Abimael Guzman, the Peruvian Communist leader of the Maoist insurgent group the Shining Path, and former philosophy professor, passed away after decades in prison. A rebel with a definite cause, he remained true to his ideals of a people’s war against the Peruvian (and American-backed) oligarchy.

No, I do not endorse Maoism, and neither do I regard Guzman as the ‘fourth sword of Marxism’, following Marx, Lenin and Mao. However, he died fighting a financial oligarchy that condemned millions of indigenous and non-indigenous in Peru to poverty.

There was another death in October, one that highlights the opposite trajectory of Guzman’s – that of an imperial servant. It is possible for a professional military person to take on a mercenary role.

Colin Powell, former American Secretary of State and military officer, also passed away earlier this month. He was the loyal servant of a mercenary empire. He added, in a cynical way, ‘diversity’ to a project that has cost the lives of millions around the world, including Vietnam, Iraq, Panama, Grenada – not to mention the so-called ‘war on terror.’ Powell never questioned the motives of US imperialist wars, lied to the United Nations, and participated in and oversaw numerous war crimes.

Guzman, in his own way, changed the Communist Party of Peru – previously a collection of politicised peasantry and leftist students – into a powerful political force. Intending to transplant the successful example of agrarian-based, guerrilla war with a class struggle focus from Maoist China, he was eventually captured in 1992. The President of Peru responsible for Guzman’s capture, Alberto Fujimori, ended up in prison himself, convicted of corruption, embezzlement and human rights abuses during his time in power.

Guzman was put on display, liked a caged animal, by the Peruvian authorities in 1992. Wearing a pantomime black-and-white striped prison outfit, his outdoor cage was revealed to the assembled cameras in an act of gloating by Fujimori. Guzman spent the remainder of his life behind bars, never renouncing the ideology he steadfastly advocated his entire life.

Guzman’s organisation reflected his Maoist outlook – his party maintained a hostile stance towards other non-Shining Path leftist revolutionary organisations. Siding with China during the Sino-Soviet split, he held that the USSR was on a deviationist course from the one true Marxism. Ironically, it was Guzman who unhesitatingly flew the red flag in the immediate aftermath of the 1990-91 dissolution of the Eastern bloc, swimming against the anti-communist tide.

While I do not endorse his actions, it is also important to avoid the hysterical campaign of screeching condemnation and demonisation of Guzman. For as long as their are criminal oligarchies, using the police and army as instruments of their financial misrule – such as in Peru – there will be Abimael Guzmans in the future, ready to wage an insurrectionary class war.

Since his 1992 imprisonment, developments in official Peruvian politics confirmed Guzman’s central contention – the criminal and predatory nature of the oligarchic structures which dominate Peruvian society. After Alberto Fujimori, numerous presidents have been indicted for corruption, malfeasance and entanglement in financial scandals.

Colin Powell, in 1990-91, was one of the main US officers responsible for the one-sided attack on Iraq. That war, plus the sanctions on Iraq since then, have resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. Powell, an architect with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, never faced accountability for the crimes he committed. His behaviour was consistent throughput his career – he was a soldier fighting for the expansion of US imperial rule.

While it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, the current hagiographic outpouring for Powell necessitates a critical examination of his conduct. Actually, Powell as a politician played an insidious role – acquiring bipartisan support for industrialised mass killing. Powell was an effective communicator and political operative, neutralising whatever mild opposition – lukewarm as it is – from the opposite side of the political fence.

It is all well and good when a black American man makes it to the top. Powell, in his capacity as a serving officer, orchestrated and participated in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a Caribbean nation which was headed by the New Jewel movement. The invasion destroyed not only a new social experiment, it returned a predominantly black Caribbean country to the service of American corporations.

Kelsey Atherton, in Jacobin magazine, notes that Powell was diligent and loyal – but these qualities mean nothing when they are devoted to the mercenary project of unceasing imperial violence. Perhaps he was a victim of deceit by the CIA – but he was also a willing victim. He had access to the highest corridors of power – and did nothing to challenge the deception at those levels.

Guzman died after in his own country, fighting against an oligarchy exploiting its population; Powell died after a lifetime serving a predatory empire deploying violence to further its interests.

European racial antisemitism is responsible for the mass murder of the Jewish people – namely in the policies of the genocidal Nazi regime. While Europe has had antisemitism for centuries – going back to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the massacres of Jews by the Tsarist Russian empire – racist antisemitism is a product of European nationalism.

When examining the Holocaust and collaboration with the Axis powers, the person of Palestinian Mufti Amin al-Husseini is raised, usually by Zionist commentators.

This may initially appear unusual – the Arabs were neither victims nor perpetrators of the Holocaust. However, when discussing Palestinian nationalist resistance to Zionism, the Mufti’s conduct during the war years is raised to portray Palestinian – and the wider Muslim-majority nations – as incorrigibly antisemitic.

Israel was created on the land of Palestine, on biblically significant areas, and thus provoked a reaction from the Arab world. If Arab opposition to Zionism – indeed any such opposition – can be slandered as antisemitic, then the Palestinian cause can be weakened. Obsessively referring to the Mufti’s wartime activities helps to portray Arab nationalism as a result of antisemitic pathology.

Appointed by the British authorities as the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, al-Husseini was very much Britain’s man. His support for the British has been conveniently forgotten in all the invective launched against him in the post-World War 2 period. After 1936, with the defeat of the widespread Palestinian rebellion against British rule, he sought the support of Nazi Germany as an anti-British nationalist. Britain, in response to the 1936-39 uprising, decided to officially partition Palestine.

The Mufti made his way to Berlin, where he did indeed meet Hitler in 1941. He gave the Nazi salute, after meeting Himmler in 1943, while reviewing Bosnian and Azerbaijani Muslim recruits for Waffen SS divisions. He gave antisemitic broadcasts as the war dragged on, and as the failure to blunt Zionist inroads into Palestine became apparent. The Nazis were never interested in supporting non-European anti-colonial movements.

The Mufti’s collaboration was sordid and reprehensible, but it was not an isolated example. Husseini was not the first anti-British non-European leader to seek Nazi support. Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian anti-colonial activist, sought out German support for Indian independence. Aung San, father of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, appealed to Imperial Japan for assistance in the nationalist struggle for Burmese independence.

There was, in fact, one Arab political leader who modelled the party he created along explicit fascist lines. Seeking support from the Axis powers, he initiated the closest thing the Arab world has to a European-style antisemitic party – Pierre Gemayel, who created the Lebanese Christian Phalange. It is that party, finding support among the Maronite Christian Lebanese community, that would go on to ally itself with the Israeli state in the post-1948 period.

It is interesting that Maronite Christian separatism was cultivated by the leaders of Tel Aviv from the 1950s onwards. As for Husseini, the military failure of the Arab armies to reverse Israeli gains in 1948 sealed his fate – he soon after retired into political irrelevance. His collaboration with Nazism amounted to absolutely nothing. His political outlook, and his appeals for Nazi cooperation, were disreputable and bankrupt.

Rather than list the various attempts by all factions of the Zionist leadership, in the interwar years, to cooperate with the Nazi regime, it is better to highlight the distinct partiality Nazi officers displayed for the ideology of Zionism. Adolf Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, visited budding Zionist settlements in Palestine, and spoke approvingly of what he witnessed. He commented that, had he been a Jew, he would have been an ardent Zionist.

With the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, outlawing marriage and sexual relations between Jews and so-called ‘Aryans’, one Nazi officer commented approvingly of the role of the Zionist Federation in Germany – Reinhard Heydrich. A vicious antisemite and loyal Nazi to the end, he stated that while he staunchly rejected ‘world Jewry’, he appreciated the strict racial position adopted by the Zionist movement. With regards to Palestine, he wished the new colonists well in their endeavour to build their new state.

The Nazi leaders understood the benefits of, if not an outright alliance, then a marriage of convenience between the two racially separatist ideologies. Zionist spokespersons have long comprehended the necessity of antisemitism to their state-building project. In the Arab world, antisemitism had to be imported from Europe; Holocaust denial which involves the pseudoscientific production of materials purportedly ‘debunking’ the genocide of the Jews constitutes the ‘anti-Zionism of fools.’

Do not equate anti-colonialist Palestinian nationalism with European style genocidal antisemitism. Do not exploit the reprehensible political activities of the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini to Nazify the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority nations. Discussing the presence of antisemitism in the Arab world is one thing; obsessing about the marginal and ultimately failed role of the Mufti only serves the false goal of the Nazification of Arab nationalist resistance to settler-colonialism.

A school administrator in Southlake, Texas, has come under heavy criticism for suggesting that the school district’s curriculum should contain books that offer an ‘opposing view’ of the Holocaust, balancing out the existing Holocaust materials already being taught. The suggestion of including Holocaust denial resources took place in the context of a wider debate regarding educational materials, and viewpoints that should be taught to students.

The Republican controlled state legislature in Texas, in line with their political colleagues in other states, has been waging a campaign to ban critical race theory (CRT) – which involves teaching students the history of bigotry and racism in the United States. A newly passed law in Texas, HB3979, legislators have undermined efforts to teach CRT. This effort is part of an ultranationalist right wing campaign to deflect from teaching future generations about racism and white supremacy.

The dispute in Texas involves more than just one school board or curriculum; it speaks to the nature of whitewashing history, removing any reference to the culpability of racism and white nationalism in American – and western – colonialism. Influencing the school curriculum obviously impacts how future generations understand their history – and develop amnesia regarding the crucial role of racism in shaping American capitalism.

Holocaust denial hiding behind the shield of scepticism

How does Holocaust denial fit into all of this? The denial of the Holocaust is sadly nothing new. It is part of a concerted attempt by ultranationalist and hard Right forces to remove the genocidal culpability of the Nazi regime and its ideology, white supremacy. By cancelling the main crime of Nazism, its doctrines are open to rehabilitation. This is already occurring in numerous Eastern European nations with ultrarightist regimes.

Holocaust deniers do not live in a vacuum – they have witnessed the condemnation of Nazi doctrines after the end of World War 2. So to make their message palatable, they have adopted the disguise of being ‘sceptics’; academics and writers who are merely ‘questioning’ the globally accepted version of the Holocaust. What is wrong with free scholarly inquiry?

The notion of balance – listening to opposing points of view – is all well and good, but it is not unlimited. The Texas state teachers repudiated any attempt to shrewdly introduced Holocaust denial material into the curriculum, stating that the notion of ‘balance’ does not give anyone the right to attack historically verified facts. There are not ‘two sides’ of the Holocaust.

Critical race theory – don’t buy into the ultrarightist hysteria

The Australian Senate explicitly voted to reject CRT – which is surprising, given that Australian politicians think they have the power to restrict the national curriculum. In the United States, CRT has come under strong attack for being a purportedly ‘divisive’ subject. So, what is it?

CRT began as an obscure collection of legal doctrines which sought to answer serious questions – why do economic inequalities and racial disparities in health care, law, education, employment, real estate and so on – persist decades after the abolition of segregation and the civil rights movement? A number of academics, such as Kimberle Crenshaw, sought to answer these questions in terms of intersectionality. People experience oppression and discrimination in multiple ways, including race and ethnicity.

Race is now recognised as a social construct, but this does not prevent people from categorising into biological ‘races.’ Institutional discrimination, while suffering a fatal blow in the 1960s, did not end there. Numerous systemic measures – from the economic to the cultural – have maintained racial disparities over the succeeding decades. This is part and parcel of settler-colonial capitalism, and understanding these facts contributes to a better appreciating of measures at redressing racial discrimination.

The purpose of CRT is not to create a new racial hierarchy with African Americans at the top – it is to expose the racialised hierarchy of settler-colonialism, and work towards abolishing racist hierarchies altogether. No, CRT is not ‘racist towards white people’, but rather seeks multiethnic cooperation in an antiracist alliance.

No, not every mention of settler-colonialism is an application of CRT. It is an understanding of the history of societies based on the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples. It is not entirely surprising that the conservative airwaves have resounded with shrill denunciations of CRT, with supportive politicians attempting to block it. An exposure of the embedded white racism in the foundations of American capitalism highlights American culpability for the crimes of white nationalism.

CRT is not a Marxian conspiracy to subvert the American way of life. It is an attempt to comprehend the racist history of settler-colonialism, and understand ways to change it. Let’s recognise that white supremacy continues to harm minority communities. Rather than denying history, it is better to focus our energies on strategies to confront racism and build a more inclusive and socially just society.

The Iraqi government has cracked down on participants in a conference which called for the normalisation of ties between Baghdad and Tel Aviv. Attended by political, business and community leaders in Erbil – the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan – the conference was organised by the Centre for Peace Communications, a conservative American think tank.

Normalisation of a sordid situation

What could be wrong about establishing connections between Israel and its Arab neighbours, such as Iraq? Surely the Abraham accords – the recent peace deals struck between Tel Aviv and several Arab capitals – are a positive development? Behind the cynical deployment of promoting cultural understanding between Muslims and Jews, Tel Aviv is pursuing a calculated, strategic goal of furthering its own economic and military interests.

In fact, Tel Aviv has long practiced the cynical manipulation of the stories of Jewish communities in Arab nations, to promote support for the narrow settler-colonial policies of Zionism. By alleging that Arab nations – in the late 40s and early 50s – engaged in a systematic policy of expelling their Jewish minority populations – Tel Aviv hopes to rebalance the moral calculus, and distract from its own ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1940s, and in subsequent settlement expansion.

The subject of the dispossession of the Palestinians by the Zionist movement – its ‘original sin’, so to speak – is a sensitive issue for Tel Aviv. Countering attempts by Palestinians, and their supporters, from exposing the criminal policies of the Zionist parties requires the cynical and selective deployment of sympathy. The story of Iraq’s Jewish community, and the complex, multi-factorial causes of their flight from Iraq, have been twisted and oversimplified into a falsely slanderous portrayal of Iraq, and Arab societies generally, of being hatefully antisemitic.

The Iraqi Jewish community – victims of ruthless geopolitics

The Iraqi Jewish community had historical connections and roots in Iraq, going back to Mesopotamia. Iraqi Jews built economically and culturally successful communities when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire. Britain, which acquired Iraq as a mandate colony after the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish empire in 1920, maintained cordial relations with Iraq’s – and particularly Baghdad’s – prosperous Jews. The latter had successfully integrated into Arabic-majority Iraq.

The Baghdadi Jewish community, having had special protected status as a non-Muslim minority under the Ottoman Turkish authority, appealed to the British for similar recognition. Britain, eager to put down Iraqi nationalist revolts in its new colony, shrewdly appealed to Baghdad’s Jews. While employing their commercial prosperity and administrative skills, the British authorities made sure that the Jewish community did not grow too powerful.

Britain supported the Zionist movement’s drive to colonise Palestine – from 1917 onwards. There was hardly a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to the kibbutzim of Palestine. The Baghdadi Jews were assimilated, occupying crucial positions in the administration of British authority in the nation, and were indifferent to the Zionist project.

By the time World War 2 began, the only multiconfessional political formation in Iraq was the Communist party. Pro-German factions in the Iraqi army cunningly appealed to Iraqi nationalism, hoping to establish a pro-Nazi regime in the nation. However, the troubles of those times passed, and the Iraqi Jewish community thrived.

It was the 1948 Zionist colonisation of Palestine, and the Iraqi military’s incompetent performance on the battlefield, which brought sectarian polarisation to a head. The close identification of the Jewish community with the British-backed Iraqi monarchy made them convenient targets for anticolonial sentiment. As much as Iraq’s Jews protested that they were loyal citizens, and repudiated Zionism, the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Said regarded them as a potential fifth column.

The new Zionist government in Tel Aviv claimed to speak for Jews worldwide, and its agents did their utmost to increase tensions between the Iraqi government and the Baghdadi Jewish community. Encouraging the latter to emigrate was the intended goal of the Zionist movement; exploiting internal Iraqi problems would create enough of an external push-factor to incite Iraqi Jewish emigration.

Zionist operatives, active inside Iraq, organised the bombings of cafes, synagogues and areas that Iraqi Jews frequented, increasing sectarian tensions. The government, under British and American pressure, passed a denaturalisation law in 1950, allowing those Iraqi Jews who renounced their citizenship to emigrate.

Nuri al-Said was Britain’s right-hand man in Iraq; dedicated to maintaining the British-backed monarchy in the country. Facing this destabilising campaign by Zionist agents, he relented and allowed thousands of Iraqi Jews to leave. Was he incapable of providing a political programme to unite Iraq’s various ethnicities? Yes. Was he a vicious antisemite, out on a Hitlerian frenzy to eliminate every Jewish person in sight? No, he was not.

The evacuation of Iraqi Jews, presented by Tel Aviv as an ‘in-gathering of the exiles’, was actually the uprooting of an ancient and established community. The Israeli forces, throughout 1947-48, acquired territories outside those allotted by the UN partition plan – extra space, especially ethnically cleansed areas, require filling by extra numbers of people.

The misleading characterisation of the Israel/Palestine conflict as resulting from ‘ancient hatreds between Muslims and Jews’ only serves to disguise the original guilt of the Zionist movement; the dispossession of the Palestinians. Do not use the claim of ‘cultural understanding’ or ‘religious tolerance’ to mask economic and political objectives.

In September this year, the 12-tonne statue of Confederate general and racist traitor, Robert E Lee, in Richmond Virginia, was taken down by the authorities. In its place, a statue commemorating the emancipation of slaves was erected. This measure, undertaken by the Virginia state government, reignited a debate about memorialising the Confederacy, and the persistent myth of the Lost Cause.

Let’s examine why this is not only a historical issue, but compellingly relevant for today’s politics.

The Lost Cause, a propaganda campaign developed over several decades after the end of the Civil War, downplays the importance of slavery and racism in driving the Southern states to secede. Instead, the partisans of Lost Cause mythology posit several, seemingly legitimate reasons for secession – states rights, preserving the ‘Southern way of life’, and hostility to ostensibly greedy Northern interests. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a pressure group formed after the Civil War, promoted public activities to rehabilitate the Confederacy.

By denying the role of slavery – and its aggressive promotion by the slave owning states – the Lost Cause myth absolves the Confederacy of its racism, and recasts the Southern states as historical patriots. The Lost Cause – advocated by ex-Confederate generals and soldiers – is a counter factual reading of history, removing the stain of white supremacy from the Confederate cause.

Fighting for ‘states rights’ against a supposedly overbearing federal authority sounds like a ‘noble’ motivation. Fighting for the expansion of slavery to benefit white Southern landowners and politicians sounds more materialistic in intent.

The naming of streets, statues, military bases and public spaces after Confederate generals is not a matter of simply adhering to historical veracity. They are public tributes to segregationist traitors and slave-owning racists, and promote the claim that white supremacist ideology is something to be normalised. After the Civil War, Confederate apologists worked tirelessly to deny the expressly stated intention of the secessionist states – slavery, and the white supremacy upon which it was based.

Repurposing the Confederate cause as one of defending ‘cultural heritage’ has a cynical and perverse consequence – uniting whites from the Southern and Northern states into one racialised block against the African American community. Disguising the role of the Southern landowning aristocratic class in instigating the Civil War serves to break down interethnic bonds between poor whites and black Americans.

The UDC, and similar Confederate advocacy organisations, monitored school textbooks and evaluated the history sections, ensuring that a Southern-sympathetic point of view was included. As the decades after the end of the Civil War proceeded, and the veterans of that conflict passed on, a concerted effort was made to ensure that succeeding generations learned the repackaged Lost Cause myth of the Civil War.

From the 1880s onwards, numerous projects to erect statues to Confederate generals were undertaken. As Reconstruction was wound back, new ways of enforcing racial segregation were explored – resulting in extensive Jim Crow legislation. Public rallies, children’s activities, ceremonies honouring the bravery of Southern soldiers, renaming military bases after Confederate generals – and the growing white supremacist vigilante insurgency by the KKK – all these events helped to reintegrate the Confederate cause into the public consciousness.

The Lost Cause advocates have never tired of recycling an old falsehood – the myth of the loyal slave. While slave owning was downplayed by neo-Confederates, the pernicious distortion of the happy black slave has been promoted in books and films. Indeed, the Lost Cause contends that these ‘loyal slaves’ even took up arms for the Confederacy. Former US President Donald Trump recycled this myth in his frequent outbursts defending the old South.

That claim is interesting, because the Confederacy – even when the tide of the Civil War turned against the South – the ‘happy slaves’ were never armed by the ‘non racist’ slave owners. In fact, the Southern aristocratic class were constantly terrified of slave uprisings, escapes and rebellions. This unending anxiety was not confined to the Confederacy; throughout the slave owning colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, slave owners were terrified of the growing number of – and possible uprisings by – the African slaves.

The Emancipation proclamation only heightened the fears of the Confederate slave owners that the erstwhile slaves would escape to the North for freedom – which they did. Black persons were employed by the Confederate armies – as servants. Armed black slaves was the last thing the Confederacy wanted; a situation which undermines the claim that racism was not a factor in secession.

Are we being too harsh, with the benefit of hindsight, to judge our forebears and their actions? In our everyday world, that makes sense. However, Confederate statues were not constructed as public artefacts to commemorate history. They were erected as part of a toxic campaign of white nationalist resentment, not for any innocuous cause of states rights. By removing these memorials to white supremacy, we can see the racist history of American capitalism more clearly.

US Vice President Kamala Harris toured southeast Asian nations last month, and finished with a visit to Vietnam. Before she arrived in Vietnam, she gave a speech in Singapore attacking China for its allegedly ‘bullying’ behaviour. VP Harris has been promoting an Indo-Pacific military buildup; however, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chin stated that Hanoi, regardless of its maritime disputes with Beijing, would not join any anti-China military alliance.

Just to clarify – the United States is seeking the military cooperation of a nation it spent decades pulverising with weapons. Be that as it may, VP Harris placed flowers at a memorial in Hanoi, thinking it was erected in honour of former military aviator the late John McCain. It transpired that the site which VP Harris visited was built in honour of the Vietnamese defenders who shot down McCain, turning him over to civilian authorities.

VP Harris was not making a cultural faux pas – that can be forgiven. By honouring the cause for which McCain was fighting – involving the bombing of infrastructure in North Vietnam – Harris was contributed to the effort to rehabilitate the American war in Indochina. The site which she visited – the place where McCain was shot down and captured – was constructed to remind visitors of the criminal actions of American imperialism in Vietnam.

Harris, by singling out McCain to whom to pay homage, disrespected the Vietnamese who fought against the American empire. She demonstrated that the US is not sorry for its destructive impact on the people and ecology of Vietnam.

The US ruling class, since the defeat of its forces in Vietnam in 1975, has eagerly sought to reverse the main political consequence of that defeat – domestic mass opposition to imperialist wars overseas. Rather than accept the presence of anti-war hostility among the population, successive US administrations have launched PR campaigns to minimise the criminal actions of US foreign policy, and demonise domestic critics of the Vietnam war.

Rehabilitating the American war on Vietnam began in the late 60s with the Nixonian inspired ‘bringing the POW/MIAs home’ mythology, which I have examined in detail in previous articles (part one is here; part two published here). The putative concern for those killed in action was cynically manipulated to divert attention from American crimes in Indochina, and garner public support for the failing military operation in Vietnam.

While that issue reached its peak in the 1980s and 90s, it petered out by the 2000s. A new way had to be found to revitalise super-patriotic whitewashing of America’s war on Vietnam. The renewed campaign to rehabilitate the Vietnam war was initiated, not by conservative Republican politicians, but by ostensibly antiwar Democrat and former President Barack Obama.

In 2012, on Memorial Day, Obama took the opportunity to announce a multi pronged series of commemorative activities, intended to last over the next 13 years. Intended as a national activity to honour the allegedly ‘disrespected’ Vietnam veterans, the commemorative events are politically motivated to revive a ‘warrior spirit’ and to distort the main US responsibility for keeping the war going for decades. Obama maintained that 2012 marked 50 years – 1962 – since the first American combat troops were deployed to Vietnam.

Had the Obama administration bothered to consult the historical record, US intervention in Vietnam began, not in 1962, but covertly in the mid-1950s. As the French war effort to recolonise its former possessions in Indochina were failing, the Eisenhower administration stepped up its secretive activities to sabotage efforts by the Vietnamese to achieve independence. Undermining the intended 1956 democratic elections, the US created a false statelet called ‘South Vietnam’, and proceeded to maintain its artificial proxy through state violence.

The Saigon regime, utterly dependent on American support for its survival, tortured dissidents and used police-state methods against any and all opposition. The United States dropped thousands of tonnes of bombing ordnance in Indochina, used napalm and chemical weapons to obliterate villages, and attempted to sabotage civilian infrastructure.

Obama was elected to office for, among other things, opposition to overseas wars. The George W Bush administration stood thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the public. Obama and the Democrats exploited this popular opportunity to war to get elected. However, Obama’s record in office indicates that he advocated new wars, and dedicated himself to downplaying the crimes of US imperialism in Vietnam.

The antiwar protesters, combined with Vietnam veterans, launched a principled campaign against US military aggression, and have nothing for which to apologise.

Scientists in Egypt have made the discovery of a four-legged whale, an ancestral species and a transitional form between land-dwelling mammals and modern, purely aquatic whales.

The newly discovered ancestral whale, called Phiomicetus anubis, is named partly after Anubis, the canine-headed Egyptian god associated with death and the afterlife. Found in the Fayum depression, it is in line with similar ancestral semi-aquatic fossils found in other continents.

Whale evolution is amply documented with a strong evidentiary basis in the fossil record. Evolving from aquatic artiodactyls, palaeontologists have been examining the ancestral species of modern whales – and the related cetaceans – for decades. Protocetids are semiaquatic whales that inhabited a niche midway between their semi-terrestrial predecessors and the ocean-going whales.

Possessing a raptor-like feeding style, they were fearsome predators. Phiomicetus anubis weighed an estimated 600 kilograms, and was three metres in length. The Phiomicetus is not the only ancestral quadrupedal whale fossil that has been found.

Back in 2019, scientists in Peru discovered the fossil of an ancient four-legged whale with hooves – adapted for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. Located in marine sediments off the coast of Peru, that finding, of a 42.6 million years old creature, shed light on the transition from land to sea by the ancestors of today’s largest mammals.

Fossils which are morphologically transitional from land mammals to modern, purely aquatic, whales are not without precedent. In 2010, National Geographic magazine reported that whales are descended from aquatic, hoofed ancestors. Indohyus, an amphibious ancestor of modern whales, had hooves with slender legs, and would take to water in the course of feeding and avoiding danger.

Indohyus, now extinct, lived 50 million years ago in what is now Southern Asia. It is an early member of the cetacean stem, related to whales and dolphins. While Indohyus had legs resembling a small deer, it also possessed the dentition of early modern whales. It lived life in both terrestrial and aquatic milieus, it possessed an involucrum, an ancient cetacean trait – a thickened piece of bone which helps whales to hear underwater.

Do palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists expect to find a transitional form of half-salamander and half-giraffe? Of course not. Creationist commentators make ridiculous claims, imputing them to evolution. They have no understanding of phyla and existing morphological similarities.

Back in 1985, when I was learning high school biology and geology, creationist Michael Denton made the following statement about a purported difficulty in evolutionary biology – a hyperbolic claim repeated in different forms over the years:

to postulate a large number of entirely extinct hypothetical species starting from a small, relatively unspecialized land mammal and leading successively through an otter-like state, seal-like stage, sirenian-like stage and finally to a putative organism which could serve as the ancestor of the modern whales. Even from the hypothetical whale ancestor stage we need to postulate many hypothetical primitive whales to bridge the not inconsiderable gaps which separate the modern filter feeders (baleen whales) and the toothed whales.Denton (1985) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis Adler & Adler Publishers:Chevy Chase, MD. p. 174

Be careful what you wish for – because the quadrupedal and semi-aquatic ancestral whale is precisely the finding that renders Denton’s observation completely irrelevant. Back in 2007, former child actor now creationist preacher Kirk Cameron, mocked evolution by presenting a fictional hybrid animal consisting of half duck-like features, and half-crocodile – a crocoduck.

Once again – be careful what you wish for; Kirk should make the acquaintance of Anatosuchus, a species among numerous examples of what can be reasonably described as a ‘crocoduck.’ The purpose of the current article is not an exercise in egotistical chest-thumping. Learning about evolutionary biology and geology in high school – a Catholic school – was a rewarding and enriching experience. The curriculum was set by the Australian Academy of Science.

Science education, and the public understanding of science, are crucial areas which impact public policy. In this age of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become painfully obvious why more people should engage with scientists and achieve scientific literacy. Of course, no single individual can become a subject matter expert on every branch of science. However, we cannot afford to be indifferent to the developments of science – and not just because of the impact of technology.

Understanding new technology is important, but it is only one part of the full interplay between science and society. Science denialism is a serious hindrance to the public acceptance of policies based on scientific issues. Climate change denialism, while relatively new, is actually based on earlier denial of evolutionary biology, and anti-vaccination hostility for that matter. We have trained ourselves to be deniers – it is time to retrain our minds to accept evidence.

Alien astronauts building ancient megastructures, the lost continent of Atlantis, the Kensington Runestone and the Roswell UFO – all these are examples of pseudoarcheology. The History Channel and cable tv generally, under the pretext of promoting academic debate, has given credence to one or more of these claims, posing as a contrarian outsider challenging the ‘orthodox’ archeological establishment.

Playing the Galileo gambit – the courageous genius maverick waging a lonely fight against the dominant forces of orthodoxy – is a cynical ploy, one that has enabled misleading and dangerous pseudoscientific nonsense to gain credibility. It is impossible to refute each and every pseudoarcheological claim, however, we can make important observations here that will enable us to be skeptical next time outlandish claims about the past are made.

The Atlantis myth

The story of Atlantis, and the perpetual search for that alleged continent, is the mother lode of pseudoarcheological theories. Plato, the Ancient Greek philosopher, first elaborated an allegorical tale in his Socratic dialogues – Timaeus and Critias – about a lost paradise. Criticising the hubris, corruption and greed of his time, Plato was making a commentary regarding the sociopolitical issues of his time.

A lush paradise inhabited by people who were half-god and half-human, Plato employed this allegorical device about Atlantis as a cautionary tale regarding the cataclysmic downfall of hubristic civilisations – and the superiority of his theory of the ideal state. Atlantis was abundant in minerals, a utopian state that became morally bankrupt. It sank, 9000 years before Plato was writing this story in 360 BC, and remained a cautionary tale.

The idea of an ultimate catastrophe destroying a once-prosperous civilisation – the Armageddon in Christian theology – is a powerful literary device used by political writers, poets, and commentators throughout the ages. However, the question that lingered bedevilled writers since Plato’s time – was he referring to an actual place?

This question remained in the background for centuries, until the discovery of the Americas. Here was a previously continent, peopled by indigenous civilisations, with no connection to any of the monotheistic religions – and they developed independently for centuries. The existence of entire nations, developing their own science, ethics and technology shattered the exclusivity of the biblically-based worldview – there was no mention of indigenous Americans in the Bible.

Could Atlantis be another lost continent, inhabited by its own resident peoples, with its own science and technology? Interest in Atlantis pseudohistory erupted with the publication of books such as Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly, a populist American politician. Numerous publications followed, with an intermingling of speculation about a ‘race’ of Atlanteans, and their allegedly superior intelligence responsible for seeding the achievements of various non-white civilisations.

Ancient alien astronauts and megastructures

The notion that superior extraterrestrial intelligence – visiting aliens – built the majority of the world’s ancient megastructures has a long lineage. Erich von Danikin got the ball rolling in 1968 with his book Chariots of the Gods? Speculating that alien astronauts are responsible for constructing ancient monuments, such as the Egyptian Pyramids, alien astronaut responsibility for megastructures has made its way around the world.

Indeed, nonwhite civilisations have had to defend themselves from claims that extraterrestrial visitors seeded their nations and built their structures. Numerous popular culture movies – such as Stargate – have popularised notions of ancient Egypt, and the pyramids, being enmeshed with alien races, demons and curses. The Nazca Lines, a series of geoglyphs in Peru, have also been assigned to alien creativity.

What is the harm of these kinds of pseudoarcheological beliefs? So what if a person thinks aliens built the pyramids, or indigenous American structures?

The problem with this kind of thinking is the inherent racism in such an outlook, dismissing the possibility that indigenous civilisations could develop the mathematics, science and technology to construct sophisticated megastructures. Julien Benoit, writing in The Conversation magazine, states that misdirecting responsibility for great archeological structures in nonwhite civilisations to alien intelligence contains a component of dismissive racism.

African nations have extensive archeological records, and impressive monuments in their own right. While Egypt has the well-known pyramids, Africa also has the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, not to mention archeological sites in South Africa and Mali. The proponents of alien architects not only misunderstand the depth of knowledge and scientific skills in nonwhite civilisations, they go to great lengths vandalising such monuments in order to prove their outlandish theories.

The Egyptian pyramids have attracted the speculations of alien enthusiasts, occultists and Atlantis advocates. Pyramidology is a particularly fertile branch of pseudoarcheological obsession. Sir Isaac Newton, the noted English scientist, spent hours not only on physics, but also examining the geometry of the pyramids, looking for signs of the Christian God’s presence in its design. The pyramids as a product of some ‘lost superior wisdom’ has preoccupied Atlantis enthusiasts and alien advocates for decades.

The purpose here is not to denounce each and every instance of ancient alien speculation. It is to highlight that archeologists deal with unsolved mysteries every day; they are passionate about their work and driven by a profound sense of curiosity about the past. They explore numerous evidentiary avenues to bring the past back to life – alien astronauts and Atlantis theorising are dead-ends.

The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan has, correctly, prompted demands of the Australian government to increase the intake of Afghan refugees. Other capitalist states, such as Canada and Britain, are opening the doors to provide sanctuary for Afghans fleeing the misogynist Taliban.

Historical comparisons have been made between today’s outflow of Afghan refugees in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover, and the post-1975 Vietnamese refugees, the majority of whom were loyal to the former Saigon South Vietnam regime. Such comparisons, while giving us a sense of comfort that ‘we have been through this before’, can be misleading. For while the Australian government of Malcolm Fraser (1975-83) admitted Saigon loyalist Vietnamese refugees, Fraser was not the champion of human rights and compassion that he is made out to be today.

This crisis provides us with an opportunity to examine an underlying trend of refugee-intake stories in Australia and other Western nations. The political use of good-news refugee stories to bolster domestic propaganda purposes is nothing new – but it reveals the true nature of our colonial-settler mindset.

Back in 2012, Rachel Stevens, research fellow at the Australian Catholic University, wrote that:

Australia has rarely had a humane refugee policy and the idea that the Fraser government compassionately welcomed Vietnamese asylum seekers is amiss.

Our ostensibly generous attitude towards selected refugee groups has always hidden ulterior motives. Since the end of World War 2, the United States applied the label of refugee to those fleeing from Eastern European nations and Soviet Union. Numerous white supremacist and Nazi collaborator groups – Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians and so on – were rebranded as refugees escaping Communist persecution. Their wartime crimes were swept under the carpet, and their skills in recruiting and fighting for the anticommunist cause were utilised by the US in the new Cold War.

Right wing communities, residing outside their country of origin, were in a practical and de facto alliance with US political elites. They became the politically acceptable refugees, and their stories were harnessed to the Cold War objectives of US foreign policy. These fascist collaborators became repurposed as ‘freedom fighters’, while their ideological similarities to Nazism and white supremacist ideology were downplayed.

Weaponising refugee and immigrant stories, the US has deployed ultrarightist and ethnonationalist communities as ideological battering rams against the USSR and officially-designated ‘enemy’ nations abroad. The Saigon loyalists, while not Eastern European, fit into this policy of the selective application of sympathy. Used as weapons to install a fanatical right wing regime – a regime that tortured dissidents and committed horrific human rights abuses – the imperialist nations then applied the label ‘refugee’ to this community of right wing exiles.

So why did Fraser provide sanctuary for the Saigon loyalist Vietnamese? Australian big capital was orienting towards business with the emerging markets in the Asia Pacific. Former Australian PM Gough Whitlam had abolished the White Australia policy, and opened direct relations with Beijing. Fraser, continuing this trend, demonstrated Australia’s willingness to abandon its racist past and accept Asian immigrants as equal citizens in a multiethnic Australia.

With the fall of Saigon, the outflow of refugees increased, and the Fraser government responded to this crisis with a combination of opportunism and cynicism. Whipping up hysteria around the ‘boat people’, it was Fraser who set the stage for increased anti-refugee paranoia. Denouncing boat arrivals as ‘queue jumpers’, the Fraser government was at pains to reassure xenophobic anxieties about Asian immigrants ‘not fitting in.’

By 1981, 53 refugee boats arrived in Australia, bringing with them a grand total of 2100 people – hardly a tsunami of unauthorised arrivals. The rhetoric used by Fraser government ministers was very similar to the tropes recycled today – that of unscrupulous operators bringing economic migrants to Australia, seeking a better life and thus not ‘real’ refugees. In fact, Fraser’s approach seems generous by today’s standards precisely because Canberra has moved even further to the far right on the question of refugees. Today’s inhumane compulsory detention of asylum seekers has its origins in the Fraser years.

Our refugee intake should be based on humanitarian concerns, and not narrow ideological interests. We must remember the time that Peter Dutton, Home Affairs minister in 2018, suggested the fast tracking of refugee visas for white South African farmers, based on reports of persecution.

Yes, there is a moral obligation to take Afghan refugees. That ethical obligation did not begin with the victory of the Taliban. Imperialist nations had the opportunity to take Afghan refugees since 2001 – ethnic minorities in Afghanistan have been persecuted for every year of the US/NATO war on that nation. Australian authorities ignored their moral obligations to refugees for the duration of that war, and only invoke sympathy for asylum seekers in the aftermath of the military defeat of the imperial project.

Afghanistan has witnessed the swift victory of the Taliban insurgency, and the complete disintegration of the US-backed Afghan government. The former President, Ashraf Ghani, and his colleagues have fled the country. While the situation remains in flux, it is possible to examine the defeat of the US and UK military forces, after nearly twenty years of warfare in Afghanistan.

The evacuation of the US embassy in Kabul – which US authorities are rebranding as reducing its functions to a ‘core presence’ – is an indication of the staggering defeat of US forces and its Afghan proxies. Highly reminiscent of the chaotic evacuation of US embassy personnel from Saigon in 1975, the fall of Kabul, and the disintegration of the Afghan security forces, occurred much faster than predicted by US intelligence.

The ease with which the American-supported Kabul regime was defeated, and the ousting of former President Ashraf Ghani, points to the failure of American state-building and the fragile nature of the US occupation.

The Kabul government, a collection of anti-Taliban fundamentalists, Tajik and Uzbek warlords, and pro-American Pashtun nationals, turned into a kleptocratic elite unable to meet the needs of the majority of Afghans. Foreign Policy magazine, back in 2014, noted that Afghanistan under the US/NATO occupation, had become the world’s most sophisticated kleptocracy.

There is no pleasure to be derived from a victory for the misogynistic Taliban insurgency – Afghan civilians are fleeing from territories under their control. Religious terrorism, while disgraceful, was not introduced into Afghanistan by the Taliban. The practitioners of fundamentalist terrorism were the Afghan Mujahideen, supported by the US-Saudi-Pakistani axis. This was the largest and most expensive anti communist fundamentalist insurgency during the Cold War.

Please do not deploy the cynical claim of defending ‘women’s rights’ to provide an ethical spin on this 20-year military occupation. There was no concern for women’s rights as the US-sponsored Afghan Mujahideen, in the 1980s, steadily undermined the Afghan socialist government which implemented and extended women’s emancipation. From schooling for girls, higher education for women, financial independence and employment opportunities, the 1979-92 Afghan socialist regime empowered women in ways not seen since its demise.

The Mujahideen forces cultivated by the US – and its Saudi and Pakistani allies – are the socially regressive, misogynistic militias which were welcomed as ‘freedom fighters’ by US ruling circles in the 1980s. Rebranded as the ‘Northern Alliance’ in the mid-1990s, it is completely hypocritical for the United States to condemn the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan, and denounce the (allegedly) culturally regressive practices of Islam – all the while supporting and promoting those very same culturally regressive fundamentalist groups.

The Afghan Mujahideen, bankrolled by the US, provided the ideological breeding ground for the subsequent emergence of the ultrarightist Taliban. In the 1980s, then President Reagan welcomed the leaders of the Mujahideen – the latter involving a young Saudi Arabian fanatic called Osama Bin Laden – as ‘freedom fighters’, comparable to the founding fathers of the 1776 American war of independence.

The Bagram air base, speedily evacuated by US forces earlier in July, was a small implantation of ‘Americana’ in Afghanistan. It had car dealerships, swimming pools, fast-food outlets, internet connection – but it was not a state. The air base was actually built by the Soviets back in the 1950s. In fact, from that time onwards, the USSR maintained friendly and cooperative relations with its noncommunist neighbour to the south, and constructed numerous infrastructure building projects.

The Soviets contributed towards building a functioning society. The twenty-year US occupation of Afghanistan built a failed narco-trafficking state. Not only did the US-installed Kabul kleptocracy take advantage of the narcotics trade, the proceeds of this trafficking business were used in the 1980s by the CIA-backed Mujahideen forces. It is a Hollywood myth that the Soviets were building an ‘empire’ in Afghanistan – such myths assist the US is recycling tropes about regime change and ‘humanitarian intervention.’ Due to rightward shifts in Moscow in the late 1980s, the Soviets withdrew their forces.

Ironically, and perhaps understandably, it is Russia along with China and Iran, who are stepping up to provide stability in the new Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. In the late 80s and early 90s, the last Communist president of Afghanistan, the late Dr Mohammad Najibullah, proposed a national reconciliation policy, involving multiparty elections, including non-Communist politicians in any new government, and a reconciliation between the Pashtuns and various ethnic minorities. This proposal was never implemented – resigning in 1992, Najibullah was brutally murdered by the Taliban in 1996.

The American ‘war on terror’ – ostensibly begun to demolish Al Qaeda in Afghanistan – was portrayed as a just, legally-sanctioned response to the September 11 terrorist atrocity. This rationale stands exposed as utterly hypocritical. After the trillions of dollars spent on fighting in and occupying Afghanistan, it is time to dispense with deceitful claims about waging a ‘good war.’ Wars of imperial conquest always end in defeat.

US President Joe Biden has the opportunity to learn from this military defeat, and abandon ‘regime change’ policies that have led to so much death and destruction. As an initial step, it is necessary to hold the political and military leaders of the US (and their allies) accountable for the crimes they have committed in Afghanistan.