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Who should be bombed and/or invaded next?
June 15, 2011 - 9:46am
There are a lot of "bad guys" in the world. Given that the Global War on Terror is a war without end, we should expect that the New World Orderites will be targeting more of them. So many targets. So little time. Who's next for some democracy from above?
Iran? Pakistan? Syria? Yeman?
Who deserve "our" continuing support? The Saudis? Bahrainians?
I'm sure that whoever it is the Conservatives will have the lapdog support of the NDP MPs.
As long as it's in the guise of "protecting civilians", the NDP won't have much of a choice if they want to be consistent.
They can be the Tzeporah Berman of 'difficult' Foreign Policy decisions
That always fools the bleeding heart liberal humanitarian interventionist hypocrites and cruise missile left.
I vote for Iran:
Noam Chomsky, long ago now, showed that the USA is itself a failed state and a terrorist regime. Maybe all those noisy advocates for The War on An Abstract Noun could get together where the USA currently tests their nuclear arsenal, and so on.
Happy New Year, Uncle Sam!
Yes, the NDP will fold on this. Unfortunate, but inevitable. NDP policy will synch with NATO policy. How could that reality be stopped?
A mild protest by the party membership would do it - unfortunately, that won't happen just as it didn't when Jacko dropped NDP opposition to NATO membership either. Inertia and entropy rules from wall to wall and sea to shining sea.
A MILD protest? "Oh dear, you really DO have to stop bombing the natives". "Nonsense the command has full authority in the matter, besides silk is so smooth against the flesh".
The only thing we can be sure of is the well established federal Liberal/Tory record for supporting Uncle Sam's every single imperial whim, from the CIA's and Military's various invasions of Haiti in order to overthrow popular people's rebellions against intolerable U.S.-backed regimes to Ottawa signing free trade deals with a right wing death squad government notorious for murdering trade unionists and social activists in Colombia. The Liberal/Tory record on cow-towing to Uncle Sam was a foregone conclusion decades ago.
This regime in Iran is not socialist. While we should not support imperialist destruction of innocent civilians and valuble infrastructure in bombing them to smithereens, we also should not support a purely ideologically-driven state oppressing the basic rights of millions of its own citizens. The CIA and Brits are fully aware of their Frankenstein creations in the Middle East and Central Asia after working diligently for decades to foment the spread of militant Islam as a deterrent to democracy in those parts of the world.
Both this militant regime in Tehran and the fundamentalists under Khomeini in the 1980s were all the result of U.S-British meddling in Iran's political affairs since the 1950s. This is not a democratic government in Tehran, and the American CIA and Brits are keenly aware of the fruits of their own work in that country since the start of the cold war and even before that when the British were there and siphoning off the oil profits while millions lived in grinding poverty and despair.
Regardless of the NDP's pledge to work towards democratizing NATO, the NDP is the first opposition party in Ottawa to consistently support democracy wherever the US and Brits have meddled, whereas our two oldest political parties in Canada have been the most inconsistent and hypocritical when supporting Uncle Sam's policies for "exporting democracy."
The 9/11 "attacks" are proving to be endlessly useful. Who could have known it was really Iran all this time??
And for as long as U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Islamabad continue financing terrorism and the madrassa system in waging war on secular socialist thought in Central Asia, they will continue to enjoy financial and military support from their cold warrior friends in the West. Charade they are.
"waging war on secular socialist thought in Central Asia"?
WTF?
Not sure why you've what the fuck'd my comment. Are you familiar with the Western world's and U.S. Military's and CIA's covert meddling in Asia in general since the 1920s? Russia? China? Vietnam? Cambodia? Afghanistan? Feel free to give us a signal anytime. This playing charades can be tiring.
Likewise with contortionism I'd imagine.
What I'm not familiar with is how many "secular socialist" thinkers in Central Asia have been targeted by these U.S.-backed radical Islamists that you imagine are everywhere. I don't remember Osama bin Laden, for example, mentioning secular socialism as the great enemy of the Muslim world in any of his declarations. Nor do I recall a whole lot of car-bomb or suicide-bomb attacks on "secular socialist" targets.
But I'm sure you have all the details.
It's like re-visiting a mausoleum isn't it?...where everything encased in stone and concrete had long ceased to keep up with the times. While the theme of 'godless Communists' or 'secular socialists' or what have you once sufficed as enough of a common pursuit between radicals of all persuasions and business attire, today they don't necessarily have to be friends anymore in order to continue feeding from one another's ideologies.
Usama bin Laden and the CIA's expendable jihadi assets were actually "Al-Qa'eda" and the mujahideen, at the same time as his CIA backers were, and at the same time US-backed military dictators in Pakistan were, from General Zia through Musharraf, right wing anti-communist wackos. Usama bin Laden was rabidly anti-communist the same as his western backers. And apparently he offered his services to the West in assassination Arab nationalists, like Saddam Hussein and Moamar Gaddafi.
iOW's, Qa'eda and all their violently misogynist mercenary friends are probably not a group of heavies working for the social justice department of the Palestinian Hamas and who are out for revenge against their employers in Pakistan's army intelligence agency, the American CIA, British MI6 etc as the imperialist "blowback" version of events goes. In fact, the expendable jihadi assets known as "the base" probably don't have social consciences at all.
The U.S. and its allies merely need to yell "Al-Qaeda!!" today in order to receive NATO backup and military aid in putting down popular people's revolts against their repressive regimes.
They used to yell "COMMUNISTS!!", in scaring hell out of Americans and Europeans and setting the whole cold war machinery in motion. Non-existent threats are overly exaggerated then and now for reasons which aren't apparent until one realizes just how many taxpayer dollars the closed economy of fear and mass hysteria is actually worth to "private enterprising" warfiteers.
The only problem with trumped-up terrorist threats today is that their think tanks have informed them that bloated militaries are useless against terrorism real and otherwise. The Sovs stabbed them in the backs by ceding the cold war, and war hawks are still on the hunt for a legitimate enemy.
Return them to fringe party status by staying home come next election. They've proven enough times already that they're not prepared to represent socialist aspirations in prime time. We already have two hand puppet parties for western imperialism.
Sorry, but we already know what that strategy produces and without having to conjure up the future with a crystal ball.
Well put, Fidel. Too often on this board any criticism of regimes hostile to western hegemony is seen as inherently imperialist. Its a foolish tendency to think we have to love or sit in silence towards theocracies or free market dictatorships in order to be truly in solidarity against imperialism.
Its a self-destructive and antique mindset for the left. Brooking no critique of those outside of the NATO fold leaves us behind the mindset of virtually all politically aware citizens, who regard as ridiculous and facile such binary breakdowns of international politics
I feel the invasion of Iran would probably spiral out of control until it spelled the end of life on earth, just to be clear.
I'd go with nuking Finland.
Nobody's been watching them much...so who knows what they've got up to?
We should be careful not to be swept along with a media chorus line that never ceases to tour in support of imperialism. It's more practical, and less hypocritical, that the focus be mainly reserved for the posture toward these regions of the corporate henchmen posing as our representatives, and the reasons behind it. It's Tony Blair style leftist internationalism that really should be avoided, whereas the antique stuff continues to work just fine in these instances at least.
There has to be SOME approach that avoids either being a cheerleader for imperialism(or, looking at it another, getting sucked into yet another effort to reconstitute the White Russian Army) OR falling into the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" trap. It's not as if we always have to look at it in terms of "choosing sides" in a strict sense.
The Left in the West(with some exceptions, like the East/West Campaign for Peace and Democracy) got that badly wrong in regards to the Warsaw Pact countries-no, there wasn't an actual open defense of "realsozialismus", but there wasn't much of anyone on the Western Left in the Seventies and Eighties arguing for an independent socialist alternative to it, and there was a lot of dismissiveness of the idea that the left should speak out about the human rights situation at all in that region.
This reticence had a lot to do with the choice made by millions in 1989 and the years thereafter, to throw their support with those who wanted a capitalist restoration in the Pact countries, believing initially that supporting those types was the ONLY way to get the police states out of power and, worse, believing afterwards that those people were the only ones free of any connection with the Soviet era.
It also has a lot to do with the continuing fact that, even though capitalism has been horrible to the populations of the former DDR, Hungary, Poland and The Artist Formerly Known As Czechoslovakia, those populations are still very vary of anyone presenting a Left alternative to the neoliberal status quo(they have embraced some alternatives, but too often they've been of the nationalist/neofascist/antisemitic and anti-Roma far Right).
There should be a huge constituency in the former Pact countries today for a Left program of some sort, but it still isn't there...and this due in significant measure, I would argue, to the fact that those people still retain a great deal of bitterness about the fact that a lot of the Western Left in the late Soviet era weren't interested in acknowledging the reality the residents of those countries experienced, or in speaking out against the things we should all have denounced as a group, like the censorship of news and of all forms of cultural expression, the excessive and pointless monitoring and control of most people's lives, and the rigid restrictions against travel out of those countries...and many weren't interested in helping those people of the Pace find an alternative to the miserable and unjustly repressive system, a system that had no moral right to claim to be "socialist", since true socialism can never be built through fear and regimentation, aht they were made to live under.
And from what I can see, the main reason a lot of the Left in the West didn't speak out as it should have(with a few exceptions) was the absurd notion that calling out the Stalinist regimes there would simply be "taking the side of the capitalists"-as if the only possible choices were Stalinism or Reaganism-Thatcherism, and as if there was anything in those states that was worthy of even the tacit support of those who favor any true and honorable form of socialist organization.
Had the left supported dissidents in those countries in large numbers, had we called for the end of police state methods there, had we spoken out in large numbers INDEPENDENTLY about the repression and the betrayals of the socialist ideal that the regimes imposed, the people in those countries have listened to us in 1989 and later. Because many of us stayed out of that out of some ridiculous notion that it would be "giving aid and comfort to the enemy", we and those who agree with us on the Left in those countries, lost and have yet to regain the trust of the majority of the population. This lack of trust has helped continue to make the Left largely irrelevant in what used to be the Warsaw Pact countries, when our ideas should, on the face of them, have a massive potential base of support there.
We need to learn from that.
And, before anyone jumps in with the response I can already predict, YES, of course there was massive repression and brutality and censorship in much of the capitalist world and in the economic colonies of that world. But it's not as if you could only denounce one empire's brutality at a time. And there was never any conflict between denouncing that and campaigning against it and doing the same with the Stalinist world. Neither empire(and let's face it, both were empires)was worthy of the support of the Left. Only the dispossessed and powerless of the world, wherever they live, wherever they suffer, wherever they struggle deserve that.
It seems to be a nuance that escapes the binary conservative/liberal-democrat mindset every time. When we say that our leaders need to stop with their oppressive militaristic and economic policies around the world, to this common mindset the propaganda implies an association with our 'preference' to be ruled and to have others ruled under totalitarian regimes. But this is a result of specific calculations that can well determine what we mean, because they know their own history so very well that they keep on repeating the things that have always worked for their business interests. They know that dictators are not manufactured in isolation chambers, just as we know that there are plenty of rogue madmen around the world that don't always follow our directions. This is where troubles usually begin.
Ken, according to Weir and Kotz in "Revolution from Above", Russians were not given a choice between socialism or capitalism. It was the nomenklatura and Moscow elites who chose capitalism because they realized how rich they could become with crooked privatizations that went on with financial and technical help from their European and American friends. Capitalism was opposed by, according to Kotz and Weir, 60+ percent of Russians who actually wanted Soviet state socialism democratizing. This was true of most Chinese protesting at Tiananmen Square as well according to Harrison Salisbury's 'Tiananmen Diary: 13 Days in June.'
And a mid -2000's survey of Germans in what was the former GDR revealed that a majority of them think life was better under Soviet communism. Yes, I remember a quote from a 40-something East German tech worker saying something like, ~"Marx was right, capitalism is a nightmare."
I was talking about Eastern Europe, not the USSR, Fidel. IN the USSR, however, Mikhail Gorbachev was working passionately to create a socialist model that DIDN'T involve repression and stagnation, and got little but grief for his efforts.
What people in Russia really miss from the former era wasn't the Gulag, the closed borders, the wiretaps and the KGB...they missed the relative level of social security the system provided to them. The fact that the West forced them to lose both the security AND the democratic renewal Gorbachev(and not Yeltsin)was working for doesn't mean that the ordinary Russians really want the days of the purges back...none of the repression actually did anything to promote state security at all-if it had, Stalin would never have had to make the devil's bargain with Hitler.
And Gladio, while it was a crime, wasn't really an excuse for what happened under Stalin and, to a less-effecient and boozier degree under Brezhnev-the development of the USSR and the Pact states under those two was actually Gladio's intended effect. The point of all that was to provoke a dictatorial response. So why defend Stalin and his accomplices for falling in to the trap?
Cleary, the USSR would have been much more secure, and might still exist today, if it had ended the internal repression right after V-E Day, and had it allowed the Warsaw Pact states to be showcases for socialism rather than armed camps run on the organizing principle of paranoia. The power of a successful socialist model would have done more to stop Western aggression than a thousand purges or a million SS-20's.
And today they have gangster capitalism. In America, the FBI reported that they'd never observed such ruthless criminals. They made the Italian mafia look almost benign by comparison. I really do think that very many of them learned their craft in Russian gulags while others were fairly well educated under the Soviet system. They were too clever by half some of them.
But Chamberlain and Daladier used the same excuse when handing Czechoslovakia and Rhyneland to Hitler. No country was prepared for war at the time except Nazi Germany. U.S. and British leaders knew full well that Hitler was violating Versailles treaty with building battleships in the 1930s.
And Stalin knew it, too. He thought it would be an inter-fascist country war for resources.
They had about 35-40 million reasons for being paranoid after chasing the Nazis every step of the way back to Berlin. Our side lost a lot fewer people in the war.
And is the NATO gang not surrounding Russia and China today militarily, Ken? The U.S. missile shield in Czech Rep. and Poland will have missiles that are just five minutes from Moscow. The Russians are concerned that they could easily be armed with nuclear warheads.
And the Russians claim they have every reason to be paranoid today with so many missile sites surrounding Russia. The same is true of China as the U.S. attempts to reassert itself in the Asia-Pacific region in regaining its former post WW II glory.
No I really do think that the combination of trade embargos and terrorism were becoming too much for the people. They've had a taste of capitalism now and understand what it's really all about same as we have here in the west. They are understanding that capitalism is very corrupt and very undemocratic.
William Blum on cold war gladio. It was quite a program of terrorism and sabotage. The U.S. and Helmut Kohl supplying Yeltsin with billions of dollars leading up to 1990s elections was just the icing on top. They wanted to create a capitalist "investor class" and decision makers in control of the commanding heights, and they had to do it overnight. Corruption was the quickest way.
By the time perestroika was set in motion, they were already beginning to rollback social gains here in the west. And what we have today is a state of liquid global warfare and NATO aggressions against formerly Eastern communist developing countries. They are assassinating people with drones and executive death squads running around picking people off. The global situation is turning into a nightmare, Ken. It's one large Gladio operation now.
Happy New Year, Ken and everyone!
A trip down memory lane, lol...