Margaret Thatcher Finally Dead

Iron Lady, Rust In Hell

Workers Vanguard

As everyone here will be only too well aware, it was Margaret Thatcher’s funeral today: a publicly funded, pomp-filled ceremonious insult to working people in this country and beyond. Anyone close to central London was subjected to a salute to Thatcher by artillery used in the Falklands in 1982, in her dirty little war against Argentina’s Galtieri dictatorship over windswept rocks in the South Atlantic. In that conflict, Thatcher earned the title “Butcher of the Belgrano” for a war crime: She ordered the sinking of the Argentine battleship General Belgrano outside Britain’s own declared war zone, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of young Argentine conscripts.

The death of nobody but Thatcher could be celebrated by such a huge swath of the population in this country. Just look at the “death parties,” as the bourgeois press termed them with horror, in Glasgow, Bristol, Brixton and Trafalgar Square. Think of the toasts raised in the pubs of former mining and industrial areas across northern England, Wales and Scotland and in the Catholic areas of Northern Ireland. Surely the outburst of jokes makes some new record, from “Thatcher’s only been in hell half an hour and she’s already closed down three furnaces” to the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle’s “I was all for a lavishly funded public cremation for Thatcher. Right up until she died.” Government officials sniffed that the celebrations are “puerile” and grumbled that some of the participants are too young to remember Thatcher. So what? They know she’s a big part of the reason there’s no education, no jobs, no future for them. Capturing Thatcher’s disdain for everything outside of that citadel of finance capital, the City of London, her biographer, Charles Moore, told Radio 5 that Thatcher was “reviled in parts of the country that are less important.”

Reformists point to British society today as proof that Thatcherism didn’t work: the devastation of the manufacturing base, insufficient and unaffordable housing, generations of unemployed and financial deregulation for the City. Well, Thatcherism did work for the capitalist class. This is why Thatcher is so celebrated, not only by the bourgeoisie’s Conservative (Tory) Party but also by Labour Party leaders: Opposition leader Ed Miliband professed to “greatly respect her political achievements” while Tony Blair offered this “towering political figure” his sincerest form of flattery, noting that his own government retained “some of the changes she made in Britain.”

Distancing himself from New Labour’s fawning, maverick Member of Parliament George Galloway objected to “spending £10 million on the canonisation of this wicked woman,” complaining: “The comparison of Margaret Thatcher with Mr. Churchill is utterly absurd. We’d be conducting this conversation in German if it was not for Mr. Churchill.” Galloway’s admiration for Churchill, a colonialist pig who engineered the starvation of millions of Bengalis during World War II, is based on the myth that WWII was a war for “democracy” against fascism. In fact, Churchill was defending the interests of British imperialism against its rivals, particularly Germany. Fundamentally it was the Soviet Red Army that smashed Hitler’s military.

The capitalist media talk about how, before Thatcher came into office, Britain was “the sick man of Europe,” crippled by strike waves and outdated industry. In fact, British industry had been in decline relative to its imperialist competitors such as the U.S. and Germany since the late 19th century. This was exacerbated by the loss of Britain’s empire and near-bankruptcy following World War II. The bourgeoisie needed to increase their competitiveness on the world market, that is, to ratchet up the rate of exploitation of the working class. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan tried to do this by cutting deals with the union tops over beer and sandwiches, through wage controls, strike ballots and a ban on secondary picketing, and when that failed by mobilising the police and army against striking workers.

During this period, miners, railwaymen, dockers and others waged strikes that shook the country, led by a powerful and militant shop stewards movement. However, while trade-union militancy was able to frustrate the capitalist system, it could not resolve the underlying conflict. There were two alternatives in the long term: either the bourgeoisie would be dealt with by workers revolution or the workers would be dealt with by the bourgeoisie. As it happened, the class struggle was derailed into electing a Labour government. When Callaghan’s Labour government proved unable to deliver for them, the bourgeoisie turned to Thatcher.

Anti-Union, Anti-Soviet Crusader for the Bourgeoisie

By 1990, after eleven bitter years of confrontation, Thatcher would be ousted by her own party as protests against the poll tax swept the country. In Scotland, where the tax was first tested out, Thatcher was so unpopular that the Tories’ fortunes have never recovered. So it’s no surprise that in the 1979 election, the Economist noted that Callaghan stood on a “platform of middle-ground conservatism” but Thatcher was dangerously radical and confrontationist. The Economist came out for Thatcher anyway, for offering the best hope to revive the economy. The bourgeoisie gambled that the unions did not have a leadership to match Thatcher in hard class war, and that gamble paid off.

The coal miners strike of 1984-85 was the defining event of Thatcher’s rule. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) represented the most powerful and militant section of the working class. They had brought down Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1974, and Thatcher was out for revenge. She decided to destroy the NUM in order to bring the trade-union movement to heel, and she destroyed the mining industry to smash the NUM.

Thatcher’s victory over the miners was not inevitable. The miners fought heroically against fierce state repression for 12 months. Their strike was supported by broad sections of the working class—there were plenty of examples of dockers and railway workers refusing to touch scab coal. But Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock obscenely echoed Thatcher, denouncing miners for “violence” on the picket lines against the strikebreaking cops. The leaders of some unions openly scabherded, while the “left” union leaders mouthed fine words but curbed the workers’ militancy. In the final analysis, it was not the capitalist state that defeated the miners but the fifth column in the workers movement, including the left-talking leaders of the dockers union, who sent their striking members back to work twice during the miners strike.

We called on all unions to refuse to handle scab coal and for a fighting triple alliance of miners, dockers and railway workers to strike together. This would have amounted to a general strike, posing the question: who was going to start things up again? Which class would rule? It was this perspective the reformist Labour politicians and trade-union bureaucrats hated and feared above all. As our paper Workers Hammer (No. 67, March 1985) put it after the defeat of the strike:

“The NUM leadership under Arthur Scargill took this strike about as far as it could go within a perspective of militant trade union reformism, and still it lost. Why? Because militancy alone is not enough. From day one it was clear that the NUM was up against the full power of the capitalist state. What was needed was a party of revolutionary activists rooted in the trade unions which fought tooth and nail to mobilise other unions in strike action alongside the NUM. But all Arthur Scargill had was the Labour Party, and it would rather see the NUM dead than organise to take on the bosses’ state in struggle.”

In 1983, on the eve of the miners strike, Scargill was witchhunted by the misleaders of the Trades Union Congress, aided by Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, for telling the truth that imperialist-funded “free trade union” Solidarność in Poland was anti-socialist. The failure of any delegate to defend him signalled to Thatcher that Scargill was isolated and she could launch her attack. For Thatcher, the miners and other militant workers represented “the enemy within” while the Soviet Union and East European deformed workers states were the ultimate “enemy without.” Polish Solidarność had a programme for capitalist counterrevolution. This is why, apart from the Union of Democratic Mineworkers who scabbed on the miners strike, it was the only “trade union” Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ever liked.

Those trade-union bureaucrats who were the most anti-Soviet were also the most hostile to the miners strike. And the anti-Communist “socialists” like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whose devotion to capitalist “democracy” led them to support Solidarność, were far to the right of the majority of striking miners. The SWP had members in the steel plants who crossed miners’ picket lines. When we exposed this at a public meeting, their founder-leader Tony Cliff bragged about how many and where! Workers Power and (retrospectively) the Socialist Party supported the scab ballot Thatcher and Kinnock were trying to force on the NUM, with workers already on strike supposed to hold a strike vote. The miners had voted with their feet; their weapon was not the bourgeoisie’s strike laws but the picket line!

As for Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarność, during the strike he took a stand on behalf of his imperialist patrons, praising Thatcher as a “wise and brave woman” in the Sunday Mirror under the headline “Why Scargill Is Wrong—by Lech.” Walesa came to Thatcher’s funeral to pay homage with other Cold Warriors like Henry Kissinger. (Scargill, on the other hand, was laying low, reportedly responding laconically to a friend’s text of the news “Thatcher dead”: “Scargill alive.”)

Baroness Bigot

During the miners strike, you saw how various minorities got behind the miners. They saw a powerful working-class struggle taking on their common oppressor: the Thatcher government and her brutal cops. Blacks, Asians, gays, Irish Republicans and Catholics championed the miners and gave them material assistance. In turn, the miners came to the defence of oppressed minorities, championing their cause even after the strike: participating in gay rights marches, for example. The miners were predominantly white and from rural areas, but the strike radicalised them. Many miners would say that before the strike they never knew what it was like to be black or Asian, or to be Catholic in Northern Ireland. After they had been on the receiving end of the cops’ violence, they could relate to that oppression.

The miners strike also impacted broader layers of the working class. In 1984, when the IRA set off a bomb at the Tory conference, a common joke was that the culprits should be shot because they missed Thatcher. A worker at a car plant in Birmingham quipped that the police had better get started rounding up suspects because there were 50 million of them. Ten years earlier, Irish workers had been physically driven out of this same plant after the criminal bombing of two city centre pubs was attributed to the IRA. During the strike, in the Catholic areas of Northern Ireland banners went up: “Victory to the Miners!” Large collections of food and money were taken up in Dublin. Irish trade unionists said they were repaying the miners for the support British workers gave them during the Dublin Lockout of 1913.

Thatcher personified the bourgeois onslaught against the working class and the oppressed overall. In 1981, Thatcher saw Bobby Sands and nine other Irish Republican hunger strikers die grisly deaths rather than discuss their demand to be treated as political prisoners. As support grew around the world for the men’s heroic struggle, Thatcher intoned: “Crime is crime is crime. It is not political.” Under Thatcher, British armed forces colluded with Loyalist death squads in the murder of Northern Irish Catholics, including Pat Finucane, a solicitor who defended Republican prisoners. As Labour’s Peter Mandelson recalls, when he became Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999 she advised him: “You can’t trust the Irish, they are all liars.”

Under Thatcher, the black and Asian youth whose parents had come to Britain in times of labour shortages were treated as a surplus population, left to rot in areas deprived of resources. They were at the mercy of racist cops that she spurred on. The Brixton police riots of 1981 and 1985 are hallmarks of the Thatcher years, when blacks who tried to protest police brutality were attacked by police and denounced by Thatcher as “criminal, criminal.”

Among the more nauseating claims about Thatcher is that by triumphing in the male-dominated world of bourgeois politics she struck a blow for women’s equality. Thatcher was a dedicated enemy of women’s liberation. She attacked single mothers and unashamedly campaigned to restore Victorian values. She openly maligned gays and managed to enact Section 28, the first anti-gay legislation in over 100 years, which prevented the “promotion” of homosexuality by school and local authorities. Moreover, the triumph of movements she supported internationally—such as the reactionary mujahedin in Afghanistan and capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe—came at the cost of women in particular.

Thatcher spearheaded the British capitalists’ reactionary campaigns. But some credit for the dismal situation of the trade unions in Britain today must be given to the “old Labour” misleaders who isolated struggles, disarmed militant workers and supported the drive for capitalist counterrevolution in the East. When asked what her greatest achievement was, Thatcher reportedly answered “Tony Blair and New Labour.” And under Tony Blair the Labour Party earned its claim to the Iron Lady’s legacy, trampling on the working class and gutting social services. Working people need a party that will fight for our own class interests, a workers party committed to sweeping away the bankrupt capitalist system. But we’ll take what comfort this deeply unjust world has to offer. Eighty-seven years old, her last days spent in a suite at the Ritz: it’s not exactly Mussolini’s end. Nevertheless, we are glad to see the last of this exceptionally vile representative of the capitalist class, and finally be able to “tramp the dirt down.” 

In Venezuela, Oligarchy Strikes Back

Félix López

Henrique Capriles, the candidate of Venezuela’s oligarchy and imperialism, has lost two presidential elections in six months. The first on October 7, 2012, against Chávez. The second, this April 14 against Nicolás Maduro. Capriles’ most recent election victory took place on December 16, 2012 when he became governor of Miranda, with an advantage of just 45,111 votes over his Bolivarian opponent, Elías Jaua. At that time, the National Electoral Council (CNE) seemed to him to be a very fair, respectable, and transparent body.

This April 14, Capriles lost to Nicolás Maduro by a difference of 234,935 votes (according the first official bulletin released). And as he made clear through his attitude prior to the elections, he is not accepting the result and he has called for national protest with cacerolazos (banging of pots and pans in street demonstrations), guarimbas (public disorders, blocking streets), accusations and refusal to acknowledge the election results, lies, and fear campaigns, denying the President-elect’s legitimacy and ignoring the majority will of the people, leading in the aftermath of the election to despicable acts of violence against some properties including health facilities, and residential, commercial, and political buildings.

Undoubtedly, the coming days in Venezuela will be tense. The irresponsible attitude of the defeated candidate and his campaign staff, which receive their orders and assistance from the U.S. embassy in Caracas, aims to create a similar climate to that of April 2002. Only this time the leadership of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces is connected to the people and is loyal to their Comandante en Jefe; the Bolivarians are more organized, the national public system of communication is more solid and Nicolás, the elected President, has told them that he is a man of peace, but that he will not allow the country to descend into violence.

The sore loser and his mentors are lashing out against the CNE. They are demanding a recount of the votes, a demand that the Bolivarians accept, confident as they are that they will emerge even better when the non-automated votes are counted, which come from the remotest areas of the country where there is majority support for the revolution. But Capriles has not requested a peaceful audit process. His fit of temper, as well scripted as his election campaign, involves creating a series of destabilization events, and in any one of these scenes something out of the ordinary could happen which could put the country’s peace at risk.

Let us not forget today’s new style of coup d’etat, which has already been rehearsed with a certain degree of success in Honduras and Paraguay; and we say “a certain degree of success” because the people’s response to the events and the reaction across the continent also point to the existence of a new way of dealing with the situation. For the Bolivarian revolutionaries this is a time to be alert, patient and firm. While the opposing temper tantrum spreads its class hatred throughout Venezuela, the people must unite around Nicolás Maduro, the continuator of Chávez’ work.

If the Venezuelan opposition had learned the rules of the democratic game (with which Chávez won 17 to 1), they would now be leading the large number of their followers (680,000 more than in October 2012) instead of calling them to battle. Capriles has the responsibility to guide and lead those who voted for him, not to take them into confrontation, as they did in 2002, attempting to take by force the power they could not win at the polls.

Having been declared President by the CNE, Nicolás Maduro has sent a clear message: “A majority is a majority and in a democracy this should be respected, we should not be looking for ambushes, pretexts to put the sovereignty of the people at risk (…); all that has one name: golpismo (coup-plotting). And that is what this is all about, the next chapter of a novel in which the recurring theme is an ongoing coup and an intention to topple the revolution by force. Because by the proper channels (with votes) they have lost again.

Thatcher is Dead—Long Live Chávez!

George Ciccariello-Maher

Mother: O my son … an evil and pernicious death.

Rebel: Mother, a verdant and sumptuous death.

Mother: From too much hate.

Rebel: From too much love.

– Aimé Césaire

Two deaths with diametrically opposite meanings, evident from the immediate responses they provoked. One was greeted by millions of mourners packing the streets of Caracas, waiting for days to catch a glimpse of their departed leader. The other prompted spontaneous street parties in Brixton and Glasgow and a barrage of comical send-ups about the impending privatization of hell. But while revelers gathered spontaneously to celebrate the physical death of the Iron Lady of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, voters in Venezuela are heading to the polls to drive nails into her coffin and bury her legacy by electing a revolutionary successor to Hugo Chávez.

“Children of 1989”

The Fourth World War started in Venezuela, and it was a war against Thatcher and her ilk. In February of 1989, Ronald Reagan had only recently handed the baton over to George H.W. Bush, and Thatcher was gearing up to impose the Poll Tax, which would see epic riots in Trafalgar Square the following year. Meanwhile in Venezuela, a seemingly different sort of government was taking power with a surprisingly similar outlook. Centrist social democrat Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected on an anti-neoliberal platform that promised debtor-nation resistance and derided the IMF as a “bomb that only kills people.”

Once in power, however, the bait was switched and Pérez did an abrupt about face, instituting the neoliberal Washington Consensus to the letter: sweeping privatization and deregulation and the certainty that, for the poorest at least, things were about to get much worse. But while the populations of the United States and Britain were busily swallowing the bitter pill of neoliberalism under the illusion that there was no alternative, poor Venezuelans unexpectedly spat it back out and set about burning and looting to make the impossible suddenly possible.

In what was deemed the “Caracazo,” mass popular rebellion in the streets smashed in an instant the deceptive myth of Venezuelan exceptionalism and its illusory stability. It destroyed the prevailing system of corrupt two-party democracy and tossed forth Hugo Chávez himself as a political crystallization of demands unmet and aspirations unrealized. As graffiti in Caracas puts it: “We are children of 1989 in revolution.”

Slandering the Dead

But Chávez is gone and the war against neoliberalism continues. If Chávez was rarely respected by the foreign press in life – indeed, here was a figure about whom literally anything could be said, written, and published – why would we expect anything different in death? Thus alongside the popular ebullitions of grief over Chávez and joy over Thatcher, there were the reactions to the deaths of Chávez and Thatcher in the nominally progressive Guardian.

Whereas the paper’s obituary for Thatcher was polite to a fault, that pinnacle of absurdity that is Rory Carroll had only one month earlier granted a veneer of respectability to those who would bid the late Venezuelan President “good riddance.” Carroll is still evidently smarting from the day that Chávez himself subjected the journalist to a stinging history lesson. Despite the fact that he tells this story constantly, however, he can’t seem to remember what actually happened.

The bastion of U.S. liberalism that is The New Yorker has hardly fared better. Staff writer and apparent bully Jon Lee Anderson has found himself embroiled in a scandal that, while ostensibly about fact-checking, was in reality something far worse. The New Yorker eventually corrected two of Anderson’s more straightforward errors, in which he erroneously claimed that Venezuela led Latin America in homicides, and his utterly baffling suggestion that Chávez came to power in a coup rather than an election. But there is little recourse to be had regarding Anderson’s most rhetorically slippery phrases, much less his overarching narrative in which Venezuela’s poor are “victims of their affection” for Chávez.

After all, when it comes to the late Comandante, no holds are barred.

If Chávez was and continues to be roundly slandered in the press, however, we can take some consolation in the fact that most Venezuelans simply don’t believe the hype. All reputable polls suggest that right-wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski will be roundly defeated on Sunday by Chávez’s preferred candidate, the former bus driver and union leader Nicolás Maduro. Such decisive poll numbers, however, are but a reflection of the deep contradictions within anti-Chavista forces over strategy and program.

The Anti-Chavista Double-Bind

In fact, in light of such a certain defeat, much opposition posturing is little more than a performance for a foreign audience. Case in point: the opposition MUD coalition recentlycalled a press conference to denouncepurported irregularities in the electoral system, notably that: “a PSUV [United Socialist Party] member, was in possession of the password for the start-up and log-in and log-out of the machines.” But when pushed on the importance of this claim, the MUD’s Executive Secretary Ramón Aveledo conceded that the password “does not put the voting system at risk, it’s true, it does not put the electoral software at risk, nor the identification of voters, nor the vote count, nor the transmission of the results.”

What to make of this entire spectacle? If the goal was to discredit the electoral system, surely this task could have been accomplished less clumsily. The reality, however, is that these contradictory claims point to the contradiction that is the opposition itself. Not a majority, it cannot win elections, and unable to win elections, it is constantly tempted to abstain rather than competing in them.

It was this double-bind that led to the utterly hubristic coup against Chávez exactly eleven years ago today, which was reversed within 47 hours by the same masses that coup planners had so thoroughly underestimated. By attempting a coup, the opposition effectively handed the mantle of democratic legitimacy to the Chávez government, and many anti-Chavistas have spent years attempting to shed the label of golpistas, coup-mongers, with only limited success. Since Chávez wiped the floor with Manuel Rosales in 2006, the majority of the opposition has accepted the results of elections, casting their lot in with the ballot only because the bullet had failed so miserably.

Simply choosing to contest elections, however, did not solve the challenge of electability, and while attempting to silence the abstentionists in their ranks, the anti-Chavistas have simultaneously sought to move toward the center, in words at least. Thus Capriles and others have painted themselves as social democrats by suggesting that they would not abolish, but merely improve popular social programs like the Bolivarian Missions. This claim does not square, incidentally, with the reality of Miranda State, where as governor Capriles promptly assailed the Missions, especially the controversial Cuban-staffed health centers of Mission Barrio Adentro.

Nor did it help when Capriles supporters recently occupied and vandalized an apartment building being constructed to house the poorest Venezuelans through Misión Vivenda. Those who for so long have denounced as “invaders” homeless Venezuelans who occupied an empty building or an idle patch of land now reveled in invading a government project to house the poor. And while Capriles has avoided criticizing Chávez directly, instead assailing Maduro for not living up to the deceased leader’s example, it has not helped that some of his supporters daubed graffiti reading “long live cancer.”

And nor has Capriles, elite scion whose very surname attests to extraordinary wealth, had an easy time shedding the taint of the past. It didn’t help when, in the run-up to the election of October 2012, a document was leaked claiming to delineate the “Plan of Government” for a hypothetical Capriles administration. While denounced by some as a forgery, this plan was exactly what many would expect from Capriles: a return to the very same neoliberal savagery that sparked the Caracazo.

The past does not so easily become past.

Thatcher’s Shock Troops

But how mixed is the opposition’s message in reality? Perhaps it is too generous to take Capriles at his word. After all, Capriles must himself see the contradiction: if he critiques the electoral system as unfair, he discourages his own voters from participating, but if he encourages them to participate, he delivers them into the hands of defeat. While it is certainly fitting revenge that this election falls on the anniversary of Chávez’s triumphant return, we should never let triumphalism blind us to the persistent vultures that circle Venezuela’s socialist democracy. Amid a backdrop of domestic and international chatter seeking to discredit the democratic credentials of the Venezuelan electoral system, sectors of the Venezuelan opposition have begun to maneuver in ways that suggest something else might be afoot.

On Monday night, an encampment of hunger strikers from the far-right organization Active Youth for a United Venezuela (JAVU) were allegedly attacked by red-shirted assailants on motorcycles, to all appearances Chavistas. Some immediately wondered what Chavistas would gain from an attack so close to elections, and why the opposition-controlled Chacao police did not intervene. As it turned out,Chavistas from Chacao were indeed present, but insist that they themselves were attached by JAVU, effectively answering the question of why the police did not stop the attack: why intervene when your side is on the offensive?

Such an attack would not be out of character for JAVU, which while affirming the strategic nonviolence of organizations like the Albert Einstein Institution, has nevertheless been more than willing to engage in violence in the past (as has its parent organization, the admittedly violent Miami-based exile group, Orvex). JAVU has since been linked to violently provocative attacks across the country, from assaults on Chavistas in Mérida to an attempt to set the Miranda Legislative Council on fire. In Mérida, a smartphone was found containing JAVU’s manual for the coming days: they have no plans to recognize the electoral results and will instead “take the streets by any means.”

On Wednesday, even more troubling news emerged. First, Capriles publicly refused to sign a letter agreeing to respect the outcome of the election, insisting instead that he would respect that most flexible of categories: the “popular will.” Given that Capriles had indeed signed a similar letter prior to the October 2012 election, we should wonder what has changed aside from opposition strategy. This worrying refusal was immediately compounded by the release of a recorded phone callfrom Capriles’ own personal bodyguard, insisting that the opposition candidate will not recognize defeat (while incidentally revealing the bodyguard’s own delusional belief that Capriles would be the real winner).

Indeed, everything points to a possible post-election attempt to overthrow a newly elected Maduro administration. Another leaked phone recording suggests that Salvadorean mercenaries with ties to death squads are currently in Venezuela and planning to disrupt the election, possibly with ties to Capriles himself. Seventeen people have been arrested for allegedly sabotaging the electrical grid and causing blackouts. When considered against a backdrop in which the Obama administration has cast doubt on whether the election would be “clean and transparent,” such signs are troubling to say the least.

Post-Neoliberal Dawn

Frantz Fanon once argued, somewhat notoriously, that “For the colonized, life can only spring from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” To celebrate an enemy’s death by necessity carries within it, however negatively, a positive political program, and those who took to the streets to spontaneously celebrate Thatcher’s demise were invariably firing shots at neoliberalism itself.

But unfortunately for those gathered in Brixton, neoliberalism and its ideological partner, austerity, are today on the offensive in Britain and much of the global core. In no way does Thatcher’s death mark the destruction or even decline of her ideological legacy, and in this sense the celebrations are as catharthic as they are premature. It is across the globe that the greatest strides have been made to destroy Thatcher’s legacy in the intransigent insistence that there is, in fact, an alternative to neoliberalism.

As I argue in We Created Chávez, far less interesting than Chávez the man are the decades of revolutionary struggle that preceded him, crystallizing around Chávez as a symbol of and a mechanism for driving forward the struggle against neoliberalism and capitalism. Even in life, Chávez was far more than the sum of his acts, he was a vessel into which the popular sectors of Venezuela deposited their post-neoliberal aspirations. But the vessel’s shape was soon determined by its content, as Chávez became a socialist battering ram propelled by forces he did not himself control. To paraphrase C.L.R. James’ description of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Chávez did not make the revolution, the revolution made Chávez.

The Bolivarian Revolution has lost something powerfully important in this individual that was Hugo Chávez, but perhaps it is better that he departed us physically amid the upswing of the historic movement he embodied, and to which he can still lend his image to press forward the momentum of the struggle. This certainly seems preferable to death amid the decadence of a flailing system, the death of Thatcher, out of whose rotting corpse the post-neoliberal world must invariably bloom.

 George Ciccariello-Maher, teaches political theory at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke University Press, May 2013), and can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.

Fidel Castro: Avoid New Korean War

Fidel Castro Ruz

A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago.

A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.

This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet.

This is about one of the most serious dangers of nuclear war since the October Crisis around Cuba in 1962, 50 years ago.

In 1950, a war was unleashed there [the Korean Peninsula] which cost millions of lives. It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, in a matter of seconds, killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.

General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Not even Harry Truman allowed that.

It has been affirmed that the People’s Republic of China lost one million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army on that country’s border with its homeland. For its part, the Soviet army provided weapons, air support, technological and economic aid.

I had the honor of meeting Kim Il Sung, a historic figure, notably courageous and revolutionary.

If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba has always been and will continue to be with her.

Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet.

If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

Fine-Tuning U.S. Imperialist Terror Machine

Workers Vanguard

In the nearly 12 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, America’s capitalist rulers have implemented an unprecedented enhancement of their repressive powers in the name of fighting the “war against terrorism.” While unleashing its unrivaled military might from Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington has instituted massive wiretapping, surveillance and detention without trial at home. This trampling of basic rights was implemented first by the Bush administration and expanded by the Obama White House, as the ruling class sought to inculcate fear and acquiescence in the population. In obtaining legal sanction for its crimes at home and abroad, the government has made permanent fixtures of measures that in the main were portrayed as temporary exigencies. This is a deadly danger to the working class and oppressed minorities, the principal targets of capitalist repression.

The recent sparring between some on Capitol Hill and the White House over the targeted killings of U.S. citizens is all about making the state apparatus more effective in its murderous work. For weeks, various Senators made noises about holding up the confirmation of John Brennan as Obama’s CIA chief. Four years ago, Brennan was so tarred by his association with torture under George W. Bush that Obama did not pursue his nomination to the same post. But he since became the architect of Obama’s drone program.

Brennan’s critics demanded that the White House release secret legal memos that had authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens, although neither Democrats nor Republicans have batted an eye over the thousands of Pakistanis, Yemenis and others slaughtered by drones. When the Justice Department White Paper summarizing the memos surfaced in February, politicians on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly hailed this augmentation of the lethal powers of the imperial presidency. In urging Brennan’s rapid confirmation, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein intoned, with presumably unintended menace: “He draws on a deep well of experience.”

It was to be expected that the Democrats would go along with their Commander-in-Chief. So it was right-wing Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky who challenged Obama, mainly about the prospect of the assassination of U.S. citizens on American soil. Paul’s 13-hour filibuster on March 6, aimed at blocking Brennan’s confirmation vote, was widely covered in the media and received plaudits from some liberal antiwar activists and others. Make no mistake, libertarians like Paul, a Tea Party favorite, hate unions and spending government money on black people—or anyone else for that matter—far more than they object to the evisceration of civil liberties.

The Obama administration demonstrated its determination to assassinate U.S. citizens when it killed New Mexico-born Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. His son and several Yemenis were similarly blown away some months later. And all along, the White House has kept open the option of assassinating U.S. citizens on American soil as well. In a March 4 letter to Rand Paul, Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed the scenario of drone strikes inside U.S. territory as “entirely hypothetical” but granted that the president could “conceivably” authorize such attacks in the context of a “catastrophic attack” like Pearl Harbor or September 11.

On the day after the filibuster, Holder issued a curt follow-up letter claiming the right of the president to assassinate anyone, anywhere except for citizens “not engaged in combat” on U.S. soil. For the imperialists, who is “engaged in combat” is a very elastic concept. In May 2002, U.S. citizen Jose Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on trumped-up charges. One month later, he was declared to be an “enemy combatant” and was disappeared into a Navy brig in South Carolina. In the end, he was railroaded to 17 years in prison. In an amicus brief filed by the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee on Padilla’s behalf, we stressed that the “rationale of the ‘war against terrorism’ is a construct justifying not only the right to disappear citizens, but the right to assassinate them as well.”

Imperialist Crimes

A week after Brennan’s confirmation, a UN official presenting an investigation into U.S. drone strikes declared that such attacks carried out in Pakistan over the objections of local authorities violated international law. The UN investigation, carried out at the request of Russia and China as well as Pakistan, identified some 330 strikes in that country, totaling at least 2,200 dead. With U.S. drones firing with impunity on the population, including emergency response personnel, funeral processions and schools, life in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border has been shattered. Some imperialist strategists worry, with reason, that the unbridled drone program is creating a lot more “enemy combatants” around the world.

To mollify those in Washington who worry about the excessive secrecy of the drone program and have qualms about deploying drones against U.S. citizens, proposals have been made for a special court to approve the “targeted killings.” This is a total sham. Such a court would be modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts for wiretapping applications. FISA courts have never been more than a rubber stamp for the executive office.

In another proposal to refine U.S. imperialist policies, a New York Times (9 March) editorial called for repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). This legislation, which was adopted three days after the September 11 attacks, gave the executive carte blanche in the global “war on terror,” providing a go-ahead for the invasion of Afghanistan and also much of the basis for “anti-terror” measures on the home front. The Times—whose services to the “war on terror” included reporter Judith Miller retailing the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”—now laments “an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls” implemented under the 2001 authorization. The Times editorialists worry mainly that the greatly enhanced powers of the executive will someday be wielded by one less enlightened than the former constitutional law professor Obama—namely, a Republican less to their liking.

Whatever their policy differences at various times, the Democratic and Republican parties are united in furthering the interests of U.S. imperialism against the exploited and oppressed around the world. During the recent “sequestration” circus, there was bipartisan consensus that the U.S. military could stand some trimming, particularly now that the Iraq occupation is officially over and the deployment of troops to Afghanistan is coming to a close. Of course, any cuts to the Pentagon budget that Washington comes up with would still leave the U.S. as the overwhelmingly predominant military force on the planet. There is also bipartisan consensus on the strategic military “pivot” toward Asia announced last year by Obama, the primary target of which is the Chinese deformed workers state. The retailing of endless scare stories about Chinese “cyberattacks” is above all a means for the administration to justify its increased belligerence toward China.

Blood-Soaked American “Democracy”

The New York Times has apparently decided that it, too, lacked some transparency in regard to Army Private Bradley Manning. After providing WikiLeaks with a trove of classified material documenting U.S. imperialist crimes and duplicity, Manning was thrown into a military brig three years ago, suffering enormous abuse, and now faces a potential life sentence. Last month, WV wrote a letter to Margaret Sullivan, theTimes’ Public Editor, noting the omission of any mention of Bradley Manning in two February 9 articles condemning cover-ups in the drone program and charging that this was “simply cowardice on the part of the Times” (see WV No. 1018, 22 February). With his court martial approaching, Manning confessed on February 28 to having released the materials to WikiLeaks after unsuccessfully trying to interest the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Judging by Sullivan’s subsequent article “The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks” (9 March), we were not alone in calling attention to Manning’s disappearance by this major bourgeois mouthpiece. Sullivan’s column notes that the military has charged Manning with “aiding the enemy” for breaking through the wall of official secrecy. The next day, the Times ran an op-ed piece by Bill Keller, its former executive editor, which suggested that the Times might well have suppressed many of the files and would certainly feel no obligation to come to his defense in any case.

In “Hail Bradley Manning! Free Him Now!” (WV No. 1019, 8 March), we wrote: “In lifting a bit of the veil of secrecy and lies with which the capitalist rulers cover their depredations, Bradley Manning performed a great service to workers and oppressed around the world. All who oppose the imperialist barbarity and machinations revealed in the material he provided must join in demanding his immediate freedom.” Manning’s admission to being the source of the leaks has garnered him wider support, forcing even the Times to take note. With his trial slated to begin on June 3 at Fort Meade, Maryland, his supporters should turn out to demand his immediate freedom.

One writer in the bourgeois media who has given Manning extensive coverage is Glenn Greenwald. In a March 4 speech at Brooklyn College, the London Guardian columnist observed that the torture of Manning by the U.S. military was intended as a message to chill political dissent. In condemning the open-ended “war on terror,” Greenwald noted, among other things, how what started as a crackdown on immigrants from the Muslim world after September 11 became a far broader net of repression, even extending into the Occupy protests.

The civil libertarian Greenwald painted a picture of democracy dying after September 11. But attacks on the working class, minorities and perceived political opponents of the ruling class are built into the very fabric of this “democracy,” which is but a veil over the class dictatorship of the capitalist exploiters. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin taught:

“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”

—The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

U.S. history is replete with the intentional slaughter of citizens, from gunning down workers in strike battles to cops shooting black youth in the streets. As a Spartacist comrade said in the discussion period following Greenwald’s talk: “I have a memory of what American capitalism is all about: Black Panthers killed in their beds while they’re asleep, 1969, Chicago; internment of Japanese Americans. These are not excesses. The deception and the repression are inherent within the capitalist system. It has to be abolished through fighting for workers revolution.”

In the last five years, millions of workers in the U.S., and many more around the world, have lost their livelihoods and even their homes due to the grinding capitalist economic crisis. The enormous tensions between the tiny class of exploiters and the mass of people at the base of society are the seeds of future sharp class battles. When the workers are propelled into struggle against their conditions, they will be confronted with the exercise of naked state repression. This underscores the crucial need for the proletariat to oppose all imperialist wars and occupations and all domestic measures strengthening the capitalist state apparatus. The principal task for Marxists is to forge a revolutionary workers party—a tribune of the people—to lead the proletariat in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with a workers government.

Barack Obama Unveils Statue to Commemorate “National Monsanto Day”

Nina Westbury
Crimson Satellite

President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner put aside partisan bickering and stood side-by-side today at the National Statuary Hall as a monument honoring the agricultural corporation Monsanto was unveiled.

At fifteen feet tall, the statue is the largest in the Hall and is made entirely of bronze. The statue depicts a large husk of genetically modified corn and is the first to honor a corporation. 2013 is becoming a year of firsts for the Statuary Hall, which in February revealed a statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks marking the first time an African-American woman was commemorated in the gallery.

The Monsanto statue was unveiled on the same day that Congress sent President Obama a bill creating National Monsanto Day every April 1, which Obama has promised to sign as soon as it reaches his desk. Following the Monsanto Protection Act signed into law last week, these gestures are part of what the White House considers an expansion of civil rights for corporations, finally recognized as people after the 2010 Citizens United decision.

“I’m proud to live in an America where we recognize the fundamental human rights of every person, regardless of the color of their skin, who they love, or their lack of sentience. Monsanto was a pioneer in the corporate personhood movement, and this statue beautifully captures his sacrifice.” President Obama told journalists at a post-unveiling press conference.

Obama also pointed to his administration’s strong record in championing the rights of Monsanto. In Paraguay, the President told reporters, the Administration had acted swiftly to prevent former President Fernando Lugo’s “hate crimes” against the company. This resulted in a pro-Monsanto President, Federico Franco, taking office.

Other Democrats were quick to line up behind President Obama. On her personal Twitter account, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said that National Monsanto Day was a “watershed moment for corporate families” and vowed to introduce legislation protecting corporations serving in the military. In Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry stressed the importance of protecting Monsanto rights in Syria, keeping “all options” on the table. He told France 24 that he had received “personal assurances” from the newly-elected leader of the Syrian National Council that personhood for Monsanto was the top priority for the opposition.

Back in Washington, the rare display of bipartisanship between the President and the Speaker did not last long.

“This President refuses to put Ohio State in his March Madness bracket, and I’m tired of him underestimating the great people of our state,” Boehner joked to the room of journalists.

Happy April Fool’s Day!

Kerry’s Middle East Tour Prepares Endless War for Afghanistan, Syria

Alex Lantier

US Secretary of State John Kerry left Kabul for Paris yesterday, after a Middle Eastern tour to Jordan and Afghanistan to plan broader wars across the region. In Paris today, he is expected to discuss arming opposition forces fighting Washington’s proxy war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with French officials.

During his unannounced two-day visit in Kabul, Kerry held a joint press conference with President Hamid Karzai, the leader of the American puppet regime in Afghanistan. He announced that US forces will remain in Afghanistan beyond the Obama administration’s 2014 withdrawal deadline.

Kerry and Karzai both called upon the Taliban to open an office in Doha, the capital of the US-allied Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, from which location they could negotiate with Karzai. To encourage the Taliban to accept the offer, Kerry stressed that the Taliban should not count on a US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Currently there are some 100,000 occupation troops in the country, including 66,000 US forces. American officials have reportedly discussed a lasting presence of roughly 12,000 US and European troops in Afghanistan.

Kerry also offered to hand over formal control of Bagram prison to the Karzai regime. This was apparently designed to allow Karzai to posture cynically before the Afghan people, claiming he is restoring Afghan sovereignty over the country. The US-controlled prison, notorious for the killings and torture of Afghan resistance fighters imprisoned there, has become a hated symbol of the NATO occupation.

This action was apparently aimed at smoothing US relations with Karzai, strained after the latter criticized Washington for “colluding” with the Taliban.

The handover of Bagram has nothing to do with ending US rule in Afghanistan, however. Karzai made clear that Washington would continue to effectively control detainees at the prison, promising that an Afghan review board would consider intelligence provided by US authorities before deciding to release prisoners. Afghan officials also reportedly gave “private assurances” that no “enduring security threats” would be released from Bagram.

By threatening to continue the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, Kerry is pushing the Taliban leadership to negotiate a political settlement with Karzai that would include a lasting US protectorate in Afghanistan. Washington’s control would rest upon US air superiority and a permanent occupation force stationed in the country. It would be based on collaboration between Washington, the warlords backing Karzai and the Islamic fundamentalist leadership of the Taliban to suppress resistance to foreign occupation by the Afghan people.

The American ruling class sees Afghanistan as a launching pad for US operations in Central Asia, such as the hundreds of drone strikes Washington has launched in Afghanistan and neighboring countries. The New York Times commented, “The Obama administration has made a priority of reaching an agreement on an American military presence here after 2014 that will allow the United States to keep tabs on Iran and Pakistan.”

Significantly, Kerry had hoped to visit Pakistan during his tour, but decided against it. There is deep anger in that country over US drone strikes and the collaboration of the Pakistani army and intelligence with Washington. (See also: “UN says US drone war in Pakistan violates international law”)

Instead, Kerry reportedly met privately with Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Sunday, before traveling to Afghanistan.

Washington’s neo-colonial war in Afghanistan—like its proxy war in Syria, Iran’s main Arab ally—aims at establishing US imperialist hegemony over the Middle East and Central Asia. This involves not only controlling and manipulating the conflicts in Pakistan and broadly across Asia unleashed by the Afghan war, but also organizing regime change in Iran, an oil-rich state that Washington sees as the main obstacle to its interests in the Middle East.

Kerry’s visits both to Amman and to Kabul were clearly bound up with Washington’s war drive against Iran and its regional allies. As the Secretary of State left Jordan for Afghanistan, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US is working in Jordan with Britain and France to train Syrian opposition fighters. These fighters then cross the border into southern Syria to carry out attacks.

The AP wrote that these forces were “secular” forces, apparently in an attempt to distinguish them from Al Qaeda-linked forces that provide the bulk of the Syrian opposition’s fighting forces. The wire service’s description of these forces made clear, however, that they are largely army deserters recruited on a religious or tribal basis.

It wrote, “The training has been conducted for several months now in an unspecified location, concentrating largely on Sunnis and tribal Bedouins who formerly served as members of the Syrian army, officials told the Associated Press. The forces aren’t members of the leading rebel group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which Washington and others fear may be increasingly coming under the saw of extremist militia groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda.”

The AP report came a day after the New York Times published an extensive report detailing how Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia helped finance and arm the Syrian opposition for over a year. This took place under CIA supervision and after General David Petraeus, the CIA director until last November, “prodded various countries” to arm the Syrian opposition. The White House was regularly briefed on these arms shipments. (See also: “The CIA war against Syria”)

On Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed that the US “has provided some logistical nonlethal support that has also come in handy for the Syrian rebels.”

With Kerry now headed to Paris to discuss stepping up the war in Syria, the Arab League also joined in the campaign against Assad yesterday, formally seating Syrian opposition officials as Syria’s representatives to the Arab League.

Qatari emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani officially welcomed Moaz al-Khatib, the former imam of Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque who recently stepped down as the Syrian opposition’s official leader, to represent Syria. Al-Khatib was replaced by Ghassan Hitto, a US-based information technology executive. This move apparently aimed to present the opposition as less Islamist and reliant on Al Qaeda-linked forces from Libya, Iraq and Chechnya.

Al-Khatib’s speech at the Arab League made no secret of the Syrian opposition’s continuing ties to far-right Islamist elements. Denouncing Assad and supporting Hitto, he defended the presence of foreign jihadist fighters among the anti-Assad militias—though he awkwardly tried to downplay this by suggesting that if Islamist fighters’ families needed them at home, they should return to their families.

Maduro Counters Campaign to Discredit Venezuelan Electoral System

Ewan Robertson

The presidential candidate of the Bolivarian Revolution, Nicolas Maduro, yesterday counter-attacked the opposition’s campaign to discredit Venezuela’s electoral system ahead of the 14 April presidential election.

In recent days the Venezuelan opposition and allied media have been criticising the 14 April presidential election as not being held in “fair and transparent” conditions, in an apparent effort to discredit the Venezuelan electoral system ahead of the vote.

This campaign appears to have intensified following comments made on Friday 15 March by the US’s Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson, who said that it would be “a little difficult” for “open, fair, and transparent elections” to be held on 14 April.

The conservative opposition has also attempted to reach out to international opinion, with Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat, writing in the Huffington Post that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) is “no more than a tool of the regime [sic: Venezuelan government] to maintain its power”.

This discourse marks a break with the opposition’s more conciliatory approach toward Venezuela’s electoral system last year, when the opposition MUD coalition asked the CNE to organise the opposition’s own internal elections, calling the CNE “an excellent example of democratic institutions in the country”.

Polling evidence suggests that the opposition is likely to lose the April election, called after the death of President Hugo Chavez on 5 March. Four polls released by private Venezuelan firms in recent days have given Nicolas Maduro an advantage over the opposition’s candidate Henrique Capriles of between 14 and 22%.

Yesterday, Nicolas Maduro, who is currently interim president, hit back at the opposition’s campaign to discredit the CNE, claiming that it was a strategy being used in light of the opposition’s “clear defeat” on 14 April.

Maduro repeated the claims of other pro-government figures, stating that the “ultra-right wing” within the opposition is also considering the withdrawal of Capriles’ candidacy “as a way of fleeing and then crying out [to the international community]”.

He further argued that his rival Capriles is caught between the opposition’s radical wing, who want to withdraw from the race in order to discredit the election, and the “apparently democratic” wing that wants to maintain an electoral strategy.

The interim president said the Venezuelan electoral system, “guarantees the sovereign decision of the voters” and that the campaign to discredit the CNE “will not favour” the opposition.

Directly addressing the opposition, Maduro said, “If you stay [in the electoral race]; welcome. We’re headed towards a great triumph, that’s how I feel. If you go, not so welcome. We will [still] have a great victory and we’ll maintain the political stability of the country; of that you can be sure”.

The difference in opinion within the opposition toward the electoral system has also become apparent in recent comments made to media.

Hard-line opposition legislator Maria Corina Machado called the Venezuelan government a “neo-dictatorial regime” with a “democratic façade” in an interview yesterday with conservative paper El Universal. She further said the CNE was full of “tricks and irregularities”.

Meanwhile, the president of opposition party COPEI, Roberto Enríquez, said in an interview today that the opposition “recognises” the accuracy of the Venezuelan electoral system.

However, he added, “Elections in Venezuela, like in all democratic systems, are and have to be perfectible”.

UNASUR

Today the CNE signed an agreement with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) confirming that UNASUR will send an electoral accompaniment mission to Venezuela ahead of the 14 April election.

The mission’s aim, according to the head of UNASUR’s electoral council, Francisco Távara Córdova, is “to witness the electoral process within the framework of solidarity, cooperation and respect for sovereignty, with the aim of generating shared knowledge and experience in electoral matters”.

The mission’s head will likely be Argentine Carlos Alvarez, who led the UNASUR electoral mission to Venezuela for the October 2012 presidential election.

Several Venezuelan electoral NGO’s have also been invited by the CNE to observe the upcoming election.

Missing from the Drone Debate: Americans Aren’t the Only Ones Worthy of Human Rights

Rania Khalek

As the debate over drone strikes and targeted killings finally breaks into the mainstream, there remains a key aspect of the kill program that has been virtually ignored even by its most ardent detractors.

I’ve noticed that many of the people outraged over the kill program focusing solely about its potential impact on American citizens, which implies that it’s perfectly acceptable to subject non-Americans to due-process free execution. But what about the non-citizens at the other end of our drones and signature strikes? Don’t they deserve basic rights, too?

And let’s get real, we’re not talking about Canadians or Europeans, but ”Yemeni parents, Pakistani uncles and aunts, Afghan grandparents and cousins, Somali brothers and sisters, Filipino cousins”, as Falguni Sheth puts it. In other words, we’re routinely killing brown “others” whose lives have little value in the eyes of the American public. Otherwise there would have been an outcry following the a December 17, 2009, US strike in Yemen that wiped out entire families:

Among those killed that day were 22 children. The youngest, Khadje Ali Mokbel Louqye, was just one year old. A dozen women also died, five of them reportedly pregnant.

Yet these numbers mask the many individual families annihilated in the attack. Mohammed Nasser Awad Jaljala, 60, his 30-year-old wife Nousa, their son Nasser, 6, and daughters Arwa, 4, and Fatima, aged 2, were all killed.

Then there was 35-year old Ali Mohammed Nasser Jaljala, his wife Qubla (25), and their four daughters Afrah (9), Zayda (7), Hoda (5) and Sheikha (4) who all died.

Ahmed Mohammed Nasser Jaljala, 30, was killed alongside his 21-year old wife Qubla and 50-year old mother Mouhsena. Their daughter Fatima, aged 13, was the only survivor of the family, badly injured and needing extensive medical treatment abroad.

The Anbour clan suffered similarly catastrophic losses. Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye died with his wife, son and three daughters. His brother Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye’s seven-strong family were also wiped out.

Sheik Saleh Ben Fareed, a tribal leader, went to the area shortly after the attack and described the carnage to Al Jazeera reporter Scahill: ‘If somebody has a weak heart, I think they will collapse. You see goats and sheep all over. You see heads of those who were killed here and there. You see children. And you cannot tell if this meat belongs to animals or to human beings. Very sad, very sad.’

Our government has been terrorizing these communities for quite some time and aside from a handful of journalists and human rights organizations, barely anyone cared. But as soon as Americans became a target, things changed. And that’s not just speculation (emphasis mine):

A majority of Americans [59 percent] support using drones to kill high-level terrorism suspects overseas, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. But support drops [to 43 percent] when those suspects are American citizens.

Meanwhile, people laughed yesterday when Rand Paul expressed concerns that Americans could be targeted while “eating dinner” at home or “at a cafe.” But this isn’t a difficult scenario to imagine considering the routine targeting of funerals, weddings and even rescuers who come to the aid of victims in the aftermath of a (the infamous “double-tap“). As the Huffington Post points out:

Newspaper reports have identified signature strikes as the predominant type of drone attack. And because this type of strike targets behavior, such as clustering in groups, rather than individuals, they are prone to kill civilians.

A study last year by human rights researchers at Columbia University found that signature strikes make reliable tallies of the drone civilian death toll impossible to count. Even without deaths, the report added, the practice results in “constant fear” among citizens in Pakistan and Yemen, since they can never reliably know if their “behavior will get him killed by a drone.”

Children have been traumatized by this experience, researchers have reported — both by witnessing drone strikes and by living where they are common and seemingly random occurrences.

Administration officials, Brennan chief among them, have denied that drone strikesresult in civilian deaths, in part by relying on a metric that considers every military-age male to be a combatant unless definitively proven otherwise.

“Our children’s blood is not cheaper than American blood and the pain of losing them is just as devastating. Our children matter too,” writes Yemeni blogger Noon Arabia. Indeed, Americans aren’t the only ones who deserve basic human rights.

To those who object, perhaps you should look at the following pictures taken by Pakistani photojournalist Noor Behram to awaken your conscious:

UPDATE: The White House does not have the authority to target Americans with drone strikes on US soil, said US Attorney General Eric Holder in a letter to Senator Rand Paul. The letter was short and blunt:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

Again, if it’s not okay on US soil, why is it acceptable anywhere else? Keep in mind that we never declared war on Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or the Philippines, all of which have been targeted with drone strikes. If this isn’t a double standard, I don’t know what is.

Millions of Indian Workers Go On Strike

Sunil Freeman

An estimated 100 million Indian workers went on strike Feb. 20 and 21 in opposition to the government’s harsh new economic policies. Eleven major trade unions organized the general strike, which was called in response to sharply rising costs of living, low wages and poor working conditions. Several sectors were hit, with the major impact on transportation, banking and manufacturing. Maruti Suzuki India, a car manufacturer with a history of militant labor action by its workers, closed in response to the strike.

Attendance at some government offices was down and many education institutes were closed as teachers’ unions joined the strike. Universities canceled exams.

The Indian government has struggled recently as economic growth has slowed to a 10-year low. Its response has included reducing fuel subsidies and moving to open the country’s retail and aviation industries for exploitation by foreign corporations, raising concerns about rising unemployment. Labor organizers criticized the economic policies as anti-poor. Workers have also expressed anger about widespread corruption.

Tapan Sen, general secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, charged that “[w]orkers are being totally ignored, and this is being reflected in the government’s anti-labour policies.”Two deaths were reported, and nearly 100 were arrested in incidents related to the strike.

The strike showed the growing militancy and strength of India’s working class, which is rising up in opposition to the government’s neo-liberal economic policies. The work stoppage dealt a blow to capitalist profits. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a prominent group representing Indian business interests, acknowledged that the strike had resulted in an estimated loss of 260 billion rupees (equivalent to approximately $4.7 billion).