Anti-Imperialists Coming In First And Second in Iraq’s Election Iraqi Communist Party & Moqtada al-Sadr Coalition Projected Winner

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By Steven Argue, The Revolutionary Tendency
fact & opinion

[A picture run by The New York Times from Saturday's elections in Iraq. The polling station was described by the paper to be in Sadr City, a district in Baghdad]. The article, by Margaret Coker, was notable for its relative lack of spin distorting the facts in the subtle way the Times is famous for.

Anti-Imperialists Coming In First And Second in Iraq's Election
Iraqi Communist Party & Moqtada al-Sadr Coalition Projected Winner
Iranian Backed Hadi al-Amiri Coming in Second

Celebrators have poured out into the streets of Iraq in response to announcements of preliminary unexpected results. With 95% of votes counted, preliminary results of the Iraqi elections indicate that the secular anti-establishment and anti-imperialist coalition of the Iraqi Communist Party and Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has come in first in the Iraqi elections. The Iranian backed slate of Shia leader Hadi al-Amiri is coming in second. Hadi al-Amiri literally fought on the side of Iran during Saddam Hussein's U.S. backed war against Iran. Both defeated the sectarian Shia U.S.puppet regime of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi whose bloc is coming in third. Earlier security and commissions sources had earlier said al-Abadi was the winner.

I attach an article I wrote and put out the day before the election which, I'm happy to say, got high recommendations from Iraqis themselves.

May 12 Elections in Iraq
Communists in Coalition With Shia Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr

By Steven Argue

Photo: Anti-government protest of nearly a million people in Baghdad's Tahrir Square February 26, 2016.

This protest is part of a coalition movement led by Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi Communist Party demanding better public services, opposed to corruption, and opposed to sectarianism. At the protest Moqtada al-Sadr declared, "This demonstration is the voice of the displaced people and the oppressed Sunnis. We disown any corrupt party or personality." He went on to blame the sectarian and corrupt U.S. imposed puppet government of Nouri al-Maliki for the fall of Mosul to ISIS.]

On Saturday, May 12, Iraq will hold national elections. Running as part of a secular coalition that includes the Iraqi Communist Party is Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr against the U.S. imposed puppet regime of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. The communists and the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr have been in an alliance since 2015 that has been protesting in the streets demanding anti-sectarian reforms, better public services, and an end to corruption. These protests are a major movement that included a protest of nearly a million people held in Baghdad's Tahrir Square February 26, 2016.

This is a protest movement and election campaign against the U.S. imposed puppet regime of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and the corrupt sectarian system the United States has imposed on Iraq. This spells an important secular nationalist challenge to the system the U.S. set-up after the invasion, one that promotes external control and manipulation through narrow sectarian division and corrupt patronage-only politics.

Moqtada al-Sadr's earlier Shia centered parliamentary movement called the Ahrar bloc has 33 elected MPs in Iraq's parliament. Al-Sadr has urged them not to stand in this May 12th election in order to make way for the current joint secular list running.

In a 2003 CBS interview, soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr said, “The little serpent has left, and the great serpent [the United States] has come.” Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army resisted the U.S. occupation of Iraq earning him (under U.S. corporate media standards) being named the most dangerous man of the year on the cover of Newsweek in 2006.

In the fight against the Sunni supremacist fascists of ISIS, Moqtada al-Sadr's Peace Companies participated in offensive operations that included the liberation of Jurf Al Nasr in October 2014 and Tikrit in March 2015. At the same time, Moqtada al-Sadr opposed all U.S. troop participation in the campaign against ISIS, declaring their continued status as legitimate military targets for attack in resistance to the U.S. occupation and opposed to all U.S. intervention, including U.S. bombing.

Moqtada al-Sadr

Moqtada al-Sadr's Peace Companies were part of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) of about 100,000 fighters that played a central role in defeating ISIS in Iraq. There are 70 different ideological militia groupings within the PMU, many of which get Iranian backing. They are Iraqis, yet U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laughably declared it time for them to leave Iraq after they defeated ISIS. While the PMU did get essential Iranian backing in the fight to defeat ISIS, reality is, the foreign troops that don't belong in Iraq are the U.S. troops.

Fact is, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) became necessary because Iraqi military crumbled in the face of a relatively few ISIS soldiers. This is because they are a U.S. puppet without heart, working for a pay check. The most powerful militias of the PMU all fought against the troops of the U.S. occupation and, at times, the Iraqi military. These were the Peace Brigades, the Badr Organization, al-Nujaba, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Kitaeb Hezbollah. The official Iraqi military lacks popular support both for its attacks on these militias and its sectarian crimes against Sunnis. That is not to say independent Shia militias haven't carried out sectarian crimes as well, but the idea of the U.S. imposed Iraqi military being a less sectarian moderating influence over the anti-imperialist militias is pure nonsense.

The Iraqi Communist Party opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Their resistance to the U.S. occupation, however, was not consistent. In 2014, the Iraqi Communist Party organized in the Red Army in response to the threat of inhalation at the hands of the Sunni supremacist fascists of ISIS after they spilled over from the U.S. sponsored counterrevolutionary war in Syria. Red Army fighters have been credited with a battle victory with dozens of ISIS casualties in a fight near Baghdad. The Iraqi Communist Party also presently has an elected representative in Iraq's national parliament.

The Iraqi Communist Party was a major force in Iraqi politics in the 1950's and 60's. With CIA assistance, it was mostly wiped out through the execution of thousands in the 1960's after the Baathist Party and Saddam Hussein were brought to power, also with U.S. backing. Much of the secular, pro-woman, and socialist nature of the regime of Saddam Hussein can be credited to the socialist government the Baathists smashed and the communists they murdered.

Later, as capitalist counterrevolution swept much of the world, Saddam Hussein's counterrevolutionary efforts on behalf of U.S. imperialism like invading Iran, murdering Kurds, and killing communists simply were not enough. In their way of looking at things, he was cutting in to imperialist profits. His continuation of a good number of socialist policies, including nationalized oil paying for healthcare and education, needed to be ended. This type of socialist spending on human needs is unacceptable to the U.S. imperial capitalists, as it cuts into their profits.

In addition to the U.S. imperialist desire to destroy all remnants of socialism, they also needed an enemy to justify military expenditures. The wealthy capitalists of the U.S. who benefit greatly in profits from the bloated U.S. arms industry, paid for at taxpayer expense, no longer had the Soviet Union as enemy and excuse. Russia's government of Boris Yeltsin was still compliant to U.S. looting of the economy through privatization in a capitalist counterrevolution that left Russians without jobs and basic services, killing 6 million Russians (registered demographically as a drop in life expectancy of 10 years.) So they turned their once ally, Saddam Hussein, into an enemy.

The U.S. war against Iraq, starting in 1991, has murdered millions of Iraqis, destroyed its economy through privatization and military destruction, created wide scale brutal sectarian chaos, looted Iraqi oil, littered Iraq with deadly depleted uranium, cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars, and cost working class families the lives of many sons and daughters, all while lining the pockets of the arms and oil industries.

In addition to many other problems, the U.S. invasion of Iraq made the country safe for Sunni supremacist terrorists. After the U.S. invasion, Iraq was to suffer from the CIA's Frankenstein monster of al-Qaeda, created through CIA intervention in Afghanistan. Despite Bush's lies, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and al-Qaeda had never operated in Iraq under Saddam Hussein's rule. Unfortunately, after the U.S. invasion, al-Qaeda led a section of the insurrection against the U.S. occupation. Their tactics centered on successfully triggering the chaos of a sectarian civil war. As their terrorist attacks committed mass murder against Shi'ite Muslims, and this helped trigger an all sided civil war of fascistic mass murder.

Al-Qaeda moved into Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion. Al-Qaeda was created in Afghanistan through massive U.S. arms, training, and financing to the counterrevolutionary mujahideen fighting against the pro-woman communist PDPA government. The PDPA rightfully had Soviet backing against the U.S. proxy intervention carried out by fascistic and misogynistic anti-communist religious fanatics of the mujahideen whose counterrevolution gave birth to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

As the surge defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq, they moved into Syria where they renamed themselves Jabhat al-Nusra and fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood led Free Syrian Army and the Wahhabist Islamic Front against the Syrian government. They got, and still get, massive U,S, arms, training, and financing that enabled them to take large swaths of Syria. As in Iraq, al-Qaeda together with other U.S. backed forces carried out genocide against Christians, Alawites, Shi'ites, Kurds, and other religious and national minorities while enslaving women. They also established Islamic governments to replace that of Bashar al-Assad's secular, religiously diverse, pro-woman, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, semi-socialist government.

An important split from Jabhat al-Nusra and parts of the "Free Syrian Army" was, of course, ISIS, which also once again brought major terror and chaos to Iraq as well as Syria. The only difference between ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra was the fact that those who formed ISIS wanted to take the war back into Iraq to fight against the U.S. puppet government there, and those who remained with al-Qaeda wanted to continue to receive CIA funding. Al-Qaeda still controls and terrorizes important swaths of Syria with U.S. backing, as they are the main force of the U.S. backed "Opposition". In Syrian Idlib, witnesses to al-Qaeda's brutal reign of terror like mass executions of Christians and forced conversions have also pointed out that large numbers of the al-Qaeda fighters aren't even Syrian and barely speak Arabic. Turkish troops on the ground are now also defending U.S. sponsored al-Qaeda rule in Idlib. ISIS got the bad publicity for doing the same things U.S. backed al-Qaeda still does, only because they broke CIA rules by threatening the U.S. puppet government in Iraq.

Despite extremely strange accusations from the U.S. government at that time blaming Bashar al-Assad for ISIS, that ISIS invasion from Syria was from territories held by U.S. trained, armed, and financed counterrevolutionaries in Syria. The routing of the corrupt and unmotivated U.S. trained, armed, and financed Iraqi Army at that time, with ISIS near the outskirts of Baghdad, precipitated the rise of the PMU. Iranian aid to the PMU was critical to winning the war against ISIS in Iraq.

The majority of the PMU are Shias who had huge motivation to fight in the fact that the Wahhabist ISIS fascists were committing genocide against them. The PMU was established by the Shia leadership, but was clear from its beginnings it did not intend to remain only Shia. The PMU also contains Christian, Turkman, Kurd, and Yazidi forces. Other important forces fought as well outside of the PMU. These included Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Kurdish PKK forces. Also fighting against ISIS in Iraq were the Red Army, formed by the Iraqi Communist Party and the internationalist communists of the MLKP.

Trump falsely claims U.S. credit for the defeat of ISIS. He escalated the indiscriminate bombing of major cities when he came into office, killing a lot of civilians, but it was mostly Russia, Syria, Iran, the Kurdish YPG / YPJ, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), with Iranian backing, that defeated ISIS. Among these was Russia who ended the massive convoys of oil that ISIS was looting from Iraq and Syria and refining with the help of U.S. ally Turkey, the destination of the oil convoys. Obama didn't touch those convoys and didn't try to get Turkey to stop accepting it. Russia, as an early major act of their entry into the war, bombed the oil convoys and cut off an important part of the capitalist financing of ISIS.

There is no problem in the world that U.S. imperialist intervention won't make worse. Whatever any country's problems are, as today western imperialist propaganda both lies and greatly exaggerates what they are in Syria, Iran, and North Korea, but whatever those problems are, all of history proves that U.S. imperialist invasions and U.S. backed capitalist counterrevolutions are far worse. From the U.S. making Libya safe for slavery again to the mass murder and chaos the U.S. caused in Iraq, the lesson is clear, nations may well need weapons of mass destruction to defend themselves from the United States. This is part of why communists defend the right of Iran to a nuclear energy program, whether or not its intent was to build nuclear weapons, and we support North Korea's right to an armed nuclear self-defense.

Iraq was invaded partly because Iraq didn't have better weapons, as Iraq gave in to U.S. starvation blockade demands of disarmament made as Clinton's blockade murdered over half a million Iraqi children. Following that, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has killed well over a million Iraqis, all dead as a result of the U.S. invasion, bombing, the imposition of a sectarian government, failure to protect from the Sunni supremacist fascists of al-Qaeda, and the civil war all of this ignited. Free trade, privatization, and war have devastated Iraq's economy, and corruption allows the massive looting of oil fields on the black market for the profit of imperialist oil firms.

The secular coalition the Iraqi Communist Party has formed with Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr may well offer radical solutions to Iraq's problems imposed by U.S. imperialism. Strong campaigns are being waged against this coalition by the U.S. imposed puppet establishment. The more successful they are, the more likely they will come under more imperialist attack as well. In such events, it will be important for anti-imperialists, peace activists, Arab nationalists, supporters of secularism, trade unionists, communists, and socialists of all other stripes around the world to defend Iraq's right to their own representation and their own government as part of regaining Iraq's self-determination

For Socialism! For Secularism! Against Sectarianism!
U.S. Imperialists Out Of The Middle East!
U.S. Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan!
End The Colonial Occupation Of The Green Zone!
Down With The Corrupt Sectarian Shia Government Of U.S. Imperialism In Iraq!
End The Uninvited U.S., Turkish, and Israeli Military Occupations Of Syria!
End U.S. Military Aid To The Sunni Supremacist Fascists Fighting To Overthrow Secular Government of Bashar al-Assad!
End The U.S. Led Economic Blockades Of Iran, Syria, Gaza, Qatar, and Yemen!

-Steven Argue for the Revolutionary Tendency

The Revolutionary Tendency
https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency/

Also check out my 2003 article:

What Is Socialism, and Why We Oppose The Invasion of Iraq
by Steve Argue
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=581580828849363&id=578670212473758

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

America Spends About Half of World’s Military Expenditures

BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

America’s current annual military expenditures are around $1.5 trillion, which is to say, almost equal to the entire global estimate of “more than $1.6 trillion in 2015.”

The National Priorities Project headlines “U.S. Military Spending vs. the World” and reports: “World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.” But it can’t be believed, because, even if other nations aren’t under-reporting their military expenditures, the U.S. certainly is — under-reporting it by about 50%. The reality is approximately twice the official figure, so that America’s current annual military expenditures are around $1.5 trillion, which is to say, almost equal to that entire global estimate of “more than $1.6 trillion in 2015.”

America’s actual annual military budget and expenditures are unknown, because there has never been an audit of the ‘Defense’ Department, though an audit has routinely been promised but never delivered, and Congresses and Presidents haven’t, for example, even so much as just threatened to cut its budget every year by 10% until it is done — there has been no accountability for the Department, at all. Corruption is welcomed, at the ‘Defense’ Department.

Furthermore, many of the military expenditures are hidden. One way that this is done is by funding an unknown large proportion of U.S. military functions at other federal Departments, so as for those operations not to be officially “‘Defense’ Department” budget and expenditures, at all. This, for example, is the reason why Robert Higgs, of The Independent Institute, was able to report, on 15 March 2007, “The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget Is Already Here”. He found that America’s military expenditures, including the ones he could identify at other federal agencies, were actually already nearly a trillion dollars ($934.9 billion) a year:

“To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2006, the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available. In that year, the Department of Defense itself spent $499.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the Department of Energy budget added $16.6 billion. The Department of Homeland Security spent $69.1 billion. The Department of State and international assistance programs laid out $25.3 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The Department of Veterans Affairs had outlays of $69.8 billion. The Department of the Treasury, which funds the lion’s share of military retirement costs through its support of the little-known Military Retirement Fund, added $38.5 billion. A large part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s outlays ought to be regarded as defense-related, if only indirectly so. When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2006 total by nearly half again, to $728.2 billion.”

Furthermore, “Much, if not all, of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. … [As regards] Department of Homeland Security, many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. … The Federal Bureau of Investigation … devotes substantial resources to an anti-terrorist program. The Department of the Treasury informs us that it has ‘worked closely with the Departments of State and Justice and the intelligence community to disrupt targets related to al Qaeda, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as to disrupt state sponsorship of terror.’”

But, almost everything there relied upon mere estimates, because the Congress and the President always supply to the public numbers that are sadly uninterpretable by anyone who wants to know what percentage of the federal government is actually military.

For example, on April 3rd, the White House, as required by law, sent to Congress “the Seven-Day-After report for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018 (Public Law 115-141). The President signed this Act into law on March 23, 2018.” That’s the current authorized spending for the entire U.S. federal Government. It was broken down there into twelve categories, some of which were for multiple federal Departments, in order to make the reported numbers as uninterpretable as possible — for example, nothing was shown for the Treasury Department, but something was shown for “Financial Services and General Government Appropriations” and it didn’t even mention the “Treasury” Department. And nothing was shown for the Justice Department, nor for the Commerce Department, but something was shown for “Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies” (whatever those are). However, as bad as this is, the military (or invasions) department is even less fathomable from the publicly available reports than those other ones are. The ‘Defense’ Department is the only one that’s still “unauditable” so that in one of the attempts to audit it:

“The audits of the FY 1999 DoD financial statements indicated that $7.6 trillion of accounting entries were made to compile them. This startling number is perhaps the most graphic available indicator of just how poor the existing systems are. The magnitude of the problem is further demonstrated by the fact that, of $5.8 trillion of those adjustments that we audited this year, $2.3 trillion were unsupported by reliable explanatory information and audit trails or were made to invalid general ledger accounts.”

Largely as a consequence of this, Wikipedia’s “Military budget of the United States” is a chaotic mess, though useful for links to some sources (all of which are likewise plagued as being uninterpretable).

On 1 March 2011, Chris Hellman headlined “The Real U.S. National Security Budget: The Figure No One Wants You to See”, and he estimated (using basically the same approach that Higgs had done in 2007, except less accurate than Higgs, due to failing to base his numbers on “the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available” but instead using only the President’s budget request) that at that time, the U.S. Government was spending annually on ‘Defense’, “$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)” That amount was far less than the totals that the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense had been reporting, in some of its periodic investigations (such as the one just cited), to have been missed or undocumented or falsely ‘documented’ as having been spent, by that Department; but, for some mysterious reason, the American people tolerate and re-elect ‘representatives’ who ‘debate’ and rubber-stamp such corruption, which is of enormous benefit to corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, whose sales and profits depend upon the U.S. Government and its allied governments. Any such privatization of the ‘Defense’ industry, in America or any other country — treating its military operations so as to produce profits for investors (investors in mass-murder) — thus guarantees that the national-security function will be heavily loaded with lobbying and graft, because the military industry’s entire market is to one’s own government and to its allied governments: it’s not a consumer market, but a government one. Thus, privatized military suppliers grow virtually to own their government; democracy consequently becomes impossible in such nations. And, one outcome from that is the uninterpretable financial reports by America’s government, regarding ‘Defense’.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or example, probably fewer than 1% of Americans have even been informed by the press as to what the currently authorized annual federal spending for the ‘Defense’ Department is. When the Washington Post, on 23 March 2018, reported their main story about the FY 2018 federal spending authorizations (“In late-night drama, Senate passes $1.3 trillion spending bill, averting government shutdown”), the figure for the ‘Defense’ Department was buried inconspicuously in a 52-word passage within that 1,600-word ‘news’-report, which was otherwise loaded with distractive trivia. This buried passage was: “The legislation funds the federal government for the remainder of the 2018 budget year, through Sept. 30, directing $700 billion toward the military and $591 billion to domestic agencies. The military spending is a $66 billion increase over the 2017 level, and the nondefense spending is $52 billion more than last year.” That’s all. For readers interested in knowing more, it linked to their 2,200-word article, “Here’s what Congress is stuffing into its $1.3 trillion spending bill”, and all that it said about the military portion of the new budget was the 27-word passage, “defense spending generally favored by Republicans is set to jump $80 billion over previously authorized spending levels, while domestic spending favored by Democrats rises by $63 billion.” Though 23 categories of federal spending were sub-headed and summarized individually in that article, ‘Defense’ wasn’t one of them. Nothing about the budget for the U.S. Department of ‘Defense’ — which consumes more than half of the entire budget — was mentioned. However, the reality was that, as Defense News reported it, on 7 February 2018 — and these figures were unchanged in the bill that President Trump finally signed on March 23rd — “Senate leaders have reached a two-year deal that would set defense spending at $700 billion for 2018 and $716 billion for 2019.” This year’s $700 billion Pentagon budget thus is 54% of the entire $1.3 trillion FY 2018 U.S. federal budget. Another article in Defense News on that same day, February 7th, noted that, “‘I’d rather we didn’t have to do as much on non-defense, but this is an absolute necessity, that we’ve got these numbers,’ said the Senate Armed Services Committee’s No. 2 Republican, Sen. Jim Inhofe, of Oklahoma.” So: 54% of the federal budget wasn’t high enough a percentage to suit that Senator; he wanted yet more taken out of non-‘defense’. How can people (other than stockholders in corporations such as Raytheon) vote for such a person? Deceit has to be part of the answer.

Using similar percentages to those that were employed by Higgs and by Hellman, the current U.S. annual military expenditure is in the neighborhood of $1.5 trillion. But that’s more than the total authorized federal spending for all departments. Where can the extra funds be coming from? On 5 February 2018, CNBC bannered “The Treasury is set to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year”. Then, charts were presented on 10 May 2018 by Dr. Edward Yardeni, headlined “U.S. Government Finance: Debt”, in which is shown that the U.S. federal debt is soaring at around a trillion dollars annually; so, that extra money comes from additions to the federal debt. Future generations of U.S. taxpayers will be paying the price for the profligacy of today’s U.S. aristocracy, who receive all the benefits from this scam off the public, and especially off those future generations. But the far bigger losses are felt abroad, in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, where the targets will be suffering the consequences of America’s invasions and coups.

Notwithstanding its pervasive corruption and enormous uncounted waste, the U.S. military is, by far, the U.S. institution that is respected above all others by the American people. A great deal of domestic propaganda is necessary in order to keep it that way. With so many trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for, it’s do-able. All that’s needed is a tiny percentage of the huge graft to be devoted to funding the operation’s enormous PR for ‘patriotism’. And this treasonous operation has been sustainable, and very successful (for its ultimate beneficiaries), that way, in the U.S., at least for decades.

I have previously explained why specifically military corruption has come to take over the U.S. Government, but not certain other governments. And the result of its having done so has by now become obvious to people all around the world, except in the United States itself. Furthermore, ever since the first poll was taken on that matter, in 2013, which showed that globally the U.S. was viewed as the biggest national threat to peace in the world, a subsequent poll, in 2017, which unfortunately was taken in fewer countries, showed that this negative impression of the U.S. Government, by the peoples in those fewer countries, had actually increased there during the four intervening years. So: not only is the situation in the U.S. terrible, but the trend in the U.S. appears to be in the direction of even worse. America’s military-industrial complex can buy a glittering ‘patriotic’ image amongst its own public, but America’s image abroad will only become uglier, because the world-at-large dislikes a country that’s addicted to the perpetration of invasions and coups. Just as bullies are feared and disliked, so too are bully-nations. Even if the given bully-aristocracy becomes constantly enriched by their operation, economies throughout the world suffer such an aristocracy, as being an enormous burden; and, unfortunately, the American public will get the blame, not America’s aristocracy — which is the real beneficiary of the entire operation. This deflection of blame, onto the suckered public, precludes any effective response from the publics abroad, such as boycotts of U.S.-branded products and services might be. Instead, American tourists abroad become increasingly perceived as ‘the ugly American’. The restored ‘Cold War’ — this time with no ideological excuse (such as communism) whatsoever — could produce a much stronger global tarnishing of America’s global reputation. The beneficiaries, apparently, just don’t care.

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Trump Welshes on the ‘Iran Deal.’ Why (2)?

Being an abridged version of: https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-End-of-the-Iran-Deal-by-Steven-Jonas-Hezbollah_IRAN-NO-NUKES_Iran_Iran-Embargo-180508-216.html, published on May 8, 2018.

Middle Eastern affairs interventions, they could attempt to open negotiations on them.

Trump announces US withdrawal from Iran deal—a cascade of smug lies, and loads of rancid repugnant exceptionalism, as usual. The man who really knows nothing has an opinion on everything.

However, for quite some time I have not thought that it’s any real concern with those sorts of issues. If it were, the easiest thing to do first would be to attempt to re-open negotiations while, in order to establish bona fides, leaving the current deal in place. Rather, I had been thinking that it was primarily about the “foreign-policy-by-campaign-promise to appeal to the xenophobic/Islamophobic base.” However, the real reason behind the move beyond the blanatly political one — that is Trump’s primary motive for doing what he has done — has now become became abundantly clear. I heard it first articulated by none other than the former financier/PR-man/Trump’s-communications-director-for-a-minute Anthony Scaramucci.

Hardly an expert, or even half-an-expert, on foreign policy in general and the highly complex Middle East region in particular, the Mooch made it clear that that real reason behind the move is “regime change” (which, by the time this version of my original column is appearing, has become abundantly clear). Yes, the real reason why Trump welched on the deal (as he seems to have done so many times in his “business” career), that is maintaining/reinstating/increasing the sanctions on Iran, is to try to make life so unpleasant for the majority of Iranians that they will somehow get rid of the Mullahs and install, hopefully for him, another right-wing, but this time pro-U.S. right-wing, government. One can only surmise what such a government — sort of like that under the original U.S. Iranian puppet ruler, the Shah, — would achieve for major U.S. Middle East goals. And so, here is a list of the real (mainly unstated) ultimate goals of the Trumpite policy towards Iran.

They are:
1. Let the U.S. take charge of its oil industry.
2. End Iranian support for groups like Hezbollah that are hoping to end the gradual Israeli policy for taking over the whole of what the Israeli Right describes as Greater Israel (and in the process ejecting all of the Palestinian Arabs to who knows where).
3. Get Iran out of the way of the ambitions of the Saudis to become THE power in the Middle East, in the process crushing the anti-Saudi/Sunni Shiites wherever they may be found.
Trump like that sort of thing).
5. Further strengthen the dominance of Netanyahu/Likud in Israel.
6. End Iranian support for the Taliban (which is so ironic, because at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranians adopted an anti-Taliban policy).
7. Severely reduce Chinese access to Iranian oil.
8. Russia being an ally of Iran, reduce the Russian presence in the Middle East, particularly as an ally of Assad in Syria, and possibly get them turfed out of their Syrian Mediterranean ports at Tartus and Latakia.
9. Make the Persian Gulf the sixth U.S. Great Lake. 10. And I am sure that there are other reasons as well.

As for negative consequences for the United States, there are many, of course, being covered by many U.S. observers, even (conventional) right-wing ones like Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations (“Morning Joe,” 5/9/18). Also, ironically, with the accompanying rising oil prices, Russia will benefit (although maybe that’s one thing Trump had in mind, if he can think that far ahead). But one that I haven’t heard mentioned yet is that it might lead to major changes in the international banking system, led perhaps by China, holder of one trillion dollars or so of U.S. debt, so as to get out from under the secondary sanctions that Trump intends to impose on any country still dealing with Iran. Citi/Chase/Wells Fargo and the banks of Great Britain and the E.U. don’t like them too much (to put it mildly). (On a side note, do you think that Trump’s sudden reversal on ZTE has anything to do with that debt package, huh?)

As to the supposed “concerns” of the Trumpites about Iran, let’s start with ballistic missiles. (You mean like the ones Israel likely already has, except that theirs are already nuclear-tipped?) A minor concern. The U.S. has tons of them. Iranian nukes? That program has been ended, so that cannot be a U.S. concern. Iranian “interference” in the Middle East (which is a joke complaint coming from the U.S.)? Well yes, that would be ended by “regime change” of the type the U.S. will try to arrange, first by totally crippling the Iranian economy. And so, and so forth.

About the Author

The Planetary Movement; a contributor to the “Writing for Godot” section of Reader Supported News; and a contributor to From The G-Man. Furthermore, he is an occasional contributor to BuzzFlash Commentary Headlines and The Harder Stuff. He is also a triathlete (34 seasons, 250 multi-sport races).

Dr. Jonas’ latest book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Brewster, NY: Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016, available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon). His most recent book on US politics is The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, Brewster, NY), and available on Amazon. This book is currently being serialized on OpEdNews, a project that will likely continue throughout the 2017 calendar year.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Parting shot—a word from the editors

The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";

On U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism

Dateline: May 14, 2018

Photo: Keeping markets open and free.

(Image by U.S. Department of Defense Current Photos) Permission Details DMCA]

If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19^th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.

For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. It subjugates small countries, corrupts them by backing right-wing dictators, and enables death squads to commit mass murder of all suspected dissidents. During the First Cold War leftists, anti-colonialists, nationalists and intellectuals were called “communists” and imprisoned, tortured and executed. Now they are called “terrorists”.

The foreign policy interests of the U.S. are to promote the neocolonial interests of U.S. corporations, and to project the financial and military power of the U.S. internationally. If the U.S. cannot bully a head of state into collaborating then it backs a military coup d’etat, stirs up internal violence with divide and conquer strategies, and covertly uses mercenaries to start civil wars. If all else fails it will find a pretext or a false flag to invade and overthrow an unfriendly government.

Because of past disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq the U.S. is hesitant to commit large numbers of U.S. boots on the ground. Instead it prefers the safety of “boots in the sky” with its domination of air power to bomb helpless countries into submission. If it cannot get a country to submit then it destroys it mercilessly as an example of the price that other countries will pay if they do not go along to get along with the U.S.A. The U.S. never gives up on its quest for control of worldwide capitalism. Any doubters of U.S. persistence need only to look to North Korea, Cuba and Iran.

U.S. foreign policy is the domain of the elites. The public busies itself with domestic issues, just trying to make a living and raise a family. Sometimes the elites of foreign policy let their masks slip to reveal their true nature. When Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 2009 that “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people” he was not just intellectualizing, as if teaching a Harvard course on political science. Brzezinski was admitting to his personal responsibility for policies that have killed millions of people.

Photo: Brzezinski with First Lady Rosalynn Carter and President Jimmy Carter. (Image by CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies)

It was Brzezinski that advised President Jimmy Carter to destabilize Afghanistan in the 1980’s. At the time Afghanistan’s communist government was modernizing the country, developing its economy, educating its people, and improving the standard of living for millions of Afghans. It was also advancing the rights and opportunities for women, which the U.S. is constantly touting as one of its cherished human rights concerns. It was Brzezinski’s destabilization project that set women’s rights back hundreds of years in Afghanistan. When human rights get in the way of U.S. foreign policy objectives, then human rights lose.

In 1979 Brzezinski advised Carter to secretly authorize the CIA to give financial and military aid to further inflame Islamic fanatic mujahideen that were violently opposed to modernization. When the Soviet Union intervened militarily in support of the threatened Afghan government it was not an invasion. It was the legal response of Russia to a neighboring country that was asking for military aid against foreign backed insurgents. Today we see a similar Russian military assistance program in Syria for similar reasons against very similar villains.

Carter feigned indignation and outrage towards Russia and he put the freeze back into the Cold War. He decried the “invasion as a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people”, and Carter claimed it was a Russian plot to control Afghanistan’s oil. Carter declared a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics to punish Russia, and by doing so he dashed the dreams of U.S. athletes that had been training for 4 years in preparation for the Olympic Games. A good time was had by all in Moscow without the U.S. participation. U.S. athletes were sacrificed as pawns in Brzezinski’s game of the Grand Chessboard. It is a blood soaked chessboard where the masters see flesh and blood people as objects to be toyed with.

What Brzezinski and Carter did was to set a trap that the Soviets fell into when they sent their military into Afghanistan. The trap had been laid before the Russian “invasion”, and not afterwards as Brzezinski would brag years later in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur:

“Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Carter and Brzezinski were overjoyed that the U.S. would then have the sweet revenge of giving Russia a bloody Vietnam experience. Carter and Brzezinski gave Afghanistan a Vietnam experience too, in which millions of people were destroyed.

Once events in Afghanistan were set into motion, then Carter and Brzezinski added gasoline to the inflamed Islamic fanatics with billions of dollars in U.S. military support funneled through Pakistan. Thousands of mercenaries from Arab countries poured into Afghanistan to join the fight and get paid too. They were called “Afghan-Arabs”. The Brzezinski-Carter scheme would be continued under President Reagan and led to the destruction of Afghanistan, the re-subjugation of Afghan women, and millions of Afghan civilian victims of war. Afghanistan never recovered but from its ashes rose up the Taliban and al Qaeda. The mysteries surrounding the attacks on the U.S. of September 11^th 2001 are unresolved. Regardless of whodunit the attacks of 9/11 would be used as justification by President W. Bush to launch another invasion of Afghanistan.

Brzezinski’s egotism to show how smart he thought he was is the smoking gun of George Orwell’s famous quote:

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

For decades the U.S. pretended that the false narrative of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was reality. The U.S. glorified the mujahideen as freedom fighters, when actually they were Islamic fanatics and mercenary proxies used by the U.S. and its coconspirators. The U.S. and the Saudis funded a heavily armed brand of Islamic terrorism that the U.S. though that it could control, ignore or kill off once it was no longer needed.

As Brzezinski also said in that Le Nouvel Observateur interview:

“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

The U.S. thought that it had found the “silver bullet” to destroy all of its enemies and control West Asia with “stirred-up Muslims”. With the illusion of such power the U.S. fed its addiction to regime change projects using Islamic mercenaries. As Brzezinski said, controlling people is difficult. The result of regime change projects has been chaos. For the U.S. chaos is an opportunity. It is of no concern for the elites that chaos costs millions of people in the world to suffer.

Today the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria can be laid posthumously at the feet of Brzezinski. Carter has escaped public blame and he still teaches Sunday School as the Nobel Peace Prize president. Brzezinski was so good at killing millions of people that he went on to advising another Peace Prize president how to do it. President Obama called Brzezinski “one of our most outstanding thinkers”. Obama picked up the killing where W. Bush left off.

Killing millions of people instead of trying to control them is the model for asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is when the U.S. destroys a small country that has a limited ability to defend itself and cannot strike back. The tools of the trade are the CIA, air power, missiles, drones and mercenaries.

The U.S. public has become immune to its government killing millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Arabs, as long as it does not interrupt with the public’s busy daily lives. The opportunity costs to the American people is costing them universal healthcare, affordable higher education, modern mass transportation, modern infrastructure and economic security in old age; but the public does not seem to notice, and cannot connect the dots. They still think that the U.S. has the highest standard of living in the world. The reality is that the U.S. comes in at about 19^thon everything from the infant mortality rate to high speed internet; except military spending and political prisoners at which the U.S. is number one.

[Photo: John Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence.(Image by cizauskas)

How did the U.S. fall so low when it started with such high hopes on July 4^th 1776 with the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?

Those words never really meant what most Americans think they mean. American capitalism is a hierarchical based class society. Property bestows more rights and privileges on the top of the pyramid of wealth. The Founding Documents of the U.S.A. were written by the elites, for the elites and for future elites in the lottery of capitalism American-style. By “Life” is meant for those that can afford the necessities and luxuries of life. “Liberty” is the liberty to close off the commons from the natives and those that do not own property. “Happiness” is the happiness that comes with owning slaves, and finding foreign sources of cheap labor.

As the greed for more and more land, more slaves and more wealth grew, the elites declared that it was Manifest Destiny for them to spread capitalism and the American way of life across all of North America. It was then that Asia’s destiny became America’s destiny. When the U.S. boundary met the Pacific Ocean the U.S. did not stop its Westward expansion. It kept on going to Hawaii, Japan, China and Korea. The U.S. joined the European scramble for overseas colonies and empire.

Photo: Capitalism Kills Democracy Community + Family. (Image by Jagz Mario)

Capitalism must expand to survive. Adam Smith’s quaint form of capitalism was based on bartering. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker traded their products with each other providing all with meat, bread and light. Modern capitalism American-style is based on money, and money is based on debt. Debt requires that interest be paid by the borrower to the lender, thus syphoning off capital from the capitalist to the financier. The capitalist must expand production and find sources of cheap labor to pay the interest and to skim a profit too. Expanding production means that more and more natural resources are needed. To produce more requires even cheaper labor and automation. To sell an ever increasing amount of finished products of capitalism requires advertising and expanding to foreign markets. If any link in the chain is broken then the Ponzi scheme of capitalism collapses into an economic depression.

Economic depressions cause social unrest, civil disturbances and class conflict. When the social hierarchy of capitalism is shaken by economic depression, then capitalism must restore order either with violent repression or appeasement by redistributing some of the wealth to reduce tension. The first instinct of the capitalists is to resort to violence and repression to preserve their wealth. That is why capitalism and true democracy cannot coexist. One or the other has to give or the system is in danger of breaking down entirely.

Photo: Pinochet – Moneda. (Image by fpealvarez)

The natural political order for capitalism is right-wing dictatorship, martial law and fascism. Only by continuous expansion, imperialism and the exploitation of others can there be a compromise between capitalism and democracy domestically. When U.S. presidents say that the “American Way of Life” is being threatened by enemies what they mean is that small countries resist being subjugated and exploited by the U.S. Empire.

When the U.S. first began to expand beyond the shores of the Pacific Ocean they were met with rejection. Ancient societies such as in Japan, Korea and China had civilizations with thousands of years of history. They had their own social order, their way of life and they were self-sufficient. They told the U.S. capitalists to go away. Such behavior by Asians was intolerable to the U.S. capitalist and merchant classes who wanted to sell their excess production and make trading profits. The U.S. was outraged that Asians, whom the white supremacists Euro-Americans saw as being non-Christian barbarians and inferior humans, would act so superior as to refuse to buy and sell with U.S. traders. How was the U.S. to expand trade when it was met with such ‘insolence’? The answer that came naturally was to send in the navy with gunboats and the marines with bayonets to subjugate the ‘insolent barbarians’ to either open up to trade or have their cities bombarded with cannon balls and burnt to the ground.

The “West was won” with genocide of the Native Americans, and if genocide was needed to subjugate Asia, then the U.S. would use it, and it did. The U.S. continued its killing spree in the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. The U.S. considers the Pacific Ocean a U.S. lake. (The Caribbean is of course an American Lake, too, right in its backyard.)

The U.S. is still trying to control the world with cannon balls. The cannon balls keep getting bigger, more technologically complex and more genocidal. The U.S. cannot accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries to, the more destruction, death and chaos it causes. Instead of creating world order the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth is drained off by military expenditures and maintaining a foreign empire.

Vladimir Lenin explained how today’s U.S. foreign policy works in his 1917 thesis on the causes of World War One: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism“. Capitalism leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to imperialism and imperialism leads to war. Capitalism also leads to inequality. Inequality and democracy cannot coexist forever because there are limits to expansion and growth. To preserve inequality requires fascism and a police state. Democracy can only thrive if there is more equality. Eventually, choices will be made between fascism or democracy, and between capitalism or something else?

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

About the author

David William Pear
This article was first published at OpEdNews. It is the original work of David William Pear. There is no copyright, and it is available free to any publication in the world that wants to publish it in any language. Editing is permitted for spelling errors, grammatical errors, to fit the space of the publication or any other purpose except to change the intended meaning of the article. You may change the title. You may use the suggested graphics, your own or none. Please share and distribute widely. Thank you. My contact email is dwpear521@gmail.com].

[Photo: David William Pear, during anti-war speech, steps of City Hall, St. Petersburg, FL.]

David is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement.

In 2017 David spent 3 weeks in South Korea researching the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. In 2016 David spent 10 weeks in Palestine with the Palestinian lead non-violent resistance group International Solidarity Movement. In February of 2015 he was part of a people-to-people delegation to Cuba with CodePink. In November of 2015 he was a delegate with CodePink to Palestine to show solidarity with Palestinians. David frequently makes people-to-people trips to Russia as a private citizen. David returned to Palestine for 10 days in March 2018.

CARE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT DAVID?

Click on this bar

David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University to receive his Certified Financial Planner certification. He also attended courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for his certification as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA). He has volunteered for public health service, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, emergency medicine and needs of the homeless. His hobbies include boating, fishing and motorcycle touring. He is also a licensed skydiver (USPA-inactive).

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005615508769&view

Israel marks 70th anniversary amid war crimes and deepening social crisis

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By Bill Van Auken

Israel today marks the 70th anniversary of the declaration establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, which coincided with the end of the British mandate established following the defeat of the Ottoman empire in World War I.

This year, the anniversary will be marked by Israeli troops shooting Palestinian demonstrators on the Gaza border and stoking up war fever against Iran.

The anniversary will be overshadowed by the formal opening of a new US embassy in Jerusalem, a violation of international law ordered by the Trump administration that has put a final nail into the coffin of the so-called “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians and the illusion of a “two-state solution.”

It will also be the occasion for another round of bloodshed at the heavily militarized Gaza security fence, where for over six weeks thousands of Palestinians have demonstrated in what has been declared the “Great March of Return.” Over this period, some 50 demonstrators had been killed, and many thousands wounded, as the Israel Defense Forces have been given shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed protesters. On Monday, Israeli forces killed a further 37 demonstrators, and injured more than 500.

The protests are bound up with the origins of the state of Israel and their historical consequences. The demonstrators are demanding their right of return to the homes and villages from which they were expelled 70 years ago in what Palestinians refer to as the Naqba, or catastrophe. Some quarter of a million Palestinians were driven from their land through a systematic campaign of terrorism and intimidation, a gigantic act of “ethnic cleansing” designed to carve out a Jewish state based on race and religion.

The actions of Washington, both the transfer of its embassy to Jerusalem and the ripping up of the nuclear agreement between the major world powers and Iran, have been celebrated by the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They have given this regime what amounts to a green light to both redouble the violent suppression of the Palestinian people and to launch military attacks in Syria that are aimed at provoking a confrontation with Iran that could spiral into a catastrophic region-wide conflagration.

While major events like wars are largely determined by historical forces beyond the control of a single individual, the timing and details can often be the work of individual leaders. In that sense, just as the world would have been immensely better off if Hitler had never lived, so it is with Benjamin Netanyahu, the current rightwing zealot at the helm of Israel's destiny.

Israel’s rulers are deliberately whipping up war fever as a means of directing outward the immense social tensions building up within Israeli society and diverting attention from the series of corruption scandals that have implicated the entire political establishment, from Netanyahu on down.

Given the events unfolding today, the criminal celebration by US and Israeli officials of the embassy move, and the new round of carnage on the Gaza-Israel border, there will be little attention paid to the great world historical questions bound up with Israel’s origins and development, which are inextricably tied to the fate of the working class in the 20th century and the historic crisis of revolutionary leadership.

It was to these essential historical questions that the World Socialist Web Site pointed in 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel.

“Within Israel’s birth and evolution are concentrated the great unresolved contradictions of the 20th century. Its essential origins lie in one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, the Nazi Holocaust. The extermination of six million European Jews was, in turn, the terrible price paid for the crisis of the working class movement brought on by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Stalinism’s crimes and its domination over the workers movement prevented the working class from putting an end to the crisis-ridden capitalist system, which found in fascism its last line of defense.

“The defeats of the working class, the crimes of Stalinism and the horrors of the Holocaust created the historical conditions for Israel’s creation and the Zionist movement’s largely successful attempt, aided both by US imperialism and Stalinism, to equate Zionism with world Jewry. It was a movement and a state founded ultimately on discouragement and despair. Stalinism’s betrayals produced disillusionment in the socialist alternative that had exercised such a powerful appeal to Jewish working people all over the world. The crimes of German fascism were presented as the ultimate proof that it was impossible to vanquish anti-Semitism in Europe or anywhere else. Zionism’s answer was to get a state and an army and beat the historical oppressors of the Jewish people at their own game.

“The tragic irony of this supposed solution is Israel’s association of the Jewish people—traditionally and historically connected with the struggle for tolerance and freedom—with the brutal suppression of another oppressed population.”

In the 20 years since the publication of the 1998 statement by the WSWS, the malignant contradictions within Israeli society have only deepened. The number of inhabitants in the illegal Zionist settlements in the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war—the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights—has risen from 160,000 to over 600,000.

While Israel withdrew its troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip, it remains an occupied territory, effectively an open-air prison over which Tel Aviv exercises direct control in terms of borders, air and maritime space, while dictating the conditions of mass unemployment and poverty in a territory whose average income is roughly equivalent to that of Congo. The IDF has launched repeated wars against the territory that have claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, while devastating essential infrastructure. This near-genocidal campaign continues to this day with the slaughter of demonstrators on the Gaza border.

Real wages have been falling steadily since 2000 in the West Bank under the nominal rule of the Palestinian Authority, which has functioned as an auxiliary police force for the Israeli occupation, while enriching a thin layer of corrupt PLO officials and businessmen.

Within Israel itself, which ranks second only to the United States as the most socially unequal member nation of the OECD, and where the poverty rate stands at 22 percent—55 percent for Israeli Palestinians and one third for the country’s children—class tensions are growing.

Israeli dock workers ended a three-day strike Sunday under a court back-to-work order after shutting down the ports of Eilat, Haifa and Ashdod. Last December saw a nationwide strike against the decision of the generic pharmaceutical giant Teva to lay off a quarter of its workforce, and municipal workers in Jerusalem staged a walkout in January, blocking access to the Knesset with garbage trucks, over threatened mass layoffs and failure to receive their wages.

Seventy years after the founding of the state of Israel, it is now clearer than ever that there is no national solution to problems confronting any section of the working class across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Only the unification of Jewish and Arab workers across the region on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program can provide a way out of today’s bloody and increasingly dangerous impasse.

—Bill Van Auken .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is a senior editor with wsws.org, a Marxian publication. As usual we take exception to the author's Trotskyist characterisation of Stalin and his role in history.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

Anti-Imperialists Coming In First And Second in Iraq’s Election Iraqi Communist Party & Moqtada al-Sadr Coalition Projected Winner

May 12 Elections in Iraq Communists in Coalition With Shia Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr

America Spends About Half of World’s Military Expenditures

Trump Welshes on the ‘Iran Deal.’ Why (2)?

On U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism

Dateline: May 14, 2018

Israel marks 70th anniversary amid war crimes and deepening social crisis

May 12 Elections in Iraq
Communists in Coalition With Shia Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr