Harper visits Iraq to laud Canada’s role in Mideast war

Roger Jordan

In a previously unannounced trip, Prime Minister Stephen Harper last weekend visited Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) Special Forces troops based in northern Iraq and air force personnel in Kuwait.

Harper used the trip to promote Canada’s expanding role in the new US-led war in the Middle East and his government’s push to dramatically expand the powers of the national-security apparatus at home—falsely portraying both as necessary responses to Islamic terrorism.

In separate meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi and Masoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdish region, Harper reaffirmed the Conservative government’s commitment to continued military action in the country and in neighbouring Syria.

Harper sought to cast the military intervention as a humanitarian mission aimed at protecting the civilian population from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He announced modest sums of aid, totaling some $160 million, to assist reconstruction in Iraq and help several other Middle Eastern countries deal with the massive influx of Syrian refugees.

Reviewing the trip, Harper commented, “Most importantly, I got to convey my personal thanks to Canadian troops for helping protect our own citizens as well as innocent children, women and men in the region from the barbaric actions of ISIS.”

In reality, the war is a dirty imperialist enterprise, which arises out of the series of wars the US has mounted since 2003 to maintain strategic dominance over the world’s most important oil-exporting region . While ISIS has served as the pretext for the return of US and other western troops to Iraq, the ultimate goal of Washington and its Mideast allies, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, is the replacement of the Assad regime in Damascus, which is closely allied with Iran and Russia, by one more pliant to US interests.

In line with its fulsome support for US imperialist aggression around the globe, Canada has committed 69 Special Forces troops to training and advising Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, and six CF-18 fighter jets, two surveillance aircraft, and a refuel-plane, supported by some 600 CAF personnel, to assist coalition bombing missions.

In late March, the government extended Canada’s military mission in the Middle East until April 2016 and authorized the CAF to join bombing runs in Syria, making Canada the only one of the US’s western allies to attack Syria. Bombing Syria is a flagrant violation of international law and tantamount to a declaration of war on Syria’s government.

To date, CAF planes have flown more than 800 sorties over Iraq and Syria, with well over 500 of these CF-18 bombing missions.

Initially, the claim was made that ground troops in Iraq were engaged in a “non-combat” mission, and that they would merely be training and advising Kurdish militiamen behind the front lines. But within months, it was revealed that Canadian troops were making regular trips to the front to direct attacks against ISIS positions and call in air strikes by coalition aircraft. In January, the Canadian military acknowledged that around 20 percent of the time, the Special Forces troops are at the front.

This issue emerged during Harper’s trip due to the death in March of Sergeant Andrew Doiron as a result of a mix-up with Kurdish forces. Doiron and a group of Canadian soldiers were allegedly mistaken for ISIS fighters by a frontline Kurdish post, resulting in his fatal shooting.

With investigations still ongoing, Harper attempted to downplay the significance of the incident, while covering up the true character of the Canadian army’s operations in the region. “Look, this was a terrible tragedy. We will get the facts, but let it not obscure, frankly, the respect I think we should have for the Kurdish fighters in this area,” said Harper.

The Canadian prime minister’s unwillingness to apportion blame for the incident is part of ongoing attempts to smooth over tensions between Canadian and Kurdish forces, which, in the immediate aftermath of the fatal shooting, offered differing accounts of the circumstances surrounding it.

Canada’s involvement in the latest Mideast war is being driven by economic as well as geopolitical considerations. In recent years, Iraq has emerged as a major trading partner for Canada, with bilateral trade in 2012 totaling more than $4 billion, making it one of Canada’s largest trade partners in the Middle East. Moreover, Iraq is viewed as offering major growth opportunities for Canadian oil and infrastructure companies.

In recognition of this, the Conservative government last year named Iraq one of Canada’s “development partners.” This designation allows Baghdad to receive additional financial aid and other support from the Canadian government.

The Kurdish region is one of the most lucrative parts of the country for Canadian investment. Several oil companies and other businesses have operations there, and the Harper government opened a trade office in the regional capital, Irbil, last year. The office is responsible for expanding Canadian investment throughout Iraq, and was promoted by the government at the time as necessary because the Iraqi economy was one of the fastest growing in the world.

While in Irbil, Harper took time to visit the Irbil office of Melwood Geometrix, a Montreal-based company that specializes in making prefabricated concrete.

Media commentators noted the campaign-style character of this and many of Harper’s other appearances in Iraq and Kuwait. His meeting with the local Melwood Geometrix manager took place in front of running cameras, and after a greeting, Harper was handed a Montreal Canadiens hockey jersey.

During his stop in Kuwait, Harper cultivated the image of a wartime prime minister with appeals to Canadian nationalism and militarism. An article on the IPolitics website described the scene when Harper addressed air force personnel in Kuwait as follows, “In front of him, dressed in combat fatigues, stood the pilots and support crews deployed there for the Canadian mission against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Behind him were two CF18s parked at diagonal angles, and between them was a large Canadian flag.”

Although it remains unclear if the Conservatives will call an early election, it is beyond question that whether the vote takes place this spring or next October, they will mount an extreme rightwing campaign, whipping up bellicose Canadian nationalism and appealing to anti-Muslim sentiment.

Harper has already served notice that he intends to portray the opposition parties as “soft” on terrorism, because they have not fully endorsed the CAF combat mission in the Middle East and said that if elected to office, they will amend Bill C-51, the Conservatives’ legislation giving sweeping new powers to the national security apparatus. These new powers include authorizing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to break virtually any law in disrupting what it deems threats to Canada’s national and economic security or territorial integrity, and giving state agencies unfettered access to all government information on individuals named in national security investigations.

Whilst on his whirlwind Middle East tour, Harper went out of the way to put in a plug for Bill C-51. Said Harper, “We’re working to give our security agencies the whole range of modern tools necessary to identify terrorists and to thwart their plans, including greater ability to stem the recruitment and the flow of home-grown fighters.”

Within hours of Harper leaving the Middle East, a lengthy exposé appeared in the Montreal daily La presse that sheds light on the true, neo-colonial character of the Canadian military’s ever-growing list of foreign interventions.La presse revealed that over a two-month period between December 2010 and January 2011, CAF military police physically abused and psychologically tortured 40 Afghan detainees in an attempt to coerce information from them. Heavily-armed military police repeatedly invaded the cells where the detainees were being held, forced them to the ground and against walls, and otherwise threatened and abused them in an effort to terrorize them. After a complaint was made, the military authorities were compelled to investigate but hushed up the entire affair, with no one involved subject to any disciplinary action whatsoever.

US-Jordan war games prepare wider Mideast conflict

Patrick Martin

Some ten thousand troops began military exercises in Jordan on Tuesday, in the fifth annual “Eager Lion” war games led by the Pentagon. The drills are in preparation for a greatly expanded military conflict in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

A total of nine Arab countries—Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Lebanon, and Iraq—join the US, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Poland, Australia and Pakistan for the exercise.

But the US military will dominate Eager Lion, supplying 5,000 of the 10,000 troops, including headquarters, air, land, sea and special operations forces. During the two-week-long exercise, from May 5 through May 19, there will be more American troops in Jordan than in neighboring Iraq, where President Obama has dispatched some 3,000 troops to train Iraqi forces and conduct special operations warfare and airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Maj. Gen. Rick Mattson, Director of Exercises and Training at the US Central Command, said the 2015 version of Eager Lion was the largest military exercise involving US and Jordanian armed forces since the series of drills began in 2011.

The military exercise is focused on counterterrorism, although that term has been stretched to include almost every facet of military operations short of using nuclear weapons. Mattson said, “Everything available is dedicated to the success of the exercise,” including B-52 strategic bombers, which will participate for the first time.

One element of the exercise will be a simulated bombing raid by a new US plane that will take off from the United States and fly directly to Jordan to drop bombs on a desert target.

Jordanian Brigadier General Fhad al-Damin told reporters the exercises would focus on border security and “combating terrorism,” clearly linking the war games to the ongoing conflict with ISIS, the fundamentalist Islamist group whose forces are just across Jordan’s borders with both Syria and Iraq.

According to a report Monday in the Christian Science Monitor, Jordan has stepped up its intervention against ISIS and the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which recently took control of Nassib, on the border between Jordan and Syria, the last crossing point still in widespread use.

The Jordanian monarchy views the presence of ISIS and al-Nusra along its borders as the main threat to its security and continued rule, and has sought allies among tribal sheiks whose extended families live on both sides of the Syria-Jordan border, a vast and largely desert region.

According to the Monitor, “Jordan is reaching out to Syrian tribes and civilians. It’s offering support in their fight to regain towns and villages overrun by IS—a preemptive step to prevent jihadists from threatening Jordan’s borders.” Jordan has offered air support from the US-led coalition that is bombing ISIS targets in both Syria and Iraq.

Perfecting his technique of telling barefaced lies to reporters who know he is lying and take dictation anyway, General Mattson declared, “Eager Lion has nothing to do with what is currently happening in the region,” a reference to ongoing US-led or US-backed military operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Strait of Hormuz and across North Africa.

A look at the map demonstrates how preposterous that claim is. Jordan is of central importance to the US-led imperialist intervention in the Middle East. It lies just south of Syria and west of Iraq, both key battlefields against ISIS, east of Israel and north of Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, nearly all the countries joining in Eager Lion are engaged in one or another of the US-led and US-supported military operations throughout the Middle East.

In Iraq, Britain, France, Canada, and Australia are participating either in airstrikes against ISIS or training of Iraqi combat units, or both.

In Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan have joined in US-led airstrikes, mainly against ISIS targets but in a few cases against the al-Nusra Front. On Friday, a US airstrike killed at least 64 civilians in the Syrian Arab village of Bir Mahali.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf sheikdoms and Egypt are all engaged in airstrikes against Houthi rebels who ousted the US-installed president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. There are reports that Saudi and other special forces troops may be operating inside Yemen as well, and that Saudi warplanes have used US-supplied cluster bombs against Yemeni cities.

UAE, Qatari and Egyptian warplanes have struck Islamic fundamentalist militia targets in Libya as well, and the Egyptian military is fighting Islamist rebels among the Bedouin tribes who live in the Sinai Peninsula, near the Israeli-Egyptian border.

Add to this the enormous US military presence in the Persian Gulf, including major bases in Kuwait (Army), Qatar (Air Force) and Bahrain (Navy), as well as a French base in the UAE and US and British bases in Oman, along with regular US Navy patrols of the Strait of Hormuz, separating Iran and Oman.

The Middle East is a powder keg, and American imperialism is the leading arsonist, both in deploying its own military forces and selling vast (and highly profitable) caches of weapons to its client states throughout the region. That list, of course, includes the state of Israel, the most heavily armed in the region, with an estimated stockpile of at least 250 nuclear bombs, along with missiles, warplanes and submarines capable of delivering them.

The opening of the war games in Jordan follows reports in the New York Times and Washington Post that members of the US-led “coalition” against ISIS are pressing for an extension of military operations against the Islamists into other countries, including Libya and the Sinai region of Egypt, as well as unspecified repressive measures in Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen.

Meanwhile, the US continues to strike targets in Yemen with drone-fired missiles operated from the American military base in Djibouti, just across the Red Sea. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit the base this week, in a sign of the stepped-up concern in the Obama administration over the deteriorating position of US-backed forces in Yemen.

Also, the Egyptian military junta announced Sunday that it had extended by three months the deployment of “some elements of the armed forces” abroad, i.e., in Yemen. The action came a day after President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited Saudi Arabia, where he discussed both the war in Yemen and Saudi financial subsidies to the bloodstained military dictatorship in Egypt.

Massive payout for US hedge fund chiefs in 2014

Andre Damon

On Tuesday, Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine revealed that the top-earning 25 hedge fund managers in the United States secured another massive payout last year, totaling $11.62 billion.

The hedge fund managers earned an average of $400 million apiece. This meant that they received some $200,000 per hour, assuming that they worked 40 hours per week. On average, they made more than 10,000 times the median household income in the United States.

In Detroit, the city administration is preparing to shut off water service to 28,000 residents in order to force the collection of $42 million in delinquent water bills. A typical member of the top-earning hedge fund managers could have paid this entire amount nine times over from their income this year.

The highest-earning hedge fund manager was Kenneth Griffin, head of Chicago-based Citadel LLC, who got $1.3 billion last year, bringing his net worth to $6.6 billion. Citadel operates through a combination of speculation in stocks, high-speed computerized trading and the operation of so-called “dark pools”: secretive securities exchanges that function outside of all government regulation.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) records indicate that much of Citadel’s earnings come from old-fashioned securities fraud. The hedge fund has been fined or sanctioned for misconduct 26 times.

Griffin does not skimp on spending the money he procures through financial speculation. A recent divorce filing by Griffin’s wife alleges that his family regularly spends more than $1 million a month, including $300,000 a month for private-jet travel and $160,000 a month for vacation rentals. The family’s staff of servants, assistants, and security personnel is so large that Griffin has founded a company exclusively to employ them, calling it “Griffin Family Services.”

The second highest earner on the list, James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, raked in $1.2 billion last year, bringing his net worth to $14 billion. Next was Raymond Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, who made $1.1 billion.

In 2004 Dalio, whose net worth is now $15.4 billion, infamously summed up the parasitic character of the social layer of which he is part: “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around,” he said.

Hedge funds are largely unregulated financial institutions that pool funds from large investors, charging massive fees: normally 2 percent for assets under management, plus 20 percent of any profits accrued.

They employ a variety of strategies, from old-fashioned speculation and capitalizing on financial bubbles created by central banks, to actively intervening in companies they invest in, forcing them to carry out layoffs and cost cutting. To cite one example, Dow Chemical this week announced that it would lay off nearly 2,000 workers, citing pressure from the hedge fund Third Point.

In other cases, hedge funds simply operate as massive criminal enterprises. In 2013, the Hedge Fund SAC Capital pled guilty to what the SEC called wire and securities fraud “on a scale without known precedent,” resulting in “hundreds of millions” of dollars in gains for the firm. Notably, the hedge fund’s owner, Steven A. Cohen, was not charged and was allowed to keep the more than $9.4 billion he made through the firm’s activities.

The payouts for hedge fund managers are part of a massive enrichment of the financial oligarchy as a whole. The wealth of the Forbes 400 billionaires, which has doubled since 2008, has hit a total of $2.9 trillion.

The billions of dollars diverted into the coffers of hedge fund managers come not through productive activity, but through speculation, backed by a relentless assault on the jobs and living conditions of the working class.

As a result of the massive upward redistribution of wealth over the past decade, the US poverty rate increased from 12.6 percent of the population in 2007 to 14.5 percent in 2013. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), 47 percent of Americans have incomes below 200 percent of the official poverty level, making half of the country either poor or near poor.

Social inequality is the defining element of social, economic and political life in America. The vast sums of money available to these Wall Street kingpins makes it possible for them to purchase both politicians and financial regulators. It is noteworthy that Kenneth Griffin, the highest-earning hedge fund manager, was the largest donor to the campaign of Chicago Mayor and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, to whom he gave over $1 million.

Last month Citadel hired former Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke as a senior adviser, paying him handsomely for the services rendered by the Federal Reserve to Wall Street and the financial oligarchy. During his time as head of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke funneled trillions of dollars in government funds to Wall Street.

The upcoming US presidential elections a year and a half away will be the most expensive in history by far, much of it financed by contributions from hedge fund managers, and beside them the various corporate executives and traders that constitute the American ruling class.

Pamela Geller - America's New Isamophobic "Acid Queen"

Ludwig Watzal

As in "The Who's" rock opera "Tommy", where Tommy's parents sent him to a gypsy (a self-proclaimed Acid Queen) who administered him hallucinogenic drugs in order to cure him, Pamela Geller thinks to "heal" American society with her Islamophobic hate speeches and her anti-Muslim events like that in Garland, Texas, in order to make it prone to more wars against "Islamism". The best anti-Muslim cartoon was priced 10,000 US-Dollars. Two US-American Muslims tried to attack this sparse event. Luckily, they were taken out by security.

From the outset, this event perused evil intentions that were shown by the invitation of the Dutch Muslim-basher Geert Wilders, who has held the opening speech. Wilders is an icon of Muslim-bashing not only in The Netherlands. The German anti-Muslim and xenophobic "Pegida" movement also invited him to deliver his usual rant in Dresden. He often tours the US and is a welcome guest at Jewish communities and the Zionist lobby around the country. The United States have enough anti-Muslim extremists in the country, so they should refuse him the entry in order to reduce anti-Muslim incitement.

The U. S. American Muslin communities reacted low-key to this crazy event: Each Crazy can express his opinion freely, so the tenor of their statements. But this Laissez-faire attitude can't be found at other minorities. For example, Muslims or critics of the Israeli occupation get huge difficulties as the examples of numerous university professors show that lose their jobs under pressure from the pro-Zionist lobby. This lobby never reacts coolly when it comes to Israel's enormous war crimes against Palestinians.

The Muslim communities did everything possible not to give Geller "what she wants". The attempted attack was the "best thing" that could happen to Geller and her extremist supporters from the neoconservative and Zionist political class. The best thing to do is to ridicule these islamophobic nuts like the "MuslimGirl.net" did.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMjIDD-p3GU

In the end, the American society will repudiate instigators like Pamela Geller as they did with Joseph McCarthy.

Russia, Ukraine And The West: In Defence Of History Against Falsification

Mike Faulkner

According to one dictionary definition the term “propaganda” should be understood as “information, ideas, opinions etc. propagated as a means of winning support for, or fomenting opposition to, a government, institution etc.” There is nothing here to indicate whether the information, ideas and opinions propagated need be true or false.

Thus, to take a simple example, the US occupation for more than a century of Cuban territory at Guantanamo Bay for use as a naval base, is a fact. To state that fact is to speak the truth. It is also a fact that the treaty by which the US came into possession of Guantanamo was imposed upon Cuba against the will of its people, with the threat that failure to accept it would result in the US occupation of the island. It is also a fact that since 1959 the Cuban government has refused to accept the rent from the US for Guantanamo, claiming, truthfully, that the territory housing the base belongs to Cuba and that the US has no legitimate right to be there. All of this factual information and the truthful expression of opinion by the Cuban government, most recently by President Raul Castro, demanding its return to Cuba, has been reiterated consistently for the past 56 years. The demand for the return of Guantanamo may be regarded as “winning support for” the Cuban government, or “fomenting opposition to” the US government. In that case such a demand could, according to the definition, be regarded as propaganda. It would, nevertheless be a just demand on the basis of a truthful presentation of the facts.

“Propaganda” has a derogatory ring to it. It is usually taken for granted that all propaganda must be mendacious, involving deliberate falsification intended to deceive its recipients and persuade them to accept what the propagandists know to be untrue. It may be readily accepted that in many cases this is indeed what propaganda is about. But not necessarily in all cases. During the Second World War following the Battle of Stalingrad, the National Committee for a Free Germany, composed largely of captured German officers who had turned against Hitler, broadcast messages to the Wehrmacht calling on them to surrender. One of these took the form of a clock ticking off the seconds with a voice-over in German informing the demoralized German soldiers that one of their number was dying every second on the Eastern Front, and leaving the sound of the clock ticking away. It was frighteningly effective propaganda. At that time, it was also true. Even propaganda involving deliberate falsehoods may be justified at times.

The radical journalist Claude Cockburn recounts (Cockburn Sums Up. 1981) how in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, he filed a news report, purportedly from Tetouan in Spanish Morocco, in which he claimed to witness a full-scale revolt by Moorish soldiers against the Spanish army. It was intended to persuade the government of Leon Blum in France that Franco might lose the war and thus persuade him (Blum) to lift his arms embargo on the Spanish Republicans. No such revolt had happened. Cockburn made it up. After the Second World War he was roundly condemned for having engaged in “Black” propaganda, by Labour MP Richard Crossman. When Cockburn reminded Crossman that he himself had engaged in exactly such propaganda exercises to deceive the Nazis during the war, Crossman’s response was that “Black” propaganda “may be necessary to war, but most of us who practiced it detested what we were doing.” “Was it then possible” Cockburn retorted, “ that throughout the life and death struggle our propagandists had all along taken the view that their paramount duty was to be gentlemen, and not to tell lies, however damagingly misleading these might be to the enemy?” With his unfailing wit he characterized Crossman’s stance as “a comfortable ethical position, if you can stop laughing.”

It is difficult to argue convincingly that all propaganda is bad and morally indefensible. Most people would agree that during the Second World War what Crossman referred to as “black” propaganda was necessary and morally defensible when employed by the anti-fascist forces fighting the Nazis. But all propaganda employed by the Nazis and fascists was indefensible and morally deplorable. It depends entirely on the cause in which it was employed: propaganda in support of barbarism and genocide, or propaganda for humanity and liberation.

Josef Goebbels, Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, (in today’s parlance Hitler’s Director of Communications), bequeathed to the post-war world one salient lesson which he drew from the development of radio and the cinema in the 1930s. He knew that the most effective propaganda method for shaping public opinion in an advanced, literate capitalist society was one which persuaded people that they were not being subjected to propaganda at all. Most of the films they watched had no overt political content, but crucially, some did; the various news media persuaded most Germans that the racism, ethnic nationalism and anti-semitism they peddled simply echoed their own sentiments of patriotism and natural deference to leaders who deserved their trust and loyalty. German life, despite its evident militarisation, was thoroughly petit-bourgeois. The minority who were not taken in, learned, for the most part, to keep their heads down. Everyone was well aware that there were concentration camps for those who stuck their necks out. Most tried not to think about such things.

Today it is becoming more obvious than ever that we are subjected to a form of propaganda that owes a great deal to the pioneering work of Dr. Goebbels. There is no need for the threat of incarceration for those who refuse to consent to the dominant political narratives of the day. In Britain, despite the likelihood that the forthcoming general election will produce a hung parliament and that there could be something of an electoral earthquake in Scotland, there appears to be little awareness about the increasing gravity of the international situation. Wherever one looks – the Middle East, the exodus from Libya with hundreds drowning daily in the Mediterranean, Greece, Ukraine – there is evidence of deepening and unmanageable crises. But potentially the most dangerous of all is the growing Western rhetoric of revived cold war hostility towards Russia. It is impossible to understand this without looking at the part that the Soviet Union played in the Second World War.

Russia and the Falsification of History

One does not need to be an admirer of Vladimir Putin to recognize that his stand in confronting the Western powers and NATO over Crimea and Ukraine is justified. A few relevant facts, readily available but seldom mentioned in the mainstream media, are worth recording:

There are more than one thousand US and NATO military bases around the world. 737 of them are outside the USA. Since its establishment in 1949 with 12 founding members, NATO has steadily expanded to a present membership of 28 states. 12 of these are former members of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe including Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The US has increased its military forces in Poland and NATO’s control over Baltic airspace on Russia’s borders. There are 116,000 US military personnel in Europe.

Outposts defending US corporate power and not national safety, American military bases represent a constant threat to peace in every region they are deployed. Few things illustrate the meaning of American exceptionalism better than this sprawling network of offensive installations. Be sure to click TWICE on this graph for accurate resolution.

Russia has a military presence in nine countries. All but two of them (Vietnam and Syria) were formally part of the Soviet Union. The Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea in Crimea was retained after the collapse of the Soviet Union on lease from the Ukrainian government. The significance of Sevastopol for Russia is not simply due to its strategic geopolitical importance on the Black Sea. It is also because of its history, and in particular its determined resistance to the Nazi invaders during the 9 month siege of 1941/2 and the heroism of its defenders and citizens in the terrible final assault that overwhelmed them.

Anyone who genuinely wants to understand Russian concerns about the steady military expansion of the US and the NATO states on its western borders cannot afford to ignore the titanic part played by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allied fascist satraps in the Second World War. But the mainstream western media and the political elites whose politics they endorse, have no interest in dealing truthfully with this. In fact, for 70 years they have propagated a mendacious, deliberately falsified, revisionist account of this history. Throughout the decades of the cold war the major part played by the Soviet Union in the wartime alliance against Hitler was ignored or downplayed. After 1945 the myth, concocted by ideologues in the United States and supinely accepted by their foreign acolytes, was propagated that Moscow was at the centre of a world-wide communist conspiracy aimed at world domination, and that the Soviet Union was the totalitarian successor to Nazi Germany, bent on military aggression against countries of the “Free World” in Europe and Asia. Only the United States it was claimed, as the beneficent protector of the “Free World” through its formidable nuclear arsenal and its global network of military bases, together with its subordinate allies in NATO, SEATO, and CENTO, could stop the communists from dominating the world. The Soviet Union and the communist-ruled states in Europe associated with it, no longer exist. But US and NATO military power has gone from strength to strength since then. The permanent arms economy that was the main expression of US and NATO power can only justify its continued existence and relentless growth by inventing new enemies against whom it has to defend “freedom-loving peoples.”

BELOW: “The Gustav”, a giant railway gun used by the Nazis in their assault on Sevastopol.

The Second World War was the most colossal armed struggle in history. It is no exaggeration to say that had German imperialism in the form of the Nazi Third Reich triumphed in that war, the genocidal barbarism that it brought wherever its rule extended would may well have spelled the end of human civilization. It is estimated that 60 million people lost their lives between 1939 and 1945 in the war. This is about 3% of the world’s population in 1939. If we compare fatalities for four member states of the wartime alliance against the Axis (which excludes of course many other participant nations), the discrepancies are striking. The figures in brackets are the percentages of the country’s total population:

United States....... 420.000 (0.32%)
United Kingdom ..450.000 (0.90%)
France.................. 550.000 (1.36%)
Soviet Union......... 26.6 million (14.2%)

The Soviet fatalities in World War Two amounted to more than 1% of the world’s 1939 population. There is no parallel to the heroism and scale of the sacrifice of the Soviet people in that war. Americans, in particular, cannot begin to understand the dimensions of this catastrophe, for it is simply mind-boggling. It is as if the United States had emerged from a war with every single man, woman and child killed in the states of California, Texas, and New York, combined. (1)

Turning to the US and EU response to last year’s referendum in Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, it is worth repeating here a passage from an article that appeared in this column at the time of the referendum in March last year, including the extract from The Road to Stalingrad, John Erickson’s magisterial study of the Soviet Union at war.

“In that book he recounts in great detail the Soviets’ last ditch defence of Sevastopol in June 1942. General Manstein’s 11th Army subjected the fortifications to ‘27 days of relentless bombardment and savage attacks which raged on by the hour as each Soviet position had to be smothered in men and fire before opposition was literally blotted out…Each fort had to be blown out of the ground in which they were anchored with all their concrete and steel. Even when cracked open the forts fought on. Riflemen fought in gas masks and smoking stench…A sea of fire rolled relentlessly on Sevastopol.’ Erickson describes how Soviet soldiers, having fired their last rounds blew themselves up with their guns as German infantrymen closed in for the kill. The siege lasted 250 days, from 30.October 1941 to 4. July 1942. At least 18,000 Russians were killed and 95,000 were captured. After the fall of the city the Nazi Einsatzgruppen moved in and began the systematic genocide of the Jews. Ukrainian nationalist collaborators in the Crimea asked the Nazi authorities to be allowed to liquidate the Jews themselves. Manstein was promoted by Hitler to the rank of Field Marshal. Sevastopol, after its final liberation from German occupation in 1944 received the title “Hero City”. These events, like the 1941 defence of Moscow, the three- year-long siege of Leningrad, the unparalleled resistance and final victory at Stalingrad have been engraved on the memory and consciousness of generations of Russians.”

It is perhaps unnecessary to add anything to this in order to convey a sense of what the Crimea and Sevastopol mean to the Russian people and why it is that the millions who died in defending their homeland in “The Great patriotic War” are remembered and honoured with such reverence.

There are No Fascists in Kiev!

So outrageous has been the western media distortion of the situation in Ukraine, presenting the Maidan coup as a democratic revolution or peaceful transition to democracy, that the pro-Washington FP Group had to admit in March 2014 that yes, “There are Bad Guys in the Kiev government.“ Rabid fascists and antisemites such as Right Sector, the Azov Battalion and Svoboda have either been ignored or described euphemistically as “nationalists”. At any rate, it has been claimed that such groups are insignificant and that they play no role in the Kiev government or in the activities of the Ukrainian army in the East. FP Group has had to come clean, reporting that when the State Department ridiculed Putin’s “false claims” and assured Americans that the “far right” were not represented in parliament, they were wrong. Putin’s claims were not false. They were true. Likewise, the former RT presenter Liz Wahl, who was feted in the west when she quit the station, falsely claimed that Ukraine had no neo-Nazis. Prior to the March 2014 referendum the fascist group, Svoboda, demanded that, despite the fact that 60% of Crimean people speak Russian as a first language, all government business be conducted in Ukrainian. They also pushed for the repeal of a law against “excusing the crimes of fascism.” The FP Group reporter admitted that “more than a few of the protesters who toppled Yanukovych , and of the new leaders in Kiev, are fascists.” After March 2014 Svoboda held 25% of Ukrainian ministries, including defence. Members of Right Sector held the posts of prosecutor general and Deputy Chair of Parliament. Another Right Sector MP founded the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre” and described the Holocaust as “a bright period in human history.” US Senator John McCain shared a platform with Svoboda chief Tyahnbok, embracing him with the message “The Free World is with you; America is with you.”

Most Western commentary on Russia and the Ukraine seems either duplicitous or ignorant, sometimes both. Few and far between are those who have serious knowledge and experience of Russia. Few care a jot that both the Ukraine and Georgia were for hundreds of years part of the historic Russian state. Seldom mentioned is the fact that the solemn promise made to Gorbachev at the time of Germany’s reunification in 1990 that NATO would “not expand one inch to the East” was casually cast aside by Clinton. Ignored is the warning by 92-year-old George F. Kennan (who did understand Russia) in 1996 that “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era.” Ignored are the views of Steven F. Cohen, one of the few US Russian scholars to place the blame for the present crisis where it belongs.

The cohort of new cold war ideologues and mediocrities that passes for the leadership of the Western world moves on from the chaos and carnage they have caused in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere to commemorate the 70th anniversary of VE Day on May 8th. In so doing they will, with straight faces, issue grave warnings about the threat we all face from Russia. They will absent themselves from the celebrations in Moscow on May 9th and pretend that Victory in Europe in 1945 was won entirely by the armed forces of Britain and the United States. 

European Biofuel Bubble Bursts

Sean Buchanan

Ten years of debate in the European Union over the detrimental effects of the demand for biofuels for transport on food prices, hunger, forest destruction, land consumption and climate change have come to an end.

The European Parliament finally agreed new E.U. laws on Apr. 28 to limit the use of crop-based biofuels, setting a limit on the quantity of biofuels that can be used to meet E.U. energy targets.

With Europe the world’s biggest user and importer of biodiesel – from crops such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed – the vote is expected to have a major impact around the world, notably in the European Union’s main international supplier countries Indonesia, Malaysia and Argentina. It is likely to signal the end to the expanding use of food crops for transport fuel.

“Let no-one be in doubt,” said Robbie Blake, Friends of the Earth Europe’s biofuels campaigner, “the biofuels bubble has burst. These fuels do more harm than good for people, the environment and the climate. The EU’s long-awaited move to put the brakes on biofuels is a clear signal to the rest of the world that this is a false solution to the climate crisis. This must spark the end of burning food for fuel.”

With the vote, the European Union has agreed to put a limit on biofuels from agricultural crops at seven percent of E.U. transport energy – with an option for member states to go lower. Before the vote, the expected ‘business as usual’ scenario was for biofuels to account for 8.6 percent of E.U. transport energy by 2020. Current usage stands at 4.7 percent, having declined in 2013.

Indirect greenhouse emissions released by expanding biofuels production will be reported every year by the European Commission and by fuel suppliers in an attempt to increase the transparency of the impacts of the policy.

Commenting on the vote, Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth International’s food sovereignty coordinator, said: “While the EU has not gone far enough to stop the irresponsible use of food crops for car fuel, this new law acknowledges a reality that small-scale food producers worldwide know – that biofuel crops cripple their ability to feed the world, compete for the land that provides their livelihood, and for the water that sustains us.”

Around the world, 64 countries have policies to increase or maintain the amount of biofuels used in transport fuel, including most recently Indonesia, which has been criticized by environmentalists as promoting a policy that will accelerate deforestation in the country.

Kurniawan Sabar, campaign manager for WALHI/Friends of the Earth Indonesia, said: “The people of Indonesia will be relieved to hear that the EU has taken some action to limit Europe’s demand for palm oil for biofuels, which has escalated deforestation, land grabbing, and conflicts in Indonesia. The Indonesian government should take note and abandon its own plans for new subsidies to expand biofuels plantations in Indonesian forests.”

Greenpeace India Faces Imminent Shutdown

Colin Todhunter

The Executive Director of Greenpeace India, Samit Aich, today addressed his staff to prepare them for the imminent shutdown of the organization after 14 years in the country.

He said:

“I just made one of the hardest speeches of my life, but my staff deserve to know the truth. We have one month left to save Greenpeace India from complete shutdown, and to fight MHA’s [Ministry of Home Affairs] indefensible decision to block our domestic accounts.”

Greenpeace India has one month left to fight for its survival with the threat of an imminent shutdown looming large. The NGO has been left with funds for staff salaries and office costs that will last for just about a month. Calling it "strangulation by stealth," Greenpeace India challenged the Home Minister to stop using arbitrary penalties and confirm that he is trying to shut Greenpeace India down because of its successful campaigns.

The Home Ministry’s decision to block Greenpeace India’s domestic bank accounts could lead to not only the loss of 340 employees of the organization but a sudden death for its campaigns which strived to represent the voice of the poor on issues of sustainable development, environmental justice and clean, affordable energy.

Following allegations over foreign funding, Greenpeace India has been the subject of a string of penalties imposed by the MHA, all of which have been overturned by the Delhi High Court. The latest is blocking access to domestic bank accounts funded by donations from over 77,000 Indian citizens.

While, Greenpeace India is currently preparing its formal response to this decision as well as a fresh legal challenge, Aich is concerned that the legal process could extend well beyond 1st June when cash reserves for salaries and office costs will run dry.

Aich continued:

“The question here is why are 340 people facing the loss of their jobs? Is it because we talked about pesticide-free tea, air pollution, and a cleaner, fairer future for all Indians?”

Priya Pillai is a senior campaigner with Greenpeace India. Her overseas travel ban was overturned by the Delhi High Court in March. She said:

“I fear for my own future, but what worries me much more is the chilling message that will go out to the rest of Indian civil society and the voiceless people they represent. The MHA has gone too far by blocking our domestic bank accounts, which are funded by individual Indian citizens. If Greenpeace India is first, who is next?”

Greenpeace India has asked the MHA to recognize the impact of its decision.

Aich says:

“The Home Minister is trying to strangle us by stealth, because he knows an outright ban is unconstitutional. We ask him to confirm that he is trying to close Greenpeace India and suppress our voice. His arbitrary attack could set a very dangerous precedent: every Indian civil society group is now on the chopping block.”

Since coming to power in 2014, the new Modi-led administration has promised to remove ‘blockages’ to ‘development’. In pushing through a strident neoliberal agenda, this was originally taken to mean regulatory obstacles. But it is increasingly clear that protest and dissent are to be regarded in a similar light.

A 2014 leaked Intelligence Bureau report stated that foreign NGOs and their Indian arms were serving as tools to advance Western foreign policy interests in various areas. Greenpeace was singled out for particular attention and was deemed to be working against the ‘national interest’.

Greenpeace responded at the time by saying:

"We believe that this report is designed to muzzle and silence civil society who raise their voices against injustices to people and the environment by asking uncomfortable questions about the current model of growth."

At a time when the administration is opening up the economy to Western interests, which could impact the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, the hypocrisy of blaming certain individuals and NGOs for working to further Western foreign policy objectives has not been lost on observers and campaigners alike.

Taking Aim at Popular Sovereignty

Jason Hirthler

Shortly after the Cold War ended, the Pentagon advanced a strategic paradigm that judged American military might by its capacity to conduct two “major theater” wars simultaneously. Though later modified by the Bush and Obama administrations, the concept illustrated the scope of American ambitions in the unipolar world it perceived behind the collapsing scenery of the Soviet Union. Today the forces of neoliberal capital, represented variously by the Bilderberg Group, the Group of Thirty, the G7, and which are the motive force of U.S. imperial strategy, are prosecuting two simultaneous wars against the withering forces of popular rule—but by other means than military.

Enervated by forty years of persistent assault by neoliberal ideologues and their political flacks, the Western world’s progressive community and its legacy of embedded rights seems at times a spent force, unable to galvanize a soporific community of first-world consumers enthralled by the promise of creature comforts but little else. Even as its mostly deeply held beliefs in populism are emptied of their power. Western populace is largely unmoved as the twin forces of finance and trade perform a blitzkrieg on democratic sovereignty. Through a fog of legal casuistry and token reform, it is those that suffer racism and real economic exclusion that raise their voices, and their fists, in reply. But will their lone ire be enough? In more comfortable liberal circles, only the faintest signs of protest flicker absently across the expanse of exurban cul-de-sacs. These communities are happy to be co-opted by a compromised democratic left, content to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and the dispiriting “realities” of modern politics.

The first frontal assault on popular rule is in banking and finance, the second along the hazy frontier of free trade. On both fronts the advance guard of capital—represented by corporate trade negotiators and European Union executives—is rolling virtually unopposed through the economic and legal landscape of democratic governance, erecting new models designed to undermine national sovereignties at every turn, and finally shackle nation-states within a prison of corporate fascism. Two instances below nicely illustrate the stakes being contested and the methods involved. Though the venues are underwhelming—bureaucratic Brussels, sleepy Frankfurt, dull conference centers in New Zealand and Canada—the outcomes will be real and lasting.

The Finance Sector

The European Central Bank is not what one would describe as an ethically sound organization. As financial crises rolled through Europe, the ECB took one pitiless stance after another regarding economies of its members. Its destruction of Ireland is a case study in cruelty. Then, when more recently faced with a teetering Greek republic and a freshly elected anti-austerity government, the ECB barely hesitated. It reduced liquidity and then reduced the cap on Greece’s ability to issue, sell, and buy its treasury bonds, reducing the Greeks ability to finance their government. In so doing, ECB President Mario Draghi was essentially suffocating the Greek economy in order to force it to accept its detested neoliberal prescriptions. And you know what these prescriptions are: cutting state spending by slashing social welfare and constricting budgets in a straightjacket of inflexible deficit caps; liberalization of the labor market—that clever euphemism used to disguise the deregulation of labor for the benefit of capital; the privatization of state assets, ostensibly to generate cash to fund the budget, but in reality designed to both ensure regular interest payments to the ECB and to slowly cripple the state itself, removing its power to resist the decrees of a federalized Europe, run top-down by unelected bank commissions. This latter kind of privatization is effectively a form of “accumulation by dispossession,” as social geographer David Harvey puts it. And this is why earlier this year Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis were bullied into agreeing to continue, almost without revision, the neoliberal framework accepted by previous governments, despite their Syriza party’s initial promise to reject austerity. That agreement was interim, and the troika and the Greeks are working on new lending regime due to be concluded this summer.

Even such a minor concession as slowing the implementation of austerity—which Varoufakis had hoped to achieve—was too much for the ECB to stomach. The troika, or “institutions” that include the ECB, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission, is unflinching in its ideological commitment to neoliberalism. Everyone must toe the line. Everybody has to march in step. No concessions will be made in the inexorable advance of capital toward the complete control of the EU. Mario Draghi, of course, answers to the major banking concerns of the world, his fellow members of the Group of Thirty, a private cabal of central bankers.

The ECB is now the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) of the European Union, an idea ratified in 2013. This makes it the final supervisory authority of major member banks in the Eurozone, evidently a significant step toward “banking union,” which would further remove member states’ sovereign control of their economy—ever the covert dream of EU visionaries. In order to receive the ECB’s sanction to print euros, Greece must swallow the poison pill of austerity. This power makes it the de facto policy maker of Europe. Once the hope of Greek’s desultory youth and bitter public workers, Syriza has proven itself to be a false radical, having surrendered to ECB pressure. The radical elements in Syriza may mutiny, but the party’s capitulation isn’t much of a surprise. As the Oceania Saker wrote, “Empires do not surrender their colonies through reasonable arguments or by the bankruptcy of their regressive ‘reforms.’”

The Trade Sector

Add this loss of domestic power the evolving apparatus of global trade being implemented through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and previously the WTO and NAFTA, among other treaties. This free trade superstructure is establishing a supranational legal framework designed to privilege corporate profiteering over domestic legislation in the public interest. Recent leaked elements of both treaties shed light on the anti-democratic nature of each. A proposal from the TTIP negotiations recommends that all draft domestic legislation be subjected to a vast, byzantine screening process conducted by a ‘regulatory cooperation body’ evidently staffed by TTIP insiders. The power of the body to reject legislation isn’t clear, but certainly it would wield tremendous influence on proposed law, as it would represent the consolidated interests of multinational beneficiaries of the TTIP. Perhaps the more immediate goal of the screening apparatus would be to simply deter and delay the implementation of any legislation deemed harmful to corporate interests—regardless of whether that legislation is in the public or planetary interest. As if the independence of legislators across the developed world isn’t already vitiated by corporate patronage, the TTIP would expand the fetters that would prevent an independent-minded member of parliament from acting on the citizen’s behalf, making it ever easier to rationalize selling his constituents down the river, in the great tradition of Barack Obama.

Recent WikiLeaks revelations from the TPP negotiation are even more daunting in the shameless manner by which they flout democratic institutions. The TPP has already built in extensive powers for the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) model. The increasingly infamous ISDS allows corporations to sue governments if a company decides that domestic legislation is an unreasonable fetter on its profit forecasts. Suits are resolved in unelected private tribunals staffed by both parties to the suit and by another, supposedly neutral arbiter.

The ISDS model has already borne fruit for corporate power. Public Citizen conducted a thorough analysis of the leaked investment chapter and had this to say about ISDS:

Under U.S. “free trade” agreements (FTAs) alone, foreign firms have already pocketed more than $440 million in taxpayer money via investor-state cases. This includes cases against natural resource policies, environmental protections, health and safety measures and more. ISDS tribunals have ordered more than $3.6 billion in compensation to investors under all U.S. FTAs and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). More than $38 billion remains in pending ISDS claims under these pacts, nearly all of which relate to environmental, energy, financial regulation, public health, land use and transportation policies.

Like the TTIP, the TPP model elevates corporate interests above public interests. And like these trade partnerships, the federal model of the EU uses monetary policy to restrict the democratic impulses of its member populations. Together, the architecture of these commercial and financial formations promise to pinion global populations within a nominally representative but wholly unaccountable regime of multinational corporate cartels. Though Mussolini said corporatism was the merger of the state with corporate power, the coming reality represents the definitive triumph of the corporation over the state. It absorbs the state whole. Decisively beaten on two fronts, the state will likely continue to exist, but not as a democratic institution. In the new dystopia, its role would be to serve as an instrument of repression. An instrument through which corporate power can beat back negative popular reactions to its strip-mining of nation-states, their resources, and the remaining assets of an angry and alienated populace. The only question that remains is how long the majority will tolerate the intolerable.

A Coda on Change

Despite the air of inevitability around the trade and finance initiatives, there are flashes of resistance. In the past week, the Greek Supreme Court has declared pension cuts unconstitutional, a remarkable step that directly defies the prescriptions of the ECB, setting up a showdown between federal and provincial Europe. Syriza also relaunched the state television station shut down thanks to austerity. Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos continues to threaten establishment parties in advance of December elections. Across the Atlantic, in a seemingly unrelated scenario, a popular uprising has grown around the killing of a black Baltimore resident in police custody. Coming after much-publicized deaths at the hands of police in Ferguson and New York, a consistent pattern of unrest is surfacing across American society. The sour public mood is also evident in repeated nationwide strikes by service workers for higher wages, and numerous urban movements insisting that local municipalities pay $15 an hour. And not least in the rising resistance to the diktats of the unelected and self-appointed arbiters of world trade. On the face of it, these protests seem to address separate issues. But they don’t. The EU protests in Greece and Spain in particular, and the U.S. protests in Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, and elsewhere, have a common cause: the unrelenting assault of neoliberalism—on wages, on democracy, on labor, on social welfare, on minorities, and on federal government itself. Whether a reaction to intolerable economic policies, transparent efforts to remove economic decision-making from the public realm, or cries of rage against the repressive arm of the state, a single animus sparks each flare of discontent. Whether they will coalesce into a bonfire of neoliberal vanities remains to be seen.

In Praise of the Four “R”s

J.A. Masko

There are at least three potential audiences for this piece: those that are saying, “What the hell is this guy saying? Violence is good? Criminal thuggery revolutionary?” And then there are those who are wondering, what does he mean exactly? Is he just being sensationalists or radical chic? And then there are those who get it. Most of them haven’t been to university, but most have either been in a riot or have at least felt the undeniable surge that comes from desperation and rage that leads to disrupting business as usual.

Yes, rage. Riots come from rage and most commentators don’t have any rage or any experience in riots, except as creepy voyeurs, endlessly repeating the TV cycle narrative. This is why I rarely watch or read mainstream media in these events: I’ve seen and heard them time and time again, and to listen to the tired, worn out “analysis” offends my sensibility and experience. That’s the other reason I don’t listen to them because I’ve been in riots. Or should I say rebellions? I know the types and the thrills, the victories and the defeats. And because I study media and how they frame stories and because I study how we go from riots to rebellions to resistance and then to Revolution, I understand it is critical to talk about what is really going on in showing us the news. What is actually happening behind the television and print pundits’ opinions of “riots”? What function do they serve? So that we know how to interpret civil disturbances and react accordingly, as spectators of our own lives.

First of all, the specifics of the current number of riots are not important to this conversation, as they are simply replays of replays. Not until we discuss the function of different public disturbances, will we be able to understand how we get from desperation of the riot that challenges the slavery of everyday life to rebellion, resistance and Revolution. Instead we must talk about how riots are dismissed as the slavish desire of a consumer’s dream of the “good life,” instead of being recognized as a call for justice. So needless to say, I don’t believe non-violence is our only option, a reform that will only put off the inevitable. I believe riots have many causes, but I’m here concerned about taking the incidental riot and turning it into a historical riot, one that allows us to dream of a better world.

Black Lives Matter, but racial violence is class violence. Face it, everyday, people of every color get abused and murdered by the security forces that themselves are every shade of the rainbow, yet are blue and blue throughout. Of course there is a color component, how could it be otherwise when black people are a great part of the American underclass? But if you’re Henry Louis Gates and you get arrested for “breaking” into your own house, you get a beer with Obama and the racist cop who arrested you. Poor people don’t get that break. They get broken. And forget about white privilege, poor people of color aren’t denied privilege, they are denied the human rights that we all should and can enjoy. Black privilege accords with White privilege quite nicely (oh you know this if you’re 3^rd generation Spelman or Howard); it’s called class privilege. But what about those vicious crackers and peckerwoods? The KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood? The sad privilege they call their own is pathetic outdated colonialism, used by the elite to divide and conquer. The vanquished would rather argue, yes, I am not being oppressed or exploited. This is exactly what they want; it is easier to say you want to be brutalized, and to say you deserve it, than to admit you are being fucked. And of course, the working class is white in popular culture and pretty happy on the sitcoms and reality Television shows so those out there fighting for a better life are criminals, rioters, and bums. All the usual suspects that take, take, and take as they rely on the Welfare State instead of hard work.

Should we fight incessantly for equality in race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and all other political identities? YES, without fail! But we can’t fail to connect it to a larger structural system that reroutes natural allies into neoliberal narratives struggling for their own piece of the pie. And those in the academy and industry usually get the spoils before us proles. To deny the very existence of a working class and a working class life betrays the poverty of your theory and the inability to relinquish your “privilege,” but allows the petit bourgeois its illusions of helping the needy from the greedy. To frame riots, rebellion, and resistance, as a class thing, or a gender thing, or a sexual orientation thing, is to ignore the structure that in fact create the “rioting and looting” in the first place. Without the ability to help not just workers, but to help workers realize themselves as a class of workers for themselves, or in other words creating a political party that representing workers and not the business sector. This is the main fear of the elite, that the people, the demos, will move from simply rioting to envisioning a better world and ways to achieve it.

But on to the fun stuff, rioting. First of all, we’ll hear about how we only talk about riots when they’re “urban,” and not the fun loving rioting of Superbowl victories or Spring break rape revelry type. That’s because these are fundamentally different. White college kids rioting are doing it for fun, because they are bored and they can like when Kentucky lost in the Final Four recently. The authorities don’t mind (as long as too many shots aren’t fired), but letting off steam is great in their minds. When riots happen in “urban” areas it is usually because the security forces killed someone or there is at least the rumor of such an event. This is serious stuff; not kids letting off steam, but people who are pissed and not afraid to show it. Oh yes, it’s fun, but because you are finding your might and the comrades next to you as a class, not some kids breaking shit for the hell of it. And we do not find some puppyshit college kids at historical riots, you get “blue collar” workers (yeah, they still exist), you get ex-military, you get gang-members, you get mothers, and fast-food workers and housewives; you get all kinds of men and women in a like-minded state and it’s not about having fun. These are the underclass, the lumpen proletariat that can’t take it anymore and are ready to do something about it.

Why do the police have military grade equipment? Because they are going to need it when they finally understand that force and coercion won’t work. Many military and ex-military are embarrassed and angry and no longer are supportive of the security forces and more and more on duty refuse to attack their fellow citizens. Nothing will stop the desire of people to be free. Nothing. Historical Riots reestablish the existence of history itself. They re-open history as our own making and only we can make history, as people creating a better world. And who says that we cannot imagine a better world? Only the mental cripples on Wall Street.

A man far smarter than me spoke of riots, and how they came about, and he had a word for it: stikhiinost. It means something like the elemental force that erupts when that feeling of injustice can no longer be tolerated. It also has many more inflections than I can add, but it has been translated into spontaneous. That ponderous word that explains all the differences, the nuances, the causes with the simplistic, “The riot was spontaneous, It started out of nowhere” This is a way of masking that, yes, actions, disruptions occur most often in unpredictable manners, but they are not spontaneous in the sense that we cannot understand where they came from and yet the conditions that created and fostered them are present nonetheless. In fact, the point is to understand those conditions so that the stikhinnyi nature of our outrage, or our desire to change the injustices around us, is directed and not only an outpouring of anger. That it becomes politicized, not labeled criminal.

So riots do not come out of the “blue,” or even from the killing of a citizen or a thousand other injustices; they come out of the injustice of the capitalist system. Riots are the first form that says to the security forces and the elite that we will not take it. Riots are rebellions. Rebellions use riots or physical disruptions to announce that the way our lives are ordered must be changed and that a new world can and must be envisioned. So when you see the terms, “rioters,” “criminals,” “thugs,” ask what function that serves? To demonize those who simply cannot take it anymore or to hide the fact that they’ve been driven to such desperate measures? It is to depoliticize the people trying to create history.

Oh, you say, but what about those looters? Yes, there are looters and I support them in historical riots. You have been told in every facet of your life to try to get as much as you can, however possible, so if you can grab five big screen televisions and sell them, do so. This is the American Dream of the Corporate United States, so get yours! Is looting a political act? It can be when you are looting for your survival or it can be as capitalist as any Forture 500 company. Are all riots political? As I’ve mentioned already, rioting is only rebelling and rebellion can have any political nature. Can a historical riot be depoliticized? This is the function of mainstream media, to create the narrative of criminality and to “blame” the problem on the “wrong” way to protest. How sad and hopeless that our poor have to steal from themselves and be blamed for their own poverty when the titans of industry relentlessly plunder the world’s wealth in an unending class war? How many criminals on Wall Street and in the financial sector have served time for the biggest crime in history, but you are going to give jail time to someone who threw a bottle? “Just how blind America? Ain’t no tellin’.”

Remember we can talk about revolutions, but only when it is safely at a distance, in far off countries where the “rioters” skin is not white. Revolutions in the U.S. are about the new iPhone and the new app perfectly designed for white 20 something’s with just enough money to keep them distracted. This is why the revolution will not be televised, because what you see as televised is not the revolution.

Only though bringing to the table the spectator of a new day, a new horizon created by riots that we can turn to rebellion, to then Revolution. By understanding that a new Idea can be made visible and discussed instead of dismissed, we acknowledge riots as resistance. I mean the idea that a collective social arrangement, superior to the one we have at present, is something we can realize in our lifetimes. History is not dead. By creating a rebellion, a refusal to accept the conditions as they are, we move into resistance. The ability to recognize ourselves as a class, and to understand our oppressions aren’t a contest to see who has it the worst; we are not separate demographics and we all experience the alienation of work and feel hunger when our bellies are empty. Understanding how our resistance is connected and united, the process of revolution begins. Born not in blood, but through ideas, yet the erotic violence of conception cannot and should not be denied. There is love in fighting for the dignity of all humans.

This resistance is an action, a praxis that allows us to see its directions, because history does not contain the seeds of its solution. It cannot be prefigured with the loans of Caesars gold. Using the Master’s tools means tearing down his house, but only after burning it down. The elite have never committed class suicide so whatever means are necessary should be considered. Wars of position, wars of movement, wars on campuses, wars in workplaces; I’m not talking about the future. I’m talking about the wars that are going on right now everywhere. But we should remember; all war is politics so the outcome is most often decided before a blow is even landed or a gun loaded.

Our Revolution will never arrive. It will always be in the state of becoming. Our Revolution will be that state of becoming. It is within our grasp and yet we teeter on the edge of killing the planet. “Socialism and Barbarism” has never have been more evident. The choice is ours.