Rebels of the world

US steps up pressure on India to wrap-up Indo-US nuclear treaty

2008-03-08T20:07:00.000+05:30

By Arun Kumar and Kranti Kumara

With less than a year remaining in the Bush administration’s term in office, the US political establishment is showing increasing signs of anxiety about the progress India has made in finalizing the Indo-US civilian nuclear treaty. Both senior Republicans and Democrats have hailed the treaty as the cornerstone of an Indo-US “strategic” and “global” partnership.
The Telegraph, a Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) daily, reported on February 10 the mood in the US government as follows: “Ending weeks of silence on the Indo-US nuclear deal, America’s pointmen on the nuclear issue in both Washington and New Delhi today launched a concerted, two-pronged effort to get India to pursue the deal without further delay.”
The “pointmen” the article was referring to are US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who led the US team in its negotiations with India’s Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government, and the US ambassador to India, David Mulford.
“We don’t have all the time in the world, particularly since this is an election year... and so we hope very much that this process can now be expedited,” stated Burns.
Mulford was even blunter. During an interview on Indian television he said that if the nuclear treaty is “not processed in the present (US) Congress it is unlikely that this deal will be offered again to India. It certainly would not be revived and offered by any administration, Democratic or Republican” before 2010.
The following week a delegation of three influential US senators—2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, and Republican Foreign Relations Committee member Chuck Hagel—brought the same message to India. “If you don’t soon conclude the deal, the [upcoming presidential] elections in the US will have a bearing on the legislative clock,” said Biden.
The senators urged New Delhi to conclude mandatory agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group no later than the beginning of June, so as to enable the US Congress to ratify the Indo-US nuclear treaty by July. After then, they claimed, the US presidential election campaign will effectively paralyze congressional legislative action.
The UPA government has encountered many obstacles in negotiating a “safeguard” agreement with the IAEA. For months, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front, which has been sustaining the UPA government in power since May 2004, opposed the opening of talks with the IAEA. And while last November the Stalinists did finally allow the UPA government to initiate negotiations with the IAEA, they continue to say that they will bring down the government should it implement the treaty, because the treaty would entangle India in Washington’s predatory foreign policy.
Negotiations with the IAEA have also proven difficult. Despite four rounds of negotiations with the IAEA, New Delhi has been unable to conclude an agreement.
Once a deal with the IAEA is reached India will still have to negotiate a waiver from the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), before it will be allowed to partake in nuclear trade. The NSG’s support is by no means guaranteed, since allowing India to engage in nuclear trade would give it special status within the world nuclear regulatory regime as a state that obtained nuclear weapons in defiance of the five “recognized nuclear powers” and continues to refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The US senators warned that if the Indo-US civil nuclear deal is not consummated, it will impact negatively on the Indo-US relations. “If the US is not able to ratify [the treaty],” said Biden, “it might be interpreted as rejection and lack of trust in India and that will be a shame because we want to tell you that we trust India and we value this relationship very much.”
Following on the senators’ heels, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in India February 27 for a two-day visit and promptly exerted still more pressure on the Indian government. “The clock,” said Gates, “is ticking in terms of how much time is available to get all the different aspects of an agreement implemented.”
Denying that he was interfering in the internal politics of India, Gates declared that the civilian nuclear cooperation deal “serves the best interests of both countries” and would have “positive global consequences.”
From the standpoint of US imperialism, the “positive” global consequences of the Indo-US nuclear deal would be:
* The forging of a strategic relationship with India, through which the US would be well-placed to transform India into a junior partner and ensnare the country in its imperialist geo-political designs in Asia, including domination of Mid-East oil and gas reserves; recruiting India into an anti-Iran alliance; checkmating Russia in Central Asia; and, most importantly, combating China’s growing influence.
* The opening up to US arms and weapons-systems manufacturers of the huge Indian
market for weapons, till now dominated by Russia. Penetrating this market would not only allow the US military-industrial complex to rake in huge profits, but would also have the added benefit of tying India even more tightly to US foreign policy interests by making the Indian military dependent upon the US for parts.
* To position US energy companies to garner a large share of the tens of billions of dollars India plans to spend in the coming decades on civilian nuclear technology and reactors.
Despite the threats of the Stalinist Left-Front to bring down the Congress-led UPA, there is every indication that Congress Party leaders will forge ahead with the deal, for they believe it offers India great benefits. It would end the more than three decades-old US-led international embargo on nuclear trade with India. It would provide de facto recognition of India as nuclear-weapons state and allow India to concentrate more of the resources of its indigenous nuclear program on developing its nuclear arsenal. In pursuing the deal, Washington has made clear that it recognizes India’s aspirations to be a world power and that it has jettisoned any conception of Indo-Pakistani “parity.”
As for the US’s plans to use the deal to bring India into its geo-political orbit, the Indian government and much of India’s geo-political-military establishment harbors the belief, or at least the hope, that India will be able to offset US pressure by simultaneously pursuing close relations with China and Russia, as well as the European Union and Japan.
On February 26, The Telegraph published an article entitled “Countdown to nuke D-Day after budget” that reported the political designs of the Congress-led UPA as follows: “The core of the Manmohan Singh government has resolved that it would cement an Indo-US strategic partnership before the end of its term, trashing opposition from Left parties and reservations about the Indo-US nuclear deal among some constituents of the UPA.”
The Congress-led UPA, in keeping with its plans to challenge the Left Front over the nuclear issue, last week presented a populist “election” budget that boosted spending on health care and education and offered debt relief to 40 million poor farmers.
India’s corporate elite is also strongly supportive of the UPA pressing forward with the nuclear deal with the US. The Times of India published an editorial February 22 entitled “We Won’t Get A Better Deal.”
The Times editorial lauded the “far -reaching changes in US-India relations” during George W. Bush’s presidency. “Whatever the international criticism of President George Bush, his presidency will be regarded as a period of far-reaching changes in US-India relations. The Bush presidency saw a historic delinking of US relations with India from those with Pakistan. ...
“[The US] has sought to complement rather than complicate our efforts to improve relations with neighbours like Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
“Bush is the first US president to declare the importance of India in safeguarding the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean and in ‘creating a strategically stable Asia.’ US technology sanctions against India have been eased in the recent past.
“Outsourcing has grown unhindered. Finally, the nuclear agreement of July 2005 has provided a window of opportunity to end the international nuclear sanctions India has faced for over three decades now.”
The editorial went on to harshly criticize the Stalinist Communist Part of India (Marxist) or CPM, accusing it of doing China’s bidding in opposing the nuclear deal with the US. “There seems to be a striking similarity,” said the Times of India, “between the rhetoric of our communist parties and Chinese statements on the issue. Like the Chinese, our communist parties are opposed to India acquiring or possessing nuclear weapons, despite continuing Chinese assistance to the nuclear weapons and missile programmes of Pakistan.”
The reality is that the CPM is a vital prop of the Indian bourgeois state. In opposing the nuclear treaty with the US, it urges the Indian bourgeoisie, in keeping with its traditional “non-aligned” foreign policy, to forge closer relations with Russia and China, so as to promote a “multi-polar” world.
The Congress-led UPA government, in tandem with its burgeoning partnership with the US, has been continuing the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) policy of pursuing closer relations with Israel. Israel is now India’s second largest arms supplier; on January 21 India launched an Israeli spy satellite aboard an Indian rocket despite strenuous protests from Iran.
While India has long had close relations with Teheran, since 2005 it has twice buckled under US pressure and voted against Iran at the IAEA. As a result of Washington’s opposition, India has also dragged its feet on concluding negotiations with Teheran on a pipeline project that would bring Iranian natural gas to India via Pakistan.
Taking advantage of India’s vacillation, the Chinese government has wasted no time in informing Iran that it would be willing to take India’s place as the third partner in the proposed pipeline project. Thus the Iranian-Pakistani-Indian pipeline, which was meant to underpin the Indo-Pakistani peace process, could well mutate into an Iranian-Pakistani-Chinese pipeline.
Given the immense difficulty and opposition facing the Indo-US nuclear deal both domestically and internationally, it is entirely possible that the Indian elite could ultimately find itself losing both the nuclear agreement and the Iranian gas pipeline deal.
In any event, as the mounting US pressure for the nuclear deal demonstrates, India—in lockstep with its integration into the world capitalist economy and resulting “rise”—is increasingly being drawn into the struggle amongst the great powers for resources, markets, and military-strategic advantage.

US: 63,000 jobs lost as economy continues downslide

2008-03-08T20:03:00.000+05:30

By Patrick Martin
Total US employment fell by 63,000 jobs in February, the second consecutive monthly decline and worst showing in five years, according to a Labor Department report released Monday. The figure demonstrates that the recession in the US economy is worsening and that the corporate onslaught against the jobs and living standards of working people will intensify.
The stock market plunged 147 points, following Thursday’s drop of 215 points, in a decline that has taken the Dow-Jones Industrial Average to well below the 12,000 mark. The New York Stock Exchange closed at 11,893.69, its lowest point in nearly two years, and more than 2,100 points down from the peak last October 11. The total losses on all stocks traded are approaching three trillion dollars in less than five months.
The wave of selling was fueled by the jobs report, although Wall Street frequently celebrates such indicators of job market distress because rising unemployment dampens wage demands and business costs and makes it possible for the Fed to cut interest rates without sparking inflation.
In the current context, however, such concerns are dwarfed by the fear that rising unemployment will trigger a further wave of defaults on mortgages, credit cards and other consumer debt, exacerbating the credit crisis that has unfolded over the past eight months since the crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market erupted. Moreover, inflation is raging, symbolized by the soaring price of oil, over $106 a barrel in trading Friday, and the price of gold, now approaching $1,000 an ounce.
To be blunt, what Wall Street fears now is not a recession—it is already widely accepted that the US economy slipped into recession last fall—but the collapse of major financial institutions and market dislocations which could set the stage for a full-scale worldwide depression, of a kind not seen since the 1930s.
In an effort to stave off the wave of selling triggered by the jobs report, the Federal Reserve announced Friday that it would make $100 billion in new credit available to major banks this month, on top of $160 billion in short-term loans it has extended in occasional auctions since December. The Fed also announced that it will increase the size of the short-term lending in auctions set for March 10 and March 24 from $30 billion to $50 billion apiece.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has already indicated that the central bank will likely cut interest rates again at the next meeting of its Open Market Committee, now set for March 18. The Fed has cut rates by 1.25 percent in the last two months (2.25 percent since October) in an increasingly desperate effort to stimulate the financial markets.
The job report was particularly jolting to financial markets because most economists had predicted a small rise in payrolls, with forecasts estimating the increase at 25,000 jobs. Some 52,000 net jobs were eliminated in manufacturing, as well as 39,000 net jobs in construction, on top of a loss of 25,000 jobs in January.
Despite these numbers, the official jobless rate actually declined slightly, from 4.9 percent to 4.8 percent, because 450,000 unemployed stopped looking for work in February and accordingly were excluded from the count, which is based on the number of people actively seeking jobs.
The Labor Department report also found that January’s net job losses were worse than initially reported, 22,000 compared to 17,000, meaning that 85,000 net jobs have been eliminated since the first of the year. The agency also cut in half its estimate of net job creation in December, from 82,000 to 41,000.
The US economy must generate an increase of 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep pace with population growth, so the figures reported mean that over the past three months job creation fell short of the number of workers seeking employment by nearly half a million jobs.
The top economic adviser to President Bush, Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told the press Friday that the US economy might actually shrink in the first quarter, the first time that any top official has admitted that the US growth rate would fall below zero. “We don’t really know whether it will be negative or not,” he told reporters. “We have definitely downgraded our forecast for this quarter.”
The official government definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of zero or negative growth, a figure increasingly likely for the first half of 2008. J.P. Morgan’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, told the Associated Press, “It is appropriate to characterize the US economy as having entered a recession in the first quarter.”
The jobs report was only one of a series of economic reports and market events that have shaken financial markets in the last few days. Particularly significant was the default by two major companies caught in the aftershocks of the mortgage crisis.
Thornburg Mortgage, the second-largest independent mortgage lender in the US, after Countrywide, revealed Wednesday that it was in default on $610 million in loans after failing to meet a margin call from one lender, J. P. Morgan. The company, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, said it would restate its 2007 financial results and take a charge of $428 million to reflect losses on adjustable-rate mortgages.
CEO Larry Goldstone issued a bitter statement Friday warning that the company might be unable to continue as a going concern, and declaring, “The panic that has gripped the mortgage financing market is irrational and has no basis in investment reality.”
Thornburg specializes in luxury homes and has relatively few sub-prime mortgages. Its margin calls began after the Swiss bank UBS announced a write-down February 14 on the value of $26.6 billion in “Alt-A” mortgages—higher-priced and higher value than sub-prime. Since then, Thornburg’s share price has been driven down from $11.54 to $1.22 Thursday.
On Thursday, Carlyle Capital, a subsidiary of the giant hedge fund Carlyle Group based in the British Channel Islands, said it had failed to meet margin calls from banks on $21.7 billion in mortgage-backed securities. The company was heavily engaged in purchasing mortgage-backed bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two huge government-sponsored institutions that underwrite much of the US home mortgage market. Carlyle Group is expected to provide credit to prevent a default of Carlyle Capital, but the crisis casts a shadow over the most important financial institutions in the US mortgage industry.
A report Thursday by the Federal Reserve showed that household net wealth fell for the first time in five years, dropping $532.9 billion, or 3.6 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2007. The collapse of real estate values accounted for a third of the decline, while the decline in financial assets accounted for nearly half.
The Fed report also found that for the first time since such records began in 1945, American homeowners owed more on their homes than they owned. Average net home equity dropped below 50 percent—a figure that is even more remarkable since one third of US homeowners have either paid off their mortgages or bought without a mortgage, and therefore have 100 percent equity.
Other figures reported include:
* An increase in the proportion of mortgages in foreclosure to 2.04 percent, an all-time high and nearly double the level of 1.19 percent a year ago. The proportion of loans either past due or in foreclosure hit 7.9 percent in the fourth quarter, up from 6.1 percent a year earlier, and the highest since figures were first collected in 1979.
* A published estimate that mortgage losses would cost the banks $400 billion, about 40 percent of the $1 trillion in combined capital of all banks insured by the FDIC. Bank lending would be cut by $900 billion as a result.
* The Federal Reserve “beige book” report on business conditions in the United States, released Wednesday, found weak or no growth in 8 of 12 regions.
* Factory orders for January plunged 2.5 percent, according to the Commerce Department, while orders for durable goods fell more than 50 percent.
* Credit-card borrowing soared 7 percent in January, up from an increase of 2.8 percent in December, as consumers had to resort to charge cards to finance their expenses. Consumer debt overall rose 3.3 percent, nearly double the growth rate of 1.8 percent in December.
The reaction in official Washington to the dismal developments was a combination of imbecilic rhetoric and inadequate action. President Bush made a hastily organized appearance before television cameras to understate the obvious, admitting “It’s clear our economy has slowed,” and adding, “Losing a job is painful and I know Americans are concerned about our economy. So am I.”
Declaring, “our economy will prosper,” Bush touted the economic stimulus package approved by Congress last month at the instigation of the White House, although the size of the package, $168 billion, is less than one third of the decline in net worth of the fourth quarter, and entirely dwarfed by the trillions wiped out in the real estate collapse.
Bush urged taxpayers to buy consumer goods with their $600 or $1,200 rebates when they get them, which will not be until May or June, although surveys already predict that the vast majority will use the money to pay urgent bills.

World's Billionaires

2008-03-07T16:17:00.001+05:30

The World's Richest People

The number 13 has long been considered unlucky by superstitious people around the globe. How fitting, then, that Bill Gates' reign as the world's richest person ends after his 13th year at the top.
Despite being worth $58 billion, $2 billion more than last year, Gates is now just the world's third-richest person, ceding the top spot ranking to his good friend and partner in philanthropy, Warren Buffett, whose net worth jumped $10 billion to $62 billion. (All stock prices and net worth valuations were locked in on Feb. 11.) Ranked No. 2 is Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helú, whose fortune has doubled in just two years to $60 billion.
It is certainly a dawning of a new era. But not just because of Gates' fall. The 22nd annual rankings of the World's Billionaires reflects all sorts of upheavals in the list's makeup. Two years ago, half of the world's 20 richest were from the U.S. Now only four are. India wins bragging rights for having four among the top 10, more than any other country.
In Pictures: The World's Billionaires
By The Numbers: Race For Title Of World's Richest Man
In Pictures: Youngest Billionaires
For the first time ever, the number of billionaires Forbes could identify crossed into four figures, reaching 1,125. The total net worth of the group is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year. Despite the turbulence in the U.S. markets, Americans account for 42% of the world's billionaires and 37%, of the total wealth; those shares are down two and three percentage points, respectively, from last year.
Sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, with 87 billionaires, is the new No. 2 country behind the U.S., easily overtaking Germany, with 59 billionaires, which held the honor for six years.
The rankings include 226 newcomers. Seventy-seven of the new faces come from the U.S., half of whom made their fortunes in finance and investments, including John Paulson and Philip Falcone, both of whom became wealthy shorting subprime debt. Another third of the new billionaires comes from Russia (35), China (28) and India (19). Two of the most noteworthy new entrants are South Africa's Patrice Motsepe and Nigeria's Aliko Dangote, the first black Africans to make their debut among the world's richest. Dangote is also the first-ever Nigerian billionaire.
It is also a record-breaking year for young billionaires, with Forbes finding 50 under the age of 40, 25 of whom are new to the list. Sixty-eight percent of these under-age-40 tycoons built their 10-figure fortunes from scratch, including Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page; former Enron trader John Arnold, who now runs a hedge fund; India's Sameer Gehlaut, who started online brokerage Indiabulls; and, last but not least, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who at age 23 might just be the youngest self-made billionaire in history.
Zuckerberg is probably destined to be the most talked about newcomer of the year because of his age and ingenious social-networking site, but there are fascinating entrepreneurs of all ages climbing into the ranks. Some of the more notable ones include China's Gao Dekang, who is one of the world's biggest makers of down jackets and vests; Portugal's Americo Amorim, who turned his grandfather's small cork operation into the world's largest; and Brazil's Eike Batista, who built and lost a gold mining fortune, before hitting it big in iron ore. He is now one of the world's richest mining billionaires.
With all the rosy news of the past year and the overall gains, it is easy to lose sight of the volatility that has been wreaking havoc on these fortunes on a daily basis for months. For instance, Hong Kong's richest person, Li Ka-shing, lost $5.5 billion of his net worth, all tied to publicly held stocks, in the 37 days between Jan. 4 and Feb. 11.
Meanwhile, mainland China's richest person, 26-year-old Yang Huiyan, fell from $17.3 billion in September to $7.4 billion in the rankings. Google co-founder Sergey Brin's fortune touched $25.5 billion in the past year but is now down to $18.7 billion. Others were hit much harder, falling off the list entirely, including Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEH - news - people ) chief Richard Fuld and Bear Stearns (nyse: BSC - news - people ) ex-chief James Cayne (he was sacked), both victims of the world's credit crunch, and Pulte Homes (nyse: PHM - news - people )' William Pulte, whose stock collapsed along with the housing market.
What will happen in the next 12 months as we continue our wealth watching? There will likely be some big losers, some big winners and a lot of ups and downs in between. The only certainty is change itself.

The Cost of Power

2008-03-06T18:19:00.000+05:30

Coal Mining and Human Rights in Colombia
March 06, 2008 By Aviva Chomsky and Orlando Orlando Acosta is a leader of the Colombian National Mining and Energy Workers’ Union (Sintraminergética) and an employee of Drummond Mining Company (USA). Aviva Chomsky teaches at Salem State College. An eminent historian of Latin America, she is the author of Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class, (forthcoming from Duke University Press) and several other books. She is also a member of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee.

Orlando and Professor Chomsky spoke at Brown University in January 2008. This is the transcript of their presentation and the question and answer session which followed. For more information, contact achomsky(at)salemstate.edu

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First of all, I would thank the organizations that allowed me, Orlando Acosta, a representative of the workers in the mining and energy sector in Colombia, to discuss the impact of North American, Swiss, and [South] African multinationals on these countries that are full of wealth, and go there with the objective of taking away resources, with no regard for communities and the people of Colombia.

I’m going to talk about Drummond, because it is a North American company. It arrived in Colombia in 1987. It obtained a claim to exploit coal in a region of ten thousand hectares in the Caribbean region of Colombia. This mine is in Cesar province. In 1995, when the shaft was opened, the workers, because of the company’s pressures and violations of their rights, became unionized in order to resist. This is open-pit mine. When they took away the top layer of land to get down to where the coal is, the communities living in the areas surrounding the mine were displaced. Moreover, the water sources in those areas were removed, obstructed, so the ecosystem changed as well.

The struggle of workers against these multinationals resulted in the murder of four trade unionists in 2001. As soon as the multinationals arrived, they became acquainted with politicians and the powerful families of the area. These families were also related to the paramilitary groups. The killings took place during our struggle to improve working conditions.

The structure of the Colombian nation did not enable us to make an efficient complaint in order to find out who ordered these killings. Thus, we had to resort to the international community, and to speak directly to the coal miners Drummond has employed here in the United States, in Alabama. A steel union here in the US made it possible for us to denounce the head of the company, Augusto Jimenez, as the intellectual author of these killings.

International lawyers found out through their investigations that there was a direct link between president Augusto Jimenez of Drummond in Colombia and paramilitary groups, and that money passed hands, so these four union leaders would be killed. During the trial, obstacles were placed in the way of key witnesses integrated into the paramilitaries, who were imprisoned and therefore not able to testify. The lawyers specially requested that President Alvaro Uribe allow these key witnesses to testify, but he refused permission. The Colombian government’s obstruction contributed to the court’s favorable ruling in favor of the multinational. This ruling, of course, further worsened conditions for the workers and exacerbated the conflict between the union and the company. This is just one example of how the human rights situation in Colombia worsens day by day.

And the Colombian government, pursuing approval of the free trade agreement with the United States, has claimed that the number of union leaders murdered in Colombia has diminished, when in fact, that is not true. Official investigations tend to point out that union leaders die as a consequence of robberies, and not from political murder. Their other policy is to threaten the lives of family members of union leaders. A message is regularly sent to the families of leaders telling them that if they do not stop their denunciation of the policies of the mining companies, they’re going to lose what they cherish most. Last year, I myself received a leaflet at my house, which had a skull on it -- a clear message -- claiming that I was a drug dealer.

You students – the future of the world – must bear in mind that the so-called ‘third world’ countries, in their pursuit of development, surrender their natural resources, thinking that that’s the only way to effectively derive wealth from them. It is important that you understand that that is a mistake. What is left behind in these countries is just the displacement of large segments of populations and murders that remain in impunity; that is no way to develop a country. That is why we’ve told the Colombian government that the free trade agreement as it stands right now is not beneficial to the Colombian people.

This must be of interest to North Americans and the international community, because wealth rests in the hands of a few, and redistribution of it is not going to take place. We must all contribute to the denunciation of these violations so we can contribute to make the world of a better place. This is what I want to share with you. Thank you.

Let’s take three questions at a time.

QUESTIONER: What is President Uribe’s response to this? Is the Colombian government willing to step up and help out, or are they part of the problem?

QUESTIONER: Through your struggle to organize, have you developed solidarity links with other communities in the world that are also fighting the extraction of coal or other fossil fuels?

QUESTIONER: To add onto that, have there been any attempts to organize with other unions in Colombia?

ACOSTA: OK, first question: President Uribe: Is he willing to help, or is he part of the problem? I would like to say to you, the security policies of President Uribe go against the rights of the Colombian people. The money that the US government gives to the Colombian government to fight subversive groups just makes the war worse. The ones that suffer most are the peasants and common people, because they’re in the crossfire between the army and the guerrilla groups. The methods that President Uribe uses do make evident that he is part of the problem, the problem of human rights violations in Colombia. There is proof of the fact that many congress people the Uribe government relied on to carry out policies are now in prison for their links to paramilitaries.

When he was governor of Antioquia province, Uribe [helped create] the CONVIVIR, vigilante outlaw groups that [helped] cattle ranchers protect their properties. They gained strength and eventually became the paramilitaries that we know today.
Second question: You asked if we have solidarity links with other movements. We do have strong links with fellow union members that work for the Drummond company here in the United States, in Alabama. We have strong ties with unions in Venezuela. At a national level, the mining and energy sector, the teachers union, the peasants and farm unions; we’re all united. Because of our strength, the Colombian government and the large businesses (which are grouped in their own association) have had to ask the unions stop with our protests, because they were affecting the outcome of the free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. That’s the network we’ve been able to develop in order to oppose those policies.

We’re focusing on our international outreach efforts on US unions because the coal that is being extracted in Colombia ends up here. [The abuses I have described] are what pay for the commodities that you enjoy here. When Drummond moved to Colombia, they closed two mines in Alabama, because it was more beneficial for them, due to the low cost of labor in Colombia.

I think the third question was answered by my answer to the second question. Different unions, we have grouped, and formed this organization called the Mining and Energy Coordinating Committee.

QUESTIONER: Has your union had any sort of interactions – positive, negative or otherwise – with groups like FARC? And on a related note, do you see FARC as a positive or negative force in the conflict?

QUESTIONER: You spoke about a legal proceeding in the United States. Have you developed a legal strategy within Colombia, within the legal system there, and what would your perspective be on a strategy like that? And a related question, do you work with lawyers that help you on a pro-bono basis?

QUESTIONER: As a citizen and trade union member in Colombia, what changes do you feel should be made to the free trade agreement in order to make it beneficial, not only for the US but also Colombia?

ACOSTA: First question, regarding our alleged links with the FARC. We are a national organization with a political platform, and we’re totally independent from the influence of the state, the church, and the guerrillas. Whatever influence the FARC might have, positive or negative, derives from the influence of the state. The government is not interested in eliminating the FARC; the Colombian president doesn’t want to get rid of the FARC because the FARC provides an excuse for the US government to keep giving money to Colombia, so it’s in his interest to keep the war going.

QUESTIONER: I wasn’t trying to imply, necessarily, that you were working with the FARC, or that they were influencing you, I was just wondering about any kind of interactions; have they bothered you, or tried to extort protection money from you? Anything. I was just curious.

ACOSTA: We haven’t had any sort of contact with them, but of course the context of the war against the guerrillas has affected us. When President Uribe came to power, he made it very clear that those who would not side with his government would be considered enemies of his government. And he has labeled us union leaders who oppose his policies as guerrilla fighters. And he has also called us paramilitaries. We’re really in a crossfire. I mean, in some cases you might be killed by the paramilitaries, and in some cases you might be killed by the guerrilla. And you must really keep in mind that the army and the paramilitaries are just the same thing, ultimately.

The second question: To give you an idea of how the judiciary works in Colombia, the Supreme Court of Justice heard our case but really the lawyer took us there to show us what state the judiciary in Colombia is in, what happens to all the injunctions and lawsuits that are filed. The judiciary has basically collapsed. It is useless because of corruption. Basically these lawsuits don’t make it because they’re intercepted by agents, snitches if you will, that kind of tell the Drummond company that a lawsuit is being filed against them, so the company will pay bribes so the lawsuit will be thrown out of court. That’s why, when these murders happen, we have to resort to the international community, our mining union colleagues here in the US, so we can sue here in the US and those crimes will not remain in impunity.

Third question, about the free trade agreement. [We must take] into consideration the differences between the political structures in Colombia and the United States, and [remember] that the full text of the free trade agreement is not available. Only three articles have been discussed by [the Colombian] congress: intellectual property rights, agricultural affairs, and labor policy.

Intellectual property rights basically means patents on medications. The US owns eighty percent of those patents. Look at Africa. [Also look at] the Amazon; people die because they don’t have the vaccination against malaria. Or take for instance health coverage in this country; there is no public universal health coverage. Regarding agriculture, the US subsidizes its farmers, whereas Colombia doesn’t. There is no agrarian policy. One of the things that’s being permitted are genetically modified seeds, such as the terminator seeds, so that when the farmer buys seeds, they cannot re-harvest seeds from their crops to replant, because they’ve been genetically designed not to reproduce.

So there are huge disparities between the two countries, and the treaty is made in such a way that makes it difficult for the Colombian people to realize how unfair those differences are, and in what measure the treaty fails to overcome them. Union leaders in Colombia have formally proposed that this free trade agreement be taken to a referendum, so the Colombian people can determine what is in their best interest, what is the most fair treaty we could get.

QUESTIONER: You say you’re dealing with mining unions in America. So much of the mining industry right now is not unionized. The mining union is weak. What can they give, what have they given you, what are you looking for?

ORLANDO ACOSTA: From what we understand, the constitutional structure of Colombia and the US are very different, in terms of what they allow unions to be. The way they are organized in the US, the unions are very closely linked with politicians. Precisely because of their close ties with politicians in the US, unions have helped [force the] US Congress to withhold the approval of the free trade agreement with Colombia, until improvements in the human rights situation are made and improvements in the trade agreement are made.

QUESTIONER: Building two on your previous answers, it’s clear that you have to go to international courts, but I’m wondering if you have had any kind of support from other institutions in Colombia? And, I’m wondering if there’s been any progress in the campaign to force a referendum on the trade agreement? Is the initiative only from your union? Are you going to gather signatures and move forward in that procedure?

ACOSTA: We have demonstrated against the approval of the free trade agreement, and we have gathered signatures on a petition against the agreement as it stands now. We have gone before the attorney general’s office and the anti-corruption ministry, but the way they organize -- the bureaucracy and the corruption of the judiciary – turn what should be easy procedures into very lengthy and costly procedures for which we neither have the resources or time. Our situation is very urgent; we have to meet our immediate demands.

In Magdalena, my home province, there are two offices of the labor ministry, and one of them declared itself completely incapable of carrying out an investigation against Drummond. It just preferred not to do it. We have consequently sued this government official, because of her negligence and because she permitted an ill worker to be fired from his post - he has problems with his back, he has to use crutches.

I would like it if in sometime in your career at students you take a look at the effect of coal multinationals in countries like Colombia, and do take interest in what is going on. I really encourage you all to look into these matters if you can, someday.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would like to make a suggestion to everyone. The least we could do would be to contact our legislators, and those who students who aren’t from Rhode Island could contact their legislators, and say they oppose the free trade agreement. That’s the least we could do; call and say we oppose the free trade agreement in its current form. It would hurt people there, and it would hurt people here. It’s that simple.

QUESTIONER: In addition to coal mining, are there other multinationals or other types of corporations that have bad track records as far as human rights? [Audience laughter…] Well of course there are, but in Colombia right now, do you guys have other labor unions you work with?

ACOSTA: For instance, in the northern mining region, there are three companies - Glencore, which is a Swiss company; PHP Billiton, which is a British/Australian company; and Anglo-American, which is a British/South African company - that operate another open-pit coalmine in the province next to Cesar, where the Drummond mine is. Avi [Chomsky] has been doing a lot of work with the communities affected by that mine. Glencore was just nominated for an important prize, of one of the ten worst companies of the year in Switzerland as far as violations of human rights are concerned. The impact Glencore has on human rights and the displacement of communities takes place not only in Colombia, but in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Chiquita brand has changed names in 1928; it was formally known as the United Fruit Company, but in 1928 there was a famous massacre, which is featured in One Hundreds Years of Solitude.

First of all, I would like to thank you for [the money that was collected at the event]. Between brothers, there must be solidarity. We have also brought some books, some hand-woven shoulder bags. The real value of these shoulder bags is not economic; it is human. By purchasing them, you help an indigenous community in the northern peninsula known as Tabaco, which was displaced by Glencore. I’d like to give the floor to Avi, who has researched this whole issue, and is working on it, so she can explain what has happened.

AVIVA CHOMSKY: I teach at Salem State College, and Salem is home to one of two main power plants on the east coast of Massachusetts. You guys are very close to the other one, the Breighton Point plant in Somerset. Some of you are probably familiar with that. Those two plants import coal from Colombia – from the Drummond mine and the Cerrejon mine, the Drummond one being where Orlando works. And that’s how we initially, in Salem, got involved – by learning what the source of this coal that comes in on these giant forty-thousand ton ships every three weeks or so into our harbor, the coal that powers our plant and turns on our lights.

We’ve been working in particular with the community of Tabaco, which was violently displaced in 2001 by agents of the Cerrejon mine, and with five other small local communities – Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities – that are currently in what they call a ‘process of displacement.’ The company is basically just trying to make life so impossible for them – through contamination, through cutting off their roads, their access, their healthcare – that people are just going to leave.

Three projects we’ve been involved in that I want to mention to you: One, we take regular delegations down to the region, for people from the United States who receive the coal, and also people from the different countries where the companies are based, to see for themselves how their coal is mined, what the conditions are. When we go on these delegations, we generally meet with mining officials, with government officials, with members of the communities that are affected by these mines, and with the unions, in both of the mines, the Drummond and Cerrejon mines. We’re taking our next delegation in May, the 24th to the 31st, and I hope some of you will consider coming with us and see for yourselves; there are flyers about the delegation up there.

The second project we’ve been involved in is the mochila [shoulder bag] project, trying to be able to provide some material aid for the communities. One of the traditional crafts in the region is the weaving of these shoulder bags. We’ve developed a project with the communities…we all participate in unfair trade all the time, even if we don’t want to. None of us really want to displace these communities in an active way, and yet we’re passively participating in it because we have no choice in where we get our electricity, and we can’t live without electricity. Our lives are structured so that we basically can’t opt out. So we are participating in unfair trade, a trade relationship that is harmful to people on the other end of it.

We talked about if we could develop a fair trade in coal, like there’s fair trade in coffee. We thought that would be really difficult for us to do, but we’ve created this sort of alternative project in fair trade in mochilas. That is, the mochilas are something the people in these communities want to produce; it’s a traditional craft, it’s something they do by hand, it’s part of their culture and its something they’re eager to find markets for. We can’t, as individuals, pay them a fair price for their coal, but we can pay them a fair price for their mochilas that they produce. It’s a relationship that they’ve been very excited about producing. We’re selling the bags up there; the small ones are sixty dollars and the large ones are 75 dollars. All of that money goes directly back to the communities. The way we do it is we pre-pay them half the price of the mochilas and then we carry them back here. We sell them and bring back the other half to the communities the next time we go.

The third thing I wanted to draw your attention to: there are several different books for sale up there that give more information about the various issues we’ve been talking about. One is translated by me and written by the president of the state-sector mining union in Colombia. It’s a general overview of the mining sector in Colombia and how multinationals have controlled what should be public goods in Colombia, to the detriment of the population. It’s called The Profits of Extermination.

The second book I want to draw your attention to is an anthology we just published last summer in Colombia [The People Behind the Coal], which is something the communities have been asking us to do for a very long time. They’ve been saying that they need documentation of the impact of the mine on their communities, and also of the history of their communities; that in their struggle to achieve their rights with the mine, they need some of this documentation. And we were finally able to pull together last year a series of human rights reports, health reports, historical studies, testimonies from the union and the communities about the situation. So there’s a lot of primary voices in there. The book was published in two editions – English and Spanish – and both of them are available there. It was one of the most exciting book projects that I’ve worked on, the only one really where I really felt like, ‘this is an answer to what the communities have asked us to do to help them.’ So I hope you will all take a look at what we have up there on the table.

QUESTIONER: What’s the best possible vision of the future that you’re fighting for, in terms of is it more fair wages and better living conditions from the company? Is it to not have the company exist at all, and to have a better company? Is it to not have to live by extracting coal, and a whole other way of life instead? What’s the vision of another world that you hold in your heart to continue with the struggle?

ACOSTA: Our first concern is the wealth that is concentrated in the hands of these companies reaches the families of these workers. In other words, there needs to be a redistribution of wealth. Just by following environmental regulations, and by paying taxes that they’re supposed to, as specified in the leases they signed to obtain these coal claims. The problem is that these companies simply don’t pay taxes. For instance, last year Drummond had to pay back to the Colombian state forty-million dollars. The company is supposed to pay a royalty to the government for every ton of coal it exports. And the royalty payment is supposed to vary based on the price of coal on the international market. The contract says how much they’re supposed to be in royalties.

But they’re allowed to deduct the following: the coal that is taken out by water routes, and this takes four-hundred twenty kilometers; and this might cost, let’s just put a random figure on it, a low figure – forty pesos. So they’re allowed to deduct from the royalties the extra they had to pay for the transport. So a revision was made to the contract, and now the transportation is only two-hundred twenty kilometers, and its by rail, not by water. It’s much cheaper, but they’ve continued to claim the previous cost. That’s how they were underpaying their royalties, and that’s why they’ve had to pay this forty-million dollars.

We have asked the company not to leave the country, but the company definitely has to improve its policies. Local communities must be provided with schools, basic sanitation, housing. They could afford all that with the money they aren’t paying in taxes. We basically want to improve production and the working conditions, so those things the community must receive are given, and not evaded. That’s what we are fighting for.

I would like to thank you all for coming. There must be solidarity between all of us, so abuses stop. We must think of humanity as one. We can achieve the goal of a better world for all. We must really care about our neighbors, so it doesn’t happen like that famous poem, where it says, ‘they took the peasant, but I didn’t care because I am not a peasant. They took a communist, but I didn’t care because I was not a communist. They took a clergyman, but I did not care, because I was not a clergyman. But when they came for me, it did matter to me, and when I went out for help, there was none, because I did not care before.’ We must reach out to those around us, to our neighbors, and help them.

The Guerrilla in Colombia

2008-03-05T19:33:00.000+05:30

An Interview with Rodrigo Granda, Member of the FARC-EP International Commission

Rogrigo Granda interviewed by Jean Batou

Rodrigo Granda is a member of and the leading international spokesperson for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC–EP). His name gained global prominence in December 2004 when he was kidnapped in Venezuela and handed over to Colombian authorities by a number of Venezuelan National Guard soldiers seeking a reward placed on his head by the Colombian government. At the time of his capture Granda was attending a meeting of the Bolivarian Peoples Movements in Caracas. Granda’s kidnapping in Venezuela at the instigation of the Colombian government created an international dispute between Venezuela and Colombia. He was released in 2007 in response to pressures exerted on the Colombian government by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The FARC–EP describes itself as a Marxist revolutionary people’s movement and has been in an armed conflict with the Colombian regime since 1964. It is the largest revolutionary force in the country (the other guerilla group is the smaller ELN or National Liberation Army). At any given time it controls much of the country, although the mainly rural regions under its control vary. In 1984 the FARC–EP agreed to a truce and formed an organized political wing called the Patriotic Union (UP), which was to engage in electoral politics. The UP received such widespread support that the Colombian ruling class panicked and unleashed its death squads, assassinating thousands of UP members and drowning the truce in blood.
Today Columbia is ruled by what has been called a “genocidal democracy” (see Javier Giraldo, Columbia: The Genocidal Democracy, Common Courage, 1996). “The richest 1 percent of the population controls 45 percent of the wealth, while half of the farmland is held by thirty-seven large landholders.” The majority of the population subsists on less than 3 percent of the arable land, while 3 percent owns more than 70 percent of that land (James J. Brittain, “The FARC–EP in Colombia,” Monthly Review, September 2005). Columbia is the dominant source of cocaine in the world. Large parts of the country are dominated by drug lords with their paramilitary armies with which the government is closely associated. Columbian President Álvaro Uribe is himself linked to drug traffickers, including members of his own family.
In the 1990s under the Clinton administration “Plan Colombia” was introduced whereby the United States provided massive military aid and direct “special operations” support to Colombia aimed at the FARC–EP, under the cover of an anti-narcotics operation. During the Bush administration, Washington replaced this with “Plan Patriota,” carried out in cooperation with Uribe’s government, under the rubric of which the United States has intensified its war on the FARC–EP as part of the so-called War on Terrorism. In 2001–02 the United States, followed by its allies in the European Union, officially designated the FARC–EP as a “terrorist” organization. However, the dominant reality in Colombia is state/paramilitary terrorism. As part of the stepped-up repressive campaign in the Bush/Uribe period the paramilitaries in league with the Columbian military forces committed atrocities such as burning children alive and using chainsaws on others while still alive (see James J. Brittain, “Run, Fight or Die in Colombia: The Paramilitaries Burned Wayuu Children Alive and Killed Others with Chainsaws,” Counterpunch, March 12–13, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/brittain03122005.html). Meanwhile, Bogotá and Washington continue to use chemical fumigants on large parts of the country, ostensibly aimed at coca eradication, but also as a form of chemical warfare.
An issue of growing international concern has been the humanitarian exchange of prisoners/hostages taken by the two sides in the war. In June 2007, during negotiations on the release of twelve Colombian lawmakers held by the FARC–EP, a counterinsurgency attack on the FARC–EP encampment where these prisoners were being held was carried out and eleven of the lawmakers were killed in the crossfire. The FARC–EP was accused by Bogotá and Washington of having “murdered” the captives although evidence on the ground seemed to confirm the FARC–EP’s story that the death of the prisoners was unintended (see Inter Press Service News Agency, “Columbia: Pawns of War—The Hostage Crisis,” November 2, 2007, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39902).
In fall 2007 Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez became increasingly active in negotiations for the release of FARC–EP captives, bringing in a number of important international figures to support the effort, such as U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone. This led eventually to the release in January 2008 of two high-level prisoners held by FARC–EP. Chávez followed up his success in this regard with a demand that the FARC–EP (and also the smaller ELN) be designated as a “real army” with political objectives and not a “terrorist” organization; that it be accorded “belligerent status” in international law. This would then facilitate further releases of prisoners on both sides. His call was supported by the Venezuelan Assembly and Ecuador but rejected by the United States, the Colombian government, and the European Union. The according of belligerent status to the FARC–EP would mean that both the Colombian military and the FARC–EP would have to conform to the Geneva Conventions on warfare and the treatment of prisoners. It would also result in increased pressure for peace negotiations on both sides. Both Washington and Bogotá are therefore adamantly opposed to any such change in the international designation of the FARC–EP as a “terrorist” organization.—Ed.

Jean Batou: The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC–EP) looks upon itself as a politico-military movement waging a social/insurrectional war against the Colombian state. As such, the FARC–EP takes prisoner police officers, soldiers, officials, and mercenaries. The FARC–EP has also decided to kidnap civilians representing the Colombian state apparatus. In short, it also kidnaps civilians, the release of whom depends upon payment of a ransom. While no one can argue with an army taking its armed adversaries prisoner, how can the FARC–EP justify taking civilians captive? Does the FARC–EP not realize that such practices tend to isolate it from broad swathes of antigovernment public opinion in Colombia?
Rodrigo Granda: The FARC–EP is indeed a politico-military movement making use of the inalienable right to rebel against a state that practices paper democracy. What we are doing is responding to a war imposed on us from the highest echelons of power in Colombia. State terrorism has been wielded against us and our people as a method of extermination for decades.
Of course, it is common knowledge, that war of this kind needs funding. This war was forced on us by Colombia’s rich, so they are the ones that have to finance the war they unleashed. That’s why the FARC–EP holds people for whom a monetary payment is collected, which is really a tax. This money is set aside to maintain the apparatus of the people’s war.
As you may know, we talk about constructing a new power, a new state. If in Switzerland, France, or the United States someone ducks out of their duty of paying taxes, then that person has to go to jail. The new state we are shaping has fixed the payment of a peace tax. That means that any individual or corporate body, and any foreign companies operating in Colombia and making profits of over a million dollars a year, have to pay a peace tax equivalent to 10 percent of these profits. Debtors are told they have to enter into dialogue with those who manage the FARC–EP’s finances to pay this sum. If they fail to do so, of course, these people will be arrested and taken to prison until they pay and fulfill their obligations toward those of us who are shouldering the responsibility of the new state, constructed and led by the FARC–EP, acting as the People’s Army.
Now, within the context of military operations some officers, noncommissioned officers, policemen, and soldiers do fall into the hands of the FARC–EP and some are currently being held as prisoners of war. Likewise, during our confrontations with the Colombian state some prisoners from our side have fallen into enemy hands and, following summary rigged trials, they are now serving extremely long sentences in different jails across the country. Unfortunately, this is par for the course during a war. At any rate, amid the extremely acute conflict taking place in Colombia it is possible that some detentions might not, on the whole, be looked upon by the population in a favorable light. But we believe that, by making Law 002 public, according to which certain economically powerful individuals and entities have to pay a peace tax, we have already given them warning and they also have the option to discuss and resolve their situation and to settle up within the time period set. If we can ensure this is complied with then the number of detentions will certainly tail off as a result.
As for whether this divides us from the civil population...it may have some effect on that, but it probably is not crucial, because large sectors of the Colombian population are fully aware that, in general, the FARC–EP only arrests people whose economic situation is pretty comfortable. There is no way this is about arresting people for the sake of arresting them.
Prisoners of war are kept for the purposes of humanitarian trade-offs, which we are hoping to carry out very soon. Let’s not forget that in Colombia the public prosecutor’s office and the specialist judges impose heavy sentences on many guerrilla fighters (who are lucky enough not to have been killed during their capture), sentences that will keep them in prison practically for life, because justice in Colombia is class justice and is applied as such. And, obviously, those of us who make use of the inalienable right of rebellion are labeled “terrorists” or “kidnappers.” You should know that the sentences dished out to revolutionaries range between forty and eighty years.
So you can see that this matter of the tax is a need determined by the current war situation affecting Colombia. We would like it if we did not have to detain anyone, no civilians or oligarchs, not to mention the military....But the confrontation, the daily reality in Colombia, means that this is how things happen—not the way we’d like them to.
JB: The armed struggle is largely funded by the collection of the revolutionary tax on coca leaf cultivation and cocaine base production—and also, to some extent, on ransom payments from kidnappings. If a peace process is initiated, could the guerrilla movement stop using these sources of funding without jeopardizing its politico-organizational autonomy? In other words, are there not certain forces within your movement that are attempting to defend the status quo for fear that demobilization might deprive the FARC–EP of these decisive sources of funding and that this might lead to its isolation?
RG: The first thing that has to be said is that the FARC–EP has always been an autarkic movement, that is to say, it has always operated using its own means and has never depended, either in the past or at present, and will never depend, on any funding of a foreign nature. As the FARC–EP, we were able to develop a subsistence economy initially and then factors of production that have enabled us to keep the movement going.
The FARC–EP existed long before either drug trafficking in Colombia developed or a logistical policy for the systematic detention of persons was implemented. These were by-products of the general situation in the country.
Over the years the FARC–EP has diversified its financing through all kinds of investments: in high finance at home and abroad, and in agricultural production, cattle raising, mining, transport, construction, and many other productive investments.
Now, there is no doubt that the face of Colombia was transformed by the neoliberal policies imposed through terror that ruined the countryside forcing thousands of poor peasant families to survive by producing for this economy so as not to starve to death as a result of the devastation caused to their traditional crops of coffee, corn, banana, sorghum, cotton, and so on.
The FARC–EP is chiefly a rural movement and we are in direct contact with that reality, but we have no authority to force people to abandon so-called illicit crops without giving them an alternative.
At the talks in the Cagúan region (1999–2002) during the government of President Pastrana, the First International Public Audience on the replacement of so-called illicit crops and protection of the environment was held under the initiative of our guerrilla organization. The meeting was attended by the EU, Japan, Canada, the UN, and the International Group of Friends of the Peace Process in Colombia. The United States was invited but did not take part.
At these talks, the FARC–EP presented a viable project for eradicating coca leaf plantations in the municipality of Cartagena del Chairá in the Caquetá Department, of which there were around 8,000 hectares at that time.
We wanted the international community to commit to an alternative to repression and to promote social investment in the area so as to create an “experimental laboratory” there, in the search for ways to eradicate those crops, and then extend the experiment to other regions of Colombia and possibly the continent: Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. This proposal is still valid.
At the same time, we believe that legalization of the drug will help to solve the problem. Economists such as [Milton] Friedman and reputable journals like the Economist acknowledge that this is the case. There is a reason for this: as it is a clandestine business, profitability due to capital turnover is staggering. It is currently estimated that there are $680 billion circulating in the world as a result of drug trafficking and there is no crime people would not commit to get their hands on such an enormous sum of money.
First and foremost it is an economic problem, then a political, and of course, an ethical and moral one, but if the huge profits are eliminated, then the fundamental incentive, which is the return on investment, will be cancelled out and the states will be able to control the market. This would be something like what happened, allowing for differences, with the legalization of whisky...in the United States.
What must be made clear, and we have demonstrated this to the national and international community, is that there is no way the FARC–EP is a drug trafficker, not by any stretch of the imagination. We are not involved in the production, transport, commercialization, or exportation of narcotics. On the contrary, the FARC–EP is willing to work with the international community and with the U.S. government itself to solve this serious problem plaguing the world.
Our organization has implemented the collection of a tax on coca paste buyers who have to enter the areas where these crops are grown and we operate. This payment is collected as a way of controlling the abuses committed against the peasant growers. Of course, we act as policemen. It is the Colombian state that must control this area, but, up until now, it has been incapable of doing so, in spite of the billions of dollars poured in by the U.S. government to put an end to this business.
It is also important to bear in mind that the money provided by this tax is a tiny quantity in relation to the costs of the FARC–EP military apparatus. As for the arrests, it has to be said that this income also helps with the economic maintenance of the FARC–EP, but it is not the most crucial part.
The FARC–EP’s ultimate aim is not to “line the pockets” of its directive personnel, its hierarchy, or its combatants. For us money is a means, something that can help us attain the strategic political end of the FARC–EP, which is to take power in order to bring about political, economic, social, and ecological changes of all kinds that Colombia needs and is demanding. So, the financing is just a means to achieve these ends. Nobody in the FARC–EP aspires to become a millionaire. This is the big difference between us and the drug barons and paramilitaries who are seeking personal gain and want to live “the high life.”
With respect to what you say about a possible demobilization, that is not in the FARC–EP’s immediate plans. I mean, there is not even any contact with Uribe’s government. In the hypothetical case that the war was stopped and other action embarked upon, the FARC–EP has its “plan B.” But we’re talking about hypotheses; the reality is quite different.
However, the FARC–EP is not at war just for the sake of it. We have said that if the political environment changes and the conditions exist for engaging in open, legal politics without fear of reprisals or of being killed; if the door to real democracy is opened, then we could think about changing the form of military confrontation in response to whatever situation was instituted. It has fallen to the FARC–EP throughout the period of Uribe, and before, to act as the political opposition and the armed opposition to the regime because there has been no other way we could express our thinking. The Colombian bourgeoisie is a bloodthirsty, reactionary bourgeoisie that only understands the language of arms. If we had not responded to the aggression, they would already have branded us with red hot iron, and chained us up, like in the age of slavery.
JB: The recent mass mobilizations against the violence and kidnappings have pointed the finger of blame at both the government and the insurgents. Don’t these mobilizations represent a setback for the left in that Álvaro Uribe has been able to use them to his advantage to divert public attention from his involvement in parapolitical scandals?
RG: The mobilizations, as you yourself say, express a repudiation of violence and particularly official and paramilitary violence. The Colombian people are certainly showing signs of fatigue over the military-type confrontation, but what people wouldn’t after forty years of war imposed by the regime?
Álvaro Uribe tried to capitalize on a movement that incorporated popular sectors very close to the FARC–EP, and even members of our guerrilla organization. There, at these mobilizations, you could see the banners demanding a humanitarian exchange, in the search for dialogue toward a political solution to the social and armed conflict in Colombia. If you analyze the press releases, and radio and television reports, you will find that Colombia’s most prestigious commentators criticized the government’s political opportunism. You have to remember that there was even a public confrontation between the interior minister and one of the relatives of the eleven congressional representatives killed in the failed military rescue attempt ordered by the government on June 18 this year. And then the claim that President Uribe has capitalized on the mobilizations is untrue. On the contrary, in the latest opinion polls following those events Uribe’s image is shown to have been tarnished and his popularity is in “free fall” for the first time since he took office.
As for the problem of parapolitics, this is something that has been denounced for over twenty years by the newspaper Voz, the organ of the Communist Party of Colombia, by the FARC–EP, and by democratic friends throughout the country. However the Colombian state has always ignored these denunciations.
A year and a half ago I had the opportunity to talk to the peace commissioner of Uribe’s government, Dr. Luis Carlos Restrepo, at the Cómbita high-security prison, where I was being held hostage. During our conversation, we touched on various topics and I was able to demonstrate to him that the policy of “democratic security” imposed by the president and the “Plan Colombia” had failed. He said to me, “Look, Señor Granda, the Colombian state has certainly used unorthodox methods to fight you....” Those methods Restrepo was referring to are none other than parapolitics and paramilitarism: that was a project that was cold-bloodedly calculated for Colombia. It is an expression of fascism, through which mainly the financial monopolies, the industrial sector, and the landowners have benefited from all the economic restructuring resulting from globalization and privatizations in Colombia. The deals and profits these sectors have made are phenomenal. At the same time, what there is left to privatize in the country is at present minimal, which tells us that the most acute period of pushing forward the neoliberal project in Colombia is over to an extent, as there are no state companies of any size left to sell to the transnationals.
That is why the state is now trying to dismantle all the killing mechanisms they created as a military support for their fascist project to impose neoliberalism and, in this sense, we could draw a comparison with General Pinochet’s Chile. Remember that it was right when the military coup took place in Chile in 1973 that they started to implement neoliberal policies for the continent. The military coup practically wiped out the popular resistance, the working class, the middle classes of the population, the peasantry, and imposed the social discipline of the monopolies: fascism in the service of neoliberalism that used terror in our America as a basis for implementing its economic project and its ideological politics.
Now in Colombia the establishment has egg on its face: it is the institutions, along with the men that constitute them, that are implicated in the crisis they have led the nation into. Colombia is a country with one of the highest corruption rates in the world. It was said that Colombian institutions were created as a protection from all forms of corruption. That is why, in order to implement its neoliberal policies, the establishment threw overboard any sense of ethics in politics and now it is paying the price for its “unholy alliance” with narcoparamilitarism created with the intention of eliminating the revolutionary left whatever the cost. That model and that fascist project for Colombia have failed them. When the tidal wave of denouncements comes, the president tries, obviously, to avoid any kind of public debate, and creates smokescreens: the reelection, the referendum, the Soccer World Cup, etc., aiming to distract Colombian public opinion. The scandals and the corruption prevailing in Colombia are of such magnitude that none of these publicity “shows” can manage to distract attention away from one fundamental aspect: the corruption imposed by the “mafia,” paramilitarism, and narcotrafficking (which are the same thing) for a government that is a government of “mafiosi” exercising narcodemocracy.
JB: The ELN (National Liberation Army) recently decided to lay down its arms. To what extent does this weaken the armed struggle of the FARC–EP, given that from now on the Colombian state, the paramilitaries, and the United States will be able to concentrate all their efforts to fight it?
RG: The question of whether at present the whole counterinsurgent struggle orchestrated by the Colombian government and the United States can be focused against the FARC–EP is relative. Practically from the outset of Plan Colombia, the FARC–EP has withstood these operations [of the Colombian military and the United States] alone. There is no doubt that the Colombian state has never fought paramilitarism militarily. While military operations in areas where ELN comrades are active have been minimal, so, to some extent, the responsibility of combatting the bulk of operations by the Colombian army and the “gringos” have fallen on our armed organization. You must remember that at present Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, after Israel and Egypt. During the first stage of Plan Colombia, the United States provided $7.5 billion and the Colombian state imposed a war tax of 12 percent, which was increased this year by a further 8 percent. Even so, Plan Colombia and all subsequent operations have failed against the FARC–EP resistance and counteroffensive.
So it’s highly debatable whether the enemy can defeat us even if it trains its entire arsenal on us. Our history has shown this ever since our birth in Marquetalia (1964). Remember that sixteen thousand troops were moved into the region against the founding group of the FARC–EP made up of forty-eight peasants, two of them women. Besides, at that time, there was no other insurgent movement in the country either. The bulk of that offensive against the rural self-defense zones, known as “Operation LASO [Latin American Security Operation],” naturally hit the FARC–EP.
We believe, in this new period, that as far as military action by “gringo” troops, mercenaries, and the Colombian army are concerned, the limit has already been reached. What we’re talking about now is a decline. It must be said that in high circles of the Colombian government and the corridors of the Pentagon there is talk of the complete failure of “Plan Colombia,” “Plan Patriot,” “Plan Colombia Consolidation,” and “Plan Victory” (2002–07).
In other words, a military victory by the “gringos” and the Colombian state is impossible over an armed movement like ours that has been fighting for forty-three years and has extensive experience at the level of both its leadership and its combatants. It has to be said that this experience is almost unique in Latin America and the world. Just look at the fact that there’s currently no other great “plan” or “military operation” in the western hemisphere that has the scope and detail of the one being performed in central and southern Colombia, and throughout most of Colombia’s national territory.
We have truly had to fight a war alone. In the past there was the socialist camp, there was international solidarity, we had to “dance with the ugliest girl at the party,” as we say in Colombia. But we’ve shown we can confront and beat the enemy alone. For us, this is an obligation and it is our contribution of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world. The combination of all the forms of mass struggle is going to assure us victory in the near future.
The Colombian state has no alternative other than to accept that it has been incapable of defeating the insurgency and that its fascist project, which uses state terror and the chainsaw as an offensive weapon, has failed. The only thing left for this state to do is to seek a rapprochement with the insurgency so that we can sit down and talk to find a negotiated political solution to this long social and armed conflict affecting Colombia.
What you say about the ELN, well, that is the first I have heard about it....As far as I know the ELN has not laid down its arms. I cannot give an opinion on the ELN’s decisions. They are a sovereign organization, a guerrilla organization that has been fighting for years and, to my knowledge, have not so far handed over a single weapon.
JB: The FARC–EP was born from a peasant movement which continues to be its main social base. To what extent has the FARC–EP been able since then to implement a strategic reorientation in the light of extremely rapid urbanization in Colombia? In other words, how does the FARC–EP address the pauperized urban masses suffering constant attacks from the paramilitaries and the repression exercised by the Colombian state?
RG: I have been telling you that the FARC–EP is a politico-military organization, the struggle of the FARC–EP is not one of confrontation between apparatuses, i.e., between the military apparatus of the Colombian state and the FARC–EP’s military apparatus proper.
In general, if we analyze the behavior of bourgeois states over time, we observe that they have various ways of applying what they call “representative democracy” and that they combine practically all forms of struggle to exploit the people. The “gringos” call it the “carrot and stick approach,” which they practice in the following way: if they consider that the masses are meek, they can let them develop certain forms of restricted democracy for a time; if they consider that those masses are becoming radicalized, then they take troops into the streets and impose repression. But if they notice that those mass movements have already become radicalized, then they employ state terrorism, and wage genocide against their opponents and the extermination of the mass organizations. It is this terror at its most horrifying that was experienced by nearly all countries here in our America in the recent past and still persists in Colombia.
From this viewpoint, it is legitimate for the revolutionary movements of Colombia and the world to employ every form of mass struggle to achieve the revolutionary changes that society needs at a given moment in its development.
We have not declared armed struggle by decree, nor can it be declared by decree, or by the will of person or party X or Y. Armed struggle is born of the overriding need to defend class interests at a particular moment in time, when the bourgeoisie close every door of democracy and expression the masses may have.
Unfortunately, Colombia’s history has shown what I’ve just said to be true: seeking national reconciliation in 1982, the FARC–EP entered into dialogue with then-president Belisario Bétancourt and the Uribe Accords were signed. As a corollary of these accords the broad movement called the Patriotic Union (UP) was founded.
This movement erupted into national political life with enormous support among the inhabitants of town and country, the middle classes, students, etc. In other words, it was a movement that brought together very wide-ranging sectors. When the UP began to develop, the bourgeoisie panicked and commenced the planned systematic extermination—first of its leaders, then they massacred its members. This all ended in the most abhorrent political genocide ever seen in Latin America. The FARC–EP learned from this experiment, which was curtailed by state terrorism, and will not let history repeat itself.
We have been making an enormous effort with the creation and development of popular and political movements and organizations at the national level.
We are making an enormous effort with the formation of the Clandestine Colombian Communist Party, which has to be clandestine because we have already had over five thousand members of the UP killed.
We are also working on the formation of the Bolivarian Movement for the New Colombia, in which anyone can take part. This movement has no statutes, people can get together in small groups to avoid enemy strikes, nobody must allude to their political militancy, and its forms of expression are clandestine.
Through such forms of organization, we participate in the student movement, the workers’ movement, the peasant movement, the popular movement...but the FARC–EP is also setting up the Bolivarian Militias, which operate in the countryside, on the outskirts of big cities and within them.
The FARC–EP believe that the revolution in Colombia must, in part, lead to urban insurrectional expressions, perhaps very much like those that took place in Nicaragua at the time (let’s remind ourselves of the battles in Managua, Masaya, Estelí, and León, to name a few), which were guerrilla-type actions combined with popular insurrection, and which together brought down the Somoza dictatorship.
We are making a really big effort with regard to the union movement, the student movement, the urban middle classes, informal workers, the cooperative, and communal movement of family heads. In other words, we are trying to direct everything through simple forms of organization so as steadily to create from the inside-out a politico-practical consciousness of the need for change in Colombia, all the more so when the disastrous consequences of neoliberal policies not only radicalize the urban and rural masses but also, paradoxically, bring them together and ally them in their struggle.
In Colombia, the FARC–EP wishes to build a new government of national reconciliation and reconstruction, one that is broad and democratic, not exclusive in the slightest, in which all sectors of national political life can participate that are concerned about dragging Colombia out of the abyss it finds itself in and establishing it as a country that can face up to the challenges of the twenty-first century with a good deal of hope and optimism, putting us at the vanguard of the democratic and revolutionary nations of the world.
JB: Which social urban movements does the FARC–EP believe require strategic development in this process?
RG: In the cities we work fundamentally with the industrial workers sector. We are also active in the cooperative movement, with neighborhood communal action committees, with associations from the informal economy, which have grown in number in recent years due to neoliberal policies. In addition, we pay a lot of attention to the problems of women and young people in general. So we are represented in all those sectors. We are working conscientiously to give them an organizational character and steer them toward the political struggle.
At the same time, this political work, with the experiences it provides of ways of fighting repression, nourishes our own political action. Although the FARC–EP was born essentially as a peasant movement, and this base is maintained in its current make-up, it is also true that there are other sectors of Colombian society that are accompanying us in the struggle. There are middle classes and professional, technical, and upper-class sectors, as well as liberal professionals, clergy, and people from the world of popular culture and art in all its forms linked to the FARC–EP. This has been changing over recent years. We must emphasize the participation of women in our ranks, who now represent 43 percent of the guerrilla force.
JB: It is claimed that, in the regions under its control, the FARC–EP has not always shown itself to be capable of fully allowing the development of a civil society organized autonomously around the different interests it is made up of (cooperatives, unions, various associations, indigenous minorities, etc.). Doesn’t this situation reveal a rather authoritarian project for society based exclusively on the capabilities and competencies of a kind of party-state?
RG: [laughing] I don’t know where you’re going with that question or where we have had control over any part of the national territory. That has not happened yet. We are not waging a war of positions in Colombia. We are a nomadic guerrilla force. When we are in certain areas for a time, we develop direct democracy as it has never been seen in any other type of organization promoted by the state or the oligarchic parties.
As a matter of fact, I think that internally the FARC–EP is far more democratic than certain states and democracies; our maximum organ of leadership in the FARC–EP is the National Conference of Guerrilla Fighters, which meets every four years (or more, depending on the war situation). The leaders, without exception, are elected by the votes of all the guerrilla fighters. In other words, there are no appointments. It is by popular vote, by the votes of FARC–EP members, that democracy (and the question of hierarchies) is managed within the guerrilla movement.
In conjunction with the communities. The most significant case was that of San Vicente del Caguán, in south central Colombia during the period of clarity and dialogue from 1999 to 2002. We were there for three years and worked with the communities on civic-military activities. Between them, the civilian population and the “guerrillerada” built bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, local footpaths, and reclaimed certain rivers, creeks, and streams that were heavily polluted. In addition to this, the FARC–EP laid down regulations regarding ecology issues (hunting, fishing, tree felling, and forestry, and protection for native trees), all with the participation of the community.
For example, for the construction of a highway, 100 or 200 community action committees from the entire region were brought together and there, by popular vote, it was decided who was going to work, in what way, and how much they would contribute economically and logistically. Then the sums were done and these were handed over to the masses so they could work out for themselves how each of the contributions had been invested. This is open, participative democracy and true mass democracy such as Colombia has never seen before. That is our experience.
There is no place for authoritarianism in the principles of the FARC–EP. The thing is we defend principles. And when it comes to principles we are unwavering. We have our own vision of what democracy should be. Democracy should be open and as direct as possible. In other words, mass democracy as a way of defining and discussing major problems. It’s very simple, if there are a hundred people in a community, why should ten of them decide for everyone? For us those hundred people have the power to make decisions. In Colombia they talk to us about representative democracy because there are elections, but in reality these crooks, all these bums who go to the Senate or the Chamber of Representatives, are not real representatives of the communities.
They are mostly individuals who get there with the help of their wealth, through clientelism and by means of the threats they subject our people to. So, my dear journalist, it’s essential to be clear about what kind of democracy we’re talking about, what we the FARC–EP understand by democracy and what you in Europe understand by democracy. I consider the FARC–EP to be a democratic organization practicing democracy in the areas where it works.
Our option is a direct democracy that is as broad and participative as possible. Democracy exercised by and for majorities. Not paper democracy. Not democracy for a privileged few. We do not like that type of “democracy” and we are not going to practice it. I was saying that in the FARC–EP we like to organize the masses into all kinds of collectives so that they can defend their own interests. That is the secret of the FARC–EP’s existence in the midst of so complicated a conflict as Colombia’s.
JB: The FARC–EP is often criticized, even by leftist forces, for its internal use of “expedient” methods: as in the cases of deserters being executed, “demoralized” militants being sent on suicide missions, pregnant militants being forced to have abortions, and so on. There is no doubt that the FARC–EP is involved in an extremely tough armed struggle, but don’t such methods or practices strike at the individual rights of combatants or freedom of discussion at the heart of the guerrilla movement, thereby revealing an extremely vertical form of political organization in the purest Stalinist tradition?
RG: Your question shows how little is known about the FARC–EP and how, perhaps subconsciously, you are echoing all the enemy propaganda (the oligarchic Colombian regime and its ally the United States). It is the enemy who has claimed we are vertical, that we solve all problems in the expedient way you refer to in your question.
We use political methods to solve any type of problem within the FARC–EP. Initially new combatants attend a six-month training school where the materials studied are fundamentally the statutes, rules of command, and disciplinary regime. If applicants realize they cannot, for physical or moral reasons, obey those rules, they can return home no problem, because until that point they know nothing and nobody other than the people with whom, clandestinely, they have taken the initial training course. Once that level has been passed, the person makes a commitment and joins the FARC–EP for life, in other words, until the triumph of the revolution and in the subsequent construction of the new society.
We do not have obligatory military service or voluntary military service either. Admittance to the FARC–EP involves thorough development in political and military training, in terms of conscious training....Let’s not forget that anyone can use a weapon, but handling politics, the class struggle and social changes, in a society like ours, is much more complicated. This, which is what we are concerned with, calls for permanent long-term training.
It is not true then that we use firing squads or executions without trial, for instance. We have no need to because our statutes contain many ways of penalizing any violation of the organization’s discipline.
Execution by firing squad is only envisaged for traitors or infiltrators who are consciously working for the enemy. That is the most serious measure taken in the FARC–EP. Other than that, any situation can be dealt with using criticism and self-criticism based on Marxist-Leninist principles, which are an integral part of our revolutionary concept.
The other issue, reflected in your question’s content, is a defamatory campaign seeking to reduce the FARC–EP to an undisciplined movement, without a hierarchy and without recognized leaders. A military organization simply cannot survive in those conditions. There is a saying that goes “the discipline is complied with or the militia is washed up.”
It would be absurd to think we could send people on missions who are demoralized, have psychological problems, or lack the sufficient politico-military qualifications. (In a war situation, who could possibly make such a miscalculation?) Quite the contrary, within the FARC–EP participation in missions constitutes a recognition of good work, and is an incentive and an honor for combatants. The FARC–EP employs conscious participation, which is why, prior to action, the leaders make a detailed study of the qualities of the combatants who are to participate in each of the war activities or on special missions determined by the FARC–EP.
As for the conditions of women in the guerrilla force, they are free. In other words, for the first time a left-wing organization and revolutionary movement has defined women as people who are absolutely free and enjoy full equality with men, taking on the same responsibilities and the same jobs, and having the same rights. Ever since the matriarchal era, it’s perhaps only now, in the guerrilla struggle, that women are beginning to play the part they lost in the past, which was the greatest defeat the female gender has suffered in the history of humanity.
As for the issue of pregnancy in the FARC–EP, the female fighters know from the outset that in the war situation they have to go through they cannot get pregnant. Within our organization, we do a lot of educational work on diffusion of information and prevention so that women are well informed about this matter and about how to avoid pregnancy and/or sexually transmitted diseases.
Sometimes, by mistake or by accident, there are cases of involuntary pregnancy. Taking into consideration the objective rules and living conditions in the midst of combat, they are generally interrupted at the request of the combatants themselves. In these cases the interruption is carried out in hygienic, sterile conditions, by qualified doctors with all the necessary measures taken to prevent any risk to their lives.
The interruption of pregnancy has been legalized in many countries and is part of certain constitutions around the world, but we have always been accused of arbitrariness on this matter and we have been demonized. What is going on here? Double standards, that’s what.
We want you to know that, for the FARC–EP, family values and the family unit are the basis for the conception of the new society we want to build. But we’re at a stage that doesn’t facilitate the development of this important aspect of life in any way.
It is telling that, in spite of all the propaganda waged against our organization, the female presence in the ranks of the FARC–EP accounts for 40 percent of combatants at present. The FARC–EP’s women fighters are real Amazons on the battlefield, or as Simon Bolivar said, in reference to those brave Roman women warriors, they are real “Bellonas.” When they are away from the war situation, the behavior of our female comrades is very feminine. In combat, they are every bit as tough as the men. They teach us about honesty, dedication, sacrifice, fraternity, and heroism...we could hardly mistreat our female comrades, they are a fundamental part of the struggle for the triumph of our revolution.
JB: Señor Granda, who was responsible for the deaths of the eleven congressional representatives detained by the FARC–EP? How is it possible that those eleven hostages were all together in the same place? Do you think it was a deliberate operation by the Colombian state to launch a vast political campaign against the FARC–EP guerrilla movement?
RG: The FARC–EP had been warning public opinion at home and abroad that operations to rescue prisoners by force posed an exaggerated threat to the lives of the hostages it was holding.
This is why the FARC–EP has pointed out that responsibility for the deaths of the eleven representatives from the Valle del Cauca on June 18, 2007, lies mainly with those who gave the order and aided the rescue attempt by force—Uribe, first and foremost.
To explain why they were together would be to indulge in speculation because on that date you remember I had just left prison in La Dorada.
What has to be said about the deaths of the eleven congressmen is that it was undoubtedly a meticulously prepared plan, both politically and militarily, and also in terms of propaganda.
Uribe’s government began its plan by talking about the possibility of releasing a number of FARC–EP prisoners for whom no one had made any request, because we had sought a bilateral humanitarian exchange of prisoners between the FARC–EP and the government. But then, Uribe took the completely unilateral decision to free some of the FARC–EP combatants. This, in my view, had to do with the preparations for action on a larger scale in the Colombian mountains.
That covertly planned action was none other than the rescue of the twelve congressional representatives by a special force of CIA agents, British and Israeli mercenaries, and Colombian army commandos.
The intended blow was that, if this special force appeared to have successfully freed the twelve congressional representatives, Uribe would have kept in prison those he was supposedly attempting to free and embarked on a political campaign at home and abroad claiming that ransoms would henceforth be the most appropriate way to secure the release of those being held by the FARC–EP, thereby ruling out the feasibility of humanitarian exchange or any possibility of dialogue.
The result of this and other similar events have led us to believe that Lima- or Entebbe-style rescue operations cannot be repeated in the Colombian rainforests. What is unequivocally required in Colombia is a humanitarian exchange between the government and the FARC–EP as a preamble to dialogue that might open the way to peace with social justice. Let us hope that many of your readers, the international community, and social, religious, humanist, and left-wing states, governments, peoples, parties, and organizations can contribute toward this search for a solution to the social and armed conflict taking place in Colombia.

Direct-to-Consumer DNA Testing and the Myth of Personalized Medicine: Spit Kits, SNP Chips and Human Genomics

2008-03-04T16:57:00.001+05:30

http://www.etcgroup.org/

Special Report on Human Genomics, Part I

Direct-to-Consumer DNA Testing and the Myth of Personalized Medicine:Spit Kits, SNP Chips and Human GenomicsIn the coming months, ETC Group will publish a series of reports on the impact and implications of human genomics. The topic of the first report in the series is the burgeoning Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry, which is promising consumers a guidebook for maintaining health as well as a gene-based horoscope predicting future illness. The second report will examine large-scale human genomics projects and their relation to biopiracy. A third report will examine the corporate context – the industry players vying to control and profit from the genomics revolution. Issue & Impact: “Personalized medicine” is based on the belief that we can – or, one day soon will be able to – detect, prevent and treat disease according to an individual’s genetic profile. “Gene-informed,”[1] individualized medicine is being touted as a boon to health and longevity around the world, though its efficacy and usefulness have yet to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the DNA testing field is advancing rapidly. The global market for personal gene testing is estimated at $730 million and growing 20% every year, according to market research analysts.[2] An explosion of unregulated direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing is feeding that growth. Today there are more than one thousand different genetic tests available. Marketers of personal gene testing want us to believe that our genes define us and hold the key to our health and wellbeing. In fact, the information gleaned from most genetic tests has very limited use for patients, but it is extremely valuable to companies and researchers trying to establish links between medical conditions and genetic variations, enabling – they hope – the eventual development of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles. In the shorter term, drugs that have been taken off the market due to unexpected adverse reactions in a small percentage of the population could be re-marketed as personalized drugs, intended only for those with the appropriate genetic profile. Through clever (and often misleading) marketing, some companies are persuading consumers to pay for storage of genetic data and health information, which the companies intend to use (e.g., sell) for research and drug development. While DNA testing is currently expensive, risky (e.g., it can result in privacy violations and discrimination) and provides information with extremely limited usefulness, it is being marketed as the next cutting-edge, must-have accessory – the iPod of the medical world.[1] The phrase is used by Dr. Russ Altman, Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, in a Google TechTalk entitled “Opportunities for Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine,” 22 February 2006, on the Internet: http://thepersonalgenome.com/2006/02/russ_altman_tal/[2] Estimate comes from Piper Jaffray & Co., cited in Matthew Herper and Robert Langreth, “Will You Get Cancer?” Forbes.com, 18 June 2007, on the Internet: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0618/052_2.html

The veracity of Indian democracy

2008-03-03T20:08:00.002+05:30

From Gujarat to Nandigram
Sushmita
If you disagree with the state, you will be killed. If you are not a Hindu you will be killed. You are a human being and think like one. This can provide enough reasons for killing you. Didn’t you hear this during the honorable tour of Indian democracy? Our right to live will be decided by the thermometer of majority of the parliamentary politics of India. The honorable journey in the service of finance capital is moving ahead crushing the oppressed masses. Chief Minister of a state challenges all those who oppose the mass killings by saying that he is elected by the majority. Not only this he even challenged his opponents to contest the elections to find it (let elections decide whether he is right or wrong). If we follow Narendra Modi or other monks of Indian democracy, we get to the conclusion that the people of Gujarat have not only welcomed the killings organized by Narendra Modi but also provided him a license to continue.
Crisis of Indian Democracy and Fascism.
Discussions are hot on the reelection of Narendra Modi. At many places caste equations and equations of congress and BJP are being discussed. But there are much important questions which are left out.i.e. Is Modi the first person to be elected after organizing mass killings? Indira Gandhi was responsible for enforcing an emergency. Repression reached to heights, people got killed but she got re elected with majority in just three years time. The facts lay strong emphasis on the questions that are being raised on democracy in India. This democracy based on semi feudal and semi colonial relations becomes more regressive with the deepening of economic crisis. If we talk about the present structure of parliament we find that power has been centralized to the cabinet and more so in the pre determined standing committees which are found to be serving the finance capital. Even the roles of ministers are decided by this finance capital. More importantly fascism has been borne out of the Indian parliament itself. The decision to put an emergency can be undemocratic but in no way unlawful in the parliamentary framework. If in majority the government has a right to reject crores of masses on the basis of decision taken by the cabinet as the whip of cabinet is a compulsion to all members of the parliament. Today the Indian parliament is undergoing severe crisis despite using caste, religion and other regressive measures. There is a contradiction between democracy and feudalism. The growth of democracy means decline in role of feudal institutions (such as caste, creed, religion etc) in our social political life. But what we find here is that these institutions have made a strong hold. Indian parliamentary politics has made all these feudal relations more strong. Apart from this we can get a glimpse of the increasing crisis in the present structure of governance where there is multi party position and multiparty opposition. Still it is hard to complete five years tenure. And now they are talking of revising the constitution. It is harsh reality that the parliament can do nothing more than have a mock debate on economic and external affairs. Now ordinance have taken the place of bills in parliament. Emergency powers are becoming the common tools of governance. In this way Indian democracy is becoming more and more another weapon to repress the masses. Political crisis is increasing in the country. If we read the indicators in the country we find that the whole of ruling class is busy serving finance capital. The rights and struggles of working classes are being curbed. The judiciary is all set to follow the directions provided by finance capital. These indications are found in many anti-struggles and anti strike decisions given by the court. Arundhati Roy was punished for standing by the people who are displaced in the Narmada project. Whereas, Narendra Modi was spared, when he announced that, “enemies of humanity will be killed as Sohrabuddin”. May be this is not contempt of court. The rulers use a section of people to built private gangs to crush any mass struggle by the masses. In Gujarat we saw that Narendra Modi mobilized all the classes against the Muslims. Even the dalits and tribes were mobilized for the genocide. We can also see the glimpse of these regressive measures taken by that state in organizing anti struggle gangs amongst the people against struggling masses of Orissa and Nandigram. After 1990’s there has been increase in private gangs backed by the state in areas of nationalities and naxal struggle. State consciously creates an environment of terror to garner the support of masses for its repressive measures. Time and again the masses are being told that they are in constant danger. They are sitting on a heap of gunpowder which can be ignited from anywhere in Pakistan or Bangladesh. This terror is being used by the government to justify its huge expenditure on intelligence and army (legal as well as illegal) such as Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, grey hounds and cobra in Andhra Pradesh, NASUS in Jharkhand, SULFA in Assam, etc and black laws. In such a way it creates have inner contradictions amongst the masses.
The signs of fascism are quite clear. One thing the ruling classes have in common that they have all been using and organizing masses into reactionary forces. Fascism is deep rooted into the economic and political system. We also find that riots take place at those places were indigenous and handicraft industry have a strong hold. Such as Bhagalpur (silk mills), Aligarh (lock industry), Gujarat where there are a large number of small industries. Imperialism conflicts with indigenous techniques. It uses riots as means to destroy indigenous techniques. We find that not a single industrial organization protested when large numbers of small scale industries were destroyed during the riots.
Fascism in the country could be traced back to 1970s when the signs of world wide depression could be seen. Imperialism again plunged to a long term crisis from the 70s. This is the time when India faced the consequences of emergency. Indira Gandhi in her later years used Hindu chauvinism. The anti people decisions introduced fascism to the people of India in the times of growing economic and political crisis. By giving loans IMF started its structural adjustment programs in 1980s. Rajiv Gandhi’s reign saw many such anti people policies as well as concept of a strong Hindu nationalism.
The rise of Hindu fascist forces into a political force
The Hindu fascist ideology has been in existence for as long as seven and a half decades with the inauguration of the RSS in 1925 at Nagpur. But it did not play any significant role in state power. It has risen to power in the last 25 years and since then has become a strong political force. Initially its bases were upper caste people and Hindu merchant communities. In 1980s ruling classes decided to develop this fascist ideology. It has increased day by day and has made a place even amongst the dalits and backward castes. All the ruling classes have played a significant role in developing aiding and abetting the growth of fascist forces. The different fronts made with an intention of parliamentary alliances have legalized Hindu fascism. It has maintained a mask by making alliances with regional parties. BJP in its tenure associated with big commercial households and together with its organizations-CII, FICCI, and ASOCHEM-formed various committees with different ministries. It went so far as to make acquaintances with the PM office. We see that Hindu fascism is basically a result of a course of political events, which has been brought by the ruling class, which centers on imperialism and increasing political and economic crisis of national and foreign capitalists and ruling classes.
Does fascism have any definition?
According to the 13th meet of Communist International, “comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.(1) Dimitrov warns also of development of fascist ideology by the rulers if there is economic and political crisis .i.e. the main question is of economic and political crisis and class character. A special character of fascism is that, it is supported by regressive forces and it uses these forces to legalize its works. The regressive mass movement aroused by fascism is used by the rulers to terrorize and repress the people’s struggles. According to Togliyati,
“Fascism should be used only when the attack start on working class & it is being carried out on depending any mass base as petty bourgeoisie. We get this specificity in Germany, Italy, France, England, & all those other places where fascism is in existence.”2 ( translation ours)
If we read the signs coming from different parts of the country, it becomes clear that state is becoming fascist. Its roots are well dug into the crisis of imperialism which is leading to rise in dangerous political crisis.
Dying Imperialism And Growing Fascism
Fascism is directly related to finance capital. This relation can be understood by reviewing the past. After 1930’s, imperialism again went into deep and long term crisis in 1970’s. Before this period, surplus capital searched ways to grow. IMF, IBRD and globalization brought a solution for this. In 1980 inoperative capital found a way in giving loans to the third world. After 1990 .i.e. with the introduction of globalization, the surplus capital tried to make a place in the world market and come out of the depression. This technique helped a little but the crisis had come to say. After the dot.com bubble brusted in 2002, the situation became worse. The American economy started shrinking. Then came the housing bubble started by the Federal Reserve (central bank of America). It also gave fruits for some time but on august 16, 2007, the tree collapsed, which was called sub-prime crisis. This crisis had far reaching effects. According to Rodigo Rato, “US will bear the burnt of the economic consequences of the crisis, with the bulk of the impact not being felt until next year… The potential consequences of the episode should not be underestimated and the adjustment process is likely to be protected. Credit condition may not normalize soon, developed in the structure … it has an real effect on the real economy which will be felt more in 2008, with greater intensity in US, less in other areas.”(3)
The impact of the crisis of the American economy on the world economy is evident. Signs of depression cannot be ignored as it would increase the economic crisis globally.
The crisis in American sub prime market, lead to instability in all the share markets of the world. The results were so drastic that many of the leading banks of the world were endangered. So to save them, the central banks had to pour in a lot of wealth. The European Central Bank invested $130 billion, Japanese Bank invested $1 trillion and American Federal Bank invested $43 billion. As imperialism has already used all techniques, it has no other alternative left than to loot the already poor countries. This it would attain through the medium of globalization. “ To give some idea of the importance of profits from investments abroad in the total US economy, these represented about 6% of the total business profits in 1960s, 11% in 1970s, 15-16% in the 1980s &, 1990s, & have averaged 18% for the five years period 2000-2004.(4)
There has also been an increase in purchase and sale of stocks. “If we see trend of last 30 years in 1975, 19 millions stock shares traded daily on the New York stock exchange, by 1985.the volume had reached 109 million & by 2000, 1,600 million shares with a value of over $ 60 billion. Even larger is the daily trading on the world currency markets, which has gone from $ 80 billion a day in 1977, to the current average of $ 1.8 trillion a day. That means that every 24 days the dollar volume of currency trading equals the entire worlds annual GDP. (5) we can easily draw conclusions that the finance capital will search more and more avenues for profits and economic instability would increase.
Apart from this concentration has grown many folds. According to a study published in 2005 we find that the top 10 companies controls almost 59% market share of the world’s leading 98 drug firms. The top 10 companies control almost half of the $29,566 million global pesticide market. Analysts predict that only three major companies will survive in the conventional pesticide business by 2015. In 2004, the 10 global food retailers accounted for combined sales of $ 84,000 million – 24% of the estimated $ 3.5 trillion global market. We can asses from these oligarchies how trance national companies are controlling & shaping our social-economical-political life. At the beginning of this decade it was predicted by many analyst that the period of corporate mergers as seen in 1990s was over but in 2004, the global value of corporate mergers & acquisitions climbed to $ 1.95 trillion- a 40% jump over the $ 1.38 trillion in 2003. Combined sales of world’s largest 200 largest corporations account for 29% of world’s economic activity in 2004. It was about $ 11,442,253 million. We can asses the concentration of wealth from this fact that the total wealth of 946 world’s billionaires grew 35% year to year while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s population declined or stagnate.
According to James Petras, “Given the enormous class and income disparities in Russia, Latin America and China (20 Chinese billionaires have a net worth of 29.4 billion USD in less than ten years), it is more accurate to describe these countries as ‘surging billionaires’ rather than ‘emerging markets’. In backward countries globalization was produced as the solution of all their problems. Mainstream economists preach us that capital always seeks the highest returns & typically flows from rich countries to poor ones- but The Economist notes that emerging economies sent about $350 billion to rich countries in 2004.(6) These all facts of concentration show that the crisis in imperialism is deepening. We know that the fundamental reason of the crisis of the imperialism is the contradiction between social form of production & private form of ownership. These all process would intense the contradictions of imperialism to a large extent. We can say that if imperialism in the period of com. Lenin was moribund & parasite then it is thousand times more moribund & more parasite. To come out from this crisis imperialism would take more reactionary measures. As result the plunder of oppressed nation would rise at huge level. The expenditure on imperialist war would increase. The market of weapon would be promoted. In all countries racial & religious sentiments would be ignited. To keep the level of profit high many genocide & mass killings would be organized. It is the last tool in hands of imperialism.
The leaders of the Indian economy are showing the economy to be full proof, but they themselves are not sure about it. The sales of shares, by the FIIs were the largest in August after the sub prime crisis. The monthly sales reached to a record figure since they were allowed participation in the Indian markets in the early 1990s. This means that a single crisis in American market has the potentiality to shake the whole market. Big comprador houses of India are bound as never before to the imperialists. Most of the private banks in India have become more foreign than Indian. The reasons for the flow of funds by the FIIs are the serious sub-prime crisis and low interests rates rather than the strong position of Indian economy. The foreign control on Indian economy has reached to dangerous limits. The foreign investment in telecom sector is about 74%. The real estate boom in India is going the U.S way. The crisis in Indian agriculture is known to all. In the past 30 years there is a record decline in food grain production. India’s foreign debt has grown by massive 23% during 2006-07 and stood at $165 billion. It constitutes 16.4% of the GDP. From May 2007 onwards there are signs of slowdown in the economy. With such high level of dependence on foreign capital, it is inevitable that even small shocks in the international economy will badly impact India. Apart from this concentration has increased during the period of globalization. According to James Petras, in India which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to India’s security are the Maoist led guerrilla and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold. (7)
Social democrats and fascism
Social democracy in India which has changed to social fascism has also contributed to the growth of fascism. It has consciously ignored the class character and relation with finance capital. This is because It belongs to the same class of rulers in places where it has been for along time and its hunger for finance capital is well known.
In neck deep parliamentarianism, these fake Marxists consciously engage the struggle against fascism in equation of parliamentarianism. It even left behind the rulling class parties in becoming an agent of finance capital. Not only it mobilized the masses in interest of finance capital but it also used them against the struggling masses who fought against finance capital. It propagated largely about land reforms, but the fact is that distribution of a large part of acquired land is still pending in the court. The social democrats were not so serious to take the land from land lords and distribute amongst the landless than to snatch it from the farmers and give to the imperialists. Coming of fascism into power and role of social democrats in it is very rightly explained by Dimitrov, “Comrades, fascism also attained power for the reason that the proletariat found itself isolated from its natural allies. Fascism attained power because it was able to win over large masses of the peasantry, owing to the fact that the Social-Democrats in the name of the working class pursued what was in fact an anti-peasant policy. The peasant saw in power a number of Social-Democratic governments, which in his eyes were an embodiment of the power of the working class; but not one of them put an end to peasant want; none of them gave land to the peasantry. In Germany, the Social-Democrats did not touch the landlords; they combated the strikes of the farm laborers, with the result that long before Hitler came to power the farm laborers of Germany were deserting the reformist trade unions and in the majority of cases were going over to the Stahlhelm and to the National Socialists”.(8) is not the statement very apt for the social democrats in India? They in india advised the working class not to strike in interest of development. They told that it is time for class collaboration and not class struggle.
The social democrats frequently form alliances with other sections of compradors bourgeoisie and feudal rulling classes who have ample reasons to grow as fascist forces. On this Dimitrov writes “Was not the German Social-Democratic Party in a coalition government? It was. Was not the Austrian Social-Democratic Party in office? Were not the Spanish Socialists in the same government as the bourgeoisie? They were. Did the participation of the Social-Democratic Parties in the bourgeois coalition governments in these countries prevent fascism from attacking the proletariat? It did not. Consequently it is as clear as daylight that participation of Social-Democratic ministers in bourgeois governments is not a barrier to fascism”. (9). Dimitrov’s words expose these social democrats.
From 2002 Buddhdev Bhattacharya started to speak against madarasas & in favour to implement a draconian law like POTA in West Bengal.
These signals unveil the character of the social democrats. A chief minister orders to kill the masses in interest of foreign capital and reacts by saying that they have been paid back in the same coin. The same CM apologises for the attack on fascists In case of attack in Tapan Sikdar case. Does it not clear things? These social democrats declared that the largest threat were the struggling forces in the rural areas. They advised the ruling classes to understand the threat of Maoists in Nandigram. In Dimitrov’s words “Only such monstrous philistines, such lackeys of the bourgeoisie, as the superannuated theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, are capable of casting reproaches at the workers, to the effect that they should not have taken up arms in Austria and Spain. What would the working class movement in Austria and Spain look like today if the working class of these countries were guided by the treacherous counsels of the Kautskys? The working class would be experiencing profound demoralization in its ranks”. (10)
Social democrats today tell us to forget the dream of socialism. We should forget that barbarous states have plunged the world into ocean of blood just to make profits. We should forget that our friends have up rooted czar and chiang kai seik and gave there lives to create a new social system. We are being told that the martyrdom of crores of daughters and sons of the working class went in vain and socialism was there mental mayhem. We should forget that Hiroshima and Nagasaki was destroyed for profits. We should forget that the hands of these profiteers are dripping with the blood of our sisters and brothers in Vietnam and Chillie and other countries. But they should know that masses can never forget the dream of socialism. Kautsky’s legacy is not peoples’ legacy. Peoples’ legacy is with the legacy of writers such as the great Christopher Coldwell, Lorca, ken saro viva and philosophers and those great soviet daughters and sons , who under the leadership of Stalin, cut the claws of Hitler who dreamt of changing the world map.
The facts reveal that the crisis of imperialism and entrance of foreign capital and the rise of hindutva as a fascist force occurred in the same period. As the rate of foreign capital increased in the economy, more and more riots and hatred and hatred and anti people tools came into play. The road show of Indian democracy from Gujarat to Nandigram is also related to this foreign capital. The ruling classes have no other alternative than fascism to come out of this political crisis. By exaggerating the force of fascism, the social democrats and other liberal forces ultimately fulfill the interest of fascism. It ignores the fact that to crush the mass struggles it takes the path of fascism. To be in power it uses all reactionary means and create contradictions among masses. But mass uprisings take place from within these.\ and organize itself for bigger struggles. Struggle is the prime aspect here. About this Lenin says “ The school of civil war --- does not leave the people unaffected. It is a harsh school, and its complete curriculum inevitably includes the victories of the counterrevolution, the debaucheries of enraged reactionaries, savage punishments meted out by the old governments to the rebels, etc. But only downright pedants and mentally decrepit mummies can grieve over the fact that nations are entering this painful school; this school teaches the oppressed classes how to conduct civil war; it teaches how to bring about a victorious revolution; it concentrates in the masses of present day slaves that hatred which is always harboured by the downtrodden, dull, ignorant slaves, and which leads those slaves who have become conscious of the shame of their slavery to the greatest historic exploits”.(11)
The ruling classes are again becoming fascists. Fascism is not invincible. It would lead the ruling class to downfall. On the other side the struggles of masses have also increased. To crush this the ruling class is becoming more and more fascist. Today again imperialism is suffering from crisis and depression. It is becoming more and more reactionary. But on the other hand in latin America and Asia more and more masses are joining hands in struggle. Today the responsibility to smash fascism falls on the hands of inharitors of warriors & daughters and sons of soviet who sacrificed their lives in fight against profiteers powers. Victory of the working class is in inevitable because only & only masses are creators of history. State only and only represses.

1. United front against fascism – Dimitrov
2. Palmiro Togliatti on Fascism
3. The Independent, 25 September 2007.
4. Monthly Review, December 2006
5. Ibid
6. The Economist, 24 September 2004
7. Global ruling class, James Petras
8. United front against fascism – Dimitrov
9. Ibid
10. Ibid
11. [V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 15:183]
Sushmita is a researcher .

Translated from Hindi by Lalima.

BMW axes 8,100 jobs to increase profits

2008-03-02T20:45:00.000+05:30

By Dietmar Henning

On February 27, German auto manufacturer BMW confirmed its plans to shed 8,100 jobs. Shortly before Christmas, the company had announced the cutting of several thousand jobs but had not given any concrete figures. In December of last year, Der Spiegel magazine raised the figure of 8,000 jobs in danger, but BMW refused to comment further.
Now, BMW personnel executive committee member Ernst Baumann announced that most of the 8,100 redundancies are to take place in Germany in the form of unemployment for 5,000 agency workers and 2,500 members of the permanent staff. An additional 600 employees will lose their jobs at the company’s international locations.
BMW currently employs a total of 108,000 workers, including around 80,000 in Germany. In addition, the company employs 8,000 agency or temporary workers in Germany. According to personnel chief Baumann, 2,500 of these workers have not had their contracts renewed. The remaining 2,500 jobs are to be shed in the course of the year.
The elimination of jobs amongst full-time staff is due to take place through the implementation of part-time work for older workers and redundancy payments. Although BMW is prepared to pay out millions to this end, Baumann assured shareholders that the “synergy effect” would result in a reduction in personnel expenditure amounting to €500 million per year starting from 2009.
The job cuts are part of an extensive savings program aimed at increasing the company’s profits and rewarding shareholders. “We are working to improve our profits in order to achieve the required premiums” was the reason given by Baumann for the job cuts. The current rate of profits—5 percent—is to be increased to between 8 and 10 percent by 2012, while the net yield on assigned capital is to be increased to more than 26 percent.
At present, BMW profit levels are less than its main competitors. Therefore, the company plans to save a total of €6 billion in material and personnel costs by 2012 and increase annual productivity rates by 5 to 10 percent. “This is simply laid down by the competition,” Baumann insisted.
In order to double profits, it is unlikely that the present measures will suffice, and it is likely that the current round of job cuts is just the start.
Record profits
On Wednesday, Baumann announced plans by BMW for further cutbacks in other areas alongside the cuts in personnel expenditure. The company has been affected by the high costs of raw materials and development, and, in order to minimise costs, BMW is increasing its pressure on suppliers. At the start of this year, Herbert Diess, on behalf of the BMW executive, demanded that a number of suppliers agree to a discount of between 15 to 20 percent. In addition, Diess cut payments usually made by the company to suppliers to help with the costs of raw materials.
Baumann also claimed that BMW was forced to save because of the weak dollar. While BMW still produces a majority of its vehicles for domestic consumption, its most important sales market is now the US. A euro worth US$1.50 for any lengthy period of time would constitute a “critical” level for BMW. “Then we need to take further measures with regard to personnel,” Baumann threatened.
Despite increases in the prices of raw material and development costs, as well as the weak dollar, both 2006 and 2007 were record years for BMW, with the company selling more cars than ever before. All three of its brands—BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce—announced record turnover at the start of the year, and overall turnover increased by 14 percent to €56 billion. In January, chief executive Norbert Reithofer also announced that current profit levels would exceed those of last year (€3.75 billion). The exact profit level for 2007 is still to be given.
In total, BMW delivered 1.5 million vehicles worldwide, 9.2 percent more than the previous year. The biggest single market for BMW was the US, with 336,000 units sold—an increase of 7.1 percent. This was the company’s best result ever in the US, making BMW the most successful European brand on the US market.
German sales of 284,000 new vehicles were somewhat less than previous year (296,000), but BMW still fared better than the general trend—with sales dropping by 4.2 percent compared to an overall new vehicle sales decrease of 9.2 percent.
BMW assumes that increases in the rate of value-added tax were behind this decrease on the German market. The super-rich, however, remain unconcerned about such changes in commodity taxes, and luxury brand Rolls-Royce was able to sell 1,010 vehicles in 2007—increasing sales by 25.5 percent.
The role of the trade unions and factory council
The main auto trade union, IG Metall, and the BMW factory council have supported all of the job-cutting measures implemented by BMW since the 1990s, while at the same time the central works council only recently agreed on new worsened conditions with management for those employees retaining their jobs.
The factory council gave its stamp of approval to shorter breaks and the abolition of premiums and shift payments for the 80,000 workforce in Germany. The remaining workers would also have to make “a contribution,” Baumann declared approvingly. And although profits are continuously increasing, the company profit-sharing scheme would not yield any increase for its employees this year.
It is now clear that the current range of job cuts was a done deal, worked out some time ago between the union, BMW management and the factory council.
When Der Spiegel reported on the planned job cuts three days before Christmas, IG Metall and the BMW factory council barely reacted. Both bodies avoided any criticism and expressly lined up behind BMW board chairman Norbert Reithofer.
“We are not at all concerned” was the comment of Matthias Jena, speaker for IG Metall in Bavaria, just after the Christmas break. The plans for changes in production—particularly in the 7 series—have been known since May 2007. “If production is reorganised, then fewer people are needed. That is completely normal,” Jena said.
The head of the Bavarian IG Metall, Werner Neugebauer, who sits on the supervisory board of BMW, had already been informed by the executive in May 2007 on plans for dismissals. When Der Spiegel printed its report in December, Neugebauer saw no need to interrupt his Christmas holiday or make a statement. After all, the dismissals were a component of the strategy paper the company had submitted in September. This strategy paper had received the unconditional support of IG Metall and the factory council.
By refusing to lift a finger to oppose the dismantling of the jobs of agency workers, the union and factory council are driving a wedge between the company’s 80,000 full-time staff and its 8,000 temporary workers. The cynical message to the full-time staff is clear: “Keep calm, those hardest hit are the temporary workers, and we will do what we can for those permanent staff who lose their jobs.”

Economist estimates cost of Iraq war to exceed $3 trillion

2008-03-02T20:43:00.000+05:30

By Naomi Spencer
As the five-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq approaches, a leading economist is estimating that the overall cost of the war will be between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. This figure does not take into account the enormous devastation that the US military has wrought upon the population and social infrastructure of Iraq.
On Thursday, Joseph Stiglitz told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that $3 trillion was at the low end of estimated war costs. After factoring in the cost of weapons and operations, future health-care costs for veterans, interest on foreign loans used to fund the war, and future borrowing, Stiglitz said the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for the US alone. Another estimated $6 trillion will be borne by other countries, he said.
Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank and a Nobel laureate, is co-author with Harvard economics professor Linda Bilmes of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, a book released Friday. The book builds on 2006 research that estimated the cost of the so-called war on terror in excess of $1 trillion.
Officially, the US spends $16 billion every month to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, but this figure includes only direct expenses.
These enormous sums are being expended to carry out a crime of immeasurable proportions. More than a million civilians have been killed in Iraq alone. Some 4.5 million more have been displaced by the violence, with thousands of refugees fleeing the country into Syria, Jordan and elsewhere every day. With $3-5 trillion, the US government has destroyed an entire society.
Those charged with carrying out the conquest have also been sacrificed. Over 5,000 military personnel—the vast majority US troops—have died in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. A substantial portion of the estimated costs will go to pay for health care for the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers.
The American ruling class has initiated a policy of unending war as it cuts jobs and social programs in the United States. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, $1 trillion could pay for 8 million housing units, university scholarships for 43 million students, health care for 530 million children, or the salaries of 15 million public school teachers in the US.
In an interview published Thursday in the British newspaper, the Guardian, Stiglitz noted that the US spends $5 billion a year in aid to Africa. “Five billion is roughly 10 days’ fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything,” he said.
The United Nations estimates that $195 billion would end world hunger and most of the devastating diseases afflicting the world’s poor. AIDS, measles, tuberculosis, malaria and other water-borne illnesses could all be brought into manageable numbers or wholly eradicated within a short time for less than the cost of one year of waging war in Iraq. Instead, the US occupation of Iraq has reintroduced diseases such as cholera into Iraqi society.
For years, the US political establishment has carried out attacks on social programs and the jobs of American workers. Workers are now told that there is no money for decent wages and benefits, while billions are spent on military wars of aggression.
One consequence of the chaos wrought in the Middle East, Stiglitz asserts, has been the enormous rise in the price of oil. For industrialized countries, the increase in the cost of oil attributable to the war is around $1.1 trillion. For developing countries, the effect has been much more extreme. According to Stigltiz’s and Bilmes’ book, the increase in the cost of oil more than offsets the increase in foreign aid to countries in Africa.
The White House, which refused to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on the cost of the war, reacted to Stiglitz’s remarks with undisguised hostility and derision. “People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure,” White House spokesperson Tony Fratto told the press. “One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11.”
The Iraq war, Fratto said, “is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. Three trillion dollars? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”
Stiglitz told Democracy Now! radio on Friday that the most significant budgetary cost of the war is the care of disabled veterans, which he said “will total hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decades.” The war has inflicted a huge number of injuries. He said that an estimated 39 percent of soldiers would have some form of disability after completing their rotations.
Bilmes, who also appeared on the Democracy Now! program, explained that while in previous wars the ratio of wounded to dead was two-to-one or three-to-one, new medical technologies have allowed many who might otherwise have died to survive extremely serious injuries. The wounded to fatality rate for the Iraq war is approximately 15-to-1. “What it means is that the United States has a long-term cost of taking care of many, many thousands of disabled veterans for the rest of their lives,” she said.
“Then you go beyond that budgetary cost to the cost of the economy,” Stiglitz added. “When somebody gets disabled, the disability pay is just a fraction of the loss to their family, to the income that they could have otherwise earned.”
“There are a whole set of macroeconomic costs, which have depressed the economy,” including the price of oil, Stiglitz said. “What’s happened is, to offset those costs, the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with liquidity.... We were living off of borrowed money. The war was totally financed by deficits. And eventually, a day of reckoning had to come, and now it’s come.”
While the vast majority of the US and world population wants an end to the occupation in Iraq, no section of the political establishment represents this opposition.
An article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday noted that the Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, employ careful rhetoric on the issue of withdrawal from Iraq. “Both candidates draw a distinction between ‘combat’ troops, whom they want to withdraw, and ‘noncombat’ troops, who will stay to battle terrorists, protect the US civilian presence and possibly train and mentor Iraqi security forces,” the newspaper noted.
This distinction allows the candidates to posture as opponents of the war while maintaining their commitment to an indefinite occupation.
“No one is talking about getting to zero,” a foreign policy advisor for Obama told the Journal. An unnamed Obama campaign “senior advisor” said the senator was “comfortable with a long-term US troop presence of around five brigades,” according to the paper.

The World According to Washington

2008-03-02T20:41:00.000+05:30

By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said. "One way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh had been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden". Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the US and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over", an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after September 11, 2001, and so ranked second among "the most wanted militants in the world".

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported President George W Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. That may be true of "the world", but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight.

In Latin America, which has some experience with US behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional on the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic / judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world".

Following the terror trail

In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a US Navy diver was killed". This was one of two terrorist atrocities that led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered. That reflects the judgment of "the world". It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.

The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and US intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action", which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks", to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the US abstaining). "Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.

A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism", again with general acclaim by "the world".

The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.

The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed - and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the US and occasionally receive some casual mention.

Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians - "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger".

Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us", a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.

We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable US-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs.

Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge US-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.

Car bomb

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.

One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds", "killed a bride buying her trousseau", and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque". It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.

The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").

'Terrorist villagers'

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers". Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions.

We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.

These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world", when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.

The US also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on US Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.

The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hezbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad". A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack", particularly when US and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the US provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable.

In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank.

It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error - the only one - was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.

Killing without Intent

Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hezbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon". About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story.

Al-Mussawi was murdered with a US-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year-old child. Israel then employed US-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.

After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game", Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hezbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hezbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.

In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town", Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon". The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them", as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.

Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile", British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children". Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who … were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets". Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.

All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game". And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers and drugged roaches.

This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hezbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world", which understands that the US and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for US and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the US and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal and other such basics of civilized life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing - so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category.

Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over".

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and What We Say Goes, a conversation book with David Barsamian, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been published by the New Press.

Diary

2008-03-02T20:38:00.000+05:30

By Yonatan Mendel

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma'ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn't get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel's most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla's Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: 'Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.'

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn't do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert's shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon's mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu's secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin's secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to 'security' there is no such freedom. It's 'us' and 'them', the IDF and the 'enemy'; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It's not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they'd rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: 'The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.' Is this a fib? 'The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them': but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren't making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel's leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month -- December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs, strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel never kidnaps: it arrests.

The Israeli army never intentionally kills anyone, let alone murders them -- a state of affairs any other armed organisation would be envious of. Even when a one-ton bomb is dropped onto a dense residential area in Gaza, killing one gunman and 14 innocent civilians, including nine children, it's still not an intentional killing or murder: it is a targeted assassination. An Israeli journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them, or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but murder is out of the question. The consequence, whatever words are used, has been the death at the hands of the Israeli security forces since the outbreak of the second intifada of 2087 Palestinians who had nothing to do with armed struggle.

The IDF, as depicted by the Israeli media, has another strange ability: it never initiates, decides to attack or launches an operation. The IDF simply responds. It responds to the Qassam rockets, responds to terror attacks, responds to Palestinian violence. This makes everything so much more sensible and civilised: the IDF is forced to fight, to destroy houses, to shoot Palestinians and to kill 4485 of them in seven years, but none of these events is the responsibility of the soldiers. They are facing a nasty enemy, and they respond dutifully. The fact that their actions -- curfews, arrests, naval sieges, shootings and killings -- are the main cause of the Palestinian reaction does not seem to interest the media. Because Palestinians cannot respond, Israeli journalists choose another verb from the lexicon that includes revenge, provoke, attack, incite, throw stones or fire Qassams.

Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles at the Israeli town of Sderot. 'The army might respond,' I said, not realising that I was already biased. 'But we are responding here,' Abu-Qusay said. 'We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . . we are resisting Israel's continual incursions into the West Bank, its attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.' Abu-Qusay's words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in it. After all it was only a response.

At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my colleagues the following question: 'If an armed Palestinian crosses the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right? However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?' My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: 'If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It's the implementation of a government decision!'

Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas demanded the release of 450 of its prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit. Israel announced that it would release prisoners but not those with blood on their hands. It is always the Palestinians -- never the Israelis -- who have blood on their hands. This is not to say that Jews cannot kill Arabs but they will not have blood on their hands, and if they are arrested they will be released after a few years, not to mention those with blood on their hands who've gone on to become prime minister. And we are not only more innocent when we kill but also more susceptible when we are hurt. A regular description of a Qassam missile that hits Sderot will generally look like this: 'A Qassam fell next to a residential house, three Israelis had slight injuries, and ten others suffered from shock.' One should not make light of these injuries: a missile hitting a house in the middle of the night could indeed cause great shock. However, one should also remember that shock is for Jews only. Palestinians are apparently a very tough people.

The IDF, again the envy of all other armies, kills only the most important people. 'A high-ranking member of Hamas was killed' is almost a chorus in the Israel media. Low-ranking members of Hamas have either never been found or never been killed. Shlomi Eldar, a TV correspondent in the Gaza Strip, bravely wrote about this phenomenon in his book Eyeless in Gaza (2005). When Riyad Abu Zaid was assassinated in 2003, the Israeli press echoed the IDF announcement that the man was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza. Eldar, one of Israel's few investigative journalists, discovered that the man was merely a secretary in the movement's prisoner club. 'It was one of many occasions in which Israel "upgraded" a Palestinian activist,' Eldar wrote. 'After every assassination any minor activist is "promoted" to a major one.'

This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into media reports -- there are no checkpoints between the army and the media -- is the result both of a lack of access to information and of the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray soldiers as criminals. 'The IDF is acting in Gaza' (or in Jenin, or in Tulkarm, or in Hebron) is the expression given out by the army and embraced by the media. Why make the listeners' lives harder? Why tell them what the soldiers do, describing the fear they create, the fact that they come with heavy vehicles and weapons and crush a city's life, creating a greater hatred, sorrow and a desire for revenge?

Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to stop Gaza's electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that 'the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.' Another thing the soldiers do is clearing -- khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf means to expose something that is hidden, but as used by the IDF it means to clear an area of potential hiding places for Palestinian gunmen. During the last intifada, Israeli D9 bulldozers destroyed thousands of Palestinian houses, uprooted thousands of trees and left behind thousands of smashed greenhouses. It is better to know that the army cleared the place than to face the reality that the army destroys Palestinians' possessions, pride and hope.

Another useful word is crowning (keter), a euphemism for a siege in which anyone who leaves his house risks being shot at. War zones are places where Palestinians can be killed even if they are children who don't know they've entered a war zone. Palestinian children, by the way, tend to be upgraded to Palestinian teenagers, especially when they are accidentally killed. More examples: isolated Israeli outposts in the West Bank are called illegal outposts, perhaps in contrast to Israeli settlements that are apparently legal. Administrative detention means jailing people who haven't been put on trial or even formally charged (in April 2003 there were 1119 Palestinians in this situation). The PLO (Ashaf) is always referred to by its acronym and never by its full name: Palestine is a word that is almost never used -- there is a Palestinian president but no president of Palestine.

'A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,' David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, 'and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.' This 'new language' was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official set of guidelines it can be found in the Nakdi Report, a paper drafted by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. First set down in 1972 and since updated three times, the report aimed to 'clarify some of the professional rules that govern the work of a newsperson'. The prohibition of the term East Jerusalem was one of them.

The restrictions aren't confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel's most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported 'another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams' (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were not the target of assassinations). Ehud Ya'ari, a well-known Israeli correspondent on Arab affairs, sat in the studio and said: 'The man who was killed is Muhammad Dahdouh, from Islamic Jihad . . . this is part of the other war, a war to shrink the volume of Qassam activists.' Neither Ya'ari nor the IDF spokesman bothered to report that four innocent Palestinian civilians were also killed in the operation, and three more severely injured, one a five-year-old girl called Maria, who will remain paralysed from the neck down. This 'oversight', revealed by the Israeli journalist Orly Vilnai, only exposed how much we do not know about what we think we know.

Interestingly, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip one of the new 'boo' words in the Israeli media is Hamastan, a word that appears in the 'hard' news section, the allegedly sacred part of newspapers that is supposed to give the facts, free from editorialising. The same applies to movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah, which are described in Hebrew as organisations and not as political movements or parties. Intifada is never given its Arabic meaning of 'revolt'; and Al-Quds, which when used by Palestinian politicians refers only to 'the holy places in East Jerusalem' or 'East Jerusalem', is always taken by Israeli correspondents to mean Jerusalem, which is effectively to imply a Palestinian determination to take over the entire capital city.

It was curious to watch the newspapers' responses to the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh in Syria two weeks ago. Everyone tried to outdo everyone else over what to call him: arch-terrorist, master terrorist or the greatest terrorist on earth. It took the Israeli press a few days to stop celebrating Moughniyeh's assassins and start doing what it should have done in the first place: ask questions about the consequences of the killing. The journalist Gideon Levy thinks it is an Israeli trend: 'The chain of "terrorist chieftains" liquidated by Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Musawi and Yihyeh Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi (all "operations" that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and intoxicating moment), have thus far brought only harsh and painful revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world.'

Israeli correspondents on Arab affairs must of course speak Arabic -- many of them indeed studied it in the security establishment's schools -- and they need to know the history and politics of the Middle East. And they have to be Jews. Strikingly, the Israeli-Jewish media prefer to hire journalists with average Arabic rather than native speakers, since they would be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Apparently, Jewish journalists are better equipped than Arab Israelis to explain 'what Arabs think', 'Arab aims' or 'what Arabs say'. Maybe this is because the editors know what their audience wants to hear. Or, even more important, what the Israeli audience would rather not hear.

If the words occupation, apartheid and racism (not to mention Palestinian citizens of Israel, bantustans, ethnic cleansing and Nakba) are absent from Israeli discourse, Israeli citizens can spend their whole lives without knowing what they have been living with. Take racism (Giz'anut in Hebrew). If the Israeli parliament legislates that 13 per cent of the country's lands can be sold only to Jews, then it is a racist parliament. If in 60 years the country has had only one Arab minister, then Israel has had racist governments. If in 60 years of demonstrations rubber bullets and live ammunition have been used only on Arab demonstrators, then Israel has a racist police. If 75 per cent of Israelis admit that they would refuse to have an Arab neighbour, then it is a racist society. By not acknowledging that Israel is a place where racism shapes relations between Jews and Arabs, Israeli Jews render themselves unable to deal with the problem or even with the reality of their own lives.

The same denial of reality is reflected in the avoidance of the term apartheid. Because of its association with white South Africa, Israelis find it very hard to use the word. This is not to say that the exact same kind of regime prevails in the Occupied Territories today, but a country needn't have benches 'for whites only' in order to be an apartheid state. Apartheid, after all, means 'separation', and if in the Occupied Territories the settlers have one road and Palestinians need to use alternative roads or tunnels, then it is an apartheid road system. If the separation wall built on thousands of dunams of confiscated West Bank land separates people (including Palestinians on opposite sides of the wall), then it is an apartheid wall. If in the Occupied Territories there are two judicial systems, one for Jewish settlers and the other for Palestinians, then it is an apartheid justice.

And then there are the Occupied Territories themselves. Remarkably, there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news section it doesn't exist. In the past they were called the Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel's mass media today they're called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim). The term helps preserve the notion that the Jews are the victims, the people who act only in self-defence, the moral half of the equation, and the Palestinians are the attackers, the bad guys, the people who fight for no reason. The simplest example explains it: 'a citizen of the Territories was caught smuggling illegal weapons.' It might make sense for citizens of an occupied territory to try to resist the occupier, but it doesn't make sense if they are just from the Territories.

Israeli journalists are not embedded with the security establishment; and they haven't been asked to make their audience feel good about Israel's military policy. The restrictions they observe are observed voluntarily, almost unconsciously -- which makes their practice all the more dangerous. Yet a majority of Israelis feel that their media are too left-wing, insufficiently patriotric, not on Israel's side. And the foreign media are worse. During the last intifada, Avraham Hirschson, then the minister of finance, demanded that CNN's broadcasts from Israel be closed down on the grounds of 'biased broadcasting and tendentious programmes that are nothing but a campaign of incitement against Israel'. Israeli demonstrators called for an end to 'CNN's unreliable and terror-provoking coverage' in favour of Fox News. Israeli men up to the age of 50 are obliged to do one month's reserve service every year. 'The civilian,' Yigael Yadin, an early Israeli chief of staff, said, 'is a soldier on 11 months' annual leave.' For the Israeli media there is no leave.

Yonatan Mendel was a correspondent for the Israeli news agency Walla. He is currently at Queens' College, Cambridge working on a PhD that studies the connection between the Arabic language and security in Israel.

The Bourgeoisie Comes of Age in India

2008-02-29T16:18:00.000+05:30

D. D. Kosambi

The long-awaited publication of Jawaharlal Nehru's book on India [Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, (Calcutta, 1946)], past and present, has in many ways justified the great hopes raised by the author's distinguished record in the struggle for India's freedom, and by his active share in the struggle against war. His career is too well known for further comment here; those who do not know it would be well advised to read his Autobiography as well as this book. No person knows India better than Pandit Jawaharlal. He is able to express himself brilliantly both in Hindi and Urdu, as friends and admirers among Hindus as well as Muslims will admit. Most important of all, he has an intimate acquaintance with the British ruling class because of his education in England. The book in question is, therefore, a damning indictment of British rule in India; but more than that, its ambitious scope includes the history of India culturally as well as politically in a single perspective. The performance is all the more remarkable when it is considered that the work was essentially completed in jail, under the most distressing circumstances, with full consciousness on the part of the author that a struggle against Hitlerism was being waged without his help, though he himself had always been an unswerving opponent of fascism and all that fascism represents. The very fact that so able a personality should be jailed without trial while a considerable number of British agent were foisted upon India to fight the war from the safety of office chairs had an unfortunate result for the Indian population; for while the British officials and a larger number of Indian business men filled their pockets with vast quantities of paper currency, the people at large had the benefit of inflation, famine, epidemics and shortages. To explain just what this means in terms understandable to an American is beyond the reach of any sensitive person who had the misfortune to be an eye-witness of the happenings in India during the war years.
The book cannot be too strongly recommended to the general reader. The present writer wishes to make it clear that he himself is a humble admirer of the author. This is to prevent misunderstanding, for the bulk of this communication is necessarily devoted to pointing out a certain number of flaws. For the ancient history of India, little need be said because such sources as we possess are extremely meagre and their interpretation puzzles even those who have devoted a lifetime to their study; on this score we need not hold the author responsible. In some ways it is unfortunate that he has not had the leisure to study Indian sources more critically and that he has relied so heavily upon comparatively popular accounts by British authors. This, however, may be condoned on the ground that Indian political prisoners hardly have reference libraries at their disposal.
One feature that may strike the reader as rather surprising is a curious attitude towards the much abused term "race"; denunciation of racialism and of imperialism occurs on p. 386f, but on p. 387 we read: "psychology counts and racial memories are long." Just what racial memory means is not clear, particularly in the case of a country that had forgotten the splendid Mauryan and Gupta periods, including the very script of those times; that ascribes almost every cave of any date to the mythical Pandavas; and is capable of pointing out as prince Pratap Sinha, the statue of Outram (a butcher of the 1857 revolt) on the Esplanade at Calcutta. It was noticeable on the contrary that class memories are extremely short, or at any rate strikingly different from what Nehru imagines to be race memories. For example, the British Commissioner of Police in Bombay whose name was execrated for his incompetent or deliberately provocative handling of popular discontent at the end of January, 1946 (ending in a real blood-bath in the working class areas of Bombay) was nevertheless a guest May, along with the Congress ministers, at the ri weddings of the year in Bombay. On p. 431 we read: "old races develop that attitude [of quietism] to life:' Just what this means is also not clear, for ethnologically there is no evidence that any race is older than any other. In fact if the sentence can be taken as applying to the Indian races, it is quite impossible to explain why quietism has been on the wane since 1940 at least, and has given place to the constant ferment of political activity in this country .
Far more serious to the present reviewer is the absence of the question "why." No attempt at history can be regarded as mature which does not, within the framework of the author's ideology, make some attempt at analysis. For the ancient period we find considerable difficulty in explaining certain facts for the simple reason that the facts themselves are not always clear; but for the modern period it seems to me that the author's present approach cannot stand unchallenged. I may go further and venture the statement that this vague use of the term "race," the absence of the question as to why certain changes take place at certain times, are intimately bound up with another remark- able feature of the book, the absence of a class analysis. The author could have asked himself one question with the greatest of advantage, namely, cui bono; what is the class that called for or benefited by a certain change at a certain period of history? This might have clarified one issue noted by the author, that the British have fought desperately and till now effectively against granting India the same kind of social and political rights of which the English themselves are so proud in England. It is quite obvious that the class of Englishmen who fought for the suppression of local governments and civil liberties in India have also fought desperately against the lower classes in England; but when the pressure of the working class in England became too great, the bourgeois front was breached in some one place and a local amelioration was won. Then the losing section of the bourgeoisie necessarily fought for the imposition of restriction against all other owners of means of production and ultimately put a good face on the whole matter, provided that they, the rulers, had granted certain reforms at their own sweet free will. There was comparatively little class opposition from India as the British had taken every care to preserve as much feudal and religious prerogative as possible.
It may be further suggested that the absence of developed modern capital in the Muslim community as well as the great relative poverty of the Muslims in India might explain (as Nehru does not) both the case against the Muslim League (p. 466) and Muslim backwardness (p. 468) as well as the reactionary attitude of the Muslim upper classes in India. Nehru has himself pointed out (p. 437) that Indian business men demand exactly the same kind of protection in Ceylon which they rightly resent having given to British business interests in India. He is undoubtedly aware of the fact that Indians in South Africa, backed whole-heartedly by the Indian trading community there, are fighting hard for equality; but for equality with the whites and not equality with the Negroes also. The absence of class analysis vitiates the peculiar presentation of provincial differences and growth of industry (p. 392-398). We read that the people of Gujarat, Kathiawar and Kutch were traders, manufacturers, merchants and seafarers from ancient times. Now it is undeniable that the great majority of people in just those districts are definitely not traders, although people from the localities mentioned occupy so prominent a place in the capitalistic section of India today. The reason is that early contact with Mohammedan traders enabled this small fraction to develop early contact with the British and thereby introduced them to a new system of production: that is, production based on machinery and modern capital. The best example of this perhaps is the tiny Parsi community which, in its original situation in Gujarat, was one of the most shamefully oppressed of refugee minorities and is today one of the most advanced, cultured and powerful of communities in India; solely because of their adoption of modern industrial and finance capitalism. On the other hand the case is totally different with the Marwaris of Rajputana (p. 394-96) who did control finance and money-lending in the old days but had no political rights whatsoever. If Nehru will take the trouble to look up the records he will see how often such moneylenders backed the British in the days of British expansion in India. Of course that may not lead him to realise a basic contemporary phenomenon: the change of pseudo-capital thus accumulated into modern productive money. The changeover is now actually so rapid that even the most backward and degenerate of Indians, the feudal princelings, are becoming shareholders on a large scale. The days are gone when shares were issued at a face value of Rs.30/- to be quoted today (1946) at well over Rs.3,000/- or when a stock was issued at Rs.100/-, of which Rs.99/- was given back as a capital repayment, to give a dividend of over Rs.150/- today, being quoted at Rs.2,300/ -. Those stocks had a much longer start in the race for modernisation of industry, but the total volume of such capital was negligible and has now been tremendously increased by the conversion of primitive accumulation as well as by the uncontrolled inflation and profiteering of the war period.
Not only has Nehru neglected to take note of this accumulation, but he has also been unable to grasp just what this quantitative change has done qualitatively to the character of the- Indian middle class, a class which may now be said to be firmly, in the saddle. A few drops from the banquet (generally from the excess profits) have been scattered as a libation in the direction of education, scientific research, and charity; a considerable slackening of the ancient rigidity of manners, and unfortunately of morals also, is duly noticeable. Yet this is nothing compared to the principal characteristic of this class, the ravening greed which is now so obvious in the black market, in enormous bribes spent in making still more enormous profits, in speculation in shares and an increasingly callous disregard for the misery and even the lives of their fellow Indians). The progressive deterioration in the living conditions of our peasant workers (over 50 per cent of the population), of our factory labour and even the lower-paid office workers and intellectuals affords a striking contrast with the wealth that flows into the pockets of the upper middle class, though the gain may be camouflaged by the ostentatious simplicity of white khaddar (homespun) and the eternal Gandhi cap. The new constitution for India, in the gaining of which Nehru and his friends have spent so many of the finest years of their lives in jail, will come only as a recognition of the power of this newly expanded Indian middle class.
Actually the negotiations of the British Cabinet Mission are nothing if not recognition of the position of the new bourgeoisie in India. The old trusteeship theory no longer yields monopoly profits either by investment or by export; the British bourgeoisie which must export and invest has admitted the necessity of coming to terms with their Indian counterpart which needs capital goods. It is surely not without significance that the modern industrialists and financiers contribute to Congress (by which I mean the Indian National Congress Party in this note) funds, while the leadership of the Muslim League is on noticeable good terms with the Mohammedan owners of money in India; it may be suggested that one reason for the conflict between these two middle class political organizations is not only the fact that the Muslim minority forms one-third of the population of the country with less than one-tenth of its wealth, but further that the wealth in Muslim hands is based predominantly on barter pseudo-capital or semi-feudal agrarian production, both of which look for protection to the British.
In the light of all this, which Nehru does not acknowledge explicitly, it is interesting to note his comments on the Indian Communist Party (p. 524 and 629). Nehru does not realize that the Indian Communist Party (never ideologically powerful had in 1941 been suppressed to the point of ineffectiveness and that their increasing force in Indian politics today, though still virtually negligible as against that of the bourgeoisie, is due solely to their having really gone down to the peasant workers and the very small industrial proletariat-two sections of the Indian population among which the Congress and the Muslim League both have much less influence today than they did before 1943. In speaking of the Congress Planning Committee (p. 482-84) it is curious to note that the findings of the committee had apparently no influence whatsoever on the provincial Congress governments then functioning. Nehru might have studied with profit the differences between the Congress programme and the actual performance of the Congress ministries.
There is no evidence at all that the Congress as constituted today is in the remotest danger of drifting (like its planning committee) towards socialism. With the Muslim League leadership, of course, it is difficult to observe anything except pure opportunism and reaction. Without going deeper into the statistics or capital investments, it may be stated-and verified by a reference to the newspaper advertisements of the period-that the years 1937-39, when the Congress ministries ruled, show in their particular provinces a considerable number of new enterprises being started. The investor certainly demonstrated his confidence in the Congress, whether or not the British and the Congress Planning Commission gave any attention to that aspect of the matter. Of course this cannot compare with the almost explosive increase in capital today.
In dealing with the stirring events of August, 1942 (p. 579f.), Nehru has given the parliamentary side of the question in a straightforward manner. The external observer, however, may be struck by one noteworthy point which has not even been visualized in the book. When the All India Congress Committee met at Bombay, the members knew that arrest was imminent and most of them had prepared for the event by setting their family affairs and personal finances in excellent order against all contingencies that might arise for the next year or two. What strikes this writer as remarkable is that not one of these worthy and able delegates, though aware that the British adversary was about to strike, ever thought of a plan of action for the Congress and for the nation as a whole. The general idea was "the Mahatama will give us a plan", yet no especial impression was made by the Mahatma's speech just before the arrests-though that address to the assembled delegates on the eve of an anticipated popular explosion is not only not revolutionary in character, nor a plan of action of any sort, but seems, when taken objectively, to be on the same level as a comfortable after-dinner speech. Why is it that knowledge of popular dissatisfaction went hand in hand with the absence of a real plan of action? Does it mean, for example, that the characteristic thought then current among the Indian bourgeoisie had in effect permeated the Congress leadership? One may note that on a class basis the action was quite brilliant, no matter how futile it may have seemed on a national revolutionary scale. The panic of the British government and jailing of all leaders absolved the Congress from any responsibility for the happenings of the ensuing year; at the same time the glamour of jail and concentration camp served to wipe out the so-so record of the Congress ministries in office, thereby restoring the full popularity of the organization among the masses. If the British won the war it was quite clear that the Congress had not favoured Japan; if on the other hand the Japanese succeeded in conquering India (and they had only to attack immediately in force for the whole of the so-called defense system to crumble) they could certainly not accuse the Congress of having helped the British. Finally, the hatred for the mass repression fell upon the thick heads of the bureaucracy, while having the discontent brought to a head and smashed wide open would certainly not injure the Indian bourgeoisie.
In this connection we may again recall Lenin's words that "only when the lower classes do not want the old and when the upper class cannot continue in the old way then only can the revolution be victorious. Its truth may be expressed in other words: Revolution is impossible without a national crisis affecting both the exploited and the exploiters." You look in vain in Nehru's book for any recognition of the undeniable fact that, in 1942, while the toiling masses had begun to taste the utmost depths of misery and degradation, the Indian bourgeoisie was flourishing as never before. War contracts, high prices, the ability to do extensive black-marketing, had given the financiers and industrialists what they wanted; furthermore even the lower, middle classes who had normally been the spearhead of discontent in India had begun to experience an amelioration because of the great number of new clerical and office jobs created by the war and the expanding war economy. Taking cognizance of this and of the further truth that the British in India had consistently allowed investors to make an increasing amount of profit in this country, one may be able to account for the lack of a plan in 1942 and for the successive deadlocks that followed in spite of mass pressure in the direction of revolution.
History has thrust upon Nehru the mantle of leadership of a very powerful organization which still commands a greater mass support than any other in India, and which has shown by its unremitting and painful struggle that it is determined to capture political control of the entire subcontinent. But will Nehru's orientation towards Marxism change when the interests of the class which now backs Congress so heavily diverge from the interests of the poorer classes; or will his lack of a class analysis lead only to disillusionment? It would be silly to proclaim that Mahatma Gandhi, than whom no more sincere person exists, is a tool of the capitalists in India. But there is no other class in India today, except the new bourgeoisie, so strong, so powerfully organized, and so clever as to exploit for its own purposes whatever is profitable in the Mahatma's teachings and to reduce all dangerous enunciations to negative philosophical points. This bourgeoisie needs Nehru's leadership, just as India has needed the class itself. As I read the omens, the parting of the ways is clearly visible; what is not clear is the path Nehru himself will choose in that moment of agony.
Science and Society (New York), vol. X 1946, pp. 392-398.
The OM thesis at this time was that the British would never transfer power to the Indian National Congress. The OM solution was that the Hindus and the Muslims, somehow equated to the Congress and the Muslim League, should unite to throw out the foreign imperialists. The question of the class structure behind the two parties was never openly raised, perhaps because the writings of W. Cantwell Smith led the OM to believe that the Muslim League was, in some mysterious way, at heart anti-British and on the road to socialism. One sure test of effective anti-imperialism, namely how many of the leaders were jailed or executed by the rulers of empire, was not applied. The intransigence and the open alliance with the British, so profitable to the leading personalities in the League, and the insistence upon the "two nations" theory were dutifully ignored. No emphasis has been laid upon the total disruption of advanced peasant movements in the Punjab and in Bengal by the 1947 separation of Pakistan. For that matter, the OM had dismissed the Satara peasant uprising (patri sarkar) of 1942-43 as pure banditry.

Joint Statement

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Bhagat Singh

Full Text of Statement of S. Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt in the Assembly Bomb Case

(Read in the Court on 6th June, 1929, by Mr. Asaf Ali on behalf of Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt)
We stand charged with certain serious offences, and at this stage it is but right that we must explain our conduct.
In this connection, the following questions arise.
1. Were the bombs thrown into Chamber, and, if so, why?2. Is the charge, as framed by the Lower Court, correct or otherwise?
To the first half of first question, our reply is in the affirmative, but since some of the so-called 'eye witnesses' have perjured themselves and since we are not denying our liability to that extent, let our statement about them be judged for what it is worth. By way of an illustration, we many point out that the evidence of Sergeant Terry regarding the seizure of the pistol from one of us is a deliberate falsehood, for neither of us had the pistol at the time we gave ourselves up. Other witnesses, too, who have deposed to having seen bombs being thrown by us have not scrupled to tell lies. This fact had its own moral for those who aim at judicial purity and fair play. At the same time, we acknowledge the fairness of the Public Prosecutor and the judicial attitude of the Court so far.
Viceroy's Views Endorsed
In our reply to the next half of the first question, we are constrained to go into some detail to offer a full and frank explanation of our motive and the circumstances leading up to what has now become a historic event.
When we were told by some of the police officers, who visited us in jail that Lord Irwin in his address to the joint session of the two houses described the event as an attack directed against no individual but against an institution itself, we readily recognized that the true significance of the incident had been correctly appreciated. We are next to none in our love for humanity. Far from having any malice against any individual, we hold human life sacred beyond words. We are neither perpetrators of dastardly outrages, and, therefore, a disgrace to the country, as the pseudo-socialist Dewan. Chaman Lal is reported to have described us, nor are we 'Lunatics' as The Tribune of Lahore and some others would have it believed.
Practical Protest
We humbly claim to be no more than serious students of the history and conditions of our country and her aspirations. We despise hypocrisy, Our practical protest was against the institution, which since its birth, has eminently helped to display not only its worthlessness but its far-reaching power for mischief. They more we have been convinced that it exists only to demonstrate to world Indian's humiliation and helplessness, and it symbolizes the overriding domination of an irresponsible and autocratic rule. Time and again the national demand has been pressed by the people's representatives only to find the waste paper basket as its final destination.
Attack on Institution
Solemn resolutions passed by the House have been contemptuously trampled under foot on the floor of the so called Indian Parliament. Resolution regarding the repeal of the repressive and arbitrary measures have been treated with sublime contempt, and the government measures and proposals, rejected as unacceptable buy the elected members of the legislatures, have been restored by mere stroke of the pen. In short, we have utterly failed to find any justification for the existence of an institution which, despite all its pomp and splendour, organized with the hard earned money of the sweating millions of India, is only a hollow show and a mischievous make-believe. Alike, have we failed to comprehend the mentality of the public leaders who help the Government to squander public time and money on such a manifestly stage-managed exhibition of Indian's helpless subjection.
No Hope For Labour
We have been ruminating upon all these matters, as also upon the wholesale arrests of the leaders of the labour movement. When the introduction of the Trade Disputes Bill brought us into the Assembly to watch its progress, the course of the debate only served to confirm our conviction that the labouring millions of India had nothing to expect from an institution that stood as a menacing monument to the strangling of the exploiters and the serfdom of the helpless labourers.
Finally, the insult of what we consider, an inhuman and barbarous measure was hurled on the devoted head of the representatives of the entire country, and the starving and struggling millions were deprived of their primary right and the sole means of improving their economic welfare. None who has felt like us for the dumb driven drudges of labourers could possibly witness this spectacle with equanimity. None whose heart bleeds for them, who have given their life-blood in silence to the building up of the economic structure could repress the cry which this ruthless blow had wrung out of our hearts.
Bomb Needed
Consequently, bearing in mind the words of the late Mr. S.R. Das, once Law Member of the Governor — General's Executive Council, which appeared in the famous letter he had addressed to his son, to the effect that the 'Bomb was necessary to awaken England from her dreams', we dropped the bomb on the floor of the Assembly Chamber to register our protest on behalf of those who had no other means left to give expression to their heart-rending agony. Our sole purpose was "to make the deaf hear" and to give the heedless a timely warning. Others have as keenly felt as we have done, and from under the seeming stillness of the sea of Indian humanity, a veritable storm is about to break out. We have only hoisted the "danger-signal" to warn those who are speeding along without heeding the grave dangers ahead. We have only marked the end of an era of Utopian non-violence, of whose futility the rising generation has been convinced beyond the shadow of doubt.
Ideal Explained
We have used the expression Utopian non-violence, in the foregoing paragraph which requires some explanation. Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification. The elimination of force at all costs in Utopian, and the mew movement which has arisen in the country, and of that dawn we have given a warning, is inspired by the ideal which guided Guru Gobind Singh and Shivaji, Kamal Pasha and Riza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin.
As both the alien Government and the Indian public leaders appeared to have shut their eyes to the existence of this movement, we felt it as our duty to sound a warning where it could not go unheard. We have so far dealt with the motive behind the incident in question, and now we must define the extent of our intention.
No Personal Grudge
We bore no personal grudge or malice against anyone of those who received slight injuries or against any other person in the Assembly. On the contrary, we repeat that we hold human life sacred beyond words, and would sooner lay down our own lives in the service of humanity than injure anyone else. Unlike the mercenary soldiers of the imperialist armies who are disciplined to kill without compunction, we respect, and, in so far as it lies in our power, we attempt to save human life. And still we admit having deliberately thrown the bombs into the Assembly Chamber. Facts however, speak for themselves and our intention would be judged from the result of the action without bringing in Utopian hypothetical circumstances and presumptions.
No Miracle
Despite the evidence of the Government Expert, the bombs that were thrown in the Assembly Chamber resulted in slight damage to an empty bench and some slight abrasions in less than half a dozen cases, while Government scientists and experts have ascribed this result to a miracle, we see nothing but a precisely scientific process in all this incident. Firstly, the two bombs exploded in vacant spaces within the wooden barriers of the desks and benches, secondly, even those who were within 2 feet of the explosion, for instance, Mr. P. Rau, Mr. Shanker Rao and Sir George Schuster were either not hurt or only slightly scratched. Bombs of the capacity deposed to by the Government Expert (though his estimate, being imaginary is exaggerated), loaded with an effective charge of potassium chlorate and sensitive (explosive) picrate would have smashed the barriers and laid many low within some yards of the explosion.
Again, had they been loaded with some other high explosive, with a charge of destructive pellets or darts, they would have sufficed to wipe out a majority of the Members of the Legislative Assembly. Still again we could have flung them into the official box which was occupied by some notable persons. And finally we could have ambushed Sir John Simon whose luckless Commission was loathed by all responsible people and who was sitting in the President's gallery at the time. All these things, however, were beyond our intention and bombs did no more than they were designed to do, and the miracle consisted in no more than the deliberate aim which landed them in safe places.
We then deliberately offered ourselves to bear the penalty for what we had done and to let the imperialist exploiters know that by crushing individuals, they cannot kill ideas. By crushing two insignificant units, a nation cannot be crushed. We wanted to emphasize the historical lesson that lettres de cachets and Bastilles could not crush the revolutionary movement in France. Gallows and the Siberian mines could not extinguish the Russian Revolution. Bloody Sunday, and Black and Tans failed to strangle the movement of Irish freedom. Can ordinances and Safety Bills snuff out the flames of freedom in India? Conspiracy cases, trumped up or discovered and the incarceration of all young men, who cherish the vision of a great ideal, cannot check the march of revolution. But a timely warning, if not unheeded, can help to prevent loss of life and general sufferings. We took it upon ourselves to provide this warning and our duty is done.
(Bhagat Singh was asked in the lower court what he meant by word "Revolution". In answer to that question, he said:) "Revolution" does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By "Revolution" we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change. Producers or labourers in spite of being the most necessary element of society, are robbed by their exploiters of the fruits of their labour and deprived of their elementary rights. The peasant who grows corn for all, starves with his family, the weaver who supplies the world market with textile fabrics, has not enough to cover his own and his children's bodies, masons, smiths and carpenters who raise magnificent palaces, live like pariahs in the slums. The capitalists and exploiters, the parasites of society, squander millions on their whims. These terrible inequalities and forced disparity of chances are bound to lead to chaos. This state of affairs cannot last long, and it is obvious, that the present order of society in merry-making is on the brink of a volcano.
The whole edifice of this civilization, if not saved in time, shall crumble. A radical change, therefore, is necessary and it is the duty of those who realize it to reorganize society on the socialistic basis. Unless this thing is done and the exploitation of man by man and of nations by nations is brought to an end, sufferings and carnage with which humanity is threatened today cannot be prevented. All talk of ending war and ushering in an era of universal peace is undisguised hypocrisy.
By "Revolution", we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of society which may not be threatened by such breakdown, and in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognized and a world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars.
This is our ideal, and with this ideology as our inspiration, we have given a fair and loud enough warning.
If, however, it goes unheeded and the present system of Government continues to be an impediment in the way of the natural forces that are swelling up, a grim struggle will ensure involving the overthrow of all obstacles, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the dictatorship of the proletariat to pave the way for the consummation of the ideal of revolution. Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all. Labour is the real sustainer of society. The sovereignty of the ultimate destiny of the workers.
For these ideals, and for this faith, we shall welcome any suffering to which we may be condemned. At the altar of this revolution we have brought our youth as an incense, for no sacrifice is too great for so magnificent a cause. We are content, we await the advent of Revolution.
"Long Live Revolution."

US leads world in imprisoning its people

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More than one in 100 adults behind bars
By Kate Randall29 February 2008
In both raw figures and as a percentage of the population, the US is the world leader in the rate at which it puts its people behind bars. A new report using state-by-state data says a record 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008—one out of every 99.1 adults.
The report by the Pew Center on the States also documents record increases in financial outlays for incarceration, with the 50 US states spending more than $49 billion on prisons last year, almost five times more than the $11 billion spent 20 years ago.
The statistics in the report reflect a society that, while exporting violence in aggressive wars abroad, metes out parallel punishment on its population at home.
The rate of increase for prison costs last year was six times higher than the rate of increase for higher education spending. With many US states strapped for cash and facing budget shortfalls, the spending for prisons and jails has resulted in a proportionate decrease in spending on education and other social needs.
The study notes that mandatory sentencing laws and “get tough on crime” measures pushed by state legislatures have contributed to the burgeoning prison population. Even in states where crime rates have decreased, the numbers of imprisoned continue to grow.
A 1986 federal law mandated prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that are up to eight times longer than those involving powdered cocaine. Minorities, workers and the poor are far more likely to be sentenced for crack cocaine offenses.
The rate of incarceration for African Americans is significantly higher than for the overall population. An astonishing one of every nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, one in 100 is imprisoned, compared with one in 355 white women of the same age.
Between 1990 and 2000, the prison population increased by about 80 percent. One of the biggest contributing factors was the adoption by states of “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” laws mandating draconian sentences, no matter the nature of the third offense. Legislation was also passed curtailing the discretion of state parole boards in deciding when an inmate can be released.
Notably, these increased incarceration figures have had little or negative impact on the rate of repeat offenders.
The incarcerated population increased last year in 36 states as well in as the federal prison system. The largest percentage increase was in Kentucky, which had 12 percent more inmates in state prisons and jails at the beginning of this year than at the beginning of 2007. While the state’s crime rate has increased by only about 3 percent over the last three decades, the state’s prison population has increased by 600 percent.
As in the US South as a whole, the prison population in Florida has surged, close to doubling over the last 15 years. The state’s inmate population increased from 53,000 to more than 97,000 between 1993 and 1997. The Pew study notes that analysts attribute this growth mainly to a host of correctional policies and practices adopted by the state.
In 1995, the Florida legislature abolished “good time” credits and discretionary release by the state’s parole boards. The study notes that now “all prisoners—regardless of their crime, prior record, or risk to recidivate—serve 85 percent of their sentence.”
A new “zero tolerance” policy adopted by Florida also mandated that probation officers report all technical violations by paroled prisoners. This measure alone has resulted in a 12,000 jump in the prison population while the actual crime rate has declined.
Without a change in these policies, the prison population in Florida is expected to reach nearly 125,000 inmates by 2013. The report notes that based on this projection, “the state will run out of prison capacity by early 2009 and will need to add another 16,500 beds to keep pace.”
The amount spent to keep Americans behind bars is as staggering as the numbers incarcerated. Thirteen states now spend more than $1 billion a year out of their general funds on their corrections systems.
California is the leader, spending $8.8 billion last year on the more than 171,000 prisoners in the state, a 216 percent increase over 20 years earlier. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last year signed a bill authorizing $7.9 billion in additional spending on corrections, to pay for 53,000 more prison and jail beds.
The Pew study shows that state corrections budgets now consume 6.8 percent of state general funds. This means that one in every 15 dollars from states’ discretionary funds goes towards prison costs.
As a percentage, in fiscal year 2006 transportation was the only category of spending by states to increase more than costs for prisons and jails, which increased by 9.2 percent during this period. This increase outpaced spending on education and Medicaid.
A comparison of the funds spent by states on higher education with spending on incarceration provides a revealing glimpse into priorities. In 2007, states collectively spent $72.88 billion on higher education, an increase of 121 percent over the $33 billion spent in 1987. During this same period, prison-related spending rose 315 percent, with states spending a combined $44 billion in 2007, up from $10.6 billion two decades earlier.
As both a percentage of its population and in real numbers, the US prison population outranks the inmate populations of the 26 European countries with the largest numbers of prisoners. The Russian Federation, with a reported prison population of 889,598, is second. Denmark, with 3,626 prisoners, has the lowest rate of these countries.
These 26 countries, with a combined population of 802.4 million, imprison 1.8 million; the US, with a population of about 300 million, imprisons close to 2.3 million. According to the study, China, with an estimated population of 1.3 billion, has the second highest number of prisoners behind bars, 1.5 million.
These extraordinary figures are one reflection of the enormous social contradictions of American society. The United States is the most unequal of any industrialized country and ranks high on every measure of stress, depression, alienation and other social ills. Despite the US’s self-declared status as a beacon of democracy and freedom, American capitalism has no humane, rational or progressive response to social problems. Instead, social problems are treated as police matters.

Why is Iraq Missing from 2008 Presidential Race?

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Noam Chomsky

[Note: Talk starts 20 min. 15 sec. into program] In a major address, Noam Chomsky says there has been little change in the conventional debate over a US invasion abroad: from Vietnam to Iraq, the two main political parties and political pundits differ only on the tactics of US goals, which are assumed to be legitimate. On the other hand, public opposition to war has also remained consistent, Chomsky says, but, whether Iraqi or American, ignored.
AMY GOODMAN: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will face off tonight in their final debate before the crucial primaries in Ohio and Texas next week. Over the past few days, the two Democratic candidates have traded barbs over trade, foreign and domestic policies, as the rhetoric from both campaigns heats up.

Since the presidential race began well over a year ago, Iraq has been one of many topics of debate. However, the war has not been the central issue of the campaign as it was in the midterm elections in 2006, and there are still more than 160,000 US troops deployed in Iraq. Why is this?

That was the subject of a recent talk by Noam Chomsky. A professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over a half-century, Noam Chomsky is the author of scores of books on US foreign policy. His most recent is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. We spend the rest of the hour with Noam Chomsky. He recently spoke before a packed audience in Massachussetts at an event sponsored by Bikes Not Bombs.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it’s virtually disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement among the punditry.

Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. However, the war was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy adviser, who—when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were beginning to—reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.

And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that—I’ll quote him now—“Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned,” he said, “to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won’t work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.”

Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin. You’ve already heard a few words; I don’t have to review the facts. The highly regarded British polling agency, Oxford Research Bureau, has just updated its estimate of deaths. Their new estimate a couple of days ago is 1.3 million. That’s excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar. On the side, it’s kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the debate over the actual number of deaths. There’s an assumption on the part of the hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand people, it would be OK, so we shouldn’t accept the higher estimates. You can go along with that if you like.

Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within Iraq. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren’t totally wiped out. That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London, and therefore they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It’s going to leave those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate straits.

The sectarian warfare that was created by the invasion never—nothing like that had ever existed before. That has devastated the country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to quite brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and militias. That’s the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy that’s developed by the revered “Lord Petraeus,” I guess we should describe him, considering the way he’s treated. He won his fame by pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It’s now the scene of some of the most extreme violence in the country.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an epitaph entitled “The Death of Iraq” in the very mainstream and quite important journal Current History. He writes that “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century,” which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. “Only fools talk of ‘solutions’ now,” he went on. “There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”

But Iraq is, in fact, the marginal issue, and the reasons are the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of wreck and ruin. And they’re either encouraged or silenced by the good news about Iraq.

And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq—euphemistically it’s called the Multi-National Force–Iraq, because they have, I think, three polls there somewhere—that the occupying army carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It’s an important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination. You want to know what your subjects are thinking. And it released a report last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded—I’ll quote it—that the survey of focus groups “provides very strong evidence” that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to what’s being claimed. The survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups…and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis” from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.

Well, the “shared beliefs” are identified in the report. I’ll quote de Young: "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call] ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” So those are the “shared beliefs.” According to the Iraqis then, there’s hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence and the other atrocities, if they withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis. That’s pretty much the same as what’s been found in earlier polls, so it’s not all that surprising. Well, that’s the good news: “shared beliefs.”

The report didn’t mention some other good news, so I’ll add it. Iraqis, it appears, accept the highest values of Americans. That ought to be good news. Specifically, they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive war. It was the main charge against von Ribbentrop, for example, whose position was—in the Nazi regime was that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The Tribunal defined aggression very straightforwardly: aggression, in its words, is the “invasion of its armed forces” by one state “of the territory of another state.” That’s simple. Obviously, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan are textbook examples of aggression. And the Tribunal, as I’m sure you know, went on to characterize aggression as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the whole.” So everything that follows from the aggression is part of the evil of the aggression.

Well, the good news from the US military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders. I think they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values extends to the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg. He forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply the principles to ourselves.

Well, needless to say, US opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly rejects the lofty American values that were professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene, as you could quickly discover if you try experimenting by suggesting that these values should be observed, as Iraqis insist. It’s an interesting illustration of the reality, some of the reality, that lies behind the famous “clash of civilizations.” Maybe not exactly the way we like to look at it.

There was a poll a few days ago, a really major poll, just released, which found that 75 percent of Americans believe that US foreign policy is driving the dissatisfaction with America abroad, and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values and of the American people are also to blame. Dissatisfaction is a kind of an understatement. The United States has become increasingly the most feared and often hated country in the world. Well, that perception is in fact incorrect. It’s fed by propaganda. There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction—that is, the hatred and the anger—they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they’re rejected by the US government and by US elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.

There’s other “good news” that’s been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that was during the extravaganza that was staged last September 11th. September 11th, you might ask why the timing? Well, a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. They can’t come out and say it straight out, so therefore you sort of insinuate it by devices like this. It’s intended to indicate, as they used to say outright but are now too embarrassed to say, except maybe Cheney, that by committing the supreme international crime, they were defending the world against terror, which, in fact, increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to a recent analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.

Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to explain the good news. The figures they provided on September 11th showed that the Iraqi government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, which is good news indeed and remained so until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported and, in fact, a 50 percent decline from the previous year.

Well, more good news is the decline in sectarian violence, that’s attributable in part to the murderous ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion. The result of it is there are simply fewer people to kill, so sectarian violence declines. It’s also attributable to the new counterinsurgency doctrine, Washington’s decision to support the tribal groups that had already organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the decision of the Sadr’s Mahdi army to consolidate its gains to stop direct fighting. And politically, that’s what the press calls “halting aggression” by the Mahdi army. Notice that only Iraqis can commit aggression in Iraq, or Iranians, of course, but no one else.

Well, it’s possible that Petraeus’s strategy may approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where—I’ll quote the New York Times a couple of weeks ago—Chechnya, the fighting is now “limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom” after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack. Well, maybe some day Baghdad and Fallujah also will enjoy, to continue the quote, “electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city’s main streets repaved,” as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in the light of the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the “accumulated evil” of the aggression. Well, if Russians share the beliefs and attitudes of elite liberal intellectuals in the West, then they must be praising Putin’s “wisdom and statesmanship” for his achievements in Chechnya, formerly that they had turned into a land of wreck and ruin and are now rebuilding. Great achievement.

A few days ago, the New York Times—the military and Iraq expert of the New York Times, Michael Gordon, wrote a comprehensive review, first-page comprehensive review, of the options for Iraq that are being faced by the candidates. And he went through them in detail, described the pluses and minuses and so on, interviewing political leaders, the candidates, experts, etc. There was one voice missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected; rather, it’s not mentioned. And it seems that there was no notice of that fact, which makes sense, because it’s typical. It makes sense on the tacit assumption that underlies almost all discourse on international affairs. The tacit assumption, without which none of it makes any sense, is that we own the world. So, what does it matter what others think? They’re “unpeople,” nice term invented by British diplomatic historian [Mark] Curtis, based on a series of outstanding volumes on Britain’s crimes of empire—outstanding work, therefore deeply hidden. So there are the “unpeople” out there, and then there are the owners—that’s us—and we don’t have to listen to the “unpeople.”

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky speaking in Arlington, Massachusetts. We’ll come back to that speech in a minute here on Democracy Now! And you can get a copy of this speech at democracynow.org. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to Professor Noam Chomsky, teaches linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over half-a-century. Noam Chomsky is the author of more than a hundred books on US foreign policy. He was speaking before a packed audience in Arlington, Massachusetts.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Last month, Panama declared a Day of Mourning to commemorate the US invasion—that’s under George Bush no. 1—that killed thousands of poor Panamanians when the US bombed the El Chorillo slums and other poor areas, so Panamanian human rights organizations claim. We don’t actually know, because we never count our crimes. Victors don’t do that; only the defeated. It aroused no interest here; there’s barely a mention of the Day of Mourning. And there’s also no interest in the fact that Bush 1’s invasion of Panama was a clear case of aggression, to which the Nuremberg principles apply, and it was apparently more deadly, in fact possibly much more deadly, than Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, happened a few months later. But it makes sense that there would be no interest in that, because we own the world, and Saddam didn’t, so the acts are quite different.

It’s also of no interest that, at that time of the time of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the greatest fear in Washington was that Saddam would imitate what the United States had just done in Panama, namely install a client government and then leave. That’s the main reason why Washington blocked diplomacy in quite interesting ways, with almost complete media cooperation. There’s actually one exception in the US media. But none of this gets any commentary. However, it does merit a lead story a few days later, when the Panamanian National Assembly was opened by President Pedro Gonzalez, who’s charged by Washington with killing two American soldiers during a protest against President Bush no.1, against his visit two years after the invasion. The charges were dismissed by Panamanian courts, but they’re upheld by the owner of the world, so he can’t travel, and that got a story.

Well, to take just one last illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino, veteran correspondent, writes that “Iran’s intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.” Well, the phrase “the rest of the world” is an interesting one. The rest of the world happens to exclude the vast majority of the world, namely the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran’s right to enrich uranium in accordance with the rights granted by its being a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But they’re not part of the world, even though they’re the large majority, because they don’t reflexively accept US orders, and commentary like that is unremarkable and unnoticed. You’re part of the world if you do what we say, obviously. Otherwise, you’re “unpeople.”

Well, we might, since we’re on Iran, might tarry for a moment and ask whether there’s any solution to the US-Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons, which is extremely dangerous. Here’s one idea. First point, Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear energy, but not nuclear weapons, as the Non-Proliferation Treaty determines.

Second point is that there should be a nuclear weapons-free zone in the entire region, Iran to Israel, including any US forces that are present there. Actually, though it’s never reported, the United States is committed to that position. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it appealed to a UN resolution, Resolution 687, which called upon Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. That was the flimsy legal principle invoked to justify the invasion. And if you look at Resolution 687, you discover that one of its provisions is that the US and other powers must work to develop a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, including that entire region. So we’re committed to it, and that’s the second element of this proposal.

The third element of the proposal is that the United States should accept the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a position which happens to be supported by 82 percent of Americans, namely that it should accept the requirement, in fact the legal requirement, as the World Court determined, to move to make good-faith efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

And a fourth proposal is that the US should turn to diplomacy, and it should end any threats against Iran. The threats are themselves crimes. They’re in violation of the UN Charter, which bars the threat or use of force.

Well, of course, these four proposals—again, Iran should have nuclear energy, but not nuclear weapons; there should be a weapons-free zone throughout the region; the US should accept the Non-Proliferation Treaty; there should be a turn to diplomacy and an end to threats—these are almost unmentionable in the United States. Not a single candidate would endorse any part of them, and they’re never discussed, and so on.

However, the proposals are not original. They happen to be the position of the overwhelming majority of the American population. And interestingly, that’s also true in Iran; roughly the same overwhelming majority accepts all of these proposals. But that’s—the results come from the world’s most prestigious polling agency, but not reported, as far as I could discover, and certainly not considered. If they were ever mentioned, they would be dismissed with the phrase “politically impossible,” which is probably correct. It’s only the position of the large majority of the population, kind of like national healthcare, but not of the people that count. So there are plenty of “unpeople” here, too—in fact, the large majority. Americans share this property of being “unpeople” with most of the rest of the world. In fact, if the United States and Iran were functioning, not merely formal, democracies, then this dangerous crisis might be readily resolved by a functioning democracy—I mean, one in which public opinion plays some role in determining policy, rather than being excluded—in fact, unmentioned, because, after all, they’re “unpeople.”

Well, while we’re on Iran, I guess I might as well turn to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil: North Korea. There is an official story—read it right now—is that the official story is this, that after having been compelled to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons and the facilities, after having been compelled to agree to that, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way. So the New York Times headline on this ten days ago reads “The United States Sees Stalling by North Korea on Nuclear Pact.” And the article then details the charges of how North Korea is not going through with its responsibility. It’s not releasing information that it’s promised to release. If you read the story to the last paragraph—and that’s always a good idea; that’s where the interesting news usually is when you read a news story—but if you manage to get to the last paragraph, you discover that it’s the United States that has backed down on the pledges made in the agreement. The United States had promised to provide a million tons of fuel and—

What do I do? I couldn’t see you. I’m sorry.

MODERATOR: Ten minutes.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I should hurry up? Yeah, OK. Alright, just start screaming at me if I go on too long.

The US just refused to supply it. It’s refused only—it’s supplied only 85 percent of the fuel that it promised, and it was supposed to improve diplomatic relations, of course not doing that. Well, that’s quite normal.

If you want to find out what’s going on in the US-North Korea nuclear standoff, it’s better—you have to go to the specialist literature, which is uniform on it, nothing hidden, and in fact sort of sneaks out into small print in the press reports, as I mentioned. What you find is that North—I mean, North Korea may be the most hideous state in the world, but that’s not the point here. Its position has been pretty pragmatic. It’s kind of tit-for-tat. The United States gets more aggressive, they get more aggressive. The United States moves towards diplomacy and negotiations, they do the same.

So when President Bush came in, there was an agreement—it was called the Framework Agreement that had been established in 1994—and neither the US nor North Korea was quite living up to it. But it was more or less functioning. At that time, North Korea, under the Framework Agreement, had stopped any testing of long-range missiles. It had maybe one or two bombs worth of plutonium, and it was verifiably not making more. Now, that was when George Bush entered the scene. And now it has eight to ten bombs, long-range missiles, and it’s developing plutonium.

And there’s a reason. The Bush regime immediately moved to a very aggressive stance. The Axis of Evil speech was one example. Intelligence was released claiming that North Korea was carrying out—was cheating, had clandestine programs. It’s rather interesting that these intelligence reports, five years later, have been quietly rescinded as probably inadequate. The reason presumably is that if an agreement is reached, there will be inspectors in North Korea, and they’ll find that this intelligence had as much validity as the claims about Iraq, so they’re being withdrawn. Well, North Korea responded to all of this by ratcheting up its missile and weapons development.

In September 2005, under pressure, the United States did agree to negotiations, and there was an outcome. September 2005, North Korea agreed to abandon—quoting— “all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs” and to allow international inspection. That would be in return for international aid, mainly from the United States, and a non-aggression pledge from the US and an agreement that the two sides—I’m quoting—would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations.”

Well, the United States, the Bush administration, had an instant reaction. It instantly renewed the threat of force. It froze North Korean funds in foreign banks. It disbanded the consortium that was supposed meet to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor. So North Korea returned to its weapons and missile development, carried out a weapons test, and confrontation escalated. Well, again, under international pressure and with its foreign policy collapsing, Washington returned to negotiations. That led to an agreement, which Washington is now scuttling.

There’s an earlier history, an interesting one. You recall a couple of weeks ago, there was a mysterious Israeli bombing in northern Syria, never explained, but it a sort of hinted that this had something to do with Syria building nuclear facilities with the help of North Korea. Pretty unlikely, but whether it’s true or not, there’s an interesting background, which wasn’t mentioned. In 1993, Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement, in which Israel would recognize North Korea and in return North Korea would agree to terminate any weapons-related—missile, nuclear, other—any weapons-related activity in the Middle East. That would have been an enormous boon to Israel’s security. But the owner of the world stepped in. Clinton ordered them to refuse. Of course, you have to listen to the master’s voice. So that ended that. And it may be that there are North Korean activities in the Middle East that we don’t know about.

Well, let me finally return to the first member of the Axis of Evil: Iraq. Washington does have expectations, and they’re explicit. There are outlined in a Declaration of Principles that was agreed upon, if you can call it that, between the United States and the US-backed, US-installed Iraqi government, a government under military occupation. The two of them issued the Declaration of Principles. It allows US forces to remain indefinitely in Iraq in order to “deter foreign aggression”—well, the only aggression in sight is from the United States, but that’s not aggression, by definition—and also to facilitate and encourage “the flow of foreign investments [to] Iraq, especially American investments.” I’m quoting. That’s an unusually brazen expression of imperial will.

In fact, it was heightened a few days ago, when George Bush issued another one of his signing statements declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money—I’m quoting—“to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of [United States} Armed Forces in Iraq” or “to exercise [United States] control of the oil resources of Iraq." OK? Shortly after, the New York Times reported that Washington “insists”—if you own the world, you insist—“insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations,” a demand that “faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its…deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state.” It’s supposed to be more third world irrationality.

So, in brief, the United States is now insisting that Iraq must agree to allow permanent US military installations, provide the United—grant the United States the right to conduct combat operations freely, and to guarantee US control over the oil resources of Iraq. OK? It’s all very explicit, on the table. It’s kind of interesting that these reports do not elicit any reflection on the reasons why the United States invaded Iraq. You’ve heard those reasons offered, but they were dismissed with ridicule. Now they’re openly conceded to be accurate, but not eliciting any retraction or even any reflection.

Well, there’s a lot more to say about good news, but I was told to shut up, so I will just say that thinking about these things really does give some insight into the famous “clash of civilizations” and its actual substance, topics that really ought to be foremost in our minds, I believe. Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s taught there for over half-a-century. He was speaking in Arlington, Massachusetts at an event sponsored by Bikes Not Bombs.

The Red Pamphlet [A]

2008-02-28T19:41:00.000+05:30

Bhagat Singh

On the 8th April, 1929, the Viceroy's proclamation, enacting the two Bills, was to be made, despite the fact that the majority of members were opposed to it, and had rather rejected in earlier.
THE HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN ARMY (NOTICE)
It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear, with these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Valiant, a French anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours.
Without repeating the humiliating history of the past ten years of the working of the reforms (Montague-Chelmsford Reforms) and without mentioning the insults hurled at the Indian nation through this House-the so-called Indian Parliament-we want to point out that, while the people expecting some more crumbs of reforms from the Simon Commission, and are ever quarreling over the distribution of the expected bones, the Government is thrusting upon us new repressive measures like the Public Safety and the Trade Disputes Bill, while reserving the Press Sedition Bill for the next session. The indiscriminate arrests of labour leaders working in the open field clearly indicate whither the wind blows.
In these extremely provocative circumstances, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, in all seriousness, realizing their full responsibility, had decided and ordered its army to do this particular action, so that a stop be put to this humiliating farce and to let the alien bureaucratic exploiters do what they wish, but they must be made to come before the public eve in their naked form.
Let the representatives of the people return to their constituencies and prepare the masses for the coming revolution, and let the Government know that while protesting against the Public Safety and Trade Disputes Bills and the callous murder of Lala Lajpat Rai, on behalf of the helpless Indian masses, we want to emphasize the lesson often repeated by history, that it is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled while the ideas survived, Bourbons and Czars fell, while the revolution marched ahead triumphantly.
We are sorry to admit that we who attach so great a sanctity to human life, who dream of a glorious future, when man will be enjoying perfect peace and full liberty, have been forced to shed human blood. But the sacrifice of individuals at the altar of the 'Great Revolution' that will bring freedom to all, rendering the exploitation of man by man impossible, is inevitable.
"Long Live the Revolution." [B]
Signed,Balraj [C]Commander-in-Chief

Beware, Ye Bureaucracy

2008-02-28T19:39:00.000+05:30

Bhagat Singh

[A handwritten leaflet explaining the reasons for Saunders' murder, written on December 18, 1928 on Mozang House den and pasted at several places on the walls of Lahore in the night between the 18th and 19th. A copy in Bhagat Singh's handwriting was produced as an exhibit in the Lahore Conspiracy Case.]
HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN ARMYNOTICE
J.P. Sunders is dead; Lala Lajpat Rai is avenged
Really it is horrible to imagine that so lowly and violent hand violent hand of an ordinary Police Official, J.P. Saunders could ever dare to touch in such an insulting way the body of one so old, so revered and so loved by 300 millions of people of Hindustan and thus cause his death. The youth and manhood of India was challenged by blows hurled down on the head of the India's nationhood. And let the world know that India still lives; that the blood of youths has not been totally cooled down and that they can still risk their lives, if the honour of their nation is at stake. And it is proved through this act by those obscure who are ever persecuted, condemned and denounced even by their own people.
Beware, Ye Tyrants ; Beware
Do not injure the felling of a downtrodden and oppressed country. Think twice before perpetrating such diabolical deed, And remember that despite 'Arms Act' and strict guards against the smuggling of arms, the revolvers will ever continue to flow in-if no sufficient at present for and armed revolt, then at least sufficient to avenge the national insults. Inspite of all the denunciations and condemnation 0f their own kiths and kins, and ruthless repression and persecution of the alien government, party of young men will ever live to teach a lesson to the haughty rulers. They will be so bold as to cry even amidst the raging storm of opposition and repression, even on the scaffold:
"LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION" !
Sorry for the death of a man. But in this man has died the representative of an institution which is so cruel, lowly and so base that it must be abolished. In this man has died an agent of the British authority in India - the most tyrannical of Govt. of Govts. In the world.
Sorry for the bloodshed of a human being; but the sacrifice of individuals at the altar of the Revolution that will bring freedom to all and make the exploitation of man by main impossible, is inevitable.
Long Live The Revolution" !
Sd/ - Balraj
Dated
18th December, 1928

The Most Wanted List

2008-02-28T19:32:00.000+05:30

International Terrorism
By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world."

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."

Following the Terror Trail

In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities the led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered,. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.

The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S. intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining). "Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.

A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general acclaim by "the world."

The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.

The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual mention.

Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger."

Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.

We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs. Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.

Car Bomb

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.

One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.

The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").

"Terrorist Villagers"

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.

These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.

The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.

The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack," particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.

Killing without Intent

Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.

After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.

In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.

Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier.. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile," British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who... were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.

All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.

This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which understands that the United States and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing -- so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and What We Say Goes, a conversation book with David Barsamian, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been published by the New Press.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]

British Capital and Indian Revolt

2008-02-27T16:46:00.000+05:30

Shapurji Saklatvala

Date: November 23, 1922

Source: The Communist, December 2, 1922 ed., page 2
One of our speakers said that the continent of Europe had been impoverished because capital had gone abroad. Who took it abroad?
Is it a sign of disservice to the country for enterprising men to take their capital abroad? If that IS so, what can be said of private enterprise in Britain itself, and those British citizens who are taking abroad British capital produced by British working men, day after day and year alter year?
Over 74 jute mills have been erected in Bengal by British millers and capitalists, with the result that to-day we have shut up shop in Dundee and our workers in Bengal are working at from 14s. to 38s. a month — producing for the owners dividends of from 150 per cent to 400 per cent.
Out of the 121 coal companies in my country, India, 102 have been opened out by British capitalists.
If these are the results of private enterprise, may we ask our friends not to sit down and wait until the great calamity overtakes this country altogether, but to learn lessons from what has happened on the continent, and remove the causes which brought about the conditions which all of us agree are not worthy of an intelligent, and civilised race?
One or my colleagues referred to the position of trade with India, especially the textile trade, and I understand the Seconder of the Motion to refer to how it had become impracticable for the Austrians to buy Indian hides and the Germans to buy Indian cotton, and so forth.
I want the House to note carefully that the loss of trade with India is due to two separate reasons.
One has been the desire of the Government of this country (who have always prided themselves as a constitutional nation and government) to try in the outside world most unconstitutional methods of dictating Government from outside.
No Britisher would for a moment tolerate a constitution for Great Britain if it were written outside of Great Britain by people who are not British.
In a similar way the constitutions for Ireland and India and Egypt and Mesopotamia should be constitutions written by the men of those countries, without interference from outside.
But there is another great cause, and I wish the House to understand it clearly. It is the rivalry due to the spirit of private enterprise which is as responsible now, and will be responsible in the future, for one country depriving the workers of another country of their legitimate livelihood.
It is the growth of this private enterprise, of these large corporations and trusts, those huge industrial concerns in India, which is beginning to tell its tale upon the worker; of this country.
I wish to make no secret of it. The cotton industry of this country is bound to suffer from this two-fold evil, namely, the political sulking of the people of India and the spread of private enterprise and of the privileges of the private enterprisers.
The Indian private enterprisers have learned to ask for protective duties, for high dividends, for low wages, long hours, and all kinds of privileges which private enterprise in this country has claimed for 150 years.
It is this combination which is working the ruin of the workers of this land.
In reference to Ireland, I am well disciplined and trained in the general principle of the Labour movement, namely, that the happiness of the world depends on international peace, and that international peace is only possible when the self-determined will of the people prevails in each country.
I deplore greatly, therefore, those elements in the Irish Treaty that are not compatible with that great and wholesome principle.
Everyone knows that the Treaty has, unfortunately, gone forth as the only alternative to a new invasion of Ireland by British troops. As long as that element exists the people of Ireland have a right to say that the very narrow majority which in Ireland accepted the Treaty at the time, accepted it also on this understanding — that if they did not accept it the alternative was an invasion by Black-and-Tans of this country.
If it were possible in some way to allow the people of Ireland to understand that their country's constitution is to be framed by them as a majority may decide, and that the alternative would be an invasion from this country, but that this country would shake hands with Ireland as a neighbour whatever shape or form that Government took, it would be quite a different story.
Otherwise, whatever we may do, however many treaties we may pass, however unanimous the British may be in their behaviour towards Ireland, Ireland will not he made a peaceful country.
As in 1801 England gave them a forced union so in 1922 England is giving them a forced freedom.
When I say so, I put forward not my personal views, but the views of 90 per cent of those Irishmen who are my electors. They have pointed to met that, whereas under the threat of renewed invasion the Dail only passed the Treaty by a majority of barely half a dozen votes, Irishmen who are not under that threat — Irishmen who are now living in Great Britain — have, by a tremendous majority — voted against it. As long as those factors continue to exist, the Irish Treaty is not going to be what we — in a sort of silent conspiracy — have decided to name it. The reality will not be there. The reality is not there.
Before I conclude I wish to refer to one point which is conspicuous by its absence from the King's Speech.
If in the Empire, this House and this government is going to take the glory of the good, they will also have to take the ignominy of anything disgraceful which happens outside this country. This government and this House will have to satisfy this country as well as outside countries, why the policy of the South African Government in hanging and shooting workers, was permitted and was kept quiet.
We are still calling Ireland a part of this Empire and it is only last that week that four young working class lads, without an open trial and without even fair notice to their families, were shot. These acts might be described as the acts of independent governments. Either these governments are independent or they are part of this Empire. If they are part of this Empire, then the Government must see to it that a policy of this kind does not go without challenge and protest from this House.

Taslima Nasrin & "Free Speech"

2008-02-27T16:35:00.000+05:30

Arundhati Roy's Statement February 13, 2008, New Delhi, India
By Arundhati Roy

I would like to caution us all against looking at this issue, in particular the issue of Taslima Nasrin, through the single lens of a battle between religious fundamentalism and secular liberalism. Taslima Nasrin herself sometimes contributes to that view. On her website, she says: "Humankind is facing an uncertain future.” In particular, the conflict is between two different ideas, secularism and fundamentalism.” To me, this conflict is basically between modern, rational, logical thinking and irrational, blind faith. It is a conflict between the future and the past, between innovation and tradition, between those who value freedom and those who do not."

How strange it is then, that it was the West Bengal Government - led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a party that sees itself as the vanguard of secularism, modern, logical, and rational thinking - that banned Nasrin's autobiographical novel Dwikhandita, not once, but twice. Twice the ban was successfully challenged in the Calcutta High Court. The book was published, and for four years people in Bengal read it and Taslima Nasrin lived in Calcutta. And there the matter remained - without incident.

Then Nandigram happened. Muslims and Dalits bore the brunt of the government's attack. The CPI(M) began to worry about losing the "Muslim vote." So it played the Taslima card. A report by Mohammed Safi Samsi in the Indian Express (December 1, 2007) tells the story.

The government launched its operation to "recapture" Nandigram at the end of October 2007:

On November 1, Path Sanket a CPI(M) magazine published an anonymous letter supporting Taslima Nasrin, adding some gratuitous insults of its own against Prophet Mohammed. On the November 8, the government banned the magazine and a member of the editorial team called printing the letter a "historic blunder." But, of course, vernacular newspapers republished the letter. Photocopies of the letter were then distributed in Muslim-dominated localities.

On November 21 - a week after more than 60,000 people marched on the streets protesting the government's actions in Nandigram - the little-known All India Minority Forum organized a protest that then "erupted" in violence. The army was called in. The government deported Taslima Nasrin from West Bengal.

And today, on February 13, we are all gathered here to discuss "free speech." Not the recapturing of Nandigram or the continuing terrorizing, humiliation, and rape of the people who live there.

It seems pretty clear that the threat to free speech comes as much from chemical hubs and iron ore mines - and from the project of land grab, enclosure, and mass displacement - as it does from religious fundamentalism. To not see this is to fall into a trap that has been cleverly laid for us.

Religious fundamentalists, especially those from minority communities, are often inadvertently playing out a script that has been written for them. Their outrage, genuine though it may be, has become a dependable, predictable, and an extremely useful political device to further the agendas of others.

The principle of free speech and expression has to negotiate many, many fundamentalisms. Religious fundamentalism, ultranationalist fundamentalism, market fundamentalism, among others. Sometimes they are intertwined in the strangest ways.

Liberals often make the mistake of believing that free speech is a fundamental right given to us by the Indian constitution - and that when it is curbed either by the state or by vigilante militias and thugs, the constitution is being subverted. This is not true. Free speech is not our constitutional right. It is a contained right, beset with caveats, caveats that are always used by the powerful to control and dominate those who are powerless.

Now, we have a slew of new laws that make not just free speech but freedom itself in India a pathetic joke, a distant dream. There is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which incorporates some of the worst provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). There is the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act, the Madhya Pradesh Control of Organized Crime Act, and the utterly draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA). Some of these laws contain provisions whose sole purpose seems to be to criminalize everybody and then leave the government free to decide at leisure whom to imprison. Under the CSPSA and the UAPA, for example, the government is free to arbitrarily ban any organization without giving any specific reason for placing the ban.

Here is how the CSPA defines an organization: " 'Organization' means any combination, body or group of persons whether known by any distinctive name or not and whether registered under any relevant law or not and whether governed by any written constitution or not."

Remember, the vaguer the provisions in the law, the wider the net it casts, the greater the threat to civil and democratic rights.

Here is how the CSPSA defines an "unlawful activity": "Any action taken by such [banned] individual or organization whether by committing an act or by words either spoken or written or by signs or by visible representation or otherwise."

And then there are some sub-clauses that widen the net:

(i) which constitutes a danger or menace to public order, peace or tranquility

(ii) which interferes or tends to interfere with maintenance of public order

And, remarkably

(vi) of encouraging or preaching disobedience to established law and its institutions.

In Section 8(5) it says that "Whoever commits or abets or attempts to commit or abet or plans to commit any unlawful activity shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years."

So now they have mind readers in the Chattisgarh government, as well as seers.

How can there be even the pretense of free speech or freedom under laws like these? All over the country, not just journalists and writers, but anybody who disagrees with the government's plans is being arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. Sometimes murdered.

Govind Kutty, the editor of People's March, a publication banned for being sympathetic to Maoist ideology, has been arrested and imprisoned. The Maoists have as much right to the freedom of expression, as much right to place their ideology - however abhorrent the government or anybody else may believe it to be - in the public domain, in the so-called marketplace of ideas as anybody else does.

I believe that the ban on People's March should be lifted immediately and its editor unconditionally released.

Finally, I would like to say that the battle for free speech must not turn into a battle that limits itself to the freedom of writers, journalists, and artists alone. We are not the only ones who deserve this right. A friend from Chattisgarh recently told me of a doctor who had been arrested because a prescription of his had been found in some "Naxalite kit," whatever that means.

In Chattisgarh, 644 villages have been evacuated of their inhabitants. That's more than 300,000 people - displacement on a mass scale, which is eventually intended to clear space for corporate mining interests. Fifty thousand people have been moved into police camps and have become recruits for the dreaded Salwa Judum (the supposedly anti-Maoist "people's militia" created and funded by the state government). Tens of thousands of people have fled to neighboring states to escape the horror. Nobody is allowed to go back to their villages or to cultivate their land. What is freedom of expression for a farmer? The buzz in town is that a new law is on the anvil which says that if farmland has not been cultivated for two years, it can be diverted for non-agricultural purposes.

Every form of resistance, peaceful or otherwise, is being shut down by the state. Of all the cases on the anvil, the goldfish in a bowl, the dire, menacing warning to us all and to anybody who may be entertaining the idea "of encouraging or preaching disobedience to established law and its institutions" is the continued imprisonment of Dr. Binayak Sen under false charges, underpinned by blatantly fabricated evidence.

Dr. Binayak Sen, who has worked as a civil rights activist with the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and a doctor in the area for more than 30 years, was arrested last May, charged under the CSPSA, the UAPA, and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). He has been in prison for eight months, denied bail even by the Supreme Court.

By imprisoning someone like Binayak Sen, the government is trying to close out the option of peaceful resistance, of democratic space. It is creating a polarization along the lines of the Bush Doctrine - "If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists" - in which people only have the choice between succumbing to displacement and destitution or resisting by going underground and taking up arms. This is the beginning of either civil war or the annihilation of the poor. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it won't go back. There are reports that the Chhattisgarh state government has asked for 70 battalions of paramilitary forces beyond the 17 battalions that are already there. A fourfold increase. I fear the worst.

And so, from this platform I would like to ask for the granting of citizenship to Taslima Nasrin, for the immediate and unconditional release of Binayak Sen, Govind Kutty, and the other journalists whose names have been mentioned at this press conference, experienced journalists and peaceful activists who understand that reporting the realities of these situations is the only hope of righting this ship that is tilting dangerously and about to tip over. If it does tip over, everybody will suffer, the poor definitely, but the rich too. There will be no hiding place. I urge those present here to pay keen attention to the specter that is looming before us. And to begin a campaign demanding the repeal of these very frightening new laws that do not merely threaten free speech, but freedom itself.

Germany: Unemployed man starves himself to death

2008-02-27T16:30:00.000+05:30

By Dietmar Henning

The demise of a 58-year-old unemployed man who deliberately starved himself to death in a remote hideout in the woods is both a personal tragedy and a devastating indictment of the current state of German society. It says more about conditions in Germany than all the pious speeches of professional politicians and academic studies into poverty and unemployment.
The emaciated body of Hans-Peter Z was discovered two weeks ago, in a forest area near Solling in Lower Saxony. It is estimated that Hans-Peter Z had already been dead for over two months. According to a police report he died after not eating for 24 days and drinking only a little water, while documenting his suffering in a diary.
The circumstances of his death and his diary entries indicate that he wanted his suicide to send out a message. According to the press reports available, his death was as calm and quiet as his previous life had been. Even if he had “only” wanted to draw attention to his personal fate, it is closely interwoven with the sorry state of society, which his suicide has now graphically illuminated.
An “ordinary” life
Hans-Peter Z was born in April 1949 in Schleswig-Holstein, in West Germany. On finishing school, he served for 12 years as a soldier in the German Armed Forces. He completed his training as an office administrator, married and had a daughter. Like many others, after German reunification in 1990 he sought to build up his business in East Germany where there was much consumer potential.
As a self-employed person he initiated and organized trade fairs that were initially successful. For a long time, he was able to provide a living for his family, which many newspapers described as a “stable ordinary life.” But the constant travelling—only being able to see his family at weekends, if at all—seemed to take its toll. First, his marriage broke down, and later his relationship with his daughter.
In about 2000, he began to work as a representative for a company that manufactures hammocks, travelling to trade fairs throughout Germany. His boss remembers Hans-Peter Z as “extremely reliably, loyal and honest. If there was just the slightest danger that he would arrive too late in the morning for an appointment, he would drive there the evening before.”
In the meantime, he had moved to Badendorf, a small village near Lübeck, where he attracted little attention in the multi-occupancy building in which he lived. Neighbours described him as reserved, neat, as someone who “left the house early on Mondays well turned out, and came back late on Fridays.”
But three years later, Hans-Peter Z lost his job again. From October 2003, the business cut back its involvement in trade fairs; the 54-year-old man was no longer needed. At this age, it was difficult to find a job. In 2003, only about 40 percent of all those aged 50-plus had work. One in four unemployed people belongs to this age group.
Like many others, Hans-Peter Z again tried to make a living as a self-employed person, this time without success. He had money problems and could no longer pay his rent. When he couldn’t settle a hotel bill, he gave a false address. A few days later, he turned himself in to the police.
A new relationship failed. At this point, Hans-Peter Z was suffering from depression and had suicidal thoughts for the first time. He entered hospital to undergo psychiatric treatment. He lost his accommodation for non-payment of rent. In 2006, Hans-Peter Z found accommodation with friends in Seelze near Hanover.
Here also he attracted little attention in this simple postwar multi-occupancy building. Around the turn of the year 2006/2007 he then moved into a small two-room furnished apartment in Hanover. He was now living like a recluse, reading a great deal and riding his bike, surviving on his unemployment benefits. Again and again, he told his landlord and the advisors at the local unemployment agency about his job applications. But the 58-year old was only offered jobs on a commission-only basis by shady businessmen, which Hans-Peter Z rejected.
The unemployment agency was unable to help. He was told to consider early retirement. Hans-Peter Z was indignant: “I am not a candidate for a pension.” He was still optimistic, and hoped to find a proper job.
However, in October 2007 his unemployment benefits were reduced, and this previously successful self-employed man faced having to lodge a claim for welfare payments. His unemployment benefits now amounted to just €347 a month, but Hans-Peter Z did not make a claim for welfare.
Whether he actually had the prospects of a job in Cologne in November last year, or whether he only mentioned it because he had already resolved to end his life, is not known. In any case, he quit his apartment in Hanover and euphorically told his landlord about a new job in Cologne, saying that all his applications had finally resulted in success in his old field of work—trade fairs. Hans-Peter Z paid his last rent and left a few cardboard boxes in the cellar, saying he would fetch them later.
That is the last time Hans-Peter Z was seen alive.
In mid-November, he left his small apartment and rode on his bicycle the approximately 100 kilometres to Solling in Lower Saxony. With a backpack and a water bottle, he began his last journey.
At a certain point, he left his bike and continued on foot. When he climbed into the hideout in the woods, he must have decided he was not going to leave it alive. In his diary, he documents in detail each day up to his death.
He writes how his organs slowly stop working, his skin dries up, how he becomes increasingly emaciated, losing bodily sensation, and his mental faculties diminish. At one point, a young boy tries to climb into the hideout, but his father calls him back. At the beginning of December he loses track of time. On December 6, he writes that it must be Christmas. He eats nothing, only occasionally drinking some water. In the end, he asks that his diary be handed over to his daughter. The last entry is dated December13. His final wish is to be buried at sea. The police later establish that Hans-Peter Z must have resided in his hideout in the woods for at least 24 days before he died.
For over two months, his dead body lay untouched, until it was found two weeks ago by hunters. Hans-Peter Z had not been missed.
The 58-year-old seemed to have internalised all the “virtues” that businesses expect of their employees. He did not work in order to live; he lived in order to work. When society refused him the chance to work—a man who had always worked for his living—his world collapsed. At 58, he considered himself neither superfluous, nor a “candidate for a pension.” He was too proud to ask for welfare payments and face the degradation of cheap-wage labour.
Just as society was denying him work and a means of living, so he denied himself water and food. He showed the same discipline in the manner of his death that had distinguished his working life. “One has to be very disciplined to end your life this way,” said Professor Michael Manns from the Hanover University Medical School (MHH).
First, a person’s fat is consumed; then the body begins to consume the muscles. At the same time, the body lacks vitamins, protein and electrolytes, according to Manns. The level of uric acid builds up; kidney stones can form, unleashing colic attacks. “This leads to weak circulation, the blood becomes more concentrated, and the body dries out.” The person suffers general weakness, and has strong stomach pains. Muscles became weaker, until the person falls unconscious. Finally, there is heart failure.
Hans-Peter Z suffered all these agonies, finally lying down to die, as if to sleep. The two hunters found him lying on his back, legs bent and with his hands behind his head.
His death is a personal tragedy, but even more so, it is an indictment of the inhuman treatment meted out to the unemployed (and in particular the long-term unemployed) introduced by the Social Democratic-Green Party government under Gerhard Schröder (SPD) with its so-called “Hartz welfare reforms.” Older people who have worked all their life and then become unemployed rapidly lose their benefits and become dependent on welfare.
Once a person has to claim welfare under the “Hartz IV” rules, the chicanery begins. The individual has to provide comprehensive information about all their possessions and property. All their savings must first be exhausted before they can receive welfare payments. A car or more than a one-bedroom apartment is only deemed appropriate for the single “long-term unemployed” in exceptional cases. The person has to report frequently to a job centre and must accept any work, including cheap-wage jobs for which they may be overqualified. If they refuse to accept a job or do not attend an appointment they face cuts in their welfare payments. In brief, since the introduction of the Hartz legislation, to be unemployed is one long humiliation.
Hans-Peter Z’s is not an isolated case. The constantly rising physical and psychological pressures and the rapid development of technology in the workplace mean many people aged over 50 find themselves pushed aside and dependent on welfare. In the light of personal or relationship problems that arise or are caused by this situation, it is remarkable that there are not more suicides. In Germany, there are nearly 1 million people aged over 50 who are unemployed and dependent on welfare, most of them for longer than one year.
The parlous state of German society was also revealed by the media bidding war that ensued for the rights to publish Hans-Peter Z’s diary. According to press reports, his daughter has already been offered a five-figure sum for her father’s diary. A movie director and a writer have also shown an interest in his story. Before they turn to the diary of Hans-Peter Z, they should read a powerful historical precedent—Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman,” in which the main character Willy Loman eventually kills himself after losing his job in the harsh conditions of 1940s America.

Rising Inflation Creates Unease in Middle East

2008-02-27T16:24:00.002+05:30

By ROBERT F. WORTH

AMMAN, Jordan — Even as it enriches Arab rulers, the recent oil-price boom is helping to fuel an extraordinary rise in the cost of food and other basic goods that is squeezing this region’s middle class and setting off strikes, demonstrations and occasional riots from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.

Here in Jordan, the cost of maintaining fuel subsidies amid the surge in prices forced the government to remove almost all the subsidies this month, sending the price of some fuels up 76 percent overnight. In a devastating domino effect, the cost of basic foods like eggs, potatoes and cucumbers doubled or more.
In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause “theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.”
The inflation has many causes, from rising global demand for commodities to the monetary constraints of currencies pegged to the weakening American dollar. But one cause is the skyrocketing price of oil itself, which has quadrupled since 2002. It is helping push many ordinary people toward poverty even as it stimulates a new surge of economic growth in the gulf.
“Now we have to choose: we either eat or stay warm. We can’t do both,” said Abdul Rahman Abdul Raheem, who works at a clothing shop in a mall in Amman and once dreamed of sending his children to private school. “We’re not really middle class anymore; we’re at the poverty level.”
Some governments have tried to soften the impact of high prices by increasing wages or subsidies on foods. Jordan, for instance, has raised the wages of public-sector employees earning less than 300 dinars ($423) a month by 50 dinars ($70). For those earning more than 300 dinars, the raise was 45 dinars, or $64. But that compensates for only a fraction of the price increases, and most people who work in the private sector get no such relief.
The fact that the inflation is coinciding with new oil wealth has fed perceptions of corruption and economic injustice, some analysts say.
“About two-thirds of Jordanians now believe there is widespread corruption in the public and private sector,” said Mohammed al-Masri, the public opinion director at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “The middle class is less and less able to afford what they used to, and more and more suspicious.”
In a few places the price increases have led to violence. In Yemen, prices for bread and other foods have nearly doubled in the past four months, setting off a string of demonstrations and riots in which at least a dozen people were killed. In Morocco, 34 people were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for participating in riots over food prices, the Moroccan state news service reported. Even tightly controlled Jordan has had nonviolent demonstrations and strikes.
Inflation was also a factor — often overlooked — in some recent clashes that were seen as political or sectarian. A confrontation in Beirut between Lebanese Army soldiers and a group of Shiite protesters that left seven people dead started with demonstrations over power cuts and rising bread prices.
In Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, inflation is in the double digits, and foreign workers, who constitute a vast majority of the work force, have gone on strike in recent months because of the declining purchasing power of the money they send home. The workers are paid in currencies that are pegged to the dollar, and the value of their salaries — translated into Indian rupees and other currencies — has dropped significantly.
The Middle East’s heavy reliance on food imports has made it especially vulnerable to the global rise in commodity prices over the past year, said George T. Abed, the former governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority and a director at the Institute of International Finance, an organization based in Washington.
Corruption, inefficiency and monopolistic economies worsen the impact, as government officials or business owners artificially inflate prices or take a cut of such increases.
“For many basic products, we don’t have free market prices, we have monopoly prices,” said Samer Tawil, a former minister of national economy in Jordan. “Oil, cement, rice, meat, sugar: these are all imported almost exclusively by one importer each here. Corruption is one thing when it’s about building a road, but when it affects my food, that’s different.”

In the oil-producing gulf countries, governments that are flush with oil money can soften the blow by spending more. The United Arab Emirates increased the salaries of public sector employees by 70 percent this month; Oman raised them 43 percent. Saudi Arabia also raised wages and increased subsidies on some foods. Bahrain set up a $100 million fund to be distributed this year to people most affected by rising prices. But all this government spending has the unfortunate side effect of worsening inflation, economists say.
Countries with less oil to sell do not have the same options.
In Syria, where oil production is drying up, prices have also risen sharply. Although it has begun to liberalize its rigid socialist economy, the government has repeatedly put off plans to eliminate the subsidies that keep prices artificially low for its citizens, fearing domestic reprisals.
Even so, the inflation of the past few months has taken a toll on all but the rich.
Thou al-Fakar Hammad, an employee in the contracts office of the Syrian state oil company, has a law degree and earns just less than 15,000 Syrian pounds, or $293, a month, twice the average national wage. His salary was once more than adequate, and until recently he sent half of it to his parents.
But rising prices have changed all that, he said. Now he has taken a second job teaching Arabic on weekends to help support his wife and young child. Unable to buy a car, he takes public buses from his two-room apartment just outside Damascus to work. He can afford the better quality diapers for his son to wear only at night and resorts to cheaper ones during the day. He cannot send anything to his parents.
“I have to live day to day,” he said. “I can’t budget for everything because, should my child get sick, I’d spend a lot of what I earn on medication for him.”
At the same time, a new class of entrepreneurs, most of them with links to the government, has built gaudy mansions and helped transform Damascus, the Syrian capital, with glamorous new restaurants and cafes. That has helped fuel a perception of corruption and unfairness, analysts say. On Wednesday the state-owned newspaper Al Thawra published a poll that found that 450 of 452 Syrians believed that their state institutions were riddled with corruption.
“Many people believe that most of the government’s economic policies are adopted to suit the interests of the newly emerging Syrian aristocracy, while disregarding the interests of the poor and lower middle class,” said Marwan al-Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University.
The same attitudes are visible in Jordan. Even before the subsidies on fuel were removed this month, inflation had badly eroded the average family’s earning power over the past five years, said Mr. Tawil, the former economic minister. Although the official inflation rate for 2007 was 5.4 percent, government studies have shown that middle-income families are spending far more on food and consuming less, he added. Last year a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that Amman was the most expensive Arab capital in cost of living.
Mr. Abdul Raheem, the clothing store employee in Amman, said, “No one can be in the government now and be clean.”
Meanwhile, his own life has been transformed, Mr. Abdul Raheem said. He ticked off a list of prices: potatoes have jumped to about 76 cents a pound from 32 cents. A carton of 30 eggs went to nearly $4.25 from just above $2; cucumbers rose to 58 cents a pound from about 22. All this in a matter of weeks.
“These were always the basics,” he said. “Now they’re luxuries.”
With a salary equivalent to $423 and rent at $176, paying for food and fuel exhausts his income, he said. “But we are much better off than others,” he added. “We are the average.”

Losing the countryside: a restive peasantry calls on Beijing for land rights

2008-02-27T16:18:00.001+05:30

By Jamil Anderlini

Every successful peasant rebellion in China’s history has been inspired by calls for more equitable distribution of land. That is why the current government, heir to the last peasant revolt in 1949, is so worried about a fledgling land reform movement that its organisers say is set to spread across the country, challenging the foundation of communism.
China’s normally efficient state security apparatus was caught off-guard in December when separate groups of peasant farmers in four remote parts of the country published very similar statements on the internet claiming to have seized their collectively owned land from the state and unilaterally privatised it. Security agents in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and Shaanxi and the port city of Tianjin quickly rounded up most of the handful of peasants who signed the documents. Some have since been released after signing confessions while others remain in custody or have disappeared, their fate unknown

The peasants’ statements accused local officials of profiting personally by requisitioning land from farmers without providing adequate compensation and using it for corrupt development projects. The country’s Communist constitution stipulates that all rural land is owned by the state, which leases it to individuals to use on a 30-year contract basis but can take it back with relative impunity.
China’s economic boom has been partly driven by a ready supply of this cheap land, which officials sell to manufacturers or property developers after paying cursory compensation and removing any peasant farmers who occupy it. The opaque process is rife with opportunities for corruption and official land seizures have become the main cause of protests in China.

In each of the four provinces, the “seizure” of land was in name only and carries no legal weight. Before their arrest, the peasants in Heilongjiang province managed to survey and divide up a block that had been confiscated by local officials. But the documents they signed violate the Chinese constitution and at least three laws stipulating that all land in China is owned by the state. In the other locations the peasants did not even get this far – the swift action of the security apparatus forestalled any physical seizures.
Even without much action on the ground, the protest represents a new and serious challenge to the party. China’s security system deals with close to 100,000 “public order disturbances” every year (according to government statistics, which Chinese political activists believe downplay the true scale of social unrest). But the vast majority of them are localised and unco-ordinated and the protagonists usually emphasise their loyalty to the system while appealing to Beijing to address the misdeeds of local officials.

This incident was different. Not only were the protesters challenging the party directly, they were also organised at a national level by a sophisticated group of dissidents. The action was co-ordinated by a loose association of journalists, academics, intellectuals and political activists and its calls for privatisation of all rural land were a clear rejection of the current regime. In words that could have come from the mouth of Mao Zedong, one declaration asked: “Whose country is this? Who really benefits in the name of public interest? . . . Only when you protect the rights of the masses and help the masses to develop can you be called the government.”
The authors of the declarations are mostly based in Beijing and have so far evaded capture. They operate in secrecy and have requested that no details be revealed of their identities in order to avoid immediate arrest. Some are career dissidents while others are solid members of the party establishment; for their safety the Financial Times has decided not to reveal any more about who they are. They say they are acting out of a conviction that many of the problems faced by China’s peasants stem from the current land ownership system.
These organisers, comprised of a core group of about 10 people, spent more than two years travelling the country gathering thousands of signatures of peasants involved in land disputes and convincing them that seizing land was the best way to draw attention to their grievances.
They say the co-ordinated release of the four declarations is just the beginning of a movement that is set to spread across the country. According to a person who claims to have drafted the original statements (which were all quickly removed from the internet by government censors), thousands more peasant farmers in dozens of other locations in 20 provinces have already signed similar declarations and are preparing to seize land. If this happens the government will be faced with a real grassroots rebellion that could threaten its tight grip on power just as the world’s attention is focused on the Beijing Olympics.
These activists have some powerful supporters, including prominent developers who have called publicly for privatisation of rural land – a move they argue would help cool soaring property prices in the cities by vastly expanding the land supply while granting rural citizens the same security urban dwellers now enjoy.
In the 1990s the government began experimenting with private home ownership in the largest cities by transferring state housing to employees of state-owned enterprises. While all urban land technically remains state owned, the leases are much longer than in the countryside (up to 70 years) and land-use rights are bought and sold as if the land belonged to the lessee. This de facto privatisation has led to an explosion in personal wealth and was instrumental in the creation of an urban middle class. In the late 1990s, state-owned banks started issuing the first home mortgages since the revolution and today mortgage lending for urban homes makes up a large proportion of the banking system.
Peasant farmers are allowed to own their homes but not their land, so they are unable to use it as collateral for loans. Advocates of reform say this exacerbates the looming wealth gap between cities and the countryside, where land is virtually worthless.
Land privatisation appeals to the peasants themselves for obvious reasons but it also has high-level support from some reform-minded sections of the Communist party, including senior retired officials as well as some of the country’s more liberal establishment academics.
Zhang Guangyou, 73, is a well-known author and former journalist who worked for state broadcaster Xinhua and was chief editor of the state-owned Peasants’ Daily newspaper. He argues passionately that the time has come for the party to give the land back to the people. “The 30-year contract system is fatally flawed and cannot last much longer – the peasants should decide how to use their land and be allowed to privatise it if that’s what they want,” Mr Zhang says.
Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms.
The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land. While peasants do not have to pay for their 30-year leases, they are allowed to sublet their land, which provides huge scope for officials to grant government land for free to their friends and relatives, who then lease the land for a profit.
Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to the government agreeing to such a reform. “The big problem with our socialist system is that Communist party officials have become the landlords,” says one organiser of the protests, who argues that private land ownership will be a precursor to a more pluralistic political system.
He says privatisation in urban areas has given the middle class a bigger say in the way the country is run and points to a recent wave of peaceful demonstrations in cities such as Xiamen and Shanghai, in which citizens took to the streets over specific issues that directly affected their property prices – a proposed chemical plant in a densely populated part of Xiamen and a proposed extension of Shanghai’s magnetic levitation train through the city centre – and in each case managed to convince the government to revise its plans. “If the people were given land they would have the power to speak out and it would help bring democracy to China,” says the activist.
On the other side of the debate, there are some convincing critics of the land reform movement who worry that China could go down the same path as other post-Communist countries, most notably Russia, were it hastily to privatise all rural land.
“It is an impossible miracle that China, with its floating population of 200m migrant workers from rural areas, has no real slums and it is because everyone has a piece of land in their home village they can always go back to,” says Wen Tiejun, dean of the school of agriculture and rural development at the elite People’s University in Beijing. “Thanks to the current system of state ownership China has enjoyed three decades of rapid economic growth and has virtually no rural landless poor, in contrast with most large developing countries.”
He points out that a third of India’s population is classified as landless rural poor, a problem that has helped spark armed insurrection by Maoist guerrillas in the country’s north, while in Brazil a national landless farmers’ movement has sprung up. “I advise the Chinese government that if they want the same problems as India has then they should go ahead and privatise the land,” he says.
For now, the government agrees with him. The official line is that land privatisation is “illegal, unconstitutional and impossible” and that anyone who challenges the status quo will be dealt with firmly by the state’s ruthless security apparatus.
The activists say the language used in the declarations and the timing of their release was intended to evoke an event known to most students of modern Chinese history – the “spontaneous” land reform secretly carried out by a small group of peasants in December 1978 in the tiny village of Xiaogang in China’s eastern Anhui Province.
At that time the country was still recovering from the chaos of the cultural revolution. Most arable land was collectivised into communes, a system that had helped push much of the country to the brink of starvation. According to Communist party legend, after consulting the village elders on how they could avoid starvation, 18 hungry peasant farmers in Xiaogang signed a secret pact dividing their commune’s land between them for each household to farm individually, a unilateral action that could easily have led to them all being executed as traitors.
Instead, their example was championed by senior reform-minded officials, including paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the “household responsibility system” be rolled out across the countryside. Peasant households were given 30-year contracts to use their land to grow what they wished and to keep or sell any surplus they produced. Capitalism had returned and the Chinese economic miracle had begun. This year is the 30th anniversary of the Xiaogang action and, during the next few years, the original land-lease contracts will start to expire. While the government has said it will extend them by another 30 years, the calls for reform are growing louder.
Deng’s presence still looms large over Xiaogang, making it easy to find. “Just turn right when you see Deng Xiaoping,” the locals advise. Sure enough, soon after exiting the shiny new interstate toll expressway, visitors come across a giant fading billboard picture of Deng smiling down magnanimously underneath characters that read: “Xiaogang, the first village in China to reform”. But Yan Junchang, the man credited with leading the Xiaogang action that launched China’s economic reform policy, has long since lost the rebellious streak that drove him to challenge the party and communal land system that was the very foundation of Maoist ideology.
“Under the leadership of my Communist party the land is not private but collectivised under socialism. Our party can’t go back to the old times when land was all privately owned because that was the reason we liberated the whole country in the revolution to begin with,” Mr Yan says, when asked whether he supports his modern-day counterparts.
Mr Zhang bristles when he hears what Mr Yan has to say about land reform these days. “What I know is that it was the communal land system that killed more than 30m people in the Great Leap Forward and it is the current system that is causing so much suffering today and must be changed,” he says. “After all, China is a revolutionary country, its revolution was a peasant’s revolution and the main issue for the peasants is land.”
Little room for dissent in Shaanxi
The first security officer burst in within 10 minutes of our arrival at the tiny brick house in rural Shaanxi province in northwest China. In another 10 minutes the freezing room was filled with police and state security agents looming over the diminutive frame of Zhang Sanmin, the peasant farmer and activist we had come to see.
Mr Zhang had just been released on bail after 20 days of interrogation on charges of “incitement to subvert state power”, a hazy but serious charge used to detain anyone regarded as a troublemaker.
His only crime was signing a declaration posted on the internet claiming 70,000 peasant farmers had seized 10,000 hectares of “collectively-owned” state land and divided it among themselves to own privately.
In fact, no actual seizing or dividing had been done; the government was still firmly in control. But the action had spooked the security apparatus and Beijing had sent down the order to arrest all involved.
Mr Zhang, 63, has spent his life at the mercy of bureaucrats who he says act just like the hated landlords who ran China in pre-Communist times.
In the late 1950s, when he was still a teenager, his family was kicked off their ancestral land, to make way for a disastrous dam project. In the mid-1980s the government shifted thousands of people back to the area, including Mr Zhang and his family, but they were given just a fraction of the land they had left decades earlier.
Mr Zhang and his neighbours contend that venal Communist party officials exploit the current land system, under which all rural land belongs to the government but is leased for free to peasant farmers on a 30-year contract basis.
They say local officials have handed out parcels of free land to friends and relatives, who then rent it on to middlemen to lease at exorbitant prices to its original owners.
People such as Mr Zhang usually fight for their rights using the only channel legally available to them – the formal petition system that exists almost unchanged since the fall of the Qing dynasty more than 100 years ago. Under this system, anyone with a grievance can travel to Beijing to appeal to the emperor, now the Communist party politburo. Though hundreds of thousands of Chinese still make that journey every year, most are rounded up by security officers and sent back with a criminal record.
Before security personnel arrived to stop the interview, Mr Zhang told the Financial Times that it was not his intention to oppose the government or to incite revolution – he just wanted to get his land back.
But in signing the document Mr Zhang has crossed the government’s red line between acceptable dissent and open rebellion – and by talking to foreign reporters he has made matters worse.
The security personnel followed a routine familiar to foreign reporters who venture where they are not wanted. Mr Zhang was pushed around and some of his documents were taken, but he was not arrested while we remained on the premises.
We were marched to our car, and then a scuffle broke out when police tried physically to drag my Chinese assistant away for questioning.
Eventually, we were taken to the local government office where I was interrogated and lectured for over an hour before officials sent us on our way.
Shortly after we left, Mr Zhang received a death threat and security officers returned to tell him he was to be rearrested.
That night Mr Zhang disappeared. and it was not until a week later that he felt safe enough to contact his wife to let her know he had run away out of fear of what was in store. More than a month after our visit he remains in hiding.

On The Class Structure of India

2008-02-25T17:58:00.001+05:30

D. D. Kosambi
A hundred years ago, Karl Marx was a regular correspondent of the New York Tribune, one of the direct ancestors of today's New York Herald-Tribune. Among his communications was one, published on August 8, 1853, entitled "The Future Results of British Rule in India." Though he knew little of India's past, and though some of his predictions for the future have not been borne out by subsequent events, Marx nevertheless had a remarkably clear insight into the nature and potentialities of Indian society as it existed in his time. "[The British] destroyed [Hindu civilisation]," he wrote, "by uprooting native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society." Political unity was imposed by the Indo-British army, strengthened by the telegraph, the free press, the railroad, and ordinary roads that broke up village isolation-all noted by Marx as instruments of future progress. But he stated clearly:
All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but of their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation? The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, ti!l in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the British yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country...
A hundred years have passed, including nearly a decade of freedom from British rule. What is the situation today and the outlook for the period ahead?
One frequently hears the argument that India still has a backward economy combining elements of different historic social forms, that feudalism is still powerful, that the country has not outgrown its erstwhile colonial framework, and that it is relapsing into the status of a dependency of the great imperialist powers, Great Britain and the United States.
We shall comment on these various questions as we proceed. But one point needs to be made with all emphasis at the outset. There can be no doubt, it seems to me, as to who rules India today: it is the Indian bourgeoisie. True, production is still overwhelmingly petty bourgeois in character. But this cannot be more than a transitory stage, and already the nature of the class in power casts a pervasive influence over the political, intellectual, and social life of the country.
THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM.
Feudalism's decline in India may be said to date from the inability of Indian feudalism to defend the country against British penetration. To be sure, the British conquered and held the country by means of an Indian army, paid from India's resources and under British discipline; though in this respect the feudal powers of the day were not so different as might at first appear, since their own armies, also maintained at Indian ex pense, were often staffed by European drill sergeants and artillery experts. The difference-and it was a crucial difference- was that the British paid all their soldiers regularly in cash every month, in war or peace, paying also for supplies acquired during the march or for the barracks. The contrast is pointed up by the opposing Indian factions that fought the Battle of Panipat (A.D. 1761). Ahmad Shah Durrani's soldiers mutinied after winning the battle because they had not been paid for years; while their opponents, the Marathas, maintained themselves by looting the countryside. Faced with opposition of this kind, British-led arms were bound to triumph. (The same contrast-again involving the spoils of India, though indirectly- could be observed a few years later when the British defeated Napoleon in Spain; the French army lived off the countryside while the British used their superior wealth, much of it extracted from India, to pay the very Spaniards they were defending for all supplies.)
Indian feudalism tried its strength against the British bourgeoisie for the last time in the unsuccessful rebellion of 1857. Soon thereafter, the British abandoned their long-standing policy of liquidating feudal principalities and instead began to bolster up remaining regimes of this kind-provided they were weak enough to be dependent and hence compliant. Marx noted that the very same people who fought in the British Parliament against aristocratic privilege at home voted to maintain far worse rajahs and nabobs in India-as a matter of policy, for profit.
Despite British support, and in a sense because of it, Indian feudalism no longer had any independent strength and vitality of its own. Its economic basis had been ruined by the construction of railroads, the decay of village industry, the establishment of a system of fixed assessment of land values and payment of taxes in cash rather than in kind, the importation of commodities from England, and the introduction of mechanised production in Indian cities. The role of the village usurer changed. Previously he had been an integral part of the village economy, but he had been legally obliged to cancel a debt on which total repayment amounted to double the original loan: there was no redress against default since land could not be alienated nor could a feudal lord be brought to court. With British rule came survey and registry of land plots, cash taxes, cash crops for large-scale export to a world market (indigo, cotton, jute, tea, tobacco, opium), registration of debts and mortgages, alienability of the peasants' land-in a word, the framework within which land could gradually be converted into capitalist private property which the former usurer could acquire and rent out and exploit.
How thoroughly British rule undermined Indian feudalism has been dramatically demonstrated by events of recent years. The police action undertaken in 1948 by India's central government against Hyderabad, the largest and most powerful remaining feudal state, was over in two days. Political action in Travancore and Mysore, direct intervention in Junagadh and Kashmir, indirect intervention in Nepal, the absorption of Sikkim, the jailing of Saurashtra barons as common criminals- all these events showed that feudal privilege meant nothing before the new paramount power, the Indian bourgeoisie.
It should not be overlooked, however, that the decline of Indian feudalism had another side to it-the partial amalgamation of the old ruling class into the new. Just as the rise of factories and mechanised production converted primitive barter into commodity production and the usurer's hoard into capital, so too it opened a way for the feudal lord to join the capitalist class by turning his jewellery and his hoarded wealth into landed or productive capital. What the feudal lord could not do was to claim additional privileges not available to the ordinary investor, or any rights that would impede the free movement of Indian industrial or financial capital. This process of converting feudal lords into capitalists began relatively early: even before World War I, the Gaekwar of Baroda became one of the world's richest men by investing his large feudal revenues in factories, railways, and company shares.
Another process involving the liquidation of feudalism is exemplified by what has been happening since independence in the Gangetic basin. There the East India Company had created the class of Zamindars, tax collectors whose function was to extract tribute in kind from the peasants and convert it into cash payments to the company. As time went on, the Zamindars acquired the status and privileges of landholders and in return provided valuable political support for British rule. In recent years, a new class of capitalist landlords and well-to-do peasants of the kulak variety has been substituted for the zamindars by legislative action (the zamindars, of course, receiving compensation for their expropriated holdings) .
Everywhere in India, by one means or another, feudal wealth has already become or is rapidly becoming capital, either of the owner or of his creditors. [Every feudalism known to history rested, in the final analysis, upon primitive handicraft production, and upon a special type of land ownership. The former of these is no longer basic in India, and the latter does not exist.] Talk of fighting feudalism today is on a level with talk of fighting dinosaurs. No part of the mechanism of coercion is now in feudal hands. The legislature is bourgeois (and petty bourgeois) in composition. The armed forces, the police, the judiciary are all directly under bourgeois control, where these functions would formerly have been carried out by feudal levies, retainers, or the feudal lords themselves. Even the beginnings of capitalist production in agriculture may be seen, notably the introduction of tractor cultivation in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, but with smaller manifestations all over the country, especially where industrial crops like cotton are grown and where transport conditions are exceptionally favourable.
The liquidation of Indian feudalism, then, is general and complete. But it is necessary to guard against drawing unwarranted conclusions from this undoubted fact. The older privilege is being replaced or expropriated only with the due compensation. No basic improvement has been effected in the condition of the rural population, still the overwhelming majority of the Indian nation. All agrarian reforms-community schemes, voluntary (bhoodan) redistribution of land, scaling- down of peasant indebtedness, counter-erosion measures, afforestation, and so forth-have turned out to be piddling. Hunger, unemployment, epidemic disease remain the permanent and massive features of Indian society. The sole achievements have been the elimination of older property forms (with recruitment of most former owners into the bourgeoisie) and the creation of a vast class of workers with no land and no prospect of absorption into industry as long as the social structure of India remains what it is.
BOURGEOISIE AND PETTY BOURGEOISIE.
Except possibly in a few negligible corners of recently integrated backward areas, Indian production today is bourgeois 'in the sense that commodity production is prevalent and even a small plot of land is valued and taxed in rupees. But it is still petty production, consisting for the most part of the growing of foodstuffs from small holdings by primitive, inefficient methods; the produce is still largely consumed by the producer or in the locality of production. Nevertheless, the petty bourgeoisie, inhomogeneous as it is in all but its greed, completely dominates food production and, through middlemen, controls the supply to towns and cities. Though roads and other means of communication have increased, still the density of the transportation network i$ very low by American, British, or Japanese standards. The present national Five Year Plan estimates the annual national income at 90 billion rupees (one rupee equals 21 cents), which it proposes to increase to 100 billion by 1956. But the total value of all productive assets in private hands (excluding fields and houses for rent, but including plantations) is estimated at no more than 15 billion rupees, while the central and local governments' own facilities are worth more than 13 billion rupees in the field of transport, electricity, broadcasting and other means of communication, and so on. These figures prove conclusively the petty-bourgeois nature of the economy as a whole and indicate clearly that the industrialisation of India under bourgeois management can proceed only through tight co-operation between government and private capital.
Therefore, the fact that the government is the biggest capitalist, the main banker, the greatest employer, and the ultimate refuge or ineffable solace of the bootlicking intelligentsia makes for only a formal, superficial, difference. The main question to ask is: what special class-interest does this government serve? Whenever it seems to rise above the classes, or act against the bourgeois interests, does it go beyond regulating individual greed, or at most holding the balance between the petty and the big bourgeoisie? Do the government's ineffective food regulations and costly food imports mean anything beyond assuring the petty-bourgeois food-producer his pound of vital flesh while the cities are supplied with food cheap enough for the industrial labourer to maintain himself at subsistence level on the wages the factory owners are willing to pay? The government today is undoubtedly in the hands of the bigger bourgeoisie, a fact which is shown no less by its personnel than by its policies which favour Big Business and impose only such restraints as serve the interests of the sub-class as a whole and prevent any single capitalist group from dominating the rest. Moreover, there is no question that the big bourgeoisie wants industrialisation.
In this connection, it is interesting to recall the economic plan hopefully drawn up (with the aid of tame economists) by the biggest capitalists and promulgated in 1944 (published at that time as a Penguin Special, No. S148). The scheme, to be financed from unspecified sources, called for a 500 per cent increase in industry, a 130 per cent increase in agriculture, and a 200 per cent increase in "services" within 15 years. The basic figures used by planners, however, related to the year 1932 and were hence way out of date. Not only did wartime inflation and its aftermath balloon the national income beyond the dreams of the capitalist planners, but the planned agricultural output would not have sufficed to feed the population even at starvation levels (for some years after the war, India was obliged to import a billion rupees worth of food annually and the imports still continue irregularly) .
To a far greater extent than is generally realised, the big Indian bourgeoisie owes its present position to two war periods of heavy profit making. World War I gave Indian capital its first great impetus and initiated the process of Indianising the bureaucracy. World War II vastly expanded the army and Indianised the officer corps; further, it swelled the tide of Indian accumulation and enabled the capitalists, by rallying the masses behind the Congress Party, to complete the process of pushing the British out of the country. How great the accumulation was during the most recent war and postwar period of inflation is indicated by changes in the relative importance of different taxes as sources of revenue: the agricultural (land) tax now accounts for less than eight per cent of total state revenue as compared to 25 per cent in 1939, while taxes on what by Indian standards may be called luxury goods (including automobiles) rose from negligible importance to 17 per cent of the total in the same period. [The government asked in 1957 for appropriations about 100 times the central budget at the beginning of World War II. The other side of the coin as always in periods of marked inflation, has been a decline in the real income of workers and other low-income groups. It is interesting to note that the current national Five Year Plan aims to restore the general living standard of 1939-then universally recognised as totally inadequate-without, of course curtailing the immense new power and wealth that have accrued to the bourgeoisie in the intervening years.
We encounter here one of the basic contradictions of the Indian economy, the decisive roadblock to rapid development under present conditions. The civilised money-makers of advanced capitalist countries are accustomed to looking on a five percent return as something akin to a law of nature, but not so their Indian counterparts. The usual rate of return on black- market operations in recent years is 150 percent, and even the most respectable capitalist's idea of a "reasonable" profit is anywhere from 9 to 20 percent. [The very same capitalists who ask for and obtain tariff. protection for their manufactures even before beginning to produce them for the market do not hesitate to hoard smuggled gold and jewellery to the tune of (a reasonably estimated) 100 million rupees per year. This not only shows their contempt for their own government, its laws, and its plans for industrialisation in the 'private sector', but further illustrates the petty bourgeois mentality even in the wealthiest Indians.]
This kind of profiteering, however, is incompatible with the balanced development of India's economy as a whole. Seventy percent of the population still works on the land or lives off it, holdings being mostly less than two acres per family and cultivated by primitive methods. Wages are low and prevented from rising by the relative surplus population which is always pressing for available jobs. In the countryside, at least 50 percent of the population is made up of landless labourers. These conditions spell low mass purchasing power and restricted markets. When even these restricted markets are ruthlessly exploited by a capitalist class snatching at immediate maximum profits, the result can only be industrial stagnation and growing poverty.
And indeed this is precisely what we observe in fact. Idle plant is widespread; night shifts have disappeared in most textile mills; other industries show machinery and equipment used to 50 percent of capacity or even less. It is the familiar capitalist dilemma, but in a peculiarly acute form: increase of poverty and idle resources but with no adequate incentives to invest in the expanded production which is so desperately needed. This is the pass to which bourgeois rule has brought India. There is no apparent escape within the framework of the bourgeois mode of production. [The situation was changed for a while by the "pump-priming" of the First Five-Year plan- a curious jump from a colonial to a pseudo-New-Deal economy; but future prospects are decidedly gloomier.]
COLONIALISM AND FOREIGN DOMINATION.
In a sense the tragedy of the Indian bourgeoisie is that it came of age too late, at a time when the whole capitalist world was in a state of incurable crisis and when one-third of the globe had already abandoned capitalism forever. In fact, the Five Year Plans mentioned above are self-contradictory in that they are obviously inspired by the great successes of Soviet planning without, however, taking any account of the necessity of socialism to the achievement of these successes: effective planning cannot leave the private investor free to invest when and where he likes, as is done in India, nor can its main purpose be to assure him of profitable opportunities for the investment of his capital.
The Indian bourgeoisie cannot be compared to that of England at the time of the Industrial Revolution, nor to that of Japan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nor again to that of Germany from the time of Bismarck. There are no great advances in science that can be taken advantage of by a country with preponderant illiteracy and no colonies to exploit. Under the circumstances, as we have already seen, rapid industrialisation runs into the insuperable obstacle of a narrowly restricted domestic market.
Do all these unfavourable facts mean that capitalist India must inevitably fall under the domination of foreign industrialists and financiers with their control over the shrinking capitalist world market? Must we see signs of such a relapse into colonial status when, for example, the Indian government invites powerful foreign capitalist groups to invest in oil refineries on terms apparently more favourable than those granted to Indian capital, including guarantees against nationalisation?
The bogey of a new economic colonialism can be quickly disposed of. For one thing, the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer bound to deal with one particular foreign capitalist power, and the answer to stiff terms from the United States and Britain has already been found in the drive to recovery of Germany and Japan. The Indian government has invited Krupp-Demag to set up a steel plant; the Tata combine comes to quite reasonable terms with Krauss.Maffei for locomotive works and foundries, and with Daimler-Benz for equipment to manufacture diesel-engine transport. The more advanced capitalist powers, in short, can be played off against each other (and even better against the USSR ) , as they could not be in the days of British rule. And for another thing, the guarantees against nationalisation granted to the great British and American oil monopolies are really no more than Indian Big Business itself enjoys. The only industries that have been nationalised in India are those which, in private hands, hinder the development of larger capital (for example, road transport in Bombay State, taken over without compensation) or those in which there was danger of big investors losing money (for example, the nationalisation of civil aviation, with heavy compensation to the former owners). The Indian bourgeoisie has taken its own precautions against genuine nationalisation and hardly needs to give itself the formal guarantees demanded by foreign capitalists. [Perhaps, the strongest of these, and the most crippling to the supposedly planned advance towards socialism, is the systematic creation of revenue deficits. The first deliberate step in this direction, taken as a sweeping measure in Bombay state (where the bourgeoisie is at its strongest) was the costly, wasteful, and palpably inefficient prohibition policy. Now, deficit state budgets seem quite the normal fashion, while parallel outcries against the Five Year Plan become louder].
No, the invitation to foreign capital does not mean sudden, unaccountable lunacy on the part of those now in power, those who fought so desperately only a few years ago to remove foreign capitalist control from India. Entry is not permitted in fields where Indians have investments and mastery of technique, as for example in textiles. Even in the new fields opened up to the foreigners-fields in which Indians lack both know- how and the assurance of sufficiently large and quick returns to justify heavy investment-a "patriotic" strike or two could ruin the foreign enterprises should they ever become a threat or a nuisance to the Indian bourgeoisie. Fissionable materials (uranium, monazite, ilmenite) which foreign interests wanted to buy at the price of dirt are being processed by a company financed by the government and directed by Tatas. (On the other hand, high-grade Indian manganese ore is still being exported unrefined for lack of a sufficiently strong profit incentive to Indian capital).
THE ALTERNATIVE
Invitations to foreign capital, however, do have one function in addition to that of giving a fillip to industrialisation (which could have been secured by inviting much more technical aid from the USSR and the People's Democracies). That additional function is to provide a measure of insurance against popular revolt. The Indian bourgeoisie shows unmistakable signs of fearing its own masses. The leading bourgeois party (the Congress) has not yet exhausted the reservoir of prestige built up during the period of its leadership in the struggle for national independence. In addition, the bourgeoisie controls the bureaucracy, the army, the police, the educational system, and the larger part of the press. And there are the opposition bourgeois parties, like the Praja-Socialists, which can be relied upon to talk Left and act Right, to win election on an anti- Congress platform and then turn around immediately after to a policy of co-operation with Congress politicians, as they did after the Travancore-Cochin elections last spring. Nevertheless, "defence" expenditures continue to take about two billion rupees a year, about half the central budget (and a half that the Five Year Plans do not even mention); and police expenditures mount strangely and rapidly under the direction of those who took power in the name of Gandhian non-violence. Extra- legal ordinances, (against which the bourgeoisie protested so vigorously when the British first applied them to suppressing Indian nationalism), are actually strengthened now for use against the working class; the Press Acts remain in force; and on the very eve of the first general election, important civil liberties were removed from a constitution on which the ink was scarcely dry.
All these factors together, however, will not prevent rapid disillusionment at promises unfulfilled, nor the inevitable mass protest against hunger, the ultimate Indian reality. There may come a time when the Indian army, officered by Indian bourgeois and aided by a transport system designed for an army of occupation, may not suffice. The Indian capitalists calculate, quite understandably, that it is safer to have foreigners interested so that they could be called upon to intervene with armed force in case of necessity.
But note that neither special political rights, nor monopolies, nor military bases have been given to any foreign power, and that even those (France and Portugal, backed by the United States and Britain) which still have pockets on Indian soil are being vigorously pushed out, by popular action as well as by politico-diplomatic demands. Colonial status would mean foreign control of Indian raw materials and domination of the Indian market, both today unmistakably at the hands of the Indian capitalists themselves. And there is always the hope that a third world war will lead to even more fantastic profits for a neutral India-as the ruling class dreams of neutrality.
The solution for India, of course, would, be socialism, which alone can create a demand rising with the supply, a solution which can be utilised not only by advanced countries but by backward countries ( as China is demonstrating) , and without which planning is futile. But just as the Indian bourgeoisie imports the latest foreign machinery for production, so, when all else fails, the latest capitalist developments in politics will also be imported. And this means fascism, in the long run the only possible alternative to socialism. Already the talk in circles that count is of the need for a "strong man." And models are at hand, from nearby Thailand to faraway Egypt and Guatemala.
Monthly Review (New York) , vol. 6, 1954, pp. 205-213. Nationalism, and its logical extension provincialism, are manifestations of the bourgeoisie. In the feudal period, the Peshwas defeated the Nizam more than once, but saw nothing wrong in leaving Marathi-speaking regions in the Nizam's possession. The political reorganisation of India on a linguistic basis into new states was thus an index of bourgeoisie development and competition. The in- violability of private property as guaranteed by the Constitution no longer suffices. Each local bourgeoisie wants full political control over its own hinterland to safeguard investments and to exclude powerful competitors. This was seen in the bitter strife over the creation-not even by pretence of freely expressed public opinion, but by police action--of the new, enlarged, hybrid, anomalous, bi- lingual state of Bombay. The quarrel passed off as one between Gujarathi and Maharashtrian. The real fight, however, was between the veteran, entrenched capital of Bombay city, and the newer money of Ahmedabad. The Maharashtra petty-bourgeoisie remained characteristically helpless in disunity, to the end. Those who doubt that the big bourgeoisie can do what it likes with the government might give some thought to the TELCO affairs being discussed publicly (for the first time) since September 5, 1957.
The chances of fascism have not been diminished by the 1957 election. These showed that the only state government able to show an honest, incorruptible, bourgeois administration, able to raise funds without deficit finance for an honest attempt to carry out the Nehru policy was led by the communists in Kerala. In addition, this regime had at least made a start towards dealing with the most serious fundamental questions: food, agrarian production, re-division of land, employment, education, yet within the bourgeoisie framework, without touching bourgeois property relations. The dangers of this example cannot have escaped the brighter minds of the ruling class, whose cleverness far outstrips their honesty.

The End of Gandhi

2008-02-25T17:54:00.000+05:30

R. Palme Dutt
FORTNIGHT ago THE COMMUNIST warned its readers that the arrest of Gandhi was being prepared.
At the very time when that statement was made, the order to Gandhi’s arrest had actually been written out. (Mr. Montagu’s statement in the House of Commons on February 14th.)
But at this point a new factor entered the situation.
THE COMMUNIST has persistently warned its readers that the real revolutionary power in India will be found to be, when the time of trial comes, not the middle-class nationalist movement, for all its “extremism,” but the toiling workers and peasants of India, who are awakening to a consciousness of the struggle before them.
This warning has been abundantly justified by the event.
Gandhi, not from any considerations of his personal position (he has courted arrest time and again), but from genuine alarm at the certain revolutionary consequences of a struggles, has retreated and abandoned his whole programme. The victory is with the Government, and Gandhi’s arrest is held over, subject to his good behaviour.
The failure of Gandhi repeats in a new sphere and under very different conditions the old lesson of the failure of Kerensky—the failure of the man who calls the masses into movement, but shrinks from the revolutionary consequences of a movement of the masses.
The facts of the case are simple.
In December the Indian National Congress decided on the immediate adoption of the programme of “civil disobedience,” and entrusted Gandhi with dictatorial powers to carry it out. The whole of Anglo-Indian official opinion was in alarm, and the tension of popular enthusiasm was extreme.
On January 17th Gandhi postponed operation for a fortnight, on condition that the Government would release prisoners and enter into negotiations. The Government did neither.
On February 4th Gandhi postponed operation for a week, and gave the Government seven days final notice. The Government refused to move. Meanwhile, the masses grew restive, districts began to act in defiance of Gandhi, and incidents of increasing seriousness occurred.
On February 11th Gandhi postponed operation indefinitely and without conditions.
Like the Triple Alliance strike in this country, the great gun of the Indian movement of “mass civil disobedience,” after being repeatedly threatened and repeatedly postponed, never went off.
The movement, which Gandhi endeavoured to create was a national movement; that is to say, a union of classes, races and religions in defence of a national culture (a pre-machinery civilisation) against the foreign invader. This union he was able for a short period to achieve; because it is the characteristic of a revolutionary epoch in its first stage that it concentrates all forces against the fast-dissolving existing system. The racial difficulty he was ab1e to overcome by common opposition to the white invader. The religious difficulty he was able to overcome by the Moslem awakening to the imperialist threat to the whole Moslem world. The class difficulty he sought to overcome by the common programme of non-co-operation. To the middle classes, the manufacturers and merchants, non-cooperation meant the boycott of British goods; to the industrial workers non-co-operation meant the strike; to the peasantry non-co-operation meant resistance to the grievous burden of the land-tax. There remained outside only the great landlords, the ruling-princes, and the officials or professional place-seekers, who constituted “loyal” India.
But this unity contained within itself latent divergences which were bound to grow and make themselves felt. The great new fact of post-war India is the emergence of the industrial workers’ movement. According to a recent memorandum of the Government of India, there are twenty million industrial workers (industries, mines and transport) in India to-day, or more than twice as many as in Italy, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland combined (Bombay Labour Gazette, Sept. 1921). Of those an important proportion are in large-scale industry. Organisation among these only began after the war and had already reached half-a-million members at the Second All-India Trade Union Congress last December. Far more significant than the necessarily sketchy beginnings of organisation has been the actual mass movement which has developed at lightning speed since the war in the big industrial centres—the spontaneous strikes, mass demonstrations and conflicts with the authorities on an ever-increasing scale. This is the new force which, in conjunction with the first stirrings of the peasants has wrecked the calculations of Gandhi.
For here arises an all-important distinction between the workers’ movement and Gandhi’s movement. It is inherent in the workers’ movement that cannot stop short at non-co- operation; it must go on to attack the control of wealth or fail. Passive resistance is a bourgeois conception: the conception, that is, of one who possesses goods on which to live while waiting for the other side to give in.
Throughout the Gandhi movement these two strands maybe observed, working together for a while, but absolutely distinct. If a list be made of all the “incidents ” and “disturbances ” recorded from India in the past two months, it will be found that they fall into two distinct groups. About half are non-co-operator incidents; that is to say, processions, boycotts, public meetings held in defiance of prohibition. The other half are purely workers’ movements; that is to say, strike demonstrations, unemployed riots, attacks on factories, etc., and in some cases peasant movements.
A little further examination of the list will reveal a still more interesting fact. The non-cooperator incidents nearly always result in wholesale arrests. But the workers’ movements are nearly always met by police firing and casualties. A single instance from the same town of Calcutta of two incidents happening within a few days of each other will throw this contrast into relief.
(1) Calcutta, Jan. 24th.—Fifteen Nationalist Congress volunteers engaged in picketing have been arrested. Undeterred by the arrests at the recent prohibited meetings of the Bengal Provincial Congress, the organisers held another public meeting yesterday, and 273 arrests were made.—Times, 28/1/22. (2) Calcutta, Jan. 27th.—A serious riot, in which 4,000 mill hands were involved, broke out yesterday at the Standard Jute Mills at Titagarh, in the environs of Calcutta, and culminated in the police firing on the crowd, with the result that two rioters were killed and forty wounded.—Manchester Guardian, 31/1/22.
Gandhi’s movement, in fact, has not been one movement, but two. And of the two, it is the workers’ movement that has been the real revolutionary force. It is the industrial workers who, in conjunction with the peasants, will make the revolution in India.
This is the fact which has suddenly stared in the face Gandhi and his fellow Nationalists, who had hoped for a peaceful political passive-resistance movement. It is the realisation of this fact which has made them, after previously having toyed with every form of “extremism,” suddenly shrink back and rush into the arms of the Moderates.
By that capitulation the leadership of the Indian movement henceforth passes to the revolutionary workers. When the next crisis comes, the lead will be with the workers.
Meanwhile what of the position in this country?
The Indian movement will have to decide whether to place its hopes on the official Labour movement or the revolutionary workers’ movement in this country. It is the same choice, translated into a different sphere, as confronts them in their own country.
A great deal has been made of the “gagging” of the Labour Party in the House of Commons Debate on India. But if the Labour Party had spoken, what would it have had to say? Colonel Wedgwood has made this clear for us in his letter to the Daily Herald. Colonel Wedgwood, the Labour spokesman, would have got up to give the blessing of Labour to Montagu. This is what we are asked to believe the Government broke all the rules of Parliamentary procedure in order to prevent.
The suggestion of “gagging” is frankly not credible. Its would have been impossible to gag the Labour Party if the Labour Party had not wished to be gagged. Is it conceivable that in a similar important debate on Ireland, lasting seven hours, and including fourteen speakers, Tim Healy or Larry Ginnell would have let themselves be “jockeyed” by the Speaker in this way? Has a Speaker ever been known to “jockey” the Irish members unless by arrangement through Devlin, Redmond and O’Connor, and with their consent? Or are we intended to infer that the Labour members are the “poltroons” that Galloper Smith has called them?
The fact is, the Labour Party did not speak in the debate on India, because it did not want to speak, and it did not want to speak because it had nothing to say. On the very day on which the debate was held, an article of Colonel Wedgwood, the Labour spokesman, arrived in this country, in which he declared that the mission of the British in India was
“to plant well and firmly British traditions among the new third of the human race.”
Now if this kind of stuff had been telegraphed to India as the official statement of the policy of the British Labour Party in regard to India, it would have meant the final extinction of the credit of the Labour Party, in India.
But the extinction of the credit of the Labour Party in India and of pathetic hopes in its doing justice some day would have meant the final establishment of the revolutionary outlook. It would have meant that the Indian movement would have finally recognized that it must look to the revolutionary workers’ movement, and to no other, for effective support in the struggle. And the day of that recognition is the beginning of the end of British imperialist domination alike in India and in Britain.

Food prices continue to rise worldwide

2008-02-25T17:47:00.000+05:30

By Naomi Spencer
Recent developments in grain markets point to prolonged international supply shortages and price spikes, exposing billions of people to hunger and malnutrition.
US commodity exchanges have seen extreme volatility in the past week, with speculation on spring wheat crops driving per-bushel prices to record levels, while high oil prices and severe weather have contributed to rising corn and soybean prices.
Last week, the three US Midwest grain exchanges—the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGE), the Kansas City Board of Trade and the Chicago Board of Trade—all raised their daily trading limits to triple the previous ceilings, encouraging rampant speculation and substantially heightening trade activity.
On February 15, trading on the anticipated March wheat crop hit $19.88 a bushel on the MGE, the highest price ever, and 79 percent higher than a year ago. The surge came on the announcement that Japan had purchased 190,000 tons of US wheat shortly after the Egyptian government bought 235,000 tons, and in anticipation of weather-related food disruptions in China.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has warned that the nation’s wheat inventories are dropping dangerously low. In part, this is due to the fevered rate of exports driven by the weakening dollar and relative strengthening of currencies of many importing countries.
By June, the USDA projects that actual stores of wheat will fall by 40 percent, to the lowest level in three decades. Goldman Sachs’ February commodities report put world wheat stocks at the lowest level since 1948.
The world food shortage cannot be understood as a temporary phenomenon or a simple supply and demand dilemma. Rather, a number of complex and interrelated forces are behind the development, all of which underscore the inability of capitalist markets and institutions to rationally plan and provide for human needs.
Following the collapse of the housing market and subsequent crisis in the financial sector, much speculation shifted from those areas into commodities, which are considered to be more stable and, in US trading houses in particular, less vulnerable to the unfolding recession. Agricultural commodities are seen as a “safe bet” for investors; people need to eat, no matter how inflated the price of food.
It is precisely this attitude that makes agricultural markets extremely vulnerable to crises, and increases the hunger threat posed to the world’s population. The prices of crops are negotiated not when they are harvested, but well in advance, in anticipation of future yields, production needs, and so on. Agricultural producers sell so-called “futures contracts” on crops several months before harvest, thereby guaranteeing certain prices. Grain distributors and processors buy these futures contracts, guaranteeing they will not pay more upon harvest.
However, futures contracts cannot guarantee that crops will survive, or that they will meet demand when harvested. Shortages or blights, which can be ruinous to farmers and consumers, are often celebrated by speculators, who buy up futures contracts and turn profits on unmet demand.
Speculation generates volatility, in turn triggering yet more speculation. Since the eruption of the credit crisis, the grain market has assumed an increasingly volatile character, forcing up retail inflation and worsening the effects of economic downturn for the working class population.
Agricultural production is vulnerable to shocks because it is intimately connected to climate trends, declining water tables, and weather-related disasters.
Agriculture is also affected by fluctuations in the energy market. The distribution of grain is directly impacted by transportation costs, tying grain prices to oil prices. This drives prices up especially in countries dependent upon sea-shipped imports.
Further, farming and processing operations are more expensive when oil rises, not only because of fuel costs, but also because the cost of fertilizer, the nitrogen of which is made from natural gas, is bound up with energy market trends. USDA figures show that fertilizer prices have risen enormously in recent years. In the past year, diammonium phosphate, commonly used as a corn fertilizer, rose from under $300 last year to $792 per ton February 15.
Moreover, as fuel prices rise, demand for biofuel also rises. As a result, more corn, soybeans, and other feedstock crops are diverted into biofuel production. This exacerbates shortfalls in the human food system and increases the cost of feeding livestock and poultry, pushing up meat, egg, and dairy consumer prices.
The US government has pressed for the replacement of 15 percent of gasoline consumption with ethanol and other biofuels in the next few years. According to the USDA, this mandate will consume at least a third of the nation’s corn crop. And with an incentive to grow biofuel-destined crops, agricultural operations have less cropland for growing staple food grains. The drive to produce ethanol has contributed to a doubling in the price of corn in two years, and a significant drop in global corn reserves.
In a report released February 18, the European bank UniCredit projected an average $15 per-bushel for wheat in 2009, based on the trends in land allocation for ethanol crops and in increasing demand for meats in Asia. “Rising global population, the production of biofuels and more protein-rich nutrition in emerging markets are triggering a steady increase in demand,” the report said, noting that acreage devoted to wheat has been stagnating for three decades.
None of these problems can find resolution in capitalist market policies or management on a merely national basis.
Several governments, nervous over increasing prospects of social unrest, have reported rising inflation rates on food costs. This week, China announced a record 7.1 percent annual inflation rate for January, saying that severe winter storms had exacerbated the country’s already strained food system, pushing food prices 18 percent higher than one year ago.
Chinese households, many millions profoundly poor, spend about half of their income on food. Faced with riots over cooking oil shortages and high staple food costs last year, the government implemented restrictions on exports and lowered import tariffs in an effort to lesson the crisis.
On February 21, the Indian government made a public announcement of a crackdown on grain hoarding among wheat traders, who regularly withhold stocks until lean months to sell at exorbitant prices. The national government estimates that India’s 2008 wheat crop will be slightly lower than that of 2007, while import prices rise. The country also faces inflation of 4 to 6 percent and widespread under-nutrition.
Corruption is rampant among grain distributors in areas suffering scarcity. South Africa has seen a 200 percent increase in wheat prices in the past year, partly attributable to pervasive price-fixing among the bread and dairy sectors. On February 19, the country’s agriculture ministry called for a campaign against industry collusion, which it said was threatening the country with food insecurity.
Behind these government crackdowns is concern over destabilization and the risk of popular revolt.
The political consequences of rising food prices are not limited to net import countries. In the US, food inflation has averaged 4.9 percent over the past year, with a 0.7 percent increase in January alone. Along with record grain prices have come large jumps in retail meat, eggs, and dairy prices. Milk in January was 26 percent higher than a year ago, according to the latest Labor Department report.

Some Facts About the Bombay Strike

2008-02-24T12:26:00.000+05:30

Evelyn Roy

ONE hundred and fifty thousand mill operatives, including thirty thousand women and children, have been on strike and locked-out of the textile mills of Bombay for nearly three months. All the mills of the district, eighty-three in number, are closed down. The question at issue is the payment of the annual bonus to the operatives, in addition to their usual wage. In July of last year, the owners put up a notice that the usual bonus, received by the operatives during the last five years and regarded by them as a form of supplementary wages, would not be paid. The men did not heed the notice, most of them being illiterate, and it was not until the end of the year when the bonus became payable that they realised the issue at stake. A strike was declared in the middle of January, followed immediately by a lockout on the part of the owners, in an attempt to force the men back to work unconditionally.
The monthly wage of a Bombay mill operative is 35 rupees for men; 17 rupees for women—for a ten-hour day. This sum is insufficient to maintain their bodily health and strength, or to provide them with the most elementary necessities. For this reason, during the height of the post-war boom period when mill profits soared to several hundred per cent., the annual bonus was granted as a form of supplementary wages. The cost of living has risen (according to official figures) 58 per cent. since 1914; profits have risen from 674 lakhs of rupees in 1917 to 1,559 lakhs in 1921, with a slight falling-off in 1922-23. The cotton mill workers are proverbially underpaid and overworked, with the result that they are always heavily in debt to the money-lender. Their right to organise into trade unions is not legally recognised; they have no regular labour organisations and no union fund. Their leaders, up to the time of the present strike, were drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie—lawyers, politicians, philanthropists and professional labour leaders, who were closer, in interests and sympathies to the employing class than to the workers. They sabotaged every attempt to strike on the part of the latter; they took the part of the employers in every decisive issue; they used their influence to keep the men at work and satisfied with the old conditions instead of attempting to better themselves. The Government, which affects to maintain its neutrality in labour disputes, has never hesitated to call out armed police and military to aid the employers in guarding their property and crushing a strike.
Thus every institution and condition was against the success of the present strike, as it has been of previous ones. Yet the textile workers of Bombay have maintained their struggle far three months in face of all odds; they have remained peaceful and nonviolent in the teeth of the most open provocation; they have repudiated their old leaders and elected new ones from their own ranks to present their demands before the Government and the employers; they have endured with marvellous fortitude the sufferings of hunger and privation throughout the whole of the strike period. They have never wavered in their demand for the payment of bonus as a pre-requisite for returning to work; they have maintained their solidarity of front against the efforts of the employers to seduce a part of them back to work, and against the sabotage of the Government and the public, which has refrained from giving them any concrete help during the long and bitter dispute.
The textile workers of Bombay are dying in the streets from starvation. Their January wages, already earned before the declaration of the strike and lockout, have been illegally withheld by the owners. The grain dealers and provision shops have long ago refused them credit. They are unable to pay their rent for the miserable rooms in which they huddle by tens and dozens in the infamous Bombay Chawls (tenements). The workers have never possessed any material resources to carry them from one day to the next, nor any central fund to maintain them in time of strike. They are sticking to their demands in the face of slow starvation. Appeals to the public for material help and to the Government have met with no response. The charitable associations of Bombay are all controlled by the Mill Owners’ Association, and have refused to give aid to the strikers. The Legislative Councils, both national and provincial, have made no move to come to the assistance of the sufferers. The Indian National Congress, which in each of its annual sessions since 1916 has pledged its support to the cause of Indian labour, refused to sanction the granting of a sum for supplying grain or credits to the starving strikers. The All-India Trade Union Congress, which presumes to lead the struggle of the Indian workers against the employing class, has never so much as mentioned the Bombay strike, nor sent one of its office-holders to the scene of the struggle to investigate and guide it, nor issued a single appeal on behalf of the starving strikers. The Fourth Annual Session of the All-India Trade Union Congress, which was scheduled to be held on March 7, the very day on which the workers of Bombay were being shot down by the guns of the police and military, deferred its session indefinitely because of internal quarrels and factional disputes among its office-bearers. When it finally met on March 14, it broke up in a rain of abuse and a free-for-all fist fight, without so much as giving one thought to the cause of the 150,000 striking mill hands of Bombay, or of identifying the All-India Trade Union Congress with the greatest industrial struggle that has ever been waged in India.
The British Labour Government and Labour Party, which rule the destinies of the Indian people to-day, has limited its interest in the fate of the starving Bombay workers on strike for a living wage to a statement in the House of Commons that the matter “has been left to the Government of India.” While in Britain the Dockers’ strike, the tram and bus strike, and other threatened strikes have been subjected to the immediate and closest scrutiny of the Government, which spares no efforts to bring them to a speedy and satisfactory solution, in India an industrial dispute affecting the welfare and very lives of 150,000 workers, to which must be added the count of their families and dependents, and reaching out in its consequences to the very shores of England in its effect on the Lancashire textile industry, has been allowed to proceed for three months without a motion to interfere on the part of the Labour Government or a gesture of sympathy or solidarity on the part of the Labour Party.
The British Labour Government and the British Labour Party have permitted the striking and locked-out mill hands of Bombay to die in the streets from starvation, to be shot down by the rifles of armed police and military, without using their supreme power as head of the British Empire to bring this strike to an end and to secure victory to the just demands of the Bombay workers.
What are the facts of this strike? In what way is it proceeding, and what will be the result of a defeat of the workers, both in India and in Great Britain?
The present struggle is more than a mere demand for payment of bonus on the part of the workers. It is an offensive on the part of Indian capitalism (which includes both Europeans and natives) against the Indian working class to reduce still further its already pitiably low standard of living. It was intended to follow up the refusal of the bonus with a cut in wages. The comparative lull in the textile industry was seized upon by the owners as a favourable moment to cut into the wage-bill, which had been slightly raised during the boom period in response to the rise in the cost of living and the consequent strike wave that visited Bombay in 1919. Such an, offensive had already taken place in Ahmedabad, where the workers were forced to accede. The Bombay mill owners were prepared to close down for a short time to force the men to submit to the new conditions. The strike of the operatives in January was promptly replied to by the declaration of a two-weeks’ lockout; It was held that this period would suffice to bring the men to their knees. In spite of the opposition of their so-called leaders, who tried by every means to persuade them to resume work unconditionally, having failed in all their efforts to prevent the strike, the workers instinctively realised that more than the bonus was at stake—if they yielded, the next attack would be directed against their wages. Therefore they held firm, and the lockout had to be extended for two further successive periods of two weeks. At the close of each one, unsuccessful attempts were made by the owners to reopen the mills with blackleg labour. Signs were posted, saying that if the men would resume work the owners guaranteed not to reduce wages, but nothing was said about the bonus. The men held out, and at the end of six weeks the owners began to feel the effects of the complete stoppage, and division arose in their own ranks. At a meeting of the Bombay Mill Owners’ Association, a strong Indian minority were for granting the demand for bonus, but a slight majority against it carried the day. In the battle between Lancashire and Bombay, in which Lancashire textile products are protected at the expense of native industry, it is the Indian workers who must pay the difference in a lower wage bill to permit the Indian textile industry to thrive.
At the end of six weeks, in response to the urgent demands of the workers and the pressure of public opinion, the Governor of Bombay, Sir Leslie Wilson, who had refrained from taking any action calculated to bring the dispute to a close, appointed an Inquiry Committee with power to investigate “the customary, legal or equitable claim of the men to payment of bonus.” This Committee had neither power to recommend nor to arbitrate; despite the request of the workers, no representative of labour was included among its members, appointed from the prominent capitalists and Government henchmen of Bombay. It was a move to gain time, by appearing to do something, and to drag out the negotiations until the workers would be forced to surrender. This Committee held three sittings, extended over a period of two weeks. Appointed on February 29, it published its findings on March 12, five days after the events of March 7, when protest meetings of the strikers were fired upon by the police, resulting in five killed, four wounded and thirteen arrests. The decision of the Committee caused no surprise, given its nature and composition; it declared that: “The mill workers have not established any enforceable claim, customary, legal or equitable, to the payment annually of a bonus,” . . . and that “the results of the working of the mill industry as a whole for the year 1923 are such as to justify the contention of the mill owners that the profits do not admit of the payment of a bonus.” Would that the mill workers of Bombay could say to their Christian rulers: “I asked for bread, and ye gave me a stone.”
On March 7, just before these findings became public, a notice was posted on all the mill premises to the effect that: “To all workers willing to resume work unconditionally, the mills will by opened for resumption of work on March 8, and two days later the January wages will be paid.” The notice was signed by S. D. Saklatvala, Chairman of the Bombay Mill Owners ’ Association. The result was the tragic and, till present writing, unexplained events of March 7, when in reply to some stone-throwing on the part of assembled groups of strikers gathered together to discuss the notice, police fire was opened without warning on the unarmed crowd, killing five and wounding four. Thirteen workers who attempted to loot a grain shop were arrested.
This brutal massacre, which would have been unthinkable in Britain, and which roused a storm of indignation in the Indian public mind, was brushed aside by the Bombay Government with the single statement in the Bombay Legislative Council on March 8 that “the Government desire to offer their sympathy to the victims, particularly in view of the very creditable behaviour of the men hitherto. . . . Military patrols have been called out, but it is hoped that it will not be necessary to use them unless absolutely essential to preserve law and order.” Asked by a member if there was any loss to property as a result of the acts of the strikers, the Home Member replied: “I understand there has been some window breaking and some looting in the mills. But so far I have no information of any serious injury to any of the mills. ”
Human life may be held cheap in a country inhabited by 320,000,000 souls, but in the interests of what assumes itself to be “civilised government” it might have been expected that an official inquiry would be undertaken into the reasons for an order to shoot, on the sole authority of a deputy police inspector (European), in the absence of a magistrate, and before the crowd had been warned to disperse or blank shots had been previously fired into the air. Can mere stone-throwing on the part of justly-aggrieved men in the face of the most intense provocation be held to justify the calling out of armed police and soldiery and the shooting into an unarmed and defenceless mob? Are industrial Amritsars to be repeated all over India with impunity under the aegis of a Labour Government?
The events of March 7 precipitated long-delayed action on the part of the Bombay Government, and the Mill Owners’ Association was informed by His Excellency that: “January wages should be paid at once without affecting the question of bonus and irrespective of resumption of work by the men, and that the mill owners should meet the representatives of the men to discuss the questions at issue.” It should be remembered that this tardy step to effect negotiations was made two months after the beginning of the dispute which had plunged 150,000 workers, together with their wives and families, into the direst distress and the whole industrial life of Bombay into an abnormal state. Would a similar strike of such dimensions have been allowed to drag out its course in Lancashire without some action being taken by the Labour Government?
Yet still another month has been allowed to pass without any decisive action being taken to bring the dispute to a close. The latest reports bring news that the striking operatives, exhausted and starving, have appealed to the Government for help to assist 50,000 of them, with their wives and children, to be repatriated to their villages, where they hope to find some kind of work. Fifty thousand have already found their own way back to the country districts—the remaining ones, three times fifty thousand at the least if we count those dependent upon them, remain in Bombay to fight it out to the end, performing causal labour, subsisting on precarious charity, or dying outright in the streets of Bombay. The Government has been asked to provide them with some form of work to enable them to survive the struggle. A few of the smaller mills are reported to have opened, to which a few thousand men had straggled back to work. But the overwhelming majority remain firm to their voluntary pledge to abstain from rejoining the mills until their original demands have been met. Nor theirs is the cry of the British proletariat, “Work or maintenance.” To claim such a boon as their right is beyond their humble dreams. They know only how to do that which is within reach of their own human endurance—to resist the capitalist offensive dumbly, peaceably, uncomplainingly, but with what worlds of determined fortitude, until either their cause is won or they themselves are no more. There is something truly Indian in this infinite capacity for suffering; in this strength of the meek to resist injustice even unto death. What scorn of human life it expresses—or of human existence reduced to a status lower than the beasts!
The British Labour Party, in power to-day as the British Labour Government, has it within its means to save the Bombay workers from death by starvation and from the lingering existence which exploitation renders worse than death. It can send material help to support the starving strikers, and it can demand arbitration of the dispute in a manner fair and just to the cause of the Indian working class.
Upon the outcome of this strike hangs the fate, for the next few years, of the Indian textile workers in their heroic struggle for a living wage. And upon the payment of a living wage to the Indian textile workers depends the future well-being of the textile workers of Great Britain, whom the Indian workers are being forced, against their will, to undercut. The Bombay strike is but another instance o£ the fact that the international proletariat must hang together or they will hang separately.

Remembering Bhagat Singh on the 75th Anniversary of His Martyrdom

2008-02-24T12:19:00.000+05:30

by Chaman Lal
Scott Nearing was a frequent contributor to Monthly Review. His column "World Events" ran in Monthly Review from 1953 to 1972.Bhagat Singh, 23 years of age when hanged by the British on 23rd March 1931, remains to this day a model for the youth of India and the world. The accomplishments and heroism of his short life are worthy not only of our remembrance, but of our homage.
In 1926 Bhagat Singh was already a leader in forming the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, a mass organization of youth that aimed to expose the exploitative character of British colonialism. Muzaffar Ahmed, one of the founders of the communist movement and party in India, recalled meeting with the eighteen year old Bhagat Singh in that year. The communist party had come into existence at Kanpur in 1925, and Abdul Majid of Peshawar and Muzaffar Ahmed had been imprisoned in the ensuing Kanpur Bolshevik conspiracy case. Bhagat Singh had come to pay his regards to Muzaffar Ahmed at the house of his co-prisoner and comrade Abdul Majid. Thus from the very beginning of Bhagat Singh's active political life, there is evidence of his inclination towards the communist movement.
Bhagat Singh, in jail and facing certain execution, wrote in 1930 the much reprinted pamphlet Why I Am an Atheist. In his introduction to a 1970s edition of Why I Am an Atheist, the eminent historian Bipan Chandra wrote that "from 1925 to 1928, Bhagat Singh read voraciously, devouring in particular books on the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union, even though getting hold of such books was in itself at the time a revolutionary and difficult task. He also tried to inculcate the reading and thinking habit among his fellow revolutionaries and younger comrades."
In 1924, the sixteen year old Bhagat Singh joined the newly organized Hindustan Republican Association, which aimed to end colonial rule through armed resistance. By 1927 much of the leadership of the HRA had been arrested, and several hanged. Leadership devolved upon Chandershekhar Azad and some extraordinary youths, among them Bhagat Singh. By the end of 1928, he and his comrades had accepted socialism as the final object of their activities and changed the name of their organization from HRA to HSRA (the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association). Adding the word "socialist" was immediately recognized to be of great significance, and the main motivation to add the word came from Bhagat Singh. And it was not a vague kind of socialism that Bhagat Singh was carrying in his mind. Bhagat Singh accepted socialism as a concept by going through books on Marxism and the experiences of the Soviet Union.
Bhagat Singh had studied the tradition of violent resistance to British colonial rule and, in his 1928 writings, added the element of a Marxist understanding.
On 8th April 1929, Bhagat Singh landed in jail with B. K. Dutt after throwing a bomb into the Delhi Assembly. They had not sought to flee. We have a full record of his thought while jailed. His reading became even more organized and mature, despite the fact that, in the little less than two years before his execution on 23rd March 1931, Bhagat Singh repeatedly fought against the atrocities of the jail authorities by resorting to hunger strikes for weeks at a time. His reading was to prepare to present the revolutionary viewpoint in the course of the two trials he faced: the Lahore conspiracy case, which resulted in his execution along with Sukhdev and Rajguru, and the prior Delhi Assembly bomb case, in which he and B. K. Dutt were sentenced to be transported for life.
He was treated with extraordinary cruelty, but the British could not crush his spirit. Sri Rajyam Sinha, in her memoir of her husband Bejoy Kumar Sinha (a comrade of Bhagat Singh) entitled A Revolutionary's Quest for Sacrifice, has given graphic details. The revolutionaries had refused to come handcuffed into court. The court had agreed, but did not honor its word. A scuffle began and hell broke out. With police prestige pricked, a special force of Pathan policemen (known for their brutality) was requisitioned and merciless beating began. Bhagat Singh was singled out. Eight ferocious Pathans pounced on him and, with their regulation boots, kicked him viciously and beat him with lathis. Mr. Roberts, a European officer, pointed at Sardar Bhagat Singh and said, "This is the man, give him more beating." They were dragged on the ground and carried like logs of wood and thrown on the benches. All this happened right in the presence of the visitors in the court compound. The Magistrate too was watching, later to claim that he had no jurisdiction as he was not formally presiding over the court. Sheo (Shiv) Verma (later in the CPM) and Ajoy Kumar Ghose (who rose to be General Secretary of CPI) became unconscious. Bhagat Singh then raised his voice and told the court: "I want to congratulate you on this. Sheo Verma is lying unconscious and if he dies, you will be responsible."
Bhagat Singh, just 22 years old at that time, by his towering personality terrorized the British colonial power. They had learned how to deal with "terrorist groups" that had relied on confused religious and nationalist ideologies. The British were confident they could deal with that kind of threat. But British colonialism became really terrorized when HRA turned into HSRA, Bhagat Singh became its chief ideologue, and by his statements and mature political conduct in jail and court rallied the masses of the country. Frequent hunger strikes for human and political rights for political prisoners were resorted to. Jatin Dass, one of their dearest comrades, sacrificed his life on 13th September 1929 inside Lahore jail, and millions gathered at railway stations when his mortal remains were being taken by train from Lahore to Calcutta on their final journey. The admission that the popularity of Bhagat Singh and his comrades reached the level of Mahatma Gandhi among the Indian masses was made by none other than B. Pattabhirammaya, who wrote the history of the Congress Party.
In these last years Bhagat Singh read voraciously inside the jail, despite the certainty that he would be hanged for his political actions. Even minutes before being taken to the gallows, he was reading a book by Lenin, obtained through his advocate. The Punjabi revolutionary poet Paash, himself martyred by Khalistani terrorists on 23rd March, his hero's martyrdom day, paid apt tribute to Bhagat Singh in one of his prose pieces by saying: "Indian youth have to read the next page of Lenin's book, left unread by Bhagat Singh at his death."
Letters written from jail by Bhagat Singh invariably list the books he asked his visitors to bring from the Dwarka Dass Library in Lahore. These books were primarily on Marxism, economics, history, and creative literature. Thus in a letter to his friend Jaidev Gupta, on 24th July 1930, Bhagat Singh asked for the following books to be sent him through his younger brother Kulbir: (i) Militarism by Karl Liebknecht; (ii) Why Men Fight by Bertrand Russell; (iii) Soviets at Work; (iv) Collapse of the Second International; (v) Leftwing Communism by Lenin; (vi) Mutual Aid by Prince Kroptokin; (vii) Field, Factories and Workshops; (viii) The Civil War in France by Marx; (ix) Land Revolution in Russia; (x) The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt by Darling; (xi) Historical Materialism by Bukharin; and (xii) the novel The Spy by Upton Sinclair.
Bhagat Singh had command of four languages, without much formal training or education. He wrote in Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and English. His jail notebooks collect excerpts from one hundred and eight authors and 43 books, including prominently Marx and Engels, but also Thomas Paine, Descartes, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Epicurus, Francis Bacon, Madan Mohan Malviya, Bipan Chander Pal, and many others. The only extensive original comments in the jail notebook are on the subject "The Science of State." Bhagat Singh seems to have been planning an essay or book on the history of the political development of society from primitive communism to modern socialism.
For today's youth, the only name that compares is that of Che Guevera, who was as committed and who faced death with as much courage as Bhagat Singh. Leaving behind the security of being a Minister in revolutionary Cuba and the boundaries of narrow nationalism, Che Guevera took to the jungles of Bolivia to fight U.S imperialism to liberate the whole of Latin America. Che Guevara with his wide experience was of course far more advanced in thought than Bhagat Singh, yet the qualities of spirit, commitment for revolution, and sincerity bring these young revolutionaries close to each other. Both fought imperialism and capitalist exploitation of mankind ferociously, and each died for a cause dearer to him than his own life.
In a letter to the Governor of the Punjab on 20th March 1931, three days before his execution, Bhagat Singh wrote: "Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. They may be carrying on their insidious exploitation through a mixed or even purely Indian bureaucratic apparatus. All these things make no difference. No matter, if your government tries and succeeds in winning over the leaders of the Indian society through petty concessions and compromises and thereby cause a temporary demoralization in the main body of forces. No matter, if once again the Indian movement, the revolutionary party, finds itself deserted in the thick of the war. . . . The war shall continue. It shall be waged ever with new vigor, greater audacity, and unflinching determination till the Socialist Republic is established and the present social order is completely replaced by a new social order, based on social prosperity and thus every sort of exploitation is put an end to and the humanity is ushered into the era of genuine and permanent peace. . . . The days of capitalist and imperialist exploitation are numbered. The war neither began with us nor is going to end with our lives. It is the inevitable consequence of historical events and the existing environments. Our humble sacrifices shall only be a link in the chain that has very accurately been beautified by the unparalleled sacrifice of Mr. Das and the most tragic but noblest sacrifice of Comrade Bhagwati Charn and the glorious death of our warrior Azad."
Netaji Subhash Bose in a big public meeting in Delhi on the same day (20th March) said, "Bhagat Singh is today not a person, but a symbol. He symbolizes the spirit of revolt, which has taken possession of country." The Free Press Journal in its issue of 24th March 1931 wrote: "S. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev live no longer. In their death lies their victory let there be no mistaking it. The bureaucracy has annihilated the mortal frame. The nation has assimilated the immortal spirit. Thus shall Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev live eternally to the dismay of the bureaucracy. . . . To the nation, S. Bhagat Singh and colleagues will ever remain the symbols of martyrdom in the cause of freedom." And indeed the supremos and sahibs of the 1931 Raj are wholly forgotten, while millions and millions today recall and honor the twenty three year old they hanged.
Reading Bhagat Singh's jail notebook and court statements, replace the word "British" with "American" and today's reality is not far away. Bhagat Singh was clear that what mattered was not whether the leaders were British or Indian. The Indian rulers of today fit into the category of those "pure Indians" won through "petty concessions" by U.S. imperialism; but in the words of Bhagat Singh -- "The war shall continue." Che Guevera and Allende haunt the United States in today's Bolivia just as Bhagat Singh remains to haunt the Bushs and Blairs and those who do their bidding in India.
Bipan Chandra has rightly concluded that "it is one of the greatest tragedies of our people that this giant of a brain was brought to a stop so early by the colonial authorities." It is the nature of colonialism and imperialism to cause such tragedies, be it in India or Vietnam, in Iraq, Palestine, or Latin America. But the people do avenge these crimes by yet more ferocious struggles against imperialism, if not today, then tomorrow. Our task is to keep the memory of our martyrs fresh, and by doing so we prepare the victories of tomorrow.

How To Live Rich

2008-02-24T12:11:00.001+05:30

When the middle-class millionaire wants to wow her, he buys a diamond. Only the millionaire buys the rarest stone, one no one else will have.
On his travels, the millionaire goes where no one can find him--to an exclusive island resort featuring $185,000 fractional memberships in luxury vacation homes.
And at home, he relaxes not before the plasma TV but in his $150,000 yoga room where he receives massages while gazing at a Japanese-inspired garden outside.
In Pictures: Spending Habits Of The Middle-Class Millionaire
These kinds of expenditures are becoming increasingly common among the fast-growing class of "middle-class millionaires." Sixteen-and-a-half million Americans representing a little over 8% of U.S. households fall into this group, which controls almost two-thirds of the country's wealth. They are baby boomers with a median age of 58 who obviously listened to their mother's advice to get a good education and settle down--because three-quarters earned a bachelor's degree and 82% are married.
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Would we know if we brushed shoulders with a middle-class millionaire in the hallway? Probably not. "They're successful entrepreneurs," says Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute, a New York City-based research firm. "He's more likely to be the guy that owns 10 McDonald's franchises, the doctor with a MRI clinic, the owner of a small ad agency or even a trash removal company."
But even with a million in the bank, these people aren't all that rich. Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Associates, a private wealth research firm and author of The Middle Class Millionaire and The Sky's The Limit, says that today, having a million dollars net worth doesn't mean you are really wealthy. He categorizes the middle-class millionaire as those with $1 million to $10 million, the rich with $10 million to $30 million, and the super rich with more than $30 million.
Pricey Perks Still, a million dollars is nothing to laugh at. Though nationwide spending has slowed on fears of a slumping economy, this set is continuing to splurge on pricey home improvements, wine and spirits, cars and clothes.
But the middle-class millionaire is not content to simply upgrade the tiles in his bathroom. He's likely building a professional grade home spa. In researching The Sky's The Limit, Prince spoke with a hedge fund manager who covered an entire wall with plasma screens and surround sound at a cost of $40,000 so he could wind down at the end of a long day by playing "Guitar Hero" and Nintendo (other-otc: NTDOY - news - people ) Wii. Prince also worked with a Wall Street executive who spent over $60,000 to have a boxing ring installed in his Manhattan apartment.
Has luxury spending spiraled out of control? What's too extreme? Weigh in. Add your thoughts in the Reader Comments section below.
Those kinds of buys make super high-tech security systems throughout the home a necessity. When traveling one of Prince's respondents keeps track of his home by BlackBerry, and, if something looks suspicious, he can fill his house with tear gas at the touch of a button. Safe rooms are also becoming popular, says Prince.
Jewelry is the ultimate symbol of wealth, and in this category, the bigger the better. Today's millionaires invest in high end pieces from companies like Zydo or Di MODOLO. This group is looking for custom-made baubles and won't blink at spending $75,000 on a necklace.
Fashion and accessories are another hot opportunity to spend. A good example is the owner of a plumbing company who, since making it big a couple of years back, treats his wife to a $35,000 Rene Lautrec handbag bag twice a year.
While jewelry and handbags may satisfy the ladies, watches seem to scratch the itch for men. Picture this: One of Prince's respondents owns two limousine companies and sells one for $20 million. After years of collecting watches in the $1,000 to $2,000 range, he rewards himself by splashing out on a $200,000 time piece.
Diamond-encrusted, of course.

The three trillion dollar war

2008-02-24T12:04:00.000+05:30

The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have grown to staggering proportions
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes
The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined.
The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.
And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that's $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.
Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation.

On the eve of war, there were discussions of the likely costs. Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as “baloney” by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction could pay for itself through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a portion of which they believed would be financed by other countries. (Adjusting for inflation, in 2007 dollars, they were projecting costs of between $57 and $69 billion.) The tone of the entire administration was cavalier, as if the sums involved were minimal.
Even Lindsey, after noting that the war could cost $200 billion, went on to say: “The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.” In retrospect, Lindsey grossly underestimated both the costs of the war itself and the costs to the economy. Assuming that Congress approves the rest of the $200 billion war supplemental requested for fiscal year 2008, as this book goes to press Congress will have appropriated a total of over $845 billion for military operations, reconstruction, embassy costs, enhanced security at US bases, and foreign aid programmes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the fifth year of the war draws to a close, operating costs (spending on the war itself, what you might call “running expenses”) for 2008 are projected to exceed $12.5 billion a month for Iraq alone, up from $4.4 billion in 2003, and with Afghanistan the total is $16 billion a month. Sixteen billion dollars is equal to the annual budget of the United Nations, or of all but 13 of the US states. Even so, it does not include the $500 billion we already spend per year on the regular expenses of the Defence Department. Nor does it include other hidden expenditures, such as intelligence gathering, or funds mixed in with the budgets of other departments.
Because there are so many costs that the Administration does not count, the total cost of the war is higher than the official number. For example, government officials frequently talk about the lives of our soldiers as priceless. But from a cost perspective, these “priceless” lives show up on the Pentagon ledger simply as $500,000 - the amount paid out to survivors in death benefits and life insurance. After the war began, these were increased from $12,240 to $100,000 (death benefit) and from $250,000 to $400,000 (life insurance). Even these increased amounts are a fraction of what the survivors might have received had these individuals lost their lives in a senseless automobile accident. In areas such as health and safety regulation, the US Government values a life of a young man at the peak of his future earnings capacity in excess of
$7 million - far greater than the amount that the military pays in death benefits. Using this figure, the cost of the nearly 4,000 American troops killed in Iraq adds up to some $28 billion.
The costs to society are obviously far larger than the numbers that show up on the government's budget. Another example of hidden costs is the understating of US military casualties. The Defence Department's casualty statistics focus on casualties that result from hostile (combat) action - as determined by the military. Yet if a soldier is injured or dies in a night-time vehicle accident, this is officially dubbed “non combat related” - even though it may be too unsafe for soldiers to travel during daytime.
In fact, the Pentagon keeps two sets of books. The first is the official casualty list posted on the DOD website. The second, hard-to-find, set of data is available only on a different website and can be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This data shows that the total number of soldiers who have been wounded, injured, or suffered from disease is double the number wounded in combat. Some will argue that a percentage of these non-combat injuries might have happened even if the soldiers were not in Iraq. Our new research shows that the majority of these injuries and illnesses can be tied directly to service in the war.
From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.
From the beginning, the United Kingdom has played a pivotal role - strategic, military, and political - in the Iraq conflict. Militarily, the UK contributed 46,000 troops, 10 per cent of the total. Unsurprisingly, then, the British experience in Iraq has paralleled that of America: rising casualties, increasing operating costs, poor transparency over where the money is going, overstretched military resources, and scandals over the squalid conditions and inadequate medical care for some severely wounded veterans.
Before the war, Gordon Brown set aside £1 billion for war spending. As of late 2007, the UK had spent an estimated £7 billion in direct operating expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (76 per cent of it in Iraq). This includes money from a supplemental “special reserve”, plus additional spending from the Ministry of Defence.
The special reserve comes on top of the UK's regular defence budget. The British system is particularly opaque: funds from the special reserve are “drawn down” by the Ministry of Defence when required, without specific approval by Parliament. As a result, British citizens have little clarity about how much is actually being spent.
In addition, the social costs in the UK are similar to those in the US - families who leave jobs to care for wounded soldiers, and diminished quality of life for those thousands left with disabilities.
By the same token, there are macroeconomic costs to the UK as there have been to America, though the long-term costs may be less, for two reasons. First, Britain did not have the same policy of fiscal profligacy; and second, until 2005, the United Kingdom was a net oil exporter.
We have assumed that British forces in Iraq are reduced to 2,500 this year and remain at that level until 2010. We expect that British forces in Afghanistan will increase slightly, from 7,000 to 8,000 in 2008, and remain stable for three years. The House of Commons Defence Committee has recently found that despite the cut in troop levels, Iraq war costs will increase by 2 per cent this year and personnel costs will decrease by only 5 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost of military operations in Afghanistan is due to rise by 39 per cent. The estimates in our model may be significantly too low if these patterns continue.
Based on assumptions set out in our book, the budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs, the total impact on the UK will exceed £20 billion.
© Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, 2008. Extracted from The Three Trillion Dollar War, to be published by Allen Lane on February 28 (£20). Copies can be ordered for £18 with free delivery from The Times BooksFirst 0870 1608080.
Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2001. Linda Bilmes is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

Mahatma GandhiRevolutionary or Counter-Revolutionary?

2008-02-22T20:31:00.000+05:30

Evelyn Roy
A Reply to Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse

THE learned articles from the pen of M. Romain Rolland, which recently appeared in the monthly review Europe, and the reply thereto in Clarté by Henri Barbusse, on the subject of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Non-violent Non-Co-operation Movement of India during the years 1920-1922, have opened a new field of discussion between the two opposing camps of European radical intellectualism. M. Rolland, the protagonist of Non-violence, has offered to the world a new argument and, as he conceives it, a new proof of the efficacy of this doctrine as applied to political struggles. He discovers Mr. Gandhi a year after the latter has been consigned to the oblivion of a six years’ gaol sentence, and in eloquent and poetic language describes and interprets his career as leader of the Non-Co-operation Movement, in order to prove his own theory that Non-violence, based upon suffering, self-sacrifice, and brotherly love, is the only philosophy that can save European civilisation from ultimate annihilation.
M. Barbusse, belonging to the opposite camp of those who believe in opposing force to force, dictatorship to dictatorship, and the ultimate survival of the fittest, replies to the articles of M. Rolland by attempting to upset the whole basis of the latter’s thesis as to Gandhi’s true rôle in the Indian movement. Mr. Gandhi, he asseverates, is not what M. Rolland imagines him to be—an apostle of love, sacrifice, and suffering, come to redeem the world with a new gospel and a new vicarious atonement. On the contrary, Mr. Gandhi is a revolutionary to whom Non-violence is but a masterly tactic in the face of a difficult situation. Had Lenin been in Gandhi’s place he would have spoken and acted as did the latter, declares M. Barbusse; both are for compulsion; both are realists. Gandhi took care to base himself upon the working and peasant masses. He always defended the poor and the oppressed. The revolutionary movement of India is more a social struggle than a nationalist one, and the fight against the British bureaucracy is a characteristic form of the class-struggle.
So writes Henri Barbusse in a valiant effort to disprove the arguments of Romain Rolland and to defeat his object of using Gandhi as a new stick wherewith to beat the programme and tactics of Bolshevism. It may not come amiss for those who have spoken and written critically on the Non-violent Non-Co-operation Movement in India, during the past two years, to add a few words to this controversy in an effort to shed new light on what is, after all, a dark subject for the majority of European intellectuals. It is not our present purpose to analyse the Non-Co-operation Movement here; this has been done exhaustively in two books by Manabendra Nath Roy, published in 1922 and 1923 (India in Transition and One Tear of Non-Co-operation; from Ahmedabad to Gaya[1]). Therein the social forces underlying the Gandhi movement, as well as the significance and rôle of the latter upon Indian life as a whole, have been dealt with from the standpoint of historic materialism. Our immediate object is to take the articles of M. Rolland and to point out in them certain outstanding misstatements of fact and consequent wrong conclusions which are in themselves sufficient to negate the whole force of his argument without going to the opposite extreme of declaring Gandhi to be that which he is not and never will be—a “true revolutionary,” whether of the violent or non-violent variety.
M. Rolland is to be felicitated upon his praiseworthy study of the Gandhian polemics, and of his more or less accurate knowledge of the main course of events in Indian political life up to the time of Mr. Gandhi’s incarceration. Such knowledge is rare in a European, and betrays a real interest in the subject on the part of this distinguished savant and litterateur. It is not his knowledge of the main events of Mr. Gandhi’s spectacular career that we call in question, but his interpretation of those events to suit his own purposes. We regret that the first two articles on Mahatma Gandhi which he wrote have not come to our hands. We have only the final two, but they contain enough to prove that M. Rolland, in his enthusiasm for the new prophet that is to save the world, has taken too much for granted as to the rôle of Mr. Gandhi in the Indian Nationalist Movement, and has been too hasty in his conclusion, vital to prove his own thesis, that that movement has already attained its goal, or is indisputably about to do so, as a result of Mr. Gandhi’s leadership, based upon the doctrine of suffering, sacrifice, and soul-force.
Let us touch briefly upon some of the threads of M. Rolland’s arguments that all tend towards the main conclusion. In the first place he vastly over-estimates the success of the programme of Non-Co-operation in that which concerned the boycott of schools, law courts, and government posts and titles. The number of those resigning their places and titles under government was infinitesimal; the giving up of practice by lawyers was confined to a limited number of Congress politicians and patriots, for a very limited time. The majority returned to their practice before the year was ended. Only in the schools was there a notable response on the part of the young, enthusiastic, and idealistic students, and this was later acknowledged as one of the greatest mistakes of the whole campaign to bring these thousands of young men away from their studies without supplying them with any alternative means of study or of gaining a livelihood. This whole part of the Non-Co-operation programme has been such a recognised failure that it is no longer spoken of nor regarded as part of the national activities, although theoretically it has never been abandoned.
The boycott of foreign cloth and of liquor shops attained greater success, because here Mr. Gandhi and the Congress hit upon a means of directly attacking the government exchequer at its source. The boycott of liquor is not, as M. Rolland mistakenly observes, intended as a measure of “healthful discipline” and “necessary hygiene.” On the contrary, it was an attempt to cut off one of the great sources of revenue of the Indian Government, which retains control of the liquor traffic and reaps huge profits therefrom. The boycott and picketing of liquor shops was so largely successful in cutting off this source of Government revenue that huge deficits were admitted in that Department, and the Government energetically opposed itself to this side of the campaign from the very outset. As M. Rolland rightly observes, Mr. Gandhi deserves to be remembered as a social reformer long after his political triumphs and failures are forgotten. His plea for the removal of untouchability was a righteous one, but we cannot say with truth that it has attained any measure of practical fulfilment among those Hindu orthodox who constituted the chief followers of the Mahatmaji. Social revolutions are not made from above, but from below by the inexorable working of economic laws. Untouchability and caste will disappear from Indian society, and are disappearing, not as a result of the impassioned pleadings of a Mahatma, but because of the advent of industrialism and the break-up of patriarchal traditions.
The boycott of foreign cloth constituted the most important clause of the Non-Co-operation programme, not only because it coincided with Mr. Gandhi’s reactionary social philosophy that decried the advent of modern civilisation and preached the cult of the spinning-wheel and homespun, but because the backbone of the Non-Co-operation Movement founded upon sacrifice, suffering, and soul-force was the native mill-owners, whose competition to Lancashire products was immensely stimulated by the preaching of the doctrine of boycott of foreign cloth and the wearing of Swadeshi (home-manufactured goods). It was the mill-owners of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras who financed the Non-Co-operation Movement, who, together with the landlords of India, represent the rising bourgeoisie which insistently claims for itself a place in the sun. The Congress fund of one crore of rupees raised in 1921-22 was largely donated by the rising capitalist class of India, to whom the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms did not grant the economic expansion which it craved. This fund, largely on paper, constituted the string which controlled the activities and dictated the tactics of the Mahatmaji in critical moments; it lay behind his “address to the hooligans of Bombay and Madras”; it lay beneath his exhortation “not to make political use of the factory workers; it constituted the real reason for his failure to declare mass civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes, and for his insistence on the tactics of non-violence and respect for law, order, and private property.
We do not make these statements for the sake of disillusioning M. Rolland as to the spiritual rôle of his new Messiah, but in the interests of truth and the correct interpretation of historical events. The proof for these statements can be found by referring to the list of contributors to the Tilak-Swaraj Fund, and to certain very interesting disclosures made by members of the Congress opposition on the manipulation of the Tilak-Swaraj Fund in the interests of Indian capitalism. It will be replied that Mr. Gandhi was not responsible for the sins of his followers, but Mr. Gandhi made himself responsible for them on innumerable occasions; does not M. Rolland himself exclaim: “He had become in truth the conscience of India.” This was on the occasion of the riot of Chauri Chaura, when Mr. Gandhi for the last time repudiated mass-action and ordered the retreat from Bardoli, which every honest Indian now recognises to have been the greatest betrayal of the movement that could have been made.
The riot of Chauri Chaura and the right-about-face of Mr. Gandhi from the road that led to revolution back to the blind alley of reformism constitute the turning-point of his career and the acid test by which his whole philosophy will be judged by generations to come. Mr. Gandhi, after having for the third time declared the inauguration of mass civil disobedience, for which the Indian masses expectantly waited, for the third time retracted his order and disowned those simple followers who had taken him at his word. Not only did he urge the rioting peasants to deliver themselves up for judgment and make confession, but he stands personally responsible for the passing of the Bardoli resolutions in the face of his countrymen’s opposition, which denounced, once and for all, all forms of aggressive action and limited the national activities to weaving, spinning, and praying. Here stands the revolutionary exposed in his true colours as a timid social reformer, terrified at the greatness of the movement he was called upon to lead, and endeavouring vainly to crush it within the limits of his own reactionary philosophy.
The result of Chauri Chaura and the shameful retreat of Bardoli, which M. Rolland describes as “an act of exceptional moral value,” was the condemnation of 228 peasants to death by hanging for the crime of having attempted to better their miserable condition (a sentence whose barbarity put even the British Government in India to shame and was later reduced to nineteen death sentences); and the temporary dislocation of the whole Non-Co-operation Movement, followed by the arrest of its leader, and wholesale Government repression and police terrorism throughout the length and breadth of India. But Mr. Gandhi never flinched from his resolution and the Bardoli “Constructive Programme,” which enjoins upon the Indian peasants to pay rent to the Zemindars (landlords), and assures the latter that the Non-Co-operation Movement in no way attacks their property rights, remains the measuring stick by which to judge Mr. Gandhi’s status as revolutionary or reformer.
“Why did the Government arrest Gandhi?” inquires M. Rolland, naïvely. And he replies, “Because his non-violence was more revolutionary than all violence.” M. Rolland is once more mistaken. The British Government in India arrested Mr. Gandhi because it realised that his hold upon the country, and by country we mean the rebellious masses, was so weakened that it could safely put him away without awakening any great popular resentment. And such in fact is the case. The silence that fell upon India at the arrest of the Mahatmaji was not the triumphant vindication of the philosophy of soul-force, nor the disciplined obedience of the masses to the injunctions of their leader, but the acquiescence of the multitudes in the arrest of a leader who had ceased to lead them; whose repeated acts of betrayal of the true interests of the rebellious workers had cut him and the Nationalist Movement as a whole completely off from the dynamics of massaction.
Never did M. Rolland speak more truly than when he refers to the vast upheavals of the Indian proletariat and peasantry as “having only the slightest connection with the Non-Co-operation Movement.” The great mass-awakening that shook the Indian continent at the close of the war, and which came as a result of many world-factors as well as internal economic forces, coincided with the rise of the aggressive campaign of Non-violent Non-Cooperation, but was not synonymous with it, nor even identified with it until Mr. Gandhi, by dint of his compelling personality and instinctive political sagacity, succeeded in welding the two together into a temporary and artificial unity, much as he succeeded in binding together the Hindu-Mussulman communities. Not by means of an honest, straightforward programme of social and economic emancipation for the Indian masses, even at the expense of the propertied classes, but by means of playing upon the religious superstitions and susceptibilities of the ignorant and illiterate workers and peasants, to whom “Gandhi Raj” was promised within one year and to whom “Gandhi Raj” meant non-payment of rent and taxes and access to land with better living and working conditions for the exploited city proletariat—thus did the Mahatma win his ascendancy over the rebellious mass-movement and seek to combine it with that of the bourgeois intellectuals and propertied classes for an increased share in the exploitation of these same Indian masses.
But such tactics, depending upon the compelling personality of one man and the religious frenzy of the multitudes, were built upon sand. After repeated and innumerable betrayals at the hands of their bourgeois leaders, the Indian workers and peasants have fallen away from the Nationalist struggle and have resumed their interrupted fight for better wages, fewer hours of work, better living conditions, and the amelioration of their desperate economic condition. The divorce of mass-energy from the Non-Co-operation Movement, signed and sealed by the Bardoli decisions repudiating all aggressive tactics and forbidding the declaration of civil disobedience, resulted in the collapse of the latter, and delivered it over as an easy prey into the hands of the waiting Government. The only strength of the movement had lain in its backing by the rebellious masses; it was the threat of direct action on a nationwide scale, of which the demonstrations and hartals during the visit of the Prince of Wales were but a foretaste, that made the Government stay its hand so long. It was only when the movement rendered itself impotent by repudiating all mass-action that the Government lifted its hand and struck with deadly ferocity.
As a result of the Bardoli retreat the Indian movement was thrown back into hopeless confusion, from which it is only just recovering, slowly and painfully. The arrest of Mr. Gandhi assisted this recovery by removing what had proved to be a force making for reaction and leaving the field clear for new leaders to take his place. M. Rolland is mistaken in observing that “the Movement has victoriously resisted the redoubtable test of the first year without a guide.” There have been guides—able and competent ones, who sprang to take the place of those removed from the scene of action. Mr. C. R. Das, late President of the All-Indian National Congress, and founder of the Swaraj Party, is the acknowledged successor of Mr. Gandhi as an All-India leader. He has snatched the fallen standard and is carrying it forward in the struggle between Indian bourgeois nationalism and British Imperialism—a struggle which is destined to be a long one, and which M. Rolland is far too sanguine in declaring: “It appears certain that Indian Home Rule is no longer in question; in one shape or another it is inevitable. India has conquered—morally!”
In that final word lies the whole crux of the dispute at issue. To M. Rolland the gigantic struggle that is convulsing the Indian continent to-day is a moral battle between the forces of good and evil, between the Adversary and the Hosts of Heaven. Mr. Gandhi is the new Messiah who has appeared to lead this spiritual warfare, waged not only on behalf of India, but of the entire world. India’s triumph will be a world triumph of the forces of light over darkness, of spirit over matter, of God over Satan. With such a conception of the Indian struggle for freedom we have nothing to do; it embodies the exaggerated subjectivism of the disillusioned post-war intellectual, flying to the realm of metaphysics to escape from the cruel logic of facts and realities. For the scientific Marxist, who conceives the world to be built upon economic forces, subject to material laws, such a conception has all the grotesque mediævalism of the gargoyle, and we conceive of the minds of these sentimental idealists as full of such gargoyles—unreal, grinning, and out of tune with the age in which we live. They cease to be romantic curiosities and become dangerous when they seek to put their conceptions to political use—and the exploitation of Mr. Gandhi in the interests of counter-revolutionary pacifism is such a political application of these ideas. M. Rolland and the whole school of Spiritual Imperialists, who hold that the world is to be redeemed by soul-force, self-sacrifice, and suffering, are endeavouring to use Mr. Gandhi as a proof of their own thesis that Europe has brought about its own annihilation by the use of violence, of which Bolshevism is the final and concentrated form making for ultimate destruction of all that remains of European culture and civilisation. India, they declare, has been saved by the use of spiritual weapons—let Europe emulate India’s example and save herself.
The argument sounds convincing till we examine its premises and find them false. India is not yet saved; she is still struggling to pull herself out of the slough of economic backwardness; social degeneration, and political subjection—all more or less contingent one upon the other. Her present struggle is a very material one for land and bread. It is for this that the peasants of the Punjab, the United Provinces, Bengal, Madras, and the whole of India have shed their blood; it is for this that the rising proletariat has organised great strikes of months’ duration, often at the cost of freedom and even life. It was for this that the Indian workers and peasants followed the Mahatmaji, and when he repudiated this goal it was for this that they left him, to resume the struggle on the economic field, eschewing political action. The political struggle, which will enthrone the Indian bourgeoisie in a living partnership with the Imperial overlord, is far from finished; but the lines of class-cleavage in Indian society grow every day more marked, and the development of the class-struggle side by side with the Nationalist one, and often antagonistic to it, is ever more distinguishable. In this struggle Mr. Gandhi definitely aligned himself on the side of the bourgeoisie; and however much of a religious prophet he may be, however largely he may figure as a social reformer, and despite his really great contribution to the progress of Indian nationalism in the field of agitation and organisation in the future development of the Indian revolutionary movement, Mr. Gandhi must be counted among the counter-revolutionaries and not, as M. Barbusse mistakenly supposes, among true revolutionaries. He it was who conceived of the brilliant tactics of aggressive Non-Co-operation, based upon non-payment of rent and taxes; he it was who found an outlet for the movement by the slogan of Non-violence; he it was who for the first time carried the idea of Swaraj among the Indian masses. But it was equally he who, frightened by the shadow of revolution that hung over the land; alarmed at the threat to the established order which such a revolution implied; terrified at the thought of bloodshed and his own inability to control the forces of mass-energy once aroused—it was equally he who sought to beat back this rising tide of revolution by repudiating those very forces which he was called upon to lead.
The tired intellectuals of Europe may look to the East in search of a new Messiah, destined to appear miraculously to save them from the clutches of reality. But to all honest revolutionaries who understand the real forces that underlie such great movements as the Russian and Indian revolutions, all talk about “spiritual warfare,” and the triumph of non-violence over violence, is dismissed as the babble of children or the fevered eloquence of intellectual degeneration in search of new illusions. Mr. Gandhi sought to pit his individual philosophy and moral scruples against the armed might of the greatest power in existence—the British Empire—and he inevitably failed. But he would not have failed so miserably had he been gifted with the revolutionary understanding which places economic forces and material laws above the weakness of the individual, and had relied upon the resistless power of the Indian masses to fight their way to freedom. Mr. Gandhi sought to interpose his own will between the Indian masses and this inevitable struggle, and was swept aside to make way for others better able to interpret the imperative needs of the movement. Well for him that he is canonised by the disillusioned, post-war intellectualism of the West.