Will the French street call the shots?

COLUMNS, THE USA, THE WORLD 2 Responses »

Oct 182010

Sarkozy is taking a risk. France’s strikers love little more than putting leaders in their place

By Agnès Poirier in Paris

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 October 2010

[print_link]

Departing from the traditional right-bank demonstrations’ parcours, République to Nation by way of Bastille, French trade unions opted yesterday for a long and energetic stroll through Paris’s left bank, from Montparnasse to Bastille. The glorious weather might have conferred a benevolent ambiance to the outing, but every single one of the estimated 200,000 demonstrators in Paris (and 3.5 million throughout France) meant business. Either Nicolas Sarkozy’s government backs down on its pension reform, or the people’s discontent will grow louder.

[print_link] The game of cat and mouse the street and the French government have been playing in the last few weeks is becoming increasingly tense. Instead of negotiating with trade unions, especially those representing the five million civil servants in the country, Sarkozy, as so often before, has treated workers’ grievances with scorn. Having made a personal trademark of forcing his way through crises, he is, however, taking a huge gamble. The French street loves nothing more than to regularly remind the power in place that they, alone, are the true rulers. This week might be the week that they will choose to flex their muscles. {Agnés Poirer, at right}

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The American press, as usual, has practically ignored the French strikes, giving it scant coverage if any.

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The different processions, displaying red balloons, black flags and blue vuvuzelas, had their usual witty slogans, either chanted or sprayed in red ink on Haussmannian buildings, such as “Let’s strike until we retire”. I saw the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier walking alongside the demonstrators, not quite in the street but looking on from the pavement with a bright smile. Was he already sketching in his head a future demonstrator chic? We heard the Internationale and were discreetly passed on little leaflets calling for a muscular battle with the riot police at the end of the demonstration. It read: “Bloquons l’économie.” (“Let’s block the economy.”)

BELOW: A protester in Paris donned a Sarkozy mask and held a placard reading “Hello – Beat it, loser” – words the president famously snapped at a hostile member of a crowd during a walkabout last year.

It is of course ironic that this rapport de force should focus on the reform of pensions. Indeed, a recent poll suggests that 65% of French people accept the inevitability of demographics and the raising of the retirement age from 60 – the lowest in Europe – to 62.

Yet, the polls also show that 70% of the people support the strikers’ action. A typical French contradiction? Not quite. President Sarkozy has so antagonised the country since his election in May 2007 that this reform offers an ideal pretext for political action.

With an opposition that is slowly finding a voice and coming back from the dead, many think this is the moment to vent anger at Sarkozyism as a whole. Many demonstrators said the same thing yesterday, such as Laura, 28, a concert organiser: “I couldn’t care less about pensions; I’ll never get one anyway. I’m marching because I’ve had enough of all the things that have been done in my name: the Roma expulsions, rejoining Nato, the debate on national identity, the cuts in the arts and education sectors, the introduction of a profit culture in public services. I’ve had enough, and by the look of it I’m not alone.”

What Sarkozy (seen at right, with trophy wife, Carla Bruni) and his government are now closely monitoring is whether the students and schoolchildren are going to join the protests. If they do, there is trouble ahead. Each time that French youth has taken to the streets, either in 1986 or in 2005, the government has had to give in to the protesters and withdraw whatever law the street disapproved of.

In May 1968 they almost toppled the regime, with Charles de Gaulle secretly scurrying to check on the army’s loyalty in Baden Baden, the then headquarters of the French army in Germany. Figures show that yesterday’s demonstrations attracted many more young people than those during the previous weeks had. If the strike were to be held again, day after day, it could create enough momentum for the nation’s youth to join forces with their elders and change the face of the movement.

The future will tell whether the slogan of “strike till you retire” appeals to France’s younger generation – and whether the street still call the shots in France. I sincerely hope it still does.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Agnès Poirier is a Franco-British political commentator and film critic for the British, French, Italian and Polish press, and a regular contributor to the BBC on politics and films. She is also the author of Les Nouveaux Anglais (Alvik, 2005), Touché, A French woman’s take on the English (Weidenfeld &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Nicolson, 2006) and Le Modèle anglais, une illusion française (Alvik, 2006).

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

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Mass protests shake French government

By Alex Lantier  13 October 2010

Over three million workers participated in a strike yesterday against the pension cuts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, with workers in several industrial sectors voting to extend strike action.

Amid widespread fears in the press of “radicalization”—that is, that the strikes could escape the control of the trade unions and the bourgeois “left” parties—a confrontation is brewing between the working class and the entire political establishment.

The protests were called by the unions against a measure to increase the retirement age on a full pension from 65 to 67. The cut also increases the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62. While these key provisions have passed, the Senate is due to vote on remaining portions of the legislation this week.

Sarkozy is insisting that the government will not back down on the reforms, which are only the first step in plans for massive austerity measures. ABOVE (right) Riot police face off against high school students during a demonstration in Lyon on Monday at the start of a second week of actions over an unpopular pension reform bill. (Robert Pratta/Reuters)

The demands from the government have exposed the blatant class justice of state policy. Workers face cuts while the banks and super-rich are bailed out. In particular, Labor Minister Eric Woerth, in charge of pushing through the cuts, entertained corrupt relations with billionaire Liliane Bettencourt, helping her secure multi-million-euro tax refunds. RIGHT: PARIS — In the latest expression of discontent over government austerity moves across Europe, French transport and energy workers, teachers and civil servants took to the streets on Tuesday to protest plans to reform the country’s pension system — the third such strike here in just over a month.

THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the population supports the strikes and opposes Sarkozy’s reforms. A CSA poll for Le Parisien found that 69 percent of the population supports the strike, and 61 percent support continuing the strikes. Another poll found that 68 percent disapprove of Sarkozy.

State attempts to downplay the size of the demonstrations fizzled. In line with previous days of action, where they issued very low estimates for participation, police claimed that 1.2 million people had marched. Even a policemen’s union in Marseille denounced this estimate as a politically-motivated “travesty” that “made the police look ridiculous.” Police unions joined the protest march in Paris.

All sources agreed that participation was higher than in previous days of action. According to the unions, 330,000 marched in Paris; 230,000 in Marseille; 145,000 in Toulouse; 130,000 in Bordeaux; 95,000 in Nantes; over 70,000 each in Rouen, Montpellier and Grenoble.

Workers in many workplaces will be meeting in general assemblies this morning to vote on whether to continue strike action. At Total oil refineries, the SNCF national railways, and the RATP Paris public transport company, workers voted last night to continue their strikes. With the ongoing Marseille port strike already blocking the resupply of oil refineries, and reports of panic buying of gasoline, a lasting strike of public transport would threaten to bring large sections of the economy to a halt.

High school students also participated in large numbers in demonstrations, with over 300 high schools going on strike.

The ruling class currently hopes that the unions will be able to contain mass opposition so that the government can keep the law on the books. Prime Minister François Fillon told conservative lawmakers yesterday that there was “for the time being” no more “room for maneuver” in modifying the law. Consequently, he explained, “What we need is to stay calm and not provoke anyone.”

However, the Financial Times wrote that sources at the Elysée presidential palace “fear the risk of radicalization and even of sporadic violence.”

The ruling class is well aware that it faces a major political threat. In one comment, L’Est Républicain newspaper said, “All the ingredients of social revolt are present: a very unpopular government, a reform that is considered unjust, public opinion that is disoriented by the crisis, chronic unemployment, and high school students who are tempted to demonstrate.” Citing “fear of violence,” the paper said the workers “are struggling to maintain their social gains while aware that an epoch is ending.”

The Financial Times wrote more bluntly that the French political establishment was “still traumatized” by the general strike and student protests of May-June 1968.

The unions have been forced to prepare industrial action due to rising frustration in the working class. The repeated one-day protests have done nothing to halt Sarkozy’s cuts. CGT official Jean-Pierre Delannoy, himself a high-ranking bureaucrat, explained that workers are “fed up with simply strolling through the streets.”

Workers face basic political issues as they enter into struggle against the financial aristocracy’s austerity policies. The working class has the objective social power to defeat the aristocracy, and must launch determined political and strike struggles against them. The principal difficulty facing the workers is, however, the bankruptcy of the existing unions and parties, whose pose of opposition to social cuts is a fraud. LEFT: Workers of Arcelor Mittal demonstrate and shout slogans during a demonstration in MarseillePhoto: EPA

Given mass hostility to Sarkozy, the unions and the establishment parties hide their support for the cuts under the mask of organizing episodic and ineffective protests. This underlies the bourgeoisie’s main advantage over the working class in the coming struggles: its political control over the strikes, through the existing parties. It intends to use them to head off strikes and prevent them from evolving into a political struggle with the government by spreading illusions that the cuts can be “improved” through renegotiation.

The clearest example is the deceitful position of Parti Socialiste (PS). Its secretary, Martine Aubry, is now criticizing Sarkozy and warning of the “threat of confrontation.” She is calling for more negotiations between Sarkozy and the unions over the cuts. However, during the Greek debt crisis earlier this year, Aubry openly called for two-year increases in the retirement age—a position that matches the right-wing record of her party when in power.

Indeed, the likely 2012 presidential candidate for the PS, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now heads the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which released a report last week supporting Sarkozy’s cuts. The report praised the cuts for lowering pension spending by 15 percent, thus limiting state budget deficits and increasing the profitability and global competitiveness of French firms. Strauss-Kahn and the IMF played a major role in imposing even more draconian cuts on Greece during the European debt crisis this spring.

The same defense of social austerity underlies the unions’ public refusal to wage a determined struggle against them. In an interview with Libération last week, CGT secretary Bernard Thibault explained that the call for a general strike was “a slogan that for me is completely abstract, abstruse. … This does not correspond to the way one increases the relationship of forces.”

Thibault added that the current protests had allowed “tens of millions of workers to participate already, in various ways, since the month of May, in protest initiatives against the government.” Thibault could only propose, however, to “completely reopen discussions”—that is, to return to the negotiations with Sarkozy that produced the current round of cuts. His opposition to calls for a general strike is an important signal of his position: having helped formulate the cuts, he opposes prolonged strike action against them.

Thus Le Monde wrote: “There is a trap that Bernard Thibault wants to avoid at all costs, which is radicalization. Such an inherently uncontrollable radicalization would lead workers, with whom the CGT wants to build up credibility and legitimacy, into an impasse by making them think they can overcome the inflexibility of the head of State.”

This objectively places the CGT in political opposition to the working class. Workers are protesting the law after it has been passed into law by the Senate precisely because they are not satisfied with “participating in protest initiatives” that have manifestly failed.

Such wider discontent underlies the rising anger and militancy in broad sections of the working class. The logic of this opposition is bringing workers into direct conflict with Sarkozy and all the defenders of the capitalist system—including the PS, the trade unions, and their “left” supporters.

The eruption of working class opposition in France is part of a broader radicalization of workers throughout the world. For this opposition to be successful, however, it must take an independent political form, one that is directed openly at the subordination of the world economy to the profit interests of the banks and giant corporations.

The social gulf between the workers and the whole political establishment shows both the necessity and the possibility of building a new party based on the fight for socialism. The World Socialist Web Site encourages workers in France and internationally to help build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the revolutionary party of the working class.

ALEX LANTIER writes on political matters for the World Socialist Web Site.

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AS EXPECTED: Democrats' betrayal deepens

ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, CITIZEN TOOLS, Policies & Politicians Comments Off

Oct 182010

Two weeks before US midterm election—

Democrats embrace right-wing austerity policies

By Patrick Martin |  18 October 2010

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With only two weeks remaining in the 2010 election campaign, Democratic Party candidates in closely contested races for the Senate, the House of Representatives and many statewide offices are highlighting their right-wing policies and minimizing any differences with their Republican opponents.

Opinion polls and media analysts are generally forecasting a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, now held by the Democrats by a margin of 255 to 178, and significant Republican gains in the Senate, where the Democrats hold 59 seats out of 100, counting two independents who vote with them.

Some 40 states are electing governors as well, with Republican candidates expected to sweep a belt of economically devastated industrial states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin—from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. There are more closely contested gubernatorial races in three of the four largest states: Florida, Texas and California.

The right-wing policies of the Obama administration, above all its failure to take any significant measures to alleviate mass unemployment, have opened the doors for a revival of political influence for the Republican Party, which was thoroughly repudiated by the American people in the past two elections, losing control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and losing the White House in 2008.

The anticipated Republican victories are due mainly to a projected collapse in turnout by those who voted for Obama and other Democratic candidates in 2008, not to any great surge of popularity for the Republican candidates, many of them associated with the ultra-right Tea Party movement. An Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll published over the weekend found that one-quarter of Obama voters were considering voting against the Democrats this year, and an even larger number were not planning to vote at all.

A Quinnipiac poll published in the Wall Street Journal last week detailed a major demographic shift in projected voter turnout in the state of Ohio, where as many as six incumbent Democratic House members could be turned out. In 2008, voters aged 18-29 and those aged 65 and older each comprised 17 percent of the electorate. The poll projected that in 2010, the youngest age group would be only 10 percent of likely voters, while those 65 and older would account for 25 percent.

Similar figures are reported for other states, reflecting the widespread disillusionment with the Obama administration among young people, who are the most opposed to the continuing war in Afghanistan, the most affected by the destruction of jobs, and the most alienated from the official two-party system.

The Obama White House, like the congressional Democratic leadership, has already begun planning for an expected Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, if not the Senate. Obama gave a lengthy interview to Peter Baker of the New York Times, published in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, in which he suggested in broad strokes the coming shift further to the right.

Baker writes that according to Obama, “He let himself look too much like ‘the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.’” Obama virtually parroted the right-wing rhetoric of the Republican election campaign, describing the response of “average Americans” to his administration in the following terms: “They started feeling like: Gosh, here we are tightening our belts, we’re cutting out restaurants, we’re cutting out our gym membership, in some cases we’re not buying new clothes for the kids. And here we’ve got these folks in Washington who just seem to be printing money and spending it like nobody’s business.”

This reinforces the myth promoted by the corporate-controlled media that concern over federal deficits—rather than anger over unemployment and the refusal of the Obama administration to do anything about it—is the driving force of the coming Democratic electoral defeat.

Obama promised to engage in a more intensive effort to win Republican congressional support during the next two years. The contours of “Obama 2.0,” as White House aides described it, include seeking even closer relations with corporate America, and working with the Republicans to cut federal spending, particularly through the bipartisan deficit reduction commission that is to issue its report in early December.

Asked to name Republicans on Capitol Hill with whom he could work, Obama singled out Senator Judd Gregg and Congressman Paul Ryan, both of them identified with plans to cut spending. Ryan, a member of the deficit reduction commission, has issued a plan to privatize Medicare, the federal program that underwrites medical care for the elderly.

Obama made it clear that he was prepared to ride roughshod over popular resistance to the destruction of social programs. “If the question is, Over the next two years do I take a pass on tough stuff,” he told Baker, “the answer is no.”

Congressional Democrats have responded to the polling numbers—and the flood of campaign cash into the coffers of the Republican Party, mainly from the wealthy and big business—in two ways: moving further to the right politically, and throwing in the towel outright in an increasing number of campaigns. The Democrats have effectively conceded several Senate seats. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran profiles Sunday of the collapsing campaign of Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who has been virtually abandoned by the national party and trails by 20 points to a Republican challenger.

Democratic candidates in North Dakota, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Louisiana have also been largely written off, and in Florida, Democrat Kendrick Meek is denying reports that he will withdraw from the race and throw his support to Republican Governor Charlie Crist, who is running as an independent.

The triage process is more advanced in the House of Representatives, where as many as 100 of the 255 Democratic-held seats are believed to be at risk. Last week the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee cut off further national funding for a dozen House campaigns, effectively conceding these districts to the Republicans. These include seats held by two incumbents in Ohio and one each in Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado and Wisconsin, as well as open seats in Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana and Tennessee.

RIGHT: Sharron Angle, Tea Party candidate, and Harry Reid, Democrat, square off for their debate in Nevada. It was the sheer corruption and cowardice of Democrats like Reid that permitted –made inevitable–the emergence of insane Republicans such as Angle.

In the dozen or so Senate races still closely fought—New Hampshire, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Colorado, Nevada, California, Washington, Alaska—the contests between the Democratic and Republican candidates show a definite pattern.

Obama, Vice President Biden, and other national party spokesmen have adopted a bogus, pseudo-populist stance, seeking to motivate Democratic Party voters to turn out at the polls by bashing the Republicans as stooges of big business. But the Senate Democratic candidates have by and large refused to follow suit. They have focused instead on personal mudslinging, while distancing themselves from the Obama administration.

In West Virginia, for example, Democratic Governor Joe Manchin, who faces millionaire businessman John Raese for the seat vacated by the death of Robert Byrd, declared that he would support repeal of Obama’s healthcare legislation, at least in part, and trumpeted his opposition to any environmental restrictions on the coal industry.

In Kentucky, state attorney general Jack Conway faces Republican Rand Paul, son of the Libertarian former candidate for president and an extreme proponent of free-market policies. But Conway has declared his adamant opposition to government regulation of the coal industry, going so far as to file a suit against the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

In the only televised debate in the Delaware Senate race, Democrat Chris Coons avoided any serious discussion of the ultra-right politics of Republican Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who upset the favored candidate of the Republican establishment. He presented himself as a responsible ally of the state’s business establishment, and responded defensively to O’Donnell’s description of him as a “bearded Marxist” in his college days, declaring himself to be “a clean-shaven capitalist.”

In a Senate debate in Illinois, Democrat Alexi Giannopoulos and Republican Mark Steven Kirk traded accusations of personal corruption and mendacity. The Democrat has been linked to corrupt practices that led to the collapse of the bank owned by his family, while the Republican is a former military intelligence officer who lied about his service record during the Iraq war.

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the bankrupt and right-wing character of the Democratic Party election campaign came in the only debate in the Nevada Senate race, between Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid ands his challenger Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite.

While Angle is an ultra-right, not to say bizarre, candidate—her political record includes support for indoctrination of state prison inmates by the Scientology cult, as well as abolition of the federal Department of Education—Reid was thrown on the defensive over his personal wealth and lavish lifestyle.

Reid was a multi-millionaire lawyer and property developer when he first won election to the Senate in 1992, and now enjoys a personal fortune estimated at $3.1 million to $6.7 million, according to documents he filed with the Senate. It was therefore difficult for him to posture as an advocate of working people against Angle, who is of modest personal means.

The Republican candidate supports draconian measures against undocumented immigrants, in a state with nearly a quarter of the population of Hispanic descent. She opposes requiring insurance companies to cover specific procedures and medical conditions, and has advocated privatization of Social Security.

But Reid did not press her on these issues, a performance that the Washington Post described as “remarkably restrained.” He also called former president George W. Bush a “friend” and praised right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a “masterful mind” on legal affairs.

In the contests for the House of Representatives, the most notable embrace of Republican talking points has been the slew of Democrats who have publicly repudiated Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the principal targets of Fox News/talk radio venom.

Several incumbent Democrats who voted for Pelosi as speaker in 2007 and 2009 have declared that they will not do so in 2011, when the next Congress convenes. A Mississippi Democrat boasted that in 1,466 votes over the past two years, “Nancy Pelosi agreed with my vote 34 times.”

One conservative southerner, Jim Marshall of Georgia, went so far as to run television commercials showing “hippies” in San Francisco—Pelosi’s district—with the narrator intoning, “Georgia is a long way from San Francisco. And Jim Marshall is a long way from Nancy Pelosi.”

Pelosi’s response has been characteristically cynical. “I just want them to win,” she told the PBS program “News Hour”. “They know their districts.”

PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political commentator for the World Socialist Web Site.

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Save a mother bear from unjust retribution

ADVERTS, ANIMAL MARTYRDOM Comments Off

Oct 182010

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

••••

Forthright execution is the normal reaction of humans to any “animal nuisance”, let alone those rare cases when they should have the audacity to stage “an attack” on one of our species. This is highly immoral and must stop. Animal actions—domestic and wild—should be evaluated and animals afforded elementary protection and fairness in dictating their fate. Anything else is to be willfully complicit in primitive fascism toward nature.

Do yourself a favor and reduce the already grotesque bad Karma our species carries by at least signing off on this petition. It may do some good in an ocean of instances where animal victimization is met with indifference, if not active approval.

P. Greanville

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BOOKS: Plumbing the murky waters of concealed state terrorism

ARTS & FILM, BOOK NOTES, GAITHER STEWART, MEDIA SCUM, THE USA 1 Response »

Oct 182010

So, where’s Helen:

A review of Gaither Stewart’s The Trojan Spy

By Case Wagenvoord

[print_link] There is no line that separates good and evil, no threshold over which one steps. Rather a long tunnel connects the two, a tunnel that moves from the brightly-lit chamber of the good towards the black abyss of the evil, a tunnel in which shadows deepen as we move closer to the abyss. We all spend time in these shadows, but most of us are equipped with a moral gyroscope that is constantly pulling us back towards the light. For some the pull is not strong enough and they plunge into the darkness of madness, criminality. Or they become CEOs.

For the spy, it’s different. It’s the same tunnel, the same journey from the light towards the abyss. However, the spy’s tunnel is not like ours. Without warning, his can turn on its vertical axis and the movement towards the well-lit chamber becomes a plunge into the abyss, which, in turn, can suddenly be bathed in light. With time, both light and darkness merge into a twilight grey in which shapes are difficult to distinguish and the distinction between friend and foe blurs.

This is the world of the characters who occupy Gaither Stewart’s rich and complex novel, The Trojan Spy. It would be a misnomer to call this a spy story. True, it does chronicle the adventures and mishaps of a handful of spies, all looking for meaning in a world that has lost it. But it is more. It is a leisurely meditation on love, betrayal, duplicity, morality, the young, the old, Europe, America, the Soviet Union, terrorism and the Cold War,

The book revolves around two characters from different ages and different world. The first is the Cold War veteran Anatoly Nikolaevsky—Nikitin “Toyla, Nikolaev–Schmidt, a man of mixed backgrounds and loyalties. Whether he is a double or triple agent is difficult to tell. He moves with ease between his Soviet handler, Borya and his American handler, Cliff, Sr. Always in the background is the elderly Karl Ludwig Leonhard who is what? KGB? Stasi? We are never certain.

It is Karl Ludwig’s grandson, Karl Heinz, the novel’s sometimes narrator, who forms second pole around which the story revolves. Pill and alcohol dependent, it is in him we see that the real damage that has been done to the children and grandchildren of the Cold War warriors. Karl Heinz laments, “But what worthwhile causes existed for my generation? The era of great ideologies was over. Europe seemed in stasis. For us, heroic causes were foreign ones.”

Betrayal and duplicity are two of the novel’s major themes. Nikitin wears a pair of cufflinks that display the ultimate symbol of duplicity, the Trojan Horse. Borya, who is fascinated with Greek mythology and, especially, Helen of Troy, tells Nikitin, “For the Gods, the big betrayal is betrayal of what you love. The greatest freedom is the freedom to betray.” This could be why betrayal is reserved for the gods and why Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, its deepest, is reserved for traitors and betrayers, for in their betrayal they sought to imitate the Gods.

Nikitin’s cufflinks say much by saying nothing. Because the Trojan Horse was his creation, Ulysses was condemned to the eighth circle of hell, the circle reserved for the perpetrators of fraud. Perhaps this is why Nikitin says that, “[T]he result is that you inevitably come to feel like a fugitive; homeless, stateless.” This yields a crypto nihilism that is only kept at bay by the steel mask of ironic detachment. Borya is fascinated by the duplicity of Helen of Troy. Not only did she betray her husband Menelaus, she in turn betrayed the Trojans when she gave the signal for the Greeks to emerge from the horse. If she was even in Troy…

Roberto Calasso, in his book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony tells us that Paris and Helen first fled to Egypt. There Proteus, king of Memphis ruled that Helen and her treasure would stay in Egypt while Paris journeyed on to Troy alone. Calasso goes on to note, “Homer kept quiet about the supreme scandal of the Trojan War: that blood had been spilt for a woman who was not actually there, for an impalpable ghost.”

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Not since John Le Carré gave us Alec Leamas, the tormented antihero of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, have we seen a master spy with the character complexities of Anatoly Nikitin, the formidable former Soviet agent whose ultimate target is nothing less than the organizers of present-day terrorism, embedded in western intelligence. In The Trojan Spy Gaither Stewart weaves not only a classic espionage thriller but a compelling moral tale whose central questions resonate long after we put down the volume. –Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal

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Perhaps Borya sees in Helen a metaphor for the Cold War in which blood was spilt for an “impalpable ghost,” namely the specter of Communist world domination. We know now that no such conspiracy existed, that Stalin simply followed the traditional Czarist foreign policy of maintaining a protective buffer zone around Russia. Like the Greeks storming the walls of Troy, the early Cold War warriors believed “their careers were morally and ethically satisfying—they felt the existence of an evil enemy and considered themselves lucky to be in the forefront against it.”

But like all chimeras, the Cold War evaporated and its warriors were left with a terrible void in their lives. As Nikitin observes, “[T]he spy is the eternal child. He never matures. He lives his life as a fairy tale.” So when one fairy tale dies, another must be found if the spy is to feel whole. In this, the spy is a mirror in which we see ourselves, for like Samuel Beckett’s Malone we constantly invent and reinvent fictions about ourselves with which we hope to keep the void at bay.

For Nikitin, the replacement fairy tale is the belief that victims and terrorists are locked in a symbiotic embrace. “When I stop and consider who benefits from terrorism, the list grows longer and longer,” he says. “The police need terrorism to justify the government’s hard line. …The unending crisis. The wars. The special laws. In the name of the war on terrorism they can do anything they want.”

He notes that when Soviet tanks rolled into to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 it was a propaganda coup for the West. Of course the West wouldn’t go to the aid of the Hungarians. They needed their evil empire intact and whole to justify the military empire they were building. So it is that today the last thing the United States wants to do is capture or kill bin Laden. Like children, we need our monsters and bogymen. It is they who give our lives meaning. Lord Acton got it wrong. Power doesn’t corrupt; it rots the brain and keeps its wielder is a perpetual state of arrested adolescence.

So Nikitin goes in pursuit of the one individual or group he believes is the mastermind behind all terrorist activity and in doing so he becomes a poster child for the absurd of Albert Camus. Camus saw the absurd as the tension between man’s intense desire for a rational linearity that made sense of the nonlinear and unpredictable chaos that life can be. Nikitin wishes to impose a linear order on the sloppy mess that is terrorism with all of its arbitrariness and unpredictability.

It is this struggle against the absurd that forces Nikitin into his grey world of amorality. As young Karl observes, “Nikitin, Hakim and now Musa—equivocating, vacillating, changing sides in life, playing all sides against the middle, all acted as if nothing was either absolutely good or absolutely evil.” Morality slips its skids when it tries to impose a linear order on the chaotic fecundity of life, for in the end it must destroy all that doesn’t fit into its neat, rational categories.

The novel moves at a leisurely pace. Reading it is like being in the company of a group of cosmopolitan individuals as they discuss world affairs. The writing is crisp and draws the reader along.

I did have some issues with the ending. The book ends with a grand conspiracy that is plotted and successfully executed by a rogue intelligence agency. I find this troublesome on several different levels. First, there’s a problem with the intelligence community as a whole. It is a given that our CIA borders on the incompetent. The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a complete surprise to it and it tailored intelligence in the run up to the Iraq enterprise to justify policies that had already been formulated. On the Soviet side, researchers are finding that the KGB was not the well-oiled machine the West had thought it was.

Intelligence gathering is an imperfect science that is carried out by inefficient bureaucracies. So it is doubtful that a rogue agency could execute anything that resembled a comprehensive conspiracy.

When it comes to grand conspiracies, I confess to being a skeptic. I simply don’t believe Homo sapiens has the intellectual capacity to carry one out on a large scale. Human nature doesn’t lend itself to mega plots. Somewhere, someone would have one drink too many or would want to impress his mistress and the cat would be out of the bag.

Rather than conspiracies I see passing convergences of interest grounded in life’s contingencies, contingencies that are constantly in motion. These convergences are reactions to events and not their creators. This is why terrorist activity tends to be made up of isolated incidents rather than parts of some sort of overall strategy. Experts tell us that al-Qaeda isn’t so much a formal organization as an ideology.

A good analogy for these convergences can be found in chaos theory. If you sit by a fountain for a period of time, a pattern emerges. Most of the time the droplets of water fall in a random and chaotic pattern. But occasionally, the drops fall in unison, a unity that is quickly dispersed as the droplets resume their random pattern. It’s the same with convergences. A disparate group of individuals come together to plot some mischief and then disperse.

Was 9/11 an inside job plotted and executed by the Bush administration? Absolutely not! Was the administration aware that such a plot was in the works and choose to let it happen? Possibly. Did every neocon and wingnut rejoice when the planes slammed into the twin towers because this breathed new life into our militarized security state? Absolutely! It was a passing convergence of interests.

Grand conspiracies have their appeal because of our need to impose some sort of order [on] event[s] that are, by nature, chaotic and unpredictable. We want to believe a single mastermind is behind them and that once this mastermind is neutralized the threat will vanish. Such a belief is the mindset of a technician who believes that there isn’t a problem that can’t be solved by changing a battery or tightening a bolt. The trouble is that life isn’t a machine and it rarely behaves like one.

But this is a minor quibble when the novel is considered as a whole. It takes the reader on a fascinating and absorbing journey through contemporary Europe. It is a book that could well change how we look at the world. And when you get right down to it, this is what literature is supposed to do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Case Wagenvoord blogs at http://rightwingstoner.blogspot.com and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com.

NOTE: The Trojan Spy can be ordered from Amazon via this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Trojan-Spy-Stewart-Gaither/dp/0857780263/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1287432359&sr=8-1

All purchases benefit the author, one of our senior editors, and THE GREANVILLE POST, since a portion of the proceeds will be channelled to TGP. It can therefore be regarded as an indirect donation.

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Demagogy and duplicity: The Democrats in the 2010 elections

CITIZEN TOOLS, COLUMNS, THE USA Comments Off

Oct 182010

Demagogy and duplicity are not abnormal conditions for the Democratic party but its way of life. Essentially, the US government is run by expert public relations manipulators.

PATRICK MARTIN | 13 October 2010

[print_link] WITH LESS THAN THREE WEEKS remaining in the 2010 election campaign, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are seeking to stave off a major electoral defeat by making a last-minute, fraudulent appeal to popular hostility towards Wall Street and big business.

In his remarks Sunday to a rally in Philadelphia, largely drawn from the ranks of the trade union bureaucracy, Obama attacked “millionaires and billionaires,” “Wall Street banks,” “corporations”, the “oil industry,” the “insurance industry” and “credit-card companies.”

He charged that “a former lobbyist for AIG and Exxon Mobil” helped draft the “Pledge to America” adopted by the Republican Party. He then declared that “the centerpiece of the pledge is a $700 billion tax cut that would only go to the top 2 percent, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”

The business-bashing demagogy has been combined in the past week with an ugly dose of American chauvinism, with Obama and congressional Democrats claiming that their opponents are benefiting from money from “foreign-owned corporations,” supposedly funneled through the US Chamber of Commerce, the biggest single fundraiser for the Republican Party.

The charge of foreign money allows the Democrats to wrap themselves in the flag and compete with the Republicans in appeals to nationalism and anti-immigrant prejudice. It has no factual basis. The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is an instrument of American banks and corporations that operate all over the world.

Obama and the Democrats combine pseudo-populist rhetoric with right-wing policies that benefit the financial-corporate elite. For the tens of millions of working people facing unemployment and the specter of homelessness and destitution, they have nothing to offer.

While Obama claims that his administration is “finally holding accountable” the financial interests that caused the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, the Obama-Bush bailout has put the entire financial resources of the federal government at the disposal of Wall Street.

The administration has rejected any effort to create jobs directly through a major public works program, or any serious measures to alleviate deepening poverty and mass suffering in a crisis which is now completing its third full year, with the average duration of unemployment the highest ever recorded.

This week, even as Obama was mouthing utterly hollow populist-sounding slogans, his spokesmen were taking to the airways to reject calls for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures, despite mounting evidence of systematic fraud by banks and mortgage lenders.

The basic outcome of next month’s congressional elections is assured, regardless of whether the November 2 vote puts the Republicans in control of Congress or leaves a reduced Democratic majority in power. The Obama administration will move even further to the right, supposedly in response to public opinion.

The official narrative of the 2010 election campaign, promoted in lock-step by the corporate-controlled media, both openly right-wing and nominally liberal, is that Obama has tilted too far to the left. His supposedly massive federal spending has, according to the media, aroused deep anger in the public at large, reflected in the growth of support for the

Tea Party campaigns.

The received wisdom is that the American people, who repudiated Bush and the Republicans just two years ago, are now, in the midst of a social crisis without precedent in the post-war period, clamoring for more of the very pro-corporate policies—tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, the dismantling of social programs—they voted to end in 2008.

In this conception, American politics is divided along partisan lines between the Republican right and the Democratic “left,” with most of those who are dissatisfied with the existing parties residing somewhere in between these two supposed polar opposites. Summing up the conventional wisdom, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times wrote of the elections: “The party that seizes the center will win.”

Besides grotesquely distorting the actual right-wing record of the Obama administration, this portrait of American political life leaves out a decisive fact: the actual sentiments of the working people who constitute the vast majority of the population.

Never in history has a deep-going economic crisis of the capitalist system produced a shift in the masses in favor of the capitalists. On the contrary, opinion poll after opinion poll shows growing popular hatred of Wall Street speculators and corporate CEOs, who are—absolutely correctly—held responsible for the destruction of jobs and living standards. The masses in America are moving to the left, not to the right.

Within the peculiar political structure of the United States, limited to two officially recognized parties, both controlled by corporate interests and offering only right-wing policies, this shift in mass sentiment has as yet found no political outlet. But even the opinion polls conducted in the current election campaign, skewed as they are by the assumption that the existing political and social structures are unalterable, rebuts the claim that the enormous and growing dissatisfaction with the Obama administration has produced a surge of support for the policies of the Republican right.

A Zogby International poll of independent voters found that only 13 percent gave a favorable rating to congressional Democrats and only 5 percent to congressional Republicans, staggering figures that give a glimpse of the deep dissatisfaction with both of the major capitalist parties.

A Bloomberg poll conducted October 7-10 found that more than 40 percent of those who had once supported Obama said they were either less supportive or did not support him at all, two years after the 2008 presidential election. While Obama’s recent populist rhetoric has been attacked by the Republicans and sections of the media as “anti-business,” a majority of those interviewed by Bloomberg rejected this criticism, and more felt that the Obama administration had been too soft on Wall Street than too harsh.

A majority of those polled by Bloomberg rejected cuts in nearly every significant federal program: Social Security, Medicare, roads and public transportation, funding for disease research, education. They flatly opposed either privatizing Social Security or raising the age of eligibility. Most opposed the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Millions of working people in the United States are moving into a collision with the policies of the financial aristocracy and both of its parties. The November election will be followed by a turn to austerity policies, including attacks on Social Security, Medicare, public education and access to health care. It will signal an intensification of the war in Afghanistan and a continuation of US military interventions in Iraq and elsewhere. The attacks on democratic rights at home will be stepped up.

The emergence of an independent political movement of the working class is the only way to defend jobs, living standards and democratic rights against this corporate onslaught. The Socialist Equality Party advances a political program for the defense of the social rights of working people on the basis of socialist policies. We call on the readers of the WSWS to consider this program and make the decision to join and build the SEP.

Patrick Martin is a senior political writer with the World Socialist Web Site.

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Things to consider—

Sarkozy is taking a risk. France’s strikers love little more than putting leaders in their place

Mass protests shake French government

Democrats embrace right-wing austerity policies

So, where’s Helen:

A review of Gaither Stewart’s The Trojan Spy

Demagogy and duplicity are not abnormal conditions for the Democratic party but its way of life. Essentially, the US government is run by expert public relations manipulators.