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By Binu Mathew

Today is the 100th day of the heroic strike of the Film and Television institute of India (FTII), Pune students. For the last nine days three students are on hunger strike. Their hunger strike is now on for 200 hours. Lives are at stake, yet the Government of India doesn’t move. The strike started by 200 odd students of FTII has spread far and wide, to every nook and corner of India and has become a movement against saffronisation of India’s secular polity.

The strike began with the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as Chairman of India’s premier film institute. He is best known as Yudhishthira in the popular Mahabharata TV series. Chauhan has appeared in television serials, generally of inferior quality, and several ‘B’ grade Bollywood films, some of them can be termed as semi-porns. He is an active member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He extensively campaigned for the BJP in Haryana during the Lok Sabha elections last year.

FTII panel also was reconstituted with four of the eight members aligned with the ruling party. Some call them propagandists of BJP and its parent organisation Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sang(RSS). These include Anagha Ghaisas, who has made several documentary films of Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Narendra Pathak, a former president of the Maharashtra ABVP; Pranjlal Saikia, an office bearer of an RSS-linked organisation; and Rahul Solapurkar, who is intimately associated with the BJP.

The strike began with the slogans “No Colour” “No Fear”. Observers were curious why students took up this slogan “No Colour” as these appointments were clearly colour coded. The colour of ‘Hindutva’ – Saffron.

No one should mistake ‘Hindutva’ with the religion Hinduism. Hinduism is generally believed world over as a religion of tolerance and peace, mainly taking the life and practices of Mahatma Gandhi as an example. But people living in the strictly hierarchical caste structure of Hindusism tell a tale of oppression severe than racism. Untouchability is still practiced in many parts of India. Caste violence, rapes and killings still occur regularly in India. One of the demands of the Dalit groups in the “World Conference against Racism” held in Durban, South Africa 2001 was to term caste system as racism. But the Durban declaration failed to term caste discrimination as racism.

Hindutva on the other hand extols casteism and terms it as the best method of social organization suited to India. Manusmriti (Law of Manu) the moral and code of casteism would put the most extreme racist to shame. The Manusmriti decreed that if a lower caste person were to recite the Vedas, his tongue must be cut off, if he dared to listen to a recitation of the Vedas, molten metal be poured into his ears. In another section it says, with whatever limb a man of a low caste does hurt to (a man of the three) highest (castes), even that limb shall be cut off. A Sudra who raises his hand or a stick, shall have his hand cut off; he who in anger kicks with his foot, shall have his foot cut off. A low-caste man who tries to place himself on the same seat with a man of a high caste, shall be branded on his hip and be banished, or (the king) shall cause his buttock to be gashed . If out of arrogance a Sudra spits (on a superior), the king shall cause both his lips to be cut off; if he urines (on him), the penis; if he breaks wind (against him), the anus. If he lays hold of the hair (of a superior), the (king) should unhesitatingly cut off his hands, likewise (if he takes him) by the feet, the beard, the neck, or the scrotum. It also dehumanized women and prescribed that if married man dies, the widow should jump into the funeral pyre and die with him. This horrific crime called Sati was being practiced in India until a few decades ago.

The official biography of Hedgewar, written by C. P Bhishikar ‘Sanghvriksh Ke Beej’ throws light on the emergence of RSS. Dr Hedgewar alongwith B. S. Moonje, L.V. Paranjape, B.B. Thalkar and Baburao Savarkar who were all ardent advocates of Brahminical revivalism – founded Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. Explaining the need to start RSS, Hedgewar is reported to have given two reasons : one, Muslim threat and second, assertion of the lower castes.

B.S.Moonje, one of the founders of RSS, had a personal audience with Mussolini on March 19, 1931 at 3 p.m., in Palazzo Venzia, the headquarters of the Fascist government. He visited Italy’s Central Military School of Physical Education, the fascist academy of Physical Education and Balilla and Avanguardisti, organisations. According to an article written by Shamsul Islam, one of foremost scholars on Hindutva in India, titled “Marketing Fascism As Hindutva”

On March 31, 1934 Moonje, Hedgewar and others had a meeting, the subject of which was the military organisation of the Hindus, along Italian and German lines. Moonje told the gathering: “I have thought out a scheme based on Hindu Dharm Shashtra which provides for standardisation of Hinduism throughout India… But the point is that this ideal cannot be brought to effect unless we have our own swaraj with a Hindu as a dictator like Shivaji of old or Mussolini or Hitler of the present day in Italy or Germany.” Moonje also wrote Preface to ‘The Scheme of the Central Hindu Military Society and its Military School’ where he declared: “This training is meant for qualifying and fitting our boys for the game of killing masses of men with the ambition of winning victory with the best possible causalities (sic) of dead and wounded while causing the utmost possible to the adversary”.

M.S. Golwalker, the econd Sarsanghchalak of RSS, writes in his book “We Or Our Nationhood Defined”

” The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing,deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation: let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races who have chosen to live in our country.”

So Hindutva has nothing to do with Hinduism. The RSS considers its saffron coloured flag as its Guru. It is a political ideology closer to Fascism which envisages a theocratic Hindu nation where minorities live without even citizenship rights.

The first victim of this fascist ideology was none other than the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi who was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a member of the RSS. Soon after the assassination of Gandhi, RSS was banned. Until then it was working like secretive fascist organisations in Europe without a constitution and never keeping membership records. The constitution of RSS was written in 1949 on the insistence of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, then home minister of India, as a pre-condition to lift the ban. The constitution states that the Sangh had “no politics” and would remain “devoted purely to cultural work” (Article 4(b) of the RSS constitution)

After the ban was lifted, RSS worked quietly and spawned several political organizations one of which was Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which later became BJP.

After decades long efforts to polarize the society on communal lines BJP secured absolute majority in the parliamentary election of 2014 . As soon as Narendra Modi, who oversaw the Gujarat Pogrom of 2002 in which more than one thousand muslims were massacred , who also faces many criminal cases in courts of law, assumed office as the Prime Minister of India RSS quietly went about its business of changing the character of India.

The main agenda of RSS is to destroy the secular character of India and define India in terms of its fascist Hindutva ideology. The very first appointment of such nature was that of Prof. Y.Sudarshan Rao, as the chief of ICHR (Indian Council for Historical Research). Prof. Rao claims that epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata are historical events. Then nobel laureate Amartya Sen was forced out from the Chancellorship of Nalanda university. Well known writer Sethu was forced out from the Chirmanship of National Book Trust of India. Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle, a dalit discussion forum, was banned in Chennai IIT. Apart from the Chennai IIT, there was not much resistance against the cultural occupation of spaces by Hindutva forces.

Then came FTII. Although the students started it as a “No Colour” resistance, the Saffron/Hindutva/Fascist colour of the agenda was very apparent to the discerning viewer. As the strike gathered momentum and support poured in from different quarters of the civil society, the students themselves dropped the “No Colour” slogan. The larger civil society saw it as an attack on the very idea of India and its long cherished secular values.

As the strike was still going on, shedding its claim that the RSS is only a cultural organisation and not a political body.RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended a co-ordination committee meeting of 93 top RSS-BJP leaders in Delhi. In that meeting, strategies were chalked out how to take control of cultural institutions of India. The government was unabashed in its stand to clear India of ‘malicious’ elements.

The DNA Reported:

After the meeting Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma and HRD Minister Smriti Irani pledged to remove all traces of western culture from India by launching a nationwide movement. “We will cleanse every area of public discourse that has been westernised and where Indian culture and civilisation need to be restored – be it the history we read or our cultural heritage or our institutes that have been polluted over years,” Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma said. The culture and HRD ministries will prepare independent road maps for the proposed culture ‘cleansing’ exercise which will involve school curricula, art and cinema, science and technology and libraries. “We have 39 institutions under the culture ministry, including grand museums and the National School of Drama, but we have not been up to the mark in presenting our Indian cultural heritage in a right way,” said Sharma. “We will totally revamp all these institutions after a detailed roadmap is prepared.”

All other spheres of Indian society is slowly being saffronised, including the food, dress habits to criminal justice delivery system. That is a subject for another article. The beef ban in several states, the dictats of several ministers and other Hindutva elements to young women how to dress, when to go out are some of the examples.

In this highly polarized and communally charged atmosphere the students of FTII held their ground. The credit goes to the students of FTII who held fast to their ideals, in spite of threats, false cases, intimidation , even putting their own future and lives at stake and fought their battle to give the whole of India time to reflect on the direction the country is taking. Now the FTII strike has become a battleground for the whole of India, to decide to which direction the country should be headed, to a new dawn of liberal, democratic, secular polity or a long dark night of fascism?

Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org

19 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Andre Vltchek

Why should I care whether Iran has nukes? It most likely doesn’t, but even if it does… it never attacked anyone, never overthrew any government, and never performed experiments on human beings. It had not committed a single genocide, and never dreamed about conquering the world.

So why should I even bother to think much about Iran’s nuclear program, big or small, “peaceful” or defensive?

If Iran is capable of defending itself – then excellent; I am only happy! At least it will not be wiped out from the face of the Earth, as happened to its unfortunate neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan or to a bit more distant but not more fortunate countries like Libya.

Do I want this great, ancient Iranian culture to become defenseless and to eventually disappear, to be destroyed, or to get replaced by aggressive Western consumerism, arrogance and pathological lack of compassion? Or more concretely: Do I want Iran to turn into yet another Western colony? I don’t! I want it to survive and to thrive. As I want great Chinese and great Arab cultures to survive and flourish. As I want all cultures on Earth to survive and flourish.

But it seems that, as the Empire is on its final bellicose and ideological crusade, unless a truly independent nation begins to roar, unless it shows both its teeth and its missiles, it has almost no chance to survive.

Iran is roaring and it is also logically explaining where it stands. It has both guts and big heart.

***

Iran is ordered to prove its “innocence”, all of the time. There are entire “international” (sponsored and handled by the West) organizations and commissions challenging its course, sticking their muzzles into Iran’s internal affairs.

Iran is told to comply, “or else”. Its tormentors insist on “transparency”, while themselves staying in total murkiness. They are above the law; in fact they are the law. In the world they created, they themselves don’t have to prove absolutely anything, while their victims are routinely challenged, scrutinized, cornered, bullied and humiliated.

After suffering, after bleeding incessantly, it appears that Iran had finally enough. It is no longer willing to play this neo-colonialist game. It is now going public with its grievances.

***

At the opening of the “2nd International Congress on 17.000 Iranian Martyrs”, (held in Teheran on August 31 – September 1st, 2015) I was allowed to speak right after the President of Iran, Mr. Hassan Rouhani.

President Rouhani gave a powerful speech about the terrorism in the region: “Maybe for many people it is something new, but not for us… Today there are powers in Europe and the United States – they are silent about some terrorist groups, while supportive of others. Can we really win against the terrorism like this?”

“You are being targeted because you are taking care of your people”, I said after him, in my discourse, as I was designated a keynote speaker of the Conference. “Iran suffers similar attacks as Latin America. The Western imperialism tries to destroy virtually every revolutionary, socialist country. But the world is changing and you are not alone. As Latin America is not alone.”

17.000 Iranian victims; 17.000 human lives lost. And almost no one in the West seems to know! How convenient. How cowardly. How servile!

The West supports the Saudis, Qataris and other Wahhabi extremists. It had been arming ISIL (Dash). It already destroyed almost every socially oriented, moderate and secular nation in the Muslim world, from Yemen to Syria, from Egypt to Indonesia. Little surprise that independent-minded and proud Iran is now at the very top of the Empire’s hit list.

After all, Iran is standing by Syria and it is supportive of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hezbollah is the only true social force in that otherwise collapsing country; the only social force that incorporates several religious and ethnic groups. And it is locked in a dogfight with ISIL, and it fights Israel whenever Israel decides to invade Lebanon. That is why Hezbollah is also on that hit list (or call it “terrorist list”) of the West. The fact that Teheran is backing Hezbollah is yet another reason why Iran is ostracized by Washington, London and Paris.

Teheran is simply spoiling some of the most outrageous colonialist plans of both North America and Europe.

***

It is time for the Western public to wake up and pay attention to the fact that thousands of common Iranian people are dying, have been murdered, for absolutely no reasons… both common people, as well as prominent figures, including some of the country’s top scientists.

I saw mothers and wives holding photos of their murdered loved ones, in terrible grief. I saw men without legs. I saw archive photos depicting aftermaths of countless horrific terrorist explosions, executed by The Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organization (MKO), an anti-Iran terrorist group, and by other pro-Western groups.

To me, all this was not new, but it is shocking nevertheless. I saw how the Empire has been murdering thousands, even millions of those who have been reluctant to succumb to its dictate – in the Middle East, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

But here, in Iran, the West has been behaving with almost absolute ludicrousness. While torturing the country, it was shamelessly insisting that the entire world should actually fear it and despise it. Its propaganda against Iran reached crescendo.

And while murdering Iranian people directly or through vicious sanctions, the West has been demanding from Teheran ever newer proves of its “guiltlessness”.

The entire situation would be grotesque, truly laughable, if those thousands of innocent people would not be dying.

When I spoke in Teheran, my voice was shaking. I addressed the Iranian government and the academia: “We are all brothers”, I said, old images of Chavez and Ahmadinejad embracing, appearing in my mind. Then I recalled the US-sponsored coups in Venezuela, and few moments later, those thousands of innocent, slaughtered Iranian civilians.

I spoke about resistance to imperialism, about new powerful media outlets in Latin America, Russia, and China as well as in Iran itself.

I told them about my 1.000-page book “Exposing Lies of the Empire”, depicting virtually all corners of the globe that have already been ravished by the West. I spoke about those fascist, fundamentalist doctrines behind such attacks. I told them what I saw, how devastated I have been, but also how determined to resist! And I concluded:

“Why is Iran one of the main targets of the terrorists who are supported by the West? It is obviously because Iran is doing many of the right things, for its own people and for the world!”

***

Iran, one of the most criticized and scrutinized nations, is in reality one of the most peaceful and long-suffering countries on earth.

The West has been tormenting the Iranian people sadistically, continuously and relentlessly.

Since the ancient Greek Empire, Iran (Persia) was continuously invaded and partitioned, although never fully colonized.

In 1953 the US and Britain overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, a socialist leader dedicated to social changes. During his government, the Iranian people were enjoying subsidized housing, good education and medical care. He also launched a comprehensive land reform. In order to improve life of Iranian people, he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The Brits and the North Americans, of course, considered such behavior as unacceptable. Mosaddegh was ousted, and a tyrant monarch, Shah, put on the throne. Cheap oil began to flow to the West, while thousands of Iranian people were savagely tortured and killed. The Empire later committed the same crimes in Indonesia (1965) and in Chile (1973), to name just two places.

After the Shah was forced to leave, the West armed and encouraged Iraq to invade its neighbor, Iran. In 1980, a terrible war erupted. As a result, around one million people died.

When Iran decided to develop its peaceful nuclear program, brutal sanctions were imposed, destroying lives of millions, including women and children.

Then the extremist terrorist groups were “put to work” by both the West and Israel. Their goal was to spread fear and devastation, and to murder Iran’s prominent scientists.

Attempts to destabilize Iran are constant but had proven to be futile.

Shaken, injured but determined, Iran is facing vicious attacks calmly and with dignity. The more self-respect it radiates, the more vicious propaganda and loud barking are coming from the West, and the more chilling are the threats.

The position of Washington, Paris and London is obvious (and it has been for centuries): non-Western countries have no right to defend themselves. They only exist in order to supply North America and Europe with cheap raw materials and labor. They cannot decide their fate.

And there is no compromise on the table. Either a country fully submits to the Western dictate, or it is destroyed.

But Iran refused to accept such “arrangement” of the world. Too mighty to be out rightly attacked, it rose against Western global dictatorship. Of course Russia did, too. And so did China. Most of Latin American countries did as well. And now several African and Asian countries are also determined to join those who are refusing to kneel.

The West trembles: its dogmas are being challenged! And it does what it has been doing for many terrible centuries: it is trying to murder, to deceive and to trick. It is desperately fighting for being able to maintain its iron grip on the World.

At the Conference, ideas were exchanged, and concepts erected. Several speakers described how the West has been supporting extreme, ultra-conservative Islamic teaching -Wahabbism – and used it against the socialist Islam, against countries like Turkey, against several Arab states, against the Soviet Union, China and now against Iran. Ahmadinejad called Wahhabism “a cancer that made the entire Middle East sick.” I also argued that it is also making sick entire Indonesia.

One of the speakers, Professor Azizi, declared from the stage of Shahid Beheshti University Conference Center:

“Americans intend to establish their own religion, their own version of Islam… They created DAESH (ISIL) in order to support such version, such “new religion”… They do it this way, covertly, because they would not dare to fight Islam openly, fearing a great backlash.”

I heard terms like “social terrorism”.

Finian Cunningham, renowned columnist from Northern Ireland, compared the operations of British death squads in his country to other acts of terror that the Empire has been spreading all over the world, including places like Yemen and Iran: “Illegal war of aggression against sovereign nations.”

I was told by several Iranian participants, repeatedly, that one hidden “secret” which the Western media has been keeping away from the public, is that both Ahmadinejad and Chavez were actually building two respective socialist countries, two states with different history and cultures, but with very similar, socialist principles.

Western propaganda is depicting Iran as some brutal religious dogmatic state, not as an enormous 80-million inhabitants country that is re-inventing itself on the values of the socialist Islam.

High above the city, at the viewing platform of the magnificent Milad Tower, I listened to a passionate discourse of my new friend, Soraya Sebahpour-Ulrich, a great Iranian thinker, and a stepdaughter of a former cabinet minister who also happened to be the Shah’s ghostwriter:

“The world sees Iran not as it is, but as it is projected by Western media. It pains me. I see the kindness and beauty, and then I am told that it is being ugly. And this destructed image is stabbing me in the heart. I just want to say: ‘I am Iran and Iran is me… I want people to see me as I am, and I want them to see real Iran.”

Soraya also believes that Iran is a socialist country, and she wants it to stay this way: “This is Iran that I love and appreciate much more than that Iran, where I had a very privileged life.”

***

I report that I saw great socialist city – Teheran – standing tall, proud and determined.

Teheran with its old bazaars and mosques, palaces and mountains, but above all with thousands of projects designed to provide welfare for its people.

In Teheran, like in Caracas, I witnessed a breathtaking struggle for a better world. Sanctions or not, Teheran is impressive, with its modern public transportation system, huge public parks, wide sidewalks, vast cultural institutions, free medical facilities and schools.

I did not see slums. I did not see people begging. I did not witness frustration or rage. Instead, I felt kindness at each and every corner, and I also felt great confidence of the nation with tremendous culture and 5 thousand years of recorded history.

At one point, I was driven to the studios of Press TV and asked to comment on the diplomatic conflict between the USA and Russia. There was absolute trust. Few minutes later, IRINN TV interviewed me on the West–Iran relationship. Radio stations, including IRIB, were lining up, microphones ready. Some interviews were live. No one was asking those ‘BBC screening question’: “What are you going to say, Mr. Vltchek?”

It was like interacting with other progressive channels – like TeleSUR or RT.

Iran was not scared of me, as I was not scared of Iran.

What I said in Teheran, I have been saying again and again in Caracas, Quito, Beijing and Pretoria: “If we are united, we will never be defeated! Venezuela may appear far away on the world map, but in reality it is standing right here, shoulder to shoulder with you.”

The powerful specter of a united, internationalist, and anti-imperialist block horrifies the West. That is why Iran is now under attack. That is why fascist gangsters are hitting Venezuela. That is why the imperialists are encircling Russia and China. That is why Western propaganda is demonizing all proud and noble countries around the world.

17.000 Iranian victims of terrorism sponsored by the West. More than one million victims since the West overthrew the progressive government in 1953. What a tremendous toll! But true freedom is priceless.

I report that Iran is standing! And it will not succumb to vicious and senseless attacks. It will never kneel, because it knows – surrendering would lead directly to slavery.

***

One is of course tempted to ask: how much is too much? How many people have to die, before the patience of the oppressed of the world runs out?

I interacted with many Iranian people. Their peaceful nuclear program does not scare me. And it does not scare people of Western and Central Asia. Iranian culture is thousands of years old and it is deep and tolerant. It gained the trust of the world; of people who are not blinded by toxic propaganda.

But I have to admit that the Western Empire increasingly disgusts me, as it terrifies billions of people all over the world. It already lost all breaks, all sense of decency. It already ruined and finished billons of lives, by spreading and forcing its fundamentalist dogmas, its greed and incomparable brutality. I don’t want more lives to be destroyed. I don’t want more countries, more nations, to be shattered.

That is why I feel that as long as Iran and countries like Iran are standing, so are we!

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book:Exposing Lies of the Empire, “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa.

18 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Editorial of the Socialist

For decades the Palace of Westminster has been almost completely devoid of serious disagreements. All three of the major establishment parties – the Tories, Labour and the Lib-Dems – have agreed on the central questions such as the supremacy of the ‘free market’, support for privatisation and public service cuts, the necessity of austerity and the need to undermine workers’ rights to make Britain more ‘competitive’.

Nine members of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, isolated on Labour’s weak left wing, were very often the lone opponents to the endless attacks on the rights of working class people. Despite their best efforts they resembled prisoners occasionally smuggling out a note to the population outside.

But now the world has been turned upside down. The Blairites – who have considered Labour as their possession for decades – are now the 4.5%: the woeful result for the most right-wing Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the most prominent MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group, are the leader of the opposition and the shadow chancellor. The pro-austerity consensus has been smashed with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party with an overwhelming 59.5% of the vote. The hopes have been raised of millions who want to see a society for the 99% not the 1%. This is a tremendous step forward.

The Socialist Party has long argued that the potential exists in Britain for a mass anti-austerity, workers’ party. We have pointed to the five million mainly working class people who have stopped voting Labour since 1997. Profoundly disillusioned with the establishment parties many have stopped voting altogether, some have voted Green, for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, or even for Ukip in order to protest against the establishment. The austerity-lite of New Labour held no attraction to them.

An outlet for voiceless anger

We have argued that – if it could find an outlet – the up until now voiceless anger at austerity could very quickly become a powerful force. In Scotland it found an outlet in the independence referendum and then in the SNP landslide at the general election. In England and Wales it has now found an unexpected channel in Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Labour leader. No-one, least of all Jeremy Corbyn – who initially stood because it was ‘his turn’ – expected this outcome.

The possibility of building a powerful mass party can be seen from the events of the last few days. We have consistently fought for such a party. We considered it more likely to come into being from forces outside of the Labour Party – as has been the trend in most countries – given the Labour Party’s transformation into a capitalist party.

The lack of democracy in the Labour Party and growing levels of working class alienation from it meant a movement within the Labour Party structures was not the most likely scenario. Nonetheless, we have no fetish about by what route the crisis of working class political representation would be solved and have never excluded the possibility of Labour swinging left. As long ago as 2002 we argued that, “under the impact of great historic shocks – a serious economic crisis, mass social upheaval – the ex-social democratic parties could move dramatically towards the left” (Socialism Today September 2002).

However, the reality is that the Corbyn surge has mainly not come from within the Labour Party but from ‘outside’ – new members and registered supporters who were attracted by the hope of something different. This is a new party in the process of formation which will face relentless attack from the ‘old’ pro-capitalist New Labour.

Ironically, it was Ed Miliband’s further decimation of Labour Party democracy which created the conditions for this completely unintended consequence. Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband’s aide, has made it crystal clear that the intention of the Collins Review was to remove the final vestiges of trade union ‘influence’ in the Labour Party. In doing so, however, Miliband inadvertently opened the election to hundreds of thousands of people who were enthused by Corbyn.

The registered supporter scheme, where anyone could sign up for the price of a pint, enabled 105,000 people who did not want to commit to joining the Labour Party to vote in the contest. Another 55,000 of them were ‘purged’ and prevented from voting – including trade union leader Mark Serwotka – in a desperate bid to prevent Jeremy Corbyn winning.

It made no difference. More than 80% of the £3ers voted for Corbyn. Others – including students who could join the Labour Party for £1 and ex-members returning joined the Labour Party in order to vote for Corbyn. They joined a largely empty party. The turnover in Labour Party membership means that only a minority of those who voted in this election were eligible to vote in the 2010 contest. As a result, although the Blairite candidates combined vote among the full members was higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s he still came top – with 49% of the vote – in the members section as well.

Enthused millions

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has left the right wing of the Labour Party on the back foot and enthused millions. The question is how best to consolidate and extend on this success. Winning the leadership of Labour is a very long way from transforming the party as a whole. In attempting to do so, Corbyn and his supporters will face the determined opposition of not just the right-wing dominated Parliamentary Labour Party and Labour machine, but also of the capitalist class.

The Financial Times editorial the day after Corbyn’s victory described it as a ‘catastrophe’ for ‘British politics itself’ despairing that: “it places a maverick far-left figure at the head of a mainstream political party”. Thatcher considered Blair and New Labour her greatest success. Labour had been transformed into a party that could be relied on to act in the interests of the 1%. There will now be a huge campaign to try and extinguish the anti-austerity flame that has been lit with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.

The right wing of the Labour Party are on the back foot because of the scale of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory. Their dreams of ‘getting rid of him by Christmas’ have had to be dropped. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Labour right will attempt to imprison and undermine Corbyn with the aim of removing him as soon as possible. They will not be reconciled to a Corbyn/McDonnell leadership by calls for unity and attempts to build a ‘broad church’. To win requires building on the popular movement against austerity that found a voice in his election campaign. Unity has to be built around clear anti-austerity policies.

The shadow cabinet is a mixed bag. The appointment of John McDonnell as shadow chancellor, to the horror of the capitalist class, shows a willingness to oppose austerity. The same cannot be said of all of the appointees. The shadow justice secretary, the Blairite Lord Falconer, has a record of introducing draconian anti-democratic legislation. Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary, has previously supported privatisation and closure of hospitals. Andy Burnham, the shadow home secretary, showed how right-wing he is at the start of the leadership election campaign, supporting further benefit cuts and opposing the mansion tax as “the politics of envy”.

Of course many on the right of the party have refused to serve in the shadow cabinet, but there is an element of a division of labour, with those inside the tent trying to imprison Jeremy Corbyn, and others trying to sabotage from the back benches.

To defeat the onslaught Jeremy Corbyn will face going beyond the constraints of the right-wing dominated Labour Party machine or the niceties of Labour’s constitution, recast by Blair.

As a starting point we would urgently encourage Jeremy Corbyn to organise a conference of all those who have supported him, plus the many trade unions – including non-affiliated unions like the RMT, PCS and FBU – which support a fighting anti-austerity programme. The Socialist Party would participate in such a conference and would encourage all other anti-austerity campaigners to do the same.

A campaign needs to be launched to recreate Labour’s democratic structures. Labour ‘moderates’ are already bleating that the left will ‘seize the party’s levers of power’ under Corbyn’s leadership. What they mean by this is “giving more control over policy to the annual conference and the National Executive Committee and less influence to the Parliamentary Labour Party” (The Independent 11.09.15). In other words restoring some of the party democracy that existed in the past!

They are also hysterically attacking any attempt to re-select MPs. Yet the right to re-select MPs just means the democratic right of a party’s members to replace an MP that has voted against the party’s policies. That should be uncontroversial. However, it is not a surprise that it upsets Labour MPs who have voted for welfare cuts, austerity and war. A fight needs to be launched to implement every one of the democratic measures which so terrifies Labour’s right wing, including restoring the rights of the organised working class, via the trade unions, within the party, introducing mandatory reselection of MPs and more.

This does not mean simply returning to the party structure which existed thirty years ago. The Labour Party was founded by the trade unions, as part of a struggle by the organised working class to create its own political voice. Nonetheless, from the beginning Labour was a capitalist workers’ party – with a working class base but a pro-capitalist leadership, but the working class was able to influence it via the party’s democratic structures. An essential part of the transformation of the Labour Party into a capitalist party over recent decades was the removal of the trade union vote within the party. This should be restored, but on a more democratic basis; fully accountable to rank-and-file trade union members.

At the same time a Corbyn-led Labour Party needs to reach out to all those opposing austerity, including community campaigns and other political parties. A new constitution could be based on the original, federal constitution of the Labour Party. Even today a few remnants of that federal constitution remain, with some MPs standing on behalf of the Cooperative Party under the Labour Party umbrella. Why couldn’t that be extended to allow anti-austerity parties and campaigns to join with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party as affiliates, while maintaining their own independent identity, just as the ILP and John Maclean’s British Socialist Party were able to do in the first twenty years of the party?

Welcoming approach

Such an approach would be able to reach out to the millions, particularly of young people, who are anti-austerity and enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s victory, but are nervous of any hint of a ‘top-down’ party, particularly given their experience of the Labour Party. The dangers of a top-down approach were demonstrated in the mid 1990s by the stillbirth of the Arthur Scargill-led Socialist Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn has up until now rightly taken a flexible and welcoming approach to the movement that has sprung up around him, but any insistence by his campaign that the only way to support Jeremy Corbyn is to sign up as a Labour Party member under the existing constitution would be a mistake, which potentially could act to repel potential supporters.

At local level anti-austerity alliances will be needed to bring together all of those who want to fight the cuts. This is urgent. Council services have already been cut by 39% and will face further catastrophic cuts next spring. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly made the call for councils to stand together and refuse to implement government cuts.

Some of Corbyn’s supporters however, like Owen Jones, are now emphasising the importance of him being seen to be ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’ and therefore argue that Labour councils should continue to implement Tory cuts. This would be a terrible mistake. A Corbyn-led Labour Party will be popular if it is prepared to oppose austerity. Miliband showed clearly that implementing it with a sad face will never enthuse potential Labour voters.

It is hoped that many Labour councillors will now heed Jeremy Corbyn’s call and begin to oppose austerity instead of carrying it out. Where they do so the Socialist Party will fully support their stance. But unfortunately given the character of the majority of Labour councillors (only 6% of them backed Jeremy Corbyn) it is likely that many, probably the majority, will continue to implement government cuts.

Where this happens they should be opposed by anti-austerity activists at the ballot box. This will strengthen the hand of Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-austerity movement as a whole. TUSC is already writing to Labour candidates for next May’s election in order to discuss with them their attitude to voting for cuts, with a warning that we will aim to stand against all those who continue to close our libraries, lay off council workers, evict victims of the bedroom tax and all the other cruelties that come with voting for cuts.

On a national basis it is vital that Jeremy Corbyn continues to put forward the very popular policies which won him the leadership election such as nationalisation of rail and the energy companies, a £10 an hour minimum wage, free education, council house building, and repeal of the anti-union laws.

It is nonsense to suggest these are unpopular with the general public. After all 68%, 67% and 66% support renationalisation of the energy companies, the Royal Mail and the railway companies respectively. The latest polling from Lord Ashcroft has been ignored by the capitalist media, because it showed 52% of people agree that a ‘radical socialist alternative would be a good thing’.

‘People’s QE’

However, it is also necessary to go beyond the very good demands Jeremy Corbyn puts forward. He has raised the popular idea of ‘people’s QE’ but has not drawn all the conclusions about what would be necessary to implement such a policy. He merely calls for ‘meaningful regulation of the banking sector’ rather than for nationalisation of the banks under democratic control, for example.

The experience of Syriza in Greece, where the leadership of an anti-austerity party capitulated to the pressure of big business and is now implementing austerity, shows that defeating austerity requires a determined struggle with a clear goal. Endless austerity and growing inequality are not an accident; they flow from the needs of capitalism, where profits of a few have been restored at the expense of the majority.

To permanently end austerity requires a break with capitalism. That means calling for the nationalisation – under democratic working class control – of the major companies and banks that dominate the economy. Only in this way would it be possible to begin to build a democratic socialist society planned to meet the needs of the majority instead of having, as at present, a society driven by maximising the profits of the 1%.

The most important single consequence of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is that these issues – how can inequality be ended and austerity be defeated and, above all, what is socialism and how can it be achieved are now being discussed widely. A new generation is hearing about socialist ideas for the first time. This is a great step forward which must now be built on.

18 September, 2015
Socialistparty.org.uk

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

A 14-year old Muslim student takes his science project to school. Instead of appreciating his talent the school teachers call police. The teen ager is interrogated for one and a half hour. Taken to juvenile prison, fingerprinted and photographed like a criminal. During this ordeal he was not allowed to contact his parents.

What lesson the Muslim students will get from this episode and what advice I will give to Muslim students who often face bullying at school? Don’t take your innovative science project to school.

This is the horrifying story of Ahmed Mohamed of Irving High School in Texas.

Ironically, the mainstream media is now portraying him as hero of the Silicon Valley for his creative skill in making an electronic clock that was considered a bomb by teachers and police.

To borrow Zack Beauchamp of Think Progress, this is textbook racial and religious profiling: Mohamed looked like what the Irving police thought terrorists looked like, so they treated him differently.

Ahmed told NBC Dallas Fort Worth that his family surname repeatedly came up in police questioning. “I really don’t think it’s fair, because I brought something to school that wasn’t a threat to anyone. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just showed my teachers something and I end up being arrested later that day,” he said.

The CNN reported this graphic account of Ahmed’s arrest of Monday Sept 14:

By Thursday, more details of the 14-year-old’s arrest in Irving, Texas, came to light. In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Ahmed said he was pulled out of class at MacArthur High School by his principal and five police officers and taken to a room where he was questioned for about an hour and a half. He said he asked the adults if he could call his parents. “They told me ‘No, you can’t call your parents,'” Ahmed said. “‘You’re in the middle of an interrogation at the moment.’ They asked me a couple of times, ‘Is it a bomb?’ and I answered a couple of times, ‘It’s a clock.'” “I felt like I was a criminal,” the teenager said. “I felt like I was a terrorist. I felt like all the names I was called.”

Hayes asked what he meant.

In middle school, Ahmed said, he had been called “bomb maker” and a “terrorist.”

“Just because of my race and my religion,” he said, adding that when he walked into the room where he was questioned, an officer reclined in a chair and remarked, “That’s who I thought it was.” “I took it to mean he was pointing at me for what I am, my race,” the freshman explained.

Adding insult to injury, Ahmed suspended for three days from the school. The school defended its cruel action as reported by Max Fisher of Vox Media:

This arrest, clearly, should never have happened. But one would like to expect at least that the Irving school, … would realize its mistake. That the school would apologize to Mohamed for humiliating and terrorizing him, acknowledge its mistake, and use it as a teaching moment to discuss racism and profiling.That is not what has happened. Instead, even after learning that the clock was just a clock built as an educational project, the school suspended Mohamed for three days and sent out a letter, which acknowledges no mistake whatsoever on the school’s part even though by then school officials knew the clock was harmless, is infuriating to read for its tone-deafness.

It seems to imply that Mohamed was at fault for violating the “Student Code of Conduct.”The letter also asks students to “immediately report any suspicious items and / or suspicious behavior,” in effect asking students and parents help to perpetuate the school’s practice of racist profiling, even after that profiling had been clearly demonstrated as without merit. It is appalling that school officials would still think this way even after their arrest had been exposed as a horrible mistake, but it is especially telling that they would wish to announce this fact to students’ parents as well.

Social Media drive

Nobody would have noticed Ahmed Mohamed’s ordeal but thanks to social media his arrest news went viral. His sisters, 18-year-old Eyman and 17-year-old Ayisha, set up a Twitter account for him, @IStandWithAhmed, and watched it balloon to thousands of followers within hours. His sisters also posted his picture in hand cuff.

Thousands of Twitter users praised the boy’s initiative and questioned why he was detained including Nasa scientists, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Barrack Obama.

“Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great,” President Obama wrote on Twitter.

“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The future belongs to people like Ahmed.”

Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, said the case goes to show how stereotypes can cloud the judgment of even the most “good-hearted people.”

“It’s clear that at least some of Ahmed’s teachers failed him,” Earnest said. “That’s too bad, but it’s not too late for all of us to use this as a teachable moment and to search our own conscience for biases in whatever form they take.”

The White House also extended the teen an invitation to speak with NASA scientists and astronauts at next month’s Astronomy Night.

Republican Presidential candidates not sympathetic

Not surprisingly, three Republican Presidential candidates – Bobby Jindal, Gov. George Pataki and Sen. Lindsey Graham – were not sympathetic to Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest on hoax bomb suspicion.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal lauded Irving school officials and police for erring on the side of caution when Ahmed took his device to MacArthur High School. “I’m glad they’re vigilant,” he told Jake Tapper who was moderating a four-GOP presidential debate at CNN.

“We’re at war, folks,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, another GOP presidential hopeful. “Young men from the Mideast are different from Kim Davis alluding to the Kentucky county clerk briefly jailed this month for defying court orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples citing his religious beliefs. “We’ve got to understand that.”

Former New York Gov. George Pataki didn’t address Ahmed’s situation but said he would have fired Davis, adding that a Muslim county clerk who cited religious beliefs to refuse to exercise her public duty would never have generated such sympathy. [Dallas News – GOP candidates weigh in on Ahmed Mohamed arrest for ‘hoax bomb’]

Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne defends school action

Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne took to Facebook to defend the actions of the school district and police, saying their daily work helped make Irving “one of the safest cities in the country.”

“I do not fault the school or the police for looking into what they saw as a potential threat,” Van Duyne wrote. “We have all seen terrible and violent acts committed in schools. … Perhaps some of those could have been prevented and lives could have been spared if people were more vigilant.”

The mayor later amended her post, acknowledging that she would be “very upset” had the same thing happened to her own child.

“It is my sincere desire that Irving ISD students are encouraged to use their creativity, develop innovations and explore their interests in a manner that fosters higher learning,” Van Duyne wrote.

“Hopefully, we can all learn from this week’s events and the student, who has obvious gifts, will not feel at all discouraged from pursuing his talent in electronics and engineering.”

Anti-Muslim bigotry in America is out of control

For Max Fisher, Foreign Editor at Vox.com, the arrest of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, was completely in line with a problem that has been growing over the past year: Islamophobia, which is the fear-based hatred of Muslims, is out of control in American society.

To understand why a Texas school would arrest a 14-year-old student for bringing in a homemade clock, it helps to understand what came before: the TV news hosts who declare Muslims “unusually barbaric,” the politicians who gin up fear of Islam, the blockbuster film that depicts even Muslim children as dangerous threats, and the wave of hatred against Muslims that has culminated several times in violence so severe that what happened to Mohamed, while terrible, appears unsurprising and almost normal within the context of ever-worsening American Islamophobia.

Many Americans might be totally unaware this is happening, even though they are surrounded by Islamophobia: on TV, at airport security, in our pop culture and our politics, and inevitably in our schools. Perhaps, then, Mohamed’s arrest will be a wake-up call.

American Islamophobia has grown so severe that, even looking just at the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Mohamed’s Dallas suburb, one can see, in broad daylight, the climate of hostility and fear America’s 2.6 million (read 7 million) Muslims have been made to live in.

Marcus Wohlsen of Wired.com wrote: What would happen if kids across the country decided to take their own homemade clocks to school that they made following those instructions? Who knows. Maybe if enough young people make clocks, teachers and police will at least learn what a clock looks like, even on the inside. Or, if that’s too much to ask, maybe they’ll just learn to trust their students when they describe what they’ve made. We get it: technology can be scary: after all, open up any computer or smart phone, and what’s inside? Circuits! Or should we say, a hoax bomb waiting to happen.

The ACLU of Texas, executive director Terri Burke said, “Ahmed Mohamed’s avoidable ordeal raises serious concerns about racial profiling and the disciplinary system in Texas schools. Instead of encouraging his curiosity, intellect, and ability, the Irving ISD saw fit to throw handcuffs on a frightened 14 year-old Muslim boy wearing a NASA t-shirt and then remove him from school.”

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

18 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

NEW YORK – The ongoing bloodletting in Syria is not only the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster by far, but also one of its gravest geopolitical risks. And the United States’ current approach – a two-front war against the Islamic State and President Bashar al-Assad’s regime – has failed miserably. The solution to the Syrian crisis, including the growing refugee crisis in Europe, must run through the United Nations Security Council.

The roots of US strategy in Syria lie in a strange– and unsuccessful – union of two sources of American foreign policy. One comprises the US security establishment, including the military, the intelligence agencies, and their staunch supporters in Congress. The other source emerges from the human-rights community. Their peculiar merger has been evident in many recent US wars in the Middle East and Africa. Unfortunately, the results have been consistently devastating.

The security establishment is driven by US policymakers’ long-standing reliance on military force and covert operations to topple regimes deemed to be harmful to American interests. From the 1953 toppling of Mohammad Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in Iran and the “other 9/11” (the US-backed military coup in 1973 against Chile’s democratically elected Salvador Allende) to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, regime change has long been the coin of the US security realm.

At the same time, parts of the human-rights community have backed recent US military interventions on the grounds of the “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P. This doctrine, adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 2005, holds that the international community is obliged to intervene to protect a civilian population under massive attack by its own government. In the face of the brutality of Saddam Hussein, Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Assad, some human-rights advocates made common cause with the US security establishment, while China, Russia, and others have argued that R2P has become a pretext for US-led regime change.

The problem, as human-rights advocates should have learned long ago, is that the US security establishment’s regime-change model does not work. What appears to be a “quick fix” to protect local populations and US interests often devolves into chaos, anarchy, civil war, and burgeoning humanitarian crises, as has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. The risks of failure multiply whenever the UN Security Council as a whole does not back the military part of the intervention.

The US intervention in Syria can also be traced to decisions taken by the security establishment a quarter-century ago to overthrow Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East. As then-Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to General Wesley Clark in 1991: “We learned that we can intervene militarily in the region with impunity, and the Soviets won’t do a thing to stop us… [We’ve] got about five to ten years to take out these old Soviet ‘surrogate’ regimes – Iraq, Syria, and the rest – before the next superpower [China] comes along to challenge us in the region.”

When al-Qaeda struck the US on September 11, 2001, the attack was used as a pretext by the security establishment to launch its long-desired war to topple Saddam. When the Arab Spring protests erupted a decade later, the US security establishment viewed the sudden vulnerability of the Qaddafi and Assad regimes as a similar opportunity to install new regimes in Libya and Syria. Such was the theory, at any rate.

In the case of Syria, America’s regional allies also told President Barack Obama’s administration to move on Assad. Saudi Arabia wanted Assad gone to weaken a client state of Iran, the kingdom’s main rival for regional primacy. Israel wanted Assad gone to weaken Iran’s supply lines to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. And Turkey wanted Assad gone to extend its strategic reach and stabilize its southern border.

The humanitarian community joined the regime-change chorus when Assad responded to Arab Spring protesters’ demand for political liberalization by unleashing the army and paramilitaries. From March to August 2011, Assad’s forces killed around 2,000 people. At that point, Obama declared that Assad must “step aside.”

We don’t know the full extent of US actions in Syria after that. On the diplomatic level, the US organized the “Friends of Syria,” mainly Western countries and Middle East allies committed to Assad’s overthrow. The CIA began to work covertly with Turkey to channel arms, financing, and non-lethal support to the so-called “Free Syrian Army” and other insurgent groups operating to topple Assad.

The results have been an unmitigated disaster. While roughly 500 people per month were killed from March to August 2011, some 100,000 civilians – around 3,200 per month – died between September 2011 and April 2015, with the total number of dead, including combatants, reaching perhaps 310,000, or 10,000 per month. And, with the Islamic State and other brutal extremist groups capitalizing on the anarchy created by the civil war, the prospect of peace is more distant than ever.

Military intervention led or backed by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya has produced similar debacles. Toppling a regime is one thing; replacing it with a stable and legitimate government is quite another.

If the US wants better results, it should stop going it alone. The US cannot impose its will unilaterally, and trying to do so has merely arrayed other powerful countries, including China and Russia, against it. Like the US, Russia has a strong interest in stability in Syria and in defeating the Islamic State; but it has no interest in allowing the US to install its choice of regimes in Syria or elsewhere in the region. That is why all efforts by the UN Security Council to forge a common position on Syria have so far foundered.

But the UN route can and must be tried again. The nuclear pact between Iran and the Security Council’s five permanent members (the US, China, France, Russia, and the UK) plus Germany, has just provided a powerful demonstration of the Council’s capacity to lead. It can lead in Syria as well, if the US will set aside its unilateral demand for regime change and work with the rest of the Council, including China and Russia, on a common approach.

In Syria, only multilateralism can succeed. The UN remains the world’s best – indeed its only – hope to stop the Syrian bloodbath and halt the flood of refugees to Europe.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, and, most recently, The Age of Sustainable Development.

15 September 2015

By Ramzy Baroud

When Zionist Haganah militias carried out Operation Yiftach, on May 19 1948, the aim was to drive Palestinians in the northern Safad District which had declared its independence a mere five days earlier, outside the border of Israel.

The ethnic cleansing of Safad and its many villages was not unique to that area. In fact, it was the modus operandi of Zionist militias throughout Palestine. Soon after Israel’s independence, and the conquering of historic Palestine, the militias were joined together to form the Israeli armed forces.

Not all villages, however, were completely depopulated. Some residents in villages like Qaytiyya near the River Jordan, remained in their homes. The village, located between two tributaries of the Jordan – al-Hasbani and Dan rivers – hoped that normality would return to their once tranquil village once the war subsides.

Their fate, however, was worse than that of those who were forced out, or who fled for fear of a terrible fate. Israeli forces returned nearly a year later, rounded the remaining villagers into large trucks, tortured many and dumped the villagers somewhere south of Safad. Little is known about their fate, but many of those who survived ended up in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria.

Yarmouk was not established until 1957, and even then it was not an ‘official’ refugee camp. Many of its inhabitants were squatters in Sahl al-Yarmouk and other areas, before they were brought to Shaghour al-Basatin, near Ghouta. The area was renamed Yarmouk.

Many of Yarmouk’s refugees originate from northern Palestine, the Safad District, and villages like Qaytiyya, al-Ja’ouneh and Khisas. They subsisted in that region for nearly 67 years. Unable to return to Palestine, yet hoping to do so, they named the streets of their camp, its neighborhoods, even its bakeries, pharmacies and schools, after villages from which they were once driven.

When the Syrian uprising-turned-civil-war began in March 2011, many advocated that Palestinians in Syria should be spared the conflict. The scars and awful memories of other regional conflicts – the Jordan civil war, the Lebanese civil war, the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, and the US invasion of Iraq wherein hundreds and thousands of Palestinian civilians paid a heavy price – remained in the hearts and minds of many.

But calls for ‘hiyad’ – neutrality – were not heeded by the war’s multiple parties, and the Palestinian leadership, incompetent and clustered in Ramallah, failed to assess the seriousness of the situation, or provide any guidance – moral or political.

The results were horrific. Over 3,000 Palestinians were killed, tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled Syria, thousands more became internally displaced and the hopeless journey away from the homeland continued on its horrific course.

Yarmouk – a refugee camp of over 200,000 inhabitants, most of whom are registered refugees with the UN agency, UNRWA – was reduced to less than 20,000. Much of the camp stood in total ruins. Hundreds of its residents either starved to death or were killed in the war. The rest fled to other parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe.

The most natural order of things would have been the return of the refugees to Safad and villages like Qaytiyya. Yet, few made such calls, and those demands raised by Palestinians officials were dismissed by Israel as non-starters.

In fact while countries like Lebanon had accepted 1.72 million refugees (one in every five people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee), Turkey 1.93 million, Jordan 629,000, Iraq 249,000, and Egypt 132,000, Israel made no offer to accept a single refugee.

Israel, whose economy is the strongest in the region, has been the most tight-fisted in terms of offering shelter to Syrian refugees. This is a double sin considering that even Syria’s Palestinian refugees, who were expelled from their own homes in Palestine, were also left homeless.

Not surprisingly, there was no international uproar against a financially able Israel for blatantly shutting its door in the face of desperate refugees, while bankrupt Greece was rightly chastised for not doing enough to host hundreds of thousands of refugees.

According to UN statistics, by the end of August of this year, nearly 239,000 refugees, mostly Syrians, landed on Greek islands seeking passage to mainland Europe. Greece is not alone. Between January and August this year 114,000 landed in Italy (coming mostly from Libya), seeking safety. Around the same time last year, almost as many refugees were recorded seeking access to Europe.

Europe is both morally and politically accountable for hosting and caring for these refugees, considering its culpability in past Middle East wars and ongoing conflicts. Some are doing exactly that, including Germany, Sweden and others, while countries, like Britain, have been utterly oblivious and downright callous towards refugees. Still, thousands of ordinary European citizens, as would any human being with an ounce of empathy, are volunteering to help refugees in both Eastern and Western Europe.

The same cannot be told of Israel, which has alone ignited most of the Middle East conflicts in recent decades. Instead the debate in Israel continues to center on demographic threats, while loaded with racial connotations about the need to preserve a so-called Jewish identity. Strangely, few in the media have picked up on that or found such a position particularly egregious at the time of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

In recent comments Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected calls to admit Syrian refugees into Israel, once more unleashing the demographic rationale, which sees any non-Jews in Israel, be they African refugees, Syrians, or even the country’s original Palestinian inhabitants, as a ‘demographic threat.”

“Israel is a very small state. It has no geographic depth or demographic depth,” he said on the 6th September.

When Israel was established on the ruins of destroyed Palestine, Palestinian Jews were a small minority. It took multiple campaigns of ethnic cleaning, which created the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place, to create a Jewish majority in the newly-founded Israel. Now, Palestinian Arabs are only a fifth of Israel’s 8.3 million population. And for many in Israel, even such small numbers are a cause for alarm!

While the refugees of Qaytiyya, who became refugees time and again, are still denied their internationally-enshrined right of return per United Nations resolution 194 of December 1948, Israel is allowed a special status. It is neither rebuked nor forced to repatriate Palestinian refugees, and is now exempt from playing even if a minor role in alleviating the deteriorating refugee crisis.

Greece, Hungry, Serbia, Macedonia, the UK, Italy and other European countries, along with rich Arab Gulf countries must be relentlessly pressured to help Syrian refugees until they safely return home. Why then should Israel be spared this necessary course of action? Moreover, it must, even more forcefully be pressured to play a part in relieving the refugee crisis, starting with the refugees of Qaytiyya, who relive the fate they suffered 67 years ago.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

17 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

The British polling organization ORB International, an affiliate of WIN/Gallup International, repeatedly finds in Syria that, throughout the country, Syrians oppose ISIS by about 80%, and (in the latest such poll) also finds that 82% of Syrians blame the U.S. for ISIS.
The Washington Post summarized on September 15th the latest poll. They did not headline it with the poll’s anti-U.S. finding, such as “82% of Syrians Blame U.S. for ISIS.” That would have been newsworthy. Instead, their report’s headline was “One in five Syrians say Islamic State is a good thing, poll says.” However, the accompanying graphic wasn’t focused on the few Syrians who support ISIS (and, at only one in five, that’s obviously not much.) It instead (for anyone who would read beyond that so-what headline) provided a summary of what Syrians actually do support. This is is what their graphic highlighted from the poll’s findings:

82% agree “IS [Islamic State] is US and foreign made group.”
79% agree “Foreign fighters made war worse.”
70% agree “Oppose division of country.”
65% agree “Syrians can live together again.”
64% agree “Diplomatic solution possible.”
57% agree “Situation is worsening.”
51% agree “Political solution best answer.”
49% agree “Oppose US coalition air strikes.”
22% agree “IS is a positive influence.”
21% agree “Prefer life now than under Assad.”

Here are the more detailed findings in this poll, a poll that was taken of 1,365 Syrians from all 14 governates within Syria.

The finding that 22% agree that “IS is a positive influence” means that 78% do not agree with that statement. Since 82% do agree that “IS is US and foreign made group,” Syrians are clearly anti-American, by overwhelming majorities: they blame the U.S. for something that they clearly (by 78%) consider to be not “a positive influence.”

Here is the unfortunately amateurish (even undated) press release from ORB International, reporting their findings, and it links directly to the full pdf of their poll-results, “Syria Public Opinion – July 2015”. Though their press-operation is amateurish, their polling itself definitely is not. WIN/Gallup is, instead, the best polling-operation that functions in Syria, which is obviously an extremely difficult environment.

WIN/Gallup and ORB International had previously released a poll of Syria, on 8 July 2014, which reported that, at that time, “three in five (60%) of the population would support ‘international military involvement in Syria’. In government controlled regions this drops to 11% (Tartus), 36% (Damascus) and rises in those areas currently largely controlled by the opposition – Al Raqqah (82%), Aleppo (61%), Idlib (88%).” In other words: The regions that were controlled by Islamic jihadists (Sunnis who are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United States) were, a year ago, overwhelmingly wanting “international military involvement in Syria.” They wanted to be saved from ISIS. Government-controlled regions didn’t feel the need for international involvement. Syrians were, apparently, at that time expecting “international military involvement” to be anti-jihadist, not pro-jihadist, as it turned out to be (which is the reason why the current poll is finding rampant anti-Americanism there).

This earlier poll further found that, “There is also evidence to suggest that Bashar al-Assad’s position is strengthened from a year ago.”

So, apparently, the more that the war has continued, the more opposed to the U.S. the Syrian people have become, and the more that they are supporting Bashar al-Assad, whom the Syrian people know that the U.S. is trying to bring down.

Also on September 15th, Russian Television issued a video of their interview in Damascus of President Assad. Unfortunately, most of it is in Russian, and without subscripts. However, parts of it are in English, and this interview does provide English-speakers an opportunity to hear him speak, unmoderated by Western media.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

17 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Colin Todhunter

Jeremy Corbyn has won the British Labour Party’s leadership election by a landslide. Corbyn comes from the left of the party, a party that over the past 30 years has shifted further to the right whereby it has become regarded as ‘Tory-light’ – a slightly watered down version of the Conservative Party. Labour has signed up to ‘austerity’, neoliberalism, US-led wars of imperialism and has ditched any commitment to public ownership of key sectors of the economy.

Tony Blair helped create ‘New Labour’, which fully embraced privatisation, deregulation and anti-trade union legislation: a toothless Labour Party that offered no real opposition to neoliberalism.

It would be naïve to think that Corbyn can reset British politics. Not all within the party support him, and the corporate media and British Establishment will set out to smear and ridicule him at every turn. Politics is often about compromise and, despite his admirable principles, we could see Corbyn ending up disappointing many of his supporters.

However, having set out this proviso, Jeremy Corbyn appears to have struck a nerve with large sections of the electorate. He stands on an anti-war and anti-austerity platform, is committed to investing in the public sector, wants to get rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons and says he wants to renationalise profiteering public sector utilities. He wants a fairer and more equal Britain. In reality. All this could amount to is a milder, gentler form of capitalism.

The right-wing establishment paints this as harebrained leftist radicalism. That such a relatively benign political platform would provoke this type of reaction shows how far to the right British politics have become. Neoliberal extremism has come to be regarded as being the centre ground of politics, certainly within the ranks of senior politicians and commentators belonging to the corporate media.

What Corbyn seeks is in many ways no different to many Labour leaders from previous generations. And what he seems to be advocating is not a type of full-blooded socialism that seeks to replace capitalism and take into public ownership the commanding heights of the economy. His aims are in some respects quite moderate.

After three decades of spiralling inequality, the financialisation of the economy, the destruction of manufacturing industry, the endless signing up to US-led wars and an overall attack on ordinary people’s standard of living, Corbyn has much to do even if some kind of shift away from the extremism of neoliberalism is to be achieved.

Since Thatcherism, all three main parties in Britain have been pro-big business and aligned with the neoliberal economic agenda set by the financial cartel based in the City of London and on Wall Street and by the major transnational corporations.

During the last general election that took place earlier this year, the likes of Chatham House, Centre for Policy Studies, Foreign Policy Centre, Reform, Institute of Economic Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (most of which the British public have never heard of) had already helped determine the pro-corporate and generally pro-Washington policies that the parties would sell to the public. Pressure tactics at the top level of politics, massively funded lobbying groups and the revolving door between private corporations and the machinery of state also helped shape the policy agenda.

As if to underline this, in 2012 Labour MP Austin Mitchell described the UK’s big four accountancy firms as being “more powerful than government.” He said the companies’ financial success allows them privileged access to government policy makers. Of course, similar sentiments concerning ‘privileged access’ could also be forwarded about many other sectors, not least the arms industry and global agritech companies which have been working hand in glove with government to force GMOs into the UK despite most people who hold a view on the matter not wanting them.

The impact and power of think tanks, lobbying and cronyism meant that during the 2015 general election campaign the major parties merely provided the illusion of choice and democracy to a public sold to them by a toothless and supine corporate media. The upshot is that the main parties have to date all accepted economic neoliberalism and all that it has entailed: weak or non-existent trade unions, an ideological assault on the public sector, the offshoring of manufacturing, deregulation, privatisation and an economy dominated by financial services.

In Britain, long gone are most of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. The country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime, underinvestment in the public sector, low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – much of which soon went abroad), a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which all helped to keep the economy afloat and maintain demand during the so-called boom years under Tony Blair. Levels of public debt spiralled, personal debt became unsustainable and the deregulated financial sector demanded the public must write down its own gambling debts.

The economy is now based on (held to ransom by) a banking and finance-sector cartel that specialises in rigging markets, debt creation, money laundering and salting away profits in various City of London satellite tax havens and beyond. The banking industry applies huge pressure on governments and has significant influence over policies to ensure things remain this way.

Absent from mainstream political discourse has been any talk about bringing the railway and energy and water facilities back into public ownership. Instead, privatisation is accepted as a given as massive profits continue to be raked in as the public forks out for private-sector subsidies and the increasingly costly ‘services’ provided. There is no talk of nationalising the major banks or even properly regulating or taxing them (and other large multinationals) to gain access to funds that could build decent infrastructure for the public benefit.

Nothing is ever mentioned about why or how the top one percent in the UK increased their wealth substantially in 2008 alone when the economic crisis hit. Little is said about why levels of inequality have sky rocketed over the past three decades.

When manufacturing industry was decimated (along with the union movement) and offshored, people were told that finance was to be the backbone of the ‘new’ economy. And to be sure it has become the backbone, a weak one based on bubbles, derivatives trading, speculation and all manner of dodgy transactions and practices. Margaret Thatcher in the eighties handed the economy to bankers and transnational corporations and they have never looked back. It was similar in the US.

Now Britain stands shoulder to shoulder with Washington’s militaristic agenda as the US desperately seeks to maintain global hegemony – not by rejecting the financialisation of its economy, rebuilding a manufacturing base with decent jobs and thus boosting consumer demand or ensuring the state takes responsibility for developing infrastructure to improve people’s quality of life – but by attacking Russia and China which are doing some of those very things and as a result are rising to challenge the US as the dominant global economic power.

The 2015 general election campaign not for a minute concerned itself with the tax-evading corporate dole-scrounging super rich, the neoliberal agenda they have forced on people and their pushing for policies that would guarantee further plunder, most notably the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

As an individual, Jeremy Corbyn has at least succeeded in opening up a debate about some of the issues outlined above, something that has for too long been absent within mainstream politics. Given the nature of those issues, however, and the deeply entrenched power of pro-Washington think tanks, global capital and the British Establishment, which despises anything or anyone with even a moderate leftist agenda, it would be very easy to get carried away with Corbyn’s victory and inflate what he could realistically be expected to achieve.

It could take a decade to have a tangible impact on rolling back the corrupt policies and their outcomes that took three decades to bring about. And, even then, this assumes we would be operating on a level playing field – left-leaning politicians in Britain have always faced hostility from the Establishment, not least the intelligence agencies.

Jeremy Corbyn seems to be a credible alternative to the current crop of mainstream politicians, not just because of what he says but because of the reactions he elicits from this bunch of discredited pro-austerity, pro-war, pro City of London/Wall Street, union-bashing, welfare cutting handmaidens to the rich that have ruined the economy and have helped to devastate countries across the globe with their penchant for militarism. If they are attacking Corbyn, he must be doing something right.

But these are the types of people who have been running Britain for 35 years. They tell the public that their policies are correct even when they have a devastating impact on ordinary people. And how do they sell this to the public? By used the tired mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. There is no alternative to illegal wars, selling jobs to the lowest bidder abroad, bowing to global capital, being held ransom to by rigged markets and accepting the corporate hijack of politics, ultimately through the TTIP. ‘There is no alternative’ – the last refuge of the looters, liars and war mongers who will try to make us believe that people like Corbyn will lead Britain towards disaster simply because he actually does offer at least some realistic alternative policies.

The people who run Britain are pushing ordinary folk into a race to the bottom. Reduced welfare, weak or no unions, poor wages, low-level jobs, increasing automation – they call this having a ‘flexible workforce’. What they really mean is that in order to stop jobs going to India or elsewhere, workers in Britain should be blackmailed to compete with for example Indian workers, many of whom earn little, work long hours often in poor conditions, have few benefits or rights and are as ‘flexible’ as they come. This is the free movement of capital or ‘globalisation’ they cherish so much and this is the type of ‘prosperity’ the neoliberal apologists offer ordinary people under the guise of ‘austerity’. Doublespeak reigns supreme.

Michael Gove, the justice secretary, and PM David Cameron have both issued warnings that Jeremy Corbyn poses a risk to national security and the economy. Along with Gove and Cameron, the defence secretary Michael Fallon epitomises the pro-neoliberal propaganda that people in the UK have become tired of. In response to Corbyn’s victory, he said:

“Labour are now a serious risk to our nation’s security, our economy’s security and your family’s security. Whether it’s weakening our defences, raising taxes on jobs and earnings, racking up more debt and welfare or driving up the cost of living by printing money – Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party will hurt working people.”

Here’s something for Gove, Cameron and Fallon to consider. When your policies have already jeopardized national security by inflicting terror on other countries; when you have already sold the economy to the lowest bidder and have attacked welfare, unions and livelihoods; when you have allowed massive levels of tax evasion/avoidance; when you and your neoliberal policies have allowed national and personal debt to spiral; when you have driven up the cost of living by handing over public assets to profiteering cartels; when you have flittered away taxpayers money to banks; when you allowed the richest 1,000 people in the UK to increase their wealth by 50% in 2009 alone while you impose ‘austerity’ on everyone else – then what else can you offer but to roll out a good old dose of fear mongering about Corbyn simply because you have no actual argument?

Corbyn does not wish to sign up to more US wars that have led to well over a million deaths. People like Fallon talk about protecting Britain and boosting national security by standing shoulder to shoulder with Washington’s bogus ‘war on terror’ and the destruction of sovereign states like Iraq, Syria and Libya. They do of course sell this to the public in terms of humanitarianism, rooting out terror or securing the safety of the nation. Fallon’s propaganda only works as long as folk remain ignorant and apathetic. It is plain for anyone to see the reasons for British militarism if they would only take the time to look up the Project for a New American Century or the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ on the web. The blinkers soon become removed as the hoax of fighting terror or bombing people into oblivion is laid bare.

Fallon, Cameron et al are playing a dangerous game by hanging onto Washington’s coat tails. For instance, they will continue to try to fool the public about ‘Russian aggression’ because they have signed up to Washington’s plan to undermine and destroy Russia. They will never mention that the US instigated a coup on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine. No, in the twisted world of doublespeak that comes easy to unprincipled politicians like Cameron, Fallon and others, we must focus on non-existent Russian aggression. A multi-polar world has no place in the US’s its agenda of unilateralism.

Fallon says Corbyn is a danger. What bigger danger can there be when the likes of Fallon is pushing the world towards major nuclear conflict by standing shoulder to shoulder with US foreign policy aimed at Russia in Syria and Ukraine?

The pro-Washington brigade of senior politicians in Britain are following the US into a dead end. The US economy is bankrupt. There is only jobless growth, if there is any growth at all. Stock market bubbles – like real estate bubbles, like creating money out of thin air, like rentier capitalism that produces nothing but only extracts royalties or interest, like treasury bond imperialism which has allowed the US to live beyond its means at the expense of other nations – is ultimately a dead end for US ‘capitalism’. It is unproductive and parasitic.

Demand is flat and will remain flat because consumers are in debt and their wages are stagnant or falling. The biggest contributor to US GDP is the military-industrial complex – the arms companies, the military, the surveillance agencies, the logistics corporations, etc. The US can keep on printing dollars and extracting dollars from other nations via offering its treasury bonds.

But the dollar is in decline. Less countries need it for trade and the less that it is required, the less it has a value, the less the US can continue to function as a viable economic entity. Its only response is a military one to prevent countries like Russia and China from moving off the dollar and encouraging others to do so, especially in the energy field where the petro-dollar system has been the backbone of US supremacy (the backdrop to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere are partly about pipelines, control of oil and gas and retaining the dollar as the vehicle of energy trade).

Britain hangs onto Washington’s desperate attempt to enforce dollar supremacy. In the absence of vibrant, productive economies, militarism is all that remains in order to attack other countries and prevent them from rising (currency wars, sanctions or other means appear not to have had the desired outcome, as least as far as Russia is concerned). Imperialist wars, the anti-Russia/China propaganda we witness and the ‘refugee crisis’ are all connected and can ultimately be traced back to the failing economies of the US and Britain whose rich have bankrupted them for personal gain. And Corbyn recognises this.

To avoid more war abroad and more austerity at home, Britain must reinvigorate its own economy and become a productive entity again. The British left fought against the financialisation of the economy in the eighties under Thatcherism. Coming from the left of the Labour Party, it might be easy to argue that Corbyn represents a leftover from a bygone era. With the breaking of much of the union movement in the eighties and Blair having helped to destroy Labour as a credible (potential) leftist party, he might be regarded as too little too late.

But at 66, Corbyn has tapped into deeply held sentiments that exist across all age groups: that something is fundamentally wrong in Britain and needs addressing. The fact he is appealing to young people suggests Corbyn might not be the final setting of the sun from a bygone era but hopefully the beginning of a dawn.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and former social policy researcher

15 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Shamus Cooke

One drowned toddler has shifted global politics. The picture demanded action in response to the largest migration crisis since World War II, itself caused by the longest series of wars since WWII. These wars have dragged on and new ones started– Libya and Syria — under the Nobel Prize winning U.S. President.

Obama could end the refugee crisis by brokering peace in Syria, but instead he’s pushing hard and fast for war. Few U.S. media outlets are reporting about the critical war resolution that the Obama Administration is trying to push through Congress.

The BBC reports:

“President Barack Obama has called on Congress to authorize US military action in Syria. The move has provoked sharp, multifaceted debate in the US Capitol as a resolution moves through the legislative process.”

What’s in the Senate resolution demanded by Obama?

The Guardian reports:

“…Barack Obama for the first time portrayed his plans for US military action [in Syria] as part of a broader strategy to topple [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad, as the White House’s campaign to win over skeptics in Congress gained momentum.”

The resolution would allow a “a 90 day window” for U.S. military attack in Syria, where both ISIS and the Syrian government would be targeted; with regime change in Syria being the ultimate objective.

The U.S. public has virtually no knowledge of these new developments. A field of candidates campaigning for President haven’t mentioned the subject. The U.S. media’s silence on the issue is deafening.

War produces war refugees. The once-modern societies of Iraq, Libya and Syria were obliterated while the western world watched, seemingly emotionless. But the drowned toddler, named Aylan, unearthed these buried emotions.

The public demanded that “something must be done” about the refugee crisis. And now this feeling is being exploited by the Obama Administration, funneling the energy back into the war canal that birthed the problem.

The war march is happening fast, and in silence. U.S. ally Australia already announced it would begin bombing in Syria, while the U.K media has also re-started the debate to join in.

While not mentioning Obama’s new Syrian war resolution, the U.S. media is re-playing the 2013 Syria war debates, when public pressure overcame Obama’s commitment to bomb the Syrian government. History is now dangerously repeating itself. We’re back on the war track, with bombing targets imagined with each new press release.

For example, Roger Cohen of the New York Times is just one of several pundits making the absurd argument that Obama’s “lack of action” in Syria has helped lead to the catastrophe. Cohen’s argument has been uttered in various forms in countless U.S. media outlets, pushing the public to accept an expanded U.S. war in Syria:

“American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it. “

Cohen doesn’t mention Obama’s war resolution. But his well-timed war propaganda hides behind the old arguments of ‘humanitarian intervention’, a term meant to put a smiley face on the carnage of war. Obama used ‘humanitarian intervention’ arguments to justify the destruction of Libya, whose war refugees continue to drown en masse in the Mediterranean.

The many hack journalists of Cohen’s ilk are repeating — in unison– the big lie that Obama’s “inaction” in Syria produced the war and refugee catastrophe. The exact opposite is the case. These pundits know very well that Obama has intervened heavily in Syria from the beginning, and remains the driving force of the war-driven refugee crisis.

Cohen’s own paper, the New York Times, reported in March 2013 that the Obama Administration was overseeing a weapons ‘pipeline’ to Syria, funneling tons of weapons via U.S. allies to help attack the Syrian government where Obama desired –and still desires — regime change.

This story should have laid the foundation for our understanding of the Syrian conflict, since it changed the course of the war and pushed jihadist groups into positions of power, while leaving others powerless. But this narrative was ignored. The story was dropped even while the dynamic continued, intensifying the bloodbath that spilled into neighboring countries.

Who received Obama’s trafficked guns? The New York Times reported in October 2012 — before Obama’s role in the weapons pipeline was discovered– that the regional “flow” of weapons was going to jihadist groups in Syria.

And a recent U.S. Department of Defense report shows that the Obama Administration was fully aware that weapons were being shipped to Syrian groups such as al-Qaeda linked rebels and those that later joined ISIS.

As a result, these groups are the the only real players among the rebels attacking the Syrian government today. And these are the groups that will take power if the Syrian government falls, as Obama intends to achieve.

We also know that Obama’s weapon ‘pipeline’ was assisted by a flow of billions of dollars and foreign fighters from the U.S. allies that surround Syria, most notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. This ‘perfect storm’ of Syrian destruction just didn’t happen by coincidence, as the puzzled media would have you believe. Close U.S. allies don’t intervene in regional politics without having U.S. permission and support.

In 2013 the Telegraph reported the existence of a U.S. ‘rebel’ training camp in Jordan to arm and train fighters attacking the Syrian government. This story was all but ignored in the U.S. media. These training camps have since been expanded to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, while the U.S. media buried the story.

The bloody fingerprints of the U.S. government are all over this conflict, while the U.S. media has the audacity to claim that “inaction” was Obama’s cardinal sin. These same journalists never asked hard questions about Obama’s weapons pipeline, or his rebel training camps, or the actions of his close allies directly fueling the bloodshed. Obama was invited to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s shows where he received celebrity treatment. Real discussion on Syria was always “off the table”.

Baby Aylan’s death was an opportunity for peace, but Obama is intent to stay on his war track. We are at a critical moment. Russia has once again proposed renewed peace talks in Syria.

Similar deals have been offered by Russia and Syria for several years. But Obama’s peace-killing response has remained “Assad must go”. Obama continues to demand regime change: in practice this mean the war continues, and his new war resolution would expand it.

Meanwhile, Russia has made moves to bolster the Syrian government against ISIS and al-Qaeda linked rebels. In response, the Obama Administration issued a serious “warning’ to Russia” and pressured neighboring governments, like Bulgaria, to block Russia’s transportation of weapons to aid the Syrian government.

By attempting to block Russians weapons to the Syrian government Obama is empowering the groups attacking the government– al-Qaeda and ISIS. If Obama follows through with his new war resolution and topples the Syrian President, these groups are the ones who will fill the power vacuum.

Thus, millions more refugees will sweep into neighboring countries and Europe, if they survive the onslaught.

To this day Obama has pushed zero peace initiatives in Syria. Diplomacy has been off the table. Regime change remains the official position of the Obama Administration, which his new resolution finally makes official. The war on ISIS was always a distraction to pursue regime change in Syria, and most media pundits took the bait.

The world demands peace in Syria. Obama must accept Russia’s peace offering, and sit down with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian government to hammer out a peace initiative, while demanding that U.S. allies in the region “stand down” and pursue a policy of strangling the flow of guns, money, and fighters that bolster ISIS.

The U.S. must also open its borders to hundreds of thousands of refugees that are the direct victims of U.S. foreign policy. Immediately agreeing to take 500,000 refugees would be a good start.

Drastic action is needed immediately to address the destruction of Syria, it’s true. But not the action demanded by the war-hungry U.S. President Real humanitarian intervention cannot include missiles and tanks. The world demands peace.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action. He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

15 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By David Vine

With the U.S. military having withdrawn many of its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans would be forgiven for being unaware that hundreds of U.S. bases and hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops still encircle the globe. Although few know it, the United States garrisons the planet unlike any country in history, and the evidence is on view from Honduras to Oman, Japan to Germany, Singapore to Djibouti.

Like most Americans, for most of my life, I rarely thought about military bases. Scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson described me well when he wrote in 2004, “As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.”

To the extent that Americans think about these bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and global peace. Our leaders have claimed as much since most of them were established during World War II and the early days of the Cold War. As a result, we consider the situation normal and accept that U.S. military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on U.S. soil is unthinkable.

While there are no freestanding foreign bases permanently located in the United States, there are now around 800 U.S. bases in foreign countries. Seventy years after World War II and 62 years after the Korean War, there are still 174 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea, according to the Pentagon. Hundreds more dot the planet in around 80 countries, including Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar, among many other places. Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.

Oddly enough, however, the mainstream media rarely report or comment on the issue. For years, during debates over the closure of the prison at the base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, nary a pundit or politician wondered why the United States has a base on Cuban territory in the first place or questioned whether we should have one there at all. Rarely does anyone ask if we need hundreds of bases overseas or if, at an estimated annual cost of perhaps $156 billion or more, the U.S. can afford them. Rarely does anyone wonder how we would feel if China, Russia, or Iran built even a single base anywhere near our borders, let alone in the United States.

“Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld,” Chalmers Johnson insisted, “one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.” Alarmed and inspired by his work and aware that relatively few have heeded his warnings, I’ve spent years trying to track and understand what he called our “empire of bases.” While logic might seem to suggest that these bases make us safer, I’ve come to the opposite conclusion: in a range of ways our overseas bases have made us all less secure, harming everyone from U.S. military personnel and their families to locals living near the bases to those of us whose taxes pay for the way our government garrisons the globe.

We are now, as we’ve been for the last seven decades, a Base Nation that extends around the world, and it’s long past time that we faced that fact.

The Base Nation’s Scale

Our 800 bases outside the 50 states and Washington, D.C., come in all sizes and shapes. Some are city-sized “Little Americas” — places like Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, and the little known Navy and Air Force base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. These support a remarkable infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, power plants, housing complexes, and an array of amenities often referred to as “Burger Kings and bowling alleys.” Among the smallest U.S. installations globally are “lily pad” bases (also known as “cooperative security locations”), which tend to house drones, surveillance aircraft, or pre-positioned weaponry and supplies. These are increasingly found in parts of Africa and Eastern Europe that had previously lacked much of a U.S. military presence.

Other facilities scattered across the planet include ports and airfields, repair complexes, training areas, nuclear weapons installations, missile testing sites, arsenals, warehouses, barracks, military schools, listening and communications posts, and a growing array of drone bases. Military hospitals and prisons, rehab facilities, CIA paramilitary bases, and intelligence facilities (including former CIA “black site” prisons) must also be considered part of our Base Nation because of their military functions. Even U.S. military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.

The Pentagon’s overseas presence is actually even larger. There are U.S. troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories, including small numbers of marines guarding embassies and larger deployments of trainers and advisors like the roughly 3,500 now working with the Iraqi Army. And don’t forget the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers. Each should be considered a kind of floating base, or as the Navy tellingly refers to them, “four and a half acres of sovereign U.S. territory.” Finally, above the seas, one finds a growing military presence in space.

The United States isn’t, however, the only country to control military bases outside its territory. Great Britain still has about seven bases and France five in former colonies. Russia has around eight in former Soviet republics. For the first time since World War II, Japan’s “Self-Defense Forces” have a foreign base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, alongside U.S. and French bases there. South Korea, India, Chile, Turkey, and Israel each reportedly have at least one foreign base. There are also reports that China may be seeking its first base overseas. In total, these countries probably have about 30 installations abroad, meaning that the United States has approximately 95% of the world’s foreign bases.

“Forward” Forever?

Although the United States has had bases in foreign lands since shortly after it gained its independence, nothing like today’s massive global deployment of military force was imaginable until World War II. In 1940, with the flash of a pen, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a “destroyers-for-bases” deal with Great Britain that instantly gave the United States 99-year leases to installations in British colonies worldwide. Base acquisition and construction accelerated rapidly once the country entered the war. By 1945, the U.S. military was building base facilities at a rate of 112 a month. By war’s end, the global total topped 2,000 sites. In only five years, the United States had developed history’s first truly global network of bases, vastly overshadowing that of the British Empire upon which “the sun never set.”

After the war, the military returned about half the installations but maintained what historian George Stambuk termed a “permanent institution” of bases abroad. Their number spiked during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, declining after each of them. By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, there were about 1,600 U.S. bases abroad, with some 300,000 U.S. troops stationed on those in Europe alone.

Although the military vacated about 60% of its foreign garrisons in the 1990s, the overall base infrastructure stayed relatively intact. Despite additional base closures in Europe and to a lesser extent in East Asia over the last decade and despite the absence of a superpower adversary, nearly 250,000 troops are still deployed on installations worldwide. Although there are about half as many bases as there were in 1989, the number of countries with U.S. bases has roughly doubled from 40 to 80. In recent years, President Obama’s “Pacific pivot” has meant billions of dollars in profligate spending in Asia, where the military already had hundreds of bases and tens of thousands of troops. Billions more have been sunk into building an unparalleled permanent base infrastructure in every Persian Gulf country save Iran. In Europe, the Pentagon has been spending billions more erecting expensive new bases at the same time that it has been closing others.

Since the start of the Cold War, the idea that our country should have a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops permanently stationed overseas has remained a quasi-religious dictum of foreign and national security policy. The nearly 70-year-old idea underlying this deeply held belief is known as the “forward strategy.” Originally, the strategy held that the United States should maintain large concentrations of military forces and bases as close as possible to the Soviet Union to hem in and “contain” its supposed urge to expand.

But the disappearance of another superpower to contain made remarkably little difference to the forward strategy. Chalmers Johnson first grew concerned about our empire of bases when he recognized that the structure of the “American Raj” remained largely unchanged despite the collapse of the supposed enemy.

Two decades after the Soviet Union’s demise, people across the political spectrum still unquestioningly assume that overseas bases and forward-deployed forces are essential to protect the country. George W. Bush’s administration was typical in insisting that bases abroad “maintained the peace” and were “symbols of… U.S. commitments to allies and friends.” The Obama administration has similarly declared that protecting the American people and international security “requires a global security posture.”

Support for the forward strategy has remained the consensus among politicians of both parties, national security experts, military officials, journalists, and almost everyone else in Washington’s power structure. Opposition of any sort to maintaining large numbers of overseas bases and troops has long been pilloried as peacenik idealism or the sort of isolationism that allowed Hitler to conquer Europe.

The Costs of Garrisoning the World

As Johnson showed us, there are many reasons to question the overseas base status quo. The most obvious one is economic. Garrisons overseas are very expensive. According to the RAND Corporation, even when host countries like Japan and Germany cover some of the costs, U.S. taxpayers still pay an annual average of $10,000 to $40,000 more per year to station a member of the military abroad than in the United States. The expense of transportation, the higher cost of living in some host countries, and the need to provide schools, hospitals, housing, and other support to family members of military personnel mean that the dollars add up quickly — especially with more than half a million troops, family members, and civilian employees on bases overseas at any time.

By my very conservative calculations, maintaining installations and troops overseas cost at least $85 billion in 2014 — more than the discretionary budget of every government agency except the Defense Department itself. If the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is included, that bill reaches $156 billion or more.

While bases may be costly for taxpayers, they are extremely profitable for the country’sprivateers of twenty-first-century war like DynCorp International and former Halliburton subsidiary KBR. As Chalmers Johnson noted, “Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries,” which win billions in contracts annually to “build and maintain our far-flung outposts.”

Meanwhile, many of the communities hosting bases overseas never see the economic windfalls that U.S. and local leaders regularly promise. Some areas, especially in poor rural communities, have seen short-term economic booms touched off by base construction. In the long-term, however, most bases rarely create sustainable, healthy local economies. Compared with other forms of economic activity, they represent unproductive uses of land, employ relatively few people for the expanses occupied, and contribute little to local economic growth. Research has consistently shown that when bases finally close, the economic impact isgenerally limited and in some cases actually positive — that is, local communities can end up better off when they trade bases for housing, schools, shopping complexes, and other forms of economic development.

Meanwhile for the United States, investing taxpayer dollars in the construction and maintenance of overseas bases means forgoing investments in areas like education, transportation, housing, and healthcare, despite the fact that these industries are more of a boon to overall economic productivity and create more jobs compared to equivalent military spending. Think about what $85 billion per year would mean in terms of rebuilding the country’s crumbling civilian infrastructure.

The Human Toll

Beyond the financial costs are the human ones. The families of military personnel are among those who suffer from the spread of overseas bases given the strain of distant deployments, family separations, and frequent moves. Overseas bases also contribute to the shocking rates of sexual assaultin the military: an estimated 30% of servicewomen are victimized during their time in the military and a disproportionate number of these crimes happen at bases abroad. Outside the base gates, in places like South Korea, one often finds exploitative prostitution industries geared to U.S. military personnel.

Worldwide, bases have caused widespread environmental damage because of toxic leaks, accidents, and in some cases the deliberate dumping of hazardous materials. GI crime has long angered locals. In Okinawa and elsewhere, U.S. troops have repeatedly committed horrific acts of rape against local women. From Greenland to the tropical island of Diego Garcia, the military has displaced local peoples from their lands to build its bases.

In contrast to frequently invoked rhetoric about spreading democracy, the military has shown a preference for establishing bases in undemocratic and often despotic states like Qatar and Bahrain. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, U.S. bases have created fertile breeding grounds for radicalism and anti-Americanism. The presence of bases near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia was a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Although this kind of perpetual turmoil is little noticed at home, bases abroad have all too often generate grievances, protest, and antagonistic relationships. Although few here recognize it, our bases are a major part of the image the United States presents to the world — and they often show us in an extremely unflattering light.

Creating a New Cold War, Base by Base

It is also not at all clear that bases enhance national security and global peace in any way. In the absence of a superpower enemy, the argument that bases many thousands of miles from U.S. shores are necessary to defend the United States — or even its allies — is a hard argument to make. On the contrary, the global collection of bases has generally enabled the launching of military interventions, drone strikes, and wars of choice that have resulted in repeated disasters, costing millions of lives and untold destruction from Vietnam to Iraq.

By making it easier to wage foreign wars, bases overseas have ensured that military action is an ever more attractive option — often the only imaginable option — for U.S. policymakers. As the anthropologist Catherine Lutz hassaid, when all you have in your foreign policy toolbox is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Ultimately, bases abroad have frequently made war more likely rather than less.

Proponents of the long-outdated forward strategy will reply that overseas bases “deter” enemies and help keep the global peace. As supporters of the status quo, they have been proclaiming such security benefits as self-evident truths for decades. Few have provided anything of substance to support their claims. While there is some evidence that military forces can indeed deter imminent threats, little if any research suggests that overseas bases are an effective form of long-term deterrence. Studies by both the Bush administration and the RAND Corporation — not exactly left-wing peaceniks — indicate that advances in transportation technology have largely erased the advantage of stationing troops abroad. In the case of a legitimate defensive war or peacekeeping operation, the military could generally deploy troops just as quickly from domestic bases as from most bases abroad. Rapid sealift and airlift capabilities coupled with agreements allowing the use of bases in allied nations and, potentially, pre-positioned supplies are a dramatically less expensive and less inflammatory alternative to maintaining permanent bases overseas.

It is also questionable whether such bases actually increase the security of host nations. The presence of U.S. bases can turn a country into an explicit target for foreign powers or militants — just as U.S. installations have endangered Americans overseas.

Similarly, rather than stabilizing dangerous regions, foreign bases frequently heighten military tensions and discourage diplomatic solutions to conflicts. Placing U.S. bases near the borders of countries like China, Russia, and Iran, for example, increases threats to their security and encourages them to respond by boosting their own military spending and activity. Imagine how U.S. leaders would respond if China were to build even a single small base in Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean. Notably, the most dangerous moment during the Cold War — the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — revolved around the construction of Soviet nuclear missile facilities in Cuba, roughly 90 miles from the U.S. border.

The creation and maintenance of so many U.S. bases overseas likewise encourages other nations to build their own foreign bases in what could rapidly become an escalating “base race.” Bases near the borders of China and Russia, in particular, threaten to fuel new cold wars. U.S. officials may insist that building yet more bases in East Asia is a defensive act meant to ensure peace in the Pacific, but tell that to the Chinese. That country’s leaders are undoubtedly not “reassured” by the creation of yet more bases encircling their borders. Contrary to the claim that such installations increase global security, they tend to ratchet up regional tensions, increasing the risk of future military confrontation.

In this way, just as the war on terror has become a global conflict that only seems to spread terror, the creation of new U.S. bases to protect against imagined future Chinese or Russian threats runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. These bases may ultimately help create the very threat they are supposedly designed to protect against. In other words, far from making the world a safer place, U.S. bases can actually make war more likely and the country less secure.

Behind the Wire

In his farewell address to the nation upon leaving the White House in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the insidious economic, political, and even spiritual effects of what he dubbed “the military-industrial-congressional complex,” the vast interlocking national security state born out of World War II. As Chalmers Johnson’s work reminded us in this new century, our 70-year-old collection of bases is evidence of how, despite Ike’s warning, the United States has entered a permanent state of war with an economy, a government, and a global system of power enmeshed in preparations for future conflicts.

America’s overseas bases offer a window onto our military’s impact in the world and in our own daily lives. The history of these hulking “Little Americas” of concrete, fast food, and weaponry provides a living chronicle of the United States in the post-World War II era. In a certain sense, in these last seven decades, whether we realize it or not, we’ve all come to live “behind the wire,” as military personnel like to say.

We may think such bases have made us safer. In reality, they’ve helped lock us inside a permanently militarized society that has made all of us — everyone on this planet — less secure, damaging lives at home and abroad.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. His book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, has just been published as part of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, andMother Jones, among other publications. For more information and additional articles, visit www.basenation.us and www.davidvine.net.

14 September, 2015
TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2015 David Vine