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A debt of gratitude is owed by the anti-revisionist communist movement to Stewart Parker for the timely release of his second book ‘Marxism and the Jewish Question – In Theory And Practice 1843 – 1953’, which is a study/refutation of the many and varied allegations, by bourgeois and opportunist historians alike, of anti-Semitism within Marxism-Leninism as an ideology and within the Soviet Union in general with particular emphasis on the views and deeds of JV Stalin.
Parker’s first book, ‘The Last Soviet Republic’ was concerned with present day Belarus and its history and policies. It is a book full of useful facts and information but is somewhat timid when dealing with the wider political questions it inevitably comes up against. This timidity, or more correctly over-cautiousness regarding perceived impartiality, completely disappears in this second book. The author has settled down to deal with his subject without worrying if this work will be received as biased towards communism. It is un-ashamedly pro-communist but backs up every statement in defence of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin with solid facts and logic, likewise, it utterly destroys the claims of the accusers using these solid facts and logic against their flimsy but very well circulated and oft repeated ‘evidence’ which is shown up to be nothing but lies and carefully built up prejudices.
Among the supporters of the Soviet Union and comrade Stalin there will inevitably be some comrades who will find small parts or some conclusions not to their liking (being anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists and pro Stalin does not make us all believe the same thing on all questions) but overall this should not detract from the value of the book which is of great use to all who consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninists. It is well researched, and well written, exposing the lies so often repeated concerning the Jewish Autonomous Region, the trial of some members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the ‘doctors plot’. This is an easy and enjoyable book to read and is as important in its field as Mario Sousa’s ‘Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union’ is in countering the claims that Stalin murdered millions in death camps etc. It should be on the bookshelf (or rather in the hands) of all anti-revisionist communists and any other genuine truth-seeker on this question.
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The following are the highlights of a message sent by the leaders of the CPGB-ML to Comrade Kim Jong Il on 5 April to congratulate the Democratic People’s Republic on its successful launch of an experimental communications satellite:
On behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), all members and supporters of the party, as well as in our own names, we send you our warmest congratulations and best wishes on your country’s successful launch of an experimental communications satellite.
This outstanding scientific and technological feat realised by your revolutionary workers, intellectuals and army personnel, under the leadership of the party, has again demonstrated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an advanced country in science and technology. It underlines once again the superiority of the socialist system and is a genuine milestone on the road to building a great, prosperous and powerful socialist nation before the 100th birth anniversary of the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung in 2012.
No amount of clamour, of threats or pressure, from imperialists and other reactionary forces can obscure this great achievement; nor can it negate the DPRK’s sovereign right to develop its satellite and space industry in the interests of the country’s development, the enhancement of the people’s living standards, the peace and security of the world, and mankind’s quest for scientific, technological and social progress.
In congratulating you on this magnificent feat, we once again renew to you the assurances of our invariable support for the DPRK, the Workers’ Party of Korea and the Korean people, under your leadership, in defending the independence of the country, in adhering to the anti-imperialist standpoint and in building socialism.
•
At around 7:20pm on Wednesday 1st April 2009, as he made his way home through the city of London, 47 year old Ian Tomlinson, father of 9, was brutally attacked by uniformed thugs of London’s notorious Territorial Support Group (TSG) Riot Police.
The attack was witnessed (among others) by photographer Anna Braithwaite, who said: “I can remember seeing Ian Tomlinson. He was rushed from behind by a riot officer with a helmet and shield two or three minutes before he collapsed.”
Another witness recalls that as he was assaulted and thrown to the floor by these British state-sponsored thugs “…he hit the top front area of his head on the pavement. I noticed his fall particularly because it struck me as a horrifically forceful push by a policeman and an especially hard fall; it made me wince.”
Following his assault, he was seen stumbling before he collapsed and died on Cornhill Street, opposite St Michael’s Alley, at around 7.25pm.
Police initially claimed that “Mr Tomlinson appears to have become caught between police lines and protesters, with officers chasing back demonstrators during skirmishes.” And further that “when paramedics tried to move Mr Tomlinson away for urgent treatment, bottles were thrown at them by protesters”
Cold-blooded and unprovoked police murder
In fact the incident has been captured on video, and is available online. It can be clearly seen from this footage that Tomlinson posed no conceivable threat to the TSG assassins who took his life, but had his back to them and was walking away from them with his hands in his pockets, when he was arbitrarily struck in the legs with a baton and brutally shoved to the floor, without warning or provocation. No attempt was made to aid him as he lay on the ground, apparently remonstrating with the officers.
As a result of this cold-blooded and unprovoked assault, Ian Tomlinson hit his head forcefully on the concrete paving-stones. He subsequently became confused, collapsed and died. The cause of his death has initially been reported by the police as a “heart attack”, but he had no cardiac history, and was in good health, having recently run a half marathon. It seems far more likely that he suffered a fatal brain injury due to head trauma (the mechanism of injury and history suggest intra-cranial haemorrhage – bleeding into the cranial cavity, causing compression of his brain). While we await a coroners post mortem and inquest to shed light on these details, what is absolutely clear is that Ian Tomlinson was murdered by police thugs.
We note that news of this state-sponsored murder has only gradually leaked out, and at time of writing is confined to a few low-profile articles in the broad-sheet press. It is not hard to imagine the furore that would have ensued had a police officer suffered even a mild injury, let alone been killed – one need only cast one’s mind back to the recent assassinations of 2 soldiers and a policeman in the occupied six counties of Ireland to measure the contrast.
The foul deed has been committed, but now the campaign of dis-information, lies and slander will no doubt ensue. This has
become an all too familiar pattern following the murders of Jean Charles De Menezes, Harry Stanley and Diarmuid O’Neill, not to mention the attempted murder by police in Forest Gate.
Context of the attack
Police had been corralling demonstrators outside the Bank of England in what is essentially a form of (illegal) mass detention. Some had been thus imprisoned for hours, triggering counter demonstrations outside the cordons, demanding their release.
At around 7.10pm, G20 protesters had gathered outside the police cordon to call for those contained inside – some for hours – to be let out. Officers with batons and shields attempted to clear them from the road.
Around 7.20pm, five riot police, and a line of officers with dogs, emerged fromRoyal Exchange Square, a pedestrian side street. It was at this juncture that they encountered and attacked Ian Tomlinson.
The brutal and arbitrarily manhandling of this middle aged man quite without warning, cause or provocation, despite his lack of involvement in G20 demonstrations is easily understood by anyone that has ever encountered the TSG. Apart from being their usual modus operandi, it is quite clear that they wished to send a message to all those protesting against the reactionary policies of the City’s finance-capitalist elite and the havoc they are wreaking on the world, from destruction of jobs and livelihoods, to environmental devastation, and genocidal colonial wars of domination.
Who do the police serve?
The Police, Army and other “special bodies of armed men” form, together with parliament, the judiciary and prisons, etc., the modern capitalist state machine. This state is the means by which the capitalist class maintains its rule.
Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.” The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital…
In a democratic republic, Engels continues, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance between the government and the Stock Exchange.” (Lenin, The State and Revolution)
The assertion is made that the police are here to protect and serve ‘the community’. But Ian Tomlinson’s death illustrates all to clearly that there is a real alliance between the state forces and the stock exchange in the City of London, and that the City’s bankers, for all their economic problems, remain very much in political control.
The TSG and other ‘elite’ units (such as the firearms unit SO19) of the police are really paramilitary forces of the British imperialist state; the domestic counterpart to their armies currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from getting one’s cat out of the tree or helping the elderly across roads, their real job is to put the boot in – to anyone deemed socially or politically dangerous by the capitalist class. And not only the boot, for they are amassing an arsenal of increasingly sophisticated weaponry (chemical weapons, ‘tazer’ stun guns, pistols, high power rifles and semi-automatic machine guns, etc), and the legislative powers to employ them with impunity. It is generally enough to throw in the word ‘suspected terrorist’ to justify any detention and any – even deadly – use of force. Nor do the ample provisions of the law hem in the actions of the state services, as can be seen from leaked evidence of British Secret Services routine use of Rendition of suspects for ‘contracted-out’ torture.
So bankers – whose ‘job’ is to ensnare masses of workers and third world nations in debt, and thus enable ‘dead’ capital previously looted from the world’s workers to extract yet more surplus value, vampire-like, from the blood sweat and toil of the still living impoverished masses – when they loose a few hundred billion in their financial crisis, can use their connections with (really mastery over) the governmental and state apparatus to loot the treasury (and therefore the tax-paying public) of its reserves, in a vain attempt to prop up their moribund capitalist economic system.
But workers, when they protest against the injustice of what they increasingly perceive to be the rule of the financial elite, can expect to get their heads cracked. Ian Tomlinson seems to have been ‘collateral damage’ (the intended action, but the wrong victim), as was Jean Charles de Menezes; but that does not change the nature of the shoot-to-kill policy employed by the Metropolitan Police, or its policy of beating protestors off the streets. Whatever happened to those much lauded ‘democratic rights’ of which we hear so much?
TSG record of brutality
Such heavy-handed actions and thuggish behaviour are not new to the storm-troops of the TSG. Rather, they form an integral part of their rich tradition of repression, as central to police culture as institutional racism, islamophobia, beating up striking miners and shooting the Irish. The TSG are well known, in police circles and beyond to be ‘animals’, who itch to exercise the little power they are licensed to wield; who revel as they torture their victims; who have been trained to find some little relief from their petty nature and poverty of spirit by the ‘power’ they feel as they kick the living daylight out of their victims – who are generally the most dis-enfranchised members of society: poor, working-class, Irish, Muslim, Black or Asian and, of course, political opponents of their master’s political system, or simply unlucky enough to be mistaken for one of these categories of personae non gratae (as was the case with Harry Stanley, Jean Charles de Menezes and now Ian Tomlinson).
These words might sound far-fetched to those who have not had the misfortune to encounter a TSG officer gleefully performing his duty, but a few examples may prove instructive:
Police officers involved in a “serious, gratuitous and prolonged” attack on a British Muslim man that led the Metropolitan police to pay £60,000 in damages this week have been accused of dozens of previous assaults against black or Asian men.
Babar Ahmad, 34, a terrorist suspect [ie a British working man who happens to be muslim and of asian origin], was punched, kicked, stamped on and strangled during his arrest by officers from one of the Met’s territorial support groups at his London home in December 2003.
After six years of denials from Scotland Yard, lawyers acting for the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, were forced to admit in the high court that Ahmad had been the victim of sustained and gratuitous violence during his arrest and agreed to pay £60,000 in damages.
But the Guardian can reveal that the Met was aware for years that the six officers involved were the subject of repeated complaints. According to documents submitted to the court, four of the officers who carried out the raid on Ahmad’s home had 60 allegations of assault against them – of which at least 37 were made by black or Asian men. One of the officers had 26 separate allegations of assault against him – 17 against black or Asian men.
The Met has confirmed that since 1992 all six officers involved in the Ahmad assault had been subject to at least 77 complaints. When lawyers for Ahmad asked for details of these allegations it emerged that the police had “lost” several large mail sacks detailing at least 30 of the complaints.
(Guardian, 21 March)
Details of previous criminal thuggery committed by just four TSG officers came to light after the high court issued a disclosure order on 13 February 2009, demanding that the Metropolitan police release all “similar fact allegations” to Ahmed’s legal team:
• March 2007: one officer is accused of bundling a man into the back of a police van where he was told to “get on his knees”. When he replied this was not Guantánamo Bay he claims the officer grabbed him round the neck and “discharged his CS gas while continuing to hold his throat”. He says he was then thrown from the van, leaving him with eye, neck and head injuries. According to the document no action was taken because the complaint was either “incapable of proof” or there was “no case to answer”.
• November 2005: two of the officers were accused by a “black male” of attacking him in the back of a police van. The document states that he was subjected to “constant kicking to his head and stomach (approx 12 kicks). Head lifted off the floor by grabbing his right ear and lifting head.” The attack left the man with bruising and swelling to his face but the case was not pursued, the Met said, because of “non-cooperation” by the complainant.
• October 2005: the document stated that two of the officers were involved in another assault on a “black male”. It read: “In van repeatedly assaulted – kicks to the face, stamps on his head whilst handcuffed.” The victim said afterwards he “felt like he might die”. Vomiting and blood coming out of his ears, black swollen eye, lip busted, hands very swollen.
• June 2003: two officers accused of beating a “black male” in the back of the TSG van. “The beating continued in the van and in a search room at the station.”
• July 2008: TSG officers ‘tazer’ [electrocute] 17 year old black teen in Hyde park for participating in a water fight (ibid)
Multiply this by the thousands of TSG officers deployed every day on our streets, and factor in the tiny proportion of victims who might think it worth complaining to the very police that have attacked them (and sought to criminalise them to justify their actions) in the first instance, and one begins to appreciate the massive repression meted out by the police in general and such units as the TSG in particular.
For the police, murder and repression represent business as usual
Quite clearly these draconian measures are fully sanctioned from the highest police and governmental levels and therefore the inevitable consequences are essentially considered to be business-as-usual by all branches of the state apparatus and the majority of media (as ever, acting as the faithful propaganda arm of the state in any matters of importance). Hence the low profile and ‘sympathetic’ coverage surrounding such abuses.
Judging from past form, we can expect, at best, a brief internal
investigation, followed by full exoneration of all officers involved – and their speedy return to cracking heads (a.k.a. their ‘duty’.) How else can the British monopoly-capitalist class govern in these uncertain times?
The government’s prime concern, now as with the Bloody Sunday or Hutton enquiries is to ensure that the state remains unfettered in its task upholding the real interests of the financial elite; the spirit, rather than the letter of the bourgeois legal code. British Imperialism has a long history of brutal colonial and domestic repression, but with deepening capitalist crisis, the full force of its many ‘anti-terror’ statutes will inevitably be deployed with increasing frequency.
The victims of state repression are bound to be overwhelmingly ordinary British workers, resisting the consequences of the free-market fundamentalism of ‘our own’ imperialist ruling class of bankers and financiers.
The way forward
We note that “[t]he state has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” (Lenin, op cit)
Such increasingly desperate acts of violence will not safeguard this decadent and parasitic capitalist system of production for profit; this system of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation; of the many by the few. Rather, they will hasten the day that working people take their destiny in their own hands, and realize that force, when wielded by the masses against this repressive apparatus can “play another role” (other than that of a diabolical power) “in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the instrument by the aid of which the social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms” (ibid)
We send our condolences to the family and friends of Ian Tomlinson, yet another victim of the British capitalist state, and hope that the mounting anti-capitalist movement will hasten the day of British Imperialism’s demise, which can be the only fitting reparation for its crimes.
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While the CPB whinges to anyone who will listen to them about the wholly warranted criticism that they receive from the CPGB-ML, due to the former’s rotten revisionism, they have once again put their putrid politics of surrender and their deformed brand of internationalism on display to prove the correctness of our position of criticising them.
In an article in the Morning Star, a paper supported, promoted and sold by the CPB, on Monday 6 April, there was an attack on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by Kate Hudson, CND chair and a prominent member of the CPB. Ignoring the information put out by the KCNA, the news agency of the DPRK, she accepted without question the view of imperialism that this was some kind of test linked to weapons delivery systems and condemned the launch of the communications satellite by the socialist DPRK as both “unnecessary and provocative”. Adding for good measure “which, regardless of whether its intentions are peaceful,” (something she clearly does not believe) “risks others seeing the launch as a threat to regional security”.
In making this assertion, Ms Hudson shows the political cowardice that has come to be associated with her party. There are very many satellites whizzing around our planet, most of which are the property of imperialism and which are used for a variety of military and spying purposes. These satellites are launched on a regular basis without a murmur from Ms Hudson, her party or its paper, so what’s the big deal now?
The US objects strongly when its virtual monopoly of space is in any way challenged, even by a peaceful communications satellite, and the appeasers of CND and the CPB/Morning Star, instead of standing up and supporting the right of the DPRK to launch a satellite for whatever reason it wants, including defence if it should so choose, give lectures to a socialist country for ignoring the threats and lies of US imperialism and their lackeys.
We in the CPGB-ML, on the contrary, loudly applaud Comrade Kim Jong Il, the Workers’ Party of Korea and the people of the DPRK on the launch of this satellite and acknowledge their correctness in ignoring both the rants of imperialism and the lick-spittle admonishments of the social-pacifists of the CPB.
•
Statement issued by Embassy of Cuba in Greece, Monday 30 March 2009
Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva, Cuban nationals whose husbands are serving lengthy prison sentences in the USA, have for the ninth time been denied temporary visas allowing them to visit their husbands. Olga Salanueva has been told that she is now permanently ineligible for a visa.
The US authorities have denied successive visa applications from both women over the course of seven years. The reasons cited for the denials are based on claims that both women are threats to national security. Yet neither woman has faced charges in connection with such claims, nor has any credible evidence been produced to substantiate the allegation. Over the years, the grounds cited for denying temporary visas has varied, highlighting an inconsistency in the authorities’ reasoning for prohibiting the women’s visits to their husbands.
Adriana Pérez’s latest application was rejected in January 2009 due to her status as “non eligible” under the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. This legislation restricts the “issuance of visas to non-immigrants from countries that are state sponsors of international terrorism“.
“I have lived in Cuba since I was born, yet this is the first time that US authorities have used this piece of legislation to deny me a visa. It is a paradox that the families of the other ‘Cuban Five’, who also live in Cuba, continue to receive visas in spite of this act.” Adriana Pérez, March 2009
Olga Salanueva’s most recent application was refused on the grounds that she was deported from the US in November 2000.
The women’s husbands, René González and Gerardo Hernández, are part of a group known as the ‘Cuban Five’ or ‘Miami Five’, who have been imprisoned in the USA since 1998. They were found guilty of “acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government” and related charges. Although some Cuban relatives in the case of all five prisoners have been granted visiting visas, they have experienced considerable delays ranging from a couple of months to two years before learning their applications were successful.
Prior to her deportation in 2000, during René González’s trial, Olga Salanueva had been living legally in the US. She was subsequently granted a visa to visit her husband in March 2002, which was revoked on 23 April 2002, shortly before her trip. In 2002, Adriana Pérez obtained a visa to visit her husband but was detained upon arrival in the USA and expelled 11 hours later.
Denying prisoners visits from their family in these circumstances is unnecessarily punitive and contrary to standards for humane treatment of prisoners and states’ obligations to protect family life. Amnesty International has urged that these restrictions be reviewed, drawing the government’s attention to international standards that stress the importance of the family and the right of all prisoners to maintain contact with their families and to receive visits.
In the case of prisoners whose families live outside the USA, indefinite or even permanent denial of visits from the prisoner’s immediate family is a severe deprivation to the individual.
Amnesty International urges the US government to once again consider granting temporary visas to the two women for visitation purposes.
Amnesty International continues to review the case in consideration of the fairness of the criminal proceedings leading to the convictions of the five men.
PLEASE SEND APPEALS TO:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE
- Call on the Secretary of State to overturn the decision that Adriana Pérez is “non eligible” under the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002.
- Urge her to grant temporary visas on humanitarian grounds to Adriana Pérez and to Olga Salanueva so that they may visit their husbands in prison in the USA.
Secretary Janet Napolitano, THE US DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
- Call on the Secretary of Homeland Security to overturn the decision that Olga Salanueva is permanently ineligible for a visa.
- Urge her to grant Olga Salanueva a temporary visa on humanitarian grounds so that she may visit her husband.
In both letters, please express concern that:
- By denying temporary visas for visitation purposes, the USA is imposing unnecessary punishment on the prisoners beyond the constraints of their imprisonment, in contravention of international human rights standards.
- Note that the families of all five prisoners have experienced considerable delays in being granted visas to the USA. Urge that such visas are granted to the families without undue delay.
Please send copies of both letters to the Office of Cuban Affairs
ADDRESSES:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
US Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington DC 2052O
USA
Secretary Janet Napolitano
US Department of Homeland Security
Washington DC 20528
USA
Director Bisa Williams
Office of Cuban Affairs
US Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington DC 20520
USA
•
Via www.globalresearch.ca
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.
Some Real History
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted–months before Soviet troops entered the country–that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban—heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan—fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.
•
Via Pan African News blog.
An Open Letter To The People Of Zimbabwe: West Must Lift Sanctions Now!
Sign the letter (International Action Center)
First, let us begin by saying thank you. Thank you for demonstrating to and for African people and the world the courage and conviction that must be had to be self-determining in the face of insurmountable odds. Odds that would have crushed others with any less will to be free.
The road you chose for national liberation, which was carved through your first and second Chimurengas (armed liberation wars), cut an enduring path for us all to follow.
At this moment in time, when all the enemies of Africa have attempted to circle their wagons around you and crush your right to land and sovereignty, your leadership and the veterans of your struggle have rallied you to unite.
The words of one of Africa’s greatest patriots are so fitting to your struggle at this time:
“No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.”
–Patrice Lumumba’s last letter, December 1960
Lift the Sanctions Now!
As anti-war, community, political, youth, trade union activists and Pan Africanists along with other people of good conscience of all nationalities inside the U.S. and worldwide, we are declaring our full solidarity with the heroic struggle in Zimbabwe to defend the right to full independence and sovereignty. At the heart of this struggle is the ongoing fight for the control of African land, illegally and brutally stolen beginning in the late 19th century by racist British colonizers led by Cecil Rhodes.
The Lancaster House Agreement–signed by the representatives of the ZANU-ZAPU guerrilla movements and the British government in 1980–promised to legally transfer ownership of the millions of acres of arable land from a handful of very privileged white farmers back to the Zimbabwean people. The British government reneged on this promise while the people of Zimbabwe patiently waited for reparations in the form of land reform to happen. When their patience ran out after waiting 20 years for legal justice, the people had no other recourse but to expropriate the land themselves by any means necessary.
As a result of taking back what is rightfully their birthright: the land, the people of Zimbabwe have had to bear the full brunt of unmitigated ire and disdain on the part of the U.S. and British governments and more recently, the European Union governments. This disdain is reflected in the political demonizing of government leaders, notably President Robert Mugabe, who has defended the Zimbabwean people’s right to the land.
Defending the people’s right to the land, the fruits of their labor and the country’s resources means recognizing the right to self-determination and sovereignty without any imperialist interference. This is President Mugabe’s “crime” in the eyes of the imperialist governments and their media. Behind this demonizing of President Mugabe lies the real crime–the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., Britain and other Western countries that have resulted in the collective punishment of the Zimbabwean people.
These cruel sanctions for almost a decade have caused massive unemployment, malnourishment, hyperinflation, deeper poverty, lack of health care and fuel, the deterioration of the infrastructure and much more. A recent cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of thousands could have been prevented if water purification chemicals had not been banned under the sanctions.
These genocidal attacks on the human rights of the people of Zimbabwe are very reminiscent of the sanctions imposed on the Palestinian population in Gaza by the U.S.-backed Zionist state of Israel. Let’s be clear–President Mugabe is not to blame for the economic crisis in Zimbabwe; it is the sanctions.
These economic sanctions along with other austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank are acts of aggression against the people of Zimbabwe with a goal of igniting political instability and regime change. We unequivocally denounce these sanctions as war crimes and the officials who initiated them as war criminals. Even as a national unity government has been implemented, the sanctions remain in place.
The people of Zimbabwe, like the people of Gaza, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere, are inspiring examples of resisting all forms of imperialist war and occupation. Millions of people around the world are facing an unprecedented economic crisis, including the U.S., where foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, utility shut-offs, lack of health care, tuition hikes and much more are skyrocketing at an alarming rate.
We face the same enemies at home as do the people of Zimbabwe–the worldwide clique of bankers and bosses who put their greed for profits before meeting people’s needs. Our solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe is not just moral in character but also material in character. Their victory is also our victory.
It is in this spirit of international solidarity that we will continue to work hand in hand with our sisters and brothers in Zimbabwe to demand from the U.S., British and other imperialist governments:
End the Economic Sanctions Now!
Full Land Reform for the Indigenous Zimbabweans!
Respect the Democratically Elected Leadership!
Stop the Demonizing!
Hands Off Zimbabwe!
Sign the Open Letter at http://www.iacenter.org/africa/zimbabweopenletter
Initial Signers:
Africans Helping Africans
December 12th Movement
Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST)
Friends of Zimbabwe
International Action Center (IAC)
Peoples Video Network
Dr. Molefi Asante, Pan-Africanist professor and author
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor, Pan-African News Wire
Amiri Baraka, playwright & poet
Sharon Black, All-Peoples Congress, Baltimore
Omowale Clay, December 12th Movement
Hillel Cohen, Doctor of Public Health, NY
Heather Cottin, Long Island Troops Out Now Coalition, NY
Chaka Cousins, All African People’s Revolutionary Party
Susan E. Davis, National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981*
Ellie Dorritie, ret., APWU*, WNY
Rachel Duell, prof., NJ
Andrea Egypt, organizer, Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice (MECAWI)*
Sharon Eolis, nurse-practitioner, ret., NY
Leslie Feinberg, Co-founder, Rainbow Flags for Mumia, NY
Sherry Finkelman, UFT L. 2*, NY
Sara Flounders, co-director, IAC
Julie Fry, V-P., Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys*, NY
Michael Gimbel, del., NYC Central Labor Council*
Jerome D. Goldberg, attorney, Detroit, MI
Fred Goldstein, author, “Colossus Feet with Clay: Low Wage Capitalism”
Deirdre Griswold, editor, Workers World
Teresa Gutierrez, coordinator, May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights*, NYC
Dr. Sue Harris, co-director, Peoples Video Network
Imani Henry, Playwright/Performer
Larry Holmes, national organizer, Bail Out the People Movement*
Debbie Johnson, co-founder, Detroit Action Network For Reproductive Rights*
Prof. Dr. Leonard Jefferies, City College CUNY
Stevan Kirschbaum, chair, Grievance Comm., USW L. 8751*, MA
Michael Kramer, I.D.F. veteran, Veterans for Peace, Chap. 021*, NJ
Donna Lazarus, UFT*, NJ
Janet Mayes, Ph.D., NY
Dr. James McIntosh, Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People
Monica Moorehead, Millions For Mumia; editor, “Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle”
Milt Neidenberg, ret., Teamsters L. 840*, NJ
Frank Neisser, CWA L. 1701, ret.*, MA
John Parker, coordinator, IAC, Los Angeles
Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement
Susan Schnur, Transit Union L. 268*, OH
Atty. Malik Zulu Shabazz, New Black Panther Party
David Sole, Pres., UAW L. 2334*, MI
Paul Teitelbaum, IAC, AZ
Jill White, EdD, IL
•
Appeal received from the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia (SKOJ).
Appeal to progressive forces worldwide: let’s stop the big capital puppet regime exterminate communism in Serbia!
With capitalism on the brink of global collapse and with people in Serbia rising their voice against the capitalist system, the Serbia’s puppet regime with its dirty campaign of lies and deceit is poised to seize the offices the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) uses since 1991 and regularly pays for.
As the owner of the building in Nemanina 34 where on the third floor NKPJ has its offices, the bourgeois government, with the help of the media, such as the daily newspaper Press controled by the pro-imperialistic Democratic Party, wants the communists thrown out on the streets. They are not offering us any relocation to some new premisis.
The reason for removing the NKPJ out of the premises where they are legal residents for the last 18 years is the desire of the regime to destroy the leading factor of the national workers movement. The capitalists know very well that the NKPJ is integral part of the struggle against the pro-imperialistic and neo-globalistic policy.
Let it be known that the League of Yugoslavia Communist Youth (SKOJ) shall fight back! As on the October 5th 2000 counter-revolutionary coup, we shall be defending with our bare hands our rooms from all enemies, whatsoever!
SKOJ shall keep you informed about this new attack against our party.
We invite all progressive organizations and people in Serbia to support our struggle and help NKPJ !
Bourgeois hands off of the NKPJ!
Please send protest by email on predsednikvladesrbije@srbija.sr.gov.yu or fax 00381113617471
Secretariat of the SKOJ
Belgrade, December 30, 2008.
