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

---

[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!