You wouldn’t expect a BBC report on Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday to suggest that “it was a birthday celebration, but it felt more like a cult meeting in adoration of the leader.” Nor would you expect talk of “fearsome missiles” or a “snarling martial threat” in the military parade that accompanied the celebrations.
And yet that’s what the footage above, uploaded to YouTube last week, appears to show.
Appearances can be deceiving. Although the footage in the video is from the Trooping the Color ceremony at Buckingham Palace — a military parade that accompanies the queen’s official birthday each year — the audio comes from a BBC radio report by Stephen Evans, a foreign correspondent who covers extravagant North Korean military parades for the news organization.
It appears that the YouTube user who uploaded the video created it with satirical intentions (it is also worth noting that the video was the only one uploaded by the account, which is under the name John Smith — a common placeholder name).
The altered video succeeds in showing just how different things can appear from a different perspective. Many Britons accept lavish military parades in honor of a hereditary head of state as part of British life. North Koreans can understand that.
The U.S. political elite is never entirely secretive about its aims. It spells them out, maybe not always clearly and maybe sometimes elliptically, but it is fairly open in declaring its objectives and how it intends to achieve them. When she was U.S. secretary of state, Hilary Clinton adumbrated the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a 2011 article in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elite-consensus forming organization which Laurence H. Shoup in a recent book dubbed “Wall Street’s Think Tank”, and, in an earlier book, an “imperial brain trust.” [1]
In “America’s Pacific Century,” Clinton announced that the Obama administration was “working with China to end unfair discrimination against U.S. and other foreign companies or against their innovative technologies, remove preferences for domestic firms, and end measures that disadvantage or appropriate foreign intellectual property.” [2] Which is exactly what the TPP sets out to do, except—and this is a significant point—without China.
US defense secretary Ashton Carter says the Trans-Pacific Partnership is as important to him as another aircraft carrier.Almost without exception, commentary on the TPP from the North American Left has focussed on the potential harm the pact will likely inflict on ordinary North Americans, the 99 percent. The emphasis has been on the TPP as a weapon of the corporate elite—a new battle tank in a class war that billionaire investor Warren Buffet famously acknowledged exists and that his class is winning. [3]
Commentary on the TPP as a weapon wielded against North American workers is important and necessary, but no less important is the reality that the TPP also exists as a weapon wielded against China, a country the U.S. ruling class designates as a rival. Even the U.S. political elite has embraced the weapon metaphor. U.S. secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter has called the pact “as important to me as another aircraft carrier.” [4]
Who’s Involved?
The TPP is a U.S.-initiated pact among 11 other Asia-Pacific region countries, including Washington’s anglosphere allies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, along with Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Peru, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam. Despite their significant place in the Pacific Rim, Russia and China were left out of the pact by Washington. The exclusion of China is significant, because the TPP is said to be the economic arm of “the much-extolled (U.S.) ‘pivot’ to Asia,” aimed at bolstering the United States’ presence in the Asia-Pacific region. [5]
Containing China
Coverage of the TPP in the two principal elite U.S. newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, has portrayed a major aim of the pact as containing China. “The pact…is seen as a way to” raise “a challenge to Asia’s rising power…which has pointedly been excluded from the deal,” wrote Kevin Granville in The New York Times. [6] Jane Perlez in the same newspaper described the pact “as a win for the United States in its contest with China for clout in Asia”. [7] “Critics in China,” noted The Wall Street Journal, are on the same page, viewing “the Trans-Pacific Partnership with suspicion, seeing it as one more way for Washington to seek to contain China’s influence.” [8]
What U.S. ruling circles seek to contain in the Asia-Pacific region is Chinese encroachments on U.S. profits. Chinese industry is taking an ever growing share of the region’s trade, at the expense of corporate USA. “Time is running out,” warns the U.S. defense secretary. “We already see countries in the region trying to carve up these markets.” [9]
As recently as 2004, the United States was the largest trading partner of Asean, a 10 country association of Southeast Asian economies, with total trade of $192 billion. “But now China, which was an inconsequential trading partner of Asean as recently as the late 1990s, is by far the region’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade of $293 billion in 2010.” Not only is China Asean’s biggest trading partner, it’s the top trading partner of Japan, Korea, India and Australia, notes Cui Tiankai, a Chinese vice foreign minister. [10]
What’s more, “the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China now provide more loans to the region than the (U.S.-dominated) World Bank and Asia Development Bank combined.” [11] And China “has picked off American allies like Britain, Germany and South Korea to join…the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a project started by China in part to keep its own state-owned firms busy building roads, dams and power plants around Asia. China is at the same time setting up other trade pacts around the region so it can use its cash and enormous market leverage to strike deals more advantageous to its interests.” [12] Needless to say, the deals China strikes, the roads, dams and power plants it builds, and the trade it carries out, represent lost opportunities for U.S. banks, corporations and investors.
China’s growing economic clout has raised concerns on Wall Street and in Washington of “being left on the outside, looking in.” Fearful that U.S. firms and investors “risked being shunted aside in Asia,” Washington initiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership [13] as a means of defending the interests of U.S. finance and business in Asia.
Re-orienting Economies from China to the United States
One of the ways the TPP defends and promotes U.S. profits is by re-orienting the economies of the pact’s other partners toward the United States and away from China. “Ichiro Fujisaki, a former Japanese ambassador to the United States, described the Trans-Pacific Partnership as ‘economic glue to cement ties with like-minded countries,’ including emerging economies such as Vietnam that are only partly integrated into the global economic order shaped by the United States.” [14] The TPP isn’t as much about free trade as it is about restricting trade and investment within a US-dominated bloc.
During talks, U.S. negotiators “aiming to bolster American exporters” stipulated “that countries joining its new Pacific trade zone cut back on imports from China.” U.S. negotiators demanded that “Vietnam, a major garments exporter, reduce its reliance on textiles made in China… to get preferential market access to the U.S.” Washington’s goal was “to create new markets in Vietnam for the U.S. textile industry.” Since the “U.S. and Mexico are especially large textile producers, Vietnam would simply have to shift its sourcing of yarns and fabrics from China to the U.S. and Mexico.” [15] This exemplifies the entire aim of the U.S.-initiated TPP: to disrupt China’s growing trade relations with its neighbors in order to bolster U.S. profits.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington estimates that the TPP will “cost China about $100 billion a year in lost exports as the partners trade more among themselves and less with China.” [16]
Pressuring China to Abandon State-Directed Development
Another way the TPP seeks to buttress U.S. profits is by leaving open the possibility of China joining the pact if it abandons its development model, which relies heavily on state-owned enterprises and assistance to domestic industry. While China was initially excluded from the partnership, “U.S. officials… say they are hopeful that the pact’s ‘open architecture’ eventually prompts China to join.” [17] But to link up with the 12 economies of the TPP club the “Chinese government would need to work harder at economic reform in order to meet the pact’s standards.” [18] Specifically, China would have to open markets and limit assistance to state-owned companies. [19]
China has “tens of thousands of state-owned enterprises that dominate half of China’s economic output and that the government heavily subsidizes and protects.” [20] They “account for about 96% of China’s telecom industry, 92% of power and 74% of autos. The combined profit of China Petroleum & Chemical and China Mobile in 2009 alone was greater than all the profit of China’s 500 largest private firms.” [21]
In addition, foreign competitors are restricted by government rules, required to share their technology in joint ventures with state companies, and are passed over for lucrative government contracts in favor of state enterprises.
China’s reliance on state-directed development has provoked ire on Wall Street and in Washington. Chinese “state capitalism” restricts profit-making opportunities within China for U.S. firms and investors. At a public forum in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, then U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner complained that “China does present a really unique challenge to the global trading system, because the structure of its economy, even though it has more of a market economy now, is overwhelmingly dominated by the state.” [22] U.S. President Barack Obama, referring to Washington’s Asian rival, complained that “It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg upon ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.” [23] The point of China’s state-directed development is to raise many more hundreds of millions of Chinese from poverty, as the Chinese Communist Party has already done, even if it means irking U.S. banks, investors and corporations and their political handmaidens in Washington.
U.S. and European corporations have grown “increasingly agitated over what they regard as unfair curbs on their ability to compete with domestic companies in China’s vast and growing market.” [24] The TPP is a response to that agitation. “Prodded by corporate chiefs across the country, U.S. trade officials…launched a coordinated attack on the core of America’s commercial conflict with China: the heavily protected and subsidized Chinese state-owned enterprises that are pounding U.S. companies not just in China but in competition globally.” [25]
Accordingly, one set of the TPP’s “provisions requires that state-owned enterprises…receive fewer government subsidies in the form of low-rate loans, cheap or free land and other assistance,” notes Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “The clause is initially aimed at Vietnam—as well as Malaysia and Singapore to some extent—but it offers a signpost for the direction in which the United States wants China to move.” [26] “The message to China: If you want to join, you have to change.” [27]
The TPP’s Connection to Regime Change in Libya and Syria
The preceding paragraphs point to a significant reality of U.S. foreign policy: U.S. State Department initiatives are “prodded by corporate chiefs” and aim to open up the world to U.S. trade and investment–and keep it open. Trade and investment agreements, and the Pentagon, are both instruments of the U.S. corporate and financial world, deployed by Washington’s political elite to secure the interests of the United States’ most “substantial” citizens. Hence, U.S. secretary of defense Ashton Carter can draw an equivalence between the TPP and an aircraft carrier.
To the U.S. capitalist ruling class, China, with its immense market, represents a potential cornucopia of profits, all the greater if the Chinese Communist Party can be persuaded to abandon its state-directed development model, which severely restricts the latitude of U.S. investors, banks and corporations to manoeuvre within the Chinese economy. The Chinese model has proved worthy of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, not surprisingly, since its aim is internal development, not the aggrandizement of super-wealthy foreigners ensconced on Wall Street. By contrast, the development model favored by the corporate-based ruling class of the United States predictably favors private enterprise and free trade (within US-dominated blocs)—a model that has proved worthy of creating fabulous wealth for a parasitic elite at the apex of U.S. society, but abject poverty at the other extreme for people in the developing world.
Finally, another reality should be acknowledged. Both Libya and Syria have followed development models that are very much similar to China’s, and have equally irked US corporate and political leaders.
A November 2007 U.S. State Department cable warned that those “who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector” and that there was “growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism.” [28] The cable cited a 2006 speech in which then Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi said: “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.” [29] Gaddafi’s government had also forced companies to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names. Worse, in the view of the oil companies, “labor laws were amended to ‘Libyanize’ the economy,” that is, turn it to the advantage of Libyans. Oil firms “were pressed to hire Libyan managers, finance people and human resources directors.” The New York Times summed up Washington’s objections. “Colonel Gaddafi,” the newspaper said, “proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands.” [30]
Similar complaints are heard in Washington about Syria. The U.S. Library of Congress country study of Syria refers to “the socialist structure of the government and economy,” points out that “the government continues to control strategic industries,” mentions that “many citizens have access to subsidized public housing and many basic commodities are heavily subsidized,” and that “senior regime members” have “hampered” the liberalization of the economy. [31]
Regime change operations in Libya and Syria originated in the U.S. ruling class goals of opening the world to U.S. banks, investors and corporations and crushing development models which refuse to yoke markets, labour and resources to U.S. corporate interests, not to (contrived) alarm over an (invented) impending massacre in Libya or revulsion over the way the Syrian state has defended itself against an uprising by violent sectarian Sunni Islamists (in reality egged on, funded, trained and armed by the United States and the marionette Middle East tyrannies it counts as allies.) Equally, U.S. corporate goals of defending U.S. profit-making opportunities in Asia animated the activities which led to the TPP as an instrument of disrupting Chinese trading relations and pressuring Beijing to change its economic regime of internal development to one favoring Wall Street. U.S. military intervention against a resource nationalist government in Libya, the deployment of Islamist proxies against an economically nationalist government in Syria (in other words, the mobilization of religion for profane ends), and an exclusionary trade and investment bloc aimed at harming and pressuring China over its policy of state-directed development, have one thing in common: they are prodded by a parasitic elite at the apex of US society rooted in Wall Street and are intended to serve its interests by clearing away impediments to its further accumulation of capital on the world stage.
1. Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, Monthly Review Press, 2015.
While Washington toppled a resource nationalist in Libya who annoyed US oil companies, it failed to install a successor government in a stable environment in which US interests could be effectively advanced. US policy in Syria emphasizes “an orderly political transition” in which Arab nationalists vacate the Syrian state, yielding to anti-nationalist US marionettes. The political transition is to be brought about by proxies, militant jihadists, who the United States and its allies will strengthen enough to weaken and dispirit the current government in Damascus but not enough to topple it and plunge the country into a Libya-style chaos.
Washington’s strategy in Syria is an implicit admission that its direct military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have failed to bring about its desired foreign policy objectives of establishing stable conditions in which pro-US regimes can carry out policies to advance Wall Street’s economic, and Washington’s interlinked political and military agendas, in those few remaining parts of the world that refuse to submit to US hegemony, alternatively described as the international dictatorship of US business interests .
To be sure, the objectives have been partially met. There’s a US-installed regime in Kabul, but the active resistance of the Taliban limits its room to maneuver to advance US goals. Sectarian strife in Iraq, largely the consequence of the divide and rule policies forced upon Iraqis by US occupying forces in the mid-2000s, has produced tension among Iraq’s major ethno-sectarian communities, while Iran competes with Washington for influence in the country. And the US-led (from behind) military operation in Libya—essentially a marriage of NATO air power with al-Qaeda foot soldiers to topple a “resource nationalist” whom US oil companies could no longer abide—has produced a failed state, utter chaos, and no reliable US puppet to take control of the country to reshape it in the interests of corporate USA.
With these failures in mind, Washington has approached the project of purging Damascus of its governing Arab nationalist ideology more judiciously and with greater caution than it approached similar regime change projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The strategy is to force a political settlement in which the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his Arab nationalist colleagues step aside, leaving the infrastructure of the Syrian state in place, to be taken over by reliable anti-nationalist US marionettes. The political settlement is to be brought about by forcing a military stalemate between the Syrian government and Islamist rebels. At some point, it’s hoped, the Arab nationalists in Damascus will realize that their situation is hopeless, and sue for a graceful exit.
The key to the strategy is ISIS and other groups of fanatical Islamist militants. They must be allowed to be strong enough to maintain unrelenting military pressure on Damascus but not so strong that they topple the Syrian government. To achieve this delicate balance, ISIS is held in check by a US-led air campaign of containment, while other jihadists are managed through controls on the amount of arms, money and training they receive from their sponsors, the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, and the Gulf oil dictatorships.
It seems clear now that US planning for a post-Assad Syria foresees an end to aid to its jihadist allies—the United States “has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years” through a covert CIA program—and an intensification of the US campaign against ISIS, if, and when, a political settlement is reached to purge the Syrian state of its Arab nationalist elements. Obama’s choice of words in declaring war on the self-proclaimed caliphate was not insignificant. The US president said that the Pentagon would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. So far US and allied forces have only degraded the militant group’s capabilities, holding it in check so that it doesn’t grow strong enough to topple the Arab nationalists, while not pressing so hard that ISIS is destroyed. The Pentagon won’t turn to destroying ISIS until its usefulness in advancing the US agenda of forcing a military stalemate and Assad’s exit through a political settlement has been realized. At that point, and only then, will the hammer come down.
The character of the Pentagon’s ISIS campaign is reflected in the complaints of many people, from Assad to Obama’s critics in Washington, that the campaign has been ineffective and seemingly half-hearted. Assad points out correctly that the Syrian Arab Army has borne the brunt of the fight against ISIS, and that the Syrian air force, small by comparison with US coalition forces, flies more missions.
According to US secretary of state John Kerry, “Our focus remains on destroying ISIL and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria.” US strategy might be more aptly summed up this way: “Our focus remains on destroying ISIL eventually and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria to be brought about, we hope, partly by the pressure ISIS and other jihadists can bring to bear on Damascus.”
According to Western dogma, Kerry, along with British foreign secretary Philip Hammond, are champions of democracy, on a moral plane far higher than that on which the Syrian president operates. After all, Assad is a dictator, or so we’re told, whose ‘brutal repression” of “largely” (i.e., not entirely) peaceful demonstrations in 2011 sparked an Islamist rebellion. It’s not clear how a peaceful call for democracy can almost instantly metamorphose into a violent rebellion on behalf of the anti-democratic project of creating a state based on the Quran. But this is not the only reason to question the narrative. The story suffers from another problem.
Islamist rebellions have been an ongoing feature of Syria’s modern history, antedating Bashar al Assad’s presidency. Tensions between secular Arab nationalists on the one hand, and conservative Islamists on the other, have been a staple of Syrian politics. The conflict has often been deliberately stoked by London and Washington, seeking to use political Islam to counter communist and nationalist threats to their domination of the Near East and its immense petroleum resources, no less in Syria than in Egypt (against Nasser), Iraq (against Saddam Hussein) and in Afghanistan (against a leftist, secular, modernizing government committed to eliminating discriminations based on race, sex and property.) Britain and the United States don’t want the populations of Western Asia owning and controling their own natural resources for use in their own interests. As Bernard Lewis put it in a 1992 article in the virtual house organ of the US State Department, Foreign Affairs, the danger to the United States of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was the possibility that it would lead to ”monopolistic control (by Arab nationalists) of (Arab) oil.” Damascus is perhaps the final redoubt of the kind of Arab nationalist thinking that inspired Lewis to call for a rethinking of the Middle East.
Curiously, Kerry and Hammond appear to be able to work themselves up into great fits of outrage over Assad, the “dictator”, who, contrary to the odious appellation Western officials and media have foisted upon him, is not as dictatorial as may be supposed. He was elected in a multi-candidate contest, and Syria has an elected legislature. At the same time, the two Western foreign ministers feel only the warmest regard for Saudi dictator, King Salman, the head of a family of parasites who owes his political position, privileges and immense wealth to hereditary succession and the patronage of his imperialist sponsor, the United States. The West recognizes no limits to its indulgence of the misogynistic, anti-Shia, sectarian, belligerent, democracy-abominating brutes in Riyadh, whose reciprocal indulgence of Western business interests is no less limitless. Apart from facilitating the Western oil industry’s accumulation of profits, the Saudi royal dictatorship uses oil revenues, not to develop the Arab nation as the Arab nationalists would do, but to keep the pipeline of money flowing to New York investment banks and Western weapons companies.
For their services in expanding the wealth of the West’s corporate elite, the Saudi despots get a pass. They can send Canadian-supplied light armored vehicles into Bahrain to violently repress protestors who call for a parliamentary democracy without fear the Canadian government will allow its rhetoric about promoting human rights scuttle future sales of more light armored vehicles to Riyadh. Recently asked to justify his policy of arming a repressive regime, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper could only lamely reply, “They’re our allies.” This was the same lame defense invoked by US State Department spokesman Mark Toner, when asked by a journalist for his reaction to the jaw-dropping news that Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 100 people this year, mostly by beheading, has been selected to head a key U.N. human rights panel. “I don’t have any comment, don’t have any reaction to it,” said Toner. “I mean, frankly it’s—we would welcome it. We’re close allies.”
The nature of the blatant hypocrisy that indulges a medieval tyranny while seeking to regime-change an elected president was spelled out clearly in the pages of The Washington Post by a senior US official. “The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.” We need look no further to understand why the United States and its allies are using jihadists to try to force a political settlement in Damascus that would cleanse the Syrian state of a non-cooperative Arab nationalist ideology while giving a pass to the cooperative Saudi dictatorship to behead and crucify, sequester and veil women, prevent them from driving automobiles and subordinate them to male domination, and illegally invade, bomb and blockade Yemen (amply assisted, incidentally, by Washington and London whose high state figures never tire of singing paeans to the rule of law they have no intention of being bound by themselves.)
To return to Kerry and Hammond, the alleged democrats, and Assad, the alleged anti-democrat, which of the following statements reflects the spirit of democracy, and which reflects the spirit of its opposite, rule of a people without representation from abroad, (the very arrangement that American colonists rebelled against King George III over)?
Who is Philip Hammond, a member of the British political elite, resident of a country half a world away from Syria, to say who Syrians can and can’t have as their president?
Hammond’s arrogance, as US policy on Syria, is an affront against both geography and democracy.
Why is it that this photograph of a young Syrian refugee who drown in flight from the war in Syria has been made an iconic image…
…while this similar photograph of a young Palestinian killed by the Israeli military while playing on a Gaza beach has not?
Which isn’t to say that one tragedy is more worthy of attention than the other, but that’s just the point. One has been made more worthy than the other.
Why?
The answer, I think, has much to do with how politics pervades the mass media and uses it to draw attention to some events and not others.
Why has a media spotlight been shone on the pitiable plight of refugees, now, and not earlier? Syrians have been displaced in countless numbers by the jihadist rampage through their country for more than four years. For four years their plight has been largely invisible.
What of refugees fleeing the chaos created by the war on Libya—essentially a marriage of NATO air forces with al-Qaeda foot soldiers to oust a resource nationalist, Muammar Gaddafi, whom US oil companies could no longer abide?
Why has little attention been paid to the exodus of refugees from the ongoing tumult in Afghanistan, and Iraq?
And the little boy slaughtered on a Gaza beach: He too is forgotten, if he was ever really noticed in the first place.
Could the invisibility of these victims have something to do with reality that they were victimized by the United States, by NATO, by Israel, the supposed “good guys”?
And could the visibility of the drowned little Syrian refugee boy, on a beach, serve a political purpose—to blame the tragedy of the Syrian war on the supposed “bad guy”, Bashar al-Assad, a man the West wants to step aside from his job as president of Syria, because he, like Gaddafi, is a nationalist, and the United States doesn’t like nationalists?
Meanwhile, Saudi King Salman, not a nationalist, is illegally bombing, invading, and blockading his neighbor Yemen (with the assistance of the United States.) The United States likes Salman. Journalist Glen Greenwald recently wrote that “Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days), and not only is it serially flogging dissidents, but it is reaching new levels of tyrannical depravity as it is about to behead and then crucify the 21-year-old son of a prominent regime critic, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was convicted at the age of 17 of engaging in demonstrations against the government.”
Earlier, Saudi Arabia invaded neighboring Bahrain to violently repress protesters demanding a parliamentary democracy. They used Canadian-supplied light armored vehicles. The Canadian government has organized the sale of more light armored vehicles to the Saudi royal dictatorship. This is all pretty much invisible.
If the image of a drowned Syrian refugee is being used in an attempt to blame the tragedy of the Syrian war on the supposed “bad guy”, Bashar al-Assad, that too, would be another feat of deflection, of concealing the crimes of the West, namely, that the chaos of Syria that ultimately led to the death of a little child on a beach (and the death of numberless others in far more gruesome ways), is as much as the chaos of Afghanistan, of Iraq, and of Libya, a product of decisions taken by the United States and its allies to impose their wills, their politics, their militaries, their economics, their religions, and their proxies, on other peoples’ countries.
The United States has trained and equipped almost 10,000 rebels and sent them into Syria to foment chaos, misery, and terror, part of a covert CIA program. Its allies have showered fanatical Islamist militants with money, weapons and training, to destabilize Syria, to force a political settlement that would see the current government in Syria step down, to make way for one that is willing to cooperate with the United States politically, militarily and economically.
Two little boys lying dead on beaches killed by governments that present themselves as the “good guys.” Neither are.
More than 130 years after the death of Karl Marx, and 24 years after the demise of the USSR, conservatives in the world’s leading capitalist countries still take the co-author of The Communist Manifesto seriously.
One such conservative is Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, whose essay The Middle Class Squeeze, appeared in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.
Moore uses “middle class” as a synonym for Marx’s “proletariat.” By “middle class squeeze” he means the class war, as Warren Buffet famously termed it–the one Buffet said he and his fellow billionaires, major investors, and high-level CEOs are winning. The connection between the expanding wealth of the owners of capital, on the one hand, and the flagging standard of living of people who must sell their labor in order to survive, on the other, is becoming all too evident, frets Moore.
Moore, who apart from singing paeans to Margaret Thatcher, was the editor at various times of the British newspapers The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, offers a good account of the growing harshness of capitalism for the West’s middle class. (It has always been harsh for residents of the periphery.)
In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”
In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s.
Persuaded during the Cold War that life would always get better in the capitalist West, the proletariat now lives with unfulfilled expectations.
In Britain and the U.S., we are learning all over again that it is not the natural condition of the human race for children to be better off than their parents. Such a regression, in societies that assume constant progress, is striking. Imagine the panic if the same thing happened to life expectancy.
All of this makes Moore anxious.
When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?
So, where might today’s proletariat, the squeezed middle class, look for answers? “How about this,” asks Moore, pointing to quotes from Marx:
“The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”
Moore assures his fellow conservatives that he has not “become a late convert to Marxism.”
But Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.
We might pause for a second to wonder who it is that Moore is addressing when he says “we don’t want to be a Marxist society.” Surely, it can’t be the squeezed middle class, for why would its members object to a society shaped in their interests?
When Moore says “we need to put it right” he means conservatives need to put it right in a way that preserves their ability to exploit “the middle class” to maintain their wealth and privileges; it’s just that they need to improve the condition of the middle class with a little less squeezing. It’s as if a prescient slave-owner is warning his class cohorts that “The slaves are getting restless. There are two ways this can be put right. We can improve the conditions of our slaves. Or the slaves can take it into their hands to abolish slavery. Let’s do the first before the slaves do the second.”
One wonders whether Moore is as familiar with the work of Marx’s intellectual companion, Friedrich Engels, as he appears to be with that of Marx? In the last paragraph of his The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote:
The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerilla skirmishes swell into more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion, then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the land: ‘War to the palaces, peace to the cottages!’—but then it will be too late for the rich to beware.”
Moore appears to be sounding the same warning. But Engels wrote an important sentence which immediately precedes the paragraph cited above: “It is too late for a peaceful solution.”
Highlights from a Russian media interview of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on September 16, 2015.
On the West’s campaign against ISIS
Since this coalition started to operate, ISIS has been expanding. In other words, the coalition has failed and it has no real impact on the ground.
On why the West is against him
[T]he Western principle followed now in Syria and Russia and other countries is changing presidents, changing states, or what they call bringing regimes down. Why? Because they do not accept partners, and they do not accept independent states. What is their problem with Russia? What is their problem with Syria? What is their problem with Iran? They are all independent countries. They want a certain individual to go and be replaced by someone who acts in their interests and not in the interest of his country. For us, the president comes through the people and through elections, and if he goes, he goes through the people. He doesn’t go as a result of an American decision, a Security Council decision, the Geneva conference or the Geneva communiqué.
On the origins of unrest in Syria
[W]e saw that the war [in Iraq would] turn Iraq into a sectarian country, into a society divided against itself. To the West of Syria there is another sectarian country, Lebanon. We are in the middle. We knew well that we will be affected. Consequently, the beginning of the Syrian crisis, or what happened in the beginning, was the natural result of that war and the sectarian situation in Iraq, part of which moved to Syria, and it was easy for them to incite some Syrian groups on sectarian grounds.
The second point which might be less crucial is that when the West adopted terrorism officially in Afghanistan in the early 1980s and called terrorists at that time “freedom fighters,” and then in 2006 when the Islamic State appeared in Iraq under American sponsorship and they didn’t fight it.
All these things together created the conditions for the unrest with the Western support and Gulf money, particularly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and with Turkish logistic support, particularly that [Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip] Erdogan belongs intellectually to the Muslim Brotherhood. Consequently, he believes that if the situation changed in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, it means the creation of a new sultanate, this time not an Ottoman sultanate, but a sultanate for the Brotherhood extending from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and ruled by Erdogan.
And if … gaps and weak points [in democracy] are the cause [of the unrest], why didn’t they lead to revolutions in the Gulf States, particularly in Saudi Arabia which doesn’t know anything about democracy?
The West has portrayed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an aggression, but the re-integration of Crimea into Russia can be understood as a pre-emptive measure on the part of Moscow to preserve Russian access to a strategically important naval base at Sevastopol, from which the Russian Black Sea fleet likely would have been ejected by the new Russophobe regime in Kiev. While a highly visible campaign has been mounted in the West of demonizing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to mobilize popular support for tough measures against Russia, the West has supported major aggressions by Saudi Arabia in Bahrain and Yemen. While Western politicians and commentators have vociferously condemned Russia’s “aggressions,” they have met the Saudi aggressions, which are on another scale entirely, with almost complete silence.
August 29, 2015
By Stephen Gowans
France cancelled the sale to Russia of two Mistral warships in response to “Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine,” [1] but announces that it is perfectly happy to sell the same warships to a coup government in Egypt, which has a deplorable—though in the West, largely glossed over—human rights record. Since Egypt’s Western-backed dictator Abdel Fattah Sisi “came to power in a coup two years ago, his government has criminalized street protests, sentenced hundreds to mass death in mass trials, and, according to the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, imprisoned some 40,000 political opponents and their supporters.” [2] On top of the possible sale of the Mistral warships to Cairo, France announced in February “the sale of nearly $6 billion worth of military hardware to Egypt, including two dozen Rafale fighter jets and a naval frigate.” [3]
Saudi troops arrive in Bahrain on Monday, March 14, 2011. A Saudi-led military force crossed into Bahrain with Canadian-supplied light armored vehicles to suppress a movement for a representative parliamentary democracy. APA /LandovBased on France’s purported commitment to the principles of equality, fraternity and liberty, one might think its government would have some reservations about striking weapons deals with a politically repressive regime which gags journalists, marches tens of thousands of political opponents into jail, and has condemned to death the elected president it overthrew. Certainly, France makes much of its commitment to liberal democratic values. How, then, could it support a regime that represents the very antithesis of the values it professes to cherish–unless the profits of France’s substantial citizens are senior to all other considerations?
Not to be outdone, in either arming an Arab dictator or exhibiting stunning hypocrisy in doing so, the United States gives Cairo $1.3 billion annually in military aid—effectively a pre-paid credit card for use in the US arms bazaar. The annual largesse, briefly suspended as a pro forma response to the coup for public relations purposes, has been resumed. In March, US “President Barack Obama agreed to release to Egypt a dozen F-16 attack aircraft and other military equipment,” including 12 F-16 aircraft, 20 Harpoon missiles, and 125 M1A1 Abrams tank kits. [4]
Meanwhile, the Canadian government, which, along with France, has made a show of deploring Russian “intervention” in Ukraine—and met it with its own interventions in encouraging the Maidan uprising, and in providing military training to Ukrainian militias—has facilitated a $15 billion sale of light armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada. Significantly, “it was Canadian-made fighting vehicles that Saudi Arabia sent into Bahrain in 2011 to help quell a democratic uprising.” [5] So, while France cancelled a deal to deliver Mistral warships to Russia owing to Russian intervention in Ukraine, Canada arms Saudi Arabia with the very same equipment the kingdom’s military used to intervene in Bahrain to suppress protestors demanding a representative, democratically-elected, government. France too is arming the Saudi defenders of illegitimate royalist rule. In June, it “announced plans to sell $12 billion worth of equipment to Saudi Arabia, including civilian helicopters and naval patrol boats.” [6] No pressure is exerted on Canada or France by the EU or Washington to suspend their deals with the Saudi tyranny.
That Canada and France have any dealings with Saudi Arabia is remarkable, considering the country is a human rights sewer, where woman have no rights, the state regularly amputates the heads (a la ISIS) and limbs of people convicted of crimes, and there is no democracy, procedural or otherwise. Its foreign policy is as ugly as its domestic policy. It has initiated a war of aggression on neighboring Yemen, part of which involves a blockade in which one in five faces starvation. [7] It exports its benighted, medieval Wahhabi ideology, backing anti-secular, misogynistic, sectarian religious fanatics to break the backs of socialist, communist and secular national forces in the Arab world, all to the delight of the Western imperialist powers that benefit. The Saud family plunders the country’s oil wealth, investing it abroad in US banks and on arms purchases that swell the coffers of US, French and Canadian weapons manufacturers, rather than investing it at home in Arab economic development—which explains why Ottawa and Paris haven’t the slightest reservations about arming this regionally aggressive abomination. The only reservation Canada’s government has is whether the arms deal it has approved with the Saudi tyranny is acceptable to another abomination, Israel [8], whose founding principle is the dispossession of one Arab people from its land, the Palestinians, to make way for Jewish settlers from other lands. Diderot remarked that humanity would never be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. It might be said that the Arab world will never be free until the last Arab king is strangled with the entrails of the last Jihadi. (As Robert Dreyfuss has pointed out, the oil monarchies are ruled by royal kleptocracies whose legitimacy is nil. Most Arabs know that the monarchies were established by imperialists building fences around oil wells. [9] The kleptocracies have a symbiotic relationship with the imperialists. They loot the country and share the stolen wealth with the imperialists who provide military support.
Regarding Russia’s “intervention” in Ukraine, let’s be clear that the annexation of Crimea followed in the wake of the emergence of two major threats that arose from Washington’s sponsorship of a coup d’état in Kiev to bring to power a Russophobe government. [10]
The first threat was expressed in the European Association Agreement, whose signing became the immediate raison d’être of the Maidan rebellion that preceded the coup. The terms of the agreement direct Ukraine to reorient its economic and foreign and military policies to the West. [11] Since Ukraine is Russia’s largest trading partner, the signing of the agreement has overwhelmingly important and deleterious economic consequences for Russia. Imagine Canada and Mexico signing agreements to reorient their economies toward Russia.
There are compelling geographic and economic reasons why Russia ought to be Western Europe’s principle economic partner, and not the United States. It’s close to Western European markets and production, and offers a vast treasure trove of natural resources, easily transportable over comparatively short distances to Western European markets. A significant role for Russia in Western Europe, however, threatens US economic hegemony. To eclipse the threat, US foreign policy has long sought to weaken and isolate Russia, by keeping Western Europe locked in the US orbit, while at the same time drawing countries on Russia’s periphery into the US-superintended circle, severing their historical and geographically natural connections to Russia’s economy. Washington’s sponsorship of the Russophobe coup in a country that is Russia’s principal economic partner is part of the larger US strategy of weakening Russia through isolation from its natural markets and peripheral economies.
The second threat was expressed in the probability that the coup government in Kiev would try to evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base in Crimea, significantly undermining Russia’s security environment. Russian self-defense would be further threatened by the probability that the base would be transferred to the US Sixth Fleet. As Putin explained, “What did our partners (the West) expect from us as the developments in Ukraine unfolded?…[W]e could not allow our access to the Black Sea to be significantly limited, and could not allow NATO forces to come to Crimea and Sevastopol.” [12]
Hence, the narrative that Western foreign policy is animated by opposition to foreign aggression is challenged by the arms deals that France and Canada—whose governments profess to oppose foreign intervention—have struck with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi tyranny has intervened militarily in Bahrain against a movement for a representative political democracy, and, to the shame of the Canadian government, using light armored vehicles sold to Saudi tyrants by a Canadian arms manufacturer, approved by Ottawa.
Saudi Arabia is waging a war of aggression on Yemen, which blatantly violates international law. The war involves an air campaign, and a naval blockade that has left one in five facing starvation. US warships assist in enforcing the starvation blockade and the Pentagon provides the Saudis with logistics and intelligence support.The Saudi tyranny has also launched a blood-soaked intervention into neighboring Yemen, with the ostensible goal of restoring to power a pro-Saudi president who was ousted in an uprising. That president, Abd-Rabbu Hadi, has virtually no support in Yemen. [13] There is some resemblance to Ukraine, i.e., a president ousted in a coup and a military response by a neighboring country, though the toppled Ukraine president was neither pro- nor anti-Russian, had far more support in Ukraine than Hadi has in Yemen, and Russia isn’t bombing Ukraine or enforcing a blockade to starve Ukraine into submission. Nor does Russia seek the restoration to power of Victor Yanukovych, the ousted Ukraine president. Yet bombing and blockade happen in Yemen, and there’s only silence in the West. US and British warships assist in maintaining the blockade. The Pentagon provides logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi bombing campaign. [14]
The entire affair is a blatant breach of international law, and an assault on authentic democracy and self-determination. Yet it is met by silence in the West (whose Saudi partner in robbing the Arabs of their oil wealth is the perpetrator.) Western politicians who rail against “Putin’s aggressions” and commentators who counsel tough measures against Moscow’s “belligerence”, have nothing to say about the US- and British-assisted Saudi war of aggression on Yemen, just as earlier they could find no words to condemn the Saudi march into Bahrain.
Imagine that Russia was bombing Ukraine and blockading its borders, instead of the Saudis doing the same to Yemen. The outcry would be deafening. Already, there is a full-throated call for aggressive economic and military action against Russia. And yet, what, in truth, was Moscow’s offense? Has it bombed Ukraine? No. Is it blockading its neighbor’s borders? No. It annexed Crimea, historically part of Russia, whose residents opposed the coup government in Kiev and welcomed their reintegration into Russia [15], and which is the site of an important Russian naval base. Russia’s actions were a predictable defensive measure against an aggressive US-led campaign to deprive Russia of its principal economic partner and its strategically important naval base on the Black Sea.
There is much to condemn and oppose: The Saudi interventions in Yemen and Bahrain; Western support for the Arab kleptocracies; the economic and military threats from the US against Russia that provoked Moscow’s defensive annexation of Crimea; royalist oppression in Saudi Arabia and the Western arms manufacturers and their partners in government who furnish the Saudi kleptocrats with weapons to suppress internal revolts. “Putin’s aggressions”—largely a fantasy—are not among them.
1. Matthew Dalton, “Egypt in talks to buy Mistral warships from France,” The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2015.
2. Tamer el-Ghobashy, “Egypt’s leader reinvents himself as bulwark against terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2015.
3. Nicola Clark, “Egypt to purchase fighter jets and a warship from France,” The New York Times, February 12, 2015.
4. Bryon Tau and Adam Entous, “Obama administration releases military aid to Egypt,” The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2015.
5. Steve Chase, “Foreign Affairs found no ‘red flags’ for Israel is Saudi arms sale,” The Globe and Mail, August 27, 2015.
6. Dalton.
7. Shuaib Almosawa, Kareem Fahim and Somini Sengupta, “Yemeni government faces choice between a truce and fighting on,” The New York Times, Aug 14, 2015.
8. Chase.
9. Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Holt, 2005, p. 99.
10. The arguments developed in connection with Ukraine are based mainly on Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, I.B. Taurus, 2015.
11. Sakwa, p. 75.
12. Sakwa, p. 167.
13. Patrick Cockburn, “In the Middle East, our enemy’s enemy must be our friend,” The Independent, April 12, 2015.
14. Ian Sinclair, “Yemen: Britain lurks behind Saudi atrocities,” The Morning Star, July 20, 2015; Shuaib Almosawa, Kareem Fahim and Somini Sengupta, “Yemeni government faces choice between a truce and fighting on,” The New York Times, Aug 14, 2015; Jay Solomon and Asa Fitch, “U.S. met secretly with Yemen rebels,” The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2015; Maria Abi-Habin and Adam Entous, “U.S. widens role in Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen,” The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2015; Hakim Almasmari and Maria Abi-Habib, “Saudi-backed forces set back in Yemen,” The Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2015.
15. Peter Hart, “Radioactive Putin is ‘Stalin’s Spawn’”, Extra!, May 1, 2014.
If you want to find examples of governments restricting the flow of information on the internet for political purposes, look to the United States and its allies, and not to the low-level of internet use in Cuba, which, notwithstanding press reports to the contrary, is a consequence of Cuba’s comparatively low-level of economic development, not communist ‘totalitarianism.’
August 22, 2015
By Stephen Gowans
Part of the dogma of capitalist societies is that communist states are inherently restrictive and ‘totalitarian’, in contrast to liberal democracies, which are portrayed as beacons of liberty. Communist states, we’re told, suppress dissent, while capitalist states allow it to flourish. This, of course, is nonsense. All states, regardless of how they’re organized economically, suppress dissent under circumstances of grave threat, and relax repression as danger diminishes. Those that are the most free, are those that face the least danger. Highly restrictive societies are typically highly threatened. The restrictions in the Soviet Union from its birth in 1917 to its collapse in 1991 are pointed to as proof of the totalitarian nature of communism (or “Stalinism”), but the reality that the country was in a permanent state of crisis is ignored, and restrictive measures have long been recognized as legitimate and necessary under emergency conditions, including in liberal theory and practice. Wave after wave of aggression crashed against the Soviet Union from its birth until its collapse. These included the aggressions of Wilhelmine Germany, the intervention of the Entente powers in the Civil War, Japan’s harassment of Soviet borders in the 1930s, the invasion of Nazi Germany, the Cold War, and Reagan’s program of spending the Soviets into bankruptcy. The objective of each aggression was the total annihilation of the communist state.
Totalitarianism has not been a stranger to liberal democracies either. Despite being sheltered by two oceans, having no hostile powers on its borders, and facing no realistic threat of invasion, the US state in two world wars invested its executive with dictatorial powers. These were used to direct the country’s economy, control the flow of information, crackdown on dissent, and herd potential fifth columnists into concentration camps. Even today, despite facing the comparatively minor threat of potential blowback from the political Islamic forces it has long supported to disrupt secular Arab nationalism [1], the United States, Britain, France, Canada and Australia have invested the political policing functions of their respective states with growing powers of surveillance and disruption.
Philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo observes:
In reality, although protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific, every time it has rightly or wrongly felt itself imperilled, the North American republic has proceeded to a more or less drastic reinforcement of executive power and to more or less heavy restrictions on freedom of association of expression. This applies to the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its devotees on American soil were hit by the Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Civil War, the First Word War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War. Even in our day, the sequel of the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. However terrible, the threat of terrorism is minor compared with that of invasion and military occupation, not to mention nuclear destruction. [2]
The restrictive practices, or ‘totalitarianism’, of communist states are not inherent. They are, instead, defensive measures against external threat. Cuba and North Korea have been under a greater sustained threat of invasion and military occupation than any other country (and North Korea is additionally under the threat of nuclear destruction.) It is in these countries that the pressure for restrictive practices is most acutely felt. Nor are restrictions on civil and political liberties unique to communist states. They are also found in abundance in capitalist countries, as well.
To illustrate how the dogma in capitalist society conditions its mass media to portray communist countries as inherently restrictive, consider a recent Wall Street Journal article on the expansion of internet access in Cuba (“Cubans get a tantalizing taste of the internet,” August 19, 2015).
The article attributes the comparatively low level of internet use on the Caribbean island to a theorized desire of Cuban authorities to control the flow of information, rather than to a more likely explanation, namely Cuba’s low level of economic development. We would expect that more developed countries would have a higher level of internet use, and less developed countries a lower level. If the level of internet use in Cuba is on par with that of other countries at the same level of economic development, the country’s low level of internet use can be explained by economic development, not a desire to restrict access to the internet to control the flow of information.
The graph below uses World Bank data to show the relationship between internet use per 100 people and GDP per capita. If the Cuban government deliberately restricts internet use, we would expect Cuba to depart significantly to the right of the trend line. Instead, it falls close to it, meaning the level of internet use in Cuba is typical of countries at an equal level of economic development. We can dismiss, therefore, the view that the Caribbean island’s low level of internet use is due to the government deliberately restricting access to the Web. The Wall Street Journal’s explanation of the low level of internet use in Cuba is a political argument, intended to mislead and discredit, not illuminate.
At 30 users per 100 people in 2014, internet use in Cuba was on par with that of Egypt (32) and El Salvador (30) and greater than in Guatemala (23), Honduras (19), India (18), Nicaragua (18) and Haiti (11) (World Bank). The average for Central America, a region on which the United States has lavished much attention to keep it free from communist ‘totalitarianism’, was 29, virtually equal to that of Cuba. If Cuba’s low level of internet use is indicative of Havana deliberately restricting access to the internet to control the flow of information, then the governments of Central America, along with Egypt and India, must also be ‘totalitarian.’
More fertile ground for identifying governments that impede the flow of information for political purposes can be found in the US orbit, among such trusted US (and capitalist) allies as South Korea, Turkey, Britain, Canada and the United States itself.
The South Korean police state vigorously effaces online content it doesn’t want South Koreans to see. When a computer user in South Korea clicks on an item on the North Korean Twitter account, a government warning against illegal content pops up. In 2011, South Korean authorities blocked over 53,000 internet posts for infractions which included having a kind word to say about North Korea. In the same year, the South Korean police state deleted over 67,000 Web posts that were deemed favorable to North Korea or which criticized the US or South Korean government. Over 14,000 posts were deleted in 2009. [3]
In Turkey, “thousands of Web sites are blocked by the state, mostly without any publicized reason.” [4]
In Britain, government officials have met with representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry “to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest.” Free-speech advocates liken these policies to those the British government “has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states.” [5]
The Canadian government recently passed legislation that would give its spy agency, CSIS, authority to disrupt “radical websites” and remove “terrorist propaganda” from the Internet—that is, restrict the flow of information on the Web. [6]
As for the United States, in 2009 “the U.S. Treasury Department ordered the closure of more than eighty websites related to Cuba that promoted trade and thus violated U.S. legislation on economic sanctions.” [7]
If the United States, South Korea, Turkey, Britain and Canada restrict the flow of information on the Internet for political reasons, how is it that Cuba is totalitarian, but these states are beacons of liberty?
Two further points.
First, the United States has waged a campaign of economic warfare against Cuba for over five decades. It’s impossible to say how large the Cuban economy would be today had it been allowed to develop unimpeded, but some estimates put the cost to Cuba of US economic aggression at $750 to $975 billion. [8] One analyst estimates that “Without the blockade, the Cuban standard of living today might well be equal to that of Western Europe.” [9] If so, internet use in Cuba would likely resemble European levels of 76 per 100 people, rather than today’s 30.
Second, the US propaganda system can’t mention internet access in Cuba without making reference to blogger Yoani Sanchez, whose online newspaper 14ymedio “is blocked in Cuba,” according to The Wall Street Journal. [10] There is a good reason for this. Sanchez’s web site appears to be a hostile project of the United States, a country in a virtual state of war with Cuba. Despite her status as a grassroots dissident, Sanchez’s web site is miraculously “available in no less than 18 languages….No other site in the world, including those of major international institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, OECD, and the European Union, has as many language versions available. Not even the U.S. State Department web site or the CIA has such a variety.” [11]
Moreover,
The site hosting the blog of Sanchez has a bandwidth 60 times higher than Cuba has for all its Internet users! Other questions inevitably arise about it: Who manages these pages in 18 languages? Who pays the administrators? How much? Who pays for the translators who work daily on Sanchez’s site? How much? Furthermore, the management of a flow of more than 14 million visitors monthly is extremely expensive. Who pays for that? [12]
Jose Luis Martinez, a spokesman for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, attributes the blocking of 14ymedio to the Cuban government’s desire “to have some type of control” and of being “a totalitarian regime trying to operate in the 21st century.” [13] US client state Egypt has locked up nearly 500 of Sanchez’s fellow political bloggers [14], while Washington’s strategic partner and major arms buyer Saudi Arabia has sentenced one blogger to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for his dissident views [15], yet Havana, the ‘totalitarian regime’ that insists on ‘some type of control’, has spared Sanchez a similar fate. By Martinez’s reasoning, Egypt—which receives $1.3 billion annually in military aid from the United States, second only to Israel [16]—must be a totalitarian state on steroids. And yet it suffers none of the denigration Western news media heap on Cuba.
Losurdo observes that if Cuba’s measures for repressing some political dissent are totalitarianism, then West Germany, which did not shrink from repressing communists, and which, like Hitler, banned the Communist Party, would also have to be regarded as totalitarian. [17] The same could be said of South Korea, whose infamous National Security Law continues to be used to lock up leftists. The South Korea police state recently disbanded one left-wing party, stripping its legislators of their parliamentary seats, and jailing a handful of its members, including the lawmaker Lee Seok-ki. [18]
Decades of low-intensity warfare against Cuba carried out by the United States, including a blockade, unremitting military threat, sabotage, support for fifth columnists, and occasional terrorism, has created a de facto state of war. Nevertheless, Cuba has reacted to this situation with measures no more drastic than those implemented in the United States during two world wars, [19] and no more drastic than those once implemented in West Germany and currently practiced with vigor in South Korea.
It’s not ‘totalitarian’ Cuban government policy that has limited internet use in Cuba. Internet use in Cuba has been limited by the comparatively low level of development of the Cuban economy and the US economic aggression which has stifled it. What restrictions Cuba has implemented are warranted defensive measures against the predations of its hyper-aggressive neighbor to the north. This, however, would be news to those who follow the mass media in capitalist societies. The sole interest of these media when it comes to Cuba and North Korea is to discredit ideological competitors through the propagation of dogma which treats the warts of all societies as uniquely present in those of communism and absent in those of capitalism.
1. See Robert Dreyfus, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Holt Paperbacks, 2005 and Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, Serpent’s Tail, 2010.
2. Domenico Losurdo. War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century. Verso. 2015. p 58.
3. Stephen Gowans, “South Korea’s Police State Wages War on Proponents of Democracy,” what’s left, January 27, 2015.
4. Sebnem Arsu, “Internet filters set off protests around Turkey”, The New York Times, May 15, 2011.
5. Ravi Somaiya, “In Britain, a meeting on limiting social media”, The New York Times, August 25, 2011.
6. “Tell Parliament-defeat police state bill C-51!”, People’s Voice, February 5, 2015.
7. Salim Lamrani, “The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez,” MRZine, December 11, 2009.
8. Aida Calviac Mora, “With Obama in the White House, the blockade hasn’t changed at all”, Granma International, September 16, 2010; Thomas Kenny, “Interview with Thomas Kenny co-author of Socialism of ‘Betrayed Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991,” PoliticalEconomy.ie, March 16, 2015.
9. Kenny.
10. Ryan Dube, “Cubans get a tantalizing taste of the internet,” The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2015.
11. Lamrani.
12. Lamrani.
13. Dube.
14. Jeffrey Fleishman, “In Egypt, a blogger tries to spread ‘culture of disobedience’ among youths,” The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2009.
15. Jay Solomon and Felicia Schwartz, “U.S. rebukes Saudis for sentencing blogger to 1,000 lashes,” The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2014.
16. Carol E. Lee and Gordon Lubold, “U.S. seeks to allay concerns of allies on Iran nuclear deal,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2015.
Paul KrugmanIn one of his twice-weekly New York Times columns, the Nobel Prize-winning liberal economist Paul Krugman attempted to discredit Republican Party politicians by portraying them as creatures of a money-driven political system. He unfairly and dishonestly excluded Democratic Party politicians, as if they somehow lived in a different world, free from the influence of money. But if we correct Krugman’s partisan bias—he’s a Democrat—the economist produces a creditable critique of why the procedural democracies that almost everyone deeply genuflects to are nothing but fronts for the pursuit of plutocratic interests:
Wealthy individuals have long played a disproportionate role in politics…You often see political analyses pointing out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is preceded by an ‘invisible primary’ in which candidates compete for the support of crucial elites…a stark competition for the affections and, of course, the money of a few dozen plutocrats. What that means, in turn, is that … (elected politicians) will be committed … to a broader plutocratic agenda (and will have) won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent. [1]
Thomas Ferguson elaborated this view into an investment theory of party competition in his Golden Rule, a reflection on the logic of money-driven political systems (those who have the gold, rule). [2]
But Krugman and Ferguson are late to the party. Those inspired by the communist tradition longed ago recognized the anti-democratic character of procedural democracies, contrasting them with authentic democracies in which outcome, not procedures, matter. A system of regular, multiparty elections, which reliably produces anti-popular policy favoring the interests of the one percent is hardly democratic, but such a procedural system, embedded in a larger society dominated by the logic of capitalism, will inevitably produce this outcome, elections and civil society notwithstanding.
Not long ago Krugman publicized a study that re-discovers the view that the wealthy owners of productive property dominate policy-formation and the political process. It’s a study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University that appeared in the Autumn 2014 issue of Perspectives in Politics. [3] Gilens and Page examined over 1,700 policy issues, concluding that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interests groups have little or no independent influence.” In other words, they produced data consistent with what Marxists, and others, including Adam Smith [4], had long maintained: that the economy’s owners have extraordinary influence over the state and everyone else has virtually none—the Golden Rule, as Ferguson succinctly put it.
Warranted contempt for the falsity of procedural democracy is evidenced in the indictment of German Communist Party leader Hugo Urbahns in 1923. “We will rather burn in the fire of revolution,” he promised, “than perish on the dung heap of democracy.” [5]
UrbahnsMuch earlier, Marx and Engels, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, defined democracy, not as a set of procedures for electing representatives, but as the rule of the working class, or in today’s parlance, of the 99 percent. Elections may happen, and politicians may vie (or say they’re vying) for the “middle-class” vote, but that doesn’t mean the interests of the 99 percent will be translated into public policy. As Ferguson explains, the key question is: Who do elected representatives represent? The answer is not the electorate, but the class that has the resources to invest in the political system—resources politicians need to get elected. This is none other than the class of capitalists.
Still, despite the glaring disparity between the promise of procedural democracy and its outcomes, most everyone celebrates it, or talks about democracy as if it had only recently been negated, as if the domination of capitalist society by capitalists is a recent phenomenon and not a necessity by definition.
Governments that emerged in the 20th century from the fires of revolution turned out to be a good deal more democratic, in any meaningful sense of the word, than the dung heaps of government by the one percent for the one percent. Consider the Soviet Union under Stalin—in the dogma of capitalist societies, the very antithesis of democracy, but which may have, in fact, been the very first expression of authentic democracy.
In the mid-1930s, the USSR had the most inclusive and equal political democracy in the world. Adult suffrage was universal. Discrimination on the basis of race, sex and property had been eliminated. By comparison, Britain had an unelected second chamber and unelected head of state (abominations against authentic democracy that persist to this day, not only in Britain [6], but in some inheritors of the British system, including Canada [7].) Only 70 million of 500 million inhabitants of the British Commonwealth lived in procedural democracies. The vast majority of British subjects were ruled by colonial administrators. South Africa denied suffrage to its black majority and Canada and Australia did the same to their aboriginal populations. [8]
Meanwhile, in the United States, a “democracy” founded on the extermination of Native Americans and slavery of Africans—the framers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were slave-owners, as were the first presidents—practiced racial segregation and truncated its black (second-class) citizens’ civil and political liberties. “Herrenvolk” democracies, procedural democracies for a master race, have largely jettisoned their racist features since, likely under the pressure of the counterexample provided by states that followed the antiracist communist tradition, but continue to produce policy outcomes that favor a parasitic elite of productive-property owners at the top.
Not too long ago, the dung heaps were called “capitalist democracies” to distinguish them from “socialist democracies”. Use of the phrase “capitalist democracy” reveals an absent understanding of either capitalism or democracy or both, since the two are mutually inimical, and their pairing produces an oxymoron, or, worse, a political deception, namely, the transformation of capitalism as a type of society at odds with democracy into democracy itself.
Capitalism, a system supporting owners of capital through the parasitism of wage labour, can hardly be democratic. Equally, democracy, a type of society in which the interests of the bulk of people prevail (historically, the rabble, an exploited class or oppressed people) can hardly coexist with capitalism. Either a society is capitalist, in which case it’s not democratic, or it’s democratic, in which case it’s not capitalist. And it’s clear to many, including Nobel Prize winning economists, in which direction the contradiction resolves itself on the dung heap.
Clarity of language aids analysis. If we acknowledge that we live in capitalist societies, the discovery that our politics favors capitalists hardly seems extraordinary or radical—just obvious, if not axiomatic.
1. Paul Krugman, “Republicans against retirement,” The New York Times, August 17, 2015.
2. Thomas Ferguson. The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. The University of Chicago Press. 1995.
4. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote, “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” (Book 5, Chapter 1, Part 2.)
5. Arthur Rosenberg. Democracy and Socialism: A Contribution to the Political History of the Past 150 Years. Beacon Press. 1938, p. 9.
6. The British House of Lords consists of 781 unelected members who collectively have the authority to amend and delay legislation. It is the world’s largest legislative chamber outside of China. British Prime Minister David Cameron intends to expand the chamber further, with scores of appointments in the works. How extraordinary that the largest legislative chamber outside the world’s most populous country, is unelected, and exists in a country that celebrates its ‘democracy’. An August 22, 2015 New York Times article, (“A British house overflowing with Lords draws scorn”) critiques the House of Lords for its demographic imbalance, disproportionately elderly and male, but not its undemocratic character. We’re left to believe that if only the chamber’s demographic failings were redressed, all would be fine. On a dung heap, an unelected legislative chamber is wholly acceptable so long as it’s demographically representative.
7. In Canada, the abomination against authentic democracy is even greater since the country’s head of state was neither born in, nor resides in, Canada. However, the head of state has only nominal authority, making this a largely academic concern. Canada’s unelected Senate is a more problematic affair. It’s bad enough that the elected representatives that sit in Canada’s House of Commons represent a capitalist class and not the electorate, but that an unelected and non-popular body has any input into public policy is an intolerable scandal, but one the Canadian public nevertheless passively accepts under the onslaught of blanket propaganda that astonishingly holds up their country as a shining light of democracy. That Canadians are able to believe Canada is even much of a procedural democracy, let alone an authentic one, is testament to the efficacy of the propaganda system to befuddle the public on issues of the greatest political significance.
8. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. Longmans, Green and Co., Third Edition. 1947. pp xxi-xxii.
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