I Do Not Care to Finish Reading This Mediocre Kissinger Biography by Niall Ferguson
Tuesday, 29 March 2016 14:15
Brown writes: "I'd made it 375 pages into Niall Ferguson's newish first volume of a planned two-volume life of Henry Kissinger before receiving in the mail a copy of Greg Grandin's review of same, in which the author of last year's excellent Kissinger's Shadow sums up Ferguson's tome as follows: 'The irony is that it has been Kissinger's sharpest critics who have most appreciated his acute sense of self, who have treated him, however disapprovingly, as a fully dimensional individual with a churning, complex psyche.'"
Barrett Brown. (photo: Sparrow Media)
I Do Not Care to Finish Reading This Mediocre Kissinger Biography by Niall Ferguson
By Barrett Brown, The Intercept
29 March 16
This is the latest installment of 'The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison.' Barrett Brown is a journalist currently serving time in prison for charges relating to the 2012 Stratfor email leak. He is the founder of Project PM, a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex, and was described as an unofficial spokesperson for Anonymous before renouncing ties to the collective in 2011.
'd made it 375 pages into Niall Ferguson’s newish first volume of a planned two-volume life of Henry Kissinger before receiving in the mail a copy of Greg Grandin’s review of same, in which the author of last year’s excellent Kissinger’s Shadow sums up Ferguson’s tome as follows: “The irony is that it has been Kissinger’s sharpest critics who have most appreciated his acute sense of self, who have treated him, however disapprovingly, as a fully dimensional individual with a churning, complex psyche. In contrast, Ferguson, tone deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, condemns him to a literary fate worse than anything that Hitchens could have meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is boring.”
This is about as true a thing as has ever been written about any other thing, so much so that I feel both morally and professionally justified in simply abandoning this charmless book unfinished despite having promised to review it at the end of my last column (I would have figured out some other convenient justification for this regardless, but it’s always good to be able to show your work). Nor am I being insulting to Ferguson simply because I disagree with the pro-Kissinger stance he’s taken as the fellow’s authorized biographer and ideological admirer; two years ago I reviewed Kissinger’s own 1,200-page memoir, White House Years, which, though likewise betraying something of a pro-Kissinger stance, was also undeniably compelling and well-written. And while Kissinger is clever enough that one often needs to sort through a great deal of raw material in order to do a proper job of making fun of him, with Ferguson the threshold is somewhat … lower. Here, then, is my review of Ferguson’s 33-page introduction to Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist.
“A plainly unhinged woman writing as ‘Brice Taylor’ insists that, when she was a child, Kissinger turned her into a ‘mind-controlled slave,’ repeatedly making her eat her alphabet cereal in reverse order and taking her on the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland,” writes Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, who also scrutinizes Lyndon LaRouche’s claim that Kissinger is a British agent and David Icke’s assertion that he’s a reptilian shape-changer from the lower fourth dimension before concluding, “No rational people take such nonsense seriously. But the same cannot be said for the allegations made by conspiracy theorists of the left, who are a great deal more influential.” The conspiracy theorists of the left, it seems, include not only Oliver Stone but also Howard Zinn and Hunter S. Thompson.
Before things get totally out of hand, as they’re clearly about to, keep in mind that Ferguson was chosen by Kissinger to do this biography 10 years ago, which is to say that Ferguson had a decade to come up with some way of depicting the great bulk of anti-Kissinger sentiment as not only misguided but also malicious and at any rate beyond the pale of American political discourse as usually conducted, and that what follows is nonetheless the best that he could do.
Back to the text:
In his People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn argues that Kissinger’s policies in Chile were intended at least in part to serve the economic interests of International Telephone and Telegraph. In place of evidence, such diatribes tend to offer gratuitous insult. According to Zinn, Kissinger “surrendered himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction.” In their Untold History of the United States, the film director Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick refer to Kissinger as a “psychopath” (admittedly quoting Nixon). The doyen of “gonzo” journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, called him a “slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure” — adding, for good measure, “pervert.”
So Ferguson promises us influential left-wing conspiracy theorists, which we’re to understand are inherently silly things to be, as if one is not forced into theorizing about conspiracies when one studies a man who conspired to secretly carpet bomb Cambodia, and who did so under the aegis of a presidential administration in which was discussed the viability of assassinating a troublesome newspaper columnist by having LSD applied to his steering wheel.
Still, every allegation must be considered on its merits — something we are unable to do in the case of the single conspiracy theory Ferguson attributes to anyone by name, an allegation supposedly made by Howard Zinn, as Ferguson does not see fit to actually quote it for us. But he does find the space to quote Zinn deploying a disapproving metaphor to describe Kissinger’s decision to go to work for a man he himself had declared not long before to be unfit for the presidency. This, in Ferguson’s accounting, constitutes a “gratuitous insult” on Zinn’s part, whereas referring to another historian’s words as a “diatribe” without having the decency to even reproduce them is presumably not gratuitous at all.
If one bothers to check Ferguson’s footnotes, one comes across the first of several ethical oddities with which his introduction is dotted — for one finds that the “princes of war and destruction” remark is actually from another book written years after People’s History, and thus can hardly be said to constitute an especially good example of an insult offered “in place of evidence,” the place for evidence generally being in the vicinity of the allegation (but we’ll look at the actual evidence in a bit). We are not treated to any better examples down paragraph, where Ferguson quotes Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik quoting Nixon insulting Kissinger — out of bounds, gentlemen, out of bounds! — without this time deigning even to summarize what allegations the two of them may have leveled at Kissinger to get them thrown in with the likes of Crazy Old Howard Zinn. Hunter S. Thompson makes an appearance as well, unencumbered by anything approaching a reason for being included in what was originally billed as a paragraph detailing unfounded conspiracy theories directed against Kissinger by influential leftists; by now Ferguson seems to have resorted merely to trying to prove that some on the left have insulted Kissinger, or at least quoted Nixon insulting him. To Ferguson’s credit, he does indeed prove this.
Ferguson himself may be aware that he’s promised more than he can deliver here; it may also have occurred to him that he’s just accused several people of failing to back up their allegations with evidence while he himself fails to back up this very allegation with evidence and that this sort of thing might be frowned upon in some circles, if not necessarily at the Hoover Institution. But rather than just deleting this paragraph due to one or more of the several distinct problems, which each on its own makes it worthy of deletion, Ferguson decides to just make it longer. “One left-of-center website recently accused Kissinger of having been somehow involved in the anthrax attacks of September 2001, when anthrax spores were mailed to various media and Senate offices, killing five people.”
Here we have finally been provided with something on the order of an implausible conspiracy theory emanating from the left. And we will be satisfied with this so long as we are willing to overlook the fact that Ferguson promised us that the bearers would be “influential” and yet here cannot bring himself to name the author or even the outlet, presumably in hopes that we won’t realize that both outlet and author are somewhat obscure and that this is merely the same manner of accusation that can be found on any number of minor websites about any number of powerful men.
If we check Ferguson’s endnotes again, we find that he’s referring to a piece by a certain Kevin Barrett titled “Arrest Kissinger for Both 9/11s.” If we check the URL he provides, which comes in the form of a blind bit.ly link-shortener, we find that it’s a dead link. Fair enough; perhaps it’s been taken down since then. If we simply Google the title and author (or have someone else do it for us because we’re in prison), we discover that the piece in question has appeared on a couple of sites, the most mainstream of which would seem to be presstv.ir, itself based on an Iranian host. If we go so far as to read the article, we find that the author does indeed accuse Kissinger of perpetrating the anthrax attacks. But he also accuses him of involvement in “the explosive demolition of the World Trade Center, and massacre of nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington in 2001,” going on to denounce “Kissinger’s complicity in the coup d’état of September 11, 2001” and noting in passing that the former secretary of state was involved in “helping design the 9/11 shock-and-awe psychological warfare operation.”
One might ask why it is that Ferguson neglected to mention that this “left-of-center” website that’s supposedly mainstream enough to be worthy of inclusion in a paragraph with Zinn and Thompson actually went so far as to accuse Kissinger of involvement in 9/11 itself. After all, that would seem to be the smoking-gun proof that Kissinger really is subject to unsubstantiated allegations from influential leftists, an argument that Ferguson is plainly desperate to make. If we’re feeling gentlemanly, we might allow for the possibility that Ferguson is incapable of understanding what he’s reading — but then that would be something of a knock at Harvard, would it not? So wouldn’t it be even more polite to conclude, as is obvious anyway, that he left this out lest we realize that whatever site he’s taken pains not to name for us isn’t at all “influential” or even mainstream? Because, after all, Harvard?
As a sort of professional courtesy to himself, Ferguson pretends that his case has now been made. “All this vitriol is at first sight puzzling,” he writes presently. A page later, after listing Kissinger’s various awards won and offices held and treaties negotiated, he invites us to ponder with him: “How, then, are we to explain the visceral hostility that the name Henry Kissinger arouses?” That there is to the contrary nothing puzzling about anything Ferguson has shown us and no degree of hostility to be found in connection with the name of this particular American political figure that cannot be found associated with dozens of others of similar prominence becomes even more, rather than less, evident to the extent that one’s been paying attention to Ferguson’s own examples. Hunter S. Thompson famously used similar language about everyone from Hubert Humphrey to his personal acquaintances. Oliver Stone is probably not best known for his reluctance to accuse public officials of involvement in criminal conspiracies (not that we’ve even been told what, if anything, he’s claimed about Kissinger, but whatever). And Howard Zinn has of course been a consistent critic of the American government’s amoral conduct abroad. Indeed, until his death a few years ago, Zinn was probably one of the nation’s most effective mobilizers of popular opposition to the ends-justifies-the-means-and-oops-we-fucked-up-the-ends-too foreign policy establishment that’s so perfectly represented not only by Kissinger, but by such quasi-intellectuals as Ferguson as well. Perhaps this is why Ferguson felt the need to lie about him.
For Zinn did not, in fact, argue that “Kissinger’s policies in Chile were intended at least in part to serve the economic interests of International Telephone and Telegraph,” as Ferguson claims he did, nor does he even imply it. What he actually wrote in People’s History, a copy of which I had sent to the prison from which I now currently serve as an unpaid fact-checker for Penguin, apparently, was this: “And in 1970, an ITT director, John McCone, who also had been head of the CIA, told Henry Kissinger, secretary of state, and Richard Helms, CIA director, that ITT was willing to give $1 million to help the U.S. government in its plans to overthrow the Allende government in Chile.” Elsewhere: “It was also learned from the investigation that the CIA — with the collusion of a secret Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger — had worked to ‘destabilize’ the Chilean government headed by Salvadore Allende, a Marxist who had been elected president in one of the rare free elections in Latin America. ITT, with large interests in Chile, played a part in this operation.”
As these are the book’s only two references to ITT’s involvement in the Chile coup, and as Zinn does not in any way “argue” that those plans were originally composed or thereafter modified with any view to ITT’s economic interests whatsoever, and also taking into account that Ferguson refrained from actually quoting Zinn on this matter while having earlier given David Icke plenty of space in which to accuse Kissinger of being a shape-shifting lizard mage from the lower fourth dimension who forces children to eat cereal in an incorrect fashion, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ferguson has chosen to simply lie about another historian who, being dead, is not in a position to defend himself (not that I’m angry about it; on the contrary, this was my original excuse for not finishing the book).
The alternative explanation, again, is that Ferguson is incapable of understanding his sources. But, again, Harvard.
Harvard!
But what about the two assertions that Zinn actually does make? Are they provided without evidence, as Ferguson would have us believe? Not at all. Both of Zinn’s brief references to ITT and Chile, including his single reference to ITT and Chile and Kissinger, are clearly indicated in the text as being drawn from the various post-Watergate congressional investigations into the CIA and the Nixon administration; indeed, both of these Zinn quotes appear in passages that discuss the results of those investigations. The reader may have noticed, for instance, that one of those selections that Ferguson refrains from quoting begins, “It was also learned from the investigation that …” Zinn, obviously, is not “arguing” anything at all, much less putting forth some novel and outlandish “conspiracy theory”; as with the rest of the book, he’s drawing upon the public record — everything Zinn discusses pertaining to the overthrow of Allende, along with much else, can now be found among various online government archives.
At any rate, the Senate’s findings that ITT offered through McCone to assist in the overthrow of Allende didn’t entail any accusation to the effect that the overthrow itself was actually intended even in part to assist ITT; regardless of the extent to which any such offers were motivated by the firm’s economic interests, or ideology, or just the pure joy of overthrowing a democratically elected government, no one involved accused anyone on the planning side, much less Kissinger in particular, of actually tailoring the plot to assist the firm’s bottom line. The only person to have brought this up is Ferguson, in order to portray it as something made up by Zinn; for everyone else, the truth is sufficient.
So Ferguson has falsely accused Zinn of having made a supposedly outlandish claim about Kissinger, whereas in fact, Zinn was closely paraphrasing a Church Committee report published by the U.S. Senate, and implies that Zinn insulted Kissinger rather than providing the necessary evidence for his claim, whereas the “insult” was actually delivered in an entirely different book, and whereas of course no evidence is necessary because Zinn is merely relating an account of events derived from an official inquiry.
Even aside from this instance of outright libel, which has at least the pragmatic justification of being not easily detectable by the sort of toy fascist, National Review-subscribing scum who would presumably make up the central audience for an authorized biography of Henry Kissinger as written by a Hoover Institution scholar and who would be unlikely to have copies of Howard Zinn books lying around with which to check up on Ferguson’s claims, this whole haphazard bid to portray Kissinger as being subject to outsized criticism relative to his actual conduct is also remarkable for how it occasionally collapses even without any need for research or in fact any particular knowledge whatsoever beyond the understanding that if X applies to A, B, and C, then X is not particular to B, and does not tell us anything about B by which we might differentiate it from A and C.
Ferguson himself notes, for instance, that David Icke’s surreal allegations encompass pretty much everyone of socio-political prominence; Icke’s “List of Famous Satanists,” Ferguson writes, “includes not only Kissinger but also the Astors, Bushes, Clintons, DuPonts, Habsburgs, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and the entire British royal family — not to mention Tony Blair, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Joseph Stalin. (The comedian Bob Hope also makes the list).” So why is it remarkable that Kissinger should be included? And what’s the point of bringing up Lyndon LaRouche’s allegation that Kissinger works for the British? Search LaRouche’s name on YouTube and you’ll find, among other things, a 1980s TV promo in which he denounces Walter Mondale as “not just a KGB agent in the ordinary sense” but also “wholly owned by the left wing of the Socialist International and the grain cartel interests.” If you’re wondering why I happen to have that memorized, the answer is that this was one of several amusing political clips I was in the habit of watching once a week or so prior to my arrest; the funny part is that if Mondale were indeed under someone’s control, the “grain cartel interests” is exactly the sort of lame-ass shit that he’d be fronting. Anyway, it’s none of your business.
Having finished doing whatever it is that he thinks he’s just done, Ferguson at last makes an effort to engage Kissinger’s critics on the complex issue of whether or not Kissinger bears any responsibility for his actions. He now lurches into an overview of Christopher Hitchens’s 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which Hitchens “went so far as to accuse Kissinger of ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places’ (in fact, the only other place discussed in his book is Bangladesh).” Apparently Hitchens didn’t think to just throw Hunter S. Thompson in there to round out his list, but then the old heretic apparently had worse problems than just his well-known lack of imagination: “Hitchens was a gifted polemicist; his abilities as a historian are more open to question.” It’s the reverse with Ferguson, who’s undoubtedly an accomplished sorter-through of archives but who cannot seem to make even an exceedingly dishonest argument come out in his own favor.
But Ferguson isn’t done making dishonest arguments, and I’m not done making fun of them; we’ve really only covered three or four pages so far, after all. Next time we’ll take a look at how Ferguson handles Hitchens and certain other Kissinger critics. (SPOILER: He does it dishonestly.)
Harvard!
Awkward Questions of the Day, for the Hoover Institution and/or Harvard University to Ask Niall Ferguson About His Various False and Misleading Statements Taken From a Single Paragraph of His Introduction to His Mediocre Kissinger Biography:
What was the website to which you linked in your bibliography that hosted the article “Arrest Kissinger for Both 9/11s”?
Why did you describe the website in question specifically as “left-of-center”?
Why did you refrain from quoting that article?
Did you fail to notice that the article — which, again, was titled “Arrest Kissinger for Both 9/11s” — accused Kissinger of perpetrating 9/11?
If you didn’t notice this noteworthy thing, do you think it’s possible that you misread other sources as well in the course of researching this biography?
If you did indeed notice this, why did you inform your readers that this article accused Kissinger of involvement in the anthrax attacks that killed five people, while refraining from informing them that it also accused him of involvement in the September 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people?
Do you now agree that you made a “mistake” in accusing Zinn of accusing Kissinger of basing his Chile policies in part on ITT’s economic interests?
If not, what particular passage in A People’s History of the United States would you cite that could most reasonably be interpreted as making that accusation?
If you do agree that you were mistaken, are you concerned that your book might include other serious errors in which individuals are mistakenly accused of serious misconduct?
Why did you refrain from quoting from the book in question?
Do you realize how angry Henry Kissinger is going to be when he learns that you resorted to deception in the course of trying to achieve your objectives? (NOTE: THIS IS A JOKE QUESTION, DO NOT REALLY ASK HIM.)
(Make up your own question here! Maybe ask him about the time when he misrepresented some figures in a 2012 Newsweek article and he got called on it by a number of his colleagues but suffered zero consequences, and whether or not this emboldened him to make further misrepresentations, and whether maybe the fact that he’s nonetheless managed to maintain his position at the heights of establishment academia is perhaps indicative of a larger problem in American public life! Or whatever! Be creative!)
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6396"><span class="small">Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch</span></a>
Tuesday, 29 March 2016 14:13
Engelhardt writes: "You can be sure of one thing: never in the history of television, or any other form of media, has a single figure garnered the amount of attention - hour after hour, day after day, week after week - as Donald Trump. If he's the O.J. Simpson of twenty-first-century American politics and his run for the presidency is the eternal white Ford Bronco chase of our moment, then we're in a truly strange world."
Donald Trump shook hands at a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. (photo: Zach Gibson/NYT)
Entering Uncharted Territory in Washington
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
29 March 16
he other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least late last year. There is essentially never a time when some network or news channel isn’t reporting on, discussing, debating, analyzing, speculating about, or simply drooling over some aspect of the primary campaign, of Hillary, Bernie, Ted, and above all -- a million times above all -- The Donald (from the violence at his rallies to the size of his hands). In case you’re young and think this is more or less the American norm, it isn’t. Or wasn’t.
Truly, there is something new under the sun. Of course, in 1994 with O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco chase (95 million viewers!), the 24/7 media event arrived full blown in American life and something changed when it came to the way we focused on our world and the media focused on us. But you can be sure of one thing: never in the history of television, or any other form of media, has a single figure garnered the amount of attention -- hour after hour, day after day, week after week -- as Donald Trump. If he’s the O.J. Simpson of twenty-first-century American politics and his run for the presidency is the eternal white Ford Bronco chase of our moment, then we’re in a truly strange world.
Or let me put it another way: this is not an election. I know the word “election” is being used every five seconds and somewhere along the line significant numbers of Americans (particularly, this season, Republicans) continue to enter voting booths or in the case of primary caucuses, school gyms and the like, to choose among various candidates, so it’s all still election-like. But take my word for it as a 71-year-old guy who’s been watching our politics for decades: this is not an election of the kind the textbooks once taught us was so crucial to American democracy. If, however, you’re sitting there waiting for me to tell you what it is, take a breath and don’t be too disappointed. I have no idea, though it’s certainly part bread-and-circuses spectacle, part celebrity obsession, and part media money machine.
Actually, before we go further, let me hedge my bets on the idea that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century O.J. Simpson. It’s certainly a reasonable enough comparison, but I’ve begun to wonder about the usefulness of just about any comparison in our present situation. Even the most nightmarish of them -- Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, or any past extreme demagogue of your choice -- may actually prove to be covert gestures of consolation, reassurance, and comfort. Yes, what’s happening in our world is increasingly extreme and could hardly be weirder, we seem to have the urge to say, but it’s still recognizable. It’s something we’ve encountered before, something we’ve made sense of in the past and, in the process, overcome.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
But what if that’s not true? In some ways, the most frightening, least acceptable thing to say about our American world right now -- even if Donald Trump’s overwhelming presence all but begs us to say it -- is that we’ve entered uncharted territory and, under the circumstances, comparisons might actually impair our ability to come to grips with our new reality. My own suspicion: Donald Trump is only the most obvious instance of this, the example no one can miss.
In these first years of the twenty-first century, we may be witnessing a new world being born inside the hollowed-out shell of the American system. As yet, though we live with this reality every day, we evidently just can’t bear to recognize it for what it might be. When we survey the landscape, what we tend to focus on is that shell -- the usual elections (in somewhat heightened form), the usual governmental bodies (a little tarnished) with the usual governmental powers (a little diminished or redistributed), including the usual checks and balances (a little out of whack), and the same old Constitution (much praised in its absence), and yes, we know that none of this is working particularly well, or sometimes at all, but it still feels comfortable to view what we have as a reduced, shabbier, and more dysfunctional version of the known.
Perhaps, however, it’s increasingly a version of the unknown. We say, for instance, that Congress is “paralyzed,” and that little can be done in a country where politics has become so “polarized,” and we wait for something to shake us loose from that “paralysis,” to return us to a Washington closer to what we remember and recognize. But maybe this is it. Maybe even if the Republicans somehow lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, we would still be in a situation something like what we’re now labeling paralysis. Maybe in our new American reality, Congress is actually some kind of glorified, well-lobbied, and well-financed version of a peanut gallery.
Of course, I don’t want to deny that much of what is “new” in our world has a long history. The present yawning inequality gap between the 1% and ordinary Americans first began to widen in the 1970s and -- as Thomas Frank explains so brilliantly in his new book, Listen, Liberal -- was already a powerful and much-discussed reality in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton ran for president. Yes, that gap is now more like an abyss and looks ever more permanently embedded in the American system, but it has a genuine history, as for instance do 1% elections and the rise and self-organization of the “billionaire class,” even if no one, until this second, imagined that government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires might devolve into government of the billionaire, by the billionaire, and for the billionaire -- that is, just one of them.
Indeed, much of our shape-shifting world can be written about as a set of comparisons and in terms of historical reference points. Inequality has a history. The military-industrial complex and the all-volunteer military, like the warrior corporation, weren’t born yesterday; neither was our state of perpetual war, nor the national security state that now looms over Washington, nor its surveilling urge, the desire to know far too much about the private lives of Americans. (A little bow of remembrance to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is in order here.)
And yet, true as all that may be, Washington increasingly seems like a new land, sporting something like a new system in the midst of our much-described polarized and paralyzed politics. The national security state doesn’t seem faintly paralyzed or polarized to me. Nor does the Pentagon. On certain days when I catch the news, I can’t believe how strange and yet humdrum this uncharted new territory is. Remind me, for instance, where in the Constitution the Founding Fathers wrote about that national security state? And yet there it is in all its glory, all its powers, an ever more independent force in our nation’s capital. In what way, for instance, did those men of the revolutionary era prepare the ground for the Pentagon to loose its spy drones from our distant war zones over the United States? And yet, so it has. And no one even seems disturbed by the development. The news, barely noticed or noted, was instantly absorbed into what's becoming the new normal.
Graduation Ceremonies in the Imperium
Let me mention here the almost random piece of news that recently made me wonder just what planet I was actually on. And I know you won’t believe it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Given the carnage of America’s wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa, which I’ve been following closely these last years, I’m unsure why this particular moment even got to me. Best guess? Maybe that, of all the once-obscure places -- from Afghanistan to Yemen to Libya -- in which the U.S. has been fighting recently, Somalia, where this particular little slaughter took place, seems to me like the most obscure of all. Yes, I’ve been half-attending to events there from the 1993 Blackhawk Down moment to the disastrous U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of 2006 to the hardly less disastrous invasion of that country by Kenyan and other African forces. Still, Somalia?
Recently, U.S. Reaper drones and manned aircraft launched a set of strikes against what the Pentagon claimed was a graduation ceremony for "low-level" foot soldiers in the Somali terror group al-Shabab. It was proudly announced that more than 150 Somalis had died in this attack. In a country where, in recent years, U.S. drones and special ops forces had carried out a modest number of strikes against individual al-Shabab leaders, this might be thought of as a distinct escalation of Washington’s endless low-level conflict there (with a raid involving U.S. special ops forces following soon after).
Now, let me try to put this in some personal context. Since I was a kid, I’ve always liked globes and maps. I have a reasonable sense of where most countries on this planet are. Still, Somalia? I have to stop and give that one some thought to truly locate it on a mental map of eastern Africa. Most Americans? Honestly, I doubt they’d have a clue. So the other day, when this news came out, I stopped a moment to take it in. If accurate, we killed 150 more or less nobodies (except to those who knew them) and maybe even a top leader or two in a country most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.
I mean, don’t you find that just a little odd, no matter how horrible the organization they were preparing to fight for? 150 Somalis? Blam!
Remind me: On just what basis was this modest massacre carried out? After all, the U.S. isn’t at war with Somalia or with al-Shabab. Of course, Congress no longer plays any real role in decisions about American war making. It no longer declares war on any group or country we fight. (Paralysis!) War is now purely a matter of executive power or, in reality, the collective power of the national security state and the White House. The essential explanation offered for the Somali strike, for instance, is that the U.S. had a small set of advisers stationed with African Union forces in that country and it was just faintly possible that those guerrilla graduates might soon prepare to attack some of those forces (and hence U.S. military personnel). It seems that if the U.S. puts advisers in place anywhere on the planet -- and any day of any year they are now in scores of countries -- that’s excuse enough to validate acts of war based on the “imminent” threat of their attack.
Or just think of it this way: a new, informal constitution is being written in these years in Washington. No need for a convention or a new bill of rights. It’s a constitution focused on the use of power, especially military power, and it’s being written in blood.
These days, our government (the unparalyzed one) acts regularly on the basis of that informal constitution-in-the-making, committing Somalia-like actsacross significant swathes of the planet. In these years, we’ve been marrying the latest in wonder technology, our Hellfire-missile-armed drones, to executive power and slaughtering people we don’t much like in majority Muslim countries with a certain alacrity. By now, it’s simply accepted that any commander-in-chief is also our assassin-in-chief, and that all of this is part of a wartime-that-isn’t-wartime system, spreading the principle of chaos and dissolution to whole areas of the planet, leaving failed states and terror movements in its wake.
When was it, by the way, that “the people” agreed that the president could appoint himself assassin-in-chief, muster his legal beagles to write new "law" that covered any future acts of his (including the killing of American citizens), and year after year dispatch what essentially is his own private fleet of killer drones to knock offthousands of people across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa? Weirdly enough, after almost 14 years of this sort of behavior, with ample evidence that such strikes don’t suppress the movements Washington loathes (and often only fan the flames of resentment and revenge that help them spread), neither the current president and his top officials, nor any of the candidates for his office have the slightest intention of ever grounding those drones.
And when exactly did the people say that, within the country’s vast standing military, which now garrisons much of the planet, a force of nearly 70,000 Special Operations personnel should be birthed, or that it should conduct covert missions globally, essentially accountable only to the president (if him)? And what I find strangest of all is that few in our world find such developments strange at all.
A Planet in Decline?
In some way, all of this could be said to work. At the very least, it is a functioning new system-in-the-making that we have yet to truly come to grips with, just as we haven’t come to grips with a national security state that surveils the world in a way that even science fiction writers (no less totalitarian rulers) of a previous era could never have imagined, or the strange version of media overkill that we still call an election. All of this is by now both old news and mind-bogglingly new.
Do I understand it? Not for a second.
This is not war as we knew it, nor government as we once understood it, nor are these elections as we once imagined them, nor is this democracy as it used to be conceived of, nor is this journalism of a kind ever taught in a journalism school. This is the definition of uncharted territory. It’s a genuine American terra incognita and yet in some fashion that unknown landscape is already part of our sense of ourselves and our world. In this “election” season, many remain shocked that a leading candidate for the presidency is a demagogue with a visible authoritarian side and what looks like an autocratic bent. All such labels are pinned on Donald Trump, but the new American system that’s been emerging from its chrysalis in these years already has just those tendencies. So don’t blame it all on Donald Trump. He should be far less of a shock to this country than he continues to be. After all, a Trumpian world-in-formation has paved the way for him.
Who knows? Perhaps what we’re watching is the new iteration of a very old story: a twenty-first-century version of an ancient tale of a great imperial power, perhaps the greatest ever -- the “lone superpower” -- sinking into decline. It’s a tale humanity has experienced often enough in the course of our long history. But lest you think once again that there’s nothing new under the sun, the context for all of this, for everything now happening in our world, is so new as to be quite literally outside of thousands of years of human experience. As the latest heat records indicate, we are, for the first time, on a planet in decline. And if that isn’t uncharted territory, what is?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37266"><span class="small">Greg Shupak, Jacobin</span></a>
Tuesday, 29 March 2016 14:07
Shupak writes: "When ISIS claimed responsibility for the horrendous attacks in Brussels last week, President Obama was unequivocal: the US and its allies, he said, 'can and will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world.' More bombing, it hardly needed to be said, was on the way. For their part, the presidential candidates only disagree on the scale of military action needed to stamp out ISIS - not on the appropriateness of yet more American warfare."
Iraqi children in the Bamarne camp for internally displaced people in northern Iraq, December 2014. (photo: UK Department for International Development)
The Case Against Bombing ISIS
By Greg Shupak, Jacobin
29 March 16
The military campaign against ISIS is just the latest phase of US imperialism in the Middle East.
hen ISIS claimed responsibility for the horrendous attacks in Brussels last week, President Obama was unequivocal: the US and its allies, he said, “can and will defeat those who threaten the safety and security of people all around the world.” More bombing, it hardly needed to be said, was on the way. For their part, the presidential candidates only disagree on the scale of military action needed to stamp out ISIS — not on the appropriateness of yet more American warfare.
The call for a muscular response, however, overlooks the casualties the US has already inflicted.
To date, US-led coalition airstrikes in the war on ISIS have likely killed at least 1,044 civilians in Iraq and Syria. Even the brutal calculus of “collateral damage” cannot rationalize such deaths. They’re simply the latest victims in the latest phase of a decades-long, US-led campaign that has visited death and destruction on countries across the globe — particularly in the Middle East.
The current anti-ISIS strategy — which treats the group as a discrete problem with a ready military solution — is myopic. ISIS is the product of long-term, structural factors. To “degrade and ultimately destroy” the group, it’s necessary to address the root causes of its growth. An American war promises, at best, a combat trophy — and the spawning of new jihadist groups.
Even if military intervention dispersed ISIS, the social forces undergirding it would persist, perhaps emerging even stronger than before. If ISIS disappeared, another organization would likely swoop in to fill the void (whether it was Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, or some analogous upstart group), ready to carry out ethnic cleansing and the occasional terrorist attack in the West.
Or perhaps ISIS would simply move its base to countries like Libya or Yemen that, thanks in part to US actions, it’s established a foothold — inflicting even more devastation on the local population.
In either scenario, though, we could expect the same US response: begin the drumbeats for war, kick off another round of death and destruction.
Children of the Occupation
It was one of those bloody rounds that birthed ISIS.
Lydia Wilson, an Oxford researcher who has interviewed imprisoned ISIS fighters, describes them as
children of the [US] occupation [of Iraq], many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.
Wilson also quotes Douglas Stone, a US general who oversaw Iraqi detainees at several military prisons during the occupation. Stone says that “every single detainee” he encountered complained about the disintegration of security triggered by the American invasion.
Elsewhere, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German politician and journalist who spent ten days in 2014 embedded with ISIS, says the group’s militants described the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a “terrorist recruitment program” and notes that ISIS “was created six months after the start of the invasion: it is Bush’s baby.”
If a hard-right US leader laid the groundwork for ISIS in Iraq, a Democratic president helped produce the conditions for ISIS’s rise in Syria.
At various points in the Syrian war, the United States and allies such as Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have armed a variety of anti-government factions. By late 2012, foreign policy analyst Aron Lund points out, much of the armed uprising had taken on a sectarian character, and large portions espoused ideologies that ranged from “apolitical Sunni conservatism or rural sufism, across the Muslim Brotherhood’s ikhwani Islamism, to the rigid ultra-orthodoxy of salafism.”
A 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report notes that “the West, Turkey and the Gulf” support the Syrian opposition, admits that the Syrian war could result in the creation of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria, and warns that “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
In 2014, US general Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee that America’s “Arab allies” were funding ISIS, and Vice President Joe Biden said the same. Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, estimates that “60 to 80 percent of the arms that America shoveled in [to Syria] have gone to al-Qaida and its affiliates.”
To make matters worse, the US and its proxies repeatedlythrew up obstacles to a negotiated settlement in Syria, allowing ISIS to fester and Syria to bleed.
War Is a Racket
Policymakers in the United States and its imperial partners aren’t stupid. So what’s driving their actions?
In his indispensable book Joining Empire, Canadian political scientist Jerome Klassen points to the US’s adoption since World War II of “hegemonic liberalism,” a strategy that ties the spread of capitalist relations across the globe to American diplomatic and military primacy.
During the Cold War, the chain linking the general interests of international capital with US foreign policy was relatively undisguised. Even through the 1990s, the Department of Defense openly admitted that advancing capital’s interests was a central goal of US foreign policy.
“[O]ur overall objective [in the Middle East] is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and [to] preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil,” a 1992 Defense Department document read. Similarly, a 1997 issue of the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review noted that one of the purposes of US military policy was “securing uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.”
Klassen contends that a transnational capitalist class has now come to rely on the US military to direct and enforce global capitalism through what he dubs “armored neoliberalism” — the joining of “the economic logic of global exploitation with the political logic of disciplinary militarism.”
Under Obama, the Joint Forces Command has argued that the US military “underpins the open and accessible global system of trade and travel that we know as ‘globalization’” and provides “safety and security for the major exporters to access and use the global commons for trade and commerce.”
Recent history bears this out. Capitalists based in the US and allied states made vast amounts of money off the 2003 attack on Iraq, both directly and indirectly. The engineering company Bechtel National nabbed a $1 billion reconstruction contract a month after the invasion and another for up to $1.82 billion nine months later. According to a Financial Timesreport, by 2013 companies had received at least $138 billion in public money for building infrastructure, feeding soldiers, and delivering services such as private security.
The Florida-based International Oil Trading Company collected $2.1 billion to transport fuel from Jordan to US forces in Iraq. The Cheney-linked, energy-focused engineering and construction firm Kellog, Brown and Root was awarded $39.5 billion during the war, more than any other company. When most of the US military briefly withdrew in 2011, the State Department estimated that it would spend $3 billion over the next five years on private security for its gargantuan embassy in Baghdad.
Weapons manufacturers got in on the action as well. In 2004, a $259 million contract for guns, trucks, and other equipment went to ANHAM, a consortium whose principals are in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the US. Two years later the Washington Post reported a surge in profits for the company, which had benefited more directly from the war than any other large “defense” contractor due to its knack for making armored vehicles, tank shells, and bullets. Even after the American drawback, arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin sold $3 billion worth of fighter jets to the Iraqi government.
On the eve of the Iraq War, oil was also on policymakers’ minds. As Doug Stokes points out, the invasion was not merely a short-term cash grab for particular companies but an effort by the US ruling class to become “the key guarantor of stability for two of the most oil-rich states in the world, Saudi Arabia and Iraq” — thereby giving them substantial control over the global oil market.
Of course, specific firms also enjoyed a financial windfall from the invasion. Before the attack, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was nationalized and inaccessible to Western companies. But by 2013 — after a raft of contracts between private oil companies and state-owned firms — the oil sector was “largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.”
Companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell all saw flusher coffers, even as the average Iraqi continued to face grinding poverty.
And Business Is Good
Imperial powers are not omnipotent, or without contradictory impulses. Their regional priorities and tactics can shift — and deep internal rifts can develop. But the ascent of ISIS has occasioned no such recalibration from the US ruling class.
Why change course, after all, when business is booming?
Arms sales — which the New York Timeshas credited with fueling the Middle East’s “descent into proxy wars, sectarian conflicts and battles against terrorists” — show no signs of letting up. Indeed, US intelligence believes the wars in the Middle East will last for years, making regional governments “even more eager for the F-35 fighter jet, considered to be the jewel of America’s future arsenal” and the costliest weapons project on earth.
When the US coalition ratcheted up its assault on ISIS targets in 2014, the aggression industry reacted with glee and immediately saw its profits spike. In the years since, Lockheed Martin has received thousands of additional orders for Hellfire missiles.
To fight ISIS, the Daily Beastwrites, AM General is supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvees, General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition, and SOS International — whose board of advisers includes Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld — says it has been awarded more than $400 million to provide services such as private security.
In 2015, despite a relatively flat market elsewhere, the United States boosted its weapons sales by 35 percent. Weapons makers Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, as well as the surveillance company Booz Allen, all saw their value sharply increase when François Hollande vowed to “destroy” ISIS following the Paris massacres.
Many of the weapons deals are with some of the same states that facilitated the rise of jihadism in Syria. The US and Qatar have signed letters of offer and acceptance to sell Apache helicopters, as well as Patriot and Javelin defense systems worth $11 billion. Last year, the State Department approved weapons sales of $293 million to Jordan, $380 million to Turkey, $845 million to the UAE, and nearly $21 billion to Saudi Arabia. This is to say nothing of the exorbitant profits reaped by US arms sales to Western governments participating in the coalition, such as Canada, France, and the United Kingdom — or the considerable sales these countries’ own weapons firms have made in the Persian Gulf.
Similarly, the New York Timesdescribed in January a US–Saudi Arabia arrangement in which the Saudis provide funds and weapons to the Syrian opposition, and the CIA trains them — this despite the Saudis’ “support for the extreme strain of Islam, Wahhabism, that has inspired many of the very terrorist groups the United States is fighting.”
If the US–Saudi bond is rock-solid, the US’s preoccupation with oil seems equally unbreakable. American forces began engaging ISIS as early as four days after the group took control of Tikrit “and, along with it, partial control of Iraqi oil.” Furthermore, as Steve Coll argues, the US’s 2014 intervention in Erbil, Iraq had less to do with protecting Yazidis from ISIS than safeguarding a territory that is important to ExxonMobil and Chevron.
The war against ISIS is not just about controlling the flow of oil and delivering immediate material rewards to Western military contractors, though. It’s also about building the infrastructure for tomorrow’s wars.
In June, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey told reporters that the US is considering constructing at least four more bases in Iraq. These sites, called “lily pads,” are smaller than the average base but can be quickly expanded.
Further west, the US has put up a new outpost in Al-Hasakah, a Kurdish-held governorate in northeastern Syria “chosen because it’s just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from ISIS frontline positions and some of its lucrative oil fields.” And construction is underway on an air base southeast of Kobani, which straddles the Turkish border.
The proliferation of such bases allows the US military to deepen its presence in the Middle East, influencing the affairs of host countries while signaling to civilian populations that the US anticipates carrying out future attacks.
With each base the US builds, it fosters an environment not simply more hospitable to ISIS but one that could create a group so ferocious it makes ISIS look tame by comparison. As Andrew Cockburn has reported, in 2015 a US-Turkish-Saudi “coordination room” ordered the rebel groups it was supplying to cooperate with Jaish al-Fatah, a coalition led by al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
In other words, the group the US had once excoriated as the most world’s most barbarous had become the lesser evil.
There Is an Alternative
The war against ISIS isn’t a fresh response to a novel situation. Whether it’s funneling weapons into the region or advancing the interests of capital or consorting with dictators, we’ve seen this show before. The military campaign against ISIS represents the latest episode in an ongoing effort by the US ruling class and its allies to more fully dominate the Middle East.
Given the political and economic weight of those pushing these policies, undoing the present state of affairs is a considerable task: as Klassen argues, it would require wiping out the capitalist social relations that underlie imperialism and replacing them with “democratic modes of production and exchange.”
In the immediate term, however, people living in member states of the US-led coalition can organize against aerial bombardment and boots on the ground. Not only is there no military solution to the wars in Iraq and Syria, but such action impedes the diplomatic and humanitarian remedies that can get at the source of these conflicts.
For example: facilitating unconditional negotiations, and halting US military support for the Syrian opposition, to end the Syrian war; pushing for the meaningful integration of Sunnis and other minorities into political life in Iraq; and pressuring Turkey to stop allowing ISIS to freely use its border. Additionally, supporting the struggle of those inside and outside Turkey against the government’s ongoing assaulton the Kurds both aids the goal of Kurdish self-determination and buttresses Kurdish forces in their continued battle against ISIS.
These policies could cause ISIS to wither. The US-led coalition’s military-heavy approach, by contrast, risks killing ever more Iraqis and Syrians without putting an end to the horrors that ISIS and its political equivalents continue to inflict. On this, we must be as unequivocal as Obama. The problems created by imperialism will not be solved by more imperialism.
FOCUS: The US Wants the Islamic State Group to Win in Syria
Tuesday, 29 March 2016 12:04
Swanson writes: "The U.S. State Department does not want the government of Syria to defeat or weaken the Islamic State group, at least not if doing so means any sort of gain for the Syrian government."
Islamic State Group fighters. (photo: Reuters)
The US Wants the Islamic State Group to Win in Syria
By David Swanson, teleSUR
29 March 16
So many enemies, so little logic.
he U.S. State Department does not want the government of Syria to defeat or weaken the Islamic State group, at least not if doing so means any sort of gain for the Syrian government.
Watching a recent video of a State Department spokesperson speaking on that subject might confuse some U.S. war supporters. I doubt many residents of Palmyra, Virginia, or Palmyra, Pennsylvania, or Palmyra, New York could give a coherent account of the U.S. government's position on which enemy should control the ancient Palmyra in Syria.
The U.S. government has been arming al-Qaida in Syria. I doubt many people in the United States, of whatever political persuasion, could explain why. In my experience, having just begun a tour of speaking events, very few in the United States can even name the seven nations that President Barack Obama has bragged about bombing, much less explain which parties he is or is not bombing in those countries. No nation in the history of the world has had so many enemies to keep track of as the United States has now, and bothered so little about doing so.
The particular problem with Syria is that the U.S. government has prioritized one enemy, whom it has utterly failed to scare the U.S. public with, while the U.S. government has made a distant second priority of attacking another enemy that most people in the United States are so terrified of they can hardly think straight.
Consider what changed between 2013 and 2014. In 2013, President Obama was prepared to heavily bomb the Syrian government. But he did not claim that the Syrian government wanted to attack the United States, or even to attack a handful of white people from the United States. Instead he argued, unconvincingly, that he knew who was responsible for killing Syrians with chemical weapons. This was in the midst of a war in which thousands were dying on all sides from all kinds of weapons. The outrage over a particular type of weapon, the dubious claims, and the eagerness to overthrow a government, were all too close to U.S. memories of the 2003 attack on Iraq.
Congress members in 2013 found themselves at public events confronted with the question of why the U.S. would overthrow a government in a war on the same side as al-Qaida. Were they going to start another Iraq War? U.S. and British public pressure reversed Obama's decision. But U.S. opinion was even more against arming proxies, and a new CIA report said that doing so had never worked, yet that was the approach Obama went with. The overthrow, which Hillary Clinton still says should have happened, would have quickly created the chaos and terror that Obama set about developing slowly.
In 2014, Obama was able to step up direct U.S. military action in Syria and Iraq with virtually no resistance from the public. What had changed? People had heard about videos of the Islamic State group killing white people with knives. It didn't seem to matter that jumping into the war against the Islamic State group was the opposite side from what Obama had said in 2013 the U.S. needed to join. It didn't even seem to matter that the U.S. clearly intended to join in both sides. Nothing related to logic or sense mattered in the least. The Islamic State group had done a little bit of what U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and elsewhere did routinely, and had done it to Americans. And a fictional group, even scarier, the Khorasan Group, was coming to get us, the Islamic State group was slipping across the border from Mexico and Canada, if we didn't do something really big and brutal we were all going to die.
That being why the U.S. public finally said yes to open-ended war again – after really not falling for the lies about a humanitarian rescue in Libya, or not caring – the U.S. public naturally assumes that the U.S. government has prioritized destroying the evil dark force of so-called Islamic Terror. It hasn't. The U.S. government says to itself, in its little-noticed reports, that the Islamic State group is no threat to the United States. It knows perfectly well, and its top commanders blurt it out upon retirement, that attacking terrorists only strengthens their forces. The U.S. priority remains overthrowing the Syrian government, ruining that country, and creating chaos. Here's part of that project: U.S.-backed troops in Syria fighting other U.S. backed troops in Syria. That's not incompetence if the goal is to destroy a nation, as it seems to be in Hillary Clinton's emails:
"The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad ... Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about – but cannot talk about – is losing their nuclear monopoly ... It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel's security."
The Islamic State group, al-Qaida, and terrorism are far better tools for marketing wars than communism ever was, because they can be imagined using knives rather than nukes, and because terrorism can never collapse and vanish. If (counterproductively) attacking groups like al-Qaida were what motivated the wars, the United States would not be aiding Saudi Arabia in slaughtering the people of Yemen and increasing the power of al-Qaida there. If peace were the goal, the U.S. would not be sending troops back into Iraq to use the same actions that destroyed that country to supposedly fix it. If winning particular sides of wars were the main objective, the United States would not have served as the primary funding for both sides in Afghanistan for all these years, with decades more planned.
Why did Senator Harry Truman say the United States should help either the Germans or the Russians, whichever side was losing? Why did President Ronald Reagan back Iraq against Iran and also Iran against Iraq? Why could fighters on both sides in Libya exchange parts for their weapons? Because two goals that outweigh all others for the U.S. government often align in the cause of sheer destruction and death. One is U.S. domination of the globe, and all other peoples be damned. The second is arms sales. No matter who's winning and who's dying, the weapons makers and arms dealers profit, and the majority of weapons in the Middle East have been shipped there from the United States. Peace would cut into those profits horribly.
Castro writes: "We don't need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet."
Fidel Castro attends a meeting with intellectuals and writers at the International Book Fair in Havana, Cuba. (photo: Roberto Chile/AP)
Brother Obama
By Fidel Castro, Granma
29 March 16
We don’t need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.
he kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.
Tourism today, in large part, consists of viewing the delights of our landscapes and tasting exquisite delicacies from our seas, and is always shared with the private capital of large foreign corporations, whose earnings, if they don’t reach billions of dollars, are not worthy of any attention whatsoever.
Since I find myself obliged to mention the issue, I must add - principally for the youth - that few people are aware of the importance of such a condition, in this singular moment of human history. I would not say that time has been lost, but I do not hesitate to affirm that we are not adequately informed, not you, nor us, of the knowledge and conscience that we must have to confront the realities which challenge us. The first to be taken into consideration is that our lives are but a fraction of a historical second, which must also be devoted in part to the vital necessities of every human being. One of the characteristics of this condition is the tendency to overvalue its role, in contrast, on the other hand, with the extraordinary number of persons who embody the loftiest dreams.
Nevertheless, no one is good or bad entirely on their own. None of us is designed for the role we must assume in a revolutionary society, although Cubans had the privilege of José Martí’s example. I even ask myself if he needed to die or not in Dos Ríos, when he said, “For me, it’s time,” and charged the Spanish forces entrenched in a solid line of firepower. He did not want to return to the United States, and there was no one who could make him. Someone ripped some pages from his diary. Who bears this treacherous responsibility, undoubtedly the work of an unscrupulous conspirator? Differences between the leaders were well known, but never indiscipline. “Whoever attempts to appropriate Cuba will reap only the dust of its soil drenched in blood, if he does not perish in the struggle,” stated the glorious Black leader Antonio Maceo. Máximo Gómez is likewise recognized as the most disciplined and discreet military chief in our history.
Looking at it from another angle, how can we not admire the indignation of Bonifacio Byrne when, from a distant boat returning him to Cuba, he saw another flag alongside that of the single star and declared, “My flag is that which has never been mercenary...” immediately adding one of the most beautiful phrases I have ever heard, “If it is torn to shreds, it will be my flag one day… our dead raising their arms will still be able to defend it!” Nor will I forget the blistering words of Camilo Cienfuegos that night, when, just some tens of meters away, bazookas and machine guns of U.S. origin in the hands of counterrevolutionaries were pointed toward that terrace on which we stood.
Obama was born in August of 1961, as he himself explained. More than half a century has transpired since that time.
Let us see, however, how our illustrious guest thinks today:
“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people,” followed by a deluge of concepts entirely novel for the majority of us:
“We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans,” the U.S. President continued, “Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought here from Africa. Like the United States, the Cuban people can trace their heritage to both slaves and slave-owners.”
The native populations don’t exist at all in Obama’s mind. Nor does he say that the Revolution swept away racial discrimination, or that pensions and salaries for all Cubans were decreed by it before Mr. Barrack Obama was 10 years old. The hateful, racist bourgeois custom of hiring strongmen to expel Black citizens from recreational centers was swept away by the Cuban Revolution - that which would go down in history for the battle against apartheid that liberated Angola, putting an end to the presence of nuclear weapons on a continent of more than a billion inhabitants. This was not the objective of our solidarity, but rather to help the peoples of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and others under the fascist colonial domination of Portugal.
In 1961, just one year and three months after the triumph of the Revolution, a mercenary force with armored artillery and infantry, backed by aircraft, trained and accompanied by U.S. warships and aircraft carriers, attacked our country by surprise. Nothing can justify that perfidious attack which cost our country hundreds of losses, including deaths and injuries
As for the pro-yankee assault brigade, no evidence exists anywhere that it was possible to evacuate a single mercenary. Yankee combat planes were presented before the United Nations as the equipment of a Cuban uprising.
The military experience and power of this country is very well known. In Africa, they likewise believed that revolutionary Cuba would be easily taken out of the fight. The invasion via southern Angola by racist South African motorized brigades got close to Luanda, the capital in the eastern part of the country. There a struggle began which went on for no less than 15 years. I wouldn’t even talk about this, if I didn’t have the elemental duty to respond to Obama’s speech in Havana’s Alicia Alonso Grand Theater.
Nor will I attempt to give details, only emphasize that an honorable chapter in the struggle for human liberation was written there. In a certain way, I hoped Obama’s behavior would be correct. His humble origin and natural intelligence were evident. Mandela was imprisoned for life and had become a giant in the struggle for human dignity. One day, a copy of a book narrating part of Mandela’s life reached my hands, and - surprise! - the prologue was by Barack Obama. I rapidly skimmed the pages. The miniscule size of Mandela’s handwriting noting facts was incredible. Knowing men such as him was worthwhile.
Regarding the episode in South Africa I must point out another experience. I was really interested in learning more about how the South Africans had acquired nuclear weapons. I only had very precise information that there were no more than 10 or 12 bombs. A reliable source was the professor and researcher Piero Gleijeses, who had written the text Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, an excellent piece. I knew he was the most reliable source on what had happened and I told him so; he responded that he had not spoken more about the matter as in the text he had responded to questions from compañero Jorge Risquet, who had been Cuban ambassador and collaborator in Angola, a very good friend of his. I located Risquet; already undertaking other important tasks he was finishing a course which would last several weeks longer. That task coincided with a fairly recent visit by Piero to our country; I had warned him that Risquet was getting on and his health was not great. A few days later what I had feared occurred. Risquet deteriorated and died. When Piero arrived there was nothing to do except make promises, but I had already received information related to the weapons and the assistance that racist South Africa had received from Reagan and Israel.
I do not know what Obama would have to say about this story now. I am unaware as to what he did or did not know, although it is very unlikely that he knew absolutely nothing. My modest suggestion is that he gives it thought and does not attempt now to elaborate theories on Cuban policy.
There is an important issue:
Obama made a speech in which he uses the most sweetened words to express: “It is time, now, to forget the past, leave the past behind, let us look to the future together, a future of hope. And it won’t be easy, there will be challenges and we must give it time; but my stay here gives me more hope in what we can do together as friends, as family, as neighbors, together.”
I suppose all of us were at risk of a heart attack upon hearing these words from the President of the United States. After a ruthless blockade that has lasted almost 60 years, and what about those who have died in the mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airliner full of passengers blown up in midair, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and coercion?
Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education, science and culture.
I also warn that we are capable of producing the food and material riches we need with the efforts and intelligence of our people. We do not need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, as this is our commitment to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.
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