on account of women's day i received this two articles from A World to Win News Service. For those who are not subscribers to AWTWNS, i reproduce them here.
Vatican: ''Let little girls die''
The girl was nine years old. She had been hospitalised for stomach pains when it was discovered that she was pregnant with twins after having been raped by her stepfather, who is thought to have been abusing her since she was six.
Doctors determined that because she was so small (weighing 32 kilos), her uterus couldn’t hold even one baby, let alone two. They scheduled an abortion.
The Catholic Church, however, believes she should have been allowed to die. The archbishop in Brazil's northeast, where the little girl lives, tried to block the operation. When that failed, he excommunicated her mother and the doctors and the entire medical team that performed it.
This case is not just a matter of the particularities of Brazil's downtrodden northeast region, nor the country itself. On 7 March, a leading Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, replied to a storm of protest against the excommunication from rank and file Catholics and many others by upholding the Brazilian cleric's action as vital to the defence of Church doctrine. Excommunication means being excluded from the Church and religious services. It is a relatively rare form of punishment for challenging Catholic doctrine and spreading ''division and confusion among the faithful''. The rapist stepfather does not face excommunication for his actions. ''Rape'', said the cardinal, who is also in charge of Latin America, ''is less serious than abortion.'' ''It's a sad case, but the real problem'', he told the Italian daily La Stampa, ''is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and not be eliminated.' '
The real problem, of course, is just the opposite: both the pregnant child and the embryos might very well have died if she had not had an abortion, and this Vatican authority is arguing that that outcome would have been better than saving her life through an act that violated ''God's law''. So please don't tell us that the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion is based on respect for ''the sanctity of human life''. It's about religion and religious authority, especially the doctrine that defines females as vessels for childbearing. The Catholic Church's actions in this case are not very different from ''honour killings'' of ''unchaste'' women under Islam and other religions.
Further, the special circumstances in this case have somewhat obscured the broader issues. Brazilian law allows abortion only if the woman's life is in danger or if the pregnancy is the result of rape. What if this girl hadn't been carrying twins, and it was not known who the father was? The fact is that the simple and basic right to decide if and when they will have children is denied to most of the world's women, either by law or in fact.
Whatever divides them, proponents of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions have joined hands to keep women down. Nearly everywhere in today's world where there is motion around the right to abortion, it is motion backwards. Their insistence on this aspect of women's oppression is part of their more general devotion to patriarchy and the enslavement of women in the role of wife and mother instead of their emancipation as fully equal human beings. Further, as backward-looking as these religious movements may be, their battle is to shape the future – to preserve and strengthen, in the face of growing opposition and changes in material life, the dominant social and economic relations and institutions and ideas that are what chain the world's women – not biology.
The Catholic Church has unleashed its divisions against legal gains in the right to abortion, where they have been won, as well as divorce, homosexual rights and secularism in general, and to impose ''the sanctity of the family'' by force if need be. Nowhere is this more apparent than Spain, where the Church-sponsored movement is wrapped in the still-lingering odour of Generalissimo Francisco Franco's fascist regime, but the same is true to varying degrees in Italy, Poland, France and elsewhere. In the U.S. and other countries this battle has been championed by legions of evangelical Protestants, in a global political climate where the opposition to the legal right to abortion has become respectable even among those who claim to know better.
The Catholic Church's readiness to excommunicate a Catholic mother and medics who saved a child's life contrasts with another notorious excommunication affair: Pope Benedict XVI recently lifted a predecessor' s excommunication of a group of ultra-rightist priests sanctioned in 1970 for defying the Church reform known as Vatican Council II. Now Benedict is pretending to be surprised that one of the priests he welcomed back into the folds of the Mother Church, Richard Williamson, continues to deny the existence of Nazi gas chambers. We say ''pretend'' because Williamson's group, the Society of St. Pius X, was well-known for its Nazi sympathies and its opposition to any change in the Catholic doctrine that all Jews should be held responsible for the death of Christ. Pope Benedict plans to visit Israel in May, thus demonstrating his ability to combine tolerance for anti-Semitism with support for Zionism in the service of higher interests – the defence of the unjust, intolerable and unnecessary world order.
The Pope, at least, seems very aware of the centrality of the oppression of women as a pillar of this order. He is not the only guardian of the world as it is, but he is one of the most influential and wily – a wolf in shepherd's clothing.
Women hold up half the sky – once more than a dream
Shortly after the Chinese revolution in 1949, new laws gave women the equal legal status and full rights denied to them in the days when the imperialists, their local capitalist allies and feudal landlords ruled the country. New laws put an end to child and arranged marriages, granted women the right to divorce and gave them the right to land so that they would no longer be the property of men in any way. The freeing of countless women from prostitution is another example of great changes brought about almost overnight.
But Mao Tsetung understood that the leap from formal equality under law to the complete emancipation of women from all that has oppressed them as an unequal sex would require protracted hard struggle – and that without it, the revolution could not go in the direction of overcoming all the birthmarks of oppression and exploitation left by the old society and would instead install capitalism. The revolution, as it developed and as women took part in creating a new society, would have to transform not only the traditional social and economic relations that oppressed women but also social institutions and people’s values and thinking. With the famous slogan "Women hold up half the sky", Mao and the Chinese revolutionaries proclaimed that there could be no emancipation for humanity without the participation and emancipation of half of society – its women.
Here we are reprinting excerpts from three books about women in revolutionary China that show the impressive steps toward the liberation of women in what was then one of the world's most backward countries. Such steps can only take place when the proletariat, the class whose own liberation requires the liberation of humanity from all forms of exploitation, holds state power. These accounts also show the powerful role women can play in driving forward that process. The reality of the achievements of socialist China give a glimpse of what can be accomplished in the future, when once again the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is established in one or more countries as part of the process of bringing into being communism, a world finally free of classes and class divisions and the institutions and thinking born of class society.
***
In the book Fanshen, A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Vintage Books, 1966) William Hinton wrote about the countryside in the early days of the Chinese revolution, when the old feudal domination, institutions and customs were first being overthrown. He described typical cases of wives being beaten for going to evening meetings of the Women's Association. The Association members would arrange meetings for all the women in the village and summon the husband or the father-in-law to defend himself publicly against the accusations made by the woman or the daughter-in- law. If he refused to answer they would often give him a beating to show him that things would be different from now on and that he had better not abuse the woman once he was alone with her. The women's committee would be present, ever-watchful and ready to intervene again if necessary. Hinton writes:
"Among those who were beaten was poor peasant Man-ts'ang's wife. When she came home from a Women's Association meeting, her husband beat her as a matter of course, shouting, 'I'll teach you to stay home. I'll mend your rascal ways.' But Man-ts'ang's wife surprised her lord and master. Instead of staying home thereafter as a dutiful chattel, she went the very next day to the secretary of the Women's Association, militiamen Ta-hung's wife, and registered a complaint against her husband. After, in a discussion with the members of the executive committee, the secretary called a meeting of the women of the whole village. At least a third, perhaps even half of them, showed up. In front of this unprecedented gathering of determined women a demand was made that Man-ts'ang explain his actions. Man-ts'ang, arrogant and unbowed, readily complied: He said that he beat his wife because she went to meetings and 'the only reason women go to meetings is to gain a free hand for flirtation and seduction'.
This remark aroused a furious protest from the women assembled before him. Words soon led to deeds. They rushed at him from all sides, knocked him down, kicked him, tore his clothes, scratched his face, pulled his hair and pummelled him until he could no longer breathe.
"'Beat her, will you? Beat her, and slander us all, will you? Well, rape your mother. Maybe this will teach you.'
"'Stop, I'll never beat her again,' gasped the panic-stricken husband who was on the verge of fainting under their blows.
"They stopped, let him up, and sent him home with a warning – let him so much us lay a finger on his wife again and he would receive more of the same 'cure'.
"From that day onward Man-ts'ang never dared beat his wife and from that day onwards his wife became known to the whole village by her maiden name, Ch'eng Ai-lien, instead of simply by the title of Man ts'ang's wife, as had been the custom since time began."
***
The Great Leap Forward launched in 1958 brought women out of the household and into the swirl of the battle to create a new society in production, politics, culture and other fronts. The People’s Communes established as collective forms of ownership and governance in the countryside brought community dining rooms, nurseries, cooperative home repair and other things that not only provided for the peasants’ welfare but also began to free women from the confines of the family by providing collective solutions for social needs that formally rested on women’s shoulders alone. This made it easier for them to take part in the start-up of new factories and in irrigation projects, and to play a greater role in politics and other spheres.
This process was resisted by those in the Communist Party who wanted to halt the revolution with the modernisation of China and develop capitalism, a society in which the formal equality of all individuals hides real inequality, oppression and exploitation. Instead of being a bastion for the worldwide struggle for communism, they wanted to sell the country and its people to the world capitalist system.
That's why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a great struggle of countless millions of people to take a further and bigger leap down the socialist road. The struggle between the two roads in the party and in Chinese society went on for a decade. Ultimately, after Mao's death in 1976, the ''capitalist roaders in the party'' Mao had warned about were able to carry out a military coup, arrest the revolutionary party leadership and begin to make China what it is today – an enormous source of profit for globalised capitalism, and once again a place where the needs of humanity count for nothing, and a special hell for girls and women.
The book Some of Us, Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (edited by Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng and Bai Di; Rugers University Press, 2001) offers accounts by individual Chinese women (who are now living and teaching in the U.S.) of memories of their participation in the Cultural Revolution and their experience as "educated youth" who went down to the countryside to work with the peasants. In general they regard that period as very positive and express no regrets – a refutation of what one editor calls the current "dark age narrative" of the Cultural Revolution and the "Mao craze". The editors and authors point out that memories of the Mao era in China are necessarily diverse, depending on class outlook and social context. The views of well-known "suffering memoirs" are hotly contested by these now-older "youth without regrets", educated youth who recount how they went from the urban environment to work with the peasants and help overcome the huge economic, social and intellectual gap between the cities and countryside.
In this book, they demand to know, "Whose experience and whose memories count as history"? While they have their own criticisms, they insist that the profound social changes for women and subsequent contradictions that were brought about by the revolution and Mao's gender equality policies and attempts to break down the disparity between rural and urban conditions require exploration. While in school, they felt no stigma as females. These young women eagerly took up their role in the revolutionary ferment. One of the writers remarks that for a young woman to be trained as a cheerleader in the West should be considered a form of ideological brainwashing in terms of a woman's position in society and exclaims how lucky she feels to have been "brainwashed to become a revolutionary" instead.
In this excerpt from Some of Us, Naiha Zhang describes the close bonds she formed with two peasant women her age and how she felt honoured to be able to work in the countryside. She emphasises the "can-do" atmosphere in which women were encouraged to play an active and often leadership role – and did.
"Both Guirong and Lifeng stood out among their peers. Guirong, a year older than I, was the head of the Brigade’s Women’s Federation. Lifeng, a year younger, was head of her village’s women’s team. Both were skilled at farm and needlework. Guirong looked and frail but was known for the farming skills she learned from her uncle, a master farmer. To watch her thin out sorghum seedlings was a treat. In her hands, the long-handled hoe moved with high efficiency and accuracy, a few agile and neat strokes would clear out a seedling. There was never a wasted or redundant move. She was equally adept at sorghum harvesting, another farm task that sets farmers apart in terms of their skills. She was quick, yet extraordinarily calm and graceful, leaving behind small bundles of sorghum in the exact same shapes and intervals, making a well-patterned design if viewed from the edge of the field…
"We often said to one another that there must have been some kind of lot or luck that brought us and kept us together. After a year at the brigade’s experimental station, we were transferred to the brigade’s small orchard, with me in charge. The orchard was located on a hillside next to Guirong's village, with a two-room earthen house overlooking rows of little Chinese pear-leafed crab-apple trees. We had three oxen and an old-style cart with wooden wheels. We grew short crops such as beans and vegetables in between the small fruit trees. After working at the brigade orchard for a year, the commune wanted to establish an agricultural experimental farm on the site of the commune, with me as its head. I told the commune leaders that I wanted Guirong and Lifeng to go with me, and they happily agreed. We remained together along with a dozen other people–farmers from various brigades and a few local zhiqing (urban youth who went to the countryside) – until I left the countryside to attend university three years later in 1977...
"Together, the three of us did all kinds of work–one of the most strenuous was throwing up mud and trowelling the roof of a house… All this may suggest we had a hard time. Yes, we encountered many difficulties and endured hardships, but, all in all, we were happy. At that time, all organizations or projects had to be self-reliant. We had to support ourselves before we could have money to do experiments or other tasks. We were proud that, as a result of our efforts, both the brigade orchard and the commune experimental farm were doing well economically. .. We studied together in the evenings. Guirong picked up books I had. Lifeng, who had very little schooling, began to learn to read and write. She had a little notebook with her and often took it out to review the words in it when she had a chance. We had shared dreams and aspirations and we had lived together like I would with my zhiqing friends. But we were all aware, even though we did not talk about it, that our final destinies would diverge because of the fact that I was from the city and they were from the countryside… I left Momoge in January 1977 with nostalgia and a sense of guilt. The experimental farm was dismantled at the end of 1977."
***
Claudie Broyelle visited China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution with a group of French women activists intrigued by the difficult and untidy struggle for women’s liberation in China. They heard many stories from women about how they came out of the traditional roles that women play in the home and as child rearers, to learn to read, to grapple with intellectual ideas and to play their full role in transforming society. In her book Women’s Liberation in China (Harvester Press, 1977), she writes about what she along with other women experienced in the ChaoYan rural area:
"Inside the factory there was a feeling of solidarity, dynamism and dedication. It was quite common to see women workers staying on after their day's work to finish a job, or to practice a difficult technique. Of course we weren't forced to do that, and we weren't paid for the overtime. Must we get bonuses for making the revolution? And that was what it was about. Besides, our experiment didn't by any means please everybody. In 1961 some of the factory's managers, completely blinded by orders from the Peking town council, decided to 'rationalize' production. They decreed that there were too many of us working there and that we would have to stop making kettles since we were now a medical-apparatus factory. How contemptuous they were about our kettles! The 'reorganisation' would have meant a good number of us returning home. They thought they'd convince us by saying that the men would get a wage rise so that we could stay at home and look after our families. Wouldn't everything be simpler that way? But these plans encountered spirited resistance from the women, and they declared: 'We won't go back to our cooking, we won't give up our jobs!' Life in the factory became very tense. There was a desperate struggle between that faction of the management who wanted the factory to be run for immediate profit and who, above all, didn't want the women workers to liberate themselves, and the large majority of women workers who wanted to continue on their chosen path.
"This struggle was fought in full awareness of what it was all about. We understood what was at stake. In most cases our husbands and the other men supported us. That can easily be explained. What happened in Chao Yan wasn't an isolated incident. In all the factories a reactionary offensive arranged by Liu Shao-chi aimed either to re-establish capitalist norms of production, or to prevent their overthrow by the masses. This explains why the men, who were also having to confront the bourgeois offensive, understood and generally backed up the women's resistance. Since many of us were out of work, we got no pay. But it didn't matter. If we didn't have any work, we would make some for ourselves! If we got no wages, we would hang on by helping one another! We asked other factories to give us work that we would then do in 'our factory'. Some women workers would bring scrap to the factory (bricks, sheet metal and so on) and we salvaged and cleaned it for recycling. The women's work was useful, even if it wasn't 'profitable' , and we proved it. A few women, only about fifteen of us, were unable to go through with it. They either went to work in large factories or returned home. During the Cultural Revolution we came to understand even more clearly the real nature of this reactionary policy. We led campaigns to denounce the method of so-called 'rationalization' .
"Most of those who had supported Liu Shao-chi's line discovered the interests they had really been serving. They are now working side by side with us. Almost all the women who had left the factory have come back to work here. Recently the women workers at this factory have perfected a process for the manufacture of silicon. Previously the workers here were all former housewives and generally quite old, between forty and fifty. Now we also have some young school-leavers, who share their knowledge with the older workers, at the same time learning from them the qualities of revolutionary persistence and proletarian resilience. In this neighbourhood virtually none of the women stays home, only the women who are too old or who are in bad health – but even for them life has changed. They help one another and take on a few domestic chores to relieve the ones who have jobs away from home; they organize the political and cultural life of the district; they aren't as isolated as before. This transformation is the result of the move by thousands of women into productive and social activities. As for us, we are wage-earners, and it's important that we have won our economic independence. But it must be understood that it is still more important for us to stand four-square in the world, to be concerned about communal affairs rather than to care only about family problems. We have used production as a weapon to liberate ourselves, to serve the Chinese people and world revolution better."
The conditions for women today, whether in developed capitalist society or in the third world, remain grounded in oppression, taking different forms in different places. Capitalism has only updated this oppression with modern forms through super-exploitation in a globalised economy where women earn $2 a day in factories spread throughout the four corners of the globe. Women are still raped, killed are become prizes of war. Sex slavery of women and children has become a worldwide phenomenon. And everywhere women are evaluated in terms of their usefulness to men as mothers, wives and for sexual gratification. The liberation of women can only be attained through revolutionary transformation of the world and all of humanity, with the emancipation of women as one cornerstone of this emancipation.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
IMPERIALIST CRISIS AND MAOIST ALTERNATIVE
an invitation to step off track
all india symposium
under the aegis of
STRUGGLE INDIA
IMPERIALIST CRISIS AND MAOIST ALTERNATIVE
C.Achutha Menon Hall (near ERNAKULAM public library)
from 10 A.M TO 6 P.M ON 22ND FEBRUARY 2009
Presentations
PROF:SUKHENDU SARKAR (KOLKOTA, STRUGGLE INDIA)
N. VENUGOPAL (HYDERABAD, EDITOR, VEEKSHANAM)
K. SIVASUNDAR (BANGALORE, FREELANCE JOURNALIST)
M.N. RAVUNNI (PORATTOM)
Interventions
K.P. SETHUNATH
MOHAMMED IRSHAD
organisers of the symposium in kerala: porattom
for details contact: 09249713184
all india symposium
under the aegis of
STRUGGLE INDIA
IMPERIALIST CRISIS AND MAOIST ALTERNATIVE
C.Achutha Menon Hall (near ERNAKULAM public library)
from 10 A.M TO 6 P.M ON 22ND FEBRUARY 2009
Presentations
PROF:SUKHENDU SARKAR (KOLKOTA, STRUGGLE INDIA)
N. VENUGOPAL (HYDERABAD, EDITOR, VEEKSHANAM)
K. SIVASUNDAR (BANGALORE, FREELANCE JOURNALIST)
M.N. RAVUNNI (PORATTOM)
Interventions
K.P. SETHUNATH
MOHAMMED IRSHAD
organisers of the symposium in kerala: porattom
for details contact: 09249713184
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Red Block, Italy: Against threats to "identify and punish demonstrators"
The following is excerpted from the Web blog of Red Block, a revolutionary youth organisation in Italy. (www.redblock- it.blogspot. com)
Students from La Sapienza University in Rome challenged the president of the Chamber Gianfranco Fini as he was speaking 21 January. [Fini, a so-called "postfascist" – the self-identified successors to Benito Mussolini – is a leading member of the rightist government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and president of the lower house of parliament.] Since then, from right to left, all the "palace parties" [past and present members of governing parliamentary coalitions] have expressed their solidarity with this neo-fascist, and no spokesperson for the government or the centre parties has so much as made any public reference to Fini's threat on that occasion to "identify and punish” those demonstrators.
Punish them for what?
It's not that we're surprised that guard dogs for the bourgeoisie and representatives of the PD [Democratic Party – one of the main currents that came out of the non-revolutionary Communist Party that had been a pillar of the system in Italy for decades] have once again called for repression.. .
Nevertheless, it's necessary and important to denounce this witch-hunt atmosphere we're forced to breathe in Italy, where the state of the bourgeois imperialists and modern fascists does not hesitate to repress any form of dissent, and in the name of "security" foment racism and intolerance [against immigrants] – and whatever other manure that encourages the proliferation of neo-fascist and Nazi groups that are guilty of committing assaults, stabbings, etc. While criminalizing dissent, they remain silent about Israel's crimes, and flood us with propaganda according to which anyone who defends that state's victims is a terrorist.
This is why we express our maximum solidarity with the Roman students who have challenged this neofascist president of the Chamber, and particularly with the students who were identified by the police for the sole reason that they shouted "fascist" (which is the truth) at Fini.
Today we still live in a democratic state where freedom of expression and dissent are guaranteed, but we have no illusions about bourgeois democracy. We must constantly oppose any step the state may take toward modern fascism and strongly protest any attempt by the bourgeoisie to violate its own constitution in a reactionary direction.
Students from La Sapienza University in Rome challenged the president of the Chamber Gianfranco Fini as he was speaking 21 January. [Fini, a so-called "postfascist" – the self-identified successors to Benito Mussolini – is a leading member of the rightist government led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and president of the lower house of parliament.] Since then, from right to left, all the "palace parties" [past and present members of governing parliamentary coalitions] have expressed their solidarity with this neo-fascist, and no spokesperson for the government or the centre parties has so much as made any public reference to Fini's threat on that occasion to "identify and punish” those demonstrators.
Punish them for what?
It's not that we're surprised that guard dogs for the bourgeoisie and representatives of the PD [Democratic Party – one of the main currents that came out of the non-revolutionary Communist Party that had been a pillar of the system in Italy for decades] have once again called for repression.. .
Nevertheless, it's necessary and important to denounce this witch-hunt atmosphere we're forced to breathe in Italy, where the state of the bourgeois imperialists and modern fascists does not hesitate to repress any form of dissent, and in the name of "security" foment racism and intolerance [against immigrants] – and whatever other manure that encourages the proliferation of neo-fascist and Nazi groups that are guilty of committing assaults, stabbings, etc. While criminalizing dissent, they remain silent about Israel's crimes, and flood us with propaganda according to which anyone who defends that state's victims is a terrorist.
This is why we express our maximum solidarity with the Roman students who have challenged this neofascist president of the Chamber, and particularly with the students who were identified by the police for the sole reason that they shouted "fascist" (which is the truth) at Fini.
Today we still live in a democratic state where freedom of expression and dissent are guaranteed, but we have no illusions about bourgeois democracy. We must constantly oppose any step the state may take toward modern fascism and strongly protest any attempt by the bourgeoisie to violate its own constitution in a reactionary direction.
Fidel Castro: Contradictions between Obama’s politics and ethics
By Fidel Castro Ruz
February 4, 2009 -- A few days ago I referred to some of Obama’s ideas which point to his role in a system that denies every principle of justice.
Some throw their hands up in horror if anything is said to criticise the important personality, even if it is done with decency and respect. This is usually accompanied by subtle and not so subtle darts from those with the means to throw and transform them into the elements of media terror imposed on the peoples to sustain the unsustainable.
Every criticism I make is always construed as an attack, an accusation and other similar qualifiers reflecting callousness and discourtesy towards the person involved.
This time I’d rather address some questions of many that could be raised and that the new President of the United States should answer.
The following for example:
Whether or not he renounces his prerogative as President of the United States -- that his predecessors with few exceptions exercised as a right per se -- to order the assassination of a foreign political adversary usually coming from an underdeveloped country?
By any chance, has any of his many assistants ever informed him of the sinister actions carried out by former presidents from the days of Eisenhower through the years 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1967 against Cuba, including the mercenary Bay of Pigs [Giron] invasion, the terror campaigns, the introduction to our territory of a great amount of weapons and ammunition, and other similar actions?
It is not my intention to blame the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, for actions conducted by former presidents when he had not been born or when he was just a 6-year-old boy born in Hawaii to a black Moslem Kenyan father and a white Christian American mother. On the contrary, this is an exceptional merit of the US society and I am the first to admit it.
Is President Obama aware that for decades our country was the victim of deliberately introduced viruses and bacteria carrying diseases and plagues which affected people, animals and plants? Does he know that some of them like the hemorrhagic dengue fever later became a scourge that took the lives of thousands of children in Latin America and that other plagues impinge on the economy of the peoples of the Caribbean and the rest of the continent as collateral damages that have yet to be removed?
Does he know that several politically submissive Latin American countries, which are today embarrassed by all the damage they caused, also took part in such terrorist and economically harmful actions?
Why is our country the only one in the world enduring the imposition of a disrupting Cuban Adjustment Act which promotes trafficking in persons and other events that take the lives of people, mostly women and children?
Was it fair to impose on our people an economic blockade lasting almost 50 years?
Was it right to arbitrarily demand from the world to accept the extraterritorial application of this economic blockade which can only bring hunger and shortages to the people?
The United States cannot meet its vital needs without extracting large mineral resources from a great number of countries often limited in their exports of them by the intermediate process of refining. In general, when it is convenient to the interests of the empire, these products are traded by big transnational companies operating with Yankee capital.
Will that country renounce such privileges?
Would that renunciation be compatible with the developed capitalist system?
When Mr Obama promises to make large investments to be self-reliant in oil, despite the fact that his country is today the largest market in the world, what could the future be of those countries whose main revenues come from exporting that energy as many of them lack any other significant source of income?
After the crisis, once the competition and the fight over the markets and sources of employment is unleashed again, as it is usually the case among those who are better off and more efficient in the monopoly of that technology with sophisticated means of production, what possibilities will be left to the not developed countries dreaming of industrialisation?
The efficiency of the new vehicles manufactured by the auto industry notwithstanding, will they use the procedure demanded by the ecology to protect humanity from the increasing deterioration of the climate?
Will the blind philosophy of the market be able to replace that which only rationality could promote?
Obama promises to mint enormous amounts of money to foster the quest for technologies that can multiply the production of energy whose absence would paralyse modern societies.
He includes the nuclear power plants among the sources of energy he promises to hastily develop. These are already opposed by a high number of people due to the high risks of accidents with disastrous consequences for life, the atmosphere and human food. It is absolutely impossible to prevent the occurrence of some of these accidents.
Modern industry has already contaminated all the seas on the planet with the release of toxins, even without such accidental disasters.
Can the conciliation of such contradictory and antagonistic interests be rightly promised without transgressing ethics?
The US House of Representatives with a Democratic Party majority launched the extremely protectionist slogan of “buy US goods”, to please the unions that supported his campaign. This tramples on a basic principle of the World Trade Organization, since every nation in the world, be they big or small, dream of their development based on trading goods and services; however, only the big and rich among them have the privilege to survive to realise such dream.
The Republicans in the United States, discredited by the actions of the reckless Bush administration, soon reacted against the measures taken by Obama to please his allies in the unions. Thus is wasted the credit given by the voters to the new President of the United States.
As an old politician and fighter I commit no sin by modestly exposing these ideas.
As hundreds of news items from the political, scientific and technological circles are published every day, many questions could be raised for which there are not easy answers.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Genocide in Gaza
Following are the articles received from A World To Win News Service on the genocide of palastinians
Gaza: The political goals of both sides and possible outcomes of this war
12 January 2009. A World to Win News Service. Gaza suffered terrible civilian casualties during "stage one" of Israel's assault, the aerial bombardment of one of the world's most densely populated areas. As Israeli ground troops moved in for "stage two", the number of dead and injured grew enormously, as did the proportion of civilian casualties among the overall dead and wounded. Children under 16 and women accounted for 40 percent as of 11 January, according to Gaza medical personnel (Al Jazeera, BBC). Many families dare not move through the streets to take their dead to hospital.
Unbearable atrocities
As the Israeli army added tank, mortar and sniper fire to the weapons being used against Gaza, they began to commit atrocities even more horrendous than the initial bombings. Among them were:
• Three shellings of schools run by the UN being used as civilian shelters. Israeli mortars killed more than 40 people outside one school in the Jabalya refugee camp. The Israeli armed forces had been informed of the geographical coordinates of these schools. The head of the United Nations refugee relief agency (UNWRA) in Gaza refuted Israeli claims that the school had been used by Hamas, and called for a war crimes investigation. Israel responded by releasing a video purportedly showing Hamas fighters in the building, but later had to admit that the footage was from 2007, when the UNWRA was not using the school. (Haaretz, 9 January)
• The shelling of homes in Zeitun, near Gaza City. Israeli troops surrounded the area, building earthen barriers and keeping out rescue teams for four days. When paramedics eventually entered 7 January, in one destroyed home they found four half-dead children clinging to the corpses of their mothers in the rubble.
• In a warehouse, they found the bodies of about 25 members of the Samouni extended family, 10 adults and the rest children. Israeli troops had destroyed five of their homes, and then told them to take shelter in the unfinished building. Some of them were escorted there by Israeli soldiers. When a small group ventured outside the next day to bring in other relatives, they were hit by a tank shell. Then another shell or a missile hit the roof. When the survivors came out, carrying improvised white flags and shouting, "We have kids" in Hebrew, Israeli soldiers shot at them. The soldiers later gave some children first aid, but detained some adults in their firing positions to use as human shields. Not long after the rescue convoy led by the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived, Israeli gunfire forced them to flee without searching for more bodies (as many as 70 of the 100 family members may have been killed). Some injured were reportedly left behind.
• Israeli snipers have been filmed shooting at ambulances and medical personnel on foot trying to reach the wounded and dead lying in the streets. The World Health Organisation counted 21 medical workers killed as of 12 January. (UK Telegraph, 8 January; Independent, 10 January; UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
• The UN temporarily suspended aid conveys ferrying emergency supplies into Gaza when Israelis fired at several of them, killing three drivers, even though the Israeli army had cleared the trucks to enter at the border. A tank shell killed a forklift driver as he loaded supplies for one of these convoys. The International Committee of the Red Cross also suspended operations when Israeli troops fired on a convoy transferring intensive care patients to Egypt, again after the Israel army had cleared the vehicles to travel. (Independent, 9 January)
• Amnesty International accused the Israelis of "frequently" forcing civilians to remain in the ground floor of their homes while using the upper floors for sniper positions or as observation posts for extended periods. It also charged Hamas with firing at the invaders from homes, but refuted Israeli claims that this justifies attacking civilians: "The army is well aware gunmen usually leave the area after having fired and any reprisal attack against these homes will in most cases cause harm to civilians," an Amnesty director said.
• When asked on Al Jazeera (11 January) to confirm or deny reports that his government was using white phosphorous bombs in Gaza, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev implicitly confirmed them by arguing that his government was not using any weapons banned by international law, and that at any rate, Nato forces, too, are equipped with the substance and have plans to use it (as the U.S. did in Falluja, Iraq). While it is true that international conventions do not prohibit the use of these incendiary bombs for illumination or to produce smoke to hide troop movements, their use against humans is illegal, especially civilians, because they set fire to everything they touch until the phosphorous burns itself out. The tell-tale dazzling white plumes over Gaza City visible to the whole world on television verify what hospitals on the ground have reported: that the Israelis are burning human flesh.
These atrocities are not just the inadvertent side effects of Israel's targeting of Hamas, which is itself a crime, since Israel is admittedly trying to kill anyone associated in any way, armed or not, with the elected government of Gaza. They are an integral part of the strategy guiding Israel's war: the collective punishment of all of Gaza's people in order to weaken the influence of Hamas. Israel is trying to bend or break Hamas, but it is doing more than that. It is trying to teach the people of Gaza a lesson: submit or die. In this sense, Israel massacres in Gaza serve the same purpose as the year-and-a-half- long blockade before the massive assault began.
What goals these atrocities serve
All wars and armed actions are meant to achieve political goals. Israel's central and long-term aim is unchanged from what it pursued before this war: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." (Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, in 2002, quoted by professor Rashid Khalidin, International Herald Tribune, 9 January 2009)
At the same time, it's impossible to understand Israel's ferocity without taking the broader context into account. Many commentators have said that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak at first resisted pressure from others in his government to invade Gaza, although when he decided to do so, he went all out. ("Ending the war in Gaza," International Crisis Group, 5 January 2009) The New York Times wrote, "Barak never took Hamas as serious as many others did, considering it a relatively small strategic challenge whose rockets and arms build-up could be tolerated for a while to allow bigger problems to be handled... 'His eyes are focused on Iran,' noted Gilead Sher, who was Barak's chief of staff when he was prime minister a decade ago. 'Hamas and Hezbollah largely worry him in relation to Iran.'" (NYT, 9 January 2009).
By attacking the much weaker and geographically isolated Hamas, Israel wants to get revenge and prove its might after the humiliating setbacks it suffered at the hands of the Islamic movement Hezbollah in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. "For Israel, it was important to persuade not only Hamas but others in the region that the Islamist movement could not extract concessions through violence — that it was not Israel's equal." (International Crisis Group)
Israel did not live up to the terms of its ceasefire with Hamas by opening Gaza's borders for food and other supplies because it did not want the Islamic organisation to show Palestinians that it could rule despite Israeli opposition. When in retaliation, Hamas let a few rockets be fired, and after Hamas responded to an Israeli attack by firing more in December in what the Crisis Group calls an armed attempt at obtaining a stronger negotiating position, Israel felt it had to prove that it alone had a monopoly on the use of violence. This is the point no matter what it decides to do next — whether Tel Aviv accepts a ceasefire that might weaken Hamas but lets it survive, for fear that no one else could restrain Palestinians like this Islamic group, a solution that the ICG favours, or whether, as the ICG warns, "the dynamics of warfare ... push the undertaking much further."
Hamas has its own political goals in this war. It never even dreamed of defeating Israel militarily at this point. It may need only to survive to gain a political victory, bolstering its standing as the leadership of any possible Palestinian resistance. In the ICG's analysis, Israel faces the contradiction that the more they attack Hamas, the more they improve its political standing. This could lead Israel to stop short at some point, or it could lead it to fight for a more drastic solution.
Either way, from the start Israel's decision to assault Gaza was intended to draw civilian casualties. A former senior Israeli defence ministry advisor told the Crisis Group, "Israel decided to play the role of mad dog for the sake of future deterrence." The fact that these massacres are a part of a cold-blooded strategy makes them all the more criminal.
What the U.S. and Israel share
As the U.S. government arrogantly admits, it has acted to prevent a ceasefire until Israel's aims are accomplished. If and when this particular assault halts, the U.S and Israel will continue to pursue those aims in new forms. Israel's war aims are shared by the U.S., which also shares the infamy for the deaths inflicted with American weapons and munitions. These aims include the protection of the Jewish state, the U.S.'s only thoroughly reliable outpost in a region whose population seethes with indignation. They also include confronting Islamic fundamentalism and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a central necessity in the US crusade to more thoroughly impose its will on the region and achieve the incontestable world hegemony on the political and economic fronts that has so far eluded the world's only superpower.
The U.S.'s unabashed support for Israel means that it also shares the risks inherent in this war: that it "will inflame the region, and Iran will take advantage of this," as a Hamas leader told the ICG. Hamas is just as logical in its thinking as Israel, both in its acceptance of the existence of Israel under present world conditions and in its hopes for what Israel fears, a radical change in that world situation.
The Crisis Group, an international advisory organisation whose aim is to maintain the present world order, which inherently means the imperialist economic and political system that underlies it, cynically fears that civilian deaths may bring "political damage (regional polarisation and radicalisation, further discrediting of any 'moderates' or 'peace process'… What is required is a Lebanon-type diplomatic outcome."
Certainly any diplomatic outcome will be as squarely aimed at the Palestinian people as this war has been. Israel can't solve its "Palestinian problem" without wave after wave of oppression and cruelty. Therefore, no matter what the terms are, more "radicalisation" seems possible. What form that radicalisation may take — what political goals and ideology guide it — is a critical question for the future of the Palestinian people and the region. That also applies to the mounting radical anger we have seen in protests on every continent.
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The Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews and Israel's massacres of Palestinians
12 January 2009. A World to Win News Service. The following is excerpted from a longer article in AWTWS 31 January 2005, with new beginning and final paragraphs.
It's intolerable for the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews to be used as an argument to support the murders committed by Israel. Now, as in the past, these imperialist powers and their leaders have never had any special love for Jews, and still less have they ever really opposed any oppression.
The truth is that the U.S. and UK failed to lift a finger to stop that genocide, covered it up while it was happening, and after the war protected the men who did it.
When the Nazis came to power in the German elections of 1933, they aimed to drive the Jews out of Germany. But few countries let them in. In fact, only one welcomed them in unlimited numbers: the then socialist U.S.SR. In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference, a meeting of 32 countries held in France, to decide what to do about Jewish refugees. Although the U.S. and UK were admitting tens of thousands of a year, ten times more were applying for visas. The two main powers asked other countries to take them instead. France refused. The only country in attendance that agreed to increase its quotas was the Dominican Republic. The Nazi press saluted the conference as a sign that the world was coming around to its racial policies.
The SS Saint Louis departed Hamburg, Germany, in May 1939 bound for Cuba with 937 desperate refugees aboard, nearly all German Jews. Most had applied for visas to the U.S. Cuba had given them permission to land there while they waited for an answer. Just before they arrived, the U.S. pushed Cuba to change its mind and forbid the refugees to leave the ship. No other Latin American country would take them either. The ship sailed so close to American shores that passengers could see the lit streets of Miami at night. It waited offshore for a response to a cable sent to Roosevelt asking for humanitarian refuge. The U.S. government had already decided against them, but sent no reply. In June, the ship was forced to return to Europe, where many of its passengers ended up in Nazi death camps.
By 1941, when the Nazis officially forbade Jewish emigration, more than 80 percent of German Jews had already left. But the German invasion of Poland had brought Europe's main concentration of Jews under the control of the Third Reich. As the Nazi armies moved through Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union, rampaging through heavily Jewish areas in Byelorussia and Ukraine, many millions of Jews came under their boot. In January 1942, at a conference in a leafy green suburb of Berlin called Wansee, they adopted a plan for "the final solution": all Jews would be sent to camps in the east. Those too weak to work would be exterminated. The rest would be worked and starved to death. Those who survived would also be exterminated.
The Western Allies knew about this, but kept it secret. When the World Jewish Council in Geneva sent the U.S. State Department a cable detailing the Wansee plans, the government not only ignored it but also told a leading American rabbi who had also received the report to keep his mouth shut. The Vatican knew the full story from the beginning through Catholic sources, but despite requests from below, Pope Pius XII refused to make a public statement against killing Jews, whom the Church still officially considered "Christ killers". Today the Vatican is trying to have that pope declared a saint.
In the Warsaw ghetto, a Jewish fighting organisation led by communists and other resistance forces sent scouts through the sewers and beyond the walls where the Nazis had locked them in. They followed the trains that were taking families away by the thousands to an unknown destination. At the end of the line was Auschwitz, where eventually more than a million Jews, 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 18,000 Roma (Gypsies) and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were to perish, killed by poison gas, their bodies burned in ovens.
A representative of the pro-British Polish government overthrown by the Nazis was brought into the ghetto to hear their story. They described the camp and told him that the trains were carrying 10,000 Jews a day to their deaths from Warsaw alone. Although not particularly inclined toward Jews, he agreed to slip out of Poland and tell the British and American authorities, thinking that as a political ally they would listen to him. He was the kind of man who expected to meet with Churchill, and he had a long talk with Roosevelt. Nothing happened.
Auschwitz, like the other concentration camps, was fed its constant intake of Jewish lives and coal by rail starting in 1942. Without those railroad tracks, the death factory would have ground to a halt and the gas ovens grown cold. Why didn't the Allies bomb them?
Auschwitz was approaching its infernal climax. Poland was emptied of Jews. The trains brought 440,000 Hungarians, half of the country's Jewish population, to their deaths over the course of only a few weeks in May and June. The U.S. and Britain merely watched.
In August and September of that year, the U.S. Air Force staged bombing runs on an industrial complex less than five minutes by air away from the gas chambers. An Auschwitz survivor speaking in a recent BBC documentary bitterly recalls how she and other prisoners watched hundreds of warplanes pass over their heads. They said to each other, Why don't they bomb this place? Even if they kill many of us, that's the only chance any of us have to live.
October 1944 saw one of the known prisoner revolts at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners attacked the guards with axes and rocks. They used smuggled explosives to blow up a gas chamber and set a crematorium on fire. The Allies were considering airdropping guns on the camp. They never did.
In fact, the camps continued running without outside interference until 27 January 1945, when the Soviet Red Army arrived at its gates. They found about 7,000 survivors, all too weak to walk. The Nazis had taken another 58,000 with them on a death march as they fled to the west. They were determined that even if they were defeated, no Jews would remain alive.
The crimes of the U.S., however, did not stop on that date. Very few Nazi leaders and executioners were ever brought to justice for the simple reason that the U.S. protected them. Shortly after the war, the U.S. recruited many former leading Nazis as partners in their efforts against the Soviet Union.
The vicious Allied powers identified three million Germans as having committed crimes during the war. A million were tried. Eleven were sentenced to death. A few received short prison sentences. Most of the rest had to pay a fine or were briefly ineligible to hold public office. In 1951, almost all of them were amnestied. Big capitalists like Krupp whose factories had used concentration camp labour were given their fortunes back. The Nazi commandant at Auschwitz was hung. But of the 10,000 members of the elite Nazi SS who administered the murders there, only about 750 suffered even the slightest punishment.
As recently reaffirmed by the book U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis by Norman J. W. Goda, based on official American archives, thousands of Nazis and SS officers were brought to the U.S. where "they could be useful in countering communist leanings in immigrant communities, " as an Associated Press article put it. The Catholic Church and American military intelligence worked together to smuggle some of the most notorious Nazis out of Germany. In fact, Goda says, the CIA took a group of German officers who had been responsible for intelligence on the Eastern Front and used them as the core around which to build West Germany's future intelligence service, still at work today.
One big reason explaining the conduct of the U.S., UK, France and other Western powers during the war is this: If the truth about the extermination camps became known, public pressure to do something about it would have interfered with their freedom to set military priorities according to their overall war aims. They also believed, not without justification, that many Jews were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks emancipated the Jews in a country, Tsarist Russia, which had been a hellhole for them for centuries. They welcomed Jews into the revolutionary movement and the public life from which they were previously banned. In the course of World War 2, the Red Army saved the lives of 1.5 million of the 4 million Jews in German-occupied or invaded territory. (Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?)
If you want to know what the U.S.'s aims were, look at what came out of it when they won: America became the chief imperialist power, able to fatten on exploitation around the world. The UK, although taken down a peg from its former position, survived as a major power and became the U.S.'s chief partner. Germany and Japan, which had tried and failed to achieve the kind of global dominance the U.S. did achieve, had no choice but to become associate members in the U.S.-led crime syndicate. The U.S. and UK could not spare a single bomb to save Jewish lives because they had other aims. They protected Nazis after the war for the same kind of imperialist reasons.
Today, in one of history's most cruel ironies, the rulers of all the Western powers — today's representatives of the same monopoly capitalist ruling classes active or complicit in the genocide of Europe's Jews — use it to justify yet more murder: Israel's oppression and massacres of the Palestinian people. The U.S., in particular, with the support of all the other imperialist powers, has built up Israel as a key outpost in the enforcement of imperialist interests in the region, not because of supposed Jewish influence in public life but for the same reasons they allowed the Jewish genocide in the first place: imperialist interests.
Today's ruling reactionaries equate opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism in a cynical effort to cover up the real nature of Israel and the role it plays, which many Jews oppose. Israel does have a special relationship with Washington, as American politicians so often proclaim, because its citizens enjoy benefits from their country's services to the U.S., while people in other countries in the region reap misery from their country's subservience to it. But while equating Israel and Jewish people in general promotes Zionism, it also foments anti-Semitism, as if the reason for the crimes that fill most of humanity with revulsion were some supposedly inherent Jewish nature and not imperialism and its Zionist partners.
Some pro-Palestinian protestors in Europe have been carrying signs that cut to the heart of the matter: "Gaza = Warsaw ghetto". That's a correct position in the face of the efforts to use a genocide to justify massacres.
We shouldn't take events out of their historical context, like the promoters of Zionism do, and get lost in unscientific comparisons. But one profound lesson of the genocide of the Jews is the same as what we're seeing in Gaza and Palestine today: the imperialist system will produce horrors, again and again, in different forms and often beyond our imagination, until it is overthrown throughout the world. In building opposition to the crimes of today, we need to link this to ending a criminal system
Gaza: The political goals of both sides and possible outcomes of this war
12 January 2009. A World to Win News Service. Gaza suffered terrible civilian casualties during "stage one" of Israel's assault, the aerial bombardment of one of the world's most densely populated areas. As Israeli ground troops moved in for "stage two", the number of dead and injured grew enormously, as did the proportion of civilian casualties among the overall dead and wounded. Children under 16 and women accounted for 40 percent as of 11 January, according to Gaza medical personnel (Al Jazeera, BBC). Many families dare not move through the streets to take their dead to hospital.
Unbearable atrocities
As the Israeli army added tank, mortar and sniper fire to the weapons being used against Gaza, they began to commit atrocities even more horrendous than the initial bombings. Among them were:
• Three shellings of schools run by the UN being used as civilian shelters. Israeli mortars killed more than 40 people outside one school in the Jabalya refugee camp. The Israeli armed forces had been informed of the geographical coordinates of these schools. The head of the United Nations refugee relief agency (UNWRA) in Gaza refuted Israeli claims that the school had been used by Hamas, and called for a war crimes investigation. Israel responded by releasing a video purportedly showing Hamas fighters in the building, but later had to admit that the footage was from 2007, when the UNWRA was not using the school. (Haaretz, 9 January)
• The shelling of homes in Zeitun, near Gaza City. Israeli troops surrounded the area, building earthen barriers and keeping out rescue teams for four days. When paramedics eventually entered 7 January, in one destroyed home they found four half-dead children clinging to the corpses of their mothers in the rubble.
• In a warehouse, they found the bodies of about 25 members of the Samouni extended family, 10 adults and the rest children. Israeli troops had destroyed five of their homes, and then told them to take shelter in the unfinished building. Some of them were escorted there by Israeli soldiers. When a small group ventured outside the next day to bring in other relatives, they were hit by a tank shell. Then another shell or a missile hit the roof. When the survivors came out, carrying improvised white flags and shouting, "We have kids" in Hebrew, Israeli soldiers shot at them. The soldiers later gave some children first aid, but detained some adults in their firing positions to use as human shields. Not long after the rescue convoy led by the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived, Israeli gunfire forced them to flee without searching for more bodies (as many as 70 of the 100 family members may have been killed). Some injured were reportedly left behind.
• Israeli snipers have been filmed shooting at ambulances and medical personnel on foot trying to reach the wounded and dead lying in the streets. The World Health Organisation counted 21 medical workers killed as of 12 January. (UK Telegraph, 8 January; Independent, 10 January; UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
• The UN temporarily suspended aid conveys ferrying emergency supplies into Gaza when Israelis fired at several of them, killing three drivers, even though the Israeli army had cleared the trucks to enter at the border. A tank shell killed a forklift driver as he loaded supplies for one of these convoys. The International Committee of the Red Cross also suspended operations when Israeli troops fired on a convoy transferring intensive care patients to Egypt, again after the Israel army had cleared the vehicles to travel. (Independent, 9 January)
• Amnesty International accused the Israelis of "frequently" forcing civilians to remain in the ground floor of their homes while using the upper floors for sniper positions or as observation posts for extended periods. It also charged Hamas with firing at the invaders from homes, but refuted Israeli claims that this justifies attacking civilians: "The army is well aware gunmen usually leave the area after having fired and any reprisal attack against these homes will in most cases cause harm to civilians," an Amnesty director said.
• When asked on Al Jazeera (11 January) to confirm or deny reports that his government was using white phosphorous bombs in Gaza, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev implicitly confirmed them by arguing that his government was not using any weapons banned by international law, and that at any rate, Nato forces, too, are equipped with the substance and have plans to use it (as the U.S. did in Falluja, Iraq). While it is true that international conventions do not prohibit the use of these incendiary bombs for illumination or to produce smoke to hide troop movements, their use against humans is illegal, especially civilians, because they set fire to everything they touch until the phosphorous burns itself out. The tell-tale dazzling white plumes over Gaza City visible to the whole world on television verify what hospitals on the ground have reported: that the Israelis are burning human flesh.
These atrocities are not just the inadvertent side effects of Israel's targeting of Hamas, which is itself a crime, since Israel is admittedly trying to kill anyone associated in any way, armed or not, with the elected government of Gaza. They are an integral part of the strategy guiding Israel's war: the collective punishment of all of Gaza's people in order to weaken the influence of Hamas. Israel is trying to bend or break Hamas, but it is doing more than that. It is trying to teach the people of Gaza a lesson: submit or die. In this sense, Israel massacres in Gaza serve the same purpose as the year-and-a-half- long blockade before the massive assault began.
What goals these atrocities serve
All wars and armed actions are meant to achieve political goals. Israel's central and long-term aim is unchanged from what it pursued before this war: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." (Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, in 2002, quoted by professor Rashid Khalidin, International Herald Tribune, 9 January 2009)
At the same time, it's impossible to understand Israel's ferocity without taking the broader context into account. Many commentators have said that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak at first resisted pressure from others in his government to invade Gaza, although when he decided to do so, he went all out. ("Ending the war in Gaza," International Crisis Group, 5 January 2009) The New York Times wrote, "Barak never took Hamas as serious as many others did, considering it a relatively small strategic challenge whose rockets and arms build-up could be tolerated for a while to allow bigger problems to be handled... 'His eyes are focused on Iran,' noted Gilead Sher, who was Barak's chief of staff when he was prime minister a decade ago. 'Hamas and Hezbollah largely worry him in relation to Iran.'" (NYT, 9 January 2009).
By attacking the much weaker and geographically isolated Hamas, Israel wants to get revenge and prove its might after the humiliating setbacks it suffered at the hands of the Islamic movement Hezbollah in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. "For Israel, it was important to persuade not only Hamas but others in the region that the Islamist movement could not extract concessions through violence — that it was not Israel's equal." (International Crisis Group)
Israel did not live up to the terms of its ceasefire with Hamas by opening Gaza's borders for food and other supplies because it did not want the Islamic organisation to show Palestinians that it could rule despite Israeli opposition. When in retaliation, Hamas let a few rockets be fired, and after Hamas responded to an Israeli attack by firing more in December in what the Crisis Group calls an armed attempt at obtaining a stronger negotiating position, Israel felt it had to prove that it alone had a monopoly on the use of violence. This is the point no matter what it decides to do next — whether Tel Aviv accepts a ceasefire that might weaken Hamas but lets it survive, for fear that no one else could restrain Palestinians like this Islamic group, a solution that the ICG favours, or whether, as the ICG warns, "the dynamics of warfare ... push the undertaking much further."
Hamas has its own political goals in this war. It never even dreamed of defeating Israel militarily at this point. It may need only to survive to gain a political victory, bolstering its standing as the leadership of any possible Palestinian resistance. In the ICG's analysis, Israel faces the contradiction that the more they attack Hamas, the more they improve its political standing. This could lead Israel to stop short at some point, or it could lead it to fight for a more drastic solution.
Either way, from the start Israel's decision to assault Gaza was intended to draw civilian casualties. A former senior Israeli defence ministry advisor told the Crisis Group, "Israel decided to play the role of mad dog for the sake of future deterrence." The fact that these massacres are a part of a cold-blooded strategy makes them all the more criminal.
What the U.S. and Israel share
As the U.S. government arrogantly admits, it has acted to prevent a ceasefire until Israel's aims are accomplished. If and when this particular assault halts, the U.S and Israel will continue to pursue those aims in new forms. Israel's war aims are shared by the U.S., which also shares the infamy for the deaths inflicted with American weapons and munitions. These aims include the protection of the Jewish state, the U.S.'s only thoroughly reliable outpost in a region whose population seethes with indignation. They also include confronting Islamic fundamentalism and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a central necessity in the US crusade to more thoroughly impose its will on the region and achieve the incontestable world hegemony on the political and economic fronts that has so far eluded the world's only superpower.
The U.S.'s unabashed support for Israel means that it also shares the risks inherent in this war: that it "will inflame the region, and Iran will take advantage of this," as a Hamas leader told the ICG. Hamas is just as logical in its thinking as Israel, both in its acceptance of the existence of Israel under present world conditions and in its hopes for what Israel fears, a radical change in that world situation.
The Crisis Group, an international advisory organisation whose aim is to maintain the present world order, which inherently means the imperialist economic and political system that underlies it, cynically fears that civilian deaths may bring "political damage (regional polarisation and radicalisation, further discrediting of any 'moderates' or 'peace process'… What is required is a Lebanon-type diplomatic outcome."
Certainly any diplomatic outcome will be as squarely aimed at the Palestinian people as this war has been. Israel can't solve its "Palestinian problem" without wave after wave of oppression and cruelty. Therefore, no matter what the terms are, more "radicalisation" seems possible. What form that radicalisation may take — what political goals and ideology guide it — is a critical question for the future of the Palestinian people and the region. That also applies to the mounting radical anger we have seen in protests on every continent.
- end item-
The Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews and Israel's massacres of Palestinians
12 January 2009. A World to Win News Service. The following is excerpted from a longer article in AWTWS 31 January 2005, with new beginning and final paragraphs.
It's intolerable for the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews to be used as an argument to support the murders committed by Israel. Now, as in the past, these imperialist powers and their leaders have never had any special love for Jews, and still less have they ever really opposed any oppression.
The truth is that the U.S. and UK failed to lift a finger to stop that genocide, covered it up while it was happening, and after the war protected the men who did it.
When the Nazis came to power in the German elections of 1933, they aimed to drive the Jews out of Germany. But few countries let them in. In fact, only one welcomed them in unlimited numbers: the then socialist U.S.SR. In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the Evian Conference, a meeting of 32 countries held in France, to decide what to do about Jewish refugees. Although the U.S. and UK were admitting tens of thousands of a year, ten times more were applying for visas. The two main powers asked other countries to take them instead. France refused. The only country in attendance that agreed to increase its quotas was the Dominican Republic. The Nazi press saluted the conference as a sign that the world was coming around to its racial policies.
The SS Saint Louis departed Hamburg, Germany, in May 1939 bound for Cuba with 937 desperate refugees aboard, nearly all German Jews. Most had applied for visas to the U.S. Cuba had given them permission to land there while they waited for an answer. Just before they arrived, the U.S. pushed Cuba to change its mind and forbid the refugees to leave the ship. No other Latin American country would take them either. The ship sailed so close to American shores that passengers could see the lit streets of Miami at night. It waited offshore for a response to a cable sent to Roosevelt asking for humanitarian refuge. The U.S. government had already decided against them, but sent no reply. In June, the ship was forced to return to Europe, where many of its passengers ended up in Nazi death camps.
By 1941, when the Nazis officially forbade Jewish emigration, more than 80 percent of German Jews had already left. But the German invasion of Poland had brought Europe's main concentration of Jews under the control of the Third Reich. As the Nazi armies moved through Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union, rampaging through heavily Jewish areas in Byelorussia and Ukraine, many millions of Jews came under their boot. In January 1942, at a conference in a leafy green suburb of Berlin called Wansee, they adopted a plan for "the final solution": all Jews would be sent to camps in the east. Those too weak to work would be exterminated. The rest would be worked and starved to death. Those who survived would also be exterminated.
The Western Allies knew about this, but kept it secret. When the World Jewish Council in Geneva sent the U.S. State Department a cable detailing the Wansee plans, the government not only ignored it but also told a leading American rabbi who had also received the report to keep his mouth shut. The Vatican knew the full story from the beginning through Catholic sources, but despite requests from below, Pope Pius XII refused to make a public statement against killing Jews, whom the Church still officially considered "Christ killers". Today the Vatican is trying to have that pope declared a saint.
In the Warsaw ghetto, a Jewish fighting organisation led by communists and other resistance forces sent scouts through the sewers and beyond the walls where the Nazis had locked them in. They followed the trains that were taking families away by the thousands to an unknown destination. At the end of the line was Auschwitz, where eventually more than a million Jews, 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 18,000 Roma (Gypsies) and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were to perish, killed by poison gas, their bodies burned in ovens.
A representative of the pro-British Polish government overthrown by the Nazis was brought into the ghetto to hear their story. They described the camp and told him that the trains were carrying 10,000 Jews a day to their deaths from Warsaw alone. Although not particularly inclined toward Jews, he agreed to slip out of Poland and tell the British and American authorities, thinking that as a political ally they would listen to him. He was the kind of man who expected to meet with Churchill, and he had a long talk with Roosevelt. Nothing happened.
Auschwitz, like the other concentration camps, was fed its constant intake of Jewish lives and coal by rail starting in 1942. Without those railroad tracks, the death factory would have ground to a halt and the gas ovens grown cold. Why didn't the Allies bomb them?
Auschwitz was approaching its infernal climax. Poland was emptied of Jews. The trains brought 440,000 Hungarians, half of the country's Jewish population, to their deaths over the course of only a few weeks in May and June. The U.S. and Britain merely watched.
In August and September of that year, the U.S. Air Force staged bombing runs on an industrial complex less than five minutes by air away from the gas chambers. An Auschwitz survivor speaking in a recent BBC documentary bitterly recalls how she and other prisoners watched hundreds of warplanes pass over their heads. They said to each other, Why don't they bomb this place? Even if they kill many of us, that's the only chance any of us have to live.
October 1944 saw one of the known prisoner revolts at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners attacked the guards with axes and rocks. They used smuggled explosives to blow up a gas chamber and set a crematorium on fire. The Allies were considering airdropping guns on the camp. They never did.
In fact, the camps continued running without outside interference until 27 January 1945, when the Soviet Red Army arrived at its gates. They found about 7,000 survivors, all too weak to walk. The Nazis had taken another 58,000 with them on a death march as they fled to the west. They were determined that even if they were defeated, no Jews would remain alive.
The crimes of the U.S., however, did not stop on that date. Very few Nazi leaders and executioners were ever brought to justice for the simple reason that the U.S. protected them. Shortly after the war, the U.S. recruited many former leading Nazis as partners in their efforts against the Soviet Union.
The vicious Allied powers identified three million Germans as having committed crimes during the war. A million were tried. Eleven were sentenced to death. A few received short prison sentences. Most of the rest had to pay a fine or were briefly ineligible to hold public office. In 1951, almost all of them were amnestied. Big capitalists like Krupp whose factories had used concentration camp labour were given their fortunes back. The Nazi commandant at Auschwitz was hung. But of the 10,000 members of the elite Nazi SS who administered the murders there, only about 750 suffered even the slightest punishment.
As recently reaffirmed by the book U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis by Norman J. W. Goda, based on official American archives, thousands of Nazis and SS officers were brought to the U.S. where "they could be useful in countering communist leanings in immigrant communities, " as an Associated Press article put it. The Catholic Church and American military intelligence worked together to smuggle some of the most notorious Nazis out of Germany. In fact, Goda says, the CIA took a group of German officers who had been responsible for intelligence on the Eastern Front and used them as the core around which to build West Germany's future intelligence service, still at work today.
One big reason explaining the conduct of the U.S., UK, France and other Western powers during the war is this: If the truth about the extermination camps became known, public pressure to do something about it would have interfered with their freedom to set military priorities according to their overall war aims. They also believed, not without justification, that many Jews were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks emancipated the Jews in a country, Tsarist Russia, which had been a hellhole for them for centuries. They welcomed Jews into the revolutionary movement and the public life from which they were previously banned. In the course of World War 2, the Red Army saved the lives of 1.5 million of the 4 million Jews in German-occupied or invaded territory. (Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?)
If you want to know what the U.S.'s aims were, look at what came out of it when they won: America became the chief imperialist power, able to fatten on exploitation around the world. The UK, although taken down a peg from its former position, survived as a major power and became the U.S.'s chief partner. Germany and Japan, which had tried and failed to achieve the kind of global dominance the U.S. did achieve, had no choice but to become associate members in the U.S.-led crime syndicate. The U.S. and UK could not spare a single bomb to save Jewish lives because they had other aims. They protected Nazis after the war for the same kind of imperialist reasons.
Today, in one of history's most cruel ironies, the rulers of all the Western powers — today's representatives of the same monopoly capitalist ruling classes active or complicit in the genocide of Europe's Jews — use it to justify yet more murder: Israel's oppression and massacres of the Palestinian people. The U.S., in particular, with the support of all the other imperialist powers, has built up Israel as a key outpost in the enforcement of imperialist interests in the region, not because of supposed Jewish influence in public life but for the same reasons they allowed the Jewish genocide in the first place: imperialist interests.
Today's ruling reactionaries equate opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism in a cynical effort to cover up the real nature of Israel and the role it plays, which many Jews oppose. Israel does have a special relationship with Washington, as American politicians so often proclaim, because its citizens enjoy benefits from their country's services to the U.S., while people in other countries in the region reap misery from their country's subservience to it. But while equating Israel and Jewish people in general promotes Zionism, it also foments anti-Semitism, as if the reason for the crimes that fill most of humanity with revulsion were some supposedly inherent Jewish nature and not imperialism and its Zionist partners.
Some pro-Palestinian protestors in Europe have been carrying signs that cut to the heart of the matter: "Gaza = Warsaw ghetto". That's a correct position in the face of the efforts to use a genocide to justify massacres.
We shouldn't take events out of their historical context, like the promoters of Zionism do, and get lost in unscientific comparisons. But one profound lesson of the genocide of the Jews is the same as what we're seeing in Gaza and Palestine today: the imperialist system will produce horrors, again and again, in different forms and often beyond our imagination, until it is overthrown throughout the world. In building opposition to the crimes of today, we need to link this to ending a criminal system
Friday, January 2, 2009
50 YEARS OF CUBAN REVOLUTION
Yesterday world celebrated 50 years of Cuban revolution. On this occassion i post this article published in the website of Communist Party of Great Britian (ML)
New Year’s Day is a day for celebrating, not only as it is the dawn of a new calendar year but also as it marks the triumphant day on which the Cuban people ousted the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, so ridding themselves of the shackles of capitalism and setting out on the road toward socialism.
This New Year, 2009, is especially significant as it will be the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. No doubt there will be big celebrations across Cuba, and these are bound to be mirrored around the world by the masses of exploited and oppressed people who recognise the huge achievements brought about by the Cuban revolution and who hold dear the shining example of the Cuban people, who have demonstrated for half a century what working people are capable of when they take power.
A Spanish colony
Cuba spent some 400 years as a Spanish colony, having been ‘discovered’ by Columbus in 1492. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a fierce anti-colonial struggle developed, lead by José Martà and the Cuban Revolutionary Party.
By 1897, the success of the independence movement seemed within reach, with the Spanish prime minister making the following statement: “After having sent 200,000 men and shed so much blood, we don’t own any more land on the island than what our soldiers are stepping on.” (Quoted in Prof J Cantón Navarro, History of Cuba)
However, just a few months later, in February 1898, the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana Bay and drew the US into a war with the Spanish. It is widely believed that the attack on the battleship was actually instigated by the US in order to pull Spain into a war for the ‘ownership’ of Cuba.
The US were the victors of that war, and so, in 1899, dominion over Cuba was transferred to the US, which granted nominal independence to the island in 1902, but retained economic control until the revolution in 1959.
A US neo-colony
The first half of the 20th century saw Cuba descend into a haven for drugs, prostitution and gambling, as the US ruling class, with the help of the Cuban comprador bourgeoisie, turned the small island into an offshore playground.
Successive Cuban governments showed themselves to be nothing more than puppets of US imperialism, maintaining the status quo and allowing the wealth of the land to be leeched by foreign imperialists while the average Cuban was left to serve the colonisers or starve.
Nevertheless, throughout this period, progressive forces continued to mobilise and struggle against the reactionary governments. The increasing strength of the movement was illustrated on 10 March 1952, when Fulgencio Batista, in a bid to prevent a communist candidate winning the elections, seized power by force.
Batista had been a military man for many years and had served the establishment well, suppressing uprisings during the 1930s and 40s. In 1940, he served a term of four years as elected president, during which time US trade relations increased and Cuba entered the second world war on the side of the allies.
Following the coup d’etat in 1952, Batista ruled Cuba with an iron fist. He abolished the constitution, dismissed the Congress of the Republic and firmly held open the door to US imperialism.
Fidel Castro, then a young revolutionary, denounced the coup and called on all Cubans to fight the dictatorship, warning: “once again there is tyranny, but there will also be men like Mella, Trejo and Guiteras [revolutionaries who had fought Spanish and US forces]. There is oppression in the homeland, but there will be a day of liberty again”. (Quoted in History of Cuba, op cit)
Moncada Barracks
Following this call to fight, Castro got together with a group of other revolutionaries who had fought in previous uprisings, with the intention of carrying out an attack on the military regime and thus providing a catalyst for further uprisings.
The target of this attack was to be the Moncada Barracks, the second-largest barracks in Cuba, located a fair distance from any potential back-up forces, as well as being on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba, where the independence movement had always been strong.
During the night of 26 July 1953, a group of 131 combatants led in three groups by Fidel Castro, Abel Santamaria and Raúl Castro attacked the barracks. Despite extensive and secretive preparation by Fidel and others, the first attacking column was intercepted by an unscheduled patrol of Batista’s forces, sparking a battle and alerting the rest of the barracks to the attack.
Almost all the combatants were captured, eight being killed in battle while a handful escaped. The following day, a further 50 fighters were executed as a warning to others. The rest were tried, along with others who had been rounded up but had no involvement in the attack.
It was during the Moncada Barracks trial that Fidel gave one of his most famous speeches, now recognised by his final statement: “History will absolve me”. Fidel used the speech to expose the brutality of the Batista regime, the downtrodden existence of the Cuban people and the need to fight for liberty and freedom.
He also outlined five revolutionary laws that would have been proclaimed if the attack had been successful. These laws were to “return power to the people”, “give non-mortgageable and non-transferable ownership of land to all tenants”, “grant workers and employees the right to share 30 percent of the profits of all large industry”, “grant all sugar planters the right to share 55 percent of sugar production”, and to confiscate “all holdings and ill-gotten gains … of previous regimes … Half of the property recovered would be used to subsidise retirement funds for workers and the other half would be used for hospitals, asylums and charitable organisations.”
The success of the defence team, in spite of limitations imposed on them by the court, meant that only 26 were found guilty, and a large proportion of these were given lenient sentences.
Movement of 26 July
Fidel, however, along with several others involved in the attack, was sentenced to 15 years and imprisoned in Isle of Pines. Two years later, following continued protests for their release, and in the face of increasing unrest, Batista granted the release of Castro and the other imprisoned combatants.
On their release, they were greeted with great popular acclaim and determined to continue the work they had started. So, in June 1955, Castro and several other revolutionaries who had attacked the Moncada Barracks held an official meeting and formed the Movement of 26 July (M 26-J).
As M 26-J increased its activity, so too did the repressive measures of the Batista regime. By July, Fidel had decided that, in order to effectively organise, he needed to leave the country and train elsewhere.
Mexico and Guevara
Having relocated to Mexico, Castro and several others set up camp, specifically choosing remote terrain similar to Cuba’s in order to prepare themselves for the next stage of the struggle. It was here that they met Che Guevera.
Che had fled persecution in Guatemala and, having met some of the M 26-J comrades previously, was introduced to Castro and so began his involvement in the preparations for the Cuban revolution.
M 26-J members in Mexico maintained constant communication with the workers’ and peasants’ struggles taking place in Cuba. Fidel wrote manifestos for the movement analysing the struggle and the tasks ahead, which were distributed in Cuba.
While the revolutionaries trained in Mexico, hardships suffered by the Cuban population under Batista increased the support for the goals set out by the M 26-J.
Granma
After a year of mobilising troops and building up the forces both in Mexico and in Cuba, the M 26-J planned coordinated attacks across the country, with the Mexican contingent travelling across the Gulf to reinforce the eastern front.
On 25 November 1956, from the port of Tupax, Mexico, the Granma, only a small boat, carried 82 members of the M 26-J across the Gulf of Mexico, aiming for Cuba’s eastern coast. However, the heavy load on the boat slowed the journey, delaying its landing to 2 December, two days after the attacks of the M 26-J were to be launched.
This proved almost fatal for the insurrection as, despite the forces within Cuba mounting uprisings and making some gains, they had not been the outright victors. The delay of the Granma meant that Batista’s forces were at the boat’s landing site within an hour with all the planes and troops they could muster.
In the face of this military onslaught, and against all odds, the rebels continued towards the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. However, a large part of their contingent was captured and over 20 executed on the spot. The remaining 10 members moved deeper into the mountains and regrouped, ready to continue the fight against the regime.
During the next 24 months, the 10 members of M 26-J in the Sierra Maestra recruited workers and peasants from across the countryside and towns as a fierce war ensued against the regime.
As Fidel recounted on the 40th anniversary of the revolution: “the infallible tactic of attacking the enemy when it was on the move was a key factor [to success]. The art of provoking those forces into moving out of their well-fortified and generally invulnerable positions became one of our commands’ greatest skills.” (Speech made in Céspedes Park, Santiago de Cuba, 1 January 1999)
By December 1958, the rebel army, with Fidel as commander-in-chief, and Che Guevara, Camilio Cienfuegos, Raúl Castro, Juan Alemida and Celia Sánchez as leaders of the columns, led the forces across the country taking city after city and growing in number by the day.
Che Guevara’s Column No. 8, by this time made up of 300 well-armed and experienced troops, was joined on 29 December by 5,000 recruits trained in the Escambray mountains in the battle for Santa Cruz.
This was the dictatorship’s last and most powerful stronghold. The rebels captured enemy positions one by one, cutting off communication and finally taking all government troops prisoner and seizing control of the city.
At 2.00am on 1 January 1959, Batista fled the country, leaving the rebel army victorious. Thus it was, five years, five months and five days after the attack on the Moncada Barracks, that the programme publicised during the Moncada trial for developing a Cuba for the Cuban people was finally put into action.
Soy Cuba – depiction of Cuban life
For a real flavour of this struggle, it is well worth watching the beautifully filmed and choreographed epic Soy Cuba (I am Cuba).
Using the lives of several Cubans, from a farmer forced to sell all his land to the United Fruit Company to a young girl living in a tin shack having to serve opulent US and foreign ‘diplomats’, it shows graphically the disparity between the life of a Cuban and that of the foreign and comprador bourgeoisie under Batista.
The film aptly portrays the struggle in the towns by the students and workers and how this eventually combined with the guerrilla war led by Fidel, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos and the other fighters and the thousands of recruits who joined the guerrillas from the countryside.
The film ends with the triumphant scene of the guerrilla army advancing victoriously towards Havana.
The revolution continues
The revolutionary government began by addressing the poverty, hunger and illiteracy that had plagued the lives of Cubans for the past century.
The sentiment of the five revolutionary laws outlined in Fidel’s ‘History will absolve me’ speech was put into action. In May 1959, under the Agrarian Reform act, Cuba began expropriating land and private property for the benefit of more than 100,000 rural families.
Rental costs were reduced by 50 percent. Social security measures were extended across the entire population.
The revolution embarked upon creating 10,000 classrooms for the 10,000 teachers without jobs to be able to teach the 600,000 children not then in school. They also began training voluntary teachers, who were then sent to wherever they were needed, thus becoming part of the campaign to rid Cuba of illiteracy.
By 1960, the government had nationalised more than $25bn worth of private property in Cuba, and on 6 August 1960, Cuba nationalised all US-owned property, as well as all other foreign-owned property.
This move unsurprisingly brought the wrath of the already fuming imperialist power. The US government seized all Cuban assets abroad and tightened the embargo that it had imposed following the success of the revolution.
Since 1962, the US has maintained a full economic blockade of the country.
Bay of Pigs
Cuba became one of US imperialism’s most hated states, not only because it seized assets previously under the control of US corporations, directly hitting the US economy, but also because of the example it set to all the downtrodden exploited masses in the US and elsewhere of what is possible when power is seized by the working class and peasantry.
Thus it was that the wrath of US imperialism was not only felt economically through the embargo but also militarily.
In 1961, the US staged an attack on the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to oust Fidel and the Communist Party from Cuba. The invasion was defeated, however, through the coordination of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (who rounded up all pro-Batista and US forces, preventing them from mobilising a coup within towns), combined with a strong military response led by Fidel.
Economic blockade and subversive attack
Having failed to get rid of socialist Cuba by direct invasion in 1961, US imperialism has not relented and continues to this day in its attempts to undermine the revolution.
This is done through encouraging and financing counterrevolutionary and terrorist activities against Cuba, from backing Luis Posada Carriles, the self-confessed terrorist who has attacked Venezuela and Cuba and now is protected by the US, to funding Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue [!]), a terrorist group created in the US to attack Cuba.
The period from 1959 to 1997 saw “5,780 terrorist actions against Cuba, 804 of them considered as terrorist attacks of significant magnitude, including 78 bombings against the population that caused thousands of victims”. (‘Fifty years of US terrorism against Cuba’, Voltaire.net, 15 December 2005)
This is in addition to the economic blockade that the US has held Cuba under for almost 50 years, which prevents a vast number of goods entering Cuba, from food to medicine, affecting every area of Cuban life. Estimates in 2004 calculated the total direct damage to the economy caused by the blockade at $80bn. (‘The US blockade of Cuba’, Cuba Solidarity Campaign)
In 1992, just after Cuba had lost 85 percent of her trade with the Soviet Union following the latter’s collapse, the US senate tightened the blockade passing the Cuban Democracy Act[!], known as the Torricelli Act. The act, as outlined by Congressmen Torricelli himself, was designed to “wreak havoc on the island”, extending the blockade to countries outside the US and thus preventing the purchase of vital goods by Cuba.
Then, in 1996, the US passed the equally inappropriately titled Cuban Liberty and Democracy Solidarity Act, aka the Helms-Burton Act, extending the embargo to penalise any foreign company that trades with Cuba. It also called for more active interference in the running of the country, through funding subversive activity as mentioned above and increasing the use of external radio and TV broadcasts into Cuba from Miami, notably Radio Marti and TV Marti.
The Helms-Burton Act also further restricted the sale of Cuban goods within the US, which for a moment in 1999 was broken following Cuba’s development of a vaccine against meningitis B. After an outbreak in the US, the Treasury Department finally relented and granted a licence in 1999, having refused to do so for over 10 years.
It is in the face of this that the Cuban people, led by the Communist Party of Cuba, have not only survived but made massive strides in improving the standard of living of all Cubans.
A Cuban diplomat at a recent meeting of the UN member states, at which, for the 17th consecutive year, an overwhelming majority of members (96 percent) voted to condemn the US blockade, stated: “[The US] will never be able to bring the Cuban people to their knees. Neither blockades nor hurricanes will be able to take away our spirit. There will be no human or natural force capable of subjugating the Cuban people”. (‘UN General Assembly condemns US economic blockade against Cuba for the 17th consecutive year’, Cuba News Daily, 30 October 2008)
Cuban achievements
The Cuban people enjoy a standard of living incomparable in the western world. Incomparable not because of the material goods they have, as these are undoubtedly limited, but because of the freedoms that they benefit from: the freedom that ensures every Cuban lives under shelter, has the right to universal free education and access to a healthcare system that is not dependant on income. In short, the freedom to live a full life no matter who you are or which family you are born into.
Housing
Decent housing for all is a right guaranteed by the Cuban constitution. Homelessness is unheard of. Housing costs in Cuba have been maintained at a low level, with many either owning their homes outright or paying an average of 10 percent of income towards their homes.
This is in stark contrast to the insecurity of many in Britain, one of the world’s richest countries, where mortgage rates are such that house repossessions have increased by over 45 percent, with estimations of over 45,000 homes being taken back by lenders by the end of the year. (‘Figures from house repossessions soar to 12-year-high’, The Independent, 8 August 2008)
Education
As for education, the initial ambition of the revolution to rid Cuba of illiteracy has long since been achieved, something not all so-called developed countries can lay claim to. Education is taken very seriously, with 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP being spent on providing free, universal education for all.
Education is compulsory to ninth grade, with one teacher for every 36.8 inhabitants, as compared to one teacher for every 802 inhabitants in the UK. (Figures from ‘Eye-witness to socialism: school education in Cuba’, Proletarian, February 2007)
Unlike the increasingly expensive university education that is a privilege rather than a right in the imperialist world, all Cubans can attend any of Cuba’s 47 universities free of charge. Scholarships are also open to less privileged students from Latin America, the Caribbean, and even the US and Europe, many of whom study medicine and are encouraged to return to their homelands after graduation to implement their skills there.
Health
Before the revolution, only 8 percent of the rural population had access to health care, but today Cuba can boast of a system that provides free health care to its entire population, as highlighted in the recent Michael Moore film Sicko.
The doctor to patient ratio in Cuba is higher than any other country, with a doctor for every 169 inhabitants. In Britain, on the other hand, the average doctor has to attend to 600 inhabitants. The effect of this is that general check-ups are far more frequent and monitoring for potential illness or disease is much easier in Cuba.
Consequently, Cuban life expectancy matches that of the US or Britain, and is way above other developing countries, yet for a fraction of the cost, since the emphasis is on preventative medicine and full health, rather than the system only dealing with those who are already sick and in need of expensive treatments.
The advances in medical research and techniques in Cuba have also been astounding. Not least, the meningitis B vaccine previously mentioned, which was developed in the 1980s, despite the blockade severely limiting the medical supplies that are allowed into Cuba owing to the extent of US patents on treatments.
It is to the credit of the well-managed, centrally organised socialist system that it is able to provide treatment and operations for 11.2 million Cubans despite these limited supplies from abroad.
Cuba puts paid to myth of the ‘inefficiencies of public money’ that has been peddled by our bourgeoisie to justify the dismantling of the NHS in Britain. If the will is there, the funding and results can be found.
The difference between Britain and Cuba is not that the doctors and nurses in Britain do not care, but rather that that, in a system where profit is the driving force, corners will be cut wherever possible, whether the company in question is making cars or providing health care. In socialist Cuba, where people come first, health care, education, shelter and security are the focus, and everything else comes second.
Cuban internationalism
The achievements Cuba has made have also benefited hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people across the globe.
During the 1960s and 1970s Cuba gave much-needed political and military support to independence struggles in Africa, not least those of Angola and Namibia. In 1979, Cuba’s military support to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua assisted them in the defeat of Somoza’s dictatorship.
Cuba’s medical expertise has been shared the world over, with over 25,000 doctors sent to 68 countries. This is in stark contrast to the ‘brain drain’ of doctors who are tempted away from third world countries to serve in the NHS in Britain.
Cuba has given support to many afflicted peoples at times of great need. After the south Asian tsunami, Cuba sent teams of medics to give support, as she did also in the aftermath of earthquakes in Pakistan.
It is also well known that after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2007, Cuba was one of the first countries to offer assistance in the form of 1,500 doctors. The US, despite a severe shortage, never accepted this offer.
In collaboration with Venezuela, the continent-wide Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle) has been underway for three years, treating vast numbers of poor people who have lost, or are losing, their eyesight, by providing free ophthalmology operations. Cuba provides the doctors and expertise while Venezuela provides transportation, accommodation and food, in effect giving sight back to over 6 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the potential for the programme to be extended even further.
As part of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americans), Cuba and Venezuela have also agreed to share expertise and goods. Cuba is providing doctors, who work in neighbourhoods across Venezuela as part of Mission Barrio Ardentro. In return, Cuba purchases crude oil at reduced rates.
Support socialist Cuba
The developments in Latin America as a whole have been tremendously positive for the small island of Cuba. From the collapse of the USSR in 1991 until recently, Cuba was an isolated socialist country, struggling alone in the Americas against the might of US imperialism just 90 miles to the north, with a host of US puppet regimes to the south.
Now, with Venezuela and Bolivia standing as strong allies, along with several other progressive Latin American countries, Cuba’s position has been strengthened. In addition, the increased trade links with China and Russia will also strengthen Cuba’s presence and stability in the region.
While capitalism is deep in crisis, the example that Cuba sets the working class and oppressed people should be broadcast as widely as possible. Cuba is a country that all progressive people should be proud of. When asked what alternative there is to capitalism, we should outline what the Communist Party of Cuba, supported by the people of Cuba, has been able to achieve in the face of constant imperialist aggression.
The proletariat in the imperialist countries must stand shoulder to shoulder with the Cuban people in their heroic defence of Cuban independence and socialism and against US imperialist bullying, trade blockades and threats of invasion and aggression.
Celebrate New Year’s Day this year with added vigour, remembering what has been achieved in Cuba and what could be achieved by a successful socialist revolution in Britain.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Bush in Baghdad: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog"
The article given below is from A world to Win News Service
Bush in Baghdad: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog"
15 December 2008. A World to Win News Service. U.S. President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad to say farewell to the country his government raped. The highlight, a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was touted as proof of the improved situation for the occupation.
Just as Bush concluded his remarks, a young Iraqi journalist in the audience stood up and hurled a shoe at the U.S. president, shouting, "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!" Then he threw the other shoe, adding, "This is from the widows, the orphans and all those who were killed in Iraq!" Bush ducked and the shoes hit the U.S. and Iraqi flags behind his head.
Hitting someone with the sole of your shoe is an extreme insult in the Arab world. All Iraqis remember the way people pounded Saddam Hussein's statue and portraits with their shoes when he went down.
The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, was present as an accredited correspondent for a satellite television station that broadcasts from Cairo, and had passed a U.S. Secret Service background check. His family was known to have suffered arrests under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He was said to have been deeply shaken by the American outrages at Abu-Ghraib, and then by the dead children he saw as a reporter on the scene during the U.S. bombing of the Sadr City slums last March. His employer described him as a "proud Arab and an open-minded man."
Bush made light of the incident. "This is what happens in a free society," he said. People in Iraq were not so convinced about the "freedom" the U.S. has brought Iraqis. U.S. Secret Service agents and Iraqi security guards could be seen beating Zaidi in the press conference room and he could be heard yelling “My hand, my hand.” Apparently the beating continued out of sight in the next room. His brother told BBC that he had suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, an eye injury and internal bleeding.
The 28-year-old journalist wasn't speaking just for himself. Two other reporters present were also arrested and beaten after his act, reportedly for remarking that it was courageous.
The next day thousands of people marched in the capital's Sadr City, Najaf and Basra, brandishing shoes and demanding his release. Since then some Iraqis have taken to throwing shoes at passing American patrols. Support for him is said to be overwhelming among Iraqis, crossing religious and ethnic lines among all those opposed to the occupation.
He has been taken as a role model by other journalists across the Middle East. Many are wondering, half seriously, if from now on press conferences with American officials will be "socks only". Among the hundreds of lawyers who have volunteered to defend Zaidi, some are reportedly Americans. Many comments on the Al Jazeera Web site posted from the U.S., Canada and Europe said Zaidi spoke for them and “simple folk across the planet.” Tens of thousands of people have joined Facebook groups set up on the Web in his support.
Zaidi’s brother said he was outraged by the U.S.-Iraqi Status of Forces treaty (see AWTWNS 27 October) whose signing Bush came to Baghdad to celebrate. Part of what’s fuelling a new swell of popular anger in Iraq is that Bush may be saying goodbye, but the U.S. occupation does not seem about to end. In the days before the press conference, U.S. commanding general Ray Odierno, on whose judgment incoming president Barack Obama says he will rely, announced that although the treaty promises that American troops will withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns after June 2009, he intends to keep "thousands" in the capital and other urban centres by re-labelling them "enablers" rather than combat forces. He suggested that the Iraqi government might later change the treaty and allow the U.S. to remain for years to come after the 2011 deadline it calls for. Speaking in favour of that idea, a spokesman for the Maliki government guessed that might mean another decade of occupation.
And for those who think they missed the opportunity to throw their shoes at Bush, dont worry. Here is a chance for u too to throw the bastard
http://sockandawe.com/
Bush in Baghdad: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog"
15 December 2008. A World to Win News Service. U.S. President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad to say farewell to the country his government raped. The highlight, a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was touted as proof of the improved situation for the occupation.
Just as Bush concluded his remarks, a young Iraqi journalist in the audience stood up and hurled a shoe at the U.S. president, shouting, "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!" Then he threw the other shoe, adding, "This is from the widows, the orphans and all those who were killed in Iraq!" Bush ducked and the shoes hit the U.S. and Iraqi flags behind his head.
Hitting someone with the sole of your shoe is an extreme insult in the Arab world. All Iraqis remember the way people pounded Saddam Hussein's statue and portraits with their shoes when he went down.
The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, was present as an accredited correspondent for a satellite television station that broadcasts from Cairo, and had passed a U.S. Secret Service background check. His family was known to have suffered arrests under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He was said to have been deeply shaken by the American outrages at Abu-Ghraib, and then by the dead children he saw as a reporter on the scene during the U.S. bombing of the Sadr City slums last March. His employer described him as a "proud Arab and an open-minded man."
Bush made light of the incident. "This is what happens in a free society," he said. People in Iraq were not so convinced about the "freedom" the U.S. has brought Iraqis. U.S. Secret Service agents and Iraqi security guards could be seen beating Zaidi in the press conference room and he could be heard yelling “My hand, my hand.” Apparently the beating continued out of sight in the next room. His brother told BBC that he had suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, an eye injury and internal bleeding.
The 28-year-old journalist wasn't speaking just for himself. Two other reporters present were also arrested and beaten after his act, reportedly for remarking that it was courageous.
The next day thousands of people marched in the capital's Sadr City, Najaf and Basra, brandishing shoes and demanding his release. Since then some Iraqis have taken to throwing shoes at passing American patrols. Support for him is said to be overwhelming among Iraqis, crossing religious and ethnic lines among all those opposed to the occupation.
He has been taken as a role model by other journalists across the Middle East. Many are wondering, half seriously, if from now on press conferences with American officials will be "socks only". Among the hundreds of lawyers who have volunteered to defend Zaidi, some are reportedly Americans. Many comments on the Al Jazeera Web site posted from the U.S., Canada and Europe said Zaidi spoke for them and “simple folk across the planet.” Tens of thousands of people have joined Facebook groups set up on the Web in his support.
Zaidi’s brother said he was outraged by the U.S.-Iraqi Status of Forces treaty (see AWTWNS 27 October) whose signing Bush came to Baghdad to celebrate. Part of what’s fuelling a new swell of popular anger in Iraq is that Bush may be saying goodbye, but the U.S. occupation does not seem about to end. In the days before the press conference, U.S. commanding general Ray Odierno, on whose judgment incoming president Barack Obama says he will rely, announced that although the treaty promises that American troops will withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns after June 2009, he intends to keep "thousands" in the capital and other urban centres by re-labelling them "enablers" rather than combat forces. He suggested that the Iraqi government might later change the treaty and allow the U.S. to remain for years to come after the 2011 deadline it calls for. Speaking in favour of that idea, a spokesman for the Maliki government guessed that might mean another decade of occupation.
And for those who think they missed the opportunity to throw their shoes at Bush, dont worry. Here is a chance for u too to throw the bastard
http://sockandawe.com/
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Chief Seattle's Letter
With Barack Obama being elected president of the US, the question doing rounds is whether there will be a change in US. Is a sudden change possible in the Empire that rules the world. People like Fidel Castro thinks “it would be extremely naive to believe that the good intentions of an intelligent person could change centuries of interests and selfishness already created.” Yes centuries of interests and selfishness...
But has America always been like that? Definitely not. The letter written by a Red Indian chieftain in 1855 suggests that america had a different past too.
In 1855 the president of the United States Franklin Pierce wrote to Chief Seattle with an offer from the government to buy his people’s land. The US government was offering Seattle a considerable sum. And it was in reply to this Chief Seattle wrote the letter. The letter is also an eye opener to those who advocate to civilize the savage and bring them to the mainstream.
Here for my readers i post the famous letter
The Great White Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. He also sends words of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him since we know he has little need of our friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. What I say the Great White Chief can count on as truly as our white brothers can count on the turning of the seasons. My words are like stars: they do not set.
How can you buy or sell the sky; the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water, so how can you buy them from us? We will decide in our time, but every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every glade and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.
We know that the white man doesn’t understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the Earth whatever he wants. The Earth is not his brother but his enemy; and when he conquers it he moves on. He leaves his fathers’ graves behind and doesn’t care. He kidnaps the Earth from his children. His father’s graves and children’s birthrights are forgotten. His appetite will devour the Earth and leave behind a wasteland. The sight of your cities pains the eye of the red man. But perhaps this is because the red man is a “savage” and doesn’t understand.
There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the leaves of spring or the rustle of insects’ wings. The clatter insults the ears. But perhaps I am only a “savage” and don’t understand. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or the argument of the frogs around a pond at night? The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, and the wind itself cleansed by the midday rain or scented with pinion. The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath: the beasts, the trees, the man. The white man doesn’t seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for days, he is numb to his own stench.
If I accept, I will make one condition: the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am just a “savage” and don’t understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a “savage” and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo whom we kill only to live. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone then men would die from a terrible loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.
Our children have seen our fathers humbled in defeat. Our warriors have felt shame. After defeat they turn their days in idleness and contaminate their bodies with sweet food and strong drink. It matters little where we pass the rest of our days; they are not many. A few more hours, a few more winters, and none of the children of the great tribes that once lived on the Earth, or that roamed in small bands in the woods, will be left to mourn the graves of a people once as powerful and hopeful as yours. One thing we know that the white man may one day discover: our God and your God are the same. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man and his compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The Earth is precious to him, and to harm the Earth is to pour contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your own bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed.What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by telegraph wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and then hunt, the end of living and the beginning of survival.
We might understand if we knew what it was that the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, what visions he burns into their minds so that they will wish for tomorrow. But we are “savages”. The white man’s dreams are hidden from us. And because they are hidden we will go our own way. If we agree, it will be to secure the reservation you’ve promised. There, perhaps we may live out our brief days as we wish. When the last red man has vanished from the Earth, and our memory is just the shadow of a cloud passing across the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my people, for they love the Earth the way a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat.
If we sell you our land, love it as we’ve loved it. Care for it as we’ve cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land, as it is when you take it. And with all your strength and all your might and with all your heart preserve it for your children, and love it as God loves us all. One thing we know: our God is the same as yours. The Earth is precious to him. Even the white man cannot be exempt from common destiny.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Afghan Maoists: On the military situation of the Taleban and other Islamic anti-government forces
The article given below is from A World to Win News Service. For those who r not subscribers of AWTWNS, i post it here.
Afghan Maoists: On the military situation of the Taleban and other Islamic anti-government forces
1 December 2008. A World to Win News Service. Following are edited excerpts from issue no. 19 (July 2008) of Shola Jawid, organ of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan. The explanations in parentheses are by AWTWNS.
The Taleban made little use of guerrilla methods in their war against the "Islamic Interim State of Afghanistan" headed by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massood (the warlord regime that came to power after the fall of the pro-Soviet regime in 1992 and eventually fell to the Taleban in 1996). For the most part their offensives took the form of conventional warfare.
In their initial confrontation with the U.S. and UK (after the October 2001 invasion), they used the same methods and suffered heavy losses. After two months of putting up more resistance than the invaders expected, they quickly retreated from the regions under their control. At that time they were unable to reorganise their forces to fight guerrilla warfare and continue fighting in the villages or mountains. In addition to these organisational and military questions, other major factors behind their inability to sustain the fighting were the lack of mass support and low morale in their own ranks due to the general assumption that it was impossible to resist the superior military forces led by the U.S. This defeat caused a relatively large section of the Taleban forces to defect and join the puppet regime.
The Taleban did not mount significant military operations between that time and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in 2003. The beginning of resistance in Iraq brought with it scattered guerrilla resistance by the Taleban and the growing activities by the (historically and organisationally distinct) Pakistani Taleban and Arab and non-Arab groups related to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The widespread movement in the Western countries against the U.S. and UK invasion and occupation of Iraq increasingly turned its attention to the Afghanistan situation too. Previously the occupation of Afghanistan was not a big issue in these protests, in comparison with the war in Iraq. Further, the Iraq war widened the cracks among the imperialists, in particular between the U.S. and Russia, and somewhat intensified their contradictions. Moreover, the Taleban were able to gain manoeuvring room because of U.S. threats against Iran, on the one hand, and on the other Pakistan's alarm at the increasingly close relations between the U.S. and India, which Islamabad considers a threat to Pakistan's security and even to its existence. These factors created new conditions for cooperation between the Taleban and certain political forces and sections of the ruling classes in Iran and Pakistan.
However, the most important factor in sparking the revival of the Taleban was the consequences of the imperialist occupation and the rule of the regime they installed. This is the main reason why by 2006 the Taleban were strengthened to the point of becoming a relatively large force with bases in much of the country. In particular, the failure of the imperialists' reactionary reconstruction efforts in the political, economical, cultural and social spheres greatly helped the once-defeated and hated Taleban to regain influence among the masses and extend their military activities.
The Taleban made the most of the masses' increasing discontent with the occupiers and their puppet regime. Partly by relying on the masses in certain regions and with direct and indirect foreign support, they were able to give a more organised form to their scattered activities against the regime and the occupation armies, and win over new forces as well.
A report by the county's main security agency (the General Supervision of National Security) given to the regime's parliament largely reflects the intensification and expansion of Taleban military activities. The total number of Taleban operations recorded by this agency are as follows:
In 1383 (20 March 2004-20 March 2005) 1,466 actions
In 1384 (21 March 2005-20 March 2006) 1,796 actions
In 1385 (21 March 2006-20 March 2007) 3,012 actions
In 1386 (21 March 2007-20 March 2008) 4,118 actions
These figures include ambushes and assaults, sabotage, kidnappings, suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, but not all Taleban military operations. For example, they do not include the numerous cases where, without fighting, the Taleban have seized villages briefly or even for a longer time. These operations are very important for the Taleban. When the regime loses control over these villages, the Taleban can enforce their own rules. They close girls' schools and establish their version of the Sharia (religious) justice system, impose Islamic taxes and collect donations. They also take over the security of poppy-growing farms, heroin production and drug trafficking. They have more freedom to run their religious schools and recruit from the people.
The Taleban recruiting methods are simple. They invite the inhabitants to join the jihad (holy war) against the kafir (infidels). They arm these volunteers and organise them into their ranks. In regions where they have more stable control, they demand that every certain number of families (for example 20) offer one person as a fighter, or that they pay the annual living expenses for one soldier. This kind of primitive recruiting has made it easy for spies and informers to infiltrate their ranks. The secret services have used the information they obtained in this way to inflict serious blows on the Taleban, including killing some of their leading commanders. But instead of changing their recruiting methods, the Taleban have tried to prevent infiltration by brutally punishing any spies and informers they can catch. Often this means beheading. Such terror has produced some results and seems to have hindered infiltration somewhat, but it has not been very effective. Moreover, it has given rise to so much discontent among the masses that recently Mullah Omar (the Taleban leader) ordered a halt to beheadings.
Taleban fighting tactics
The Taleban base their military tactics on the experiences of Afghanistan's previous wars, and, additionally, the methods used by Al Qaeda in Iraq. The operational methods used to occupy villages and districts are basically the same as during the war against the Soviet occupation. Suicide operations, however, were unknown in Afghanistan until recently. It is said the initial training for suicide attacks in Afghanistan took place in Iraq. The main Taleban guerrilla operations in urban areas are suicide bombings. The 27 April attack in Kabul that forced the Hamid Karzai government to cancel its celebrations (of the victory against the Soviet Union) in the capital and elsewhere – an operation with worldwide political impact – was meant to be a suicide attack. The regime is in such crisis that the members of its security forces ran way when the shooting started, so the attackers did not find it necessary to detonate their bombs and got away alive after their successful operation.
The Taleban fighters have no air defence weapons. Their arms and equipment come from three sources: the material remaining from their years in power, and that which they get from Iran and Pakistan. Certain sections of the ruling powers in these two countries support them to a certain degree. In addition, the Taleban have developed an almost nation-wide network for buying arms and ammunition. This is the only Taleban activity that is not limited to Pashtun areas.
It is impossible to have an opinion on the exact number of Taleban fighters. The occupiers and regime put their numbers at 15,000 – 20,000, but these statistics are far from reliable. The Taleban themselves have not put out figures, and in fact it is likely that they themselves do not have an accurate count. This is because most of their fighters are not permanent. Even their full-time fighters are not organised separately into a regular army. Many fighters are either part time or enlist for a limited time frame (often defined by harvests). Despite their relatively broad international connections, the Taleban and their fighting forces have mainly kept their tribal character. This is an impediment to combining their forces into a single army.
The Taleban suffer from an incurable limitation: they are known as the most violently Pashtun chauvinist organisation in Afghanistan. (At roughly 42 percent of the population, the Pashtun are not only by far the single biggest ethnic group but historically the country's oppressor nationality – Afghanistan means "land of the Pashtuns" in Farsi.) During their "Islamic Emirate", they acted with an extraordinary ruthlessness and brutality against non-Pashtun people. They harshly suppressed the people in general in non-Pastun regions and non-Pashtuns in the mixed areas in the north. In the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif they waged a brutal war of ethnic cleansing. That is why the Taleban forces are almost entirely Pashtun. In addition to the country's south and east, where Pashtun are the majority, they are also active in Pashtun minority regions in the west and north.
Many of the anti-Soviet jihadis and the formerly pro-Soviet militias who quickly capitulated to the U.S. claimed that these new invaders offered a ray of hope to save the country from the Pashtun-chauvinist Taleban. They continue to do so today. This factor played an important role in spreading capitulationism among the non-Pashtun nationalities. Over the years of occupation this "ray of hope" has lost much credibility, but the Taleban are still unable to exert much influence among the non-Pashtun nationalities. The Taleban themselves are aware of this limitation and that is why they do not make much effort to recruit from them.
The Pakistani Taleban have also emerged as an important force, able to carry out significant military operations over a wide area. But in Pakistan, too, they are a single-nationality movement, active only in Pashtun areas and mainly among the tribal areas. The Pakistani Taleban have played an important role in strengthening the Taleban movement as a whole and participated extensively in the war in Afghanistan. In some cases their actions have gotten more attention than their Afghan counterparts. For example, most of the suicide attacks attributed in Afghanistan are carried out by Pakistani Taleban. The Pakistani Taleban areas serve as a secure rear area for Afghan Taleban, where they can rest, train and satisfy logistical needs.
On other Islamist forces
Among other Islamist forces that fight the occupiers and the regime is the Hezb-e Islami, the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (The prime minister of the Islamic regime established after the departure of the Soviet army, Hekmatyar's faction played a key role in reducing Kabul to rubble during the subsequent civil war among the former jihadis.) Like the Taleban, Hekmatyar's party is limited to the Pashtun heartland and Pashtun minority areas. The Islamic Party used to be multi-national, but after the occupation nearly all its non-Pashtun components joined the Karazi regime.
Where the Taleban are strong, the Islamic Party works through them. In fact, the Taleban do not allow anyone else to carry out independent activities. Where the party is stronger than the Taleban, they do mount their own military activities. For instance, it is widely believed that the Islamic Party and associated organisations are behind many of the operations in Ghazni (a province in east-central Afghanistan) .
Hekmatyar has some backing among fundamentalist circles in Pakistan and certain circles in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Militarily his forces today tend to follow the same model they employed during the war against the Soviet occupation – a war of attrition focused on planting mines, and rocket, artillery and sniper attacks from a distance. They do not carry out suicide operations.
A few words on Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan: despite the dramatic presence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, it seems that the main Al-Qaeda bases are still in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, this presence has diminished. In the last few years, due to the intense contradiction between the Parvez Musharraf regime and Al-Qaeda, heavy blows were inflicted on the Al-Qaeda organisation in Pakistan. Nearly a thousand of its leaders and cadres in Pakistan have been killed or arrested and handed over to U.S. officials.
In any case, while it is impossible to exactly determine the number of Al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, considering the number of their causalities and arrests over the last few years, it seems that they are much less numerous than the Taleban and do not dominate the fundamentalist opposition overall. However, their presence in Afghanistan is still relatively effective.
Revolutionary forces
As we can see, in general the Islamist forces monopolise the military resistance to the occupiers and the puppet regime. Both in the country and abroad, this military resistance is considered Islamist and basically Taleban. In other words, revolutionary military forces are not present on the battlefield. Experience shows that if this continues to be the case, the Islamic and Taleban colouring of the resistance will only get stronger. At a certain point, it is possible that the grounds for the presence of the revolutionary armed forces in the battlefield will disappear and the whole revolutionary movement and communist movement will be marginalized, unable to assert an effective influence on the country's political scene for years and years to come.
It is absolutely clear that there are certain objective and subjective factors that make it potentially possible for revolutionary military forces to enter the battlefield against the occupiers and the regime. However, these potentially favourable objective and subjective
elements will not flourish automatically. Emerging from the present unfavourable situation would require hard and tireless work by the whole party and advanced masses. We are well aware that without such a turn, we will not be able to play a significant positive role in changing the country's political situation. Only by launching and successfully advancing a revolutionary people's national resistance war against the occupiers and the puppet regime will we be able to wage an effective ideological and political struggle against the enemies of the revolution and position ourselves to provide the practical revolutionary leadership on the whole war of resistance and lead this war to the victorious path of new democratic revolution
Afghan Maoists: On the military situation of the Taleban and other Islamic anti-government forces
1 December 2008. A World to Win News Service. Following are edited excerpts from issue no. 19 (July 2008) of Shola Jawid, organ of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan. The explanations in parentheses are by AWTWNS.
The Taleban made little use of guerrilla methods in their war against the "Islamic Interim State of Afghanistan" headed by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massood (the warlord regime that came to power after the fall of the pro-Soviet regime in 1992 and eventually fell to the Taleban in 1996). For the most part their offensives took the form of conventional warfare.
In their initial confrontation with the U.S. and UK (after the October 2001 invasion), they used the same methods and suffered heavy losses. After two months of putting up more resistance than the invaders expected, they quickly retreated from the regions under their control. At that time they were unable to reorganise their forces to fight guerrilla warfare and continue fighting in the villages or mountains. In addition to these organisational and military questions, other major factors behind their inability to sustain the fighting were the lack of mass support and low morale in their own ranks due to the general assumption that it was impossible to resist the superior military forces led by the U.S. This defeat caused a relatively large section of the Taleban forces to defect and join the puppet regime.
The Taleban did not mount significant military operations between that time and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in 2003. The beginning of resistance in Iraq brought with it scattered guerrilla resistance by the Taleban and the growing activities by the (historically and organisationally distinct) Pakistani Taleban and Arab and non-Arab groups related to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The widespread movement in the Western countries against the U.S. and UK invasion and occupation of Iraq increasingly turned its attention to the Afghanistan situation too. Previously the occupation of Afghanistan was not a big issue in these protests, in comparison with the war in Iraq. Further, the Iraq war widened the cracks among the imperialists, in particular between the U.S. and Russia, and somewhat intensified their contradictions. Moreover, the Taleban were able to gain manoeuvring room because of U.S. threats against Iran, on the one hand, and on the other Pakistan's alarm at the increasingly close relations between the U.S. and India, which Islamabad considers a threat to Pakistan's security and even to its existence. These factors created new conditions for cooperation between the Taleban and certain political forces and sections of the ruling classes in Iran and Pakistan.
However, the most important factor in sparking the revival of the Taleban was the consequences of the imperialist occupation and the rule of the regime they installed. This is the main reason why by 2006 the Taleban were strengthened to the point of becoming a relatively large force with bases in much of the country. In particular, the failure of the imperialists' reactionary reconstruction efforts in the political, economical, cultural and social spheres greatly helped the once-defeated and hated Taleban to regain influence among the masses and extend their military activities.
The Taleban made the most of the masses' increasing discontent with the occupiers and their puppet regime. Partly by relying on the masses in certain regions and with direct and indirect foreign support, they were able to give a more organised form to their scattered activities against the regime and the occupation armies, and win over new forces as well.
A report by the county's main security agency (the General Supervision of National Security) given to the regime's parliament largely reflects the intensification and expansion of Taleban military activities. The total number of Taleban operations recorded by this agency are as follows:
In 1383 (20 March 2004-20 March 2005) 1,466 actions
In 1384 (21 March 2005-20 March 2006) 1,796 actions
In 1385 (21 March 2006-20 March 2007) 3,012 actions
In 1386 (21 March 2007-20 March 2008) 4,118 actions
These figures include ambushes and assaults, sabotage, kidnappings, suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, but not all Taleban military operations. For example, they do not include the numerous cases where, without fighting, the Taleban have seized villages briefly or even for a longer time. These operations are very important for the Taleban. When the regime loses control over these villages, the Taleban can enforce their own rules. They close girls' schools and establish their version of the Sharia (religious) justice system, impose Islamic taxes and collect donations. They also take over the security of poppy-growing farms, heroin production and drug trafficking. They have more freedom to run their religious schools and recruit from the people.
The Taleban recruiting methods are simple. They invite the inhabitants to join the jihad (holy war) against the kafir (infidels). They arm these volunteers and organise them into their ranks. In regions where they have more stable control, they demand that every certain number of families (for example 20) offer one person as a fighter, or that they pay the annual living expenses for one soldier. This kind of primitive recruiting has made it easy for spies and informers to infiltrate their ranks. The secret services have used the information they obtained in this way to inflict serious blows on the Taleban, including killing some of their leading commanders. But instead of changing their recruiting methods, the Taleban have tried to prevent infiltration by brutally punishing any spies and informers they can catch. Often this means beheading. Such terror has produced some results and seems to have hindered infiltration somewhat, but it has not been very effective. Moreover, it has given rise to so much discontent among the masses that recently Mullah Omar (the Taleban leader) ordered a halt to beheadings.
Taleban fighting tactics
The Taleban base their military tactics on the experiences of Afghanistan's previous wars, and, additionally, the methods used by Al Qaeda in Iraq. The operational methods used to occupy villages and districts are basically the same as during the war against the Soviet occupation. Suicide operations, however, were unknown in Afghanistan until recently. It is said the initial training for suicide attacks in Afghanistan took place in Iraq. The main Taleban guerrilla operations in urban areas are suicide bombings. The 27 April attack in Kabul that forced the Hamid Karzai government to cancel its celebrations (of the victory against the Soviet Union) in the capital and elsewhere – an operation with worldwide political impact – was meant to be a suicide attack. The regime is in such crisis that the members of its security forces ran way when the shooting started, so the attackers did not find it necessary to detonate their bombs and got away alive after their successful operation.
The Taleban fighters have no air defence weapons. Their arms and equipment come from three sources: the material remaining from their years in power, and that which they get from Iran and Pakistan. Certain sections of the ruling powers in these two countries support them to a certain degree. In addition, the Taleban have developed an almost nation-wide network for buying arms and ammunition. This is the only Taleban activity that is not limited to Pashtun areas.
It is impossible to have an opinion on the exact number of Taleban fighters. The occupiers and regime put their numbers at 15,000 – 20,000, but these statistics are far from reliable. The Taleban themselves have not put out figures, and in fact it is likely that they themselves do not have an accurate count. This is because most of their fighters are not permanent. Even their full-time fighters are not organised separately into a regular army. Many fighters are either part time or enlist for a limited time frame (often defined by harvests). Despite their relatively broad international connections, the Taleban and their fighting forces have mainly kept their tribal character. This is an impediment to combining their forces into a single army.
The Taleban suffer from an incurable limitation: they are known as the most violently Pashtun chauvinist organisation in Afghanistan. (At roughly 42 percent of the population, the Pashtun are not only by far the single biggest ethnic group but historically the country's oppressor nationality – Afghanistan means "land of the Pashtuns" in Farsi.) During their "Islamic Emirate", they acted with an extraordinary ruthlessness and brutality against non-Pashtun people. They harshly suppressed the people in general in non-Pastun regions and non-Pashtuns in the mixed areas in the north. In the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif they waged a brutal war of ethnic cleansing. That is why the Taleban forces are almost entirely Pashtun. In addition to the country's south and east, where Pashtun are the majority, they are also active in Pashtun minority regions in the west and north.
Many of the anti-Soviet jihadis and the formerly pro-Soviet militias who quickly capitulated to the U.S. claimed that these new invaders offered a ray of hope to save the country from the Pashtun-chauvinist Taleban. They continue to do so today. This factor played an important role in spreading capitulationism among the non-Pashtun nationalities. Over the years of occupation this "ray of hope" has lost much credibility, but the Taleban are still unable to exert much influence among the non-Pashtun nationalities. The Taleban themselves are aware of this limitation and that is why they do not make much effort to recruit from them.
The Pakistani Taleban have also emerged as an important force, able to carry out significant military operations over a wide area. But in Pakistan, too, they are a single-nationality movement, active only in Pashtun areas and mainly among the tribal areas. The Pakistani Taleban have played an important role in strengthening the Taleban movement as a whole and participated extensively in the war in Afghanistan. In some cases their actions have gotten more attention than their Afghan counterparts. For example, most of the suicide attacks attributed in Afghanistan are carried out by Pakistani Taleban. The Pakistani Taleban areas serve as a secure rear area for Afghan Taleban, where they can rest, train and satisfy logistical needs.
On other Islamist forces
Among other Islamist forces that fight the occupiers and the regime is the Hezb-e Islami, the Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (The prime minister of the Islamic regime established after the departure of the Soviet army, Hekmatyar's faction played a key role in reducing Kabul to rubble during the subsequent civil war among the former jihadis.) Like the Taleban, Hekmatyar's party is limited to the Pashtun heartland and Pashtun minority areas. The Islamic Party used to be multi-national, but after the occupation nearly all its non-Pashtun components joined the Karazi regime.
Where the Taleban are strong, the Islamic Party works through them. In fact, the Taleban do not allow anyone else to carry out independent activities. Where the party is stronger than the Taleban, they do mount their own military activities. For instance, it is widely believed that the Islamic Party and associated organisations are behind many of the operations in Ghazni (a province in east-central Afghanistan) .
Hekmatyar has some backing among fundamentalist circles in Pakistan and certain circles in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Militarily his forces today tend to follow the same model they employed during the war against the Soviet occupation – a war of attrition focused on planting mines, and rocket, artillery and sniper attacks from a distance. They do not carry out suicide operations.
A few words on Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan: despite the dramatic presence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, it seems that the main Al-Qaeda bases are still in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, this presence has diminished. In the last few years, due to the intense contradiction between the Parvez Musharraf regime and Al-Qaeda, heavy blows were inflicted on the Al-Qaeda organisation in Pakistan. Nearly a thousand of its leaders and cadres in Pakistan have been killed or arrested and handed over to U.S. officials.
In any case, while it is impossible to exactly determine the number of Al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, considering the number of their causalities and arrests over the last few years, it seems that they are much less numerous than the Taleban and do not dominate the fundamentalist opposition overall. However, their presence in Afghanistan is still relatively effective.
Revolutionary forces
As we can see, in general the Islamist forces monopolise the military resistance to the occupiers and the puppet regime. Both in the country and abroad, this military resistance is considered Islamist and basically Taleban. In other words, revolutionary military forces are not present on the battlefield. Experience shows that if this continues to be the case, the Islamic and Taleban colouring of the resistance will only get stronger. At a certain point, it is possible that the grounds for the presence of the revolutionary armed forces in the battlefield will disappear and the whole revolutionary movement and communist movement will be marginalized, unable to assert an effective influence on the country's political scene for years and years to come.
It is absolutely clear that there are certain objective and subjective factors that make it potentially possible for revolutionary military forces to enter the battlefield against the occupiers and the regime. However, these potentially favourable objective and subjective
elements will not flourish automatically. Emerging from the present unfavourable situation would require hard and tireless work by the whole party and advanced masses. We are well aware that without such a turn, we will not be able to play a significant positive role in changing the country's political situation. Only by launching and successfully advancing a revolutionary people's national resistance war against the occupiers and the puppet regime will we be able to wage an effective ideological and political struggle against the enemies of the revolution and position ourselves to provide the practical revolutionary leadership on the whole war of resistance and lead this war to the victorious path of new democratic revolution
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