Hilary Clinton Pretends to Love Gays

Recently Hilary Clinton, US Secretary of State, made a speech proclaiming that US foreign policy will be driven by the question of LGBT rights — “Gay Rights are Human Rights; Human Rights are Gay Rights!”

Both the liberal media and LGBT organizations are hailing this as a step forward. Indeed it is, but it’s not a ‘free pass’ by any means.

Hilary Clinton is a capitalist politician and her ‘brave speech’ to the UN must be seen in the light of the imperialist foreign policy of the US.

Just as ‘born-again’ Jimmy Carter raised the banner of ‘religious freedom’ in support of the clerical-reactionary Solidarność to bring down the Jaruszelski government in Poland, and Ronnie Rayguns used the cloak of ‘national sovereignty’ in backing the misogynistic primitivists of the mujahedin (spiritual progenitors of the Taliban in Afghanistan) to weaken the USSR, so Clinton’s support of LGBT rights is aimed fairly and squarely at the US’ latest bête noire, Iran — another oil-rich country where, coincidentally, homophobia is rampant.

I guess in the fishbowl that is the US, the destruction of a nation of 70 million people, whose history stretches back some four thousand years, doesn’t really matter. Yet it should, especially when Obama is letting homophobic god-botherers have free rein in ‘the Homeland.’

Historical Note: Many members of the British ruling class were ‘carpet-munchers and leap-froggers’ (or both) or ‘cross-dressers’ or “freaks born into the wrong bodies,” but this didn’t stop them supporting Hitler — even when the Nazis were shoving LGBT folks into gas-chambers.

Quick Thought #5

Another loony comment from the Australian Defence Force — this time from the Returned Services League (RSL).

It was suggested recently that, since nearly thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War and since thousands of Australians have visited Vietnam as tourists, it was about time that Aussie veterans declare peace and begin treating the Vietnamese as human beings again.

“No,” said some Old Diggers. “I can’t forget what they did to my mates!”

Well, dear Australian soldiers, you seem to have forgotten something important — it wasn’t the Vietnamese who invaded your country … it was you who, at the behest of your “Great and Powerful Friend,” Uncle Sam, invaded theirs. So, I would think it would be the Vietnamese who had reason to be resentful.

In their hatred, the Diggers were spurred on by those Vietnamese who had come to Australia as ‘refugees’ — those bourgeois who were offended that the Vietnamese communists wouldn’t allow them to own two houses instead of just one.

Interestingly, Australians were much quicker to forgive the European fascists – they only killed Communist workers and other such ‘subhumans’!

Occupy

Recently I responded to a dewy-eyed op-ed piece on a liberal website with this post:

Oh dear, how sweetly naïve you all are!

You know as well as I what will happen to the ‘Occupiers.’

They will be allowed to camp-out, to cook-out, to make speeches, to sing and dance and have street-theatre — for a while. ‘Left’ liberals like yourself will be able to call this a ‘great upsurge of public opinion’ while right-wing commentators will have a field day raving about ‘lunatics, thugs and paid agitators.’

Then the capitalists will decide that it’s time to get back to ‘business as usual.’ They will tell the Occupiers that they have made their point and that they should now go home. “Public Order must be restored,” the capitalists will cry.

The capitalists will be supported by a lapdog media, some of who will admit that the Occupiers are right to be angry but that “this is not the time or the way,” while others will decide that the Soccer Moms and Nascar Dads of Middle America (and their counterparts in other countries) have had enough Spectacle and that it’s “time to move along.”

If the Occupiers don’t ‘move along,’ they will be dispersed with the full force of the bourgeois state — courts, cops and army — and their movement will be drowned in blood. If they do ‘move along,’ they will have gained nothing, except to have “upheld their democratic right to express their opinion.” Either way, it *will* be ‘business as usual’ for capitalism — even if the Occupiers manage to squeeze some ‘concessions’ from the bourgeoisie, such concessions will quickly be undermined not only by the ‘lobbyists’ who influence capitalist legislatures but by the legislators themselves who have their own salaries and stock portfolios to guard — and in five or ten years, the Occupiers will be back where they started.

For, girls and boys, these problems are *systemic* (endemic to capitalism). Boom-and-bust cycles — ‘bubbles’ — have occurred for as long as the capitalist mode of production has existed, and will go on occurring as long as more goods are being produced than can be consumed and as long as they are being produced for private profit rather than for genuine public need (not ‘need’ created by advertising).

The only way out of this cycle is to change the *system* — but for that, one must be prepared to fight, for the likes of the Koch Brothers will not give up their power without a struggle.

Predictably, the repression I envisaged is now materializing, with arrests and police assaults on the Occupiers in many countries.

There is a chance for a positive outcome — if the Occupiers learn to fight back! They will certainly be denigrated by the bourgeois state and its mouthpieces and will probably be defeated this time, but hopefully lesson will be learned that will one day assist in the destruction of the capitalist system and its replacement by a socialist one.

Of course for this to happen, the class character of the ‘Occupy’ movement needs a shake-out. At present it is a petty-bourgeois movement, limiting itself to the desire to ‘reform’ capitalist system in order to better accommodate the aspirations of an upwardly-mobile ‘middle class’ — in some respects it is openly hostile to the proletariat.

Yet there are indications that at least some of the protestors are developing a class-oriented analysis — young black workers in New York particularly are saying that their concerns are being swamped in a sea of sentimental class-collaborationist ‘unity’ that will ensure that power remains in the hands of those who cause these crises to begin with.

Only working people have the social power to end forever the cycle of boom-and-bust and its associated misery that characterizes the rotten system of capitalism. To do so they must take on board the concerns of all the Occupiers — especially women and immigrants, but also the disabled, veterans who are being pepper-sprayed, those who have lost homes, gays and people of colour —filter them through the lens of class and keep explaining, over the inane reformist illusions of the liberal media,  that the problem is systemic and that the solution involves overthrowing the system of capitalism.

Quick Thought #4

The bourgeois media are crowing — “The ‘Gaddafi Regime’ has but a few hours to live.”

We’ve had the “brutal dictator oppressing his own people,” the “torture chambers,” the “rape rooms” — all the same old bullshit.

But what’s really going on here? The reason America has been raining bombs on Libya is the same reason it toppled Saddam Hussein — Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libya’s oil fields. He “sinned further” by also proposed a common currency for Africa —  in their trade with each other, African countries could then be free from the tyranny of the dollar.

Uncle Sam does not let such insolent defiance go unpunished.

God Bless America? Nah, I’d rather wipe my arse on its flag!

UK Riots

 
This week the UK exploded in rioting. It started over the shooting by police of a man in London, but it is now much more than that.

The UK government, handmaiden to British and international capitalism, is determined to force ‘austerity’ down the throats of the British people — more cuts in health, education and social welfare, not for them, of course, but for ‘ordinary people.’ Such measures, combined with job cuts and reduced accessibility to housing — and in the wake of over 30 years of Thatcherite ‘shock-and-awe’ economic policy that ground them down — have pushed these ‘ordinary people,’ the British proletariat, to the brink.

Added to the disgust that the ‘ordinary people’ are feeling while multi-millionaire businesspeople are making laws to ‘disappear’ the last remnants of the safety net that has kept their heads above water since the end of WWII, and billionaire bankers and CEOs are raking in the cash while they starve, is the disrespect for ‘British society’ inculcated by the knowledge that politicians, bureaucrats and police have been “in the pocket of” (“taking money from”) a rogue, right-wing paper-boy called Rupert Murdoch

Every capitalist politician — Conservative, Labour and Liberal and their analogues around the world — as well as bourgeois social scientists, media commentators and ‘comfortable’ members of the middle class (some of whom blame the ‘welfare state’ for “making people lazy”) have lined up to condemn the rioters as ‘unemployed thugs,’ lacking in ‘discipline’ and ‘respect,’ the result of ‘bad parenting’ and ‘the rise of gang psychology’ and motivated by “the politics of envy.”

Yes, there might be an element of this, but there is also a sound instinct that British society (and ours) is fundamentally insane in the patterns of wealth and ownership that it allows.

But the “politics of envy” argument (“*I* resent someone who is smarter than I and more energetic than I having more than I do.”) is how Adam Smith's concept of individualistic self-interest derails any movement for social change under capitalism.

By this same logic, anyone who says “I am shocked at the inequitable distribution of power and income in our society — I am going to form/join an organization to redress the balance,” has to be a cynical manipulator aiming for ‘power,’ or a gullible fool.

The capitalist ideologue is happy to embrace change, but only when it comes in the shape of gradual reform, and more importantly in a way that does not challenge the concept of private ownership of the means of production — capitalists will give away “a piece of the pie” (better social conditions) only when forced to by the fear that they will lose the lot.

British PM, David Cameron, waited for three days before returning from holiday to address the situation. He is now threatening to ‘punish’ the rioters (How? By denying them the right to take holidays in Tuscany?). Meanwhile, one commentator is telling the rioters that they should “learn their place in civil society”!

Hey, at least the Brits are honest about this! In the US (and to a lesser extent here) they still brainwash their citizens with the myth of ‘social mobility’[1]. Mind you, US capitalists have turned Smith’s argument into a religious axiom — wealth is a sign of divine favour, the result of the primary ‘Virtues’ of hard work and thrift, and those who are wealthy ‘deserve’ their wealth, while conversely the poor are not only responsible for their own plight but in breach of divine commandments.[2]

Meanwhile, back on the streets, the violence continues. Unless the rioters develop the grievances into a comprehensive critique of the capitalist system that is responsible for their plight, there is a real danger that fascist groups will rise to the leadership, splitting the rioters along racial and class lines.

 
PennyRed has posted an eyewitness report from London, http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html

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[1] “The Pursuit of Happyness” lulls USans (and the rest of us) into optimistic feel-good mode in spite of the fact that ‘social mobility’ has declined markedly in ‘capitalist democracies’ for at least the past 30 years.

[2] The British under good queen Vicky believed this too, but the ‘ordinary’ people had never been as immersed in the myth as their US counterparts. Luckily, the more enlightened sections of the British bourgeoisie recognized this and pressed for the dispossessed to receive at least some crumbs from the tables of the rich.

6/9 August 1945 — Dropping the Atomic Bombs

Sixty-six years ago, B-29 bombers from the US Army-Airforce dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The first, codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August, while the second, ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August.

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000-166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefectural health department estimates that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and short term cause of death, 15-20% died from radiation sickness, 20-30% from flash burns, and 50-60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.

The US government expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October!

The publicly-stated rationale for the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare so far was to end the war in such a way as to save lives, both US and Japanese, which would otherwise have been lost in occupying and ‘pacifying’ Japan. This was (and still is) one of the greatest LIES ever told.

US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Harry S Truman that he (Stimson) was fearful that the US air force would have Japan so bombed out that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength.” He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb.” His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.” General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified, “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, Truman (who, in typically sententious American fashion, had invoked the blessing of his invisible friend on the act) voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success of the experiment.” Dropping the atomic bomb was merely a war-crime, only one in a long line committed by the European-descended inhabitants of the United States, from the Pequot War of 1636, through My Lai in 1968 to Fallujah in 2004 — and if it hadn’t been for Philby, Burgess and McLean, the US would have been holding the rest of the world hostage for 66 years instead of just the past 20.

And one can make a good case that it was the USSR that was responsible for the final defeat of the Japanese Empire. The US had rebuffed Japanese offers to surrender from as early as 1943, and decided to fight it out. The US airforce had been bombing Japan around the clock for months before dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August and the second on 9 August

On 9 August 1945 a large Soviet army under General Afanasiy Pavlantevich Byeloborodov entered the war against Japan, launching several offensive operations simultaneously, in North-east China, North Korea, South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Over a short period of time, the Russian armies with naval support cleared the Japanese forces from vast expanses of East Asia, leaving no alternative to Hitler’s Far Eastern ally. Between 9 August and 20 August about 80,000 men of the Kwangtung Army – Japan’s strongest — were killed and. 600,000 taken prisoner. Approximate Russian losses were 8,000 dead and 22,000 wounded. Twenty-two Japanese divisions were routed.

Japan waited five days before capitulating and eleven before signing the actual document of surrender. Tokyo’s leaders saw the impossibility of continuing the war only after Russia declared war on Japan. On the same day (9 August) that Russia entered the war in the Far East, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said, “The entry into the war of the Soviet Union this morning puts us in an utterly hopeless situation and makes further continuation of the war impossible.”

Socialism's Agenda Time

Over on his blog what's left, Stephen Gowens has just left an important post.

Read it here http://gowans.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/socialism%E2%80%99s-agenda-time/

Quick Thought #3

So the Navy SEALs who performed the extra-judicial execution (aka ‘assassination’) of Osama bin Laden — and that’s what it was, people, since there was never any intention to take him alive, as Nicholas Schmidie has shown an article printed in The New Yorker of 8 August entitled “Getting Bin Laden”  — have died in a helicopter ‘accident’ in Afghanistan?

“Well,” to quote my old mate George W, “who’d’a thunk it?” The execution squad can no longer be interrogated as to who ordered the ‘hit’ or what their instructions were — they are now safely dead and, as ‘genuine American heroes’ are beyond the pale of criticism by ordinary mortals (even – or especially – congressional oversight committees). And their deaths can be used as justification for greater US efforts to control the globe.

No surprises here — move along, folks!

22 June 1941 - The Real "Date That Will Live In Infamy"

Seventy years ago, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, in comparison to which the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i (to which Roosevelt’s quote refers) seems like a fart in a hurricane.

The world had for twenty years been sliding towards another World War. In Mein Kampf, published in the 1920s, Hitler formulated a programme for the future destruction of Soviet Russia. Capitalist (and pre-capitalist) ruling classes the world over supported the Nazis, recognizing in them a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’ — in the case of the US bourgeoisie this support was not only ideological (Joseph Kennedy, Prescott Bush) and financial (Henry Ford) but also practical (GM, Curtiss-Wright, Standard Oil, Chase National, IT&T).

In 1939, military talks between Britain, France and Russia to form an  alliance against the Third Reich failed and, in order to buy some time for the USSR, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Even after he seized Poland in 1939, setting off the Second World War, Hitler did not risk an immediate attack on the Soviet Union. Rather, he decided to wait until the Anglo-French bloc was defeated. But on 23 November 1939 Hitler told a military conference, “We have a treaty with Russia. However, treaties are observed only while they offer advantages.”

In September 1940 the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan was forged and in December Hitler signed a Directive containing instructions for the invasion of Russia. A series of ruses was put into effect to cover preparations for the invasion — only partially successful, since the Finnish aggression of November 1939 had alerted at least some in the Soviet military to possible future events (Finland was a German ally and its hostility to the USSR, silently underwritten by both the US and UK, went back to the days of the Revolution).

Finally, on Sunday, 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany threw men and equipment against the USSR in unprecedented numbers — 190 divisions, over 4,000 tanks, almost 5,000 aircraft and more than 200 warships. Joining the attack were forces from Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Finland. A total of five million men took part in the blitz attack along the entire Soviet frontier that stretched some 5,986 kilometres. Such an invasion force had never been seen before in human history.

Defining his war aims, Adolf Hitler told a conference of German generals, “Russia is to be abolished.” The war, he said, was to be one of “annihilation.” On the fate of Moscow he did not mince words — the city and every single person in it were to be destroyed, and the site turned into a lake! The Nazis spoke with contempt about “lower orders” of people, an estimation that included the entire Soviet population of Slavs, Jews, gypsies and others — this is a view which many in ‘the West’ still hold, openly or covertly (I will return to this topic in discussing ‘the epidemic of Soviet rape’ on the march to Berlin).

The Nazi generals, conscious of their advantages and their quick victories in Poland and Western Europe, based their plans on the concept of Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, which had already been so successful. Above all they counted on the shattering effect that a surprise strike by massed armoured, air and infantry forces would have, and banked on an easy thrust into the USSR’s vital centres. The generals hoped that the entire campaign would last no more than thirty or forty days. American and British experts sided with the German estimates — the US Army’s General Marshal gave the Red Army no chance of escaping “total defeat within six weeks” while the Imperial General Staff of the UK gave the Soviets three months.

At first it seemed that nothing could withstand the ferocity of the German onslaught. But it soon became clear that even if the German armies would ultimately win, they would not do so with impunity. The Russians began preparing for a massive defensive campaign. In Moscow more than 500,000 citizens began to build fortifications in and around the city. Up to a dozen volunteer divisions and almost ninety combat battalions were formed. As Hitler’s armies pushed towards Moscow, more than forty partisan groups taking their orders from Moscow operated behind enemy lines, disrupting enemy logistics and communications and sometimes tying up large bodies of German troops.

Many in the Soviet military and civilian bureaucracy had realized that sooner or later Hitler would attack but the more perceptive knew that preparations for it were pitifully incomplete — that the Soviet armies, strong though they were, were not equal to the most prepared and powerful army ever assembled. Stalin apparently believed he had at least six more months of peace to strengthen his nation’s defences. In the spring of 1941 the USSR was feverishly striving to fulfil its Third Five-Year Plan (1938—42), building up industrial and military capacity. By the end of that year, military production had increased by over 400%.

Hitler had statistical superiority in the beginning. In early 1941 Germany had the manpower resources of 290 million people and the raw materials and industrial capacity of nearly the whole of Europe at its disposal. The Third Reich was capable of producing twice the quantity of metal, electricity and coal as the Soviet Union — when the invading armies occupied the USSR’s western areas, which accounted for over 40 per cent of its population, and more than half of its industrial output and a third of its food production, Germany’s advantages were even more glaring.

If, as its enemies claim, the Soviet Union’s military forces were being “controlled by fear of punishment,” or Soviet citizens living under a “brutal totalitarian regime,” this would have been the time when they could have defected in droves. Yet none did — in fact, the heroism and self-sacrifice of Soviet military and civilian personnel from all walks of life and from every ethnic group remained at a high level until the final victory.

When I speak of heroism in this context, I am thinking of the ‘Night Witches’ — young women mostly in their late teens or early twenties who flew wood-and-paper biplanes on bombing missions (often in the depths of the winter) to disrupt the Axis armies, and the pilots who rammed German aircraft to bring them down, a tactic you didn’t see in Memphis Belle. I am thinking of the snipers like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Vasiliy Zaitsev and Nina Lobkovskaya, and of Tatyana Baramzina, who was captured, ‘interrogated’ (tortured and raped), then had her eyes gouged out with a bayonet before being shot in the stomach at close range with an anti-tank gun and left to die. I am thinking of the partisans (like Zoya Kosmodemyanska, who, moments before her execution at the age of nineteen, said, “There are 200 million of us — you can’t hang us all!”), the medics, the tankists, machine gunners, soldiers, sailors and air-force personnel, and the inhabitants of Leningr. I am thinking of the Karelians Mariya Smirnova, Mariya Melyentova and Anna Lisitsyna, the Kazakhs Manshuk Mametova and Aliya Moldagulova, the Tatar Maguba Syrtlanova, the Pole Anelia Kzhivon, the Estonian Yelena Kullman and the Lithuanian Marija Melnikaite, the Cossack Trofim Negoduko, of Nur Sadykov, Botabai Suleimenov, Akaky Shevardnadze and the dozens of unknown soldiers from over thirty ethnic groups who died at Brest in the first moths of the war, of Jews and Roma and of the millions of Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians who gave their lives to bring an end to Fascism. And I am thinking of  eleven-year old Tatyana Savicheva, the representative of half a million civilians who perished in the 900-day siege of Leningrad, keeping her diary until she no longer had the strength to do anything but die.

And yes, I am even thinking of Yakov Dzhugashvili — Stalin’s son — who threw himself onto the electrified fence of a POW camp rather than be a propaganda tool for the Nazis.

There were groups of disgruntled nationalists who fought for the Third Reich, but they soon learned that shifting their loyalties didn’t mean going up in the estimation of their new friends.

Taking advantage of their surprise attack and superior numbers — up to five to one in the sector of the main effort — Axis troops advanced up to 155 miles by the night of 25 June and 372 miles by 10 July. The leadership was triumphant. A little over a week later, Hitler endorsed a plan to reorganize the Wehrmacht for carrying out new tasks — future operations against Britain and (a vaunted target for the future) the USA.

There were however, some early bumps in the smooth German road. The stiff defence by the garrison of the frontierfortress of Brest — the ‘Hero Fortress’ — showed at the start that the USSR would not be an easy victim. German generals commented on the stubbornness and valour of the defenders, a circumstance that unsettled some who accepted the propaganda that Slavs were a “lower order” of species.

In a fierce battle at Smolensk (lasting from 10 July to 10 September) the Third Reich’s Army Group Centre — the force battering its way towards Moscow — suffered heavy losses. Greater losses were suffered by the Soviets — but at Smolensk for the first time since the war began the Wehrmacht was compelled, temporarily, to assume the defensive in its main line of advance. It was the first crack in the German armour.

By the beginning of the fourth month of the invasion the total losses in the invaders’ ranks exceeded 500,000 officers and men, whereas in the first two years of the Second World War the German armed forces had lost fewer than 300,000 troops in seizing nearly the whole of Europe. Although the Wehrmacht continued its successful drive in the summer of 1941, the Nazi High Command failed to reach its main objectives, failing to capture Leningrad and Moscow, or the oil resources of the Caucasus.

The fight-back gathered momentum until Victory Day on 9 May 1945.

In respect of the number of troops and weapons involved and the frontage of the attack, the Eastern Front was the main theatre of operations in World War II, the site of at least fifty major battles — Moscow (1941-42), Stalingrad (1942-43), Kursk (1943), Operation Bagration (1944), the Yassy-Kishinev Campaign (1944), the Vistula-Oder Operation (1945) and Berlin (1945). At different stages of the war the two sides had from eight to thirteen million troops, from 5,700 to 20,000 tanks and assault guns, from 6,500 to 18,000 aircraft and from 84,000 to 163,000 artillery pieces and mortars — at no time from the day of the invasion until the fall of Berlin did the armed forces of the USSR face less than 66% of the forces of the western members of the Axis.

So I mourn the US service personnel who died at Pearl Harbour (as I mourn all those who died in that horrendous conflict). But for the US to paint itself as the Ultimate Victim, for Hollywood to bombard the “Free World” with at least one movie/series per year telling us how much the US had suffered and dinning into us that the US had won WWII on its own, with the implication that the rest of us should be damned grateful? Bullshit!