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Dirty Wars: Pope Francis’ Ties to Argentina’s Right-wing Junta

The Catholic Church was complicit in Argentina’s Dirty War, between 1976 and 1983, in which up to 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’ by the rightwing military junta.

Democracy Now! reports this morning:

While praised for his work with the poor, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio — now Pope Francis — has long been dogged by accusations of his role during Argentina’s military dictatorship. We speak to Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine journalist who exposed Francis’ connection to the abduction of two Jesuit priests. Verbitsky is an investigative journalist for the newspaper Página/12, or Page/12, and head of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, an Argentine human rights organization.

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Doug Saunders reporting in Canada’s Globe & Mail:

[...] Much of the attention centers around two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were kidnapped by government forces on May 23, 1976, imprisoned for five months at clandestine detention center, tortured, and later found lying drugged and semi-naked in a field.

Days before their disappearance, according memoirs and statements made later by the priests, they had been dismissed from the Jesuit order by Father Bergoglio for having ministered to residents of the slums, which were considered hotbeds of Marxist agitation. Kicking the priests out of the order is seen by many Argentines as a move that, in the polarized climate of the Junta, may have served as a clear signal to the military dictatorship that they were to be targeted.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais quotes from a 1995 memoir by Father Jalics, who now lives in Germany, in which he accuses Father Bergoglio of betraying them.

“Many people who held far-right political beliefs frowned on our presence in the slums,” the priest writes. “They thought we were living there in support of the guerrillas, and set out to denounce us as terrorists. We knew which way the wind was blowing, and who was responsible for these slanders. So I went to [Father Bergoglio] and explained that they were playing with our lives. He promised that the military would be told that we were not terrorists. But from subsequent statements by an officer and 30 documents that we were able to access later, we saw without doubt that [Father Bergoglio] had not kept his promise but, on the contrary, had filed a false complaint with the military.” [...]

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Pope Francis (left) with Jorge Videla, head of the rightwing fascist Argentine Junta, responsible for the death, disappearance and torture of tens of thousands of Argentines in its ‘Dirty War’

And Uki Goni and Jonathan Watts reporting in The Guardian today:

Pope Francis: Questions Remain Over His Role During Argentina’s Dictatorship

Despite the joyful celebrations outside the Municipal Cathedral in Buenos Aires yesterday, the news of Latin America’s first pope was clouded by lingering concerns about the role of the church – and its new head – during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship.

The Catholic church and Pope Francis have been accused of a complicit silence and worse during the “dirty war” of murders and abductions carried out by the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

The evidence is sketchy and contested. Documents have been destroyed and many of those who were victims or perpetrators have died in the years that followed. The moral argument is clear, but the reality of life at that time put many people in a grey position. It was dangerous at that time to speak out and risk being labelled a subversive. But many, including priests and bishops, did so and subsequently disappeared. Those who stayed silent have subsequently had to live with their consciences — and sometimes the risk of a trial.

Its behavior during that dark period in Argentine history was so unsaintly that in 2000 the Argentine Catholic church itself made a public apology for its failure to take a stand against the generals. “We want to confess before God everything we have done badly,” Argentina’s Episcopal Conference said at that time.

In February, a court noted during the sentencing of three former military men to life imprisonment for the killings of two priests that the church hierarchy had “closed its eyes” to the killing of progressive priests.

As head of the Jesuit order from 1973 to 1979, Jorge Bergoglio – as the new pope was known until yesterday – was a member of the hierarchy during the period when the wider Catholic church backed the military government and called for their followers to be patriotic.

Bergoglio twice refused to testify in court about his role as head of the Jesuit order. When he eventually appeared in front of a judge in 2010, he was accused by lawyers of being evasive. [...]

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Categories Argentina, History, International, Reactionary Watch, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

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Political Cartoon: Pope Francis I, good friend of Argentina’s dictatorship

20 Mar

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Categories Argentina, History, International, Media & Culture, Political Cartoons
Author The Red Phoenix

The Rise and Fall of Third Worldism – Part 1

1 Jan

PART ONE: “Two, Three, many Vietnams”: National Liberation and the Rise of the Third World (1945 – 1991)

Asia, Africa and Latin America in the Early Years of the Century

With the exception of Latin America, and several noteworthy cases in Africa and Asia, the pre-1945 history of what came to be known as the “Third World” is overwhelmed by the fact of imperialism. Native voices were silenced and native cultures nearly eradicated.

In Asia, Japan was the only country to industrialize, and thus the only country to emerge as a major player in world affairs. Although at first resistant to Western influences; by the middle of the 19th century Japan had embarked on a major modernization program. Building upon traditional values, Japan built an army and navy powerful enough to challenge Russia over Korea at the turn of the last century; and strong enough to join the British, French, Germans, and Americans in carving out a sphere of influence in China. A hybrid of feudal/warrior institutions and modern technology would characterize Japan throughout most of the 20th century. Some argue that this mixture would enable Japanese economic success.

China, the most populous nation on earth, with a culture going back some 5,000 years, was weak and felt herself victimized by the Great Powers. Unlike Japan, China had not modernized. Chinese institutions had frozen. The Manchu dynasty which had ruled China for some 300 years seemed more interested in maintaining itself in power than in bettering the lot of its people; the majority of whom lived in conditions of appalling poverty. Although there was a strong feeling against foreign domination, which periodically erupted into mass uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion; China had been effectively divided up amongst the Great Powers, who controlled large areas known as ‘concessions’ where they enjoyed trade monopolies. The corrupt and infirm Manchu dynasty fell underneath its own weight in 1911. The collapse of Manchu rule created a power vacuum which was filled by ambitions local strongmen, the ‘warlords,’ who became a law unto themselves in China’s vast outlying regions and frustrated any attempt at national unification.

Only two nations in Africa escaped colonial rule: Liberia and Ethiopia. Liberia, created by American abolitionists in 1825 as place to which future freed slaves could be “repatriated,” existed as a small anomaly to the general imperialist trend. Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia, continued as a feudal monarchy surrounded by European protectorates and outright colonies.

Latin America was the great exception. By 1821, most of the old Spanish and Portuguese colonies had become independent states. Most of the 19th Century, in Latin America was consumed by a fierce struggle between traditional elites who favored a continuation of the old colonial plantation system and modernizers who wished to institute capitalist economics and bring in contemporary technologies and ideas. This conflict was further complicated by the beginning of the 20th Century by the active involvement of the United States in the region. Going back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1825, the United States had seen Latin America as its “back yard”; and American investments and interests in Latin America grew exponentially.

In Central America and the Caribbean, the battle between Conservatives (traditionalists) and Liberals (modernizers) lasted, in some case up to the 1930s. The ever increasing US presence stunted indigenous development and encouraged the rise of military dictatorships which maintained a precarious balance between repressing domestic dissent and ensuring continued US support. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonial rule was replaced, in the first instance by an apparent independence masking the reality of outside control, and in the second case, by direct US annexation.

Different scenarios were played out north and south of Central America. To the north, Mexico, which had, shortly after independence, lost much of its territory to the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1842, developed a strong, albeit contradictory state. In 1911, the Mexican Revolution overthrew the 40-year military dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and inaugurated a period of titanic political/economic/social struggle. Populist radical leaders such as Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata vied with conservatives such as Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon as ad hoc revolutionary armies fought against whom ever happened to constitute the government at the time and each other. Eventually, the radicals were either marginalized or destroyed, and power settled into the hands of a conservative, modernizing elite composed of political strongmen and their followers. This elite held power through the mechanism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI oversaw the secularization and modernization of Mexican society. By 1945, Mexico was a contradictory mixture of large cities with modern industries, and a poor, backward countryside; a strong national sense of self, and control by a coterie of politicians and businessmen; an independent foreign policy, and a sharp awareness of the presence of the United States. In one way or another, this pattern would come to characterize not only Mexico, but much of Latin America.

In the south, Brazil and Argentina were becoming industrial power houses – albeit conflicted ones. Brazil seemed to follow the pre-established Mexican pattern: large, sprawling urban areas surrounded by impoverished rural zones. Brazil’s industries were concentrated in the north and along the coast; the wealth of the interior was only sporadically exploited. Argentina, with its large immigrant population (mainly Italian and Eastern European) provided something of a contrast. Heavy industry had appeared at the dawn of the century; the immense volume of European immigrant coming to work in those industries. The immigrants brought with them European ideas and social relations; both of which conflicted with traditional values. By 1945 the dictatorship of Juan Peron which combined a fascist core with modernizing elements initiated a period of military rule which would, by and large, characterize Argentina until the 1980s.

Imperialism and Colonialism Revisited

The decisions of the Versailles Conference of 1919 dismantled the Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but kept the British and French Empires intact. Not only that, but the Portuguese continued to rule Angola and Mozambique in Africa; the Belgians continued to rule the Congo; and the Dutch continued to govern Indonesia. The Middle East was divided between British French spheres of influence and protectorates. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did become independent commonwealths – and Ireland did fight her way to a disunited independence – but, by and large, imperialism remained intact after World War I.

It wouldn’t be until after World War II that powerful drives towards independence and de-colonization would shatter the old European empires and create the modern states of Asia and Africa. The Second World War, with its anti-fascist and democratic aspirations, would impel the peoples of the colonial world to demand the same.

National Independence Struggles

In some cases, indigenous forces had played a major role in the defeat of the Axis powers. In Vietnam and Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno (respectively) emerged from the war as venerated national leaders. After the war, the French attempted to restore their rule in South East Asia. This misguided attempt came to an end in 1954 when, at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese forces under the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh which had previously defeated the Japanese; now prevented the French from returning. When the Americans tried to supplant the French, they too came to grief. A similar situation unfolded in Indonesia when the Dutch tried to restore the pre-war order. A similar outcome resulted: Sukarno, who had led resistance to the Japanese, now oversaw the independence of Indonesia.

The British came out of World War II in no condition to hold their empire together. In India, the Congress Party, under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah had been the focus of the independence movement there for decades. Their moment arrived in 1948 when the British pulled out and Indian independence was declared. But independence brought crisis. Perhaps with British encouragement, Jinnah led a faction which demanded that a separate Muslim state be created. In multi-religious, polyglot India, this demand led to massive disruption, forced resettlement of huge amounts of people, and a great amount of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed. In the end, India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim) were created as two separate – and mutually hostile – states.

In Africa, decolonization quite often led to extended periods of instability. Independence leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Julius Nyere (Tanzania), and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) strove to modernize their countries by following a socialist model of development. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba failed to establish a fully independent state, at the cost of his life. In many parts of Africa, the pull out of the colonial powers created confusion, chaos, and ethnic strife. Often this was caused by old imperial states themselves, as they continued to try to exert influence in their former possessions by sponsoring ethnic and political rivalries. Portugal refused to divest itself of its colonies, with the result that it took nationalist guerrilla movements until the 1970s to establish the independent nations of Mozambique and Angola. In the former British colonies of Rhodesia and South Africa, the white settler population refused to yield to demands for civil equality for the native Africans. Fighting lasted until 1975 when Rhodesia became the majority-African governed Zimbabwe (under Robert Mugabe); and until 1989 when the racist apartheid system was destroyed in South Africa (under Nelson Mandela).

In the Middle East, the Algerian Revolution of 1956 forced the French out of that country. In Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser came to power with a promise to encourage “Arab unity” and “Arab Socialism.” Nasser’s ideas spread to Syria and Iraq, where a movement claiming to champion Arab Socialism, but in fact more reminiscent of Italian Fascism took hold, Baathism. In many cases, interference by Western powers led to the displacement of radical, modernizing regimes with repressive conservative governments. The neutralization of the Left and the bankruptcy of the Right led many to see radical Islam as a viable political alternative.

The creation, by UN mandate, of the state of Israel in 1948 exacerbated the crises endemic to the area. The flow of immigrants to the new Jewish state led to the displacement of much of the native Palestinian population. The new Israel developed into a thoroughly militarized state, eventually going to war with the surrounding Arab states in 1967 and 1973.

The movement for de-colonization was strongly affected by the Cold War. Many independence movements had adopted one or another variety of socialism as its ideology, and many post-independence regimes sought Soviet aid. Other, more conservative post-independence governments became allies of the United States. Some changed sides. Thus, movements such as the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, Frelimo in Mozambique, and the MPLA in Angola saw themselves as Marxist; Israel, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia were in the US camp; while governments in Algeria, Egypt, and the Congo (Zaire) switched from Soviet to American sponsorship. The proxy conflict between the US and USSR was played out in the post-colonial world. Soon, two other forces, China and Cuba, would enter the fray.

The Chinese Revolution

China has seen a century of revolution – and some would say that it’s far from over. Revolution overthrew the decrepit Manchu dynasty in 1911. The newly created Chinese Republic, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), wanted to create a united, modern, and democratic China. The first step in achieving this would be the cancellation of foreign concessions and the bringing to heel of the regional warlords. It was ‘simple’ enough to ask the British, French, etc. to leave; the second part of that equation was more difficult to achieve. The warlords were ensconced in remote areas, unseating them would require a trained, professional army. In order to raise an officer class capable of leading such an army, the Whampoa military academy was established in 1920. The Whampoa academy attracted many young, patriotic Chinese of all political persuasions. Many of China’s future leaders would come out of the Whampoa Academy. At the head of the academy, as director, was Sun yat-Sen’s protégé, Chiang Kai-Shek. By the end of the 1920s, the “Northern Expedition,” as the anti-warlord campaign was termed, was largely successful. By that time, however, a new conflict had developed.

The new China was alone in the world. The former imperial powers, who had just been asked to leave, weren’t about to render any aid. Desperate for support, China turned to another nation just then going through a revolution of their own, the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to provide political and military aid to China, but at a price: that the Kuomintang bring into the government, as partners, the newly-created Communist Party of China. Sun Yat-Sen agreed, and the Communists were essential to victory in the Northern Expedition. However, Sun Yat-Sen’s lieutenant Chiang Kai-shek vehemently disagreed with any cooperation with the Communists. After Sun’s death in 1925, he was succeeded by Chiang who jettisoned any pretense of democracy, making himself military dictator. Chiang also wanted to get rid of the Communists at the first available opportunity.

In November of 1927, Chiang struck. Nationalist troops unexpectedly turned on their Communist fellows. In all of China’s major cities, Communists and their sympathizers were massacred in the streets. Overnight, the Chinese Communist Party was almost exterminated. In a state of confusion and disarray, the surviving Communists, made their way to the southern province of Jianxi where, a local Communist leader, an ex-librarian named Mao Tse-tung, had managed to hold the party together.

Organizing Communist guerrilla forces into a Red Army, Mao managed to hold off the Nationalists long enough to force an escape out of Jianxi. Known as the “Long March,” the Communists embarked on a 6,000 mile trek over rivers, mountains, and deserts, fighting Nationalists troops all the way. Finally, the Communists found sanctuary in the area of Yenan in China’s northern mountains. This, then, became their base. The Long March solidified Mao as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party. From Yenan, Mao’s Communists engaged Chiang’s Nationalists in guerrilla warfare, and extended the Communist-controlled zone.

The full-scale Japanese invasion of China brought a temporary truce between the Communists and Nationalists, as they agreed to join forces against the foreign occupiers. Overall, as American advisers during World War II pointed out, the Communists were the more effective fighters against the Japanese. Chiang seemed to be more afraid of the Chinese Communists than he was of the invading Japanese; and American aid sent to Chiang often ended up in the pockets of Nationalist politicians. The end of the war and the defeat of Japan signaled a resumption of hostilities between the Nationalists and Communists. After an intense four-year civil war, Communist forces gained the upper hand. Chiang’s Nationalists were forced to flee the mainland; establishing themselves, as the republic of China, on the island of Taiwan – where they have remained to this very day. On October 10, 1949, from Beijing, Mao proclaimed the creation of the new, communist, Peoples Republic of China.

Communist China became a new and powerful ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In fact, Chinese troops entered the Korean War against the United States. Domestically, the Communists embarked on numerous developmental and modernization campaigns. Campaigns to eliminate infectious disease and illiteracy, as well as campaigns to ensure the equality of women were, in great part, successful. Attempts to industrialize China’s economy were less so. The best known of these, the “Great Leap Forward” (1959), which tried to jump start China’s development through mass participation in the form of things such as encouraging the building of backyard blast furnaces to produce steel, was a failure.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union and his policy of Peaceful Coexistence with the West met with disapproval in Beijing. Mao felt that the new Soviet leaders were abandoning revolutionary principles and bowing to the US. Tensions within the Communist camp came to the breaking point in 1961 when, at a meeting of Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese and Albanian delegations denounced the Soviets and their supporters and walked out. The Sino-Soviet split divided the world Communist movement and led to the creation of new, more militant Communist groups dedicated to the Chinese position. China felt itself to be the new center of the world revolutionary movement and, as such, supported and encouraged revolutionary parties and guerrilla groups in the Third World. The Cold War was developing into a three-cornered fight.

Within the Communist Party of China itself, Mao feared that elements similar to those represented by Khrushchev in the USSR would derail his revolutionary vision. Starting in 1964, Mao moved to isolate “conservative” and “pragmatic” elements in the Party. His attempt at a mass mobilization to reinvigorate revolutionary enthusiasm resulted in the upheaval known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution consumed China in chaos as radical and moderate forces, through the medium of youth organizations known as “Red Guards,” jostled each other for power and influence. Reaching a crescendo in 1966 – 1967, the Cultural Revolution involved pitched armed battles between rival Red Guard units. Mao called a halt to the anarchy in 1969, castigating some of the excesses of the more extreme radicals. However, tension and conflict between the more radical and the more pragmatic members of Mao’s inner circle remained.

The same year, 1969, that Mao rolled back the Cultural Revolution saw an intensification of the Sino-Soviet crisis as the Chinese and Soviets came to blows over a border dispute. This event seems to have convinced Mao that the Soviet Union was a greater threat to China than the United States. China offered the United States an opportunity to begin a normalization of relations; an opportunity the American President Richard Nixon took advantage of. In 1972, Nixon traveled to China, met with Mao and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, and the thaw in the Chinese- American Cold War began.

Chou En-lai’s, a protector of the moderates in Mao’s circle, death in 1976, followed by Mao’s own passing later that year renewed the conflict between radicals and moderates within ruling Party circles. After a brief and intense power struggle, the radicals were defeated. Deng Xiaoping, who had been exiled as a “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution emerged as China’s new leader. Deng’s policies not only reversed the Cultural Revolution, but effectively dismantle communism itself. Throughout the 1980s, China more and more embraced a pro-market orientation, encouraging foreign investment and development of key industries. By the 1990s, China had emerged as a major economic force, exporting goods across the globe. Although the People’s Republic of China is still ruled by the Communist Party, it has, in fact, become a modern capitalist power.

The Cuban Revolution

Although conducted on a much smaller scale than the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 would send even stronger shock waves throughout the Third World. On New Year’s Eve of 1959, guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew the long-standing government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista had been supported by the United States since 1933; and, under his leadership, the island had become a haven for US interests which virtually managed the Cuban economy.

Castro’s victory signaled major reform, including land redistribution, literacy and public health campaigns, and the nationalization of major utilities and industries. These latter reforms incurred the ire of American corporations which lost their investments in Cuba. The United States’ severing of diplomatic relations followed by the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and an economic embargo against Cuba caused the Castro government to fully enter the Soviet orbit. However, the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union was far from smooth. Having come to power in through a guerrilla movement in a peasant society, Cuba had much in common with China. Both China and the USSR courted Cuba to support them in their struggle with each other. Cuba was, for a time, caught between the feuding Communist powers. Instead, Cuba developed a unique image and presented itself as a model for Third World nations to follow. This pleased neither China nor the Soviet Union. Adding to the conflict with the Soviets was Cuba’s support for armed guerrilla movements, especially in Latin America, which threatened Soviet attempts at a rapprochement with the US.

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution guerrilla and national liberation movements emerged, aiming at spreading the Cuban example in Latin America. Castro’s right-hand-man, the Argentine born Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was central to this endeavor. Guevara personally led Cuban-trained guerrillas in Africa; and, in an attempt to foment revolution in South America, died while organizing a guerrilla force in Bolivia, becoming a revolutionary icon in the process. Although most of the guerrilla organizations spawned in the 1960s failed, they had the unexpected consequence of producing a severe reaction in the form of repressive military regimes devoted to their destruction. Thus, in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina, extremely violent military dictatorships characterized those nations in the 1970s. In Chile, the election and subsequent overthrow of a Socialist president, Salvador Allende, produced a similar phenomenon. Cuban advisers trained guerrillas in other parts of the world, as well, namely Angola and South Africa.

Cuban attempts at developing an independent, diversified, modern economy met with failure. By the 1970s, Cuba had abandoned overtly encouraging armed struggle and integrated itself into the Soviet system. This would continue until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

In the 1950s, Indian Prime Minister Nehru stated that the modern world was divided into “Three Worlds.” The “First World” consisted of the United States and the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe; the “Second World” was the Soviet Union and its Communist Bloc allies; the “Third World” was the poor, underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Fought over by both the First and Second Worlds, Nehru urged the Third World to develop an independent stance, find its own voice, and put forward its own demands and aspirations. Thus, the “Non-Aligned Movement” came into being.

Led by India’s Nehru, Yugoslavia’s Tito, and Egypt’s Nasser, Non-Alignment did not mean neutrality. India leaned to the West, Cuba (who later joined the Non-Aligned Movement), leaned towards the Soviets; instead, Non-Alignment meant that the Third World countries recognized that they shared a commonality of interests. Indeed, many of the Non-Aligned nations were bitter rivals; India and Pakistan readily come to mind. However, despite sometimes serious differences, the Non-Aligned nations managed to bring questions of development and industrialization, debt and poverty, national independence and self-determination to the world’s attention.

Although the Non-Aligned movement seems to have greatly dissipated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the appearance of a unipolar world dominated by the United States, non-alignment did shift world politics from the East vs. West emphasis of the Cold War to the North vs. South conflict that persists to this very day.

FORTHCOMING:

PART TWO: “The coming of the new international:” Third Worldist Theory in the 1950s – 1970s.

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Categories Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colonialism, Congo, Cuba, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Economic Exploitation, Economics, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Former Eastern Bloc, France, Ghana, Guatemala, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, India, Indonesia, International, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Netherlands, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Republic of Korea, Revolutionary History, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Science, Second World War, South Africa, Soviet Union (USSR), Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Theory, U.S. Military, United Kingdom, United States History, Vietnam, Workers Struggle, World History, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

Nobel Prize: A tale of ignoble peace laureates

12 Oct

One man introduced indefinite detention and expanded the deadly global drone war. Another was the architect of the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina. What do they have in common? Both are Nobel Peace laureates.

Gandhi never got one. Al Gore did. In one of the stranger ironies befitting of both Kafka and Orwell, sometimes the makers of permanent war are awarded for bringing temporary peace. Sometimes they don’t even get that far.

With the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize set to be announced in Oslo, Norway on Friday, the shadow of Barack Obama still looms large. In 2009, the committee awarded the current US president “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Nominations for the award are due by February 1, meaning Obama had served as America’s executive for less than two weeks when the Norwegian Nobel Committee selected him. Perhaps it was wishful thinking.

Since then, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, making it legal to indefinitely detain US citizens. There are also the deadly drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan, the war waged in Libya, the Afghan surge and a secret “kill list” revealed this year by The New York Times, which grants a select few American officials the option to mark perceived national security threats – foreign citizens or otherwise – for assassination. Ironic, yes, but they never could have known.

Even attempts for the committee to play it more conservatively have backfired. Last year, the committee decided to recognize three women for their role in a non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. The three women included a Yemeni activist, Liberian President Johnson Sirleaf and her fellow citizen and civil society activist Leymah Gbowee.

On Wednesday, Gbowee publically lambasted Sirleaf for failing to fight corruption and nepotism in Liberia.

Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission even put Sirleaf on a list of 52 people who should be sanctioned for committing war crimes for supporting former Liberian warlord and President Charles Taylor in the late 1980s.

Taylor, who infamously campaigned on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him” during the 1997 general election that followed a war that killed over 200,000 people, fortunately did not win a Nobel Prize.

The post-Obama rehabilitation of the prize might not have gone as smoothly as hoped, but the prize’s history is replete with examples of questionable choices, to say the least.

Chief among them was the 1973 prize awarded to North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. Tho rejected the prize, telling Kissinger that peace had not been restored in South Vietnam. Kissinger for his part accepted the prize “with humility.”

Before, during and after his acceptance of the prize, Kissinger would be implicated in assassination, war crimes and the slaughter of civilians in a large swath of countries: East Timor, Pakistan, Greece, Cyprus, Chile, Argentina, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

This year’s winner(s) will be drawn from 231 different nominations, 188 of whom are individuals, while the rest are organizations.

Among them are Russia’s own radio station Ekho Moskvy and the Memorial human rights center.

Also on the list is Myanmar’s President Thein Sein, who might be recognized for his role in moderating Myanmar’s notoriously repressive military regime. But even Sein has been implicated in confiscating land from paddy farmers which was later sold to an officer from the effectively paramilitary United Wa State Arm, who then used the land for the production of amphetamines.

If Sein were to win, it might cause a scandal. But it certainly wouldn’t be the biggest shock in the prize’s hundred-plus years.

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Categories Afghanistan, Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Libya, Vietnam, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

The NYT and the School of Assassins

17 Aug

by JOAN ROELOFS

Saturday, August 11, The New York Times printed a front page article about the nun, Sister Megan Rice, age 82, who committed civil disobedience at the Oak Ridge Tennessee nuclear reservation in a protest against nuclear weapons. The article also informs us that she had been arrested in 1998 protesting at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. The Times then notes that some of the trainees from that school “went on to commit human rights abuses.” You might think of denials of same-sex partner medical benefits, or censorship of soldiers’ mail; in fact, the abuses were (and still are) assassination, torture, and military overthrow of elected governments.

The Times then states: “The school has since been closed.” This is not the case at all. The name has been changed to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, with the same curriculum.

The SOA, aka WHISC, is probably the best known locale of foreign military training, because of the vigil and civil disobedience organized every November by the School of the Americas Watch organization. Some mainstream news sources note this event; The New York Times usually ignores it. Perhaps that is why they think the school is closed; if it is not in the NYT, it can’t possibly exist.

SOA graduates include the murderers of Jesuit priests, the lay missionary and 3 nuns, Archbishop Romero, and the El Mazote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador; and many other victims. SOA training manuals advocate torture. The recent overthrow of Honduras government was the work of graduates of SOA. Other alumni are Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.

Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela have withdrawn participation in SOA.

“Multicultural” education doesn’t stop with the SOA. More than 200 institutions in the US train foreign military personnel, and US military sponsored training occurs all over the world, in our overseas institutions and in situ. The 571 page State Department Report on Foreign Military Training for 2010 indicates that approximately 67,100 students from 159 countries participated.

“Education” is offered through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Program, and activities funded through Defense and State Departments. All armament sales are accompanied by training. The State Department International Military Education and Training (IMET) is a major offering. The Expanded IMET (E-IMET) program (arising from criticism of our past trainees’ post-graduate projects—assassination, torture, military takeovers, etc.) is supposed to teach respect for civilian control of the military, human rights, and belief in the rule of law.

Among the DOD programs is Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET). US Special Operations Forces (SOF) train “with friendly foreign forces. . . The primary purpose of JCET is always the training of US SOF personnel, although incidental training benefits may accrue to the foreign forces.”

Programs exist for combating terrorism, counter-narcotics training, humanitarian demining, and a whole university of military and civilian subjects. Civilian government leaders of many countries are also invited and participate in the trainings.

The WHISC brags that it teaches peaceful skills such as public administration, but the purpose is clear: when the troops take over a country they have to know how to do it. Perhaps the DOD has learned from the experience of Lawrence of Arabia: his men captured Damascus, but didn’t have any public administration skills, so lost it.

Each branch of the military has its own network of schools, the military academies have exchange programs, there are regional centers, and civilian institutions have foreign military students. Even military prep schools can get into the picture; some start at pre-Kindergarten. Private contractors also perform training.

Some examples of participating institutions among the 200 are the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (In D.C., Senegal, and Ethiopia); the US Army JFK Special Warfare Center and School, Fort Bragg, NC for Special Forces training (Green Berets); and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (Marshall Center).

Land-grant universities were originally planned to include military training, and they are today important centers for these programs. Indonesian special forces—Kopassus—were trained at Norwich University in Vermont. When this was revealed by a reporter, a scandal ensued, the reporter was fired from her newspaper, and the program was shut down. However, the University’s president recently announced that the relationship was resuming.

Among the many countries participating in our military training are Sweden and Switzerland, sometimes thought to be neutral. They are affiliated with NATO, in a “Partnership for Peace” status. So also is Russia, and its troops joined ours in anti-terrorism training this May in Colorado. Another odd grantee is the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, as Lora Lumpe points out in her excellent 2002 Report on military training.

One goal of these programs is to enable foreign military forces to support combined operations and “interoperability” with US forces. Military hardware is also advertised and demonstrated, being an important part of US exports.

The larger picture is positioning the US as a “holding company” for all the world’s militaries. These are also being groomed to penetrate civilian governments, in some cases by the old fashioned military coup. More sinister is the influence our past trainees, now heavily represented in foreign defense ministries, exert on the temporary elected governments in countries considered democracies—especially those considered the most democratic, such as Sweden and Denmark. Currently fashionable “networking” is indeed a potent technique of US domination.

Source

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Categories Argentina, Colonialism, Ecuador, El Salvador, Government, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, U.S. News, United States History, Venezuela, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Former Argentine dictators found guilty of kidnapping babies

6 Jul

Justice at Last for Argentina’s Stolen Children

LONDON — Jorge Rafael Videla was the tall, thin one in the triumvirate of senior officers that seized power in Argentina’s 1976 military coup. El Flaco, they used to call him – “the skinny one.”

El Flaco, his trademark black moustache now turned a whiskery grey, was jailed for 50 years in Buenos Aires on Thursday for masterminding a plan to steal new-born babies. Other former leaders of the military regime received sentences from 15 to 40 years.

There is something particularly nightmarish about the crime, even by the lamentable standards of the world’s dictators. It involved taking babies born to the regime’s opponents and handing them over to be raised by suitable military families after killing their mothers.

Many of those “adopted” only discovered their real origins decades later.

General Videla took power as head of a junta of the three armed services that had ousted President Isabel Martinez de Peron. Their promise to put an end to political chaos and urban guerrilla violence was initially welcomed by many weary Argentines.

Argentina was on the front line of a world war against godless communism, the generals said, and that was a battle that required sacrifices.

Tens of thousands of leftists, or other presumed enemies of the state, were rounded up to be tortured and murdered in secret jails.

The secret police used to roam city streets in Ford Falcon cars. You could always tell them because they had no registration plates. If the plainclothes squads stopped to snatch a victim in broad daylight, bystanders would wisely look the other way.

Many were hauled off to the Naval Mechanical School that was run by Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, Videla’s bumptious naval colleague. Everyone in the country knew what was going on there, but no one spoke about it, at least not in public.

Some who disappeared were thrown out of helicopters over the River Plate. But the bodies started washing up on its banks. So the military took to slitting open their stomachs beforehand, so that the corpses would fill with water and sink.

It was a way to try to hide what was going on, both from the people and from those foreign powers that looked kindly on a restoration of law and order in a troubled land. The U.S. ambassador, Robert C. Hill, had greeted the military takeover in March, 1976 as “The best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine History.”

But on the ground, Argentines were aware of the nature of the regime, if not the full extent of its iniquity. That was enough to cow the people and silence the press.

There were honorable exceptions. The so-called Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo risked jail or worse to demand to know what had happened to their disappeared children.

A small, English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, pushed the boundaries of censorship and common sense to expose what it could of the human rights violations.

Its editor at the time, Robert Cox, was a witness at Videla’s trial. Mr. Cox this week described the quiet-spoken general as a self-professed religious man, who once said “God held my hand” throughout the so-called “dirty war.”

“There was always a Nazi element in what the military did,” Mr. Cox said, describing how officers stressed the patriotic self-sacrifice involved in the unspeakable crimes they felt obliged to commit on behalf of the nation.

Some 500 babies born in jail were taken by the military. “They try to make it sound as if they were being humane in saving the kids,” said Mr. Cox. “But the kidnapping of babies is the one thing that even the most rightwing fascist-minded supporters of the dictatorship condemn.”

Source

Former Argentine dictators found guilty of baby thefts

Two former Argentine dictators, Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, were handed heavy prison sentences for overseeing the systematic kidnapping of babies from leftist activists killed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Jorge Videla, 86, was de facto president of Argentina from 1976 to 1981. He is already serving a life sentence for human rights abuses that occurred under his rule.

Videla was found guilty by a criminal court of the “theft and kidnapping” of 20 babies.

Reynaldo Bignone, 84, Argentina’s last dictator before the country’s return to democracy in 1983, was sentenced to 15 years for the same offence.

He, too, is already serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity – including the establishment of a torture centre in a hospital during the coup that brought the military to power.

Jorge Acosta, known as ‘The Tiger’, received a 30-year sentence and Antonio Vañek was condemned to 40 years.

They headed the military’s largest clandestine detention centre during its Dirty War against left-wing subversion.

In total, 11 men were found guilty by the court and given prison sentences.

During the case, Videla denied he had given orders to steal the babies. He has repeatedly been accused of remorselessness by human rights groups.

The trial, which began in February 2011, sought to establish the true identities of around 400 infants stolen by the regime.

It proved that 35 babies were stolen. Some were born in captivity while others were kidnapped at a very young age together with their parents. The infants were often raised by families linked to the dictatorship.

Twenty-six people were able to recuperate their identities.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the court in Buenos Aires to celebrate.

“It’s a historic day,” said Taty Almeyda of the Mothers of the Plaza de Maya, a human rights group formed by women who had their children ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship.

“It’s important that we’ve shown the crimes were systematic. But we won’t stop here.”

An estimated 30,000 people were killed during the Dirty War.

Juan García, the son of a desaparecido – the name in Spanish for those people taken by the state and murdered without their whereabouts ever being revealed – was dumped in an orphanage in 1976 after his father, a member of the Montoneros guerrilla group, was murdered.

“We’ll continue this fight for justice,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Source

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Categories Argentina, Government, History, Imperialism, International, Reactionary Watch, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Juan Perón and Social-Fascism in Argentina

5 Mar

President Perón at his 1946 inaugural parade.

History of the Terms “Social-Democracy” and “Social-Fascism”

The term “social-democracy” has been used by the left since the time of Marx and Engels. The term is a pejorative one today, since it has become almost synonymous with liberal reformism. About a century ago, “social-democrat” was a word to describe other appendages of the socialist movement. Everyone who was an adherent to either the First or Second Internationals before 1914-1919 would be called a “social-democrat,” regardless if they were supporters of the revolutionary Marxism of V.I. Lenin in Russia or the reformist Socialist Party of America.

The Second International under Karl Kautsky failed to rally the working class when it encouraged supporting “one’s own” governments during the inter-imperialist First World War. It encouraged this viewpoint among the international socialist movement, many of whom began supporting the war. This amounted to betrayal of the working class and conciliation towards the capitalist system. This caused a split in the social-democratic movement, eventually leading to the formation of the Third International, also called the Communist International or Comintern, in 1919. The Third International was primarily led by the revolutionary wing of Russian social-democracy, the Bolsheviks under V.I. Lenin, who had seized power and led the first successful socialist revolution in the world in October of 1917. They opposed the World War as an imperialist war between capitalist powers and called for “turning imperialist war into civil war,” meaning into revolution.

After the foundation of the Third International, revolutionary social-democrats the world over abandoned the term “social-democrat” and called themselves “communists.” The term “social-democracy” became the viewpoint of surviving adherents of the Second International, including many socialist parties who had adopted reformist lines. “Social-democracy,” then, changed from being a term meaning the ideology of the entire socialist movement to mean bourgeois reformism that was in opposition to the working class and the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism.

The term “social-fascism” came from a theory supported by the Comintern of the 1930′s that social-democracy was the “left-wing of fascism.” This perception became commonplace after the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the crushing of the Spartacist Uprising, which resulted in the murder of the German socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht among many other revolutionaries by a social-democratic German government, assisted by right-wing paramilitaries called the Freikorps. While some historic applications of this theory were incorrect, there is a trend in modern social-democracy that gave support to fascism and tends toward fascism even while using left-wing or populist rhetoric.

While modern social-democrats have appealed to centrists and center-leftists, there are a few that make full-on attempts to sway the revolutionary left by appealing to social programs, economism and trade unionism as a way of disorganizing the left’s revolutionary determination. While raising wages and improving the populace’s immediate standing of living, the class nature of the state remains the same: in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Labor is still treated as a commodity and surplus value is still extracted from the workers for the sake of “incentive” and private profit. It’s common practice for bourgeois politicians to appeal to those who demand change and progress, only to surrender to the status quo and multinational corporations upon seizing power. Modern capitalist politicians are very skilled at making public appeals to the progressive sections of the populations, only to turn their backs on the same people who voted them into office.

Argentina’s government under Juan Perón is frequently portrayed by the bourgeois media by many misguided “leftists” as a socialist government where the working class had power. Others have described it as a social-democracy, as some alternative form of fascism less offensive than the Hitlerite variety, or even as some kind of “compromise between capitalism and communism.” Argentina’s Perónist period is perhaps the most fitting example of social-fascism in practice.

Juan Perón’s Early Life and Rise to Power

Born in Buenos Aires on October 8, 1895, Juan Domingo Perón had a staunch Catholic upbringing. In 1911, at the age of 16, he was sent to the Argentine National Military College. In 1938, he was sent overseas as a military advisor to the Axis powers and their allies, collaborators and colonies including Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Albania and Yugoslavia. It was there that he first came into contact with the fascist government of Benito Mussolini, whom Perón vigorously endorsed.

According to Robert J. Alexander in his book Juan Domingo Perón: A History, Perón’s advisory role to Italy “gave him a chance to study in some detail and at first hand the way in which the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini had reorganized, or tried to reorganize, Italian society” [1].

Even more damning are Perón’s own words:

“Italian Fascism led popular organizations to an effective participation in national life, which had always been denied to the people. Before Mussolini’s rise to power, the nation was on one hand and the worker on the other, and the latter had no involvement in the former. [...] In Germany happened exactly the same phenomenon, meaning, an organized state for a perfectly ordered community, for a perfectly ordered population as well: a community where the state was the tool of the nation, whose representation was, under my view, effective. I thought that this should be the future political form, meaning, the true people’s democracy, the true social democracy.”[3]

Perón returned to Argentina in 1941 and became a colonel of Ramon Castillo’s Military. It was then that the “Group of United Officers” or “GUO” was formed in order to prevent the succession of Castillo’s rampantly corrupt regime. The GUO staged a coup prior to the year’s presidential election. This brought an end to Castillo’s conservative traditionalist regime and brought about the military government of Argentina.

Upon first coming to notoriety in 1943, Perón’s policies were embraced by a variety of tendencies all across the political spectrum, although the corporatist character of Perónism drew attacks from socialists who accused his administration of preserving capitalist exploitation and class division. This viewpoint shared by the leftists turned out to be prophetic, as capitalist production relations remained intact despite the raising of wages and the generally elevated status of the Department of Labor, including the department obtaining secretariat status under Perón’s leadership.

The main opposition to Perón came from the Socialist International-affiliated Radical Civic Union, the Socialist Party of Argentina and the Comintern-affiliated Communist Party of Argentina, although the conservative National Autonomist Party also showed opposition to Perón by relying on support of the financial sector of the economy, as well as the Argentine Chamber of Commerce.

Populist Tactics of Juan Perón: With the Workers and the Capitalists

The colonel served under three different military government administrations: those of Arturo Rawson, Pedro Pablo Ramirez, and Edelmiro Farrell. All throughout his political career, Perón maintained the reputation of a pro-labor military man, constantly bolstering up the labor unions, engaging in pushing through social programs such as greater unemployment and health care benefits, and urging the “leading role” that labor played in the economy of Argentina.

Upon ascending to the status of President of Argentina on June 4, 1946, his outspoken goals were comprised of very leftist and pro-labor sentiments, including the need for a five-year plan, increase in salaries, giving priority to pensions, economic independence and diversification and investment in public transportation.[2]

Perón even encouraged striking amongst laborers who employers did not grant labor benefits. With the abundant amount of vocal support from the General Conference of Labor, or “CGT,” they followed his word. Strike activity led to a loss of 500,000 work days in 1945, which leapt to 2 million days in 1946 following his election, and to over 3 million lost days in 1947. This stress put on the advancement of Labor’s status in the Argentine economy consequently led to a boom in the amount of members among the CGT. The ranks grew to 2 million active dues-paying members by 1950 [3]. It seemed at this point that Perón was truly a man of his word. However, we shall delve further into his career to show that he was not, by any means, a friend of international socialism or the working people.

Juan Perón as a Friend of Fascism

While urging “neutrality” in the face of the Second World War, Perón’s foreign and domestic policies were much closer to the fascist and military governments of Europe than anything resembling full-hearted socialism. Perón not only traveled to, but admired Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. He seems to have no objections to their invasion and colonization of countries such as Austria, Hungary, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia and Albania.

If this was not alarming enough, it was and still is common knowledge that escaped Nazi war criminals sought refuge and lived fairly comfortable lives in Argentina, turning the country into a sort of haven for Nazis perpetrators and collaborators. Among those whom Perón openly welcomed:

Emile Dewointine (who manufactured Luftwaffe aircraft, later seeking refuge under Franco before arriving in Argentina) [4]
Josef Mengele (the infamous Nazi doctor who performed notoriously sick-minded medical experiments on concentration camp inmates)
Adolph Eichmann (one of the chief bureaucrats of the Holocaust)
Franz Stangl (Austrian representative of Spitzy in Spain)
Charles Lescat (editor of Je Suis Partout in Vichy France)
SS functionary Ludwig Lienhart
German industrialist Ludwig Freude

Aside from Nazi war criminals, members of the genocidal Croatian Ustaša, a pro-Nazi puppet government responsible for the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia and Bosnia, took refuge in Argentina, including their notorious leader, Ante Pavelić, and Milan Stojadinović. The latter was allowed to spend the rest of his life as presidential advisor on economic and and financial affairs to governments in Argentina, and was the founder of the financial newspaper, El Economista [5].

In “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Latin America,” authors Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira wrote:

“It is still suspected that among her [Eva Perón's] possessions, there were pieces of Nazi treasure that came from rich Jewish families killed in concentration camps”.

They add that,

“Perón himself even spoke of goods of ‘German and Japanese origin’ that the Argentine government had appropriated”.

In 1947, the first lady of Argentina, Eva Perón, traveled across Europe in an attempt to boost her husband’s regime abroad. It was here that she is believed to have opened a Swiss bank account to deposit funds and other valuables she received from Nazi war criminals in exchange for Argentine passports to the aforementioned [6].

Juan Peron Makes Overtures to the Left

On June 15, 1955, Pope Pius XII excommunicated Perón after the fifty-nine year old military President described himself as “not superstitious”. The following day, Perón called for a rally of support on the Plaza de Mayo, a time-honored custom among Argentine presidents during a challenge. However, as he spoke before a crowd of thousands, Navy fighter jets flew overhead and dropped bombs into the crowded square below before seeking refuge in Uruguay. This effectively ended Juan Perón’s second term in office. First seeking refuge in Venezuela, and later Panama, he eventually settled in Francoist Spain. Desperate to reclaim his position in government, Perón began making appeals to the revolutionary left.

In his book, “La Hora de los Pueblos,” he made his appeal to internationalists:

“Mao is at the head of Asia, Nasser of Africa, De Gaulle of the old Europe and Castro of Latin America [7].”

Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, Perón started aligning himself with more militant unions and maintained close links with Montoneros, a “leftist” Perónist Catholic grouping who later kidnapped and assassinated anti-Perónist President Pedro Aramburu in retaliation for the June 1956 mass execution of a Perónist uprising against the ruling military junta.

However, while attempting to play both sides of the coin, Perón hailed the far-right as well. He supported the conservative leader of the UCR, as well as members of the Tacuara Nationalist Movement. Political tendencies did not play a role in the man’s mind when it came to power grabs and smooth talk.

Following Perón’s example, the Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara, or the Tacuara Nationalist Movement, was a right-wing extremist guerilla group in Argentina formed in the 1960s. Although initially opposed to Perónism, it later adopted Juan Perón’s idea of “Special Formations (gathering right-wing radicals in the TNM as well as the Argentine Iron Guard),” and the movement was directly inspired by the anti-Semitic Catholic Julio Meinvielle’s writings (Meinvielle not only blamed Martin Luther, but also both the French and October revolutions for the decline of Catholicism).

As such, the TNM defended nationalist, Catholic, anti-communist, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic ideologues, such as Primo de Rivera (the founder of the fascist Falange in Spain). The guerilla group’s routes can be traced back to the “Nationalist Students Union Side” (UNESCO) as well as the “Alliance of Nationalist Youth,” both centrally based in the capital of Buenos Aires [8].

The group opposed the secularization of schools that occurred under Perón and admired both Hitler and Mussolini [9]. Entrenched in anti-Semitic hatred, the group gained notoriety for kidnapping and injuring a number of Jewish students including 15 year old Edgardo Trilnik, and 19 year old Graciela Sirota, who was subject to torture and was eventually scarred with Swastika insignias [10].

In 1963, a TNM commando group robbed the Polyclinic Bank, killing two employees, wounding fourteen and taking for themselves fourteen million pesos, the equivalent of one-hundred thousand U.S. dollars. The TNM’s objectives were to afford a boat to travel to the Falkland Islands so that they may establish a guerrilla base in Formosa. All were arrested after seven months after one of the perpetrators spend a portion of the spoils at a brothel in France. While the group was formally outlawed in 1963, most of those imprisoned for the robbery were released in May 1973 when the Perónists returned to power and President Hector Campora decreed a broad amnesty for political prisoners [11]. Most of the former group’s leaders dead, imprisoned, disillusioned with the right-wing, or seeking other professions (one of the TNM’s strongest supporters of anti-Semitism, Alberto Ezcurra Uriburu, became a Catholic priest in 1964 and later joined the “Argentine Anticommunist Alliance” death squad).

The Class Nature of Perónism

Perónism is an opportunist and Third-Positionist ideology geared at dismembering and demobilizing the revolutionary workers through attempts of reformism, economism and pacifism. A military government, no matter how “worker friendly” it may initially appear to be, only opens the way for further exploitation of the working class, more coup attempts and power grabs. While championing himself to be an ally of the working masses of Argentina, Juan Perón simultaneously aided in the protection of some of the most notorious war criminals of World War II.

While Juan Perón’s government did not completely match up with those of Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco, what they all have in common is militarism, nationalism, appeals to emotionalism and class collaborationism. A state based on these principles simply cannot offer working people anything other than defeat. The experience in Argentina is a shining example “social-fascism,” of the fusion between social-democracy and fascism, of failed reformism and corporatism.

Though the Argentine President boasted about giving the leading role in government to the working class of Argentina, put a strong emphasis on “social justice” and even nationalized key industries, this does not earn Perón’s government the title of socialist. The protection of the far-right, along with the numerous left groups that exposed Perón’s fascist leanings (including both the Argentine Socialist and the Communist parties) offers material and historical evidence as to why social-democracy and/or Third-Positionism can and most likely will lead to a fascist state.

Perón’s coming to power did not consist of a revolution, let alone the organization of the proletariat as the leading class in society to whom the means of production are to belong. Rather, a military coup was what brought this fascist-sympathizing military colonel to political standing. The “peaceful path” of social-democracy was not only a political slogan, but also a method of demobilization that is directed at the workers movement. Its aim is to deny the inevitability of armed struggle when the class struggle reaches a higher stage and the question of power comes to the forefront. It has historically been used as an anesthetic; a vice that claims to solve the contradictions of the rule of capital.

However, history is on the side of the revolutionary workers in this day and age. Millions of people all across the world have witnessed these instances of class collaboration over struggle, economism over theory, and idle reformism over revolutionary change. The next tide of revolution will not succumb to these illnesses.

Sources

[1] http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3418/Per-n-Juan-1895-1974-Former-Argentine-President-Began-Military-Training.html

[2] Rock, David. Argentina, 1516–1982. University of California Press, 1987

[3] Los mitos de la historia argentina 4. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta. Pg. 28

[4] American Jewish Yearbook, 2006. Pg. 266

[5] Mark Falcoff, Perón’s Nazi Ties, Time, November 9, 1998, vol 152

[6] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2033084/First-lady-Eva-Peron-allowed-Nazis-hide-Argentina-exchange-treasures-looted-rich-Jewish-families.html

[7] http://nuevomundo.revues.org/35983

[8] http://www.fabio.com.ar/verpost.php?id_noticia=1548

[9] Daniel Gutman, Tacuara. Historia de la primera guerrilla urbana argentina (Ediciones B Argentina, 2003, p.58)

[10] http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-51068-2005-05-15.html

[11] http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2004/04/12/g-04001.htm

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Categories Albania, Argentina, Britain, Chile, Economic Exploitation, Economics, France, Germany, Government, Health Care, History, Hungary, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Labor, Poland, Racism, Revolutionary History, Science, Second World War, Soviet Union (USSR), Spain, Theory, U.S. News, United Kingdom, Workers Struggle, World History, Yugoslavia
Author The Red Phoenix

Review of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”

1 Nov

The Theory of “Shock Therapy”

Every once in a while, a book comes along that sets the liberals on fire. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein is one such book. This volume has been hawked by such national liberal pundits as Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. There has been such a buzz over this book in the past two years that it behooves us to write a review of it. Overall, the writing style is quite friendly to those of us who are not political scientists. It is, so to speak, an easy read. The historical research that went into the book is respectable (for the most part). Naomi Klein’s title refers to the “shocking” ways in which unregulated free markets have been applied to many countries throughout the world, and how “disaster capitalism,” or capitalism that is a disaster for working people, has been put in power.

From the coup in Chile to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the “shock therapies” used in Poland, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even the US and UK, this book lays out quite completely the pattern used by the Friedmanite capitalists of the Chicago School from their rise in the 1970s to their mastery over the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s and their control of WTO and GATT today. Overall, the pattern is the same between these different occurences in different countries at different times. It is a form of imperialism, which as we know is the necessary expansion of capitalism to capture more resources and more markets. Unless capitalism constantly expands it is subject to collapse. Klein is correct about this. That said, there are severe flaws with the ideology expressed in the book.

The “Shock Doctrine” of “Disaster Capitalism” Applied

The Friedmanite model of capitalism requires three things: social spending cuts (or even better the absence of a social support system), deregulation and extensive tax cuts for business ventures and the wealthy. In the instance of Chile and the Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia) the start was a coup of the more independent-minded capitalist governments that pursued the European social-democratic style. The first to be subjected was Chile, which had elected Allende, and it was deemed prudent by the Nixon Administration to support a coup by Pinochet and to radically alter the Chilean state. According to Klein, the only way to successfully pull this off was through extreme psychological and cultural shocks to knock down the resistance of the Chilean people to these so-called reforms.

Klein mentions many of the “shocks” of the Chilean coup, such as tanks seizing government buildings, military police arrests, disappearances, murders and torture—all of which was developed by the CIA under the MKULTRA program and resulted in the creation of the “KUBARK” manual.* Pinochet, being a general who had no schooling in economics, needed economic experts. These were provided by Chicago School of Economics graduates, both Americans and Chileans. Even before the coup, they devised an economic plan called “the Brick” which called for the destruction of the Chilean social programs, massive tax cuts, deregulation and the removal of protective tariffs. The results of these political shocks, economic shocks and later shocks to individuals through torture as Klein’s “shock” metaphor goes, were economic disasters for the Chilean workers and massive profits for the capitalists in America and the Chilean bourgeoisie.

The “Shock Doctrine” at Home

Next in line were Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. Over the course of time, these methods were refined and redefined for use in so-called democratic countries like the US and UK. According to Klein, “Thatcher-ism,” as it was called in the UK, was pulled off by starting a war with Argentina over an archipelago in the South Atlantic called the Falkland Islands. Thatcher was able to use the war to whip up patriotic sentiment to enable her to bust unions and radically revise the social structure of the UK in the name of an “Ownership Society.” People thought that was a phrase coined by George W. Bush—the former President isn’t that smart, quite frankly.

In the United States, high rates of interest imposed by the Federal Reserve (also known as the Fed) were putting economic pressure on America. It was during this time that Ronald Reagan began his campaign of union-busting, starting with the air traffic controllers.

International Implications

During the 1980s expansion of the Freidmanite “shock treatments” in the developing world were imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. They demanded privatization, social austerity and deregulation as conditions to give loans, which were usually take out to pay debt incurred from previous loans for economic development. The end result of course, was a disaster for the working people of Africa and Asia.

In the 1990s, the “shock doctrine” was expanded to Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact states. The prime examples—Poland and Russia—were exposed to so-called shock therapy almost immediately. In 1990, the Solidarity group were used by the West to call for privatization, deregulation and asset sales from the Polish state-operated infrastructure. Naomi Klein does her best to whitewash Solidarity, using frivolously high numbers for their membership and neglecting to mention their ties to the West, instead portraying them as victims. Russia followed much the same pattern as Poland, although at an accelerated rate. This netted huge profits for Western capitalists and worsening conditions for the Russian and Polish workers.

Friedman-ism also worked its way into the People’s Republic of China, which was already undergoing the construction of a capitalist society under Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s policies of course had the result of growing inequity in China, and also an increase in unemployment, as capitalism, in order to maximize profit, requires the presence of surplus labor to drive down wages. There were also severe cuts to the social programs in the PRC at the time.

This leads us to Klein’s next subject – the use of pressures for deregulation by the West to cause capital flight in the so-called “Asian Tigers,” namely South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia. These societies had extremely high tariffs, huge public infrastructure in state-capitalist companies as well as in social goods like education. By pushing for the deregulation of their capital controls, the Asia Crises was engineered by the WTO and the IMF.

Modern-Day “Shock Doctrine”

All of this leads to the final frontier for capitalist penetration, namely, the economies of the Middle East and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. In the Middle East these states, usually with large oil reserves, did not have loans to pay off and were mistrustful of foreign influence. To the superpowers, the only solution was invasion and occupation by an outside force. What better outside force than America, which spends more on its military than anyone else? There was only one problem—the American people did not want to start a war. In short, a “shock” to the system in the United States was necessary and the bourgeoisie was more than willing to allow the plans of Osama Bin Laden to go through, since it would open up opportunities for the military-industrial complex and the creation of a new market – “Homeland Security Solutions.” Needless to say, Bin Laden was more than willing to oblige, and the outsourcing of everything from cooking and military construction to companies like Halliburton went through unabated.

As we mentioned, there are deep flaws to this book. Naomi Klein seems to believe that a form of capitalism can be devised which is not a “disaster” for working people when capitalism by its very nature is contradictory to the interests of all those who lack capital. Throughout the book, the author repeatedly hammers home her view that Keynesian capitalist economics is some how better for working people. Such a view is patently untrue. Regulated capitalism, which is the basis of Keynesian economics, as we know, only places rules and regulations on a system imposed by and supported by the very people who have the means to destroy, subvert and work against those very regulations. Keynesian economics is at best a temporary solution to a crisis in capitalism which will be replaced eventually by the most abusive forms of capitalism precisely when the capitalists think they can get away with it.

Indeed, despite the bourgeois liberal-leaning of Naomi Klein, and despite her whitewashing of social democracy and Keynesian economics, she has managed to show that that the current War on Terror is nothing more than the latest manifestation of imperialism, which must ultimately culminate in one of two outcomes: capitalist dictatorship or socialism.

*Remember this folks, because it will become apparent by the time of War on Terror that the torture methods and rendition methods used in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were not just some soldiers making errors but rather methods developed at the highest levels of the intelligence services of the United States.

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Categories Afghanistan, Argentina, Books, Chile, China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Economic Exploitation, Former Eastern Bloc, History, Imperialism, International, Media & Culture, Poland, Republic of Korea, Thailand, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Review: Glenn Beck’s “Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die”

3 Apr

Part V of VI: Castro, Che & Cuba

The “Cult of Che” & the Execution of Rojas

One of the last parts of Beck’s documentary contains a truly disturbing element far above the mere falsification of history we have seen so far. In this portion, Beck sets his sights on the Cuban Revolution with a sob story about the execution of a former soldier who served the regime of Cuba’s former brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista. The various enforcers of the Batista dictatorship are portrayed as loving humanitarians who gave their people everything and were “patriots and saviors.” While there is a general consensus on the negativity of the Batista regime across the planet Earth, in this documentary Beck seeks to rehabilitate and redeem the legacy of the former Cuban dictator, portraying those who died in the service of his regime as heroes and a martyrs, and those who executed them as the most heinous of villains.

Beck begins the segment by attacking the cult of Ernest “Che” Guevara, the politics of which have been watered down by commodity fetishism. He then makes a reference to the recent “Che” biopic by Steven Soderbergh, claiming “Nowhere is Che seemingly loved more than in Hollywood, USA.” It is quite odd to hear such a rabid advocate of so-called “free market” complain about capitalizing on a revolutionary figure to sell T-shirts and coffee mugs.

After this, the documentary turns to Barbara Rangel, a woman born in Cuba, the granddaughter of Colonel Cornelio Rojas, a man executed by firing squad (surely a merciful death compared to the many thousands tortured to death under Batista’s reign) in a famous black-and-white film clip from the Cuban Revolution. Speaking of Che Guevara, Mrs. Rangel claims that “They portray him [Che] in the movies as a hero and as a humanitarian. He was a cold killer.” Bizarrely, Beck literally tries to blame Che Guevara on the premature birth [!!] of Barbara’s mother’s baby. Barbara Rangel’s mother says about the executed Colonel, “Che Guevara took away the greatest thing in my life because my father was the greatest. He was a good father. Che Guevara took that away from me and that is why I have been suffering for 50 years. I will never forget what he did to me.” Rangal herself continues that her grandfather was “a freedom fighter” and “a descendant of patriots” who was “executed by cowards” but who “died like a hero.”

So, here emotional anecdotes are posited as an argument on the legitimacy of the legacy of Che Guevera, but also by association the legitimacy of the entire socio-economic system in Cuba post-January 1959.

Rangel’s story in no way contradicts the official image of Che Guevera; Che was a revolutionary, and incidentally being a revolutionary generally includes armed struggle, or the aspiration to engage in armed struggle.
Ms. Rangel’s grandfather was not a civilian, but a military man who served the regime that the 26th of July movement was engaging in armed conflict with. Cornelio Rojas, whether or not he was a “good father,” was a chief of police under the Batista regime. Now, in a regime known for the regular arrest and torture of political dissidents, the position of police chief carries with it a malicious connotation rather than a heroic one.

The discussion on the merits of the Batista regime and the actions of those who served it is not explored. Instead, a tear-jerking story of the execution of a “good father,” who just happened to be a police chief in a murderous dictatorship, is leveled at the legacy of an internationally recognized and cherished revolutionary figure.

What was Cuba like Under Batista?

Nick Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief of Reason.com, says that Guevera “became known as the butcher of La Cabana prison in revolutionary Cuba where he personally oversaw the execution of anywhere from 175 to several hundred people.” Gillespie, a man who is apparently qualified to psychologically diagnose a man he’s never met (or any man for that matter), pronounces sentence on the famous revolutionary: “You can probably call him clinically a sadist.” With all this talk about Che and Castro’s “brutality” towards the torturers and murderers of the Batista Regime, one wonders exactly the historical context of such actions. Let us for a moment take our eyes off of individuals such as Colonel Rojas in order to see the bigger picture—specifically, the bigger picture of exactly what type of regime Rangal’s father worked for.

For over 25 years, Fulgencio Batista “ruled Cuba with an iron fist, and the full blessing and endorsement of the United States government” (1). During Batista’s reign, he “subverted the constitution and terrorized political opponents. He enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle from the money generated by the influx of tourism and American corporations to the island, while the country’s poor became even more impoverished. He did so with the explicit support of American mobsters and with the acquiescence of the American government” (1).

Batista’s repression did not stop at corruption. Under Batista, “the average Cuban family had an income of $6.00 a week, fifteen to twenty percent of the labor force was chronically unemployed, and only a third of the homes had running water” (4). Under Batista, Cuba was effectively a colony of the United States. “At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands – almost all the cattle ranches – 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions – 80 percent of the utilities – practically all the oil industry – and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports” (4). Batista’s terrorism against Cuban civilians was not kind. Under Batista, “[h]undreds of mangled bodies were left hanging from lamp posts or dumped in the streets in a grotesque variation of the Spanish colonial practice of public executions” (5). In this period, it “has been estimated by some that as many as 20,000 civilians were killed” (5).
Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., when asked by the US to analyze Cuba, remarked that the “corruption of the Government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice … is an open invitation to revolution” (2). During phony “elections” held by Batista in an unsuccessful attempt to lend his regime legitimacy, “the people showed their dissatisfaction with his government by refusing to vote. Over 75 per cent of the voters in the capital Havana boycotted the polls. In some areas, such as Santiago, it was as high as 98 per cent” (2).

Under the reign of Batista, “Brothels flourished. A major industry grew up around them: Government officials received bribes, policemen collected protection money. Prostitutes could be seen standing in doorways, strolling the streets, or leaning from windows… One report estimated that 11,500 of them worked their trade in Havana [alone]…Beyond the outskirts of the capital, beyond the slot machines, was one of the poorest – and most beautiful – countries in the Western world” (2).
In order to build the reputation of Cuba as a colony for gambling, prostitution and other criminal activities, “Batista established lasting relationships with organized crime, and under his guardianship Havana became known as “the Latin Las Vegas” [….] A summit at Havana’s Hotel Nacional, with mobsters such as Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Santo Trafficante Jr., Moe Dalitz and others, confirmed Luciano’s authority over the U.S. mob, and coincided with Frank Sinatra’s 1946 singing debut in Havana. It was here that Lansky gave permission to kill Bugsy Siegel” (3).

Due to the corruption of this dictatorship, Castro’s rebels soon gained massive support. Batista feared his own overthrow. During the Cuban revolutionary period, “Many innocent people were tortured. Suspects, including children, were publicly executed and then left hanging in the streets for several days as a warning to others who were considering joining Castro” (2). Batista’s reign was so unpopular in fact, that even the CIA had decided to form a coup against him when he became too oppressive even for American interests. Upon Batista’s ousting by the 26th of July movement, and his subsequent unfortunate escape, “[t]ens of thousands of Cubans (and thousands of Cuban-Americans in the United States) joyously celebrated the end of the dictator’s regime” (6).

Even the imperialist and anti-communist US President JFK, the man who personally helped engineer the Bay of Pigs incident, once remarked, “I believe that there is no country in the world, including the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba […].” He continued, “I believe that we [the United States] created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it [….] In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries” (7).

Under Batista, “some 1.5 million people (25% of the population) struggled to survive. Big sugar companies kept hundreds of thousands of acres uncultivated, while landless peasants were forced to plant on the sides of roads, until the brutal, machete-wielding rural police, the Guardia Rural, would drive them out” (8). And finally, in the Cuban rural areas under Batista, “75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees, more than 50% had no toilets of any kind, 85% had no inside running water and 91% had no electricity. There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas and more than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites. Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables. The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person. 45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school” (8).

Castro Assuming Power was Widely Supported by the Cubans

In the cities, “25% of the labor force was chronically unemployed, 1 million people were illiterate (in a population of about 5.5 million) and 27% of urban children, not to speak of 61% of rural children, were not attending school. Racial discrimination under Batista was widespread, the public school system had deteriorated badly, corruption was endemic; anyone could be bought, from a Supreme Court judge to a cop, and police brutality and torture were common” (8).

Sources Cited:
(1) http://anonym.to?http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1768.html
(2) http://anonym.to?http://www.spartacus.scho…COLDbatista.htm
(3) http://anonym.to?http://historyofcuba.com/…acts/batist.htm
(4) http://anonym.to?http://www.jfklibrary.org…ES_60OCT06b.htm
(5) Invisible Latin America, by Samuel Shapiro, Ayer Publishing, 1963, pg 77
(6) http://anonym.to?http://www.history.com/th…alls-from-power
(7) http://anonym.to?http://www.spartacus.scho…/JFKdanielJ.htm
(8) http://anonym.to?http://www.thegully.com/e…ubastats59.html

Rangal’s father worked for Batista, who was known the world over as a military dictator indifferent to the plight of his people, one who is now conversely being painted as a Cuban patriot, as are those that served his regime. If Rangal’s grandfather was a patriot, why did he serve a government which was so despised for its brutality? Surely a patriot would sympathize with the general poverty and suffering of the people of the island nation? Certainly a great patriot, such as Rangal’s grandfather, would have objected to his homeland being kept firmly under the thumb of a foreign power, and reduced to a position of an exploited neo-colony? Patriots, if nothing else, bristle with nationalism at foreign intervention to the detriment of their own country, no?

Another Fake Quote
Glenn Beck attributes a fake quote to Stalin. “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” There is no evidence Stalin said this. It is falsely attributed to him, but to this day no one has been able to find the source for it.

Che’s “Racism”
Beck continues by tossing out a few quotes from Che, such as the following: “We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.”

Other infamous quotes mentioned are: “The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” and, “[t]he blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.”

The American Party of Labor has already extensively covered accusations of racism from a person such as Glenn Beck. For further notes on this issue we recommend you read the first and third parts of this series.

The above quotations have a source which Beck does not mention. One is page 92 in Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson. It is worth noting that Ernesto “Che” Guevara made these statements when he was young and uneducated about socialist theory. To tear individual quotes that Che made during his youth before he had a chance to study Marxist ideas out of context is misleading. Notably, this occurs in a chapter entitled “An Unquiet Youth,” which on the same page says, “Ernesto had rarely been around black people.” The next chapter is fittingly also entitled, “I Am Not the Same I Was Before,” surrounded by quotation marks from Che himself. Due to his sudden ideological change into a revolutionary upon reaching adulthood, Che was clearly not a “raging” racist, homophobe or anti-Semite.

In fact, casual racism was probably typical of a person of working class Argentine origin, especially given that Argentina is the most “European” of all Latin American countries, as far as ancestry is concerned. What was not typical, however, was Che traveling to the Congo to help the Congolese people fight against European imperialist control. It’s far-fetched to believe that Guevera held racist attitudes towards a people that he risked his own life for, fighting for a country that was not his own, nor did he have any personal stake in bettering.
As far as the quotation “We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing” is concerned, this quotation is allegedly taken from Che’s Congo diaries, on his participation in the armed revolution in that country. The Congo Diaries of Che Guevera are generally about Che’s bitterness at the failure of that revolution, and his analysis was that he mostly blamed it on the people of the Congo themselves. Now, one could say that this is his own way of taking no responsibility for his own actions or the failure of his revisionist and anti-Marxist “foco” theory, but this certainly does put the whole quote into perspective. Given Che’s general outlook on the revolution in the Congo, the above quotation wasn’t a racial comment per se, but rather bitterness at what Che saw as the Congolese people’s indifference to the revolution that he tried to start. Regardless, Beck jumps on the chance to paint Guevera as a common bigot.

As well, there many other quotes which Beck does not mention, which show that if Che was indeed racist, he later shed that view. In Cuba: A Revolution in Motion, Isaac Saney quotes Che speaking on December 28th, 1959 on the role of universities: “I have to say [the university] should paint itself black, it should paint itself mulatto, not only it’s students but also the professors; that it paint itself worker and peasant, that it paint itself people, because the University is the heritage of none, it belongs to the Cuban people […] and the people that have triumphed, that have been spoiled with triumph, that know their own strength and that they can overcome, that are here today at the doors of the University, the University must be flexible and paint itself black, Mulatto, worker and peasant, or it will have no doors, the people will break them down and paint the university the colours they want.”

Also, from the BBC: “Guevara, with limited knowledge of Swahili and the local languages was assigned a teenage interpreter Freddy Ilanga. Over the course of seven months Ilanga grew to ‘admire the hard-working Guevara’, who according to Mr. Ilanga, ‘showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites.’” Source: “DR Congo’s Rebel-Turned-Brain Surgeon” by Mark Doyle, BBC World Affairs, December 13, 2005

“…A quarter of a century after the revolution, employment, infant mortality and life expectancy rates were better for blacks in Cuba than for anywhere in the world, even the United States.” Source: Marable, Manning 2000. In Hisham Aidi, ‘Is Cuba a Racial Democracy?’ January 28.

” At this time, we must continue consolidating the just policy of promoting blacks and women in particular as cadres … The party must insist on the applications of this policy in all spheres of society.” From: Communist Party of Cuba , ‘The Party Unity, Democracy and the Human Rights that we Defend,” 1997. In addition, Article 42 in the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba reads that, “discrimination because of race, color, sex or national origin is forbidden and is punished by law,” and Article 295 of the Cuban criminal code establishes fines and sanctions of between six months and two years for discrimination and incitement of hatred on the basis of gender, race or national origin.

For a country with alleged racists in high positions of state authority, it seems Cuba did quite well to make some of the greatest progress on Earth for a majority black and mixed society. While in other societies, racists in positions of state legislative power result in racist state policies, in Cuba their allegedly racist legislators somehow produced policies that greatly benefited the very people that the legislators were allegedly prejudiced against. What are the odds of that?

The tarring of Che Guevera as a racist is typical projection, making use of the valid sensibilities of the masses of people against racism to inoculate them against Marxism-Leninism. Worst case scenario: Che Guevera was a racist. In this case though, from how things played out in Cuba, one can see that at the very least then Che must have been a racist who didn’t allow his personal prejudices to interfere with the affirmation of rights for all Cubans regardless of ethnicity or heritage, because he advocated and helped legislate measures against racism during his time in Cuba. So, in the case of leftism, the absolute worst case scenario is that we have individuals with personal prejudices, whereas in the case of the United States and all capitalist countries we have racism legislated, institutionalized and propagated from the highest organs. Institutionalized slavery, Jim Crow Laws and official segregation found in the history of the United States (and many other capitalist countries) trump any distasteful prejudices that a figure from the past may or may not have had.

Finally, the whole matter becomes extreme hypocrisy anyway, because it is most likely that if the same quotes were said by some conservative talk show host or professor (as they are on a regular basis, too numerous to cite every single incident and individual), and that person found themselves in hot water over said comments, pundits like Glenn Beck would be decrying the “political correctness” and “reverse discrimination” of it all.

One Last Note: Che’s Execution Was Engineered by a Nazi War Criminal

From the article: “Che Guevara’s capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the ‘Butcher of Lyon’. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz.
Barbie’s record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.
Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie, says: ‘He met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. Altmann [Barbie] no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience.’
In October 1967 the Bolivian army, with CIA help, captured the 39-year-old Guevara and killed him. Barbie was involved in torture again in Bolivia and dreamed of establishing a Fourth Reich in the Andes.”
Source: http://anonym.to?http://www.guardian.co.uk….secondworldwar

Tags: and spends his money on frivolities, Batista, Batista dictator, Che Guevara, Che Guevara death, Che Guevara murderer, Che Guevara quotes, Che Guevara racism, Che image, Che movie, Che racism, Che racist quotes, Che t-shirt, Colonel Rojas, Congo, Cuba, Cuba before Castro, Cuban history, Ernest Che Guevara, Ernesto Che Guevara, Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro, Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck Revolutionary Holocaust, he Negro is indolent and lazy, Imperialism, Klaus Barbie, life under Castro, life under Fidel, Part 5, Part V, politics, refutation

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Categories Argentina, Cuba, History, International, Media & Culture, TV, United States History, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

US Strategy in Latin America was Wrong

15 May

Three years ago I wrote an article arguing that the political changes sweeping across Latin America were epoch-making and probably irreversible, and that they would fundamentally alter the relationship between the region and the United States. Some of the most important economic causes of the region’s shift to the left – including the unprecedented long-term growth failure since 1980 – were unrecognised then and remain mostly unacknowledged to this day.

At the time, Washington’s stated strategy was to isolate Venezuela from its neighbours. This was before the election of additional left governments in Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Paraguay and El Salvador. I argued that this strategy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what was happening in the region, and that it would only succeed in isolating the United States from its southern neighbours.

All this has come to pass, but more interestingly, for the first time we have an acknowledgement of this failure from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. At a press conference last Friday, she said in response to a question about Venezuela:

“When we look around the world, actually, we see a number of countries and leaders – Chávez is one of them but not the only one – who, over the last eight years, has become more and more negative and oppositional to the United States. … The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to … turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work.”

This is a remarkable confession, and it didn’t get a fraction of the attention it deserved. Clinton did not name the countries, but in Latin America, Bolivia would have to be included as a country where Washington has incurred resentment by supporting opposition movements against President Evo Morales. And of course there is the 47-year failure of the embargo against Cuba:

“We’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is just saying you’ve got to change.”

She didn’t mention that they are also saying that Washington must change its policy toward Venezuela. President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has consistently defended Hugo Chávez, has told Barack Obama as much and reportedly counselled him at the Summit of the Americas not to listen to his advisers – most of whom have appeared to seek continued hostility toward Venezuela and possibly Bolivia.

It is remarkable that pressure for a reality-based view of the world has had to come from the south, and says a lot about the state of civil society in the US. How is it that nobody from our leading foreign policy institutions could have figured this out years ago? On Cuba, there has been dissent – partly because there are powerful business interests that want access to the island, and partly because 47 years of failure is a long time even for slow learners.

But on Venezuela, the primary focus of US foreign policy in the hemisphere for the past seven years, there has been an overwhelming consensus of fantasy and hype. Chávez is the only democratically elected leader in the world, facing a media that is still overwhelmingly controlled by his political opposition, to be successfully maligned as a “dictator”. And a threat to the US – what exactly has he done to the US, anyway, other than provide a $100m annual subsidy to poor people here for heating oil?

The sad reality is that while the US has at least some civil society organisations that can present an independent view to the public on domestic issues, on foreign policy issues we are much more like Russia. The vast majority of expert opinion on foreign policy that is allowed access to major media in the US consists of government officials, former government officials or people who or are otherwise influenced by the government. This is one reason why it was so easy to invade Iraq and so difficult to get out of there or out of Afghanistan – in spite of the American public’s long-standing lack of enthusiasm for sending combat troops overseas.

Hillary Clinton also took note that Russia, Iran and China are gaining economic and political influence in Latin America, and recognised that we are operating in “a multi-polar world.” This is also obvious – China has recently invested billions in Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba and Ecuador, and agreed to a $10bn currency swap arrangement with Argentina. This week China also passed the US as the number one recipient of Brazilian exports. But Clinton’s recognition of a “multi-polar world” is unusual and probably unprecedented for a US secretary of state.

The signals from Washington remain mixed. The state department last week took another gratuitous swipe at Venezuela, listing the country as a “terrorist safe haven”, among other unsubstantiated allegations. (A few days later, Venezuela deported five Colombian guerillas to their home country). Obama’s top economic adviser Larry Summers recently made a point of saying that Argentina would not qualify for the IMF’s flexible credit line, from which Mexico had just received a $47bn commitment.

Washington is the IMF’s principal overseer. Mexico and Brazil also each have access to a $30bn currency swap arrangement with the US Federal Reserve. These are large commitments, and a reminder that Washington is still using its clout in a time of crisis to play political favourites, rather than contributing to regional balance of payments support.

But Clinton’s unprecedented reality-based remarks are an indication that she and Obama may have taken home some important lessons from their conversations with other presidents at the Summit of the Americas on 22 April. Such new thinking would be long overdue.

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/07-10

Tags: American Imperialism, Latin America, Red Phoenix

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Categories Anti-War, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Economic Exploitation, Ecuador, El Salvador, Government, Guatemala, Haiti, History, Imperialism, International, Mexico, Puerto Rico, United States History, Venezuela
Author The Red Phoenix

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Dirty Wars: Pope Francis’ Ties to Argentina’s Right-wing Junta

Political Cartoon: Pope Francis I, good friend of Argentina’s dictatorship

The Rise and Fall of Third Worldism – Part 1

PART ONE: “Two, Three, many Vietnams”: National Liberation and the Rise of the Third World (1945 – 1991)

Nobel Prize: A tale of ignoble peace laureates

The NYT and the School of Assassins

Former Argentine dictators found guilty of kidnapping babies

Former Argentine dictators found guilty of baby thefts

Juan Perón and Social-Fascism in Argentina

Review of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”

Review: Glenn Beck’s “Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die”

US Strategy in Latin America was Wrong

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