Quick Thought #2 - Crap Anywhere, But On The Front Lawn!

The Australian Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, recently castigated several members of the ADF for homophobic slurs against serving personnel and civilian staff on departmental social-networking sites.

Note that he did not take them to task for being homophobic or sexist — he took them to task for “misusing social-networking sites in a manner liable to bring the Department [of Defence] into disrepute.”

So, Aussie military boys and girls, you can be as homophobic as you like, you can rape ‘lezzos’ (or any of your female colleagues really) to “put ‘em in their place,” you can bash ‘poofters’ ‘cos they’re not ‘real men’ (http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/04/06/the-dark-side-of-mateship-in-australian-military-ranks/) — just don’t go putting hate-speech up on websites where it could get us, your bosses, sued.

Remember, boys and girls, if you can’t be good, be careful. Above all, don’t leave any evidence — when you do do the sexual assault or even just the hate-speech thing, you can rest assured that your conduct will be whitewashed, because we, your bosses, will be the ones running any inquiry and we don’t want the departmental budget crippled by compensation payouts either.

That’s right folks. It’s never about rights, dignity or even safety — like all issues in capitalist society, it’s all about money.

9 May 1945 - Victory Over Fascism!

Today is the day on which, 66 years ago, the war in Europe ended for the people of the Soviet Union.

Why does this matter?

In an article published on Thursday, 30 April, 2009 by TomDispatch.com, bourgeois historian Andrew Bacevich of Boston University writes:

 For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% [Australia suffered 0.57%] of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Between TWENTY-SEVEN AND TWENTY-EGHT MILLION Soviet citizens – soldiers and civilians, women, children and men — lost their lives in that epic struggle, five million of those in concentration camps. The German aim was to destroy the USSR and kill, deport or enslave its inhabitants — their fantasy was to turn the Soviet Union into a gigantic “theme park” with Teutonic Knights and their families hunting Russian “peasants.”  

Civilians and hostages were routinely massacred (the largest number of civilian deaths in a single city was 1.2 million citizens during the 900 day Siege of Leningrad). In three years of occupation, between one and two million Soviet Jews were killed. Other ethnic groups were also targeted for extermination, and even those nationalist groups who collaborated with the Germans (Ukrainians and Cossacks, for example) met short shrift from their new “liberators.”  Millions died from starvation as the Germans requisitioned food for their armies and fodder for their draft horses. As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarus in 1943–44, the German occupiers systematically applied a scorched earth policy, burning towns and cities, destroying infrastructure, and leaving civilians to starve or die of exposure

Prisoners of War were treated abominably — sixty percent died, starved, beaten, summarily executed, left to freeze to death or die of untreated wounds, or forced marched to be slave labourers in the Reich. And lest anyone try to excuse the Wehrmacht (the regular German Army) on the grounds that “it was all the work of the SS,” let me set you straight. Hitler’s “Commissar Order” — communicated to all ranks prior to the invasion —absolved in advance ANY soldier of the Reich who committed what would now be called “crimes against humanity.” Jewish PoWs were sent away for “special treatment,” soldiers from the Central Asian Republics were executed out of hand and on 29 June 1941, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge ordered, ‘Women in uniform are to be shot.’

Later, as their excesses ignited a protracted partisan war, the Germans reacted by issuing harsh orders calling for the execution of any Red Army personnel found in civilian clothing. An order to the 56th Infantry Division stated, ‘Soldiers in plain clothes, mostly recognizable by their short hair, are to be shot following their identification as Red Army soldiers.’ Villages were razed for sheltering Red Army soldiers, and prisoners were shot in retaliation for partisan attacks or for simply being soldiers. A field court-martial had sentenced a major to demotion for shooting PoWs for no particular reason. Hitler intervened and excused the major, stating, “We cannot blame lively spirits when they, convinced as they are that the German people are engaged in a unique battle of life and death, reject the Bolshevik world-enemy beyond all commandments of humanity.”

Wikipedia notes that, “According to a summary, presented by Lieutenant General Roman Rudenko at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, the property damage in the Soviet Union inflicted by the Axis invasion was estimated to a value of 679 billion rubles. The combined damage consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church buildings, 31,850 industrial establishments, 65,000 kilometres of railroad, 4100 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, and 43,000 public libraries. Seven million horses, and 17 million sheep and goats were also slaughtered or driven off.” (While Wikipedia can be “liberal” with the truth about Communism, these figures match those in my copy of the IMT’s transcripts).

I have many bones to pick with Comrade Stalin. Yet none of them would have stopped me from picking up a gun and marching with the Red Army all the way to Berlin!

Quick Thought #1 - Easter

Every year the famous pagan / jewish / christian festival of Easter brings forth its crop of loony quotes from loony people with invisible friends.

This year one of the geriatric god botherers was fulminating against Voluntary Euthanasia. Taking aim at the claim that those in pain should be allowed to die with dignity, he frothed that “no death is dignified” and then exhorted his audience to look at “Jesus … who suffered many indignities in his dying, yet bore it nobly.”

Such is the bizarre pattern of thinking that animates the religious mind. Leaving aside the twisted logic of sacrifice and atonement that underpins the jesus-myth, it is clear that the good cleric expects us all not only to suffer simply because his god-man did, but to accept that the suffering is ‘good for us’!

Osama Dead

Breaking News — the CIA have killed Enemy Number One of the USA. Derided as a ‘criminal’ and ‘terrorist’ by the rulers of the US Empire for nearly 20 years, Osama bin Laden was ambushed in a ‘mansion’ in Pakistan and shot in the head.

I can’t say that I’m not happy — in fact I’d be one of the first to piss on his grave (if he hadn’t apparently been buried at sea in an attempt to deprive his acolytes of a potential ‘shrine’).

USAns are celebrating almost as frenziedly as they did at the end of WWII — one US commentator interviewed here tried to explain that as “a deserved triumphalism over a dangerous enemy who managed to bring down two symbols of American Might.” This is ridiculous. Firstly the ‘dangerous enemy’ was the ‘guru’ of a ragtag band of trainee clerics armed with box-cutters, not Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and secondly the ‘War on Terror’ was nothing like WWII — to say otherwise is to insult those who fought and died in the latter.

But the ruling class in the US did not always harbour such malice toward Osama. Back in the 1980s (waaay before ‘9/11’ and well before most had even heard his name), bin Laden was a Hero. In an article entitled “Bin Laden Comes Home to Roost,” from the MSNBC Web site in 1998, bin Laden’s unclassified CIA biography states that he ran a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar — the MAK — which funnelled money, arms and personnel to Afghanistan (These were the mujahedin ‘freedom fighters,’ the bloodthirsty throwbacks to mediaevalism who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and skinned Communist teachers alive for the ‘crime’ of teaching little girls to read and write). MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the main CIA conduit for ’Charlie Wilson’s War,’ the imperialists’ covert war against the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR in Afghanistan. The article quotes Republican Orrin Hatch, senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that he would make the same call today knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said. “Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.” [I shall have more to say about Afghanistan in later posts].

Ironically the same Fall From Grace overtook Saddam Hussein, the USA’s BFF in the 1980s’ proxy war against the Evil Ayatollahs of Iran. It would seem to argue that becoming a client of the Empire is not particularly a good idea — save for the fact that plenty do and manage to survive.

To see what makes a ‘survivor,’ let’s look at Chilean ‘president’ Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet accepted his US-authored brief, to get rid of the ‘evil leftist,’ Salvador Allende, round up and ‘disappear’ (rape / torture / murder) the latter’s supporters and turn Chile into an experimental laboratory for neoliberal economic theology. This he did, faithfully and joyfully — and then he stopped. For the rest of his life (well, until Chileans had finally decided they had had enough and the Empire decided he was surplus to requirements in its geopolitical games), he sat on his arse in his palace in Santiago, collecting his CIA pension, perusing the latest Gospel from the Chicago School of Economics, keeping the living standards of ordinary Chilean workers and farmers at rock-bottom while lining the pockets of the wealthy, signing the odd Death Warrant for an ‘uppity’ worker or university student, and looking forward to the annual telegram from his chum, Maggot Thatcher. He didn’t try to invade another Imperial client state like Saddam did in 1990, nor did he have intoxicating visions of recreating the religious empires of the early Middle Ages like bin Laden and his islamist mates. 

One imagines that if Uncle Adolf had confined himself to ‘righting’ the German economy in the interests of capitalism and ‘disappearing’ only German ‘liberals,’ trade unionists, communists, homosexuals, Jews and Gypsies he would have been allowed to stay in place as long as his Spanish colleague, Francisco Franco — especially given the popularity of fascism among the ruling classes of the Anglosphere.

Truly, international relations is rather like that early episode of Ally McBeal where the naïve new employee Portia diRossi says to Calista Flockhart, “We hate her, right?” — we never know who we’re going to be friends with unless our ‘betters’ (politicians, military men, intelligence agents, media proprietors and even shock jocks) tell us. And we little people love whom we’re told to love and hate “the Enemies of our Country / Race / Religion / Civilization.”

Yes, I hated Osama, but not for the reasons the above-mentioned ‘betters’ give me. I hated him because he was a reactionary, god-bothering, misogynist wanker — but then, so is GW Bush, and I’ll  happily piss on his grave too!

It's May Day!

 

Pictures from tragically short life and bloody death of the first Workers' Republic (The Paris Commune) provide a scenic background to the universal anthem, sung in the language of those who brought the idea of a socialist state to fruition.

(PhotoMontage courtesy of Solidaritet2010)