Kolkata students support Iraqi scribe who threw shoes at Bush! It had been always EASY to protest international Imperialism, what Indian Marxists have been doing all these SIXTY years! What about internal imperialism? For who and for How MANY would you PRESCRIBE THE Bush treatment? CPI-M to work towards forming political alternative and Buddhadeb Slams RSS for Hindutva. But No MARXIST or SECULAR Icon Dared to Support Antulay Defying Blind Nationalism hype created by War Monger Fascists and Imperialists!
I support Buddhadeb who dares to point out that Lal Krishna Adwani is RESPONSIBLE for TERRORISM in India as he launched Ram Janma Bhoomi Andolan eventually climaxed into Babri Mosque demolition launching RSS in Power! But we know very well how the Marxist brahmins of West Bengal led by PRANAB and BUDDHA played vital role in Branding all Partition Victim Black Untouchable Refugees from East Bengal as ILLEGAL MIGRANTS enacting Citizenship Amendment Act! How this Lethal TRIO of internal Imperialism and Caste Hindu fascism launched DEPORTATION Drive against Dalit Bengali Refugees already ejected out of Bengali geopolitics as they sent DR BR Ambedkar to the Constitution Assembly while Congress defeated him in Maharashtra! Anti fascism and Anti Imperialism are only the slogans to mobilise Muslim VOTE BANK while these are the ELEMENTS of VITAL AESTHETICS of Indian Marxism at Present enhanced by LPG, SEZ, Chemical HUBS, Nuclear Parks, Retail Chain and Nexus with MNCs and Builders!
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 129
Palash Biswas
Economy will need another booster dose: Montek
Saturday, 20 December , 2008, 09:21
New Delhi: The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, on Friday reiterated the need to properly implement the fiscal stimulus package announced by the Government earlier this month.
Ahluwalia also said that the economy will need another stimulus package during the next fiscal as the global slowdown will continue for some more time.
Slideshow of the day: Concord: 100 & ticking...
“It is certainly my view that the need for fiscal stimulus will not end this fiscal and will go beyond that,” he said on the sidelines of a function organised to celebrate the 75th birthday of economist Prof Amartya Sen.
The function, which was attended by the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, was jointly organised by Cornell University and the Institute for Human Development.
The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission was of the opinion that the fiscal deficit is likely to be higher mainly on account of the package announced by the Government.
Commenting on inflation falling further, Ahluwalia pointed out that it had already come down and might come down further.
Need of stimulus package in 2010, too: Montek
The Government had on December 7 announced a “multi-dimensional” fiscal stimulus package that included additional Rs 20,000-crore Plan expenditure. It had also announced an across-the-board 4 percentage point reduction in cenvat rate to stimulate demand in the economy.
Inflation to fall further: Ahluwalia
The cenvat duty cut resulted in the Government foregoing excise duty revenues of Rs 8,700 crore during the remaining months of the financial year.
The fiscal stimulus package also included a 2 per cent interest subvention for the labour intensive export sectors and steps for improving the financial environment for infrastructure projects.
Ajmal’s village sealed: Sharif
Hindu - 17 hours ago
ISLAMABAD: In a potential embarrassment to the Zardari government, the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has revealed that Pakistani authorities have sealed a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province to which journalists traced the origins of Ajmal ...
Ajmal Kasab is Pakistani, says Sharif Economic Times
Nepal says reports on Kasab arrest aimed at damaging its image
Confessions of LeT recee man Fahim
Times Now.tv - 3 hours ago
More evidence of Pakistan's involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai Terror plot came from the interrogation of Lashkar-e-Taiba's (LeT) fundraiser -- Fahim Ansari.
Cops probing if Faheem made CD of recce Times of India
Mumbai 26/11: Probing the UP connection NDTV.com
Indian Express - The Statesman - IBNLive.com - Hindu
U.S 1929 Great Depression Vs 2008 Financial, Housing, Credit Crisis
13 million people became unemployed. Industrial production fell by nearly 45% between the years 1929 and 1932. Home-building dropped by 80% between the years 1929 and 1932.
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Hand Gestures - What They Mean in Different Countries
When you travel abroad you do not only need to take language barriers into account but also body language barriers.
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A person, 40-year-old investor, was disgruntled with his investments in Unit-Linked Insurance Plan (ULIP).
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The Terror Saga
If incidents of mob justice tarnished the year 2007, terror attacks have made 2008 a dark year. The Year of Terror Strikes - 2008 - saw militancy assuming different forms and magnitudes, starting with Jaipur serial blasts and culminating in Mumbai attacks.
The year saw an unknown terror outfit called the Indian Mujahideen coming into existence. It saw the alleged Hindu terrorism sprouting up to counter the so-called Muslim terrorism. It saw terrorists adopting novel modus operandi. It saw militants taking away security feeling from the minds of people.
As the repercussions of the terror saga continue to rock the nation and the world, we here try to put together the shattered pieces of the events together - scene by scene.
Text: Salil Jose
http://sify.com/news/imagegallery/galleryDetail.php?hcategory=13733685&hgallery=14815948
Kolkata students support Iraqi scribe who threw shoes at Bush! It had been always EASY to protest international Imperialism, what Indian Marxists have been doing all these SIXTY years! What about internal imperialism? For who and for How MANY would you PRESCRIBE TH Bush treatment?
Good news for Kolkata! As Indian Express reports: Legendary Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s historic stopover at the Dum Dum airport in the fall of 1973 while returning from Hanoi will revisit the city in the form of a photo exhibition.Photographs of Castro addressing the frenzied Kolkata crowd from a portico were taken by reputed lens man Satya Sen and now will be exhibited at Nandan from December 26 to 30.
Student activists here staged a demonstration demanding immediate release of Muntadher-al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist arrested for tossing shoes at US President George W. Bush.The long march, organised by the All India Democratic Students' Organisation (AIDSO), ended in front of the US Consulate.
CPI-M to work towards forming political alternative and Buddhadeb Slams RSS for Hindutva. But No MARXIST or SECULAR Icon Dared to Support Antulay Defying Blind Nationalism hype created by War Monger Fascists and Imperialists!The confusion prevailing in the Congress party over the Antulay controversy was underlined by surprise support for the beleaguered Minority Affairs Minister from one of the party general secretaries Digvijay Singh who saw nothing objectionable in his stand questioning the circumstances surrounding the killing of Maharashtra ATS Chief Hemant Karkare. Singh's remarks in Varanasi at a press conference came on a day when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi grappled with the mess arising out of A R Antulay that has created a political storm and the Opposition for his removal from the Cabinet.
I support Buddhadeb who dares to point out that Lala Krishna Adwani is RESPONSIBLE for TERRORISM in India as he launched Ram Janma Bhoomi Andolan eventually climaxed into Babri Mosque demolition launching RSS in Power! But we know very well how the Marxist brahmins of West Bengal led by PRANAB and BUDDHA played vital role in Branding all Partition Victim Black Untouchable Refugees from East Bengal as ILLEGAL MIGRANTS enacting Citizenship Amendment Act! How this Lethal TRIO of internal Imperialism and Caste Hindu fascism launched DEPORTATION Drive against Dalit Bengali Refugees already ejected out of Bengali geopolitics as they sent DR BR Ambedkar to the Constitution Assembly while Congress defeated him in Maharashtra! Anti fascism and Anti Imperialism are only the slogans to mobilise Muslim VOTE BANK while these are the ELEMENTS of VITAL AESTHETICS of Indian Marxism at Present enhanced by LPG, SEZ, Chemical HUBS, Nuclear Parks, Retail Chain and Nexus with MNCs and Builders!
In Kolkata, Carrying banners and placards, the demonstrators raised slogans against theS President and called for an immediate release of reporter Zaidi.
Apart from screaming 'Hail Zaidi...', the protestors with clenched fists shouted 'Americans, hands off Iraq... George Bush, the thief'.
"We are aware that he has been brutally tortured in custody. In demand of his unconditional immediate release," said Sourav Mukherjee, General Secretary, AIDSO, Kolkata.
The protestors also burnt an effigy of US President Bush that was garlanded with a pair of shoes alongside the words that read 'goodbye kiss'.
Reportedly, Zaidi had shouted 'This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog'.
With these words, he had flung one shoe at Bush, forcing him to duck and soon it was followed by another, which sailed over Bush's head and hit the wall behind him.
Muntadher-al-Zaidi seems to have become a hero in the eyes of many with leftist leanings for his foolhardy act of hurling shoes at Bush during a press conference at Baghdad.
This incident took place on December 14 when Bush, on an unannounced farewell visit to Iraq was addressing the journalists along with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
Kannur: The ruling CPI-M in Kerala today accused the UPA Government at the Centre of not initiating steps to redress crisis facing farmers owing to the shrinking market for various produce.
Even though the LDF government could infuse confidence among the cultivators, the prices of entire agriculture produce came down drastically with the Centre failing to take adequate steps to revive the market base by its suitable intervention leading to unprecedented crisis in Kerala&aposs agrarian economy, CPI-M State Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan said.
While liberal import coupled with subsidised prices of palmoil had led to sharp fall in prices of coconut, the Centre had not taken any steps to curb import of rubber and other produce whose growers are reeling under the sharp fall in prices due to global economic recession, Vijayan alleged.
In Kolkata:The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) would work towards forming a “political alternative” at the centre which would be totally different from the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said here Saturday.”We should all try to form a political alternative at the centre which would be totally different from the Congress and BJP. That government should follow a secular and independent foreign policy for the people in India,” Bhattacharjee told the 15th conference of Communist Party of India-Marxists’ youth arm Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI).
He said: “We’ve already come a long way but we’ve to proceed further. It’s not a very easy job to replace Congress or BJP at the centre. We’ve to struggle very hard for bringing that change in the national politics.
“If BJP comes to power, Christians and Muslims would not be able to live in this country. Growing communalism is the greatest enemy in India now.”
Rubbishing the capitalist economy championed by the US, he said that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) went with the US economic policies despite repeated suggestions by the Left parties not to follow them.
“Our youth have to be very careful about their ideology as they’ll have to play a very important role in the days to come. They’ll have to shoulder greater responsibility than any other section in our society,” he said.
Bhattacharjee also lambasted the Maoist rebels, saying they are killing innocent villagers, and criticised other separatist forces active in different parts of the state, like Bankura, Purulia, West Midnapore and Darjeeling districts.
Mentioning the recent terror attack in Mumbai, West Bengal Left Front chairman Biman Bose said: “If we really want to combat terrorist attacks, we first have to fight capitalism as it is the main source of suppression, torture and bloodshed.”
The US thinks Pakistan-based militants' implication in the Mumbai terrorist attacks is giving Islamabad some food for thought as it considers how it should deal with terrorists operating on its soil.
"I think they're beginning to understand that the extremists in ungoverned spaces in their west have become an existential threat to Pakistan," US Defence Secretary Robert M Gates said in an interview aired on Wednesday.
In Chennai,Terming the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Mumbai terror strikes as a 'brilliant stupidity', noted US strategic analyst Stephen P Cohen said the attacks had brought to the fore Pakistan's role in assisting terror outfits!
Interpol chief meets Chidambaram!
Who runs the show in Pak, asks Pranab! But who runs INDIA, let us think! The CIA MOLE in Indira gandhi cabinet has NEVER been EXPOSED. We never know the FOREIGN Hand which Killed Indira Gandhi, Indian Constitution and Indian nation! What we know is a PERFECT SET of US SUPERSLAVE CLOWNS Ruling India in Collaboration with LPG MAFIA and KILLING the Enslaved MASSES quite indiscriminately!
Interpol chief Ronald K Noble on Saturday met Home Minister P Chidambaram and offered all possible international assistance in probing the Mumbai terror strikes.
“India has long been a strong partner of Interpol, it is only appropriate that Interpol stand shoulder to shoulder with India as it investigates the Mumbai terrorist attacks,” Noble said in a statement. Chidambaram and the Interpol chief held an hour-long meeting.
Sources said Noble offered help in unravelling details of the terrorists killed or captured in Mumbai - including their names, fingerprints, DNA profiles and photographs - by comparing them with Interpol's global databases and disseminate the information with its member countries.
“Noble discussed possible international assistance in the investigation and terrorism prevention support following the Mumbai terror attacks. He expressed Interpol's solidarity with the Indian government,” sources in the home ministry told IANS.
Mukherjee suggested rightly:
India would not like to advocate how other countries should be governed but would certainly like to know "whom we should deal with vis-a-vis another government; in other words, who runs the show?"
How is it then EVERY STEP by the Government of India is Dictated and Promoted by United states of America without any SHAME! Bypassing the parliament and the Constitution?
And see! here you are!
We now have to depend on Foreign hands for our Security and Safety as the government of India has FAILED Miserably!This Government of India working as a MARKETING Agent of US Corporate Imperialism is only concerned to SUSTAIN the brahaminical hegemony of MANIUSMRIRTI and APARTHEID!
Antulay rightly detects:Congress caught between terror and vote bank!though the MEDIA HYPE happens to be as follows:
If there is anything more tragic than India's Muslims having to vouch for their nationalism in the aftermath of every terrorist strike, it is the insane utterances of some of their self-appointed saviours!
Why Indian Media which was BARKING on Hindutva and HINDUTA Bomb and Hindu terrorism have become so PATRIOT that it it is RELUCTANT to question the DEATH MYSTERY of Hemat Karakare and top ATS officials involved in the investigation of Malegaon BLAST? Where is the Folowup on either Prjya singh or the Top Military officils in service involved with the case?
The fate of Minority affairs Minister continued to hang in balance as Congress President Sonia Gandhi [Images] and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [Images] to A R Antulay day grappled with the mess arising out of his controversial remarks on the killing of Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare.The meeting to resolve the situation caused by his remarks raising questions over the circumstances surrounding the killing of Karkare by Pakistani terrorists in Mumbai ended without a decision and the government's position is expected to be made clear in Parliament before it winds up business for the session on December 23.
The hour-long meeting of the Congress Core Group at the residence of the Prime Minister is believed to have gone into the pros and cons of the matter but there was no official word on whether his resignation was being accepted.
Opposition BJP and Shiv Sena having been gunning for Antulay's removal from the Cabinet accusing him of compromising the country's position vis a vis terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil.
"No decision has been taken. The position will be made clear in the session of Parliament concluding on December 23," said a senior leader who declined to be identified.
Meanwhile, Antulay, who has resigned in the wake of apolitical storm over his remarks and the opposition demand for his removal from the Union Cabinet, received rare support from his party when AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh saw nothing "objectionable" in the minister's statement.
Union Minister A R Antulay, facing flak from various quarters over his remarks on the killing of ATS chief Hemant Karkare, on Saturday found support in two MPs from the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.
Rashid Masood of the SP, the UPA's key ally, referred to the November 25 interview of Karkare in which he had reportedly said that a few Hindu organisations and Muslim extremist groups were working together and they would be exposed soon.
"If he is shot under such circumstances and one demands a probe...which even I demanded, I don't understand what is the need for an exaggerated reaction," he told a news channel in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
BSP MP Ilyas Azmi, while talking to the same news channel, here said, "people at Cama Hospital, where Karkare and other senior Mumbai Police officials were shot, had claimed that people sitting in the van were conversing in Marathi... local newspapers had carried this story. Only Sonia Gandhi and L K Advani seem to be ignorant about it".
National security can never be taken for granted: Air chief
Hyderabad : Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal F H Major has said the national security "can never ever be taken for granted" in the backdrop of recent terror strikes in Mumbai.
Addressing the Combined Graduation Parade of the flight cadets of the Indian Air Force at the Air Force Academy at Dundigal near here on Saturday, the Air Chief Marshal said: "We will continue to be confronted by various forces. We have to be fully geared up to face the challenges."
Major said the Indian Air Force was on the "threshold of comprehensive transformation" in terms of modernisation.
"Aerospace has revolutionised all other forms of warfare and it has itself undergone profound changes with ever-accelerating advances in technology. The present decade is likely to see even more rapid changes in weapon technology, which may fundamentally alter the very nature of warfare," the Air Chief added.
Stating that a career in the Indian Air Force was not only challenging but also satisfying, the Air Chief Marshal exhorted the young cadets to acquire full understanding and knowledge of application of new technology to exploit the true potential of aerospace power.
The Air Chief awarded the President's Commission to the flight cadets on behalf of the President of India, the supreme commander of Armed Forces.
Flying Officer Sandeep Singh Hooda, who commanded the passing out parade, was awarded the President's Plaque and Chief of Air Staff's 'Sword of Honour' for standing first in overall order of merit.
GOI is the greatest failure to defend National Integrity and Unity! Public Security and safety. It is a BRANCH OFFICE of GLOBAL DEFENCE Kickbacks , nothing else. It has mastered only in Genocide Cultre replicating the BUTCHERY hitherto attributed to United satates of america!
GSG-9 to help train and upgrade the NSG!
We'll help in probing Mumbai attacks, Interpol to India!
Armed with sufficient material on the terror attacks in Mumbai to nail Pakistan, India will mount a diplomatic offensive from Monday by convening a two-day closed door meeting in New Delhi [Images] with the heads of all foreign countries' missions in the national capital as part of strategy to get Pakistan declared as a 'terrorist State'.Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee will interact with ambassadors and high commissioners stationed in Delhi and discuss with them the problem of the repeated terror attacks planned and executed by their masters sitting in neighbouring countries.The exercise is to convince foreign governments that Pakistan would continue to harbour terrorists that pose a danger not only to India but to all other countries and to pressurise it to take effective steps for getting rid of all terrorist outfits and camps and not allowing them the base to regroup under new names.
Evidence of the involvement of the Pakistan Army's secret agency, Inter Service Intelligence, in the Mumbai attacks as also in the attack on the Indian mission in Kabul and other attacks will also be presented at the meeting to convince foreign governments that all efforts to banish terrorists from Pakistan will fail so long as they continue to get patronage and support of ISI, sources in New Delhi said.
Post-26/11, US more committed for biz with India!
What Business? it is well understood as We, the COMMON Enslaved Masses with inherent INEQUALITY and INJUSTICE happen to be PREDESTINED to be KILLED in the WAR ZONE and Ruling HEGEMONY created Killing Fields infinite across the political borders in this divide bleeding SOUTH ASIAN GEOPOLITICS!
How do you feel that the best OIL BLOCKS in India, invented by our ONGC scientists go to Reliance Petro? Is it not the fact that the Government hesitates to cut Kerosene and gas PRICES despite stiff SLUMP in Oil Prices just because it makes the PRIVATE OIL Companies unusually FAT! Now, Mukesh Ambani-controlled Reliance Industries Ltd may go slow on certain of its planned projects such as the Rs 5,000-crore Rewas port project, the Navi Mumbai SEZ project and the Rs 30,000-crore semi-conductor project in response to the global financial meltdown. Instead, it will focus more on its core businesses that include refining and petrochemicals.RIL, India’s biggest private corporate entity in terms of market capitalisation, is also mulling other measures such as streamlining back-end operations, tuning production capacities and re-allocating some of its workforce to battle the financial crisis, sources familiar with the development said. However, on the retail front, Reliance Retail may tweak its expansion plans in certain regions in the country, but overall, it may not be that affected. The RIL spokesman said that Reliance Retail continued to grow as per our expansion plans. “In the last quarter, Reliance Retail has added over 80 stores and at present has over 800 stores across the country.”
ALL corporates, MNCs, Builders and promoters do everything to sustain this BLOODY Killer UPA Pro US government! Why?
That is why Government Security Officers from the American Embassy in India on Saturday shared with USIBC member-companies a cautious but upbeat assessment of the security situation in Mumbai, as life in India's financial capital returns to normal. In a bid to restore investors' confidence after Mumbai terror attacks, the US-India Business Council (USIBC) has presented an optimistic assessment of the security situation in India, saying it is committed to doing trade with the country. Representatives of the Taj Group of Hotels and Oberoi Group of Hotels, who also joined in the USIBC members-only tele-conference, indicated that sophisticated security measures had been put in place since the November 26 attacks on Mumbai, reassuring future visitors and hotel guests.
The Taj and Oberoi properties will reopen for business on December 21, it was reported, the USIBC, a premier business advocacy group, said in a statement.
"It is a testament to the resilience and courage of the people of Mumbai how quickly India's financial capital has returned to normal. It is equally remarkable how India has demonstrated such restraint in so far as its relations with Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. For USIBC, this must mean a re-doubled commitment to doing business with India," Ron Somers, President of the USIBC, said.
"The correct response to this heinous act is for the US business community to get right back on jet planes as soon as possible to renew our engagement and partnership with India," he said.
On the other hand, Hinting at the Pakistani establishment's backing to terrorists who struck in Mumbai, India on Saturday said such strikes could be carried out with impunity only when the safety of the "handlers" of attackers has been assured.External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the lone terrorist, who was caught alive during the terror attacks in Mumbai on November 26, has given to investigators a "chilling accounts of his handlers."
"The impunity with which these attacks are carried out is possible only because of the safety the handlers have been assured," he said addressing a conference here.
Mukherjee said the attack on Mumbai was "cold and calculated murder" and the death of innocent people there were "not accidental or unintended as is sometimes referred to as collateral damage."
Seeking to nail Pakistan's denial that perpetrators of Mumbai attacks were elements of that country, Mukherjee said "the faces of terrorists have been seen across the globe."
While talking about the Mumbai strikes, he also referred to a similar attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July.
In an obvious reference to the clout of Pakistan military vis-a-vis democracy in that country, he said genuine democracy does not come about simply by holding an election
"but rather through a process of democratisation that makes elected representatives accountable and also ensuring that there is no "de facto centre of power" that is actually "pulling the puppet strings."
"The pretence of democracy is not equivalent to democratisation," Mukherjee said.
India would not like to advocate how other countries should be governed but would certainly like to know "whom we should deal with vis-a-vis another government; in other words, who runs the show?"
Mukherjee's remarks come at a time when Pakistan is doing a flip-flop on the origin of the attackers who carried out the terror strikes in Mumbai.
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari [Images] had earlier admitted that the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage could be 'non-state' actors of his country but later said there is still no "real evidence" that the terrorists came from his country.
Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said the village of Ajmal Amir Iman alias Ajmal Kasab [Images], who was caught alive in Mumbai, was cordoned off and his parents were not allowed to meet anyone.
Pakistani security agencies and local officials in Faridkot have launched a cover-up since India made it public that Kasab belonged to the village in Punjab province and his father acknowledged to a Pakistani newspaper that the gunman captured in India was his son.
Zardari had earlier agreed to send ISI chief Shuja Pasha to India to help in investigating the Mumbai attackers but later backtracked claiming that the agreement was to send a Director-level official and not the Director General of the spy agency.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald K Noble met Union Home Minister P Chidambaram on Saturday and promised all help to secure details of the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attacks. During their 20 minute meeting, Noble said the details of the terrorists who were killed or captured, including their names, fingerprints, DNA profiles and photographs, were compared with Interpol's global databases and appropriately disseminated to each and every one of its 186 member countries, Home Ministry sources said. Interpol also offered to issue Black Notices (for deceased persons) and Blue Notices (to obtain additional information) for the 10 terrorists involved in the attacks.These notices will allow investigators to seek formal and structured assistance from Interpol member countries, they said. In addition to the ongoing support to the probe, Interpol is offering to extend access to its global databases beyond the Interpol National Central Bureau here to include police, immigration, border-control units and other law enforcement authorities, thus enabling officers to conduct real-time checks of databases on wanted persons, stolen and lost travel documents and other critical information related to terrorism. Noble also met CBI Director Ashwani Kumar on Friday. "India and its CBI have much experience in using Interpol tools and services to track down terrorist fugitives and so India understands that it cannot be expected to find the answers to this incident without the support of the global law enforcement community, and we will help ensure that this happens," Noble said in a release.
In WASHINGTON, Insisting that the steps taken by Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks are "not nearly enough", the US has advised it to keep on working to "really deal" with terrorism to help ease the "crisis" with India. Neither India nor Pakistan wanted to escalate tensions and "no one was speaking in belligerent language", Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at a function in Washington.
"And if Pakistan continues to work to really deal with the terrorism problem, and if India can do the hard work of both helping to bring the perpetrators to justice and trying to prevent the next attack, then I think we can get through this crisis," the top official said.
Asked if she believed the civilian government in Pakistan has control over the military and the ISI, she said civilians were very much in charge and there have been some "positive" steps "though they're not nearly enough to this point".
"I have to say that I didn't hear a different line from the military and from the civilians. In fact, I heard from the military that they want the civilian government to succeed."
Rice felt that the deepening of Indo-US ties since 2001 helped in better tackling the crisis arising out of the Mumbai terror attacks, as there is now a greater level of trust between the two countries.
She said her visit to the subcontinent following the November 26 carnage was aimed at showing solidarity with India as also giving a message to Pakistan that terrorists operating from its soil have to be dealt with and it is not enough to say that they are "non-state actors".
Sources said Noble offered help in unravelling details of the terrorists killed or captured in Mumbai - including their names, fingerprints, DNA profiles and photographs - by comparing them with Interpol's global databases and disseminate the information with its member countries.
“Noble discussed possible international assistance in the investigation and terrorism prevention support following the Mumbai terror attacks. He expressed Interpol's solidarity with the Indian government,” sources in the home ministry told IANS.
Technology vital to counter terror: PM
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Saturday said the role of technology in supporting India's counter terrorism and internal security efforts was not being given adequate emphasis and there was need for greater investment in security technologies.
"Other countries have used modern science and technology in their security structures with great effect. It acts not only as a force multiplier but can also provide solutions to human problems relating to command, coordination and communication," the prime minister said while giving away the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awards, the country's highest science awards, for 2007 and 2008 to young scientists.
"Some of the areas where greater work is required are surveillance systems, cryptography, near real time search and identification from distributed large data bases and computer simulation exercises to enhance our crisis tactics and responses," he said.
This is the second time that Manmohan Singh has referred to the role of technology in countering terror after the Mumbai strikes last month in which over 170 people were killed.
UPA govt has been soft on terror: Advani
"We should use scientific interventions to neutralize weapons of terror and mass destruction. I believe that investment in security technologies is vital if our security systems are to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of international terrorism and crime."
The prime minister also said that public-private partnerships (PPP) should be used to commercialize technologies emerging from research and development programmes.
"How can science, industry and government work as one efficient and integrated machine to deliver to the people the benefits of these scientific and technological advances? This is an area where countries such as China and Japan have scored over us."
"Unless we apply ourselves to this task, the powerful scientific tools of social and economic change will remain confined to our laboratories and to our institutions. Our scientists, I suggest, should work to connect science to the daily lives of millions of our people," he said.
Full coverage: Mumbai terror attack
Stressing on the importance of PPP, he added: "Public-private partnerships should be used to commercialize the technologies emerging from R&D programmes being funded by various science departments. We should focus more on linking the lab with the market".
Appreciating the work of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the prime minister said: "CSIR should work to commercially exploit its vast knowledge base, currently embodied in more than 3,000 or so patents held nationally and globally".
Indian Express reports:
More than two decades after the National Security Guard (NSG) was set up on the lines of the German GSG-9 counter-terrorism force, the two countries have agreed after the Mumbai attacks for GSG-9 to help train and upgrade the NSG which is being expanded to have six regional hubs. It’s learnt that after the recent visit of German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble, the two countries are working to put in place an intensive assistance mechanism where the foremost priority is being given to improving the communication equipment used during operations. Sources said Germany had offered training from GSG-9 along with the communication equipment to help NSG upgrade.GSG-9 is the elite counter-terrorism and special operations force of the German police, set up after the 1972 Munich Olympic terror incidents where the German police was found inadequate in countering the terrorists. German officials have told their Indian counterparts that no major terror incident has happened in Germany after that. GSG-9 is famous for its seven-minute quick operation in October 1977 to free a hijacked Lufthansa flight that was being held hostage in Mogadishu. In continuing these high-level discussion, German Foreign Policy and Security Advisor Christoph Heusgen was here on Friday to meet his counterpart M K Narayanan to intensify cooperation on all fronts needed to enhance India’s preparedness to counter sophisticated terror operations like the one LeT launched in Mumbai. He assured all support, including GSG-9 training. India, sources said, told Germany that LeT had footprints in at least 24 countries that includes Somalia, among Chechen rebels in Russia and even in Indonesia where Jamaat-ud-Dawa is said to have engaged in relief work after tsunami. Also, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvi, who is believed to be the mastermind behind 26/11, is said to have fought in Bosnia. These details were shared with Germany to underline the extent of LeT’s presence and hence, the ability to strike even in the West. In fact, heads of German national and foreign intelligence agencies will be visiting India soon to take this conversation further besides sharing experiences on countering terror. Germany, which is also part of the recently formed group called the Friends of Pakistan, agreed that there was sufficient evidence to prove that the terrorists came from Pakistan, but it was still not clear that the trail led to the Pakistan Army or the ISI. Germany, reliable sources said, also agreed that Pakistan had not done enough in terms of action after the Mumbai attack. But like other Western countries, Germany felt that that the civilian Government led by Asif Ali Zardari must be strengthened, as it was not aware of the attack. In the recently concluded meeting of the Friends of Pakistan, Germany has agreed to double the development assistance to Pakistan, particularly in FATA, from 40 million Euros to 80 million Euros.
Goa Govt bans New Year beach parties!Panaji After initial reluctance, Goa government on Saturday decided to ban the beach parties on the Goa's coastline during Christmas and New year in view of heightened terror threat perception. Goa attracts 26 lakh tourists annually, of which maximum inflow is during the Christmas and New Year. The state is famous for beach parties for which thousands flock the state coastline to usher in the New Year.
"Taking into consideration all the aspects, we have decided that beach parties would not be allowed from December 23 to January 5," Goa Chief Minister Digamber Kamat said outside his official residence.
The Legislatiure Party of ruling Congress initially had recommended the ban but the Chief Minister on December 19 clarified that they might not ban the parties.
The Chief Minister held a high-level meeting in the presence of Home Minister Ravi Naik to review the security arrangement in the state.
Emerging from the meeting, the Home Minister said that all other festivities and celebrations will continue in the state. "There is no ban for the functions in the hotels. Also, the traditional celebrations will go on uninterrupted," Naik said. He said the security has been tightened all along the state and guests need not worry.
We can't have links with Islamabad: Anand
New Delhi Agreeing with the government's stance of not sending the cricket team to Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, three-time World chess Champion Viswanathan Anand on Friday said the prevailing circumstances were not conducive to continue (sporting) links with Islamabad.
"It's easy to understand the decision. It would be highly insensitive to the victims (if the team goes to play in Pakistan), we can't have any links with Islamabad in the present circumstances. It is a completely normal decision and it applies to any sports," Anand told reporters in Delhi.
India's cricket tour of Pakistan was on Thursday officially scrapped after the government refused to grant permission in the aftermath of the Mumbai massacre, carried out by people from the neighbouring country.
But Anand advised people to stay calm in such a critical situation as he felt terrorism was aimed at attacking the confidence of people and countries.
"It's most important that people in the country be calm. Essentially terrorism is creating panic in people's mind. So it should be looked after that the society is not turning on itself," said the Chennai-born, who visited the capital for the first time after retaining his World Championship title in Bonn, Germany, by defeating Russia's Vladimir Kramnik.
"It is simply a strategy to affect the victims' confidence. But you've to deal with it objectively and with practical details," he added.
Asked how exactly terrorism could be tackled, Anand first quipped: "If I knew I would have slain many gunmen long ago."
But on a serious note he suggested measures like "you need to give police a better equipment as it (terrorism) had become a global phenomenon now".
Having said that, Anand felt like terrorism, deadly diseases and hunger were also important issues and needed to be dealt with urgently.
"All diseases and hunger are killing more people than all the terrorism in the world. These problems are also as important," he said.
Anand, who is based in Spain, is the only chess player in the world to have won the World Championships in all the three formats of the game – knock-out, round robin and matchplay.
Anand is also reigning supreme in the world in the Rapid version of the game.
Call off composite dialogue with Pakistan, says BJP
New Delhi Accusing the ruling UPA of losing grip of the situation in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, the main Opposition BJP has suggested that the government should call off composite dialogue with Pakistan as that country has not responded adequately to India's demands. BJP leader Yashwant Sinha said the government seemed to lack 'cohesion' of thinking as senior ministers were speaking in different voices on the issue of dealing with Pakistan.
The former External Affairs Minister said New Delhi should build pressure on Islamabad by sending high-level political emissaries to various countries, besides the US and UK, with "incontrovertible" proof of involvement of Pakistani elements in the Mumbai attacks.
"Not judging between strength and weakness, somewhere the grip seems to have loosened over the last few days. Our government seems to speaking in different voices," Sinha told Karan Thapar in the interview on 'Devil's Advocate' programme.
"We heard the External Affairs Minister (Pranab Mukherjee) say one thing, Defence minister (A K Antony) say another thing on the same day (on dealing with Pakistan). I think it will be better if there was unity and cohesion within the spokespersons of the government," he added.
He said the ministers should discuss more among themselves and "come to a clear conclusion. There is lack of cohesion in thinking."
On how to deal with Pakistan, he said if his party were in power, it would have opted to "call off the composite dialogue" rather than putting a "pause" as has been done by the UPA government.
Making it clear that his party was not satisfied with the measures taken by Islamabad to meet New Delhi's demands for curbing terrorism, Sinha said "well, Pakistan has taken some steps. But, clearly Pakistan is not doing enough. I think what Pakistan has done is most inadequate if not eye-wash".
When asked if it wasn't enough for the government to rope in the US and UK to build pressure on Pakistan, the BJP leader suggested that the government should have approached other countries too.
"It is alright to rope in US and UK but I would prefer the government to send out emissaries to all important capitals of the world. Why should we ignore Paris, Berlin and many other capitals," Sinha said.
He said India should send high level political emissaries to important capitals of the world with "incontrovertible evidence of the involvement of Pakistan and even taken them on board on our side."
When asked if he or his party leader L K Advani would have accepted to be such an emissary, he said, "I think we would have certainly taken up this national duty."
The saffron party feels that the UPA was wrong to restrict itself in fixing responsibility merely on the 'elements of Pakistan'.
He said if BJP were in power it would have held ISI as also the government of Pakistan responsible. Commenting on US President-elect Barack Obama's reported intention to mediate on Kashmir issue, Sinha said any such initiative would not be acceptable to India.
"We should discourage and strongly discourage any attempt by anyone including President-elect (Barack) Obama to dabble into the issue of Jammu and Kashmir," Sinha said.
When asked if BJP's views would remain the same if it comes to power after the general elections, he said, "I am making it crystal clear today that no mediation by any envoy is acceptable to India."
This is a mega telecom scam, cries CPM
New Delhi: The CPM on Friday accused Communication Minister A Raja of misleading the Parliament on the issuance of new telecom licences at throw away prices that allegedly cost the exchequer a whopping Rs 1,00,000 crores and demanded that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh look into it.
"This is a mega telecom scam. New telecom licences have been given on first-come, first-serve basis at the prices fixed in 2001. The market value of these licences is roughly seven times higher now," CPM Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury told reporters in New Delhi.
The existing mobile operators under the umbrella of Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) had also opposed the decision of issuing new licences at a fixed price of Rs 1,651 crore for pan-India coverage.
Raja had defended the decision, saying that as late as in March 2007, just two months before he took charge from his predecessor Dayanidhi Maran, new licences were given to existing players at the same price.
Yechury said the government should have adopted a policy of open auction to arrive at market-determined price for issuing new licences and spectrum.
Asked whether CPM has joined hands with the COAI for opposing the new policy, the party's leader Nilotpal Basu denied this and said that they were also demanding an enquiry into allocation of additional spectrum to existing players beyond their eligibility.
Raja, in reply to a question in Parliament, had claimed that neither the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) nor the telecom regulator TRAI had raised any objection to the allocation of spectrum to 2G telecom service providers on a first-come, first-serve basis.
"This is nothing but an attempt to mislead Parliament, obfuscate matters and conceal the truth," Yechury said.
Yechury said that in a letter dated November 15, the CVC had expressed dissatisfaction over an earlier response of the DoT to the Commission's queries on the policy for allocation of spectrum. The CVC had asked for specific issues including clarification with regard to Swan Telecom selling their equity at high value.
As far as TRAI is concerned, it had said that the DoT violated the recommendations of the regulator while allocating new licences to 2G telecom operators.
The CPM has demanded immediate action on the part of the Prime Minister in this regard.
"Failure to initiate probe into the matter and fix responsibility, undertake steps to retrieve the lost revenues and review the entire gamut of spectrum allocation policies would make the entire Cabinet complicit with this gigantic scam," he said.
India's Right Wing Advocates Nuclear War!
[The text of the interview given by the RSS supremo is available at
Excerpt:
Quote
Q. Don't you think that warfare [to be launched by India against Pakistan in retaliation of terror attack on Mumbai] will not stop at guns, bombs and grenades?
Ans: Yes, I know it will not stop there. It will be nuclear war and a large number of people will be perished. In fact, not me but many people around the world have expressed their apprehension that this terrorism may ultimately result into III world war. And this will be a nuclear war in which many of us are going to be finished. But according to me, as of now, it is very necessary to defeat the demons and there is no other way. And let me say with confidence that after this destruction, a new world will emerge which will be very good, free from evil and terrorism. (Is vinaash ke baad jo sansaar aayega, waha bahut hi sundar hoga. Vahan par kuch bhee bura nahin rahega aur aatankawad bhi gayab ho jayega ).
Unquote
Evidently this tremendously influential madcap is totally unmindful of the fact that the "new world" that "will emerge" out of a nuclear world war, which he is both predicting and advocating, would be no "world" at all. It would just be a dead radioactive planet shorn of all life forms!]
http://www.truthout.org/121708M
India's Right Wing Wants Nuclear War
Wednesday 17 December 2008
by: J. Sri Raman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Mumbai's terrorist outrage of November 26 has found a response truly matching it in madness. A call for a nuclear war - and nothing less - has come as the culmination of warped and warlike reactions to the traumatizing tragedy, which has claimed a toll of 200 lives.
The demented call, which still cannot, unfortunately, be dismissed as inconsequential, is not only a regional war of the said, scary description. It is also one for a global conflict of the kind.
Fittingly, the call has emanated from the real fuehrer of India's far right. He may be relatively unknown to the outside world, and less known even in his country than political leaders of the "parivar," as the far-right "family" labels itself. But Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan is the supremo of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the misleading name meaning the National Volunteers' Association.
The RSS holds a commanding position in the parivar, as its patriarch and ideological fountainhead. It has a hold over the political front of the "family," the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well. Party leaders - even of such notoriety as Narendra Modi, who gloried in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, and of such national-level ambitions as Lal Krishna Advani, styled as the "shadow prime minister" - have always had to proclaim loyalty of the RSS from time to time.
The RSS, as every political reporter in India knows, has tightened its hold over the BJP in time for the parliamentary elections to be held by May 2009. Sudarshan's clarion call came in the course of an interview with a freelance journalist and was quoted first in a leading Pakistani newspaper on December 12. Asked if India should go for a full-fledged war with Pakistan, 77-year-old Sudarshan said, "If there is no other way left. Whenever the demons start dominating this planet, there is no way other than the war. Tell me if there is any other way out. But war should be the last resort. Before that India should consider other options."
That was his only attempt at sounding reasonable. Asked if such a war would not escalate into a nuclear conflict, he was disarmingly candid, "Yes, I know it will not stop there. It will be nuclear war and a large number of people will perish."
The vision of the apocalypse was not restricted to the region. "In fact, not me alone but many people around the world have expressed their apprehension that this terrorism may ultimately result in a Third World War. And this will be a nuclear war in which many of us are going to be finished. But according to me, as of now, it is very necessary to defeat the demons and there is no other way."
Then came the coup de grace: "And let me say with confidence that after this destruction, a new world will emerge, which will be very good, free from evil and terrorism."
He had hinted at his horrific vision earlier too. In January 2002, when India and Pakistan traded nuclear threats during a terrifying standoff in Kashmir and elsewhere, Sudarshan recalled epic Mahabharata to make his point: "When [the] Mahabharata [war] was fought in Kurukshetra, its repercussions were felt across the country but now India was the Kurukshetra and the battle, if fought, would have its effects across the globe."
In May 2005, in another media interview, he said that Pakistan-controlled Kashmir (Azad Kashmir) should be "annexed by force." What if there is a nuclear war? He said, "If it happens, it'll happen. We can't keep quiet all the time because of the scare of nuclear weapons."
It took a Mumbai, however, for Sudarshan to come out with his blood-curdling call with barely a reservation or qualification.
As Sudarshan acknowledged, he knew what a nuclear war meant - for the region and the world. Every reasonably educated person should know as well, after so many expert studies on the subject.
According to one of the studies, for example, if five cities each of India and Pakistan are hit in a nuclear war, about 1.7 million people will be killed in India and about 1.2 million in Pakistan, or a total of about three million in the region. If 15 cities of the two countries (eight in India and seven in Pakistan) are nuked, according to a classified Pentagon study, the toll could mount to 12 million deaths. Carcinogenic black rain in coastal areas of Hiroshima-like high humidity and the velocity of summer winds and dust storms especially in the India-Pakistan border region will widen the fallout. The global consequences will be no less grim - even if the conflict remains regional and does not become a world war of Sudarshan's vision. Ira Helfand, a US medical specialist, in a study of October 2007, projected "a total global death toll in the range of one billion from starvation alone" as a result of the regional war over a period of time.
Earlier studies have suggested that such a conflict would throw five million tonnes of black soot into the atmosphere, causing a reduction of 1.25 degrees Celsius in the average temperature at the earth's surface for several years. Consequently, the annual growing season in the world's most important grain-producing areas would shrink by between 10 and 20 days. According to Helfand, the world was ill prepared to cope with such a disaster. "Global grain stocks stand at 49 days, lower than at any point in the past five decades. These stocks would not provide any significant reserve in the event of a sharp decline in production. We would see hoarding on a global scale." All this was said quite sometime before the eruption of the latest food crisis.
Yet another study estimates the smoke unleashed by 100 small 15-kiloton nuclear warheads could destroy 30 percent to 40 percent of the world's ozone layer. This is expected to kill off some food crops.
A Third World War with origins in this region may lead to the emergence of a "terror-free" world of Sudarshan's special sense, but it will be a significantly truncated world indeed, to go by all available evidence. Nuclear militarism had always occupied a prominent place on the ultra-nationalist agenda of the RSS and the parivar. The BJP's parent body, the Jan Sangh, had demanded an Indian bomb, even in 1951, a full 13 years before China acquired nuclear weapons. The very first thing the BJP-led government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did in May 1998 was to conduct bomb tests and declare India a nuclear-weapon state. The regret in parivar circles is that the bomb is yet to be used.
During the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999, the RSS organ in Hindi, Panchjanya, wrote, "Pakistan will not listen just like that. We have a centuries-old debt to settle with this [Islamic] mindset. It is the same demon that has been throwing a challenge at Durga [Hindu goddess] since the time of Mohammed bin Qasim [of Saudi Arabia, eighth century, who conquered Sind and Punjab]."
Panchjanya added, "Arise, Atal Bihari! Who knows if fate has destined you to be the author of the final chapter of this long story. For what have we manufactured bombs? For what have exercised the nuclear option?"
What makes Sudarshan's call scarier is the not so indirect support he is receiving from supposedly apolitical "security" experts. Says one of them, Marroof Raza, "The suggestion of external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee that India could exercise a military option against Pakistan has alarmed the international community, particularly the US, that a war between the two nuclear-armed neighbors could see the first ever use of nuclear weapons by both sides. It is precisely this nuclear nightmare scenario that Pakistan's establishment and its military brass, in particular, have often exploited to blackmail the world each time India wants to take them to task for their many acts of terror...."
This sounds like a repetition of the RSS chief's rhetoric: "How long can we keep quiet all the time because of the scare of nuclear weapons?"
Satish Chandra, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan and deputy national security adviser in the Vajpayee government, said on December 14, "Terror outfits operating from Pakistan are state supported. Until and unless we inflict pain on Pakistan we are not going to achieve results." He added, "We have a variety of options before us. Water, agriculture, covert action and economy are some of the options before us to get the results. You have other options as well." The last sentence can again sound Sudarshan-like to some.
Meanwhile, the post-Mumbai war of words between New Delhi and Islamabad has served to illustrate the special danger of a nuclear conflict in the specific regional context. What New Delhi described as a "hoax call" was allegedly made to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on November 28 by a man who claimed to be India's External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and spoke in a "threatening" tone. The call threatened eruption of a military conflict, with Pakistan placing its army on high alert and its air force moving aircraft to forward bases on its front with India.
A semblance of normalcy has now been restored with Mukherjee denying the call and Zardari officially accepting the denial. The incident, however, has shown how well-founded are the apprehensions of an accidental nuclear war in the region, voiced by the peace movements in both the countries
Islamabad's official response to war cries from within India has been an attempt to sound reasonable, but not without a counterwarning of the same nuclear kind. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the country's parliament, "We are a nuclear power ... we want to act in a graceful manner and we do not want to create an impression that we are an irresponsible nation."
Surprisingly, no political party in India has so far reacted to Sudarshan's call to nuclear arms. Parties and forces opposed to the far right have, perhaps, chosen to treat his declaration with the contempt it deserves, in their view. If they have done so, they are indulging in an egregious error. The nuclear saber-rattling needs to be taken with the utmost seriousness.
Particularly eloquent, of course, is the silence with which the BJP has greeted the beating of the nuclear war drum. The BJP has always found it impolitic to implement the parivar's agenda fully while in power, which it has so far had to share with allies.
This, however, may precisely be the compulsion behind Sudarshan's call. His interview, which the RSS has taken care to authenticate officially, would appear designed to put pressure on the BJP against deviating from the path of the parivar if it returns to power in five months.
There may, thus, be a method in this nuclear madness.
IMF Chief Warns Of Riots In Response To Economic Crisis
Strauss-Kahn says advanced countries will see violent civil unrest if elite continues to exploit financial chaos for their own ends
London, 17 Dec, The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that advanced nations will be hit by violent civil unrest "if the elite continue to restructure the economy around their own interests while looting the taxpayer."
During a speech in Madrid, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that "social unrest may happen in many countries -- including advanced economies" if governments failed to adequately respond to the financial crisis.
"He added that violent protests could break out in countries worldwide if the financial system was not restructured to benefit everyone rather than a small elite," reports the Guardian.
Strauss-Kahn's comments echo those of others who have cautioned that civil unrest could arise, specifically in the U.S., as a result of the wholesale looting of the taxpayer and the devaluation of the dollar.
Widely respected trends forecaster Gerald Celente recently told Fox News that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.
Acts of Terror and Terrorising Act Unfolding Indian Tragedy In some circles, it is argued that the judiciary places unnecessary curbs on the power of the investigating agencies to tackle terrorism. In India, those who subscribe to this view also demand changes in our criminal and evidence law — such as provisions for longer periods of preventive detention and confessions made before police officials to be made admissible in court. While the ultimate choice in this regard lies with the legislature, we must be careful not to trample upon constitutional principles such as 'substantive due process.'
...
The role of the judiciary in this regard should not be misunderstood.
Adherence to the constitutional principle of 'substantive due process' is an essential part of our collective response to terrorism. As part of the legal community, we must uphold the right to fair trial for all individuals, irrespective of how heinous their crimes may be. If we accept a dilution of this right, it will count as a moral loss against those who preach hatred and violence.
K. G. Balakrishnan, Chief Justice of India
It is a matter great shame and concern that the amended UAPA Act which had been placed before the Lok Sabha on Tuesday evening was passed unanimously the very next day, on Dec. 17.
Similarly, the Rajya Sabha passed it the following evening.
This is almost a rerun of the shameful saga concerning the saga of the highly controversial and contested SEZ Act in early 2005. There is, however, at least one crucial difference. In the earlier case, it was a rather quiet affair, almost a hush-hush. This time it was done amidst ugly chest-thumping. Last time, in the Lok Sabha, the BJP did not even participate in the deliberations. This time they claimed with full gusto the credit (sic) for the passage of the Bill overshadowing its official sponsors.
While the full details remain to be accessed and analysed, it is pretty much clear that most of the provisions of the earlier scrapped POTA, on account of strong reactions triggered by a history of huge misuse against the minorities, other marginalised sections of the society, people struggling against social and political injustices and also known opponents of those in positions of power have been brought back. Only the provision for legal admissibility of a "confession" made in police custody is left out. But there are other areas, where its reach has further extended. The most important aspect, however, is that the court has to treat an accused as guilty till proved otherwise and unless the court finds the accused prima facie innocent it won't grant any bail to the accused. In case of a "foreign national", there is just no provision for any bail, whatever. This evidently runs counter to the recent Supreme Court directive that during a trial granting of bail should be the norm, and rejection an exception.
Even the BJP’s start speaker in the Rajya sabha, Arun Jaitley, had to thus admit in course of his shrill advocacy for a draconian Act while supporting the Bill:
Quote
It is obvious that an anti terror law is not a substitute for stronger intelligence and security responses. You need a powerful intelligence mechanism which infiltrates into the enemy camp and brings you advance information of what the enemy is planning. The intelligence has to be coordinated and then effectively passed on to those who will take preventive measures. Your security responses have to be fast. Your commando reactions must send fear into the enemy mind. Obviously, an anti terror law is not a replacement of all these.
Unquote
[Source: http://offstumped.nationalinterest.in/2008/12/18/arun-jaitleys-speech-in-rajya-sabha-on-nia-uapa-bills/.]
It is not necessary here to get into the utterly perverse nature of Jaitley's foundational assumption of some perpetual enmity and a permanent "enemy camp" except for noting that this is the central element of mobilization strategy of the Hindutva Brigade in pursuance of its “Hindu Rashtra” project – ideological negation and physical liquidation of “secular democratic” India.. But what is more relevant is that even he cannot run away from the obvious fact that draconian laws are no substitute for good intelligence gathering (to prevent acts of terrorism) and prompt and effective response to such acts when they take place nevertheless.
A rider, a forewarning, issued by the incumbent Chief Justice of India, in a recent article of his is extremely instructive in the current context:
Quote
(T)he trauma resulting from the terrorist attacks may be used as a justification for undue curtailment of individual rights and liberties. Instead of offering a considered response to the growth of terrorism, a country may resort to questionable methods such as permitting indefinite detention of terror suspects, the use of coercive interrogation techniques, and the denial of the right to fair trial. Outside the criminal justice system, the fear generated by terrorist attacks may also be linked to increasing governmental surveillance over citizens and unfair restrictions on immigration.
.....
This implies that we must be wary of the use of torture and other forms of coercive interrogation techniques by law enforcement agencies. Coercive interrogation techniques mostly induce false confessions and do not help in preventing terrorist attacks. Furthermore, the tolerance of the same can breed a sense of complacency if they are viewed as an easy way out by investigative agencies.
Unquote
[Source:
Pretty unfortunately, but rather expectedly, the entire thrust of the discourse spearheaded by the outraged elite is to "tighten the law" to ensure "conviction" of the accused by granting more powers to the law enforcing agencies whose performance in stalling terrorist attacks amidst repeated claims of busting the "terror modules" and capturing, and also "neutralising" through encounters, the (innumerable) "masterminds" remains utterly and increasingly dismal. Highly conspicuous is any anxiety to ensure an efficient investigation and effective intelligence gathering and making those responsible for failures accountable for their failures.
Draconian laws, let there be no confusion, will only tend to turn the highhanded, corrupt and lousy police force even more so and thereby further worsen the situation. Not that there will not be more convictions and many more arrests, indefinite detentions, custodial and encounter deaths. The continued incarceration of Dr. Binayak Sen – a dedicated doctor of highest distinction and a human rights activist of national stature - behind the bars since May 2007 on apparently trumped up charges despite national and global protests, even without the aid of the newly brushed up UAPA Act, is enough of a pointer. But that will not stop or deter terrorism, rather further aggravate. It is a great tragedy that such measure is being sold and consumed considered as the silver bullet in spite of clearly proven track record of gross failures. The attack on the Indian Parliament, the Red Fort, Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar and also the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar are just a few examples. All these are, incidentally, of somewhat nature as that of the latest attack in Mumbai.
The latest terror attack in Mumbai, which is somewhat atypical in the context of endless terror attacks in India since the one on March 12 1993 - flowing directly from the preceding bloodbath sparked on January 6 1993 – has, however, one common characteristic. That is the gross failure of intelligence.
Intelligence gathering and sorting out of the same through interactions of various agencies into actionable knowledge has various stages and levels. The gathering itself has essentially two categories – domestic and external. The external element is of course the charge of a very specialized agency mainly through a set of trained “spies”, and tips from other “friendly” agencies. The internal gathering process is, however, far more varied. Even then the base, and the most crucial element, is constituted of intelligence gathering at the grassroots level. Here the present practice is to obtain information through paid “informers” – all sorts of shady characters, petty and professional criminals. Given the extremely negative image of the police vis-à-vis the local communities, it could hardly be otherwise. But this method cannot but be far less efficient than would have been in case of voluntary and free flow of information from the common citizenry. But that would call for a very different image of the police. A very different relationship with the local communities. Instead of an institution symbolizing and embodiment of torture and oppression, the police has to have a people-friendly image in order to make that possible. But in such an event, not only intelligence gathering would be far more efficient – but that would rather be a fringe benefit – the maintenance of “law and order” itself would be much smoother.
Nothing can be truer and more forthright than a recent assessment of the current state of Indian policing as contained in a statement issued by the Asian Human Rights Commission on the last December 2, in the wake of the terror attack in Mumbai.
Quote
The fact remains that the Maharashtra State Police, like any other state police force in the country, can hardly do anything to avert these incidents. The state of policing in the country is in such demise that it has completely severed its contact with the people. Most police officers contact the members of the public only to demand bribes. Corruption in the police service is at such levels that even in order to lodge a complaint the complainant has to pay a bribe.
Police brutality is so rampant in the country that the sight of a police uniform is enough to scare an ordinary person, particularly among the poor population. Information, independent of its nature, has to be forced out of the ordinary people. Information obtained under the threat of violence is tainted and cannot be acted upon. Terrorists are different from the ordinary people in the sense that they have money, better training and equipment at their disposal to achieve their goals. They can bribe the police and are in fact doing so.
…..
To expect an ordinary Indian to approach the local police with information is an impossibility in the country. An example is the statements made by the parents who lost their children in the infamous 2006 December Noida serial murder case. The case began after the recovery of the skeletal remains of missing children in Nithari village in the outskirts of Noida city close to New Delhi.
Unquote
[Source:
The unfortunate “unanimous” passage of the freshly amended Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is only an indicator of the deep rot in the system. It is no less revealing that during the debates no one reportedly raised the very sensible and in fact obvious demand for a credible public enquiry covering all the aspects of widely alleged intelligence failure, response lags and lapses, who are behind the attack and why to work out a set of thoughtful and rational responses to make the system at least somewhat less vulnerable the next time round; to make the reoccurrence significantly less probable;. to make such a tragedy far less costly if it manages to happen nevertheless. We had only chest thumping demagoguery, clamour for draconian laws and war cries all around.
Instead of helping contain terrorism, let alone eradicating, it will only further aggravate social tensions through legitimization of corrupt highhandedness of the police force and targeting of specific segments of the society with full protections of the law. It is perhaps Gorky who had pronounced that if order is injustice then disorder is the beginning of justice. Unfortunately, law itself predictably turning more and more unlawful and tyrannical, more and more youngsters would tend to embrace that as a piece of divine wisdom with disastrous consequences on all sides to follow.
That even the sage words of the serving Chief Justice of India stand so casually dismissed only goes to further underscore the depth of the tragedy we have dug ourselves in.
Only an awakened common citizenry refusing to succumb to the easy lure of ugly blood lust triggered by such disasters as the last terror attack in Mumbai and steadfastly demanding thoughtful actions and radical reforms to prevent recurrence of such shameful failure is the way to get ourselves out.
Sukla Sen19 12 08
Geo TV dragged to court for revealing Kasab's identity
Lahore: Private Geo TV News channel has been taken to court for its investigative report that exposed the Pakistani origin of the lone terrorist captured in the Mumbai attacks to the embarassment of the country's leadership and a petition seeking registration of a case was admitted.
The sensational report that grabbed headlines said the surviving gunman Ajmal Amir Iman Kasab is a resident of Faridkot village in Punjab province in the country lending weight to India's assertion that the Mumbai siege had Pakistani links.
Setting aside an objection raised by the court registrar's office, Lahore High Court's acting Chief Justice Mian Najamuzzaman on Thursday admitted the petition seeking registration of a case against the employees and owners of the channel.
The petition was filed by ruling Pakistan People's Party leader Sardar Hur Bukhari in his personal capacity. On Tuesday, the registrar's office had objected to the petition, on the grounds it fell under the jurisdiction of subordinate courts, and advised Bukhari to seek that remedy first.
Bukhari said he had filed an application with the police for registering a case against Geo News's Lahore bureau chief, reporters and cameraman as well as owners of the channel for beaming the report which had "damaged Pakistan's image" across the world. But police had refused to register a case, he added.
He then decided to approach the court to direct the police to register an FIR.
Geo News recently aired what it said was secretly filmed footage of residents of Faridkot acknowledging that Ajmal, alias Kasab, was a resident of the village. One resident said Ajmal had last visited Faridkot about six months ago, when he told his mother he was going away for 'jehad'.
Majority of Pakistanis want Sharif as President: Survey
Islamabad: An overwhelming majority of Pakistanis believe the country is moving in the wrong direction and nearly 60 per cent would rather prefer PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif as President than Asif Ali Zardari, a survey has said.
Eighty eight per cent of the respondents in the poll conducted by the US-based International Republican Institute (IRI) said Pakistan is moving in the wrong direction, while 73 per cent said the economic situation had worsened in the past year.
A total of 76 per cent rated the PPP-led government's performance on key issues as poor, up from 51 per cent in a survey conducted by IRI in June.
Sixty-seven per cent replied in the negative when asked if things would be better now as there is a democratically elected Parliament and President in Pakistan.
While 59 per cent of Pakistanis surveyed said they would prefer Sharif as President, only 19 per cent backed Zardari for the job. Sixty three per cent also said they disapproved of Zardari's performance while only 19 per cent approved it.
Asked which leader could best handle the problems facing the country, 31 per cent of respondents backed PML-N chief and former premier Nawaz Sharif while President Zardari was supported by eight per cent and former President Pervez Musharraf by three per cent.
Among the respondents, 64 per cent said they liked slain former premier and PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto and 60 per cent said they liked Sharif, while 65 per cent said they disliked Zardari.
Significantly, the number of people who said the powerful army should have no role in politics fell from 62 per cent in June to 49 per cent in the latest survey, which was conducted by IRI during October 15-30. Forty-two per cent said the army should have a role, up from 27 per cent in June.
Asked if they felt more secure this year compared to last year, 78 per cent replied in the negative. A total of 52 per cent also said the country had not made important steps towards democracy despite the election of a new Parliament and President, the resignation of former President Pervez Musharraf and separation of the posts of President and army chief.
Forty-two per cent said they wanted the PML-N back in the government while 60 per cent held Zardari responsible for the split between the two parties in August.
A total of 54 per cent said they would support a peace deal with extremists, down from 64 per cent in June while 60 per cent said religious extremism is a serious problem in Pakistan. The survey covered 3,500 people in all four provinces of Pakistan, IRI said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/cheney-throws-down-gauntl_b_152211.html?view=print
Cheney Throws Down Gauntlet, Defies Prosecution for War Crimes
By Marjorie Cohn
Huffington Post, December 19 , 2008
Dick Cheney has publicly confessed to ordering war crimes. Asked about waterboarding in an ABC News interview, Cheney replied, "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared." He also said he still believes waterboarding was an appropriate method to use on terrorism suspects. CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the agency waterboarded three Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003.
U.S. courts have long held that waterboarding, where water is poured into someone's nose and mouth until he nearly drowns, constitutes torture. Our Federal War Crimes Act defines torture as a war crime punishable by life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.
Under the doctrine of command responsibility, enshrined in U.S. law, commanders all the way up the chain of command to the commander-in-chief can be held liable for war crimes if they knew or should have known their subordinates would commit them and they did nothing to stop or prevent it.
Why is Cheney so sanguine about admitting he is a war criminal? Because he's confident that either President Bush will preemptively pardon him or President-elect Obama won't prosecute him.
Both of those courses of action would be illegal.
First, a president cannot immunize himself or his subordinates for committing crimes that he himself authorized. On February 7, 2002, Bush signed a memo erroneously stating that the Geneva Conventions, which require humane treatment, did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But the Supreme Court made clear that Geneva protects all prisoners. Bush also admitted that he approved of high level meetings where waterboarding was authorized by Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey says there's no need for Bush to issue blanket pardons since there is no evidence that anyone developed the policies "for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful." But noble motives are not defenses to the commission of crimes.
Lt. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, said, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Second, the Constitution requires President Obama to faithfully execute the laws. That means prosecuting lawbreakers. When the United States ratified the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, thereby making them part of U.S. law, we agreed to prosecute those who violate their prohibitions.
The bipartisan December 11 report of the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that "senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
Lawyers who wrote the memos that purported to immunize government officials from war crimes liability include John Yoo, Jay Bybee, William Haynes, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales. There is precedent in our law for holding lawyers criminally liable for participating in a common plan to violate the law.
Committee chairman Senator Carl Levin told Rachel Maddow that you cannot legalize what's illegal by having a lawyer write an opinion.
The committee's report also found that "Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there." Those techniques migrated to Iraq and Afghanistan, where prisoners in U.S. custody were also tortured.
Pardons or failures to prosecute the officials who planned and authorized torture would also be immoral. Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that "there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq -- as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat -- are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo."
During the campaign, Obama promised to promptly review actions by Bush officials to determine whether "genuine crimes" were committed. He said, "If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," but "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."
Two Obama advisors told the Associated Press that "there's little -- if any -- chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage."
When he takes office, Obama should order his new attorney general to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate and prosecute those who ordered and authorized the commission of war crimes.
Obama has promised to bring real change. This must be legal and moral change, where those at the highest levels of government are held accountable for their heinous crimes. The new president should move swiftly to set an important precedent that you can't authorize war crimes and get away with it.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and President of the National Lawyers Guild. She testified before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in May about official liability for torture. The author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.
Revoking Israel's UN Membership
By Snorre Lindquist and Lasse Wilhelmson, Stockholm
Dec 3, 2008
www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14445
The Gaza Strip is now the largest concentration camp in the world.
The situation grows steadily more insufferable for the 1.5 million
Palestinians who live there. Deliveries of food, medicine and fuel
are made difficult or stopped altogether. Child malnutrition is
increasing. Water supplies and drainage have ceased to function.
Children die for lack of healthcare. Tunnels to Egypt, dug by hand,
are the only breathing space. Journalists and diplomats are denied
entry. Israel is planning more military efforts. The Palestinians in
Gaza are now to be starved into surrender and become an Egyptian
problem.
The UN should use the word apartheid in connection with Israel and
consider sanctions with the former South Africa serving as a model.
Miguel dÉscoto Brockman, president of the UN General Assembly,
conveyed this message at a meeting on November 24th 2008 with the UN
General Secretary Ban Ki-moon present.
The 1976 Nobel peace prize laureate, Mairead McGuire from Ireland,
recently suggested a popular movement demanding that the UN revoke
Israel's membership. The international community now needs to put
tangible pressure on Israel in order to stop its war crimes.
Not once, during the past 60 years, has Israel shown any intention of
living up to the requirements stipulated by the UN, in connection
with the country's membership in 1948, namely that the Palestinians
who had been evicted from their homes should be allowed to return at
the earliest possible opportunity. Moreover, Israel holds the hardly
flattering world record of ignoring UN resolutions.
It can be questioned from the aspect of human rights legislation
whether Israel is a legitimate state. Established practice between
states usually requires borders that are legally maintained and a
constitution, neither of which Israel has. These requirements are
also named in the UN resolution (181) Partition Plan for Palestine,
approved by the General Assembly in November 1947. The plan was
accepted by the Zionists Jews in Palestine but rejected for excellent
reasons as unjust by the Arab states. Only decisions made by the UN
Security Council are mandatory. Later on, Israel unilaterally laid
claim to a considerably larger portion of land than that suggested by
the UN.
The eviction of eighty per cent of the Palestinians who lived west of
the 1947 armistice line, and Israel's refusal to allow them to return
is the human rights argument for expelling Israel from the UN. Not
only has Israel played the Partition Plan false but has, by its
actions, thwarted the grounds – fragile from the start – for its UN
membership.
Israel makes use of various strategies to achieve its goals, the same
goals as for over a hundred years ago: As few and as well controlled
and weakened Palestinians as possible in areas as small as possible
between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. And to try and get
acceptance worldwide for the theft of land that is vital to
the "state" that calls itself "Jewish and democratic". This obviously
bears no similarity to a peace process.
Why does nobody ever comment on the fact that Israel's prime minister
never misses an opportunity to harp on about how important it is that
the rest of the world and the Palestinians recognise Israel, not as a
democratic country for all its citizens, but as a "Jewish state"?
What would we have said if South Africa's Prime Minister, in a
similar way, had demanded recognition of South Africa as a "white and
democratic state", thus de facto accepting the racist apartheid
system that allowed non-whites to be classified as lesser human
beings?
In the article The end of Zionism, published in the Guardian on
September the 15th 2003 the Jewish dissident and former speaker of
Knesset, Avraham Burg wrote:
"Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity
must pay heed and speak out … We cannot keep a Palestinian majority
under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only
democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal
rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew ... The prime
minister should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racism or
democracy."
No support can be found in The UN recommendation concerning a Jewish
and a Palestinian state for unequal rights for the citizens of each
country. Neither is there any indication as to how a "Jewish" state
could become Jewish. There is support, however, for the intention
that demographic conditions should be held intact at partition.
Interpreting into the text an intention concerning characteristics of
a "Jewish state" tailored to the ideology of Zionism is wholly in
contradiction with the text of the resolution.
Even the Balfour Declaration, which entirely lacks human rights
status, notes that the Jewish national home in Palestine should in no
way encroach upon the rights of the Palestinians. Neither did US
President Truman recognize Israel as a Jewish state. On the contrary,
he ruled out precisely that formulation before making his decision to
recognize Israel.
Thus, the legitimacy of a "Jewish state" so urgently sought by Israel
lacks support in international documents that concern the building of
the state. Israel's government is, of course, fully aware of this.
Why else would it keep on searching for this recognition?
The UN should now embark on a boycott of the apartheid state of
Israel and, with the threat of expulsion from the UN, demand that
Israel allows the evicted Palestinian refugees to return in
accordance with the UN resolutions 194 and 3236.
With this done, meaningful peace talks can proceed and various
solutions be reached for co-habitation with equal rights for all
people between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. No such
solution can be compatible with the preservation of a Jewish
apartheid state.
- Snorre Lindquist is a Swedish Architect of, among other things, the
House of Culture in front of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem on the
West Bank. Contact him at snorre_lindquist@hotmail.com
- Lasse Wilhelmson is a commentator on the situation in the Middle
East, and is a member of a local government in Sweden for 23 years,
four of which in an executive position. Contact him at:
lasse.wilhelmson@bostream.nu
A History of Music Torture in the War on Terror
By Andy Worthington
http://tinyurl.com/4r33py
From Britney to Barney, any music can drive you mad if it's played
enough. And unlike with physical torture, you can't mentally prepare
yourself.
There's an ambiguous undercurrent to the catchy pop smash that
introduced a pig-tailed Britney Spears to the world in 1999 — so much
so that Jive Records changed the song's title to "… Baby One More
Time" after executives feared that it would be perceived as condoning
domestic violence.
It's a safe bet, however, that neither Britney nor songwriter Max
Martin ever anticipated that this undercurrent would be picked up on
by U.S. military personnel, when they were ordered to keep prisoners
awake by blasting earsplitting music at them — for days, weeks or
even months on end — at prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo
Bay.
The message, as released Guantánamo prisoner Ruhal Ahmed explained in
an interview earlier this year, was less significant than the
relentless, inescapable noise. Describing how he experienced music
torture on many occasions, Ahmed said, "I can bear being beaten up,
it's not a problem. Once you accept that you're going to go into the
interrogation room and be beaten up, it's fine. You can prepare
yourself mentally. But when you're being psychologically tortured,
you can't." He added, however, that "from the end of 2003 they
introduced the music, and it became even worse. Before that, you
could try and focus on something else. It makes you feel like you are
going mad. You lose the plot, and it's very scary to think that you
might go crazy because of all the music, because of the loud noise,
and because after a while you don't hear the lyrics at all, all you
hear is heavy banging."
Despite this, the soldiers, who were largely left to their own
devices when choosing what to play, frequently selected songs with
blunt messages — "Fuck Your God" by Deicide, for example, which is
actually an anti-Christian rant, but one whose title would presumably
cause consternation to believers in any religion — even though, for
prisoners not used to Western rock and rap music, the music itself
was enough to cause them serious distress. When CIA operatives spoke
to ABC News in November 2005, as part of a groundbreaking report into
the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on "high-value
detainees" held in secret prisons, they reported that, when prisoners
were forced to listen to Eminem's Slim Shady album, "The music was so
foreign to them it made them frantic." And in May 2003, when the
story broke that music was being used by U.S. psyops teams in Iraq,
Sgt. Mark Hadsell, whose favored songs were said to be "Bodies" by
Drowning Pool and "Enter the Sandman" by Metallica, told
Newsweek, "These people haven't heard heavy metal. They can't take
it."
Approval for the Use of Music Torture in the War on Terror
Depending on people's musical tastes, responses to reports that music
has been used to torture prisoners often produces flippant comments
along the lines of, "If I had to listen to David Gray's `Babylon'/the
theme tune from Barney (the purple dinosaur)/Christina Aguilera, I'd
be crying `torture' too." But the truth, sadly, is far darker, as
Hadsell explained after noting that prisoners in Iraq had a problem
with heavy metal music.
"If you play it for 24 hours," Hadsell said, "your brain and body
functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down, and your
will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them."
Hadsell, like senior figures in the administration, was blithely
unconcerned that "breaking" prisoners, rather than finding ways of
encouraging them to cooperate, was not to best way to secure
information that was in any way reliable, but the psyops teams were
not alone. In September 2003, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S.
military commander in Iraq, approved the use of music as part of a
package of measures for use on captured prisoners "to create fear,
disorient … and prolong capture shock," and as is spelled out in an
explosive new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee into the
torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody (PDF), the use of
music was an essential part of the reverse engineering of techniques,
known as survival, evasion, resistance, escape (SERE), which are
taught in U.S. military schools to train personnel to resist
interrogation. The report explains:
During the resistance phase of SERE training, U.S. military
personnel are exposed to physical and psychological pressures …
designed to simulate conditions to which they might be subject if
taken prisoner by enemies that did not abide by the Geneva
Conventions. As one … instructor explained, SERE training is "based
on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva
Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of
prisoners over the last 50 years." The techniques used in SERE
school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during
the Korean War to elicit false confessions, include stripping
detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions,
putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them
like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and
exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and
body slaps, and until recently, for some who attended the Navy's SERE
school, it included waterboarding.
The Senate Committee's report, which lays the blame for the
implementation of these policies on senior officials, including
President George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Vice President Dick Cheney's former legal counsel (and now chief of
staff) David Addington, and former Pentagon General Counsel William
J. Haynes II, makes it clear not only that the use of music is part
of a package of illegal techniques, but also that at least part of
its rationale, according to the Chinese authorities who implemented
it, was that it secured false confessions, rather than
the "actionable intelligence" that the U.S. administration was
seeking.
The Experiences of Binyam Mohamed and Donald Vance
In case any doubt remains as to the pernicious effects of music
torture, consider the comments by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident
still held in Guantánamo, who was tortured in Morocco for 18 months
on behalf of the CIA, and was then tortured for four months in the
CIA's "Dark Prison" in Kabul, and Donald Vance, a U.S. military
contractor in Iraq, who was subjected to music torture for 76 days in
2006.
Speaking to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the
legal action charity Reprieve, Mohamed, like Ruhal Ahmed, explained
how psychological torture was worse than the physical torture he
endured in Morocco, where the CIA's proxy torturers regularly cut his
penis with a razorblade.
"Imagine you are given a choice," he said. "Lose your sight or lose
your mind."
In Morocco, music formed only a small part of Mohamed's torture.
Toward the end of his 18-month ordeal, he recalled that his
captors "cuffed me and put earphones on my head. They played hip hop
and rock music, very loud. I remember they played Meatloaf and
Aerosmith over and over. I hated that. They also played 2Pac, "All
Eyez On Me," all night and all day. … A couple of days later, they
did the same thing. Same music. I could not take the headphones off,
as I was cuffed. I had to sleep with the music on and even pray with
it."
At the Dark Prison, however, which was otherwise a plausible re-
creation of a medieval dungeon, in which prisoners were held in
complete darkness and were often chained to the walls by their
wrists, the use of music was relentless. As Mohamed explained:
It was pitch black, and no lights on in the rooms for most of the
time … They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists
and hands had gone numb. … There was loud music, Slim Shady and Dr.
Dre for 20 days. I heard this nonstop, over and over. I memorized the
music, all of it, when they changed the sounds to horrible ghost
laughter and Halloween sounds. It got really spooky in this black
hole. … Interrogation was right from the start, and went on until the
day I left there. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and
night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their
heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off. …
Throughout my time, I had all kinds of music and irritating sounds,
mentally disturbing. I call it brainwashing.
Vance's story demonstrates not only that the practice of using music
as torture was being used as recently as 2006, but also that it was
used on Americans. When his story broke in December 2006, the New
York Times reported that he "wound up as a whistle-blower, passing
information to the FBI about suspicious activities at the Iraqi
security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible
illegal weapons trading," but that "when American soldiers raided the
company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked
there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware
that Mr. Vance was an informer."
Vance, who was held at Camp Cropper in Baghdad, explained that he was
routinely subjected to sleep deprivation, taken for interrogation in
the middle of the night and held in a cell that was permanently lit
with fluorescent lights. He added, "At most hours, heavy metal or
country music blared in the corridor." Speaking to the Associated
Press last week, he said that the use of music as torture "can make
innocent men go mad," and added more about the use of music during
his imprisonment, stating that he was "locked in an overcooled 9-foot-
by-9-foot cell that had a speaker with a metal grate over it. Two
large speakers stood in the hallway outside." The music, he
said, "was almost constant, mostly hard rock. There was a lot of Nine
Inch Nails, including `March of the Pigs.' I couldn't tell you how
many times I heard Queen's `We Will Rock You.' " He said the
experience "sort of removes you from you. You can no longer formulate
your own thoughts when you're in an environment like that."
After his release, Vance said he planned to sue Rumsfeld on the basis
that his constitutional rights had been violated, and he
noted, "Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had." He
added that he had written a letter to the camp's commander "stating
that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the
fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the
Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow
ourselves."
Musicians Take Action
Last week, Reprieve launched a new initiative, Zero dB (Against Music
Torture), aimed at encouraging musicians to take a stand against the
use of their music as torture instruments. This is not the first time
that musicians have been encouraged to speak out. In June, Clive
Stafford Smith raised the issue in the Guardian, and when, in an
accompanying article, the Guardian noted that David Gray's
song "Babylon" had become associated with the torture debate after
Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told
of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample
of the song, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst,
Gray openly condemned the practice. "The moral niceties of whether
they're using my song or not are totally irrelevant," he said. "We
are thinking below the level of the people we're supposed to oppose,
and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to
represent. It's disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to
the scale of the horror and how low we've sunk is a good thing."
In a subsequent interview with the BBC, Gray complained that the only
part of the torture music story that got noticed was its "novelty
aspect" — which he compared to Guantánamo['s] Greatest Hits — and
then delivered another powerful indictment of the misappropriation of
his and other artists' music.
"What we're talking about here is people in a darkened room,
physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music
blaring at them for 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he
said. "That is torture. That is nothing but torture. It doesn't
matter what the music is — it could be Tchaikovsky's finest or it
could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn't matter, it's going to
drive you completely nuts.
"No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we've
gone above and beyond all legal process and we're torturing people."
Not every musician shared Gray's revulsion. Bob Singleton, who wrote
the theme tune to Barney, which has been used extensively in the War
on Terror, acknowledged in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in July
that "if you blare the music loud enough for long enough, I guess it
can become unbearable," but refused to accept either that songwriters
can legitimately have any say about how their music is used, or that
there were any circumstances under which playing music relentlessly
at prisoners could be considered torture.
"It's absolutely ludicrous," he wrote. "A song that was designed to
make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to
threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional
breaking point?
"The idea that repeating a song will drive someone over the brink of
emotional stability, or cause them to act counter to their own
nature, makes music into something like voodoo, which it is not."
Singleton was not the only artist to misunderstand how the use of
music could indeed constitute torture — especially when used as part
of a package of techniques designed to break prisoners.
Steve Asheim, Deicide's drummer, said: "These guys are not a bunch of
high school kids. They are warriors, and they're trained to resist
torture. They're expecting to be burned with torches and beaten and
have their bones broken. If I was a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay and
they blasted a load of music at me, I'd be like, `Is this all you
got? Come on.' I certainly don't believe in torturing people, but I
don't believe that playing loud music is torture either."
Furthermore, other musicians have been positively enthusiastic about
the use of their music. Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool, which has
played to U.S. troops in Iraq, told Spin magazine, "People assume we
should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is
annoying enough that played over and over it can psychologically
break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our
song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like
that."
Fortunately, for those who understand that using music as part of a
system of torture techniques is no laughing matter, the Zero dB
initiative provides the most noticeable attempt to date to call a
halt to its continued use. Christopher Cerf, who wrote the music for
Sesame Street, was horrified to learn that the show's theme tune had
been used in interrogations. "I wouldn't want my music to be a party
to that," he said.
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine has been particularly
outspoken in denouncing the use of music for torture. In 2006, he
said to Spin magazine: "The fact that our music has been co-opted in
this barbaric way is really disgusting. If you're at all familiar
with ideological teachings of the band and its support for human
rights, that's really hard to stand." On this year's world tour, Rage
Against the Machine regularly turned up on stage wearing hoods and
orange jumpsuits, and during a recent concert in San Francisco,
Morello proposed taking revenge on President Bush: "I suggest that
they level Guantánamo Bay, but they keep one small cell, and they put
Bush in there … and they blast some Rage Against the Machine."
And on Dec. 11, just after the Zero dB initiative was announced,
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails posted the following message on his
blog:
Even James Hetfield of Metallica, who has generally been portrayed as
a defender of the U.S. military's use of his band's music, has
expressed reservations. In a radio interview in November 2004, he
said that he was "proud" that the military had used his music (even
though they "hadn't asked his permission or paid him
royalties"). "For me, the lyrics are a form of expression, a freedom
to express my insanity," he explained, adding, "If the Iraqis aren't
used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure."
Hetfield laughed off claims that music could be used for torture,
saying, "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones
with this music forever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?"
However, he also acknowledged the reason that the military was using
his music: "It's the relentlessness of the music. It's completely
relentless. If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a
row, I'd go insane, too. I'd tell you anything you wanted to know."
While these musicians have at least spoken out, others — including
Eminem, AC/DC, Aerosmith, the Bee Gees, Christina Aguilera, Prince
and the Red Hot Chili Peppers — remain silent about the use of their
work. Britney Spears' views are also unknown, but if her comments to
CNN in September 2003 are anything to go by, it's unlikely that she
would find fault with it. When Tucker Carlson said to her, "A lot of
entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?"
Britney replied, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our
president in every decision he makes and should just support that,
you know, and be faithful in what happens." Perhaps she should speak
to Pamela Anderson, who recently posted a simple message to Barack
Obama on her blog: "Please Shut down Guantánamo Bay — figure it out —
make amends/stop torture — it's time for peaceful solutions."
Dear Friends,
The footmarch started by Uttar-Pradesh Land Alliance from Golbojhi village in Paliakalan tehsil of Lakhimpur khiri village on December 13th, has now entered into the 7th day today. The Padyatras had a one day programme in the two districts of Nepal bordering the yatra area before entering to Banbasa town in the Champawat district of Uttarakhand. A report of the first two days has been attached here with.
The yatra has interesting though tough moments in the tiger reserve area. The density of the population is very low in the region and the villages of the Tharu community in particular remain deep into the forest. Completely isolated from outside world, the Tharus have lot of problem, mostly coming from the forest department and other from migrant farmers from Punjab who have grabbed a large part of their land in thiis region.
We did not have access to electrity, internet and phone connectivity in these areas, may be as these regions are termed 'sensitive' in the government's record books as they are bordering with Nepal as well as declared as Tiger reserve of the Dudhwa National park, so for the Tharus is double problem. My friend Leena returned to Delhi after two days and prepared this small update.
The interesting part of this yatra which I say exploring India is the understanding of the community and the response of the elders and children to our progrramme. As informed earlier, UPLA is a secular organisation committed to eradicate supestition and all our programmes whether related to land rights and forest rights have inherent anti superstition and secular progressive ideals inherent in them. We do not support everything and anything in the name of identity and culture as we do understand Dalits-tribals and other marginlised communities have been made victim of this culture and identity many many times.
The padyatrais displayed anti superstition programmes in many schools during the padyatra. To attackt the community, children and youths, we had shown them films using the battery of tractor. In the nights, our friends showed their skills named as ' Chamatkar ka bhandafor', exposing the miracles.
Today, in Banbasa, we plann to address school children at an Inter college and inform them about land rights as human rights and developing scientific ideas to succeed life.
The padyatra now enter in more difficult areas though not geographically but for all practical purpose as a large part of Tharu land is illegally grabbed by the powerful communities here. In the entire Uttarakhand, the land status is very low and owning even 2 acres of land is considered big but here in Tarai most of the immigrants from Punjab have 20-30 acres of land and the a huge chunk of benami land. The condition of Dalits here is very pathatic and they live in utter fear if they talk of their land rights. New farm houses have come up here and ceiling laws are circumvent to help these powerful communities.
We feel that this initiatve will bear some results and instill some hopes in the minds of the marginalised communities in Uttarakhand who feel isolated and down in the new state of Uttarakhand. We sincerely hope that this initiative will also giive the government of the state an idea what the land issues are as we are going to send our report and case studies as well as memerendum to them.
As Christmus approaches and new years comes in, I wish all my dear friends a happy new year and marry X mus. We all look for peace and tranquility in our lives. After the traumatic events this year, we hope that 2009 will bring justice to those who lost their near and dear ones in different violence. We sincerely believe that for a peaceful coexistence we need social justice and just peace.
In solidarity,
Vidya Bhushan Rawat
and other members of
the padyatra from
Uttar-Pradesh Land alliance
and Uttarakhand bhumi Haqdari manch
in Banbasa, Uttarakhand
--
Vidya Bhushan Rawat
Visit my blog at
www.manukhsi.blogspot.com
For information on the issues, movements and priorities of Scavenger community in India please log on to
www.swachchakar.blogspot.com
Contribute your article on freedom, humanism and human rights to
www.manuski.com
For information on civil society initiatives on Muslims in UP please log on to
www.rehnumaa.blogspot.com
For Social action, land rights, right to food and hunger issues support Social Development Foundation at www.thesdf.org
December 18, 2008
Dear Colombia Advocates:
We're saddened to report that the spouse of an indigenous activist working in Cauca was killed when Colombian soldiers fired shots into his vehicle this past Tuesday.
The killing of Edwin Legarda shows that despite recent firings of top military officials, the Colombian government is not doing enough to prevent new civilian killings by the army.
We need you to take action right away. Send the State Department this message to stop the cycle of impunity in Colombia and ensure that the soldiers responsible for this killing are brought to justice. The letter also calls on State to enforce the basic human rights conditions on U.S. assistance by suspending aid to all army units involved in civilian killings or abuses against indigenous communities.
Edwin's wife is a leader of the Regional Council of the Indigenous Communities of Cauca and just returned from Geneva where she testified before a United Nations human rights council on the crisis facing indigenous communities in Colombia today.
Earlier this year, the situation of indigenous communities deteriorated so much that indigenous leaders launched a peaceful protest across Colombia to urge the government to respect indigenous rights. Instead of listening to these concerns, the Colombian government sent anti-riot police and military units to various protests, in many cases leading to violence.
The tragic murder of Edwin Legarda makes it clear that there's so much more to be done--but by taking action today, you can help stop the army's attacks against indigenous leaders and their families. Don't forget to email this message to five of your friends, family members, and colleagues.
Best,
Travis and Lisa
Travis Wheeler
Lisa Haugaard
Latin America Working Group
twheeler@lawg.org
*Thanks to our colleagues at the Washington Office on Latin America for mobilizing groups and activists to take action on this case.
US Organizations Ask President-Elect Obama to Lift Policies Against Cuba
HAVANA, Cuba, Dec 10 (acn) Thirteen organizations including academic, business, humanitarian, and advocacy groups in the United States
joined to send a letter to President-elect Obama asking him to lift policies toward Cuba that limit people-to-people exchanges, family travel, and remittances.
A report posted at the Association of International Educators's website (NAFSA), (www.nafsa.org/ cubaletter) which is one the signatories of the letter, says the organizations asked the president-elect to take actions that send a "clear and welcome signal of change and reverse actions that have proven counterproductive to our shared goal of assisting the Cuban people."
The letter dated December 8 specifically urges Obama to lift executive-branch amendments to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations published in 2003 and 2004 that have decimated academic and cultural exchanges with Cuba and severely restricted travel to and from the island.
It calls for the restoration of licenses for short-term study and teaching in Cuba; study in Cuba under third-party programs; study in
Cuba under programs other than those of the institution in which a student is enrolled; academic travel to Cuba by all bona fide
professors and researchers; people-to-people, cultural, and sports exchanges unrelated to academic coursework; and programs of secondary schools for study in Cuba.
The letter goes on to urge action to restore the availability of visas to Cuban scholars, religious leaders, cultural and sports figures, and others to participate in academic conferences and events, religious and cultural activities, and other forms of people-to-people exchange.
With respect to family travel to Cuba, the group asks that current restrictions on travel to and expenditures in Cuba by family
visitors, as well as cash remittances to Cuba, be rescinded. The letter urges the president-elect and his administration to work with Congress to review U.S. policy on Cuba more broadly, including the eventual complete repeal of travel restrictions.
Among the signatories are also the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, American Friends Service Committee, Church
World Service, Fund for Reconciliation and Development, Latin America Working Group, Latin American Studies Association, National Foreign Trade Council, Operation USA, Social Science Research Council, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, USA*Engage, and Washington Office on Latin America
================================================================================
Declaración de Saul Landau, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney and Nelson Valdés en el Taller Internacional “La Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos: 60 años después
Celebramos sesenta años de fracaso. Los derechos humanos han pasado de ser un noble objetivo para convertirse en un instrumento de política exterior que utilizan las naciones ricas y poderosas contra los pueblos más pobres y débiles del mundo.
En el año 2008, casi tres mil millones de personas en todo el mundo padecen las privaciones más elementales.
Al cabo de sesenta años de una retórica vacía en el tema de los derechos humanos, exigimos que los gobie rnos centren su atención en el cumplimiento de las promesas de 1948. Redactamos este documento en el pergamino del medio ambiente, que todos compartimos, y que nos ha advertido de cambiar drásticamente la forma en que se realiza la producción en masa y el consumo.
1. Los Estados Unidos son miembros de la comunidad de naciones;
2. Cosechan beneficios quienes cooperan con la comunidad mundial y consideran a los otros países como socios potenciales para el mejoramiento de la humanidad;
3. Desafortunadamente, el liderazgo de los Estados Unidos ha decepcionado invariablemente a los que valoramos los principios y las posibilidades para la humanidad consagradas en la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos;
4. La Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos afirma el derecho a la libre determinación, el derecho de la mujer, los indígenas y el derecho de asociación, expresión y resistencia para proteger y conservar estos preciados derechos;
5. La pobreza y la profunda desigualdad de ingresos, por una parte, y la codicia y el exceso de consumismo por unos pocos, por otra, niegan a muchos en el planeta la aplicación universal de la Declaración de los Derechos Humanos;
6. El cambio climático, la agricultura insostenible, el militarismo desenfrenado, el terrorismo con impunidad y la proliferación nuclear representan amenazas para nuestro planeta y la humanidad;
7. La actual implosión del motor del imperialismo estadounidense y el capitalismo mundial contiene la semillas de un nuevo orden mundial en el que los derechos de la humanidad y la Declaración de Derechos Humanos pueden encontrar una aplicación universal;
8. El gobierno entrante de Barack Obama tiene la oportunidad única de romper con las políticas del pasado, incluida la instalación de dictaduras, las campañas de invasión, terror y difamación, la tortura y la ocupación, y puede tender puentes de paz y justicia con dignidad y respeto hacia el África, la América Latina y Europa;
9. Por consiguiente, instamos al Presidente electo a que enrumbe a los Estados Unidos de manera clara a hacia la fraternidad mundial al (a) invocar la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos, (b) rechazar la tortura y el terrorismo y demostrarlo con el cierre y evacuación de Guantánamo y la cesión a Cuba del patrimonio que le corresponde por derecho propio, (c) poner fin al embargo de los Estados Unidos, (d) liberar a los Cinco, y (e) extraditar a Luis Posada Carriles.
10. 10. Si bien esta lista no es exhaustiva, la misma representa un paso muy necesario en pos de la esperanza y el cambio.
11. Divulgaremos este documento entre nuestras redes respectivas.
Firmado: Saul Landau, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney y Nelson Valdés
Joint Statement by Saul Landau, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia Mckinney and Nelson Valdés in the International Workshop “The Universal Declaration on Human Right: 60 Years Later”
We celebrate 60 years of failure. Human rights have been converted from a noble goal into an instrument of foreign policy used by rich and powerful nations against the poorest and weakest people of the world.
In 2008, almost 3 billion people throughout the wo rld suffer the most basic privations.
After 60 years of empty human rights rhetoric, we demand that governments focus their attention on fulfilling the promises of 1948. We write this document on the parchment of environment, which everyone shares, and has warned us all to drastically change the ways in which mass production and consumption take place.
1. The United States is a member of the commonwealth of nations;
2. Benefits accrue to those who cooperate with the global community and view other countries as potential partners for the upliftment of humankind;
3. Unfortunately, the leadership of the United States Government has consistently been a disappointment to those of us who value the tenets and the possibilities for humankind embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
4. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the rights of self-determination, the rights of women, the indigenous, and the rights of association, expression and resistance to protect and preserve these precious rights;
5. Poverty, severe income inequality, on one hand, and greed and over consumption by a few, on the other hand, deny for far too many on the planet universal application of the Universal Declaration;
6. Climate change, unsustainable agriculture, unbridled militarism, terrorism with impunity, nuclear proliferation represent threats to our planet and threats to humankind;
7. The current implosion of the engine of US imperialism and global capitalism contains the seeds of a new global order in which the rights of humankind and the Universal Declaration can find universal application;
8. The incoming Barack Obama Administration has a unique opportunity to make a clean break with the policies of the past, including installation of dictatorships, campaigns of invasion, terror and slander, torture and occupation, and can build bridges of peace and justice with dignity and respect to Africa, Latin America and Europe;
9. Therefore, we call on the President-elect to put the United States on a clear course of global fraternity by (a) invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (b) rejecting torture and terror and demonstrating this by closing and vacating Guantanamo and ceding to Cuba its rightful patrimony, (c) ending the US embargo, (d) releasing the Cuban Five, and (e) extraditing Luis Posada Carriles.
10. While this list is not exhaustive, it represents a much-needed down payment on hope and change.
11. We will disseminate this document through our respective networks.
Signed: Saul Landau, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney and Nelson Valdés
A Council on Hemispheric Affairs Press Release
About COHA Contact COHA In the News Internships
Taking Human Rights Watch to Task on the Question of Venezuela’s Purported Abuse of Human Rights: Over 100 U.S. and Foreign Scholars Take Issue with the head of HRW’s Latin American Division
The following letter has been sent to the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, carrying the signatures of over 100 U.S. and foreign Latin American scholars. The letter raises serious concerns over that organization’s recently issued highly critical report on the human rights situation in Venezuela and the conduct of its president, Hugo Chavez. It is now being distributed by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs to its mailing list at the request of a number of signatories of that document. COHA’s staff is taking this step (with considerable reluctance) because it feels that it is obliged for any organization committed to social justice and democratic values, to speak out regarding the dispute now raging over HRW’s recent and very controversial report on Hugo Chavez’s human rights performance.
Any reservation COHA may have had over taking issue with a sister organization was voided by the egregiously inappropriate behavior exhibited by HRW. Most specifically it was the issuance of this report and the needlessly venomous tone resorted to by HRW’s head for Latin America, Jose Miguel Vivanco. In his charges, HRW’s lead researcher and writer of the report used intemperate language and patently disingenuous tactics to field a series of anti-Chavez allegations that are excessive and inappropriate. It is not a matter that President Chavez and the Venezuelan government are above reproach -- far from it. The problem is the presence of a mean-spirited tone and a lack of balance and fair play that characterizes Vivanco’s reportage and his tendentious interpretation of the alleged misdeeds of the Chavez revolution are demonstrably bereft of scale and accuracy.
For full article click here
This analysis was prepared by COHA
Thursday, December 18, 2008 | Press release 08.129
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers." For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.
December 18 - 24, 2008
Then and now, Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008
By Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
Watching Hugo Chavez orate on Venezuelan television rings old memory bells. “Socialism. Revolution, Patria.” Words I heard in 1960-61 in Cuba.
Now, almost half a century later, in Venezuela’s 5 million plus capital, I watched the local residents cheering and waving flags, a scene that looked almost identical to what I remembered in Havana when Fidel Castro launched his marathon exercises in exciting rhetoric.
Like his Cuban mentor, Chavez offered examples of how “imperialism” -- his word for the United States -- had violated sovereignty, by backing the unsuccessful 2002 military coup against him and how Washington interfered in the internal affairs of smaller countries.
What a difference the decades make! In the early 1960s, the CIA (using Cuban exiles) assassinated Cuban teachers and militia members, and sabotaged Cuban installations. I remember hearing explosions, shots, and screams from the street.
From May through October 1960, I heard Fidel speak frequently to large crowds. He had become what Lee Lockwood called “Cuba’s living newspaper.” (Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, 1967)
Almost fifty years later, Fidel’s ideological son attempts to apply some of his mentor’s rhetoric towards similar goals: to build a socialist society in a nation where oil has helped produce a capitalist mode of thinking and doing (shopping), a large wealthy class and a much larger mass of poor people.
Fidel exported his mortal enemies to the United States. Or, Washington had a policy of importing them. Out of Cuba, wealthy exiles could only mount terrorist campaigns -- for almost 50 years -- but not block the dramatic changes that allowed Cuban revolutionaries to transform their island.
Chavez doesn’t have the option of exporting the wealthy oligarchs, the business class below them and the professionals who adhere to distinctly anti-socialist values. Nor will Washington return to its old “import the anti-Castro Cubans” policy.
He retains strong support among the poor and especially among the most conscious sectors of Venezuela’s organized working class. He also knows that if he wins the February referendum he has the chance to remain as President until 2021. As much as he admires Fidel, Chavez will not copy the economic model of Cuba. Socialism in Venezuela will eschew Soviet models for other -- as yet unknown -- economic arrangements.
As Chavez has observed, eighteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economy staggers.
After spending a week in Caracas, I walked the streets of Havana and saw groups of young men drinking beer and singing along to reggaeton beats on portable radios or Ipods with speakers.
“And where do these lazy bums get the money to buy beer and acquire fancy music boxes?” asks a middle aged woman in Marianao, one of Havana’s populous neighborhoods.
“I’ll tell you where,” she answers her own question. “They steal.” Then came her anecdotes about how the criminals learn from some TV shows and put woolen ski caps over their heads and faces to conceal their identities. “One of these bums pointed a pistol at a neighbor and stole her motorbike. He had cut slits out and she saw he had green eyes. But so what? Thousands of Habaneros have green eyes.”
I heard her complaint echoed several times. “If we don’t do something to reform the labor system here,” said a writer friend, “we’re in deep trouble. Raul [President Raul Castro] himself said so. We can’t afford to continue down this road. On top of the hurricane damage, we now face rising crime and that is obviously linked to the refusal of some young people to work at the jobs that exist.”
He referred to three powerful super storms this year that devastated Cuban agriculture and destroyed hundred of thousands of homes. Nevertheless, Cuba’s tourist industry claimed that by year’s end some 2.3 million foreign visitors will have vacationed on the island, among them almost 700,000 Canadians. Tourism earned more than $2 billion.
Younger Cubans I speak to express resentment “at how the old guys have risen from the grave [he meant Machado Ventura and Ramiro Valdez, who have rejoined the Politburo of Cuba’s Communist Party].” The young man spoke with passion. “I’m a committed socialist, but paternalism may kill our revolution. Will those old fogies never quit?” Yes, I think, when will the very aging leaders give the car keys to the middle aged kids? People in the mid and late 70s who have wielded power for decades and offer little originality do not exactly vibrate with inspiration at a time demanding creative and revolutionary thinking.
Other young people recount the achievements -- health, education, art, music, sports, science, as well as real human rights. But none of these past glories deals with an unjust and insufficient salary structure, with mediocre but very obedient people heading agencies containing critical and brilliant people.
Raul’s daughter, Mariela, has spoken publicly about the urgent need to reform in several areas. Her courageous remarks about putting an end to homophobia on the island carry a sub-textual message as well. It’s time to put an end to the decades of official censorship, not only in the case of “dangerous” bloggers, but journalists who get chewed out by some of the old guard for writing “sentences you should not have written.” Indeed, I dare not mention the writer’s name for fear it will cause more problems.
“We have too much invested in our revolution,” a writer for Juventud Rebelde told me, “to allow the old guard to ruin everything by not allowing discussion of issues everyone knows about [referring to the irrationality of the economy and the refusal to cede power]. Cuba stands for basic human rights even if the government refuses to grant some of them. Our future must be one of enjoying. Our generation, people between 30 and 60, knows that.”
I agreed. So many people have invested their hopes and dreams in the Cuban revolution for five decades. Every time Cuba does something we think contradicts its basic revolutionary principles, we wince. “Cuba hurts,” wrote Eduardo Galeano. Right now lots of Cubans are hurting because of the condition of their daily lives. Hurricanes and a less than perfectly functioning system don’t amount to the old one two punch. But they are worrisome, especially in the context of pressure in today’s world.
Cuba offered a vision for the future despite the paternalism and other less than democratic legacies it carried. It also stood for the embodiment of human rights, again notwithstanding the absence of a free press and a voice for the opposition in its electoral politics. Cubans had rights to food, shelter, education, medical care, old age securities -- albeit not the absence of fear on the part of those who made public their criticisms of government policies. However, Cuba did not hunt down and murder “subversives” as did a gang of states, in Latin America -- backed by Washington. Nor did it launch aggressive wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East as did the United States, which officially celebrated, on December 10, the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
That day should have been a day of mourning for 60 years of failure to achieve the noble goals of the Human Rights declaration. Two wars rage on in Iraq and Afghanistan, while increased global warming vitiates the right to a safe environment. Almost 3 billion people suffer the very deprivations that in 1948 were officially the targets of all the world’s governments. Some cause for celebration!
Human rights in the United States have shrunk. In 1945, the U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg explained that waging aggressive war was permanently outlawed. In 2003, George W. Bush waged aggressive war in Iraq. In the post World War II era, torture became a crime against humanity. In the 21st Century, Bush reauthorized it. Waterboarding became associated with U.S. jailors at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba. European allies cooperated with the United States in secretly transporting people to torture centers in other places as well.
Meanwhile, Chavez, attacked by Washington for being antidemocratic, has expanded the breadth of human rights for Venezuelans. They now enjoy more health-care, women have gained greater equality, more poor people have learned to read and have access to potable water.
These accomplishments coincide with the spirit of the 1948 UN Declaration on Human Rights. It seems as if the U.S. government has forgotten the goal and uses only the words as an instrument of policy to attack its enemies while it violates the letter and spirit of the very human rights laws U.S. lawyers helped to establish.
Kolkata police planning training inst to combat terrorism
Kolkata , Dec 20 Taking lessons from the Mumbai terror attacks, the Kolkata Police is planning to set up an institute to train its officers in handling urban terrorism.
" Unless our men are trained in countering urban terrorism, the problem cannot be handled effectively. We are planning a training institute for officers to handle any urban terror situation," Police Commissioner Goutam Mohun Chakraborty said today.
Currently, the city police personnel are being trained by the army in counter-terrorism skills. The government is also considering raising a special combat battalion for the Kolkata Police, he told members of the Merchants Chamber of Commerce here.
Responding to a request from the city police, the Centre has agreed to deploy an NSG detachment in Kolkata for rapid response in case of an emergency. Initially a small unit, it will be expanded if and when required, Chakraborty said.
He said the state government is also considering a proposal for recruiting more officers and men in the Special Task Force recently set up to counter terrorism.
"The STF, which gathers intelligence and coordinates with other forces in damaging terrorist networks, has been able to recover a huge amount of fake Indian currency and nab a number of people on the basis of quality intelligence received from across the border,"he said.
CPI(M) seeks Central intervention in Orissa to check VHP
New Delhi (PTI): CPI(M) MP Suresh Kurup, in Lok Sabha, on Thursday, charged Sangh Parivar outfits like VHP with making a systematic attempt to create "terror" among Christian minorities in Orissa by calling a 'bandh' on Christmas Day.
As BJP MPs stood up in protest, Suresh Kurup, went on to demand that the Centre immediately intervene to ensure protection of the lives and properties of the Christians in Orissa.
"A systematic attempt is being made by the Sangh Parivar outfits like VHP to attack and terrorise the Christians. The attacks began on the eve of Christmas last year and these were followed by systematic attacks against the minorities in Kandhamal," Kurup said, while strongly condemning the moves.
When the BJP members continued their vociferous protest, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee adjourned the House for lunch.
On Wednesday, another CPI(M) member Hannan Mollah had raised the same matter saying "a big communal conspiracy is being hatched by communal organisations to bring parts of the country into the milieu of communal disturbances."
Mollah had asked the government to include communal attacks in the ambit of the new anti-terror laws.
Antulay competent enough to issue clarification: Lalu
Patna (PTI): RJD chief and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad on Saturday said Union Minority Affairs Minister A R Antulay, who triggered a controversy by his remarks on the circumstances leading to the killing of Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare, was competent enough to issue a clarification.
When asked to comment on Antulay's controversial remarks, Prasad said: "it is common knowledge that the Mumbai carnage is the handiwork of Pakistani terrorists and former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif has admitted that Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist caught alive, is a Pakistani national.
"All those killed in the Mumbai attack, including Karkare, were killed by Pakistani terrorists.... Antulay is competent enough to issue a clarification about his remark," he said.
Antulay had said that Karkare could have been a victim of "terrorism or terrorism plus something. I do not know" and sought to link it to the ATS chief's role as a key investigator in the Malegaon blast case in which Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Lt Col Shrikant Purohit were arrested.
Congress will bring unity, integrity, dignity to J&K: Sheila
Jammu (PTI): In an attempt to woo the voters in Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit said hereon Saturday that the Congress' mantra for this election is to bring unity, integrity and dignity to the state.
Talking to reporters here, the Congress leader hoped that the party will form next government in the state on its own and bring unity, integrity and dignity to the state.
First time in the history of the state, so many developmental works were undertaken during the rule of Congress-led government and now the people of Jammu and Kashmir have understood that which party's victory is in the best of their interest, she said.
"The Congress-led government not only undertook historical steps in matters of laying railway track in the valley, road connectivity in far-flung areas, distribution of government land to farmers free of cost and creation of more districts and tehsils in the state but also ensured peaceful atmosphere during the last three years," Sheila said.
In spite of BJP's tirade on our party, the Congress came to power in Delhi for the third time because it sincerely implemented policies for the welfare of the people in the national capital, she assured that in the same way the party will work for the welfare of the people in Jammu and Kashmir.
Sheila said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given Rs 24,000 crores to the state government for developmental purpose and it will receive more fillip in future under the Congress government in the state.
Criticising those who are dividing people in the name of religion or region in the state, she expressed hope that such forces will be rejected by the people in the elections.
US says anti-terror law matter for people and govt. of India
Washington (PTI): The United States has said India's move to bring in a new anti-terror law in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks was a "matter for the people and the government" of the country.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was asked during a media briefing here whether the Secretary of State has had any discussions about the new law.
"No..., the laws of India are a matter for the Indian people and the Indian government to decide upon," he replied.
The spokesman also refused to comment when asked if Washington believed there was anything new in the latest arrests made in Pakistan, given that militant organisations have earlier been banned in the country, only to return under a new name.
"I've spent a lot of words and a lot of time talking about this. I really don't have much to add beyond what I've already said," McCormack said.
Arabs sail to Gaza, defying Israel blockade
GAZA CITY (AP): An Israeli journalist, Lebanese activists and a delegation from the tiny Gulf state of Qatar sailed into Gaza's port on Saturday, in defiance of Israel's blockade.
It is the first official Arab delegation to sail into Gaza, since pro-Palestinian activists began manning boats to the coastal territory in summer.
The boats are meant to defy Israel and Egypt's blockade of Gaza, imposed after militant group Hamas seized power in July last year.
Israeli naval boats blocked an earlier attempt by a Libyan cargo ship to enter Gaza, laden with what Libyan officials said was aid.
The two-man Qatari delegation are from the government-funded body, the Qatar Authority for Charitable Activities.
``We are here to represent the Qatar government and people,'' said Aa'id al-Kahtani, of the delegation. ``We will look into the needs of our brothers in Gaza, and find out what is the most appropriate way to bring in (aid),'' al-Kahtani said.
Qatar has warm relations with Israel and with Gaza's rulers Hamas. The militant group has called on Arab countries to openly challenge Israel by sailing to Gaza, hoping to create a naval corridor between the coastal territory and the rest of the world.
``We hope it will be the beginning of Arab moves to break the blockade,'' said Gaza's Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, in a message sent to reporters.
Among those also on board were Israeli reporter Shlomi Eldar, a Lebanese reporter, Katya Nasser, from Arab channel al-Jazeera, and another Lebanese citizen. The two countries are officially at war.
The boat set sail from the Cypriot port of Larnuca overnight, decked with colorful Palestinian and Lebanese flags. It also carried symbolic humanitarian aid.
Gaza's latest visitors are expected to stay in the territory overnight, and then return to Cyprus.
Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso 2003)
Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London: Verso 2003)
Neal Wood, Tyranny in America: Capitalism and National Decay (London: Verso 2004)
THE TWIN PHENOMENA of the increasing volatility of the liberal market economies and the resurgence of overt US militarism have become the central concerns of a growing body of radical scholarship. On the one hand, there is little doubt that both rising social inequality and key US foreign policy decisions reflect long-term trends and continuities. On the other hand, these developments do also incorporate ruptures, and shed new light on some of the central contradictions of contemporary capitalism, having far-reaching consequences for both working people and organized labour. The three volumes that form the subject of this essay all deal with themes and issues central to the neo-liberal era, above all the interconnectedness of domestic and international policy trends.
Order and Disorder: The Bifurcation and Interconnectedness of Resource Contestations
Echoing an abiding concern of Engels, Gumplowicz (1) noted that the institutionalization process follows primitive forms of accumulation; institutions legitimize and seek to secure inequalities at whose origins lie violent acts of expropriation. Institutions may be nested at a range of levels--transnational, state, and local--yet remain concentrated at the intermediate, state level. (2) On the one hand, this weight of institutional resources the state has at its disposal provides the basis for orderly accumulation. On the other hand, resource inequalities are not specific to national boundaries; the relative weakness of transnational institutions makes conflict at transnational levels endemic.
The crisis and breakdown of the post-World War II social structure of accumulation [SSA] in the early 1970s has been followed by a neo-liberalism that undermines regulation and promotes capital mobility at both international and national levels. (3) However, neo-liberalism does not so much represent a new SSA as the temporary dominance of capital over labour; (4) it constitutes a period of volatile and sluggish growth, characterized by rising inequality and exploitation. (5)
The bifurcation of resource struggles between international and internal ones, and the successes of the post-World War II SSA in mediating and pacifying the latter did not mean that the two do not remain interconnected, or that internal class divisions have become less important. (6) Indeed, Harvey (7) argues that under neo-liberalism, a common feature of both trans-border and internal resource contestations is a reversion to accumulation by dispossession. Examples of the latter would include privatization, with state assets being handed over on extremely favourable terms to politically well-connected private firms, financialization characterized by the maximization of shareholder value through "downsizing and distribution" at great cost to other stakeholders, and "free trade" on extremely unfavourable terms to vulnerable states and regions. (8) Importantly, the neo-liberal period has been characterized by the use of overt coercion, a process that in the US has ranged from the disciplining of the domestic poor through workfare, to the flexing of military power abroad. (9) Militarization and war on the one hand, and the worsening position of the poor within the advanced societies, on the other, thus rep resent two sides of the same coin, and the shared central concern of the Pollin, Wood, and Mann volumes.
Robert Pollin: Contours of Descent
The origins of this book lie in a project exploring both the nature and effects of US economic policies in the Clinton era, later developed to encompass the domestic and international consequences of the policy agenda adopted by the Bush II regime. In Chapter 1, Pollin correctly notes that the bubble economy of the Clinton years provided the context in which accounting malpractices flourished; the subsequent WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron scandals were not simply a product of the Bush regime's ineptness. The neo-liberalism of both Clinton and Bush II represented a departure from classical liberalism in that support for free market policies became visibly circumscribed by a desire to bail out wealthy asset holders during the frequent financial crises of the 1990s and 2000s. The globalization of markets had the effect of greatly weakening the bargaining power of workers in the advanced societies; this can only be overcome through the operation of non-market forces, and/or the revitalization of labour unions worldwide. Nonetheless, what distinguished Bush II was an unabashed desire to mobilize government to exclusively serve the wealthy.
In Chapter 2, Pollin looks at the relative performance of the US economy during the Clinton years. Under Clinton, the US moved further towards the opening of markets, and adopted labour market policies that, rhetoric notwithstanding, did little to advance the interests of organized labour. Cutbacks in state spending were compensated by a rise in private consumption (mostly by those in higher income brackets), and booming private investment, inflating a bubble economy. Productivity gains were mirrored by a rising wage gap, characterized by wage stagnation or decline amongst the most vulnerable categories of labour. In the subsequent chapter, Pollin notes that, in part, this reflected the ability of firms to threaten to exit from existing employment contracts through relocation to low-wage economies. This is followed by a closer look at the makings of the bubble economy. The Internet bubble reflected not so much a moment of temporary madness but rather an inevitable tendency in poorly regulated stock markets. Similarly, the speculative consequences of temporary share buy-backs reflected not so much rational decision making but the deliberate harnessing of the effects of imperfect knowledge and rumour to maximize returns for the managers involved.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6394/is_/ai_n29233146
Internal Imperialism: The Ongoing Accumulation by Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples in Canada
These days I'm reading Harvey's New Imperialism between attempts to finish papers and locate Battlestar Galactic Season 3, Disc 3 for rental. Seriously, give me a break here, God.
Anyway, I thought I would post a good article on the ongoing dispossession of indigenous groups in Canada, written by Todd Gordon and titled 'Canadian Capitalism and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples':
Neoliberal globalization has brought with it the intensification what Marxist geographer David Harvey refers to as accumulation by dispossession. Harvey is referring to the often violent and predatory process by which multinational corporations, backed by capitalist states, expand their role and influence by dispossessing people of their land and livelihoods.
Dispossessed indigenous peoples, small farmers and peasants are forced to turn to the labour market in order to survive, creating a cheap pool of labour for corporate enterprises to exploit. At the same time, corporations can gain unhindered access to the resources on the now unoccupied land – agricultural land, minerals, lumber, real estate, oil, even commodified nature (parks, tourism). This is a central process by which capitalist imperialism operates.
The Canadian state’s predatory historical relationship with indigenous peoples provides a sharp example of the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. This involved a variety of brutal processes, including the military defeat of the Métis-led national liberation struggle in the then-Northwest Territories, the apartheid Indian Act and its Pass Laws, the attempted cultural genocide of the residential schools and the ongoing abrogation of First Nation treaty rights.
Land was taken for the development of capitalist industries, while indigenous people were “encouraged” by the Indian Act and residential schools to stop traditional subsistence and cultural practices in order to engage in the more “civilized” labour market.
NEOLIBERALISM
This agenda has intensified in the neoliberal period. Neoliberalism is the ruling class’s response to the economic profitability crisis of the 1970s; it involves restructuring labour relations in favour of business, gutting the welfare state and privatizing public services.
The success of neoliberalism is in large measure contingent on the increased commodification of indigenous land and labour, turning it into something to be bought and sold on the market.
Nevertheless, large segments of the indigenous population have successfully resisted full integration into market relations in their territories. The frontier of capitalist expansion, in the eyes of the state and business leaders, still has significantly further to go in Canada.
In a context in which, on the one hand, corporations are aggressively pursuing a cheaper and more flexible labour force as part of its agenda of neoliberal restructuring, and, on the other, the non-Indigenous Canadian-born population’s fertility rates remain low, indigenous labour has become highly valued. This is clearly expressed in policy documents produced by the Ministries of Indian and Northern Affairs, Industry and Natural Resources.
Sociologists Vic Satzewich and Ron Laliberte note that reservations were originally organized as a pool of cheap labour to be drawn upon when needed, and are still viewed by government as such. As one recent Indian Affairs and Northern Development study stresses, “The Aboriginal workforce will grow at twice the rate of the total Canadian labour force in the next ten years.”
But to the chagrin of the state and business, many indigenous people and communities continue to resist full absorption into capitalist relations. Government documents salaciously note the potential indigenous labour supply and the wealth of resources on indigenous land, but they also often reflect on the difficulties of getting indigenous people to sell their labour for a wage or willingly permit the penetration of their communities by resource companies.
MINING AND “DEVELOPMENT”
The mining industry provides a stark example of the intensifying pressures on indigenous lands and communities. Over the last decade, mining companies have been expanding their activities into regions of the country where capitalist development has hitherto been limited. Exploration has been increasing in northern and interior British Columbia, the northern prairies, Ontario and Quebec, the Yukon, Nunavut, and especially the Northwest Territories since diamond deposits were discovered there in the early 1990s.
The Mining Association of Canada notes that, “[m]ost mining activity occurs in northern and remote areas of the country, the principal areas of Aboriginal populations.” Natural Resources Canada reports, meanwhile, that approximately 1200 indigenous communities are located within 200 kilometers of an active mine, and this will only increase as exploration intensifies.
The location of the majority of mining operations is significant, because it brings the industry squarely into conflict with indigenous land rights. First Nations may claim title to much of the land mining companies seek to exploit, or oppose mining developments that will cause ecological damage to traditional territories and subsistence patterns.
But the location of mines is also very significant in a context in which, as industry and government studies indicate, mining is facing a labour shortage. Indigenous labour, in turn, is explicitly identified as central to the expansion of the industry. “Workforce diversity,” as one industry-wide study expresses it, with a healthy dose of liberal veneer, is a necessity for the future success of mining.
This is driving the growing conflicts between mining companies and First Nations like the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (Northern Ontario), Kwadacha (B.C.), Tlatzen (B.C) and Kanien’kehaka (Quebec) among many others. Indeed these are the tip of the iceberg, and battles like these will continue as mining companies intensify the expansion of their ecologically violent practices into indigenous territories, threatening ecosystems and the communities living in them.
STRATEGIES OF DISPOSSESSION
In response to indigenous peoples’ general unwillingness to prostrate themselves to capitalism, the Canadian state is engaged in a sustained effort to dispossess them of their land. This ranges from legal manipulations to outright violence, as the pressures of capitalist expansion over the last two decades have intensified, indeed militarized, the colonial conflict between Canada and indigenous nations.
The formal land claims process, for example, facilitates the expansion of capitalist development onto indigenous territories. It’s extremely slow and bureaucratic, taking up to fifteen years after a claim is initially made before the process is commenced.
That’s at least fifteen years more time for indigenous lands to be whittled away and/or poisoned. Or fifteen years for poverty and frustration in communities to grow, leading to out-migration and making the communities more vulnerable to one-sided deals with corporations.
Furthermore, the federal government has made the extinguishment of Aboriginal title a prerequisite of any land claims settlement they’ll agree to. This involves relinquishing collective ownership over land and subsurface resources of large parts of traditional territories – as is the case with the James Bay and Nisga’a comprehensive agreements.
Extinguishment – a legal form of dispossession supported by Supreme Court decision and pursued zealously by the government – is a major barrier to the fair settlement of land disputes and reinforces the colonial status quo between the Canadian state and indigenous nations.
Even where treaties exist, they are repeatedly ignored and their terms are systematically broken by governments in the interest of economic development or national security. This is the reality underlying the events at Oka (where the local municipal government tried to appropriate land for a golf course), Ipperwash (where the military stole land and physically removed members of the Stony Point community in order to build an army base during the second World War), and today in Caledonia (where housing developers are trying to build on Six Nations’ treaty land).
These are but three of the countless examples of state-sanctioned theft of treaty lands that have gained national attention because of indigenous resistance in the face of serious political and military pressure. In fact, in the Delgamuukw decision (derided by the Right and the business community as unambiguously pro-Indigenous) the Supreme Court actually defends the government’s right to appropriate indigenous land for economic reasons.
Of course, never too far removed from these strategies of dispossession is military force, which we have seen mobilized in recent years at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, Burnt Church and Ipperwash. It also remains a threat at the Six Nations standoff in Caledonia. While the state may wish to pursue its colonial strategy in the tidier bourgeois legal realm, it will make recourse to military violence to enforce its agenda where necessary.
The lesson for the Suretée du Quebec after Oka and the RCMP after Gustafsen Lake was to invest more resources in military weaponry in preparation for future confrontations.
Canadian colonialism – like colonialism around the world – has always had its bloody side. If indigenous nations won’t be compliant, capitalist expansion will be defended by violence.
The agenda of dispossession is not simply the misguided policy of shortsighted or self-interested business or political leaders. It is central to state and corporate relations with indigenous communities, driven by the demands of the capitalist economy and shaped by a deep-seated racist view of First Nations as uncivilized and unwilling or unable to economically develop their territories. This consideration must not be forgotten in the struggle against Canadian colonialism.
Just to return to Harvey's New Imperialism for a moment, he writes: "American [and Canadian] bourgeoisie have in short, rediscovered what the British bourgeoisie discovered in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, that, as Arendt has it, 'the original sin of simple robbery' which made possible the original accumulation of capital 'had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down'. If this is so, then the 'new imperialism' appears as nothing more than the revisiting of the old, though in a different place and time."
OK, I must go find Battlestar and lose myself in the chaos of the imperialistic impulse to colonize the Universe. Am I the only person who sometimes finds herself siding with the Cylons?
Links:
'Canadian Capitalism and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples' by Todd Gordon, via New Socialist
See a more recent article by Todd Gordon that discusses the recent struggles of indigenous groups - 'Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug and the Battle Over Northern Development in Canada'
Also, visit the facebook group 'Support the Lubicon Cree'
http://marginalnotes.typepad.com/pj/2008/04/internal-imperi.html
Imperialism and Disorder: The Global Ambitions and Internal Decay of the United States
Geoffrey Wood
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso 2003)
Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London: Verso 2003)
Neal Wood, Tyranny in America: Capitalism and National Decay (London: Verso 2004)
THE TWIN PHENOMENA of the increasing volatility of the liberal market economies and the resurgence of overt US militarism have become the central concerns of a growing body of radical scholarship. On the one hand, there is little doubt that both rising social inequality and key US foreign policy decisions reflect long-term trends and continuities. On the other hand, these developments do also incorporate ruptures, and shed new light on some of the central contradictions of contemporary capitalism, having far-reaching consequences for both working people and organized labour. The three volumes that form the subject of this essay all deal with themes and issues central to the neo-liberal era, above all the interconnectedness of domestic and international policy trends. 1
Order and Disorder:
The Bifurcation and Interconnectedness of Resource Contestations
Echoing an abiding concern of Engels, Gumplowicz1 noted that the institutionalization process follows primitive forms of accumulation; institutions legitimize and seek to secure inequalities at whose origins lie violent acts of expropriation. Institutions may be nested at a range of levels — transnational, state, and local — yet remain concentrated at the intermediate, state level.2 On the one hand, this weight of institutional resources the state has at its disposal provides the basis for orderly accumulation. On the other hand, resource inequalities are not specific to national boundaries; the relative weakness of transnational institutions makes conflict at transnational levels endemic. 2
The crisis and breakdown of the post-World War II social structure of accumulation [SSA] in the early 1970s has been followed by a neo-liberalism that undermines regulation and promotes capital mobility at both international and national levels.3 However, neo-liberalism does not so much represent a new SSA as the temporary dominance of capital over labour;4 it constitutes a period of volatile and sluggish growth, characterized by rising inequality and exploitation.5 3
The bifurcation of resource struggles between international and internal ones, and the successes of the post-World War II SSA in mediating and pacifying the latter did not mean that the two do not remain interconnected, or that internal class divisions have become less important.6 Indeed, Harvey7 argues that under neo-liberalism, a common feature of both trans-border and internal resource contestations is a reversion to accumulation by dispossession. Examples of the latter would include privatization, with state assets being handed over on extremely favourable terms to politically well-connected private firms, financialization characterized by the maximization of shareholder value through "downsizing and distribution" at great cost to other stakeholders, and "free trade" on extremely unfavourable terms to vulnerable states and regions.8 Importantly, the neo-liberal period has been characterized by the use of overt coercion, a process that in the US has ranged from the disciplining of the domestic poor through workfare, to the flexing of military power abroad.9 Militarization and war on the one hand, and the worsening position of the poor within the advanced societies, on the other, thus represent two sides of the same coin, and the shared central concern of the Pollin, Wood, and Mann volumes. 4
Robert Pollin: Contours of Descent
The origins of this book lie in a project exploring both the nature and effects of US economic policies in the Clinton era, later developed to encompass the domestic and international consequences of the policy agenda adopted by the Bush II regime. In Chapter 1, Pollin correctly notes that the bubble economy of the Clinton years provided the context in which accounting malpractices flourished; the subsequent WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron scandals were not simply a product of the Bush regime's ineptness. The neo-liberalism of both Clinton and Bush II represented a departure from classical liberalism in that support for free market policies became visibly circumscribed by a desire to bail out wealthy asset holders during the frequent financial crises of the 1990s and 2000s. The globalization of markets had the effect of greatly weakening the bargaining power of workers in the advanced societies; this can only be overcome through the operation of non-market forces, and/or the revitalization of labour unions worldwide. Nonetheless, what distinguished Bush II was an unabashed desire to mobilize government to exclusively serve the wealthy. 5
In Chapter 2, Pollin looks at the relative performance of the US economy during the Clinton years. Under Clinton, the US moved further towards the opening of markets, and adopted labour market policies that, rhetoric notwithstanding, did little to advance the interests of organized labour. Cutbacks in state spending were compensated by a rise in private consumption (mostly by those in higher income brackets), and booming private investment, inflating a bubble economy. Productivity gains were mirrored by a rising wage gap, characterized by wage stagnation or decline amongst the most vulnerable categories of labour. In the subsequent chapter, Pollin notes that, in part, this reflected the ability of firms to threaten to exit from existing employment contracts through relocation to low-wage economies. This is followed by a closer look at the makings of the bubble economy. The Internet bubble reflected not so much a moment of temporary madness but rather an inevitable tendency in poorly regulated stock markets. Similarly, the speculative consequences of temporary share buy-backs reflected not so much rational decision making but the deliberate harnessing of the effects of imperfect knowledge and rumour to maximize returns for the managers involved. 6
The following chapter deals with the US economy under Bush II. Pollin correctly points out that the US economy had already entered what is formally defined as a recession prior to the 11 September incident. The decline of the US stock market resulted in a reduced capacity utilization by US industry, a declining enthusiasm by overseas investors for US investments, and the inflation of a housing bubble as investors moved from the stock market into real estate. The subsequent round of tax cuts for the rich exacerbated existing income inequalities and reduced government revenue. This exacerbated the fiscal crisis of many states, resulting in cuts of basic social services to the poor; meanwhile expenditure on the military and domestic security increased. However, given the Bush regime's military ambitions, formal budgetary allocations to the armed forces soon proved inadequate; additional budgetary allocations to fund the Iraq occupation made for a dramatic increase in the money spent on the military. 7
Chapter 5 looks at changes in the global economy. Here the evidence is overwhelming: with the notable exception of China, growth in the developing world has dramatically declined following the adoption of neo-liberal policies. However, the uneven performance of specific sectors among nations underscores the point that wage cuts do not secure competitiveness. Neo-liberalism's legacy, rather, has been poverty and rising inequality; worsening and visible wealth disparities will invariably fuel violent resistance, given both the closing of peaceful channels, and the Bush regime's willingness to underwrite violently repressive regimes from Turkmenistan to Columbia. The brief final chapter explores progressive alternatives. The author concludes that market economies invariably generate inequality and misery and will prove unsustainable unless they are ameliorated through a common social solidarity underwritten not only by rights but also fairness and obligations, ironically a point central to Adam Smith's writings, yet conveniently forgotten by most of his self-proclaimed disciples. 8
Neal Wood: Tyranny in America
This extended essay is divided into two equal parts. The first, setting the scene, explores changing perceptions of avarice and democracy, which, the author argues, are crucial to understanding contemporary American capitalism. The second highlights some of the key trends that characterize the latter's decay and potential descent to barbarism. The opening chapter of the first section points out the disproportionate response to the 11 September incident resulted in the slaughter of thousands of innocent Afghan and Iraqi civilians, not "a reasoned response by a mature people," but rather one that was at once an unprincipled act of revenge and callous imperialism. The author goes on to point out that all imperial powers are subject to a period of decay and decline, and there is no reason why the United States is immune to such a process; rather, there are clear and visible signposts that this phase has already been entered. The excesses of weakly regulated market economies such as Russia represent not so much an anomaly, but a magnified reflection of the underlying logic of contemporary US capitalism. In Chapter 2, the author notes that in most pre-capitalist societies, unrestrained avarice was held to be both damaging to the individual and corrosive of social unity. With the gradual emergence of capitalist society, pursuit of personal profit gained respectability. However, it was widely held that the desire for personal gain needs to be tempered by the promotion of the common good, and the need for the state to ensure the prosperity of everyone: left alone, Adam Smith cautioned, merchants and manufacturers are prone to "impertinent jealousy," "mean rapacity," and the "monopolizing spirit." The "invisible hand" reconciling the public and private good, Smith went on to argue, only operates in a climate of justice, underwritten by government. Neal Wood argues that in our contemporary consumer age, these caveats have been conveniently forgotten, undermining the base of society as a whole. In the following chapter, the author points out that it is simply mistaken to conflate capitalism with democracy. Not only are most capitalist enterprises authoritarian by nature, but with very few exceptions, the emergence of genuine multi-party democracy rarely coincides with the development of capitalism; the latter seems particularly adept at flourishing under authoritarianism, from Pinochet's Chile to contemporary China. Current neo-liberal ideologies see society as little more than a group of profit-maximizing individuals, legitimizing old-style social corruption. Individual pleasure and wealth, the unrestrained accumulation of possessions, becomes the ultimate social goal; despite claims of democracy, citizens move between often totalitarian workplaces, and TV and other forms of entertainment shaped by capitalism. Yet, the basis of this tyranny is elusive: it is not only large corporations and their shareholders, but all involved in the capitalist enterprise. 9
The opening chapter of Part 2 seeks to identify the portents of social decay in contemporary US capitalism. The latter encompass rising social inequality, with almost 13 per cent of the US population living below the poverty line, with many suffering from malnutrition and other diseases more commonly associated with the Third World. Official unemployment rates mask the three million discouraged unemployed, the two million convicts — many subject to forced labour and the 21 million in temporary and part-time jobs. Above the poor are those in traditional blue-collar and lower ranking white-collar jobs that are often highly insecure, people vulnerable to declining incomes. At the other end of a visibly U-shaped income distribution curve are highly skilled technicians, middle managers and professionals, and finally the very rich; however, the position of all but the latter has become highly tenuous. This inequality is matched by a rising culture of violence in the form of gun crime, suicides, and road deaths. It is also matched by a glorification of unrestrained consumerism, leaving in its wake unsustainable debt and unsatiated desire. Those who can afford it retreat from a hostile world into gated compounds, consuming takeaway meals and the near-uniform vacuous media. The penultimate chapter, entitled "The Vacuity of Politics," highlights some of the contradictions underlying contemporary America. Vast military power remains contingent on economic strength, imperial hubris being matched by erratic diplomacy, opportunism, and the self-serving interests of powerful domestic lobbying groups. Resurgent "Christian" fundamentalists — inspired by the grimmer pages of the Old Testament and the book of Revelations in the New — have cast a dark shadow over both domestic and foreign politics. Behind this dark tableau, capitalism has extended its tyranny from the workplace into the furthest reaches of the polity. The brief final chapter notes a fairer alternative: the more cooperative European varieties of capitalism and the associated welfare state provide some signposts towards an unambiguously socialist future. 10
Michael Mann: Incoherent Empire
In the introductory section, Mann sketches out the nature and scale of the Bush II regime's imperial ambitions: a shift from an informal empire of countries under US domination to a "temporary territorial empire," with the US military playing an overt role in a wide range of countries and regions. These territorial ambitions have been matched by a policy shift allowing for a greater pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons. In the 1990s, the notion of the US military playing a "civilizing mission" humanitarian role — typified in the Somalian debacle — gained currency. The accession of Bush II resulted in a coalition of secular militarists and Judaeo-Christian fundamentalists driving an aggressive no-compromise foreign policy agenda; they gained mobilizing power following the 11 September 2001 incident. As Mann notes, "strange bedfellows were bought into the line of fire," bin Laden-style Islamic fundamentalists, North Korean Stalinists, and Saddam Hussein's quasifascist Iraq. The active buy-in of the US military was secured through a process that W.G. Sebald identified in the Natural History of Destruction: the production of war material inevitably gains a momentum of its own. Once weaponry has been manufactured, "simply letting it stand idle ... (runs) counter to any healthy economic interest."10 Or, as Mann notes, "since we now can do these things, why not give it a try?" (9) However, contrary to the predictions of neo-conservative imperialists and those on the left who simply conflate global capitalism with the United States, Mann argues that there are clear limits to US power. US economic power is fragile, political power is neglected, and the sources of US ideological power are invariably contradicted; moreover, the victims of US actions can, and often do, resist. 11
Chapter 1 provides a reassessment of US military power. While the US possesses a massive nuclear arsenal, nuclear weapons cannot be used to pacify, unless the target country is reduced to a nuclear wasteland — not a viable option for would-be empire builders. There are several other nuclear powers which possess the capability to obliterate the United States; the latter lacks a nuclear monopoly, and, indeed, its sabre rattling seems to have had the effect of swelling the ranks of nuclear powers. US opposition to nuclear proliferation has been erratic and inconsistent, and has done little to oppose the nuclear ambitions of a number of small friendly states that have nonetheless had a record of aggression towards their neighbours. Secondly, whilst relatively large and with a vast fire power, the US military lacks the physical manpower to pacify and hold on to a large number of other states, as the Iraq debacle has demonstrated. Thirdly, the US represents at the best a partially welcome guest in many countries; US bases are largely self-contained and in relatively remote locales. Invariably they are constrained in what they do by local political realities; only in Iraq and Afghanistan do US soldiers venture out on more ambitious missions of pacification. Fourthly, imperial countries invariably make large-scale use of local auxiliaries to maintain their local authority; whilst the US has experimented with "indigenization" strategies from Vietnam to Afghanistan, this has been of only limited efficacy, and has often strengthened the hands of local warlords. Finally, large conventional armies have a poor track record of defeating local insurgencies enjoying significant popular support, and a capacity to mount hit-and-run attacks, making use of the "weapons of the weak." 12
In the following chapter, Mann notes that the US remains heavily dependent on foreign investors, who have begun to lose their taste for dollars or US equities. Hence, an aggressive imperial power has become heavily dependent on the goodwill of a handful of Asian central banks. The US gives relatively little aid outside of what is channelled to a few strategic allies: Israel, Egypt, and Jordan (both effectively being paid not to attack Israel), narco-states such as Columbia, and buffer states on Russia's southern periphery. There has been no attempt to invest in imperial development, to maximize long-term returns from satellite countries; rather the emphasis has been on short-term strategic gain and securing natural resource concessions, a process squarely aimed at serving narrow class interests. This encompasses the expropriation of small peasants to open up land for mining and agri-business, sweatshops, and unfree labour, and police repression, in other words, the forced expropriation of both property and labour power itself. However, even here there are limits on US power; the misery inflicted by neo-liberalism has incited waves of local opposition and fear among political elites, forcing messy compromises. 13
In Chapter 3, Mann looks at the contradictory pressures facing the US. The exercise of raw power is relatively inefficient, yet multilateralism necessitates compromise, particularly given that European allies can no longer be so easily disciplined by the prospect of protection against a Soviet threat. The strength of nationalism debars the US from totally disregarding the sensitivities of its Third World clients; being totally subjugated to US wishes opens up the latter to charges of treason. It is thus hardly surprising that few of the US's new allies in the Third World are democracies. The US easily overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime, but has battled to constitute a legitimate client government in its place. The US has limited capacity to rein in important rogue allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. 14
In the following chapter, Mann explores the limitations to US ideology. Not only is US democracy in fragile shape, but the share of the US media in global markets is declining. Mass communication from a range of sources — the success of Al-Jazeera being a case in point — levels the playing field. Again, many of its opponents — local ethno-nationalists and Islamacists — have deep roots in local communities; their decentralization and internal divisions make them very much more difficult to defeat or secure a lasting peace. Chapter 5 provides a closer look at the US's Afghan adventure. The practice of encasing US soldiers in heavily armed vehicles and in body armour reminiscent of Robocop or Imperial Storm Troopers reduces any chance for meaningful dialogues with the local population, and, when combined with a notorious trigger-happiness, has proved uniformly successful in alienating civilian populations. A dangerous mix of unilateral militarism and racism led to the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay concentration campcum-torture centre that has become a global disgrace. Both the US and their Afghan client, Hamid Karzai, have been forced to attempt to divide and rule through the warlords, with very mixed results. For reasons of prestige, the US cannot abandon the Afghan government to its fate, yet it has proved incapable of securing peace and order outside of Kabul. 15
The following chapter looks at the "war against terrorism." As the author points out, there are, in fact, relatively few genuinely international Muslim terrorists targeting Western countries; from Chechnya to Western China to Palestine, most armed Islamicist groupings focus their attention on local struggles for national liberation. Heedless of this, the US has chosen to become involved in opposing a range of national liberation struggles, which is likely to yield results just as mixed as its support for the rich in the class wars of Latin America did. Chapters seven and eight critically reappraise the US concept of a rogue state: the definition has proven largely driven by political expediency, and, as in the case of all bullies, the most vigorously pursued have been the weak. Nonetheless, the US failed to deter the North Koreans from acquiring nuclear weapons. US attentions were diverted by Iraq, which in any event, had oil; the pickings from a client North Korea would have been slim. The following chapter looks at the Iraq debacle, an adventure that has proven open-ended and extraordinarily costly. The oil industry has yet to recover, and the takings by US oil majors have so far proven slim; the principal beneficiaries have been expensive mercenary companies, and equally expensive logistics providers such as the politically well-connected Halliburton. The final chapter notes that US power is uneven: America possesses overwhelming military power, yet is "too stingy to consolidate empire," it "wields power, not authority." It possesses the capacity to subjugate, but lacks the capacity to institutionalize outcomes. 16
Conclusions
Specific forms of institutional mediation made the post-World War II SSA possible; the paring back of institutional restraints in response to crisis in the 1980s and 1990s made accumulation by dispossession again a reality. This allowed for a resumption of growth, albeit volatile and uneven, in key areas. Again, the weakening of core institutions partially undermined the bases of group and class solidarities in the advanced societies, workers being transformed into individualized contractors and consumers. The emerging Third World community of nations has been shattered into a disparate cluster of the relatively fortunate and a bitterly divided rabble of supplicants for aid. However, as Gumplowicz notes, resources gained through dispossession need to be secured and legitimized through institution building to avoid endless cycles of resistance. In the absence of such a legitimization process, any social order will prove tenuous and unstable. The "reality of social disparity, degradation and disintegration" is likely to place the issue of alternatives to capitalism firmly back on the agenda.11 The present fluidity opens up certain historic opportunities for organized labour, opportunities that will only be realized through actively building bridges between the many clusters of dispossessed. Trade unions and community organizations in the advanced societies, and their counterparts in the developing world, have a stark choice between fruitless horizontal struggles, squabbling over the crumbs from the tables of the rich, or working towards a redistribution of power and wealth that will involve far-reaching compromises and lifestyle changes for all. 17
Notes
1 Ludvig Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology (Philadelphia 1889).
2 Robert Boyer and J. Rogers Hollingsworth, "From National Embeddedness to Spatial and Institutional Nestedness," in Hollingsworth and Boyer, eds., Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions (Cambridge 1997), 466.
3 Martin Wolfson, "Neoliberalism and the Social Structure of Accumulation," Review of Radical Political Economics, 35, 3 (2003), 255.
4 Wolfson, "Neoliberalism," 260.
5 David Kotz, "Neoliberalism and the Social Structure of Accumulation: Theory of Long Run Capital Accumulation," Review of Radical Political Economics, 35, 3 (2003), 270.
6 Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology.
7 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford 2003), 145–182.
8 Harvey, The New Imperialism, 156–157; John Grahl and Paul Teague, "The Regulation School, the Employment Relation and Financialization," Economy and Society, 29, 1 (2000), 160–178.
9 Jamie Peck, Workfare States (New York 2001); Ellen Frank, "The Surprising Resilience of the US Dollar," Review of Radical Political Economics, 35, 3 (2003), 252–3.
10 W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London 2004), 18.
11 Kotz, "Neoliberalism and the Social Structure of Accumulation," 270.
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Western Imperialism and Internal Pressures
By the 19th cent. British merchants, who had actively traded in S China, pressured their government to make repeated attempts (1793, 1816, 1834) to open China's market by establishing official trade relations with the Ch'ing government. All these attempts failed. But Britain's victory in the first of the Opium Wars (1839–42) forced China to sign the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), the first of the unequal treaties that China signed with Western countries. By these treaties China was forced to open coastal and later internal ports to foreign trade and residence, cede Hong Kong to Great Britain, and establish extraterritoriality for Western nations.
The Manchu regime, already weakened by Western encroachments, was further enfeebled by internal rebellions. The Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) nearly brought the dynasty to an end. However, the Manchu regime suppressed the major rebellions and embarked on a policy of diplomatic, technological, and military modernization led by Tseng Kuo-fan (1811–72) and Li Hung-chang (1823–1901). These statesmen played important roles in the T'ung Chih restoration (1862–74), during which the dynasty attempted to restore the traditional order by reasserting Confucian social values and importing modern weaponry from the West.
China yielded to Western demands for permanent diplomatic representation in Beijing (1860) and continued to suffer territorial encroachments. Russia occupied Ili, Japan incorporated the Ryukyu islands, France made Annam a protectorate, and Great Britain completed its annexation of Burma (Myanmar). The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) deprived China of its suzerainty over Korea and Taiwan, and the war was followed by the partition of mainland China into “spheres of influence.” The general agreement was that Great Britain should predominate in the Chang (Yangtze) valley, France in the extreme south, and Russia in Manchuria. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Japan took over Russia's sphere.
Efforts to strengthen the dynasty against foreign imperialism were undertaken by Kang Yowei (1858–1927) with the support of the emperor Kuang-hsu. These efforts, however, were frustrated by the dowager empress Tz'u Hsi, who aborted the reform movement in a coup. She supported the Boxer Uprising, however, in a vain attempt to dislodge the foreign powers (1898–1900).
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Part 28: Imperialist expansions and 9/11
By B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 2, 2005, 22:28
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“We condemn this brutal attack in the strongest possible terms . . . A terrible reminder that the Lebanese people must be able to pursue their aspirations and determine their own political future free from violence and intimidation and free from Syrian occupation.”—White House spokesman Scott McClellan commenting on the murder of Rafiq Hariri, former Lebanese prime minister. (Source) [Italics added].
The central theme that is still dominating the American ideological discourse since 9/11 is that the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon were not like any other attacks. Specifically, the Bush administration argued that 9/11 was an indication of U.S. vulnerability against an implacable enemy, hence confronting this “enemy” requires a radical approach: war without borders against Arabs, Muslims, Islam, and their entire history, all perceived as an embodiment of “terrorism.”
This apparently ideological but substantially imperialist approach has resulted, so far, in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the killing of tens of thousands of people, while the threat to use force against Iran and Syria continues unabated.
Based on a long history of U.S. interventionist policy, it is pointless to state that 9/11 is just another pretext for military and imperialist expansion. To counter the propaganda theme employed by the administration and ancillary think tanks, I previously explored the ideological motives for which, the U.S. government treated 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing as two events different in nature, therefore, each necessitated a different response.
As per norm in the culture of imperialism, behind the claims of different nature and different response, a structured rationale is always lurking. While the U.S. considered the Oklahoma attack as internal and treated it as a criminal case, it considered the WTC attack as a mortal attack and permanent threat against its national security and existence, therefore requiring massive intervention at the “source of that potential danger.”
In other words, the administration fashioned 9/11 into a hyper-alibi to attack the Arab Middle East, as well as to expand its imperialism and physical domination through direct military occupation.
At the end of Part 27, I questioned, “Because both attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing (internal attack) and the WTC attack (assuming it is external) are “terrorist” attacks, is it conceivable then they could share basic similarities?” The following is a comparison to investigate such a possibility:
Oklahoma City Attack
It is internal and, for a variety of political motives, is hostile to the federal government of the United States.
It targeted the Murrah federal building as a symbol of the U.S. government to demonstrate that hostility.
The attack did not consider the human aspects, age, race, color, or gender of the victims it killed.
The perpetrator used explosives to carry out the attacks.
Number of victims was not a relevant factor, as presence of people inside the building was fortuitous, circumstantial, and depended on numerous factors and variables.
The resulting economic damage was not a relevant factor, as the attackers could only guess the extent of damage they could inflict.
WTC Attack
It is “assumed” external and, for a variety of political motives, is hostile to the federal government of the United States.
It targeted both towers of the World Trade Center, a symbol of U.S. financial power, to demonstrate that hostility.
The attack did not consider the human aspects, age, race, color, or gender of the victims it killed.
According to the official version of the U.S. government, the perpetrators used airplanes to carry out the attacks.
Number of victims was not a relevant factor, as presence of people inside the building was fortuitous, circumstantial, and depended on numerous factors and variables.
The resulting economic damage was not a relevant factor, as the attackers could only guess the extent of damage they could inflict.
By examining both columns of comparison, we can make the following observations: Items identified as # 1 are fundamentally different because of the qualifiers, internal vs. “external.” Items identified as # 2 are only apparently different. Since the financial power creates the political power to represent it, therefore, the political symbol of Oklahoma City is inherently equivalent to the financial symbol of the WTC. Symbolically, therefore, items # 2 of both columns are exchangeable. Items identified with # 3, 5, and 6 are identical. As for items identified with # 4, they are only apparently different, but in reality are identical since both are forms of warfare.
Conclusively, the sole structural factor that distinguishes between the subjects of comparison is, external vs. internal. This factor, alone, determined the ideological alibi and course of action of the Bush administration. Knowing what we know about 9/11, we have to ask a fundamental question” If shortly after 9/11 it had been determined that the attack was internal, could that determination have halted the onslaught on the Middle East and on Iraq?
The answer is no. Blair, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were already in Afghanistan before any investigation began, before anyone knew anything about who attacked the United States and why. And as widely reported, Bush ordered plans to invade Iraq just a few hours after the WTC came under attack. Categorically, 9/11 as an internal or external factor was inconsequential in relation to the premeditated response that Bush and Zionists gave to the attack. In other words, the decision to occupy Iraq, as well as the decision to declare permanent war against the Asian Arab Middle East under the pretext that Arabs, Islam, and Muslim traditions are violent was already moving on tracks regardless of who committed 9/11.
By opting to trash the law and discarding serious investigation of 9/11, the Bush administration has, in fact, scrapped the Constitution, the authority and principles of the courts (one is innocent until proven guilty,) and, in effect, declared the final transformation of the United States into a fascist state that no law can bind.
Is it not strange that the system which permitted Kenneth Starr to spend four years and $40 million (source ) investigating Clinton’s sexual conduct, never required the White House to explain: How was it possible that a “hijacked” airplane entered Washington, D.C., airspace without confrontation from military jetfighters of the hyper-empire? Moreover, if no jetfighters attempted to stop the attack, who ordered them to stand down and why? Is it not strange that the neoconservatives, who wrote and filled a voluminous 9/11 governmental report with Zionist ideology and rationalizations, never answered that simple question?
Answer: no jetfighters intercepted the hijacked airplane, because there was no airplane to intercept—namely, on 9/11/2001 no hijacked airplane flew into Washington airspace. If I am speculating, then what were U.S. spy satellites doing when the attack occurred? What happened to permanent vigilance against sudden Russian or other foreign attacks? Since Powell and Cheney claimed they videoed a small pick-up truck moving around Iraq "carrying WMD," why could they not spot a moving airplane in the skies of Washington D.C.? If such video exists, and it must exist, then where is it? Besides, did any one see rescue crews remove remnants of that airplane or dead passengers from inside after it collided with the Pentagon? Did that airplane vaporize to its molecular level?
Consequently, the importance of 9/11 is that the U.S. ruling classes used it as a pretext to seize two strategic countries in Asia, and to blackmail the entire Arab and Islamic states. This seizure prompts us to debate Bush and Cheney’s pretext to use 9/11 as they did. Suppose that a group of Russians (avenging the collapse of the Soviet Union, since the U.S. claimed it defeated it in the Cold War) carried out that attack: Would the U.S. dare to attack or occupy Russia? While the answer is an absolute no when Russia is involved—it is a nuclear state—, it is definitely yes when it comes to the Arabs. By their own political retardation and obedience to U.S. diktat, the Arabs have become the weakest link in the international system, thus easy prey to Zionist and imperialist ambitions that populate the American Power elites.
No doubt, therefore, by qualifying the Oklahoma attack as a criminal case and the attack against the WTC as an attack against the national security of the United States, U.S. imperialists made the strategic decision to use 9/11 as springboard for empire. To carry out that decision, Bush, exploiting a country partly in sorrow, declared permanent war against the Arab nations, who, curiously, although alien to that crime, they are by historical coincidence either still hostile to Zionism or came to terms with it under imperialist coercion and wars. This was reason enough for a Zionist-controlled U.S.A. to declare them perpetual enemies.
Let us assume, however, that it was a group of Arab Muslims who committed the crime of 9/11, then why did the U.S. involve all Muslims, all Arabs, and Islam in a crime that only 19 men committed?
There can be but one answer: our considerations are meaningless to the imperialist mafia controlling the U.S., because the objective is not finding the truth about 9/11 but something else. If 9/11 proves anything, it would be that the hostility toward Arabs, Muslims, and Islam is fictitious from top to bottom. What makes the U.S. move in the world is imperialist greed and ideology of empire regardless of who is the victim.
In addition, religion or culture is irrelevant to colonialism and imperialism. Hypothetically, would the U.S. end its hostility toward Saudi Arabia should the Saudis decide to flatten the city of Mecca, tear down the Kaaba, renounce Islam, embrace Christianity, outlaw the Arabic language, and make English the only language of communication?
The answer is no. Saudis as individuals or as a society will still own oil. And oil is a strategic asset to U.S. imperialism.
Nine-Eleven, therefore, is only a pretext, and to unravel it, let us reprise, once again, the argument that Arab Muslim fanatics who hated the U.S. because “it is free and prosperous” attacked the United States. But, if Iraq and Iraqis did not do it, then why invade Iraq?
Consider another example; assume that a group of Latin-American Nicaraguans committed 9/11 in retaliation for U.S. interference in the affairs of Nicaragua and Latin America. As per this hypothesis, should the U.S. retaliate by invading, oil rich Latin-American Venezuela?
Logically, though the answer should be no, a caveat is in order: if Latin America were in direct conflict with Zionism, the answer would be yes, and Venezuelan oil would be the trophy. Consequently, when the ideology of imperialism merged with that of Zionism in a powerful country such as the United States, a new class of fascist ideologues became the sole arbiter of the interpretation of 9/11.
How should have the U.S. reacted if: 1) Nine-Eleven was indeed an external attack, or 2) was an internal attack
Nine-Eleven as External Attack
If political coherence and logical attitudes, but not imperialism, crusading religious chauvinism, or Zionism guided the response to 9/11, then the U.S. should have opted to do two things—a legal solution and a rational strategy:
Solution: the United States should have treated 9/11 as it did the case of the Oklahoma City bombing, that is, a criminal case.
Strategy: The U.S. government, the Congress, or the American people should have required the investigation of the roots and motivation of the attack, and that the underlying causes be confronted and eliminated.
Nine-Eleven as Internal Attack
Many modalities of the WTC attack do not coincide with the version given by the Bush administration. These modalities include but are not limited to timing, mechanics, building engineering, rapid collapse, official propaganda, machinations to eliminate valid enquiries, the supersonic speed with which Arabs or Muslims have been implicated, the juggling of post-attack fact-findings, the lack of democratic discussion, and, most importantly, intimidation, leading us to have strong reasonable doubt that the attack was not external. Most likely 9/11 was a masterfully staged internal attack. How could this be so? Are those Arabs hijacking the airplanes figments of imagination?
To answer these questions, one can only cite the countless Hollywood movies where a person kills his victim, but then hides his gun in the apartment of the person that he wants to implicate for the murder. While in the movies, Colombo, Mason, Monk, and Crime Scene Investigation’s team always find the real killer, the U.S. government would never reveal the truth about 9/11 or the identity of the perpetrators.
Remember, a system will never commit suicide by telling the truth. And if it tells the truth, it is always does that after everything has been said and done, i.e., when the truth has lost its practical consequence. Lyndon Johnson’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident came to the surface after over 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans lost their lives. The lies about Iraq’s WMD came out after the U.S. slaughtered over 100,000 Iraqis; after it completed the building of four permanent military bases, and after it created the conditions with which it hopes to stay in Iraq.
Will we ever know who committed 9/11? The answer is not while Zionism is ruling America.
Based on myriad contradictions in the government’s version, strong intuitive conclusions backed by logic indicate that exclusively American internal forces may have committed 9/11, or, at least, American internal forces in association with unidentifiable external forces that could be from any nationality, including Arabs, were responsible for the planning and execution of the attack.
In all cases, if the U.S. were a state of law and order, it should have seriously investigated 9/11, without launching wars of imperialism disguised as wars of “liberation” as advocated by U.S. Zionists and by a crusading coalition comprised of extremist imperialists and Christian zealots.
Pretexts as Policy for Empire Building
Since its inception, the US thrived on pretexts to expand imperialistically. U.S. motives to invade Iraq and kill tens of thousands of its citizens are complex and require elaborate studies, because many domestic forces shaped these motives and gave them impetus. In addition, besides U.S., Zionism, and Israel, other international forces, each for its own motives, joined the American project for unhindered world hegemony. Among the forces that are hoping to collect the crumbs of U.S. colonialism are Britain, Australia, Italy, Japan, the entire former communist bloc, many poor Latin American countries, and countless unprincipled Muslim and Arab governments, as well as a substantial number of Iraqis trying to have “power” under the bloody grip of the occupation regime.
But the main player, who has the allegiance of the rest and who used the pretext of 9/11 to implement colonialism in Iraq, is not Israel or U.S. traditional imperialists but the powerful and ubiquitous class of U.S. Zionists. We shall discuss this matter in the upcoming parts.
A question: Is the pretext to occupy Iraq unique in the history of U.S. imperialist expansion, colonialism, or violence?
Next, Part 29: Iraq Occupation, anatomy of pretext
B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist. Email: bjsabri@yahoo.com.
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D.5 What causes imperialism?
In a word: power. Imperialism is the process by which one country dominates another directly, by political means, or indirectly, by economic means, in order to steal its wealth (either natural or produced). This, by necessity, means the exploitation of working people in the dominated nation. Moreover, it can also aid the exploitation of working people in the imperialist nation itself. As such, imperialism cannot be considered in isolation from the dominant economic and social system. Fundamentally the cause is the same inequality of power, which is used in the service of exploitation.
While the rhetoric used for imperial adventures may be about self-defence, defending/exporting "democracy" and/or "humanitarian" interests, the reality is much more basic and grim. As Chomsky stresses, "deeds consistently accord with interests, and conflict with words -- discoveries that must not, however, weaken our faith in the sincerity of the declarations of our leaders." This is unsurprising as states are always "pursuing the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its exceptional dedication to the highest values" and so "the evidence for . . . the proclaimed messianic missions reduces to routine pronouncements" (faithfully repeated by the media) while "counter-evidence is mountainous." [Failed States, p. 171 and pp. 203-4]
We must stress that we are concentrating on the roots of imperialism here. We do not, and cannot, provide a detailed history of the horrors associated with it. For US imperialism, the works of Noam Chomsky are recommended. His books Turning the Tide and The Culture of Terrorism expose the evils of US intervention in Central America, for example, while Deterring Democracy, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy present a wider perspective. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum are also worth reading. For post-1945 British imperialism, Mark Curtis's Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World and Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses are recommended.
As we will discuss in the following sections, imperialism has changed over time, particularly during the last two hundred years (where its forms and methods have evolved with the changing needs of capitalism). But even in the pre-capitalist days of empire building, imperialism was driven by economic forces and needs. In order to make one's state secure, in order to increase the wealth available to the state, its ruling bureaucracy and its associated ruling class, it had to be based on a strong economy and have a sufficient resource base for the state and ruling elite to exploit (both in terms of human and natural resources). By increasing the area controlled by the state, one increased the wealth available.
States by their nature, like capital, are expansionist bodies, with those who run them always wanting to increase the range of their power and influence (this can be seen from the massive number of wars that have occurred in Europe over the last 500 years). This process was began as nation-states were created by Kings declaring lands to be their private property, regardless of the wishes of those who actually lived there. Moreover, this conflict did not end when monarchies were replaced by more democratic forms of government. As Bakunin argued:
"we find wars of extermination, wars among races and nations; wars of conquest, wars to maintain equilibrium, political and religious wars, wars waged in the name of 'great ideas' . . . , patriotic wars for greater national unity . . . And what do we find beneath all that, beneath all the hypocritical phrases used in order to give these wars the appearance of humanity and right? Always the same economic phenomenon: the tendency on the part of some to live and prosper at the expense of others. All the rest is mere humbug. The ignorant and naive, and the fools are entrapped by it, but the strong men who direct the destinies of the State know only too well that underlying all those wars there is only one motive: pillage, the seizing of someone else's wealth and the enslavement of someone else's labour." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 170]
However, while the economic motive for expansion is generally the same, the economic system which a nation is based on has a definite impact on what drives that motive as well as the specific nature of that imperialism. Thus the empire building of ancient Rome or Feudal England has a different economic base (and so driving need) than, say, the imperialism of nineteenth century Germany and Britain or twentieth and twenty-first century United States. Here we will focus mainly on modern capitalist imperialism as it is the most relevant one in the modern world.
Capitalism, by its very nature, is growth-based and so is characterised by the accumulation and concentration of capital. Companies must expand in order to survive competition in the marketplace. This, inevitably, sees a rise in international activity and organisation as a result of competition over markets and resources within a given country. By expanding into new markets in new countries, a company can gain an advantage over its competitors as well as overcome limited markets and resources in the home nation. In Bakunin's words:
"just as capitalist production and banking speculation, which in the long run swallows up that production, must, under the threat of bankruptcy, ceaselessly expand at the expense of the small financial and productive enterprises which they absorb, must become universal, monopolistic enterprises extending all over the world -- so this modern and necessarily military State is driven on by an irrepressible urge to become a universal State. . . . Hegemony is only a modest manifestation possible under the circumstances, of this unrealisable urge inherent in every State. And the first condition of this hegemony is the relative impotence and subjection of all the neighbouring States." [Op. Cit., p. 210]
Therefore, economically and politically, the imperialistic activities of both capitalist and state-capitalist (i.e. the Soviet Union and other "socialist" nations) comes as no surprise. Capitalism is inevitably imperialistic and so "[w]ar, capitalism and imperialism form a veritable trinity," to quote Dutch pacifist-syndicalist Bart de Ligt [The Conquest of Violence, p. 64] The growth of big business is such that it can no longer function purely within the national market and so they have to expand internationally to gain advantage in and survive. This, in turn, requires the home state of the corporations also to have global reach in order to defend them and to promote their interests. Hence the economic basis for modern imperialism, with "the capitalistic interests of the various countries fight[ing] for the foreign markets and compete with each other there" and when they "get into trouble about concessions and sources of profit," they "call upon their respective governments to defend their interests . . . to protect the privileges and dividends of some . . . capitalist in a foreign country." [Alexander Berkman, What is Anarchism?, p. 31] Thus a capitalist class needs the power of nation states not only to create internal markets and infrastructure but also to secure and protect international markets and opportunities in a world of rivals and their states.
As power depends on profits within capitalism, this means that modern imperialism is caused more by economic factors than purely political considerations (although, obviously, this factor does play a role). Imperialism serves capital by increasing the pool of profits available for the imperialistic country in the world market as well as reducing the number of potential competitors. As Kropotkin stressed, "capital knows no fatherland; and if high profits can be derived from the work of Indian coolies whose wages are only one-half of those of English workmen [or women], or even less, capital will migrate to India, as it has gone to Russian, although its migration may mean starvation for Lancashire." [Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 57]
Therefore, capital will travel to where it can maximise its profits -- regardless of the human or environmental costs at home or abroad. This is the economic base for modern imperialism, to ensure that any trade conducted benefits the stronger party more than the weaker one. Whether this trade is between nations or between classes is irrelevant, the aim of imperialism is to give business an advantage on the market. By travelling to where labour is cheap and the labour movement weak (usually thanks to dictatorial regimes), environmental laws few or non-existent, and little stands in the way of corporate power, capital can maximise its profits. Moreover, the export of capital allows a reduction in the competitive pressures faced by companies in the home markets (at least for short periods).
This has two effects. Firstly, the industrially developed nation (or, more correctly corporation based in that nation) can exploit less developed nations. In this way, the dominant power can maximise for itself the benefits created by international trade. If, as some claim, trade always benefits each party, then imperialism allows the benefits of international trade to accrue more to one side than the other. Secondly, it gives big business more weapons to use to weaken the position of labour in the imperialist nation. This, again, allows the benefits of trade (this time the trade of workers liberty for wages) to accrue to more to business rather than to labour.
How this is done and in what manner varies and changes, but the aim is always the same -- exploitation.
This can be achieved in many ways. For example, allowing the import of cheaper raw materials and goods; the export of goods to markets sheltered from foreign competitors; the export of capital from capital-rich areas to capital-poor areas as the investing of capital in less industrially developed countries allows the capitalists in question to benefit from lower wages; relocating factories to countries with fewer (or no) social and environmental laws, controls or regulations. All these allow profits to be gathered at the expense of the working people of the oppressed nation (the rulers of these nations generally do well out of imperialism, as would be expected). The initial source of exported capital is, of course, the exploitation of labour at home but it is exported to less developed countries where capital is scarcer and the price of land, labour and raw materials cheaper. These factors all contribute to enlarging profit margins:
"The relationship of these global corporations with the poorer countries had long been an exploiting one . . . Whereas U.S. corporations in Europe between 1950 and 1965 invested $8.1 billion and made $5.5 billion in profits, in Latin America they invested $3.8 billion and made $11.2 billion in profits, and in Africa they invested $5.2 billion and made $14.3 bullion in profits." [Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 556]
Betsy Hartman, looking at the 1980s, concurs. "Despite the popular Western image of the Third World as a bottomless begging bowl," she observes, "it today gives more to the industrialised world than it takes. Inflows of official 'aid' and private loans and investments are exceeded by outflows in the form of repatriated profits, interest payments, and private capital sent abroad by Third World Elites." [quoted by George Bradford, Woman's Freedom: Key to the Population Question, p. 77]
In addition, imperialism allows big business to increase its strength with respect to its workforce in the imperialist nation by the threat of switching production to other countries or by using foreign investments to ride out strikes. This is required because, while the "home" working class are still exploited and oppressed, their continual attempts at organising and resisting their exploiters proved more and more successful. As such, "the opposition of the white working classes to the . . . capitalist class continually gain[ed] strength, and the workers . . . [won] increased wages, shorter hours, insurances, pensions, etc., the white exploiters found it profitable to obtain their labour from men [,women and children] of so-called inferior race . . . Capitalists can therefore make infinitely more out there than at home." [Bart de Ligt, Op. Cit., p. 49]
As such, imperialism (like capitalism) is not only driven by the need to increase profits (important as this is, of course), it is also driven by the class struggle -- the need for capital to escape from the strength of the working class in a particular country. From this perspective, the export of capital can be seen in two ways. Firstly, as a means of disciplining rebellious workers at home by an "investment strike" (capital, in effect, runs away, so causing unemployment which disciplines the rebels). Secondly, as a way to increase the 'reserve army' of the unemployed facing working people in the imperialist nations by creating new competitors for their jobs (i.e. dividing, and so ruling, workers by playing one set of workers against another). Both are related, of course, and both seek to weaken working class power by the fear of unemployment. This process played a key role in the rise of globalisation -- see section D.5.3 for details.
Thus imperialism, which is rooted in the search from surplus profits for big business, is also a response to working class power at home. The export of capital is done by emerging and established transnational companies to overcome a militant and class consciousness working class which is often too advanced for heavy exploitation, and finance capital can make easier and bigger profits by investing productive capital elsewhere. It aids the bargaining position of business by pitting the workers in one country against another, so while they are being exploited by the same set of bosses, those bosses can use this fictional "competition" of foreign workers to squeeze concessions from workers at home.
Imperialism has another function, namely to hinder or control the industrialisation of other countries. Such industrialisation will, of course, mean the emergence of new capitalists, who will compete with the existing ones both in the "less developed" countries and in the world market as a whole. Imperialism, therefore, attempts to reduce competition on the world market. As we discuss in the next section, the nineteenth century saw the industrialisation of many European nations as well as America, Japan and Russia by means of state intervention. However, this state-led industrialisation had a drawback, namely that it created more and more competitors on the world market. Moreover, as Kropotkin noted, they has the advantage that the "new manufacturers . . . begin where" the old have "arrived after a century of experiments and groupings" and so they "are built according to the newest and best models which have been worked out elsewhere." [Op. Cit., p. 32 and p. 49] Hence the need to stop new competitors and secure raw materials and markets, which was achieved by colonialism:
"Industries of all kinds decentralise and are scattered all over the globe; and everywhere a variety, an integrated variety, of trades grows, instead of specialisation . . . each nation becomes in its turn a manufacturing nation . . . For each new-comer the first steps only are difficult . . . The fact is so well felt, if not understood, that the race for colonies has become the distinctive feature of the last twenty years [Kropotkin is writing in 1912]. Each nation will have her own colonies. But colonies will not help." [Op. Cit., p. 75]
Imperialism hinders industrialisation in two ways. The first way was direct colonisation, a system which has effectively ended. The second is by indirect means -- namely the extraction of profits by international big business. A directly dominated country can be stopped from developing industry and be forced to specialise as a provider of raw materials. This was the aim of "classic" imperialism, with its empires and colonial wars. By means of colonisation, the imperialist powers ensure that the less-developed nation stays that way -- so ensuring one less competitor as well as favourable access to raw materials and cheap labour. French anarchist Elisee Reclus rightly called this a process of creating "colonies of exploitation." [quoted by John P Clark and Camille Martin (eds.), Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, p. 92]
This approach has been superseded by indirect means (see next section). Globalisation can be seen as an intensification of this process. By codifying into international agreements the ability of corporations to sue nation states for violating "free trade," the possibility of new competitor nations developing is weakened. Industrialisation will be dependent on transnational corporations and so development will be hindered and directed to ensure corporate profits and power. Unsurprisingly, those nations which have industrialised over the last few decades (such as the East Asian Tiger economies) have done so by using the state to protect industry and control international finance.
The new attack of the capitalist class ("globalisation") is a means of plundering local capitalists and diminish their power and area of control. The steady weakening and ultimate collapse of the Eastern Block (in terms of economic/political performance and ideological appeal) also played a role in this process. The end of the Cold War meant a reduction in the space available for local elites to manoeuvre. Before this local ruling classes could, if they were lucky, use the struggle between US and USSR imperialism to give them a breathing space in which they could exploit to pursue their own agenda (within limits, of course, and with the blessing of the imperialist power in whose orbit they were in). The Eastern Tiger economies were an example of this process at work. The West could use them to provide cheap imports for the home market as well as in the ideological conflict of the Cold War as an example of the benefits of the "free market" (not that they were) and the ruling elites, while maintaining a pro-west and pro-business environment (by force directed against their own populations, of course), could pursue their own economic strategies. With the end of the Cold War, this factor is no longer in play and the newly industrialised nations are now an obvious economic competitor. The local elites are now "encouraged" (by economic blackmail via the World Bank and the IMF) to embrace US economic ideology. Just as neo-liberalism attacks the welfare state in the Imperialist nations, so it results in a lower tolerance of local capital in "less developed" nations.
However, while imperialism is driven by the needs of capitalism it cannot end the contradictions inherent in that system. As Reclus put it in the late nineteenth century, "the theatre expands, since it now embraces the whole of the land and seas. But the forces that struggled against one another in each particularly state are precisely those that fight across the earth. In each country, capital seeks to subdue the workers. Similarly, on the level of the broadest world market, capital, which had grown enormously, disregards all the old borders and seeks to put the entire mass of producers to work on behalf of its profits, and to secure all the consumers in the world." [Reclus, quoted by Clark and Martin (eds.), Op. Cit., p. 97]
This struggle for markets and resources does, by necessity, lead to conflict. This may be the wars of conquest required to initially dominate an economically "backward" nation (such as the US invasion of the Philippines, the conquest of Africa by West European states, and so on) or maintain that dominance once it has been achieved (such as the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, the Gulf War and so on). Or it may be the wars between major imperialist powers once the competition for markets and colonies reaches a point when they cannot be settled peacefully (as in the First and Second World Wars). As Kropotkin argued:
"men no longer fight for the pleasure of kings, they fight for the integrity of revenues and for the growing wealth . . . [for the] benefit of the barons of high finance and industry . . . [P]olitical preponderance . . . is quite simply a matter of economic preponderance in international markets. What Germany, France, Russia, England, and Austria are all trying to win . . . is not military preponderance: it is economic domination. It is the right to impose their goods and their customs tariffs on their neighbours; the right to exploit industrially backward peoples; the privilege of building railroads . . . to appropriate from a neighbour either a port which will activate commerce, or a province where surplus merchandise can be unloaded . . . When we fight today, it is to guarantee our great industrialists a profit of 30%, to assure the financial barons their domination at the Bourse [stock-exchange], and to provide the shareholders of mines and railways with their incomes." [Words of a Rebel, pp. 65-6]
In summary, current imperialism is caused by, and always serves, the needs and interests of Capital. If it did not, if imperialism were bad for business, the business class would oppose it. This partly explains why the colonialism of the 19th century is no more (the other reasons being social resistance to foreign domination, which obviously helped to make imperialism bad for business as well, and the need for US imperialism to gain access to these markets after the second world war). There are now more cost-effective means than direct colonialism to ensure that "underdeveloped" countries remain open to exploitation by foreign capital. Once the costs exceeded the benefits, colonialist imperialism changed into the neo-colonialism of multinationals, political influence, and the threat of force. Moreover, we must not forget that any change in imperialism relates to changes in the underlying economic system and so the changing nature of modern imperialism can be roughly linked to developments within the capitalist economy.
Imperialism, then, is basically the ability of countries to globally and locally dictate trade relations and investments with other countries in such a way as to gain an advantage over the other countries. When capital is invested in foreign nations, the surplus value extracted from the workers in those nations are not re-invested in those nations. Rather a sizeable part of it returns to the base nation of the corporation (in the form of profits for that company). Indeed, that is to be expected as the whole reason for the investment of capital in the first place was to get more out of the country than the corporation put into it. Instead of this surplus value being re-invested into industry in the less-developed nation (as would be the case with home-grown exploiters, who are dependent on local markets and labour) it ends up in the hands of foreign exploiters who take them out of the dominated country. This means that industrial development as less resources to draw on, making the local ruling class dependent on foreign capital and its whims.
This can be done directly (by means of invasion and colonies) or indirectly (by means of economic and political power). Which method is used depends on the specific circumstances facing the countries in question. Moreover, it depends on the balance of class forces within each country as well (for example, a nation with a militant working class would be less likely to pursue a war policy due to the social costs involved). However, the aim of imperialism is always to enrich and empower the capitalist and bureaucratic classes.
D.5.1 How has imperialism changed over time?
The development of Imperialism cannot be isolated from the general dynamics and tendencies of the capitalist economy. Imperialist capitalism, therefore, is not identical to pre-capitalist forms of imperialism, although there can, of course, be similarities. As such, it must be viewed as an advanced stage of capitalism and not as some kind of deviation of it. This kind of imperialism was attained by some nations, mostly Western European, in the late 19th and early 20th-century. Since then it has changed and developed as economic and political developments occurred, but it is based on the same basic principles. As such, it is useful to describe the history of capitalism in order to fully understand the place imperialism holds within it, how it has changed, what functions it provides and, consequently, how it may change in the future.
Imperialism has important economic advantages for those who run the economy. As the needs of the business class change, the forms taken by imperialism also change. We can identify three main phases: classic imperialism (i.e. conquest), indirect (economic) imperialism, and globalisation. We will consider the first two in this section and globalisation in section D.5.3. However, for all the talk of globalisation in recent years, it is important to remember that capitalism has always been an international system, that the changing forms of imperialism reflect this international nature and that the changes within imperialism are in response to developments within capitalism itself.
Capitalism has always been expansive. Under mercantilism, for example, the "free" market was nationalised within the nation state while state aid was used to skew international trade on behalf of the home elite and favour the development of capitalist industry. This meant using the centralised state (and its armed might) to break down "internal" barriers and customs which hindered the free flow of goods, capital and, ultimately, labour. We should stress this as the state has always played a key role in the development and protection of capitalism. The use of the state to, firstly, protect infant capitalist manufacturing and, secondly, to create a "free" market (i.e. free from the customs and interference of society) should not be forgotten, particularly as this second ("internal") role is repeated "externally" through imperialism. Needless to say, this process of "internal" imperialism within the country by the ruling class by means of the state was accompanied by extensive violence against the working class (also see section F.8).
So, state intervention was used to create and ensure capital's dominant position at home by protecting it against foreign competition and the recently dispossessed working class. This transition from feudal to capitalist economy enjoyed the active promotion of the state authorities, whose increasing centralisation ran parallel with the growing strength and size of merchant capital. It also needed a powerful state to protect its international trade, to conquer colonies and to fight for control over the world market. The absolutist state was used to actively implant, help and develop capitalist trade and industry.
The first industrial nation was Britain. After building up its industrial base under mercantilism and crushing its rivals in various wars, it was in an ideal position to dominate the international market. It embraced free trade as its unique place as the only capitalist/industrialised nation in the world market meant that it did not have to worry about competition from other nations. Any free exchange between unequal traders will benefit the stronger party. Thus Britain, could achieve domination in the world market by means of free trade. This meant that goods were exported rather than capital.
Faced with the influx of cheap, mass produced goods, existing industry in Europe and the Americas faced ruin. As economist Nicholas Kaldor notes, "the arrival of cheap factory-made English goods did cause a loss of employment and output of small-scale industry (the artisanate) both in European countries (where it was later offset by large-scale industrialisation brought about by protection) and even more in India and China, where it was no so offset." [Further Essays on Applied Economics, p. 238] The existing industrial base was crushed, industrialisation was aborted and unemployment rose. These countries faced two possibilities: turn themselves into providers of raw materials for Britain or violate the principles of the market and industrialise by protectionism.
In many nations of Western Europe (soon to be followed by the USA and Japan), the decision was simple. Faced with this competition, these countries utilised the means by which Britain had industrialised -- state protection. Tariff barriers were raised, state aid was provided and industry revived sufficiently to turn these nations into successful competitors of Britain. This process was termed by Kropotkin as "the consecutive development of nations" (although he underestimated the importance of state aid in this process). No nation, he argued, would let itself become specialised as the provider of raw materials or the manufacturer of a few commodities but would diversify into many different lines of production. Obviously no national ruling class would want to see itself be dependent on another and so industrial development was essential (regardless of the wishes of the general population). Thus a nation in such a situation "tries to emancipate herself from her dependency . . . and rapidly begins to manufacture all those goods she used to import." [Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 49 and p. 32]
Protectionism may have violated the laws of neo-classical economics, but it proved essential for industrialisation. While, as Kropotkin argued, protectionism ensured "the high profits of those manufacturers who do not improve their factories and chiefly rely upon cheap labour and long hours," it also meant that these profits would be used to finance industry and develop an industrial base. [Op. Cit., p. 41] Without this state aid, it is doubtful that these countries would have industrialised (as Kaldor notes, "all the present 'developed' or 'industrialised' countries established their industries through 'import substitution' by means of protective tariffs and/or differential subsidies." [Op. Cit., p. 127]).
Within the industrialising country, the usual process of competition driving out competitors continued. More and more markets became dominated by big business (although, as Kropotkin stressed, without totally eliminating smaller workshops within an industry and even creating more around them). Indeed, as Russian anarchist G. P. Maximoff stressed, the "specific character of Imperialism is . . . the concentration and centralisation of capital in syndicates, trusts and cartels, which . . . have a decisive voice, not only in the economic and political life of their countries, but also in the life of the nations of the worlds a whole." [Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 10] The modern multi-national and transnational corporations are the latest expression of this process.
Simply put, the size of big business was such that it had to expand internationally as their original national markets were not sufficient and to gain further advantages over their competitors. Faced with high tariff barriers and rising international competition, industry responded by exporting capital as well as finished goods. This export of capital was an essential way of beating protectionism (and even reap benefits from it) and gain a foothold in foreign markets ("protective duties have no doubt contributed . . . towards attracting German and English manufacturers to Poland and Russia" [Kropotkin, Op. Cit., p. 41]). In addition, it allowed access to cheap labour and raw materials by placing capital in foreign lands As part of this process colonies were seized to increase the size of "friendly" markets and, of course, allow the easy export of capital into areas with cheap labour and raw materials. The increased concentration of capital this implies was essential to gain an advantage against foreign competitors and dominate the international market as well as the national one.
This form of imperialism, which arose in the late nineteenth century, was based on the creation of larger and larger businesses and the creation of colonies across the globe by the industrialised nations. Direct conquest had the advantage of opening up more of the planet for the capitalist market, thus leading to more trade and exploitation of raw materials and labour. This gave a massive boost to both the state and the industries of the invading country in terms of new profits, so allowing an increase in the number of capitalists and other social parasites that could exist in the developed nation. As Kropotkin noted at the time, "British, French, Belgian and other capitalists, by means of the ease with which they exploit countries which themselves have no developed industry, today control the labour of hundreds of millions of those people in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The result is that the number of those people in the leading industrialised countries of Europe who live off the work of others doesn't gradually decrease at all. Far from it." ["Anarchism and Syndicalism", Black Flag, no. 210, p. 26]
As well as gaining access to raw materials, imperialism allows the dominating nation to gain access to markets for its goods. By having an empire, products produced at home can be easily dumped into foreign markets with less developed industry, undercutting locally produced goods and consequently destroying the local economy (and so potential competitors) along with the society and culture based on it. Empire building is a good way of creating privileged markets for one's goods. By eliminating foreign competition, the imperialist nation's capitalists can charge monopoly prices in the dominated country, so ensuring high profit margins for capitalist business. This adds with the problems associated with the over-production of goods:
"The workman being unable to purchase with their wages the riches they are producing, industry must search for new markets elsewhere, amidst the middle classes of other nations. It must find markets, in the East, in Africa, anywhere; it must increase, by trade, the number of its serfs in Egypt, in India, on the Congo. But everywhere it finds competitors in other nations which rapidly enter into the same line of industrial development. And wars, continuous wars, must be fought for the supremacy in the world-market -- wars for the possession of the East, wars for getting possession of the seas, wars for the right of imposing heavy duties on foreign merchandise." [Kropotkin, Anarchism, pp. 55-6]
This process of expansion into non-capitalist areas also helps Capital to weather both the subjective and objective economic pressures upon it which cause the business cycle (see section C.7 for more details). As wealth looted from less industrially developed countries is exported back to the home country, profit levels can be protected both from working-class demands and from any relative decline in surplus-value production caused by increased capital investment (see section C.2 for more on surplus value). In fact, the working class of the imperialist country could receive improved wages and living conditions as the looted wealth was imported into the country and that meant that the workers could fight for, and win, improvements that otherwise would have provoked intense class conflict. And as the sons and daughters of the poor emigrated to the colonies to make a living for themselves on stolen land, the wealth extracted from those colonies helped to overcome the reduction in the supply of labour at home which would increase its market price. This loot also helps reduce competitive pressures on the nation's economy. Of course, these advantages of conquest cannot totally stop the business cycle nor eliminate competition, as the imperialistic nations soon discovered.
Therefore, the "classic" form of imperialism based on direct conquest and the creation of colonies had numerous advantages for the imperialist nations and the big business which their states represented.
These dominated nations were, in the main, pre-capitalist societies. The domination of imperialist powers meant the importation of capitalist social relationships and institutions into them, so provoking extensive cultural and physical resistance to these attempts of foreign capitalists to promote the growth of the free market. However, peasants', artisans' and tribal people's desires to be "left alone" was never respected, and "civilisation" was forced upon them "for their own good." As Kropotkin realised, "force is necessary to continually bring new 'uncivilised nations' under the same conditions [of wage labour]." [Anarchism and Anarchist Communism, p. 53] Anarchist George Bradford also stresses this, arguing that we "should remember that, historically, colonialism, bringing with it an emerging capitalist economy and wage system, destroyed the tradition economies in most countries. By substituting cash crops and monoculture for forms of sustainable agriculture, it destroyed the basic land skills of the people whom it reduced to plantation workers." [How Deep is Deep Ecology, p. 40] Indeed, this process was in many ways similar to the development of capitalism in the "developed" nations, with the creation of a class of landless workers who forms the nucleus of the first generation of people given up to the mercy of the manufacturers.
However, this process had objective limitations. Firstly, the expansion of empires had the limitation that there were only so many potential colonies out there. This meant that conflicts over markets and colonies was inevitable (as the states involved knew, and so they embarked on a policy of building larger and larger armed forces). As Kropotkin argued before the First World War, the real cause of war at the time was "the competition for markets and the right to exploit nations backward in industry." [quoted by Martin Miller, Kropotkin, p. 225] Secondly, the creation of trusts, the export of goods and the import of cheap raw materials cannot stop the business cycle nor "buy-off" the working class indefinitely (i.e. the excess profits of imperialism will never be enough to grant more and more reforms and improvements to the working class in the industrialised world). Thus the need to overcome economic slumps propelled business to find new ways of dominating the market, up to and including the use of war to grab new markets and destroy rivals. Moreover, war was a good way of side tracking class conflict at home -- which, let us not forget, had been reaching increasingly larger, more militant and more radical levels in all the imperialist nations (see John Zerzan's "Origins and Meaning of WWI" in his Elements of Refusal).
Thus this first phase of imperialism began as the growing capitalist economy started to reach the boundaries of the nationalised market created by the state within its own borders. Imperialism was then used to expand the area that could be colonised by the capital associated with a given nation-state. This stage ended, however, once the dominant powers had carved up the planet into different spheres of influence and there was nowhere left to expand into. In the competition for access to cheap raw materials and foreign markets, nation-states came into conflict with each other. As it was obvious that a conflict was brewing, the major European countries tried to organise a "balance of power." This meant that armies were built and navies created to frighten other countries and so deter war. Unfortunately, these measures were not enough to countermand the economic and power processes at play ("Armies equipped to the teeth with weapons, with highly developed instruments of murder and backed by military interests, have their own dynamic interests," as Goldman put it [Red Emma Speaks, p. 353]). War did break out, a war over empires and influence, a war, it was claimed, that would end all wars. As we now know, of course, it did not because it did not fight the root cause of modern wars, capitalism.
After the First World War, the identification of nation-state with national capital became even more obvious, and can be seen in the rise of extensive state intervention to keep capitalism going -- for example, the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany and the efforts of "national" governments in Britain and the USA to "solve" the economic crisis of the Great Depression. However, these attempts to solve the problems of capital did not work. The economic imperatives at work before the first world war had not gone away. Big business still needed markets and raw materials and the statification of industry under fascism only aided to the problems associated with imperialism. Another war was only a matter of time and when it came most anarchists, as they had during the first world war, opposed both sides and called for revolution:
"the present struggle is one between rival Imperialisms and for the protection of vested interests. The workers in every country, belonging to the oppressed class, have nothing in common with these interests and the political aspirations of the ruling class. Their immediate struggle is their emancipation. Their front line is the workshop and factory, not the Maginot Line where they will just rot and die, whilst their masters at home pile up their ill-gotten gains." ["War Commentary", quoted Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, p. 170]
After the Second World War, the European countries yielded to pressure from the USA and national liberation movements and grated many former countries "independence" (often after intense conflict). As Kropotkin predicted, such social movements were to be expected for with the growth of capitalism "the number of people with an interest in the capitulation of the capitalist state system also increases." ["Anarchism and Syndicalism", Op. Cit., p. 26] Unfortunately these "liberation" movements transformed mass struggle from a potential struggle against capitalism into movements aiming for independent capitalist nation states (see section D.7). Not, we must stress, that the USA was being altruistic in its actions, independence for colonies weakened its rivals as well as allowing US capital access to those markets.
This process reflected capital expanding even more beyond the nation-state into multinational corporations. The nature of imperialism and imperialistic wars changed accordingly. In addition, the various successful struggles for National Liberation ensured that imperialism had to change itself in face of popular resistance. These two factors ensured that the old form of imperialism was replaced by a new system of "neo-colonialism" in which newly "independent" colonies are forced, via political and economic pressure, to open their borders to foreign capital. If a state takes up a position which the imperial powers consider "bad for business," action will be taken, from sanctions to outright invasion. Keeping the world open and "free" for capitalist exploitation has been America's general policy since 1945. It springs directly from the expansion requirements of private capital and so cannot be fundamentally changed. However, it was also influenced by the shifting needs resulting from the new political and economic order and the rivalries existing between imperialist nations (particularly those of the Cold War). As such, which method of intervention and the shift from direct colonialism to neo-colonialism (and any "anomalies") can be explained by these conflicts.
Within this basic framework of indirect imperialism, many "developing" nations did manage to start the process of industrialising. Partly in response to the Great Depression, some former colonies started to apply the policies used so successfully by imperialist nations like Germany and America in the previous century. They followed a policy of "import substitution" which meant that they tried to manufacture goods like, for instance, cars that they had previously imported. Without suggesting this sort of policy offered a positive alternative (it was, after all, just local capitalism) it did have one big disadvantage for the imperialist powers: it tended to deny them both markets and cheap raw materials (the current turn towards globalisation was used to break these policies). As such, whether a nation pursued such policies was dependent on the costs involved to the imperialist power involved.
So instead of direct rule over less developed nations (which generally proved to be too costly, both economically and politically), indirect forms of domination were now preferred. These are rooted in economic and political pressure rather than the automatic use of violence, although force is always an option and is resorted to if "business interests" are threatened. This is the reality of the expression "the international community" -- it is code for imperialist aims for Western governments, particularly the U.S. and its junior partner, the U.K. As discussed in section D.2.1, economic power can be quite effective in pressuring governments to do what the capitalist class desire even in advanced industrial countries. This applies even more so to so-called developing nations.
In addition to the stick of economic and political pressure, the imperialist countries also use the carrot of foreign aid and investment to ensure their aims. This can best be seen when Western governments provide lavish funds to "developing" states, particularly petty right-wing despots, under the pseudonym "foreign aid." Hence the all to common sight of US Presidents supporting authoritarian (indeed, dictatorial) regimes while at the same time mouthing nice platitudes about "liberty" and "progress." The purpose of this foreign aid, noble-sounding rhetoric about freedom and democracy aside, is to ensure that the existing world order remains intact and that US corporations have access to the raw materials and markets they need. Stability has become the watchword of modern imperialists, who see any indigenous popular movements as a threat to the existing world order. The U.S. and other Western powers provide much-needed war material and training for the military of these governments, so that they may continue to keep the business climate friendly to foreign investors (that means tacitly and overtly supporting fascism around the globe).
Foreign aid also channels public funds to home based transnational companies via the ruling classes in Third World countries. It is, in other words, is a process where the poor people of rich countries give their money to the rich people of poor countries to ensure that the investments of the rich people of rich countries is safe from the poor people of poor countries! Needless to say, the owners of the companies providing this "aid" also do very well out of it. This has the advantage of securing markets as other countries are "encouraged" to buy imperialist countries' goods (often in exchange for "aid", typically military "aid") and open their markets to the dominant power's companies and their products.
Thus, the Third World sags beneath the weight of well-funded oppression, while its countries are sucked dry of their native wealth, in the name of "development" and in the spirit of "democracy" and "freedom". The United States leads the West in its global responsibility (another favourite buzzword) to ensure that this peculiar kind of "freedom" remains unchallenged by any indigenous movements. The actual form of the regime supported is irrelevant, although fascist states are often favoured due to their stability (i.e. lack of popular opposition movements). As long as the fascist regimes remain compliant and obedient to the West and capitalism thrives unchallenged then they can commit any crime against their own people while being praised for making progress towards "democracy." However, the moment they step out of line and act in ways which clash with the interests of the imperialist powers then their short-comings will used to justify intervention (the example of Saddam Hussein is the most obvious one to raise here). As for "democracy," this can be tolerated by imperialism as long as its in "the traditional sense of 'top-down' rule by elites linked to US power, with democratic forms of little substance -- unless they are compelled to do so, by their own populations in particular." This applies "internally" as well as abroad, for "democracy is fine as long as it . . . does not risk popular interference with primary interests of power and wealth." Thus the aim is to ensure "an obedient client state is firmly in place, the general perferene of conquerors, leaving just military bases for future contingencies." [Failed States, p. 171, p. 204 and p. 148]
In these ways, markets are kept open for corporations based in the advanced nations all without the apparent use of force or the need for colonies. However, this does not mean that war is not an option and, unsurprisingly, the post-1945 period has been marked by imperialist conflict. These include old-fashioned direct war by the imperialist nation (such as the Vietnam and Iraq wars) as well as new-style imperialistic wars by proxy (such as US support for the Contras in Nicaragua or support for military coups against reformist or nationalist governments). As such, if a regime becomes too independent, military force always remains an option. This can be seen from the 1990 Gulf War, when Saddam invaded Kuwait (and all his past crimes, conducted with the support of the West, were dragged from the Memory Hole to justify war).
Least it be considered that we are being excessive in our analysis, let us not forget that the US "has intervened well over a hundred times in the internal affairs of other nations since 1945. The rhetoric has been that we have done so largely to preserve or restore freedom and democracy, or on behalf of human rights. The reality has been that [they] . . . have been consistently designed and implemented to further the interests of US (now largely transnational) corporations, and the elites both at home and abroad who profit from their depredations." [Henry Rosemont, Jr., "U.S. Foreign Policy: the Execution of Human Rights", pp. 13-25, Social Anarchism, no. 29 p. 13] This has involved the overthrow of democratically elected governments (such as in Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Chile, 1973) and their replacement by reactionary right-wing dictatorships (usually involving the military). As George Bradford argues, "[i]n light of [the economic] looting [by corporations under imperialism], it should become clearer . . . why nationalist regimes that cease to serve as simple conduits for massive U.S. corporate exploitation come under such powerful attack -- Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 . . . Nicaragua [in the 1980s] . . . [U.S.] State Department philosophy since the 1950s has been to rely on various police states and to hold back 'nationalistic regimes' that might be more responsive to 'increasing popular demand for immediate improvements in the low living standards of the masses,' in order to 'protect our resources' -- in their countries!" [How Deep is Deep Ecology?, p. 62]
This is to be expected, as imperialism is the only means of defending the foreign investments of a nation's capitalist class, and by allowing the extraction of profits and the creation of markets, it also safeguards the future of private capital.
This process has not come to an end and imperialism is continuing to evolve based on changing political and economic developments. The most obvious political change is the end of the USSR. During the cold war, the competition between the USA and the USSR had an obvious impact on how imperialism worked. On the one hand, acts of imperial power could be justified in fighting "Communism" (for the USA) or "US imperialism" (for the USSR). On the other, fear of provoking a nuclear war or driving developing nations into the hands of the other side allowed more leeway for developing nations to pursue policies like import substitution. With the end of the cold-war, these options have decreased considerably for developing nations as US imperialism how has, effectively, no constraints beyond international public opinion and pressure from below. As the invasion of Iraq in 2003 shows, this power is still weak but sufficient to limit some of the excesses of imperial power (for example, the US could not carpet bomb Iraq as it had Vietnam).
The most obvious economic change is the increased global nature of capitalism. Capital investments in developing nations have increased steadily over the years, with profits from the exploitation of cheap labour flowing back into the pockets of the corporate elite in the imperialist nation, not to its citizens as a whole (though there are sometimes temporary benefits to other classes, as discussed in section D.5.4). With the increasing globalisation of big business and markets, capitalism (and so imperialism) is on the threshold of a new transformation. Just as direct imperialism transformed into in-direct imperialism, so in-direct imperialism is transforming into a global system of government which aims to codify the domination of corporations over governments. This process is often called "globalisation" and we discuss it in section D.5.3. First, however, we need to discuss non-private capitalist forms of imperialism associated with the Stalinist regimes and we do that in the next section.
D.5.2 Is imperialism just a product of private capitalism?
While we are predominantly interested in capitalist imperialism, we cannot avoid discussing the activities of the so-called "socialist" nations (such as the Soviet Union, China, etc.). Given that modern imperialism has an economic base caused in developed capitalism by, in part, the rise of big business organised on a wider and wider scale, we should not be surprised that the state capitalist ("socialist") nations are/were also imperialistic. As the state-capitalist system expresses the logical end point of capital concentration (the one big firm) the same imperialistic pressures that apply to big business and its state will also apply to the state capitalist nation.
In the words of libertarian socialist Cornelius Castoriadis:
"But if imperialist expansion is the necessary expression of an economy in which the process of capital concentration has arrived at the stage of monopoly domination, this is true a fortiori for an economy in which this process of concentration has arrived at its natural limit . . . In other words, imperialist expansion is even more necessary for a totally concentrated economy . . . That they are realised through different modes (for example, capital exportation play a much more restricted role and acts in a different way than is the case with monopoly domination) is the result of the differences separating bureaucratic capitalism from monopoly capitalism, but at bottom this changes nothing.
"We must strongly emphasise that the imperialistic features of capital are not tied to 'private' or 'State' ownership of the means of production . . . the same process takes place if, instead of monopolies, there is an exploiting bureaucracy; in other words, this bureaucracy also can exploit, but only on the condition that it dominates." [Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, p. 159]
Given this, it comes as no surprise that the state-capitalist countries also participated in imperialist activities, adventures and wars, although on a lesser scale and for slightly different reasons than those associated with private capitalism. However, regardless of the exact cause the USSR "has always pursued an imperialist foreign policy, that it is the state and not the workers which owns and controls the whole life of the country." Given this, it is unsurprising that "world revolution was abandoned in favour of alliances with capitalist countries. Like the bourgeois states the USSR took part in the manoeuvrings to establish a balance of power in Europe." This has its roots in its internal class structure, as "it is obvious that a state which pursues an imperialist foreign policy cannot itself by revolutionary" and this is shown in "the internal life of the USSR" where "the means of wealth production" are "owned by the state which represents, as always, a privileged class -- the bureaucracy." ["USSR -- Anarchist Position," pp. 21-24, Vernon Richards (ed.), The Left and World War II, p. 22 and p. 23]
This process became obvious after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the creation of Stalinist states in Eastern Europe. As anarchists at the time noted, this was "the consolidation of Russian imperialist power" and their "incorporation . . . within the structure of the Soviet Union." As such, "all these countries behind the Iron Curtain are better regarded as what they really [were] -- satellite states of Russia." ["Russia's Grip Tightens", pp. 283-5, Vernon Richards (ed.), World War - Cold War, p. 285 and p. 284] Of course, the creation of these satellite states was based on the inter-imperialist agreements reached at the Yalta conference of February 1945.
As can be seen by Russia's ruthless policy towards her satellite regimes, Soviet imperialism was more inclined to the defence of what she already had and the creation of a buffer zone between herself and the West. This is not to deny that the ruling elite of the Soviet Union did not try to exploit the countries under its influence. For example, in the years after the end of the Second World War, the Eastern Block countries paid the USSR millions of dollars in reparations. As in private capitalism, the "satellite states were regarded as a source of raw materials and of cheap manufactured goods. Russia secured the satellites exports at below world prices. And it exported to them at above world prices." Thus trade "was based on the old imperialist principle of buying cheap and selling dear -- very, very dear!" [Andy Anderson, Hungary '56, pp. 25-6 and p. 25] However, the nature of the imperialist regime was such that it discouraged too much expansionism as "Russian imperialism [had] to rely on armies of occupation, utterly subservient quisling governments, or a highly organised and loyal political police (or all three). In such circumstances considerable dilution of Russian power occur[red] with each acquisition of territory." ["Russian Imperialism", pp. 270-1, Vernon Richards (ed.), Op. Cit., p. 270]
Needless to say, the form and content of the state capitalist domination of its satellite countries was dependent on its own economic and political structure and needs, just as traditional capitalist imperialism reflected its needs and structures. While direct exploitation declined over time, the satellite states were still expected to develop their economies in accordance with the needs of the Soviet Bloc as a whole (i.e., in the interests of the Russian elite). This meant the forcing down of living standards to accelerate industrialisation in conformity with the requirements of the Russian ruling class. This was because these regimes served not as outlets for excess Soviet products but rather as a means of "plugging holes in the Russian economy, which [was] in a chronic state of underproduction in comparison to its needs." As such, the "form and content" of this regimes' "domination over its satellite countries are determined fundamentally by its own economic structure" and so it would be "completely incorrect to consider these relations identical to the relations of classical colonialism." [Castoriadis, Op. Cit., p. 187] So part of the difference between private and state capitalist was drive by the need to plunder these countries of commodities to make up for shortages caused by central planning (in contrast, capitalist imperialism tended to export goods). As would be expected, within this overall imperialist agenda the local bureaucrats and elites feathered their own nests, as with any form of imperialism.
As well as physical expansionism, the state-capitalist elites also aided "anti-imperialist" movements when it served their interests. The aim of this was to placed such movements and any regimes they created within the Soviet or Chinese sphere of influence. Ironically, this process was aided by imperialist rivalries with US imperialism as American pressure often closed off other options in an attempt to demonise such movements and states as "communist" in order to justify supporting their repression or for intervening itself. This is not to suggest that Soviet regime was encouraging "world revolution" by this support. Far from it, given the Stalinist betrayals and attacks on genuine revolutionary movements and struggles (the example of the Spanish Revolution is the obvious one to mention here). Soviet aid was limited to those parties which were willing to subjugate themselves and any popular movements they influenced to the needs of the Russian ruling class. Once the Stalinist parties had replaced the local ruling class, trade relations were formalised between the so-called "socialist" nations for the benefit of both the local and Russian rulers. In a similar way, and for identical needs, the Western Imperialist powers supported murderous local capitalist and feudal elites in their struggle against their own working classes, arguing that it was supporting "freedom" and "democracy" against Soviet aggression.
The turning of Communist Parties into conduits of Soviet elite interests became obvious under Stalin, when the twists and turns of the party line were staggering. However, it actually started under Lenin and Trotsky and "almost from the beginning" the Communist International (Comintern) "served primarily not as an instrument for World Revolution, but as an instrument of Russian Foreign Policy." This explains "the most bewildering changes of policy and political somersaults" it imposed on its member parties. Ultimately, "the allegedly revolutionary aims of the Comintern stood in contrast to the diplomatic relations of the Soviet Union with other countries." [Marie-Louise Berneri, Neither East Nor West, p. 64 and p. 63] As early as 1920, the Dutch Council Communist Anton Pannekoek was arguing that the Comintern opposition to anti-parliamentarianism was rooted "in the needs of the Soviet Republic" for "peaceful trade with the rest of the world." This meant that the Comintern's policies were driven "by the political needs of Soviet Russia." ["Afterword to World Revolution and Communist Tactics," D.A. Smart (ed.), Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism, p. 143 and p. 144] This is to be expected, as the regime had always been state capitalist and so the policies of the Comintern were based on the interests of a (state) capitalist regime.
Therefore, imperialism is not limited to states based on private capitalism -- the state capitalist regimes have also been guilty of it. This is to be expected, as both are based on minority rule, the exploitation and oppression of labour and the need to expand the resources available to it. This means that anarchists oppose all forms of capitalist imperialism and raise the slogan "Neither East nor West." We "cannot alter our views about Russia [or any other state capitalist regime] simply because, for imperialist reasons, American and British spokesmen now denounce Russia totalitarianism. We know that their indignation is hypocritical and that they may become friendly to Russia again if it suits their interests." [Marie-Louise Berneri, Op. Cit., p. 187] In the clash of imperialism, anarchists support neither side as both are rooted in the exploitation and oppression of the working class.
Finally, it is worthwhile to refute two common myths about state capitalist imperialism. The first myth is that state-capitalist imperialism results in a non-capitalist regimes and that is why it is so opposed to by Western interests. From this position, held by many Trotskyists, it is argued that we should support such regimes against the West (for example, that socialists should have supported the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). This position is based on a fallacy rooted in the false Trotskyist notion that state ownership of the means of production is inherently socialist.
Just as capitalist domination saw the transformation of the satellite's countries social relations from pre-capitalist forms in favour of capitalist ones, the domination of "socialist" nations meant the elimination of traditional bourgeois social relations in favour of state capitalist ones. As such, the nature and form of imperialism was fundamentally identical and served the interests of the appropriate ruling class in each case. This transformation of one kind of class system into another explains the root of the West's very public attacks on Soviet imperialism. It had nothing to do with the USSR being considered a "workers' state" as Trotsky, for example, argued. "Expropriation of the capitalist class," argued one anarchist in 1940, "is naturally terrifying" to the capitalist class "but that does not prove anything about a workers' state . . . In Stalinist Russia expropriation is carried out . . . by, and ultimately for the benefit of, the bureaucracy, not by the workers at all. The bourgeoisie are afraid of expropriation, of power passing out of their hands, whoever seizes it from them. They will defend their property against any class or clique. The fact that they are indignant [about Soviet imperialism] proves their fear -- it tells us nothing at all about the agents inspiring that fear." [J.H., "The Fourth International", pp. 37-43, Vernon Richards (ed.), Op. Cit., pp. 41-2] This elimination of tradition forms of class rule and their replacement with new forms is required as these are the only economic forms compatible with the needs of the state capitalist regimes to exploit these countries on a regular basis.
The second myth is the notion that opposition to state-capitalist imperialism by its subject peoples meant support for Western capitalism. In fact, the revolts and revolutions which repeatedly flared up under Stalinism almost always raised genuine socialist demands. For example, the 1956 Hungarian revolution "was a social revolution in the fullest sense of the term. Its object was a fundamental change in the relations of production, and in the relations between ruler and ruled in factories, pits and on the land." Given this, unsurprisingly Western political commentary "was centred upon the nationalistic aspects of the Revolution, no matter how trivial." This was unsurprising, as the West was "opposed both to its methods and to its aims . . . What capitalist government could genuinely support a people demanding 'workers' management of industry' and already beginning to implement this on an increasing scale?" The revolution "showed every sign of making both them and their bureaucratic counterparts in the East redundant." The revolt itself was rooted "[n]ew organs of struggle," workers' councils "which embodied, in embryo, the new society they were seeking to achieve." [Anderson, Op. Cit., p.6, p. 106 and p. 107]
The ending of state capitalism in Eastern Europe in 1989 has ended its imperialist domination of those countries. However, it has simply opened the door for private-capitalist imperialism as the revolts themselves remained fundamentally at the political level. The ruling bureaucracy was faced with both popular pressure from the streets and economic stagnation flowing from its state-run capitalism. Being unable to continue as before and unwilling, for obvious reasons, to encourage economic and political participation, it opted for the top-down transformation of state to private capitalism. Representative democracy was implemented and state assets were privatised into the hands of a new class of capitalists (often made up of the old bureaucrats) rather than the workers themselves. In other words, the post-Stalinist regimes are still class systems and now subject to a different form of imperialism -- namely, globalisation.
D.5.3 Does globalisation mean the end of imperialism?
No. While it is true that the size of multinational companies has increased along with the mobility of capital, the need for nation-states to serve corporate interests still exists. With the increased mobility of capital, i.e. its ability to move from one country and invest in another easily, and with the growth in international money markets, we have seen what can be called a "free market" in states developing. Corporations can ensure that governments do as they are told simply by threatening to move elsewhere (which they will do anyway, if it results in more profits).
Therefore, as Howard Zinn stresses, "it's very important to point out that globalisation is in fact imperialism and that there is a disadvantage to simply using the term 'globalisation' in a way that plays into the thinking of people at the World Bank and journalists . . . who are agog at globalisation. They just can't contain their joy at the spread of American economic and corporate power all over the world. . . it would be very good to puncture that balloon and say 'This is imperialism.'" [Bush Drives us into Bakunin's Arms] Globalisation is, like the forms of imperialism that preceded it, a response to both objective economic forces and the class struggle. Moreover, like the forms that came before, it is rooted in the economic power of corporations based in a few developed nations and political power of the states that are the home base of these corporations. These powers influence international institutions and individual countries to pursue neo-liberal policies, the so-called "Washington Consensus" of free market reforms, associated with globalisation.
Globalisation cannot be understood unless its history is known. The current process of increasing international trade, investment and finance markets started in the late 60s and early 1970s. Increased competition from a re-built Europe and Japan challenged US domination combined with working class struggle across the globe to leave the capitalist world feeling the strain. Dissatisfaction with factory and office life combined with other social movements (such as the women's movement, anti-racist struggles, anti-war movements and so on) which demanded more than capitalism could provide. The near revolution in France, 1968, is the most famous of these struggles but it occurred all across the globe.
For the ruling class, the squeeze on profits and authority from ever-increasing wage demands, strikes, stoppages, boycotts, squatting, protests and other struggles meant that a solution had to be found and the working class disciplined (and profits regained). One part of the solution was to "run away" and so capital flooded into certain areas of the "developing" world. This increased the trends towards globalisation. Another solution was the embrace of Monetarism and tight money (i.e. credit) policies. It is a moot point whether those who applied Monetarism actually knew it was nonsense and, consequently, sought an economic crisis or whether they were simply incompetent ideologues who knew little about economics and mismanaged the economy by imposing its recommendations, the outcome was the same. It resulted in increases in the interest rate, which helped deepen the recessions of the early 1980s which broke the back of working class resistance in the U.K. and U.S.A. High unemployment helped to discipline a rebellious working class and the new mobility of capital meant a virtual "investment strike" against nations which had a "poor industrial record" (i.e. workers who were not obedient wage slaves). Moreover, as in any economic crisis, the "degree of monopoly" (i.e. the dominance of large firms) in the market increased as weaker firms went under and others merged to survive. This enhancing the tendencies toward concentration and centralisation which always exist in capitalism, so ensuring an extra thrust towards global operations as the size and position of the surviving firms required wider and larger markets to operate in.
Internationally, another crisis played its role in promoting globalisation. This was the Debit Crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Debt plays a central role for the western powers in dictating how their economies should be organised. The debt crisis proved an ideal leverage for the western powers to force "free trade" on the "third world." This occurred when third world countries faced with falling incomes and rising interest rates defaulted on their loans (loans that were mainly given as a bribe to the ruling elites of those countries and used as a means to suppress the working people of those countries -- who now, sickenly, are expected to repay them!).
Before this, as noted in section D.5.1, many countries had followed a policy of "import substitution." This tended to create new competitors who could deny transnational corporations both markets and cheap raw materials. With the debt crisis, the imperialist powers could end this policy but instead of military force, the governments of the west sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB). The loans required by "developing" nations in the face of recession and rising debt repayments meant that they had little choice but to agree to an IMF-designed economic reform programme. If they refused, not only were they denied IMF funds, but also WB loans. Private banks and lending agencies would also pull out, as they lent under the cover of the IMF -- the only body with the power to both underpin loans and squeeze repayment from debtors. These policies meant introducing austerity programmes which, in turn, meant cutting public spending, freezing wages, restricting credit, allowing foreign multinational companies to cherry pick assets at bargain prices, and passing laws to liberalise the flow of capital into and out of the country. Not surprisingly, the result was disastrous for the working population, but the debts were repaid and both local and international elites did very well out of it. So while workers in the West suffered repression and hardship, the fate of the working class in the "developing" world was considerably worse.
Leading economist Joseph Stiglitz worked in the World Bank and described some of dire consequences of these policies. He notes how the neo-liberalism the IMF and WB imposed has, "too often, not been followed by the promised growth, but by increased misery" and workers "lost their jobs [being] forced into poverty" or "been hit by a heightened sense of insecurity" if they remained in work. For many "it seems closer to an unmitigated disaster." He argues that part of the problem is that the IMF and WB have been taken over by true believers in capitalism and apply market fundamentalism in all cases. Thus, they "became the new missionary institutions" of "free market ideology" through which "these ideas were pushed on reluctant poor countries." Their policies were "based on an ideology -- market fundamentalism -- that required little, if any, consideratiion of a country's particular circumstances and immediate problems. IMF economists could ignore the short-term effects their policies might have on [a] country, content in the belief in the long run the country would be better off" -- a position which many working class people there rejected by rioting and protest. In summary, globalisation "as it has been practised has not lived up to what its advocates promised it would accomplish . . . In some cases it has not even resulted in growth, but when it has, it has not brought benefits to all; the net effect of the policies set by the Washington Consensus had all too often been to benefit the few at the expense of the many, the well-off at the expense of the poor." [Globalisation and Its Discontents, p. 17, p. 20, p. 13, p. 36 and p. 20]
While transnational companies are, perhaps, the most well-known representatives of this process of globalisation, the power and mobility of modern capitalism can be seen from the following figures. From 1986 to 1990, foreign exchange transactions rose from under $300 billion to $700 billion daily and were expected to exceed $1.3 trillion in 1994. The World Bank estimates that the total resources of international financial institutions at about $14 trillion. To put some kind of perspective on these figures, the Balse-based Bank for International Settlement estimated that the aggregate daily turnover in the foreign exchange markets at nearly $900 billion in April 1992, equal to 13 times the Gross Domestic Product of the OECD group of countries on an annualised basis [Financial Times, 23/9/93]. In Britain, some $200-300 billion a day flows through London's foreign exchange markets. This is the equivalent of the UK's annual Gross National Product in two or three days. Needless to say, since the early 1990s, these amounts have grown to even higher levels (daily currency transactions have risen from a mere $80 billion in 1980 to $1.26 billion in 1995. In proportion to world trade, this trading in foreign exchange rose from a ration of 10:1 to nearly 70:1 [Mark Weisbrot, Globalisation for Whom?]).
Little wonder that a Financial Times special supplement on the IMF stated that "Wise governments realise that the only intelligent response to the challenge of globalisation is to make their economies more acceptable." [Op. Cit.] More acceptable to business, that is, not their populations. As Chomsky put it, "free capital flow creates what's sometimes called a 'virtual parliament' of global capital, which can exercise veto power over government policies that it considers irrational. That means things like labour rights, or educational programmes, or health, or efforts to stimulate the economy, or, in fact, anything that might help people and not profits (and therefore irrational in the technical sense)." [Rogue States, pp. 212-3]
This means that under globalisation, states will compete with each other to offer the best deals to investors and transnational companies -- such as tax breaks, union busting, no pollution controls, and so forth. The effects on the countries' ordinary people will be ignored in the name of future benefits (not so much pie in the sky when you die, more like pie in the future, maybe, if you are nice and do what you are told). For example, such an "acceptable" business climate was created in Britain, where "market forces have deprived workers of rights in the name of competition." [Scotland on Sunday, 9/1/95] Unsurprisingly. number of people with less than half the average income rose from 9% of the population in 1979 to 25% in 1993. The share of national wealth held by the poorer half of the population has fallen from one third to one quarter. However, as would be expected, the number of millionaires has increased, as has the welfare state for the rich, with the public's tax money being used to enrich the few via military Keynesianism, privatisation and funding for Research and Development. Like any religion, the free-market ideology is marked by the hypocrisy of those at the top and the sacrifices required from the majority at the bottom.
In addition, the globalisation of capital allows it to play one work force against another. For example, General Motors plans to close two dozen plants in the United States and Canada, but it has become the largest employer in Mexico. Why? Because an "economic miracle" has driven wages down. Labour's share of personal income in Mexico has "declined from 36 percent in the mid-1970's to 23 percent by 1992." Elsewhere, General Motors opened a $690 million assembly plant in the former East Germany. Why? Because there workers are willing to "work longer hours than their pampered colleagues in western Germany" (as the Financial Times put it) at 40% of the wage and with few benefits. [Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New, p. 160]
This mobility is a useful tool in the class war. There has been "a significant impact of NAFTA on strikebreaking. About half of union organising efforts are disrupted by employer threats to transfer production abroad, for example . . . The threats are not idle. When such organising drives succeed, employers close the plant in whole or in part at triple the pre-NAFTA rate (about 15 percent of the time). Plant-closing threats are almost twice as high in more mobile industries (e.g. manufacturing vs. construction)." [Rogue States, pp. 139-40] This process is hardly unique to America, and takes place all across the world (including in the "developing" world itself). This process has increased the bargaining power of employers and has helped to hold wages down (while productivity has increased). In the US, the share of national income going to corporate profits increased by 3.2 percentage points between 1989 and 1998. This represents a significant redistribution of the economic pie. [Mark Weisbrot, Op. Cit.] Hence the need for international workers' organisation and solidarity (as anarchists have been arguing since Bakunin [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, pp. 305-8]).
This means that such agreements such as NAFTA and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (shelved due to popular protest and outrage but definitely not forgotten) considerably weaken the governments of nation-states -- but only in one area, the regulation of business. Such agreements restrict the ability of governments to check capital flight, restrict currency trading, eliminate environment and labour protection laws, ease the repatriation of profits and anything else that might impede the flow of profits or reduce business power. Indeed, under NAFTA, corporations can sue governments if they think the government is hindering its freedom on the market. Disagreements are settled by unelected panels outside the control of democratic governments. Such agreements represent an increase in corporate power and ensure that states can only intervene when it suits corporations, not the general public.
The ability of corporations to sue governments was enshrined in chapter 11 of NAFTA. In a small town in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, a California firm -- Metalclad -- a commercial purveyor of hazardous wastes, bought an abandoned dump site nearby. It proposed to expand on the dumpsite and use it to dump toxic waste material. The people in the neighbourhood of the dump site protested. The municipality, using powers delegated to it by the state, rezoned the site and forbid Metalclad to extend its land holdings. Metalclad, under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, then sued the Mexican government for damage to its profit margins and balance sheet as a result of being treated unequally by the people of San Luis Potosi. A trade panel, convened in Washington, agreed with the company. [Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows, pp. 56-59] In Canada, the Ethyl corporation sued when the government banned its gasoline additive as a health hazard. The government settled "out of court" to prevent a public spectacle of a corporation overruling the nation's Parliament.
NAFTA and other Free Trade agreements are designed for corporations and corporate rule. Chapter 11 was not enshrined in the NAFTA in order to make a better world for the people of Canada, any more than for the people of San Luis Potosi but, instead, for the capitalist elite. This is an inherently imperialist situation, which will "justify" further intervention in the "developing" nations by the US and other imperialist nations, either through indirect military aid to client regimes or through outright invasion, depending on the nature of the "crisis of democracy" (a term used by the Trilateral Commission to characterise popular uprisings and a politicising of the general public).
However, force is always required to protect private capital. Even a globalised capitalist company still requires a defender. After all, "[a]t the international level, U.S. corporations need the government to insure that target countries are 'safe for investment' (no movements for freedom and democracy), that loans will be repaid, contracts kept, and international law respected (but only when it is useful to do so)." [Henry Rosemont, Jr., Op. Cit., p. 18] For the foreseeable future, America seems to be the global rent-a-cop of choice -- particularly as many of the largest corporations are based there.
It makes sense for corporations to pick and choose between states for the best protection, blackmailing their citizens to pay for the armed forces via taxes. It is, in other words, similar to the process at work within the US when companies moved to states which promised the most favourable laws. For example, New Jersey repealed its anti-trust law in 1891-2 and amended its corporation law in 1896 to allow companies to be as large as they liked, to operate anywhere and to own other corporations. This drew corporations to it until Delaware offered even more freedoms to corporate power until other states offered similar laws. In other words, competed for revenue by writing laws to sell to corporations and the mobility of corporations meant that they bargained from a superior position. Globalisation is simply this process on a larger scale, as capital will move to countries whose governments supply what it demands (and punish those which do not). Therefore, far from ending imperialism, globalisation will see it continue, but with one major difference: the citizens in the imperialist countries will see even fewer benefits from imperialism than before, while, as ever, still having to carry the costs.
So, in spite of claims that governments are powerless in the face of global capital, we should never forget that state power has increased drastically in one area -- in state repression against its own citizens. No matter how mobile capital is, it still needs to take concrete form to generate surplus value. Without wage salves, capital would not survive. As such, it can never permanently escape from its own contradictions -- wherever it goes, it has to create workers who have a tendency to disobey and do problematic things like demand higher wages, better working conditions, go on strike and so on (indeed, this fact has seen companies based in "developing" nations move to less "developed" to find more compliant labour).
This, of course, necessitates a strengthening of the state in its role as protector of property and as a defence against any unrest provoked by the inequalities, impoverishment and despair caused by globalisation (and, of course, the hope, solidarity and direct action generated by that unrest within the working class). Hence the rise of the neo-liberal consensus in both Britain and the USA saw an increase in state centralisation as well as the number of police, police powers and in laws directed against the labour and radical movements.
As such, it would be a mistake (as many in the anti-globalisation movement do) to contrast the market to the state. State and capital are not opposed to each other -- in fact, the opposite is the case. The moodern state exists to protect capitalist rule, just as every state exists to defend minority rule, and it is essential for nation states to attract and retain capital within their borders to ensure their revenue by having a suitably strong economy to tax. Globalisation is a state-led initiative whose primary aim is to keep the economically dominant happy. The states which are being "undermined" by globalisation are not horrified by this process as certain protestors are, which should give pause for thought. States are complicit in the process of globalisation -- unsurprisingly, as they represent the ruling elites who favour and benefit from globalisation. Moreover, with the advent of a "global market" under GATT, corporations still need politicians to act for them in creating a "free" market which best suits their interests. Therefore, by backing powerful states, corporate elites can increase their bargaining powers and help shape the "New World Order" in their own image.
Governments may be, as Malatesta put it, the property owners gendarme, but they can be influenced by their subjects, unlike multinationals. NAFTA was designed to reduce this influence even more. Changes in government policy reflect the changing needs of business, modified, of course, by fear of the working population and its strength. Which explains globalisation -- the need for capital to strengthen its position vis-à-vis labour by pitting one labour force against -- and our next step, namely to strengthen and globalise working class resistance. Only when it is clear that the costs of globalisation -- in terms of strikes, protests, boycotts, occupations, economic instability and so on -- is higher than potential profits will business turn away from it. Only international working class direct action and solidarity will get results. Until that happens, we will see governments co-operating in the process of globalisation.
So, for better or for worse, globalisation has become the latest buzz word to describe the current stage of capitalism and so we shall use it here. It use does have two positive side effects though. Firstly, it draws attention to the increased size and power of transnational corporations and their impact on global structures of governance and the nation state. Secondly, it allows anarchists and other protesters to raise the issue of international solidarity and a globalisation from below which respects diversity and is based on people's needs, not profit.
After all, as Rebecca DeWitt stresses, anarchism and the WTO "are well suited opponents and anarchism is benefiting from this fight. The WTO is practically the epitome of an authoritarian structure of power to be fought against. People came to Seattle because they knew that it was wrong to let a secret body of officials make policies unaccountable to anyone except themselves. A non-elected body, the WTO is attempting to become more powerful than any national government . . . For anarchism, the focus of global capitalism couldn't be more ideal." ["An Anarchist Response to Seattle," pp. 5-12, Social Anarchism, no. 29, p. 6]
To sum up, globalisation will see imperialism change as capitalism itself changes. The need for imperialism remains, as the interests of private capital still need to be defended against the dispossessed. All that changes is that the governments of the imperialistic nations become even more accountable to capital and even less to their populations.
D.5.4 What is the relationship between imperialism and the social classes within capitalism?
The two main classes within capitalist society are, as we indicated in section B.7, the ruling class and the working class. The grey area between these two classes is sometimes called the middle class. As would be expected, different classes have different positions in society and, therefore, different relationships with imperialism. Moreover, we have to also take into account the differences resulting from the relative positions of the nations in question in the world economic and political systems. The ruling class in imperialist nations will not have identical interests as those in the dominated ones, for example. As such, our discussion will have indicate these differences as well.
The relationship between the ruling class and imperialism is quite simple: It is in favour of it when it supports its interests and when the benefits outweigh the costs. Therefore, for imperialist countries, the ruling class will always be in favour of expanding their influence and power as long as it pays. If the costs outweigh the benefits, of course, sections of the ruling class will argue against imperialist adventures and wars (as, for example, elements of the US elite did when it was clear that they would lose both the Vietnam war and, perhaps, the class war at home by continuing it).
There are strong economic forces at work as well. Due to capital's need to grow in order to survive and compete on the market, find new markets and raw materials, it needs to expand (as we discussed in section D.5). Consequently, it needs to conquer foreign markets and gain access to cheap raw materials and labour. As such, a nation with a powerful capitalist economy will need an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy, which it achieves by buying politicians, initiating media propaganda campaigns, funding right-wing think tanks, and so on, as previously described.
Thus the ruling class benefits from, and so usually supports, imperialism -- only, we stress, when the costs out-weight the benefits will we see members of the elite oppose it. Which, of course, explains the elites support for what is termed "globalisation." Needless to say, the ruling class has done very well over the last few decades. For example, in the US, the gaps between rich and poor and between the rich and middle income reaching their widest point on record in 1997 (from the Congressional Budget Office study on Historic Effective Tax Rates 1979-1997). The top 1% saw their after-tax incomes rise by $414,200 between 1979-97, the middle fifth by $3,400 and the bottom fifth fell by -$100. The benefits of globalisation are concentrated at the top, as is to be expected (indeed, almost all of the income gains from economic growth between 1989 and 1998 accrued to the top 5% of American families).
Needless to say, the local ruling classes of the dominated nations may not see it that way. While, of course, local ruling classes do extremely well from imperialism, they need not like the position of dependence and subordination they are placed in. Moreover, the steady stream of profits leaving the country for foreign corporations cannot be used to enrich local elites even more. Just as the capitalist dislikes the state or a union limiting their power or taxing/reducing their profits, so the dominated nation's ruling class dislikes imperialist domination and will seek to ignore or escape it whenever possible. This is because "every State, in so far as it wants to live not only on paper and not merely by sufferance of its neighbours, but to enjoy real independence -- inevitably must become a conquering State." [Bakunin, Op. Cit., p. 211] So the local ruling class, while benefiting from imperialism, may dislike its dependent position and, if it feels strong enough, may contest their position and gain more independence for themselves.
Many of the post-war imperialist conflicts were of this nature, with local elites trying to disentangle themselves from an imperialist power. Similarly, many conflicts (either fought directly by imperialist powers or funded indirectly by them) were the direct result of ensuring that a nation trying to free itself from imperialist domination did not serve as a positive example for other satellite nations. Which means that local ruling classes can come into conflict with imperialist ones. These can express themselves as wars of national liberation, for example, or just as normal conflicts (such as the first Gulf War). As competition is at the heart of capitalism, we should not be surprised that sections of the international ruling class disagree and fight each other.
The relationship between the working class and imperialism is more complex. In traditional imperialism, foreign trade and the export of capital often make it possible to import cheap goods from abroad and increase profits for the capitalist class, and in this sense, workers can gain because they can improve their standard of living without necessarily coming into system threatening conflict with their employers (i.e. struggle can win reforms which otherwise would be strongly resisted by the capitalist class). Thus living standard may be improved by low wage imports while rising profits may mean rising wages for some key workers (CEOs giving themselves higher wages because they control their own pay rises does not, of course, count!). Therefore, in imperialistic nations during economic boom times, one finds a tendency among the working class (particularly the unorganised sector) to support foreign military adventurism and an aggressive foreign policy. This is part of what is often called the "embourgeoisement" of the proletariat, or the co-optation of labour by capitalist ideology and "patriotic" propaganda. Needless to say, those workers made redundant by these cheap imports may not consider this as a benefit and, by increasing the pool of unemployment and the threat of companies outsourcing work and moving plants to other countries, help hold or drive down wages for most of the working population (as has happened in various degrees in Western countries since the 1970s).
However, as soon as international rivalry between imperialist powers becomes too intense, capitalists will attempt to maintain their profit rates by depressing wages and laying people off in their own country. Workers' real wages will also suffer if military spending goes beyond a certain point. Moreover, if militarism leads to actual war, the working class has much more to lose than to gain as they will be fighting it and making the necessary sacrifices on the "home front" in order to win it. In addition, while imperialism can improve living conditions (for a time), it cannot remove the hierarchical nature of capitalism and therefore cannot stop the class struggle, the spirit of revolt and the instinct for freedom. So, while workers in the developed nations may sometimes benefit from imperialism, such periods cannot last long and cannot end the class struggle.
Rudolf Rocker was correct to stress the contradictory (and self-defeating) nature of working class support for imperialism:
"No doubt some small comforts may sometimes fall to the share of the workers when the bourgeoisie of their country attain some advantage over that of another country; but this always happens at the cost of their own freedom and the economic oppression of other peoples. The worker . . . participates to some extent in the profits which, without effort on their part, fall into the laps of the bourgeoisie of his country from the unrestrained exploitation of colonial peoples; but sooner or later there comes the time when these people too, wake up, and he has to pay all the more dearly for the small advantages he has enjoyed. . . . Small gains arising from increased opportunity of employment and higher wages may accrue to the workers in a successful state from the carving out of new markets at the cost of others; but at the same time their brothers on the other side of the border have to pay for them by unemployment and the lowering of the standards of labour. The result is an ever widening rift in the international labour movement . . . By this rift the liberation of the workers from the yoke of wage-slavery is pushed further and further into the distance. As long as the worker ties up his interests with those of the bourgeoisie of his country instead of with his class, he must logically also take in his stride all the results of that relationship. He must stand ready to fight the wars of the possessing classes for the retention and extension of their markets, and to defend any injustice they may perpetrate on other people . . . Only when the workers in every country shall come to understand clearly that their interests are everywhere the same, and out of this understanding learn to act together, will the effective basis be laid for the international liberation of the working class." [Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 71]
Ultimately, any "collaboration of workers and employers . . . can only result in the workers being condemned to . . . eat the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table." [Rocker, Op. Cit., pp. 70-1] This applies to both the imperialist and the satellite state, of course. Moreover, as imperialism needs to have a strong military force available for it and as a consequence it required militarism at home. This has an impact at home in that resources which could be used to improve the quality of life for all are funnelled towards producing weapons (and profits for corporations). Moreover, militarism is directed not only at external enemies, but also against those who threaten elite role at home. We discuss militarism in more detail in section D.8.
However, under globalisation things are somewhat different. With the increase in world trade and the signing of "free trade" agreements like NAFTA, the position of workers in the imperialist nations need not improve. For example, since the 1970s, the wages -- adjusted for inflation -- of the typical American employee have actually fallen, even as the economy has grown. In other words, the majority of Americans are no longer sharing in the gains from economic growth. This is very different from the previous era, for example 1946-73, when the real wages of the typical worker rose by about 80 percent. Not that this globalisation has aided the working class in the "developing" nations. In Latin America, for example, GDP per capita grew by 75 percent from 1960-1980, whereas between 1981 and 1998 it has only risen 6 percent. [Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Robert Naiman, and Gila Neta, Growth May Be Good for the Poor-- But are IMF and World Bank Policies Good for Growth?]
As Chomsky noted, "[t]o the credit of the Wall Street Journal, it points out that there's a 'but.' Mexico has 'a stellar reputation,' and it's an economic miracle, but the population is being devastated. There's been a 40 percent drop in purchasing power since 1994. The poverty rate is going up and is in fact rising fast. The economic miracle wiped out, they say, a generation of progress; most Mexicans are poorer than their parents. Other sources reveal that agriculture is being wiped out by US-subsidised agricultural imports, manufacturing wages have declines about 20 percent, general wages even more. In fact, NAFTA is a remarkable success: it's the first trade agreement in history that's succeeded in harming the populations of all three countries involved. That's quite an achievement." In the U.S., "the medium income (half above, half below) for families has gotten back now to what it was in 1989, which is below what it was in the 1970s." [Rogue States, pp. 98-9 and p. 213]
An achievement which was predicted. But, of course, while occasionally admitting that globalisation may harm the wages of workers in developed countries, it is argued that it will benefit those in the "developing" world. It is amazing how open to socialist arguments capitalists and their supporters are, as long as its not their income being redistributed! As can be seen from NAFTA, this did not happen. Faced with cheap imports, agriculture and local industry would be undermined, increasing the number of workers seeking work, so forcing down wages as the bargaining power of labour is decreased. Combine this with governments which act in the interests of capital (as always) and force the poor to accept the costs of economic austerity and back business attempts to break unions and workers resistance then we have a situation where productivity can increase dramatically while wages fall behind (either relatively or absolutely). As has been the case in both the USA and Mexico, for example.
This reversal has had much to do with changes in the global "rules of the game," which have greatly favoured corporations and weakened labour. Unsurprisingly, the North American union movement has opposed NAFTA and other treaties which empower business over labour. Therefore, the position of labour within both imperialist and dominated nations can be harmed under globalisation, so ensuring international solidarity and organisation have a stronger reason to be embraced by both sides. This should not come as a surprise, however, as the process towards globalisation was accelerated by intensive class struggle across the world and was used as a tool against the working class (see last section).
It is difficult to generalise about the effects of imperialism on the "middle class" (i.e. professionals, self-employed, small business people, peasants and so on -- not middle income groups, who are usually working class). Some groups within this strata stand to gain, others to lose (in particular, peasants who are impoverished by cheap imports of food). This lack of common interests and a common organisational base makes the middle class unstable and susceptible to patriotic sloganeering, vague theories of national or racial superiority, or fascist scapegoating of minorities for society's problems. For this reason, the ruling class finds it relatively easy to recruit large sectors of the middle class to an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy, through media propaganda campaigns. Since many in organised labour tends to perceive imperialism as being against its overall best interests, and thus usually opposes it, the ruling class is able to intensify the hostility of the middle class to the organised working class by portraying the latter as "unpatriotic" and "unwilling to sacrifice" for the "national interest." Sadly, the trade union bureaucracy usually accepts the "patriotic" message, particularly at times of war, and often collaborates with the state to further imperialistic interests. This eventually brings them into conflict with the rank-and-file, whose interests are ignored even more than usual when this occurs.
To summarise, the ruling class is usually pro-imperialism -- as long as it is in their interests (i.e. the benefits outweigh the costs). The working class, regardless of any short term benefit its members may gain, end up paying the costs of imperialism by having to fight its wars and pay for the militarism it produces. So, under imperialism, like any form of capitalism, the working class will pay the bill required to maintain it. This means that we have a real interest in ending it -- particularly as under globalisation the few benefits that used to accrue to us are much less.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/secD5.html
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant MarxistMay 10, 2006
Did Karl Marx endorse imperialism?
Filed under: imperialism/globalization — louisproyect @ 3:37 pm
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There's an article today on the Guardian newspaper's "Comment is free" blog by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a Thatcherite journalist who has remained somewhat critical of the war in Iraq but not the right of great powers to dominate weaker ones, as demonstrated by article's title: "They should come out as imperialist and proud of it." Wheatcroft is referring to a certain diffidence on the part of the Euston Manifesto's drafters to proclaim their incipient imperialist yearnings. Of course, there is also the possibility that Wheatcroft is employing Swiftian irony, but since he was called upon by the NY Times Book Review to pen a hatchet job on Robert Fisk's "The Conquest of the Middle East," that seems a bit remote.
Since Wheatcroft's article portrays Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as defenders of imperialism, a reply might be in order. As is commonly understood, there is a long-standing tradition on the British left to try to make an amalgam between socialism and the foreign policy imperatives of the British Empire. Indeed, two different and very useful blog contributions have connected the Euston Manifesto to this tradition.
From Histomat, a group blog based in Great Britain, there's an entry titled "Euston, we have a problem" that examines the Coefficient Club of the Fabian Society as a precedent to Norm Geras and company's project: "Basically, the Fabians wanted a new world imperial order spreading out from a militarised and newly efficient British state that would spread universal suffrage internationally. While the bit about 'universal suffrage' was not accepted by the non-socialist members of the Coefficients Club, these conservative and liberals who attended saluted the idea of remilitarising British society as they felt British parliamentarism had gone soft."
From Reading the Maps, another excellent group blog based in New Zealand, there's a complementary article titled "The Peculiarities of the Pro-war Left" that complements Histomat's:
"To many intellectuals in nineteenth century Britain, the first section of the Manifesto read less like history than prophecy. The first British Marxist organisation of any size and durability, the Social Democratic Federation, was led by a man who can rightly be called a forebear of today’s pro-war left. Described by Eric Hobsbawm as a ‘gentleman, cricketer, and stockbroker leading the masses toward revolution in a top hat and frock-coat’, Henry Hyndman worried the working class rank and file of the SDF by using the Communist Manifesto to make pseudo-Marxist defences of the British Empire, arguing that Britain’s colonies were the ‘just desserts’ of the British working class. Hyndman’s views found an echo amongst the so-called socialist imperialists of the early Fabian Society."
It should be understood that these Fabians were capable of quoting Marx as well as the devil cites scripture. Although Wheatcroft is a Thatcherite with zero sympathies for socialism, he seems to have absorbed much of the mischievousness of people like Hyndman.
He writes:
In the next century Mill, Macaulay and even Marx made approving noises about British rule in India. Macaulay thought it proper to elevate the Indians by teaching them Shakespeare and the doctrines of the Glorious Revolution. Early on, Marx believed "the English were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible, to Hindu civilisation"; for much the same reason Engels approved initially of France's conquest of Algeria.
While it is true that Marx and Engels held such attitudes early in their career, it is important to understand that they eventually discarded them. Marx wrote his articles on India in the early 1850s, but even if he gave critical support to Great Britain, there was no mistaking his analysis for those of the Fabians or Norm Geras. Even at this early date, Marx believed that "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether."
(The Future Results of British Rule in India, July 22, 1853)
Furthermore, even if Marx offered the barest concession to British capitalism as a force that could create the conditions for the future emancipation of India, there were clear indications that by the end of his life, he no longer held such beliefs. In his correspondence with the Russian populists, he characterized English rule in India as a "bleeding process with a vengeance" and advised the populists to reject the idea that a capitalist stage was necessary precondition for Russia to make the socialist revolution.
Continuing along in his bumbling manner, Wheatcroft opines:
According to Marxist doctrine, socialism could arrive only after bourgeois capitalism. A comparable outlook was found on the left well beyond the Marxists. Europeans instinctively believed that Europe "had achieved the highest form of civilisation ever known", which was its duty to export throughout the world, AJP Taylor wrote. He added, only part playfully, that "these were radical beliefs": that was why the Fabians supported the Boer war and championed the British empire.
Contrary to Wheatcroft, Marxists came to understand that the main obstacle to the historic goals of the bourgeois revolution in places such as India, Algeria and elsewhere was colonial rule itself. For example, one of the cornerstones of a modern capitalist society is a land reform that will hasten the development of commodity production in the countryside, a precondition for future capitalist growth. However, the colonists preferred to utilize the plantation system and forced labor as a way to guarantee a steady supply of cheap agricultural goods and superprofits. It would take socialist and anti-imperialist struggles to uproot the plantation system, not the beneficence of the mother country which fought such changes till the very end.
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6 Comments »
Just because Marx later hoped that industrial development could proceed on a non-capitalist basis, it doesn’t mean he gave up crediting imperialism with an objectively progressive role in India. “A bleeding process with a vengeance” isn’t very different from how he characterized imperialism’s cruel side in his 1852-3 articles. I don’t see how this disproves that Marx and Engels supported imperialism in much the same way as they supported free trade against protectionism or more generally, the bourgeoisie against the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. This has always been an interesting thing for me, actually, which I’ve never had time to fully pursue. In short, it seems a little like much of the Marxist characterization of imperialism, and unequivocal opposition to it, is straight out of Lenin, or Luxemburg (she was clear that imperialism had once had a progressive role, but by 1914 it was no longer worth supporting because it had trained its sights on Europe itself, and aimed to physically destroy the old bourgeois order and the proletariat itself–I think this is all from the end of the Junius Pamphlet). If that view of the world–World War One era imperialism as capitalism’s “highest stage”–is at least somewhat flawed, what happens to the critique of imperialism? How have later Marxists created a coherent critique of imperialism while acknowledging the mistakes or holes in Lenin’s model, given all that has changed in the last century? I know some names, some vague ideas (Sweezy and Magdoff, people around New Left Review–this is mostly from the sixties and seventies, which means it has its own major problems). But this is a big hole in my own knowledge, and in how I approach the current round of imperialism, which can no longer be said to have any progressive role since capitalism (or at least industry) obviously exists and has existed for decades, in some perverse form, in Iraq. What would be worth looking at?
Comment by Poulod — May 10, 2006 @ 4:43 pm
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/05/10/did-karl-marx-endorse-imperialism/
Karl Marx in the New-York Herald Tribune 1853
The British Rule in India
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Source: MECW Volume 12, p. 125;
Written: June 10, 1853;
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853;
Proofread: by Andy Blunden in February 2005.
In writing this article, Marx made use of some of Engels’ ideas as in his letter to Marx of June 6, 1853.
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London, Friday, June 10, 1853
Telegraphic dispatches from Vienna announce that the pacific solution of the Turkish, Sardinian and Swiss questions, is regarded there as a certainty.
Last night the debate on India was continued in the House of Commons, in the usual dull manner. Mr. Blackett charged the statements of Sir Charles Wood and Sir J. Hogg with bearing the stamp of optimist falsehood. A lot of Ministerial and Directorial advocates rebuked the charge as well as they could, and the inevitable Mr. Hume summed up by calling on Ministers to withdraw their bill. Debate adjourned.
Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul[104], or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere.[105]
I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan, without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of Aurangzeb; or the epoch, when the Mogul appeared in the North, and the Portuguese in the South; or the age of Mohammedan invasion, and of the Heptarchy in Southern India[106]; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahman himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.
There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette[107]. This is no distinctive feature of British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:
“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”
All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.
There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, &c.; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident, drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of Government. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.
Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez-faire and laissez-aller. But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe received the admirable textures of Indian labor, sending in return for them her precious metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung round their necks. Rings on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold or silver, and statuettes of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.
These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life. The peculiar character of this system may be judged from the following description, contained in an old official report of the British House of Commons on Indian affairs:
“A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands; politically viewed it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following descriptions: The potail, or head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people render him the best qualified for this charge. The kurnum keeps the accounts of cultivation, and registers everything connected with it. The tallier and the totie, the duty of the former of which consists [...] in gaining information of crimes and offenses, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one village to another; the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops and assisting in measuring them. The boundary-man, who preserves the limits of the village, or gives evidence respecting them in cases of dispute. The Superintendent of Tanks and Watercourses distributes the water [...] for the purposes of agriculture. The Brahmin, who performs the village worship. The schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in a village to read and write in the sand. The calendar-brahmin, or astrologer, etc. These officers and servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the above-named number of individuals. [...] Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine or disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged. The potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge or magistrate, and collector or renter of the village.”
These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:
“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”
[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]
Karl Marx
Footnotes from MECW Volume 12
104 A reference to the rule in India, mainly in the north, of the Mohammedan invaders who came from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Persia. Early in the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate became the bulwark of Moslem domination but at the end of the fourteenth century it declined and was subsequently conquered by the Moguls, new invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from the east of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan’s time, hence the name “Moguls”. In the mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included the greater part of India and part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the Mohammedan conquerors and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls practically ceased to exist.
105 Religion of the Lingam – the cult of the God Shiva, particularly widespread among the southern Indian sect of the Lingayat (from the word “linga” - the emblem of Shiva), a Hindu sect which does not recognise distinctions of caste and rejects fasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages.
Juggernaut (jagannath) – a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. The cult of juggernaut was marked by sumptuous ritual and extreme religious fanaticism which manifested itself in the self-torture and suicide of believers. On feast days some believers threw themselves under the wheels of the chariot bearing the idol of Vishnu-juggernaut.
106 Heptarchy (government by seven rulers) – a term used by English historiographers to describe the political system in England from the sixth to eighth centuries, when the country was divided into seven highly unstable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which, in their turn, frequently split up and reunited. Marx uses this term by analogy to describe the disunity of the Deccan (Central and South India) before its conquest by the Mohammedans at the beginning of the fourteenth century.
107 The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was famous for its 109 Buddhist cave temples.
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The First Indian War of Independence | East India Company | Future of British Rule in India
1853 Works | New York Herald-Tribune | Marx/Engels Archive
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
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