the business and political leaders who are eager to capitalise on the ‘gold rush’ now on in Burma, in the words of Ramzy Baroud. Martin Sorrell, the chief of the advertising and marketing firm WPP plc, captured the mood when he was quoted as saying, “When was the last time a market of 60 million people fell out of the sky?” He continued, “This is one of the last frontiers.” Another commodity that Burma has in abundance, which will be exploited by the multinational corporations to make their bonanza-profits, is cheap labour. As the correspondent for the Irrawady online newspaper explained, Japanese investors have been attracted to Thailand, despite that country’s political upheavals. But now, with a huge labour force in Burma willing to work for one-sixth of a Thai worker’s wage, could lure the Japanese business community into Burma.

The Burmese regime has gone so far as to legislate (in 2005) that Muslim Rohingya families are only allowed two children. Local authorities in Arakan state reinforced this law last year in the wake of anti-Muslim sectarian violence. This discriminatory legislation is part of the longstanding practice of anti-Islamic racism that the Burmese authorities have invoked periodically since the beginning of direct military rule in 1962. Rohingya couples must also apply for and obtain permission to marry from the authorities. As Human Rights Watch observes;

Implementation of this callous and cruel two-child policy against the Rohingya is another example of the systematic and wide ranging persecution of this group, who have recently been the target of an ethnic cleansing campaign,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “President Thein Sein says he is against discrimination. If so, he should quickly declare an end to these coercive family restrictions and other discriminatory policies against the Rohingya.

The much-celebrated democracy ‘icon’ Aung San Suu Kyi only recently spoke up about the systematic discrimination and persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority. She stated that the two-child policy is against human rights, but that it would be difficult to implement in Arakan. She expressed some lukewarm criticism of the onrush of Western investors in Burma – by claiming that they are not investing quickly enough. Suu Kyi does not advocate granting citizenship to the Rohingya people, or spoken out against the multinational companies that seek to invest in Burma while trampling human rights. The National League for Democracy (NLD) which Suu Kyi heads, is markedly pro-business oriented and welcomes further investment in Burma by the Western powers.

The opening up of the country to Western investment has corresponded with an eruption of sectarian Buddhist communalism and the targets of such national chauvinism are the Rohingya minority. Many risk perilous journeys to seek refuge in other countries, including Indonesia and Australia, rather than stay and face further violence, torture and suffering at the hands of a national-chauvinist Buddhist elite. The words of the Palestinian writer Ramzy Baroud, in the article “Ignoring Genocide: Rohingya People Deserve to Live” are the most appropriate with which to conclude, given that the Palestinians, like the Muslim Rohingya, are another stateless population yearning for self-determination. Baroud wrote;

The perpetual suffering of the Rohingya people must end. They are deserving of rights and dignity. They are weary of crossing unforgiving seas and walking harsh terrains seeking mere survival. More voices must join those who are speaking out in support of their rights. ASEAN must break away from its silence and tediously guarded policies and western countries must be confronted by their own civil societies: no normalization with Rangoon when innocent men, women and children are being burned alive in their own homes. This injustice needs to be known to the world and serious, organized and determined efforts must follow to bring the persecution of the Rohingya people to an end.

This is not just a conclusion, but also a platform for a new beginning.

The current American empire is resembling the decaying Roman imperium

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , , ,

The Roman Republic, and subsequent Roman Empire, were based on a strong class structure which divided the population into distinct economic categories. The lowest class were of course the slaves, who were regarded as chattel to be exploited, bought and sold at a whim. At the top end of the vast social pyramid was the Roman aristocracy. The nobility, the patrician class, were the wealthiest families and clans in the Roman polity, and dominated the political process. Hereditary wealth was a key factor if a person wished to occupy high political office. Gradually, a new social force, the equites, the non-patrician wealthy elite, were included (sometimes reluctantly) into the highest political positions of the Roman republic and empire.

Note how that to be in the Roman Senate, from which candidates for the most powerful political positions were drawn, wealth was the single most important criterion. While the official slogan of the Roman Empire was Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (the Senate and the People of Rome), there was no doubt that the highest and most powerful class in the land was the financial oligarchy. In fact, the largest faction of the noble class called themselves the Optimates, literally meaning ‘the best’. These were the hereditary nobles, who fought tooth-and-nail against their opposing counterparts, the Populares, those senators who were (allegedly) on the side of the Roman people.

Under the Roman Republic, there were political avenues for the people to address their grievances to the Senate. The plebeian tribune, a powerful political office, did serve as a conduit for the expression and resolution of political and economic complaints. However, the plebeian tribune office did not have any military or executive function, so its decisions were circumvented or undermined by the all-powerful senatorial oligarchy. If the plebeian tribune was to become stubborn, and persist in measures to alleviate the economic inequalities inflicted on the people, then the senators would not hesitate to use their financial power to attack – and sometimes violently assassinate – the plebeian tribunes they regarded as a thorn in their side. The most famous tribunes, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi, were both killed in politically motivated violence, victims of lynch-mob murder incited by the financial oligarchs because they wanted to reform the social and political structures of Rome to assist the poorer classes. The Senate made sure that the laws of the land favoured the preservation and extension of their wealth, and used that legal structure to suppress any threat to their economic privileges. An extensive network of patronage ensured that the republic, and ensuing Roman Empire, remained economically viable for the wealthy senatorial elite.

This excursion into ancient Roman history is not just an academic exercise. It has serious implications and lessons for contemporary times. The unifying of political and economic power is the salient feature of the Roman republic and empire. What has this got to do with today’s events?

In a revealing and powerful article, Robert Scheer, a veteran political commentator and editor-in-chief of Truthdig online magazine, writes about the incestuous relationship between powerful financial oligarchs, politicians and the Wall Street crowd in the United States today. In an article called ‘Congress Still Puts Out for Wall Street’, Scheer examines the close relations between the bankers and financial speculators that caused the ongoing capitalist economic crisis, and the political clout they exercise in the US Congress. As Scheer explains:

What does it take to make a Wall Street banker squirm with shame? Not content with having swindled tens of millions of Americans out of their homes and life savings, the very bankers who caused the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression are now subverting government regulations designed to prevent comparable disasters in the future.

Scheer cites the example of Citigroup, a mega-bank and financial institution, itself the result of a merger between two enormous financial institutions, that swindled millions in the years leading up to the 2008. They were able to do because their partisans, the army of lobbyists that they hired and unleashed on the US Congress, convinced the law-makers to abolish regulations that restricted Citigroup’s ability to generate millions in profits by speculation. For instance, the Glass-Steagall Act, passed back in the 1930s, prevented commercial banks from engaging in financial speculation with the bank deposits of ordinary investors. Pensions and bank deposits were protected from risky investment banking activities. Citigroup was one financial behemoth that led the charge to abolish this act, thus opening up billions of dollars for further speculative activities – the Glass-Steagall Act was abolished by compliant politicians in 1999.

The US Congress since 2008, rather than challenging the ability of the Wall Street hucksters to write and shape laws that enrich elite interests, has actually continued to enmesh itself in the tentacles of the financial mega-corporations. Key legislation passed by the US Congress governing financial activity has been drafted by bank lobbyists, many of them in the pay of the big banks like Citigroup. A financial oligarchy that occupies legislative positions, and enacts laws to enrich itself and transfer the social costs of the economic burden onto the poor – that looks eerily similar and highly reminiscent of an ancient empire.

It is true that the Obama administration passed the Dodd-Frank Act, subtitled the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, in July 2010. But even this lukewarm, halfhearted measure to crack down on the billion-dollar derivatives market has faced strenuous opposition from industry groups and financial institutions that portray this act with bipartisan fury as an attack on private enterprise that threatens to demolish the entire financial complex. As Scheer elaborates, the drafting of this legislation was supervised by the large financial conglomerates;

As an example of the profound corruption of our legislative process, congressional staffers turned to top corporate lawyers to draft the wording pretending to rein in their activity.

For example, as the emails reviewed by the Times revealed, House committee staffers consulted Michael Bopp, a partner at the elite law firm Gibson, Dunn who represents corporations involved in derivative trading, as to the verbiage he would prefer in the legislation. His language was well received, as the Times reported: “Ultimately, the committee inserted every word of Mr. Bopp’s suggestion into a 2012 version of the bill that passed the House, save for a slight change in phrasing.”

So the very financial institutions that caused the current economic malaise have enormous input into the legislation that is supposed to facilitate the economic recovery. The corruption of the political and legislative process by big money is all too evident. Legislation that is skewed towards preserving and extending the wealth of the financial oligarchy is having its intended effect.

The Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to gathering and collating data on social and economic issues, released a report in April this year entitled ‘A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%’ documents that during the years 2009 to 2011, the upper seven percent of the richest households saw their average net worth increase by an estimated 28 percent, while the rest of us, the 93 percent, witnessed a decline of four percent in the average household net worth. This differential wealth recovery was explained by the Pew Research Centre as a result of stock and bond market activity, and the already-affluent have their assets concentrated in stocks and financial holdings. The lower income households have most of their wealth represented by their homes, and the housing market remained flat over the 2009-11 period.

Since the 2008 capitalist economic crisis, the ruling financial elite has intensified its efforts to transfer the cost of economic recession onto the working people, while insulating its own wealth through corrupting the legislative process. The US government, under Bush and now Obama, has utilised every measure to preserve, and even increase, the ability of the financial oligarchy to accumulate staggering amounts of wealth, while social services and public utilities are cut back. Financial speculation, asset bubbles and predatory economic practices are back on the agenda and remain typical of financial activity since 2008. Obama responded to the economic crisis with ‘bailouts’, that is, handing over vast amounts of public money to the private banks, sowing the seeds of an even larger economic crash to come. Maintaining US imperial power while imposing austerity at home has been the main priority of the Obama administration.

The Roman Empire, while occupying a place in ancient history, is not so remote from our contemporary political and economic experience.

The decline of Detroit – an emblem of the failure of American capitalism

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized ,

There is an old saying of ‘a picture tells a thousand words’.

The veracity of this proverb is underlined by the following series of photographs, taken by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, and published in the Guardian newspaper regarding the catastrophic economic and demographic decline of the city of Detroit, Michigan. Once a major urban industrial centre and home of large auto-manufacturers, Detroit is now littered with abandoned hotels, ruined schools and hospitals, vacant lots and decrepit buildings.

The photographic collection is stark testimony to the destructive consequences of the demise of American capitalism. A once-teeming metropolis, with many suburbs and co-mingling communities, has now become a virtual ghost town, with decaying infrastructure and abandoned housing. Detroit was home to 2 million people in the 1950s; currently it is an emblem of the decline of American empire. The town now has a crumbling transport infrastructure, a shortage of law enforcement personnel, a rising crime rate and an unemployment rate that is twice the national average.

Towards the end of last year (2012), policy planners and Michigan officials were considering declaring the entire city of Detroit bankrupt. On March 1 2013, the city of Detroit was taken over by the state of Michigan authorities, and an emergency manager was appointed to head the city. There was no consultation with ordinary Detroiters, and the people of Detroit have no say in the decisions that the emergency manager makes.

Michigan governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, to oversee the implementation of a financial plan that will assault the basic working conditions, wages, and pensions to pay for an economic recovery where the already-wealthy will see their wealth protected. The cost of restoring social services will be shifted onto the shoulders of the working class and poorest people in the city. The economic restructuring undertaken by Orr will preserve the wealth of the financial elite, and facilitate greater hardships for the working people. For instance, Orr has indicated that the wages of the Detroit fire-fighters would be cut, as part of the overall cost-cutting program that will witness further privatisation of social services. Orr’s program will only exacerbate the worsening economic and social situation.

Detroit has undergone a process of deindustrialisation, and has lost 25 percent of its population over the last decade. As Aric Miller wrote in the Socialist Worker article covering the Detroit crisis;

Fundamentally, the job of emergency manager is to shift responsibility for capitalism’s crisis away from bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers and onto the backs of the most vulnerable. In the case of Detroit, that means poor and working-class African Americans who make up the vast majority of the city’s population.

One report has stated that nearly half of adult Detroiters are ‘functionally illiterate’. A population that is functionally illiterate provides prime cannon-fodder for the military and police services, occupations that have boomed over the past decade with the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and the accompanying militarisation of American society.

The crisis and collapse of Detroit is emblematic of the ongoing decay of American capitalism. The descent into ruinous degradation is the result not just of a demographic exodus from the city, but the conscious political and economic decisions to preserve the wealth of the financial oligarchy while transferring the social costs onto the majority of the population. These decisions are made by the industrial and financial elite, the 1 percent that is keen on maintaining a system of economic and social inequality.

The news is not all bad; workers at fast-food outlets in Detroit and other American cities are organising on a collective basis for better wages and conditions, and understand that the program of institutionalising social inequality has to be reversed. Jobs in the fast-food sector are among the most common in the United States, and among the lowest paid jobs. Detroit’s austerity and emergency management has to be seen in the wider context of the ongoing implementation of neoliberal austerity in many parts of the world, including Europe. What is taking place in Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain and other crisis-wracked European countries is nothing short of a social counter-revolution, rolling back the social gains made by workers over the last fifty or sixty years since the end of World War Two. However, there is one village in Spain that is defying the trend, and demonstrating that there is an alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Marinaleda, like the rest of Spain, has been hit hard by the capitalist economic crisis. Unemployment and the associated social ills of poverty, household debt and family breakdowns have hit the Spanish working class, just like in the rest of economically devastated Europe. But in Marinaleda, the political leadership has taken a different direction:

Marinaleda is run along the lines of a communist Utopia and boasts collectivised lands (1,200 previously unused hectares, seized by a mass land-grab in 1990 from an aristocrat’s estate) which offer every villager the opportunity to work the fields, tending to root crops and olive groves. In Andalusia, where jobs are currently being lost at the rate of about 500 a day, any work is good work.

Marinaleda’s mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, has gained national notoriety and has even been dubbed the “Robin Hood of Spain” after he and a group of labourers refused to pay a supermarket for 10 shopping trolleys filled with food, which they distributed to the area’s food banks, sparking headlines in countries as far away as Iran.

The mayor of Marinaleda, Sanchez Gordillo explained that:

Mr Sánchez  Gordillo believes Spain’s deep recession is the fault of its government. “Unfortunately, this [national] government’s policies have not been directed towards the people’s problems; they were directed towards the banks’ problems,” he says. “People are more important than banks, particularly when the profits are received by a handful of bankers who have speculated with basic human rights. The money they’ve provided doesn’t reach the base of the social pyramid, which is why the economy is paralysed. It’s the small property holders and businesses who have been hurt the most. [We have] six million unemployed and twice that number living in poverty.”

Marinaleda is being rebuilt for the benefit of its people; meanwhile Detroit is being restructured to benefit the wealthy while its infrastructure falls to pieces.

Go read the story of Marinaleda here in The Independent newspaper.

Ernest Hemingway, lost generations and economic experiments

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , , , ,

The Sun Also Rises is the first novel written by American novelist and short-story writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1962). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. A writer of fiction, Hemingway based his writings on his experiences, the social conditions of his time, and the political turbulence which he witnessed in Europe and the United States. The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, and deals with a group of American expatriates residing mainly in Paris, most of whom are veterans of World War One. Hemingway himself served as an ambulance driver on the Italian war front in 1918 and was seriously wounded.

The searing experience of World War One, the death, mutilation and trauma had a shattering impact on the generation that came of age during its ferocious battles. The psychological impact, the war propaganda and the sheer magnitude of the social and emotional wounds inflicted by the war had a profound influence on many fields of human endeavour, and literature was no exception. The decision by the various imperialist states to go to all-out war, mobilising the vast resources each had at its disposal for the purpose of mutual slaughter, involved millions of people and had a decisive impact on their lives. The war propaganda used by all sides, the orgy of national chauvinism, engulfed the European continent and spread to other countries. The generation that was most affected was Hemingway’s. While the survivors continued with their lives after 1918, they struggled with the clash between the vaunted values of patriotism, honour and sacrifice which were the stated motivations of the imperialist powers, and the horrors of death, mutilation, mass slaughter and trauma that they experienced in the trenches.

Hemingway gathered with a group of American and British expatriates in Paris after the war ended. Most of his friends were literary figures, one of whom was Gertrude Stein. She coined the phrase ‘the lost generation’ to refer to those that had experienced World War One. Hemingway popularised the phrase, and dealt with this precise subject in his novel, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway conveyed the sense of purposeless and aimlessness that characterised the expatriate generation, and examined how their lives had been subverted by the hypocrisy of fighting for alleged noble aims in a conflict involving mass slaughter and immense suffering. The horrific suffering inflicted by World War One upon members of the Lost Generation is the main theme of Hemingway’s novel, and while he explores many other themes and motifs in the book, the aimlessness and casual drifting of the expatriate generation is the subject to which Hemingway closely hews throughout his first novel. They experienced a significant cultural and social rupture; the pre-war values (or at least what had been promoted as the values of the imperialist powers) of honour, sacrifice and nationalism were used in the service of a horrendous conflict that consumed an entire generation.

There are many themes that Hemingway elaborates in The Sun Also Rises, and a detailed examination of all of them is not the purpose here. Suffice it to say that the main subject of a Lost Generation has contemporary relevance. There is another emerging lost generation in Europe, but not as a result of an intra-European war. There are no bombs exploding, or bullets flying, the suffering and social dislocation experienced by the today’s generation in Europe is no less real. The cause of another lost generation is a different kind of warfare; an economic experiment that condemns millions to impoverishment and daily suffering while enriching a tiny, exploitative minority. Humanitarian crises are certainly evident after a natural disaster, or prolonged warfare. But never before has human suffering been inflicted in slow-motion, economically piecemeal fashion as in capitalist Europe today. The economic crisis of capitalism, having created a vast social pyramid of economic inequality, is now engulfing millions of Europeans as the main imperialist institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the European Central Bank, implement so-called ‘bailout’ packages, enforcing regimes of austerity on the general population. The millions will now pay for the ‘bailout’ in the form of cutbacks to social welfare, wages, working conditions, pensions, and in the latest case of Cyprus, their bank savings. Plundering the savings of what were supposed to be government-backed deposits from workers and pensioners in order to pay for the ‘bailout’ would be called bank robbery in any other country – and it is. When the European Central Bank and IMF impose policies that result in massive losses for long-term depositors and savers results in the spectre of a run on the banks – depositors hurriedly withdrawing their money, then the question has to be asked, in whose interest do the big banks and politicians govern?

Greece was the first country to undergo this social and economic experiment – and is now facing a serious humanitarian crisis. What does that mean? While there is no universally agreed definition of a humanitarian crisis, the lack of social services, the cutbacks to social safety nets, the increasing immiseration of larger segments of the working population, and the growing inequality of provision of education and health services results in greater suffering for an increasing number of people. Previously economically productive people are becoming ever more vulnerable to financial shocks. Living in conditions of preventable material deprivation, more and more ordinary people are driven into psychological problems.

Giorgios Chatzis, a 60-year old construction, left a message on his wife’s telephone back in August 2012:

 “I will not be coming home. I have no more to offer. I am nothing anymore. I love you all. Take care of the children.”

Chatzis committed suicide. Why?

This 60-year-old construction worker had just learned that he was losing his disability benefit of 350 euros per month. He had been drawing on it for four years, in addition to a pre-retirement payment of 50 euros per month. These 400 euros made up the only income for the whole family. When he learned he was losing his disability benefits, after having made several attempts to keep them, he took his own life. His body was found later.

Giorgios Chatzis would have had to wait five more years without income just to receive a reduced retirement of 300 euros per month. The latest austerity package effectively calls for pushing back the retirement age to 67 years, which would have added two years to the total during which he would not have paid in to the private-sector retirement fund, which would have reduced even more the monthly amount of what they called “retirement.”

His case is only one out of millions of examples. The quotes above are from the article “Greece’s social crisis” by Charles-André Udry examining the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis in Greece as a direct result of the vaunted ‘bailout’  package. The author also looks at the gangrenous crisis consuming the lives of young workers, whose jobs have been cut back and the social stress that is taking lives. It is not just the ‘periphery’ that is experiencing humanitarian suffering and social dislocation; the frontal class warfare attack on the welfare state in Spain, Portugal and Ireland has resulted in reductions in wages, pensions, the privatisation of social services, the loss of public education and the consequent increase of social and psychological problems. According to the London School of Economics, the suicide rate in Spain has increased threefold because of the unbearable stress caused by losing one’s home. These kinds of socially destructive policies are being implemented because the financial and industrial elites of the European powers have decided that the social welfare state is no longer affordable. The chiefs of the European Central Bank, along with politicians in various European countries, all agree that the social welfare state has to be dismantled in order to keep the capitalist economic model going.

The countries of the Mediterranean are not the only European states undergoing significant economic contraction and social immiseration. The much-vaunted Baltic republics, (Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia) hailed as economic powerhouses after they broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been economically shrinking since the 2008 global financial crisis.  The Baltic states, along with the rest of the former Eastern bloc, adopted neoliberal economic prescriptions imported from the IMF and World Bank, where local elites made a fortune as their countries were integrated into the capitalist market. The Baltic states implemented the individualistic, IMF-driven economic model from the inception of their independence; there own version of Thatcherism, where social spending was slashed, government assets (built up under the Soviet period) were privatised, and education was cut back. In 2009, soon after the global economic crisis, riots broke out in the Baltic states, puncturing the myth of the ‘Baltic tigers’. The Baltic states are currently under a great degree of social stress, but there is one way that the Baltic populations have avoided the economic crisis in their own countries – by leaving them. The working age and able-bodied population of the Baltics is simply choosing to leave the shrinking economies of their homelands in order to find employment and financial security in other countries. The authors of a Counterpunch article explain that:

As the economic crisis intensified, unemployment grew from a relatively low level of 4.1 per cent in 2007 to 18.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2010 with a concomitant increase in emigration from 26,600 in 2007 to 83,200 in 2010. This was the highest level of emigration since 1945 and comparable only with the depopulation of the country during World War II. Since the restoration of independence in 1990, out of a population of some 3.7 million 615,000 had left the country; three fourths were young persons (up to 35 years old), many of them educated and with jobs in Lithuania. By 2008, the emigration rate from Lithuania became the highest among the EU countries (2.3 per 1,000), and double that of the next highest country, Latvia (1.1 per 1,000).

The high emigration rate, the demographic and social costs of such neoliberal austerity policies make us question the capitalist economic model and its claims to provide prosperity for all. Removing the people from an economic system is hardly an indicator of that model’s success. Back in 2010, economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Summers were documenting the staggering decline of Latvia’s economy:

Latvia has experienced one of the world’s worst economic crises. It is not only economic, but demographic. Its 25.5 per cent plunge in GDP over just the past two years (almost 20 per cent in this past year alone) is already the worst two-year drop on record.  The IMF’s own rosy forecasts anticipate a further drop of 4 per cent, which would place the Latvian economic collapse ahead of the United States’ Great Depression.

The highly financialised, capitalist system imported into the Baltics from the ‘free market’ fundamentalists of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the financial elites of Europe are causing a social breakdown in the Baltic republics, just as serious but less publicised than the humanitarian emergencies in Greece and Cyprus.

There is one other theme that Hemingway elaborates in his novel that is relevant for our purposes here. The first character that Hemingway introduces in his book is not the main protagonist, Jake Barnes, the American World War One veteran. The book opens by introducing the character Robert Cohn, who managed to avoid serving in the Great War. Cohn is Jewish, and Hemingway repeatedly and frequently reminds the reader than Cohn is Jewish. He is also the most disagreeable character in the novel; the other members of the expatriate group frequently mock and ridicule Cohn. The latter is the whipping-boy of the group, the target of their taunts and the butt of their jokes. The Cohn character is the outsider, unable to fit in with the rest of the group, separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Certainly Cohn is an outsider because he is not a war veteran, unlike the rest of the cast of Hemingway’s characters. But Cohn is also the only Jewish person, and he is repeatedly ostracised by the others in the group. At several points, Hemingway has one character refer to Cohn as a ‘kike’, a derogatory word for a Jewish person.

Was Hemingway anti-semitic, or was he accurately portraying the attitudes of his contemporaries towards Jewish people? The answer is a bit of both. Hemingway, like all writers, is a product of his times. Casual anti-Semitism was quite common in the 1920s and 1930s Europe and America. Other writers’ of Hemingway’s generation, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, also used anti-Semitic characterisations in their works. In Hemingway’s novel, the one character that is singled out for ridicule and constant mockery is Robert Cohn. There are many instances of interaction between Cohn and the other characters where Cohn is clearly the eternal outsider, and he is an outsider precisely because of his Jewishness. Hemingway possessed a superficial anti-Semitism, and in this he imbibed the prevailing racial perspectives that were ubiquitous in 1920s America and Europe. This does not excuse his anti-Semitism, but only seeks to place it in a wider social and cultural context. Epithets about Jews (and other ethnic groups) were used casually in books and media. It was not uncommon to find cartoons in newspapers using anti-Semitic stereotypes of the ‘evil Jews’, constantly scheming behind the backs of the liberal Westerners.

This point is important to understand, because there is contemporary relevance. While anti-Semitic images and politics are still sadly with us (particularly in Eastern Europe), this particular prejudice has been replaced by Islamophobia, the core of which is anti-Arab racism, applied to the wider Islamic countries and communities. The stereotype of the hook-nosed, duplicitous, scheming alien Jew has been largely replaced by the stereotype of the hook-nosed, duplicitous, scheming Muslim, taking advantage of the liberal-democratic West to spread their secret agenda of jihadism and Shariah law once our backs are turned. The Muslim person is now the eternal outsider, unable to assimilate or participate in ‘our’ democratic system. A great deal of Islamophobia is of course politically-driven. As the United States, since the end of World War One, strove to control greater portions of the Arabic-speaking world for its oil and geostrategic resources, any political group or movement that stood in its way has been demonised. That has meant the Arab ‘other’ has always been regarded as the outsider, the eternal enemy to be confronted. During the Cold War, the Palestinians, secular Arab nationalists were the main victims of this cultural assault. Beginning in the 1980s, but especially since the ‘war on terror’ began in 2001, the ‘other’ has encompassed the Islamic peoples of the world. Islamophobia is not just a cultural exercise, but also serves a useful function as an ideological prop for US imperialism. While the rabid, raving Islamophobia of populistic clowns like the execrable Geert Wilders attract condemnation, it is the creeping, but no-less-subtle form of Islamophobia in the corporate-driven media culture that is gaining ‘respectability’.

Hemingway’s novel, while exploring the major theme of the Lost Generation, never descends into pessimism. On the contrary, Hemingway recounts the resilience and fortitude of the lost generation, and while they have been damaged, they are never the forgotten or hopeless generation. In fact, the title of the book was chosen precisely to illustrate the capacity of the human spirit to defy the odds and revive. Hemingway actually took the title from a verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:3–5):

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

The current generation of Europeans is not wasting any time; they are already fighting back for an alternative future.

Broken genius – the case of William Shockley

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized ,

William Shockley (1910-1989) was a remarkably talented physicist, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a pioneer of research into semiconductors, the materials which comprise the building blocks of semiconductor electronic components. He was the co-inventor of the transistor, the invention that amplifies and switches electronic signals. The implications and applications of the transistor were immense, washing over the fields of electronic communications, computing and general electronics. It is safe to say that without the transistor, the modern electronically-based age would be impossible. Shockley, along with his co-inventors and fellow physicists, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. While Bardeen and Brattain were the ones that directly worked on the research that led to the first point-contact transistor, Shockley was their supervisor at Bell Laboratories, the leader of the solid state physics group, and his semiconductor theories and research work paved the way for Bardeen and Brattain. The transistor replaced the outmoded and inefficient vacuum tube, and boosted the field of electronics tremendously. It is no exaggeration to say that today, nearly every home in the industrialised countries has countless transistors, applied in various forms of electronic machinery. The transistor led to integrated circuits, and then the ubiquitous microprocessor. The latter, combined with the computer, made possible the exponential growth and application of computers to nearly every branch of industry, from finance to telecommunications.

Shockley’s achievements were not limited to the field of electronics; he did important work for the United States military during World War Two, applying his immense mathematical knowledge to the war effort. He worked on a team that calculated the statistical improvement of air power, and advised the US Air Force on how to increase the efficiency and accuracy of its bombing campaign. His work also influenced the US Navy to better target the menacing German U-Boat, the latter engaged in harassing North Atlantic trade between Britain and the United States.

Shockley’s post-World War Two start-up company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, provided the basis for a group of scientists and researchers that seeded what  is known until today as ‘Silicon Valley’, the home of the largest computing and technology corporations. Two of the scientists that Shockley employed went on to found Intel Corporation, today the largest manufacturer of microprocessors based on semiconductor technology. Shockley recruited the electrical engineers and physicists that form the core of the companies that began in the Santa Clara Valley, Northern California.

But if Shockley is remembered today, it is not for his work on the transistor. From the 1960s onwards, Shockley became an outspoken advocate for racial eugenics. Shockley was hardly alone in proposing a genetically-based definition of human intelligence. He was certainly not the first to attempt classifying people into distinct, biologically-determined categories called ‘races’ and endow them with social and behavioural attributes. But Shockley was not just anybody – he was an outstanding scientist and inventor, winner of the Nobel Prize. Venturing out of his field, he proposed that intelligence was largely determined by heredity, and that heredity was reflected in racial categories. The US has a long history of applying the pseudo-science of eugenics, and applying policies on that dubious basis, such as implementing immigration restrictions. In the 1960s, racial theories, and the associated biological determinism that regards the variety of human behaviour as having a genetically-determined foundation, was under attack from the rising civil rights movements, the growing anti-Vietnam war campaigns and the increasing student radicalisation on campuses. Equality between the so-called ‘races’, an assertion of African-American, (and native American) identity and dignity found their reflection on universities through the opening of research departments and courses teaching the history and philosophy of racism, African-American history and literature, colonialism and anti-colonial struggles.

In this charged environment, Shockley, whose stated concern was the quality of human life, steps up and expresses the viewpoint that the reason African Americans consistently score lower on IQ tests is because they are not as genetically-endowed with intelligence as their white American counterparts. He stated that the ‘less intelligent’ were multiplying, and this condition threatened the quality of the human race. Proceeding from his insistence that intelligence is genetically determined, and that races are immutable categories, he was concerned about the ‘retrograde’ effect of allowing the lesser-intelligent stock out-breeding the mainly white, cognitive elite.

Shockley was never an out-and-out Ku Klux Klan-style white supremacist, but his views about the racially determined categorisation of intelligence in humans crashed against the intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s. He was absolutely convinced that the future of the human species could be improved by stopping the ‘imbeciles’ from breeding. Shockley was proposed what he called ‘raceology’, the study of races and their inherited intelligence.

Shockley was met with vociferous protests, his colleagues shunned him, he was ostracised by the scientific community, and attacked by student groups whenever he spoke on university campuses. In the early 1970s, a group of students at Stanford University burned Shockley in effigy. The anthropologists and cultural theorists wrote articles attacking his pseudo-scientific theories, and even biologists and geneticists were criticising his racialist views on intelligence.

How did such a prominent scientist, a pioneer in his field and respected, winner of the Nobel Prize, have such a dramatic fall? That is the subject of a fascinating biography of William Shockley by Joel Shurkin. The book is called ‘Broken Genius: The rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the electronic age’. Shurkin does not engage in a straightforward demonisation of his subject, but rather attempts to understand why such a successful and prominent scientist could fall from grace so publicly and remain unaware of the impact of his views. Shurkin is an articulate writer, and he offers a vivid portrait of the man and his milieu. When the book was published back in 2006, Shurkin was interviewed by the ABC’s Radio National. Shurkin had access to Shockley’s personal archives and diaries, and speaking during the interview, described Shockley as follows:

He was a nasty old man. One of his friends actually described him as having reverse charisma; he would walk into a room and you instantly took a disliking to him. He was, at one time, a young man, a nice young man, not a particularly lovable young man. He was, among other things, extraordinarily bright, brighter than anybody he’d ever run into and he knew it, he was a bit arrogant about it. He lacked socialisation, his parents were, let’s say eccentric, kept him out of school until the 8th grade, so he grew up not knowing how to handle and deal with other people.

Shurkin, taking advantage of the Shockley diaries, portrays a man who was remarkably intelligent in scientific and technical matters, but sorely lacking in social and people skills. Shurkin details the struggles of Shockley’s subordinates who frequently bore the brunt of his criticism and stinging attacks. Shockley was a brilliant man, but lacked what we would today call emotional intelligence. In fact, the core team of scientists that Shockley recruited for his company eventually got so exasperated and frustrated by Shockley’s authoritarian and overbearing managerial style, that they all basically left his company and founded their own ventures which led to the formation of Silicon Valley. Shockley referred to this group of scientists as the ‘traitorous eight’. Shurkin details the attempts by Shockley’s employees to find a compromise solution, to work out their differences – all to no avail. Even Shockley’s Nobel Prize co-winners, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, sensed that Shockley harboured a certain jealousy or animosity that they had directly worked on the research for the first transistor, even though Shockley’s contribution as the overall project leader is obvious and cannot be denied. Brattain and Bardeen had increasing difficulties dealing with Shockley when they were at Bell Labs, even though, as Shurkin documents, the two of them stated that ‘there’s enough glory in this for everybody’.

Shurkin, an outstanding science writer, admirably details the scientific technicalities of semiconductor and transistor research, while also conveying the complexities of the nature-nurture debate with regard to human intelligence. He examines the responses of other psychologists and anthropologists on the ‘gene-versus-environment’ controversy, a debate that still resounds to this day. Sadly, Shockley’s views invited attacks as a racist and ignoramus in the field of biology. Psychologists and biologists currently regard the controversy as outdated, and speak of the interaction between genes and environment. We realise our nature through our nurturing environmental influences. Shockley, by advocating such genetic-determinist views on race and intelligence, seemed like an atavistic throwback, to a time in America’s history when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (particularly Jewish immigrants) were screened out because of their alleged intellectual inferiority to the superior Nordic races. Shockley’s technical brilliance in opening up the field of semiconductor research was overshadowed by his pronouncements on race. Shockley’s scientific reputation was corrupted, and his considerable achievements were largely forgotten in the maelstrom of controversy about his racial views. Shurkin avoids the temptation to dismiss his subject as a lunatic, but rather attempts to identify the trajectory that Shockley followed from public admiration to condemnation.

Shakespeare comes to Baghdad – the Iraq war continues

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , ,

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the great English playwright and dramatist, wrote a number of historical plays concerning various periods in English history. These plays are not as well known and less-frequently performed than his comedies, tragedies and romantic works. One of his main historical plays is Henry VI (Parts one, two and three). The play examines the course of English political and social life after the death of King Henry V, and the effects of English losses in the Hundred Years’ War. England had lost the bulk of its territories in France, and the political repercussions in England manifested themselves in a series of intrigues and machinations by various factions of the English ruling class. These conflicts reached a head with the Wars of the Roses, when two competing branches of the one royal family (the Plantagenets) fought an inter-dynastic civil war for political and economic supremacy.

Parts Two and Three of the Henry VI trilogy examine the role of the King, his inability to stabilise the political situation, the arming of the various rival houses (Lancaster and York), and the eventual explosion of armed conflict. It is a gripping, tumultuous series of plays, at once enthralling and disturbing. The infighting among the English landed nobility in the wake of English losses of land and resources in France is portrayed sharply by Shakespeare, and evokes powerful emotions. What happens to the ordinary people of a country when its ruling class fragments into warring factions? After inciting English nationalism for a war of conquest in France, once the territories are lost, all nationalist feeling evaporates. The welfare of England as a nation is no longer the paramount objective, but the advancement of the narrow, sectional interests of various factions of the dynastic clans that made up the ruling elite of England.

What is the relevance of this historical play for contemporary times? Patrick Cockburn, the expert foreign correspondent for The Independent states it plainly:

Want to know what Iraq is like now? Check out ‘Henry VI’, parts I, II and III

That is the title of his article in The Independent online newspaper, where he examines the eerie similarities between the conflict for supremacy in Baghdad with the historical account of the fight for victory within the English ruling dynasty during the Wars of the Roses. The corporate media has largely ignored the human tragedies of the Iraq war since 2008, mainly because of a well-crafted myth; the surge. The addition of an extra 30 000 American troops in Iraq back in 2007, so the story goes, successfully reduced insurgent attacks on US troops, providing extra muscle to deal with the Iraqi insurgent groups. Actually, as Mike Whitney explains in his article in Counterpunch, the ‘surge’ was a publicity exercise aimed at disguising the shift in tactics of the American military. What actually occurred was the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. Whitney goes on to detail how the US political and military leadership, faced with a stubborn insurgency that could not be defeated, changed tactics to one of ethnic divide-and-rule. The US created sectarian-based death squads from the local population, mainly from the Shia community, and sent them to fight and torture insurgents.

The change in tactics was not accidental, because the US has vast experience in training and arming para-military death squads that operate outside the law – they have been using this tactic for years in many Latin American countries. In fact, the main American military commander in Iraq at the time, General David Petraeus, employed Colonel James Steele, a retired US Special Forces veteran. Steele has had vast experience in death squad tactics, because he actually studied and implemented counterinsurgency warfare in El Salvador back in the 1980s. Now the Pentagon is (ostensibly) investigating the links between the torture chambers in Iraq and the political and military leadership of the United States. There cannot be any cross-sectarian reconciliation in Iraq until all the details about the torture chambers and death squads of the US dirty war in Iraq are fully exposed and culprits punished.

The irony of the situation is that prior to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, there was no sectarian animosity. Various ethnic communities mingled, intermarried and did business together. Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni privileged-elite did emerge, but that was based more on the political loyalty to the Ba’athist party. To advance in Ba’athist-dominated Iraq, joining the military or the police was the surest way to gain steady employment and benefits.

With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military and political command fueled sectarian hatred in order to divert the energies of the largely Sunni-led insurgency. What has all this got to do with the surge and the apparent reduction in US casualties? As Mike Whitney explains in his Counterpunch article, the main Shia insurgent force, the Madhi Army led by nationalist and populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr declared a ceasefire for a year. The US military authorities bought off a section of the Sunni insurgency by enlisting them in so-called ‘Awakening Councils’ to attack and defeat al-Qaeda linked groups. The systematic ethnic cleansing of Iraqi Sunnis from Baghdad, carried out by the Shia-dominated regime of current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was well underway in 2007 and 2008. These factors combined succeeded in reducing the number and intensity of attacks on US troops. The vaunted ‘surge’ did have a purpose;

the surge was used to cover an equally-heinous war crime, the massive ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunni population, millions of who were either killed, tortured or forced to flee to Jordan or Syria.

The entire article by Mike Whitney can be read here in Counterpunch online.

Failure to address the crimes of ethnic cleansing, torture and rendition makes a mockery of US claims to have brought democracy to Iraq. The recent protests, mainly by Iraqi Sunnis, have attempted to combat the sectarianism of the Maliki administration and has gained the support of the Shia cleric and politician Muqtada al-Sadr. Into this political powder-keg, Sunni extremist groups (linked to the petro-monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) are trying to stoke the fires of a Sunni-based sectarian backlash. Reconciliation will be impossible unless the criminal role of the United States is fully revealed and the perpetrators brought to justice.

Let us make one last observation; David Frum, the Bush-Cheney administration speechwriter and author of the now-famous phrase ‘Axis of Evil’, has just written an article confirming what the anti-war movement stated was the main motivation of the American drive to war. The anti-war activists were routinely vilified, ridiculed and slandered for even daring to suggest one overriding motivation for the US to occupy Iraq. While all wars have multiple motivations and agendas, reflecting the priorities of the various factions of the ruling class, the one claim for this Iraq war (the claim most stigmatised and attacked) has now been confirmed by Frum; Iraq would be an additional reservoir of oil as an alternative to exclusive dependency on Saudi Arabia.

Read the whole article by Glenn Greenwald here.

Let’s not forget that Iraq is still the issue

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized ,

Patrick Cockburn, veteran foreign correspondent for the Independent newspaper and analyst of Middle Eastern politics, has written a stinging article about the current deplorable state of political and economic affairs in Iraq. Ten years after the 2003 American invasion, Iraq remains a deeply fractured state, with the Shias in power but not in control of a country wracked by poverty, the breakdown of social services and mired in corruption. Cockburn rightly emphasizes that the international community, preoccupied with the Syrian civil war, has forgotten that Iraq is still facing a humanitarian tragedy. Cockburn’s article was reprinted in the political online magazine, Counterpunch.

Cockburn begins his article with a stark assessment:

Iraq is disintegrating as a  country under the pressure of a mounting political, social and economic crisis, say Iraqi leaders.

They add that 10 years after the US invasion and occupation the conflict between the three main communities – Shia, Sunni and Kurd – is deepening to a point just short of civil war. “There is zero trust between Iraqi leaders,” says an Iraqi politician in daily contact with them. But like many of those interviewed by The Independent for this article, he did not want to be identified by name.

While the new ‘liberated’ Iraq technically acquires 100 billion dollars in oil revenue, most of that money disappears into the pockets of a corrupt political-military bureaucracy, financial contractors and speculators. There is construction going on in Baghdad – of military outposts and police stations. However, in the working class district of Sadr City, Cockburn found frequent flooding and untreated sewage, with all the health consequences that this state of affairs entails.

This kind of corruption – Cockburn calls it ‘institutionalized kleptocracy’ in another of his articles –  means that all Iraqi ‘governments’ installed by American military forces have failed to provide electricity, clean water or sanitation to its residents, something that was unthinkable under the Saddam Hussein regime. The autonomous Kurdistan region in the north, while presented as an economic model, is also riven with corruption and theft of public funds. The privatisation of the oil sector, legislated by the American-backed Kurdish political parties, has provided wealth to a minority, while the facade of progress is maintained by the rise of skyscrapers and visits by foreign delegations from the UAE, Turkey, Germany and France. As one Kurdish critic of the regime put it to Cockburn:

“We are making the same mistake with the Turks today as we did with the Americans and the Shah in 1975. We are once again becoming over-reliant on foreign powers.”

For all their professions of independence, let us not forget that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) still depends heavily on obtaining a share of Iraqi oil revenues proportionate to its population. While Kurdish influence in Baghdad has fallen, the KRG has built economic and political links with the old enemy, Turkey – a counterweight to Baghdad, but successive Turkish governments have had no hesitation in using their armed might to kill and suppress the autonomous Kurds in the north of Iraq. The Kurds have pursued deals with foreign oil corporations, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stated that if the KRG follows through with their plans, they will face the Iraqi army.

Prime Minister Maliki rules the country as an autocrat, relying on the Shia-dominated, heavily sectarian police and army to brutally crack down on protests and dissent. The use of secret prisons, torture chambers and widespread police presence is well documented in Maliki’s Iraq. It should come as no surprise that ‘democracy’ is just a catchphrase in Iraq today, because the Maliki regime has had training and support from the experts in police repression and torture – the United States. The Guardian reported earlier this month that high-level Pentagon officials were responsible for arming and training the Iraqi units responsible for the torture and repression of dissidents throughout the 2006-07 stages of the Iraq war. General David Petraeus in particular is a veteran of counterinsurgency wars, having learned his craft in Latin America, and implementing the same death-squad techniques in Iraq in the 2000s. As Cockburn goes on to explain, Prime Minister Maliki:

He (Maliki) has sought to monopolise control over the army, intelligence service, government apparatus and budget, making sure that his supporters get the lion’s share of jobs and contracts. His State of Law Coalition won only 24 per cent of the votes in the 2010 election – 2.8 million  votes out of 19 million registered voters – but he has ruled as if he had received an overwhelming mandate.

The current Iraqi regime, boxed inside the Green Zone, makes no secret of its sectarian allegiances. Shia slogans and pictures dominate the landscape, and the Sadrist movement, headed by cleric and nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, maintains a fractious alliance with Maliki. While the Sadrists are driven by nationalistic and populist considerations, they are wary of instigating an intra-Shia civil war. The Sadrists combine social activism with an intense religious piety, and are seeking to transform themselves from an insurgent army (they did the heavy fighting back in the 2004-08, inflicting serious defeats on the Americans) into a respectable political and social force in the country. The Sadrists and their social base strongly oppose the Maliki regime’s monopolisation of power in the army and police, but against attempts to bring down the current power arrangement. The Shias are in power, but they are divided and not necessarily in control in today’s Iraq.

The blame for the current parlous nature of the Iraqi nation must be placed firmly on the shoulders of the United States ruling class. The 1990s witnessed an eruption of American militarism, part of which was the 1991 attack on Iraq. Through the use of its weaponry and subsequent economic sanctions, the US wanted to reduce a reasonably industrialised and educated Arab society to a pre-industrial level. The invasion of 2003 brought untold misery and suffering for the Iraqi people, with the reduction of health care, education, and interestingly a sharp reversal of the position of women in Iraqi society. The Iraqi people have paid a terrible price for the depredations and attacks of US imperialism. Since December 2012 however, there have been ongoing protests by Iraqis against the precarious situation, demanding their rights in a non-sectarian, democratic way.

Go read Patrick Cockburn’s entire article in Counterpunch here.

Unresolved issues, Fallujah and Iraqi protests

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized , ,

The Washington Post, the ‘liberal’ mouthpiece of the US ruling class, published an interesting article earlier this month examining the latest round of protests to erupt in Fallujah, Iraq, against the current Iraqi regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In similar tactics used by other Arab protesters in this Arab Awakening, the mainly Sunni demonstrators in Fallujah have risen up because of unresolved grievances since the armed truce of 2008-09 and the purported withdrawal of American forces in 2011. Although the US withdrawal was accompanied with great fanfare, the US has mandated a more discreet, clandestine presence in Iraq through its intelligence services, special force operatives and armed mercenaries. The withdrawal was more about removing the immediate, direct presence of the US and rebranding the occupation in more disguised form. But make no mistake, the withdrawal of US forces from the major cities of Iraq represents a serious defeat for US policy in that country.

The current peaceful protests in Iraq, triggered by the sacking and suppression of Iraqi Sunni politicians in Maliki’s coalition government, actually reflect wider political and social grievances that stem from the destructive US invasion of that country and the failure of the current Iraqi government. The Sunni Iraqis feel disenfranchised and ignored by the current Maliki administration, and have campaigned to remove the sectarian influence of the Shia-dominated Baghdad government. Maliki has accused the protests of being orchestrated by external powers, namely the Sunni regimes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. His accusations are unfounded and reflect a desperate attempt to deflect attention from the real, unresolved grievances of the Iraqi population. The protesters denounce the sectarian hostility of the Maliki government, the widespread corruption and use of torture, the lack of employment and education, the breakdown of basic social services, and the general economic downturn that has afflicted Iraq since the US invasion.

The Iraqis on the streets of Fallujah are motivated by the historic and unbroken line of Iraqi Arab nationalism. The Iraqi people have carried out several nationalist uprisings throughout the twentieth century. The Iraqis first rose in 1920 against the British colonial regime and its puppets, the royalist dictatorship of King Faisal I. In 1958, the British-supported monarchy was overthrown in a nationalist revolution, and ushered in the period of Republican Iraq and Ba’athist Party political domination. It is no secret that the rise and rule of Saddam Hussein, a Ba’athist official, was supported and nurtured by US intelligence agencies, namely the CIA. Hussein was a key asset for the United States throughout the 1980s in Iraq’s long and savage war against Iran. The Ba’athist party controlled the police state apparatus of the regime, and committed its worst crimes against the Iraqi Kurds and Shias while receiving military arms and largesse from the imperialist powers. The Ba’athist regime promoted Iraqi nationalism, through its educational policies, identifying the Babylonian and Islamic heritage of the country with the Hussein regime.

The first American attack on Iraq in 1991, and the subsequent sanctions regime, reduced the economic and social health of the country. But the 2003 US invasion brought death and destruction to a relatively developed society, destroying the electricity, health and education infrastructure of the country. The American-installed regime, having swept out the Ba’athist Party from power, resorted to extreme violence, torture and sectarian killing to suppress the population. After the mass insurgency by the Iraqi people throughout the mid-2000s, the Maliki regime came to an arrangement of sorts to end the immediate violence and include various Shia militias in a new political setup. However, Maliki is entirely dependent on the United States and Iran, the latter having gained an increased presence in the country with the removal of the Hussein regime. Iraqi government forces, trained and armed by the United States, have attacked the recent protests.

It is important to view these protests not just as a ‘Sunni’ concern, but rather a resurgence of Iraqi Arab nationalist political motivation. The demands of the protesters are not confined to a purely sectarian viewpoint – they are articulating basic demands for an improved economic and political system. Among their list of demands is the release of political prisoners, and end to torture and the death penalty, the provision of health and electricity services to impoverished communities, to stop corruption and to fight against sectarianism.

Patrick Cockburn, writing in Counterpunch, has explained that this revolt is motivated by domestic concerns, grievances that have remained unaddressed since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. He writes that Maliki does not have the force to suppress this revolt;

It is unlikely the Maliki government would succeed where Saddam and the US failed. It has military superiority but not dominance in Iraq, fully controlling only about half the country. It has no authority in the Kurdistan Regional Government’s three provinces or in the Kurdish-held disputed territories further south. Its authority is contested in the Sunni majority provinces and cities in western and central Iraq.

Go read Cockburn’s complete article here.

The Iraqi revolt has demolished the myth peddled by the corporate media that the Iraqi war is ‘all over’. The protesters are responding to the unhealed wounds and divisions caused by the US occupation and its compliant tool, the Maliki regime. They give hope that the Iraqis are rising up to assert their legitimate demands to repair the damage done by the US war and sectarian division.