The Syria Game is Just Another Repeat

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

12-24-24

Following on from Owen Jones' extensive report about the western media bias, particularly the BBC,and the US when it comes to the Israeli genocide in Palestine; we need to recognize that this is not new and not confined to that one issue.

 

As Israel, the US, and Britain bomb Yemen, (did you vote for that?) it’s important for working people to reflect on Syria for a bit and the video above is an important contribution to an understanding of the underlying causes of the Syrian crisis and US imperialism’s role in it. 

 

As the narrator points out in the video, the western mass media is praising the overthrow of Bashar Assad by the Islamist fundamentalist group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Al Qaeda offshoot which translates to the “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”. The group is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, known more familiarly as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani who until last week had a $10 million bounty on his head. HTS was also designated a terrorist organization by the US. 

 

With Assad’s overthrow, numerous forces are seeking to strengthen their positions, some local like the Kurdish YPG that the US has been supporting but as the narrator above points out, the Kurds have been betrayed by the US on more than one occasion and, in this case, what complicates matters is the Turks, who controlled the region prior to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1, consider the YPG a terrorist group. There are some 25 million Kurds in Turkey as well as others in Iraq and Syria and perhaps Iran. Turkey will not be favorable to any strengthening of the Kurdish presence in an Assad free Syria.

 

Last week, the US state department’s senior diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, met with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and its leader and removed the $10 million bounty. This has all the trappings of yet another US/ NATO catastrophe written all over it. 

 

The Islamist group’s meeting with US imperialism’s representatives in the region is like a kiss of death for the Syrian people. Neither group at the table has the interests of the workers in Syria or the region in mind. Nor are they acting in support of US or British workers.

The US proxy in the region, the Zionist Apartheid state, has been bombing Syrian infrastructure, installations, its navy and air force, in order ensure that whatever government follows Assad will not have the capability to defend itself against Israeli aggression. 

From what I understand, Jolani wants to create Sharia law in Syria but at the same time is claiming to be supportive of minorities and other religions. Why would he not? The US wouldn’t give him any of our money otherwise. But he’d better be careful. The US has no problem with supporting jihadists, religious fanatics and despots of all stripes but, only if Wall Street interests are protected. Hussein, Ben Ali, Mubarak who Hillary Clinton considered “like family”, and many other so-called friends of the US have not fared well over time.

 

Syria, a Nation state created in secret by the French and British through the Sykes/Picot agreement after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, has faced many efforts by the US to foster and promote destabilizing sectarian divisions over the past 25 years.

 

In 2006, five years before the Arab Spring that forced numerous ruthless US backed dictators from power in 2011, “….destabilizing the Syrian regime was a central motivation of US policy.” Robert Naiman wrote in the Wikileaks Files. Thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, we have access to cables sent by William Roebuck, chargé d’ affairs at the US embassy in Damascus, to the US State Department and White House.

 

In a December 2006 cable Roebuck stressed that there were a number of weakness in the regime that could be exploited including the Kurdish threat and Islamic extremists. Bathist regimes were traditionally hostile to Islamic fundamentalists but the US clearly has a much more flexible approach as the makeover of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani shows.

“The cable suggests….”,  Naimann writes, “…that the US goal in December 2006 was to undermine the Syrian government by any available means and that what mattered was whether US action would help destabilize the government, not what other impacts the action might have.” My added emphasis. Let’s not forget that the first Americans in Vietnam were CIA, and their job was to disrupt that society.

 

Publicly, the US was then, and still is apparently, opposed to Islamic extremists unless they serve Wall Street’s interests as Osama bin Laden did for a while.  In Syria, as in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, US imperialism saw the possibility of Islamic extremism as a potential threat to the Syrian government and an opportunity that should be taken.

 

Syria is a very diverse nation composed of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Kurds, Jews, Christians and US representatives would be failing in their duties if they didn’t foster sectarian divisions when it suited US interests. 

 

With the growing influence of Iran and the ongoing tensions between the Iranian Mullahs and the Saudi’s, Roebuck saw an opportunity and suggested that the US should try to destabilize the Syrian government by joining forces with Egypt and the Saudi’s  to “fan sectarian tensions between the Sunni and Shia.”, writes Naiman. 

 

Roebuck’s cable to the White House makes that pretty clear: “Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here…….are giving increasing attention to the matter and, we should coordinate more closely with their governments on wats to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue” added emphasis.

 

The US ambassador to Syria was recommending cooperation with two of the most corrupt regimes in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in an effort to undermine the Assad regime in the hope of creating a more reliable pro-western ally. 

 

Eight years later as Syria was engulfed in civil war that had sectarian Shia/Sunni elements in it, the US, and most likely other western nations, criticized this conflict as an unfortunate development, a product of Arab/Muslim backwardness. These former colonial subjects simply don’t know how to govern themselves. The Irish, the black South Africans, the numerous colonized states of Latin America, all of them unable to govern, were desperately in need of a colonial overseer to save them from themselves. 

 

Their political instability and relative backwardness, economically, the inability to develop “healthy” capitalist democracies along the lines of Britain or Germany,  was not a product of colonial occupation, restricting this development, but inherent in the racial or religious makeup of the population.

 

As I read some of the cables detailed in The Wikileaks Files, I am reminded of the debt we owe to Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others who have pulled the mask from the ugly face of capitalist politics. There are others mentioned in Julian Assange’s excellent book, When Google Met Wikileaks

 

The developments in Syria will not benefit the Syrian working class and we will see more bloodshed as the forces determining the outcome are the enemies of the Syrian workers and workers throughout the world.

 

But this is not unique to Syria. Sudan, Kashmir, Eastern Europe, Argentina, Mexico, India and throughout the world we are witnessing the by-products of a global social system that has reached the limits of its ability to take human society forward. China too will be engulfed in struggle as the Chinese working class pushes back against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing. There is no human or environmentally friendly capitalism and China will confirm that as time goes on.

 

Most of the nation states in the former colonial world are relatively young, created from without. Nigeria for example only became a state in 1960 as British colonialism put a box around hundreds of different tribal communities and told them they are all Nigerian now; national consciousness takes time. Syria and all the problems we are witnessing in former European colonies are a direct result of colonialism and will never escape endless war, poverty and famine within the framework of global capitalism.

 

National borders are not a divine creation but workers cannot ignore them. The vast majority of the world’s people possess no working capital. Yes there are huge differences in living standards and conditions are so bad in some regions that slavery is a norm. But we have much in common as an exploited class and there is an inherent tendency for oppressed peoples to unite and seek allies beyond their immediate borders. The attack in immigrants is an attempt by our enemies to undermine this tendency. But we can, and must build an international movement to combat and eliminate the system that is waging war against humanity and nature.

 

The only answer is a global federation of democratic socialist states that can work cooperatively to produce the necessities of human life in a way that is in harmony with nature not in conflict with it. As things are going, there will be huge swathes of the planet that will be uninhabitable due to climate change, a product of industrial society and capitalism.

 

We have a future to fight for, a future for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to them.

Reprinted from the UK socialist website, Left Horizons

Lobby outside the High Court. Free Julian Assange!

21 February 2024 Posted by Editor

Report from Dave Putson

Supporters of Julian Assange have been at the High Court two days running now, where he is fighting against extradition to the USA. When I arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice on the first morning, I was expecting to see a few dozen people, but by 8.30am, there were already easily 300 people carrying placards and banners, and that was in the rain (picture top).

Assange has been illegally incarcerated for years. He was first of all holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy for seven years up to 2019, and in prison after that. He is facing extradition to the USA on trumped up charges under their Espionage Act.

Most of the media that appeared to be there did not seem to be from the mainstream, but mostly independents. The one exception, Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian, who previously supported and accepted information to enable award-winning articles to be written, courtesy of Assange’s Wikileaks, only then to turn on him when he was threatened by the UK security services (and probably the USA ’s as well).

Incarcerated in Belmarsh for five years.

Among the supporters and campaigners for Assange, there were some with materials to purchase goods to enable funding the support Julian Assange campaign were there, as they are every Saturday at General Gordon Square in Woolwich SE18, unless there is an actual event outside Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been held, for five years, such as for his birthdays.

There was a very limited window of opportunity for speeches at the Court lobby, so many people who spoke but were limited to just a few minutes. We heard from Julian’s father and brother, and the briefest of words from his wife Stella. A couple of members of the European Parliamentary spoke, as well as MPs Zarah Sultana, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon and Jeremy Corbyn, who still gets waves of cheers when he gets up.

Among the speakers, there was also a journalist from Jacobin who had flown in from Washington DC specifically for this event. Craig Murray, a formed UK Ambassador, also had a minute or two, But by far and away the largest noise and cheering was when Andrew Feinstein was announced to speak. It appeared it was in equal measure for his personal approval, as well as the fact that he is standing against Keir Starmer in his seat in the coming the general election. It did not appear that the Labour Party’s alleged leader was very popular with this crowd!

Julian Assange has been held in HMP Belmarsh for five years, whilst having sustained no charges against him. The hypocrisy is of the  mainstream media and most establishment politicians is staggering. Western ‘journalists’ (using the term loosely) and politicians have been decrying the incarceration, and then the subsequent death of Alexei Navalny in Russia.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, for most politicians and the media, Assange is already guilty and condemned, even before his trial. Those politians like Tony Blair and George W Bush, who ‘justified’ the war on Iraq with lies and cover-ups, are allowed to go free. But Assange, who exposed war crimes during that war, is castigated andd condemned.

Among the crimes shown by Assange – which would never had seen the light of day, but for Wikileaks – was film of the wanton strafing and killing of men and youths in a street in Iraq, as they were simply hanging out and chatting. The war criminal goes unpunished, while his exposer is crucified for his actions.

Australian parliament voted for Assange to be released

Assange, if these journalists but knew it, follows in the tradition of other outspoken critics of the UK state, like John Lilburne (“Freeborn” John), who was also arrested many times for having the temerity to speak truth to power, and was eventually dumped in prison. Julian Assange’ real ‘crime’ is to expose the truth, to the great embarrassment of the US and UK states and it is for that reason and that reason alone he has  been imprisoned for years without a charge.

The UK government will have made sure that the Court as it is now in session is a “safe pair of hands”, to get the decision they want. I believe it will be a massive surprise if any decision is made that gives Julian Assange justice. The Court will doubtless disregard the vote of the Australian parliament – by a two thirds majority – to return to Julian to Australia his native country.

Unfortunately, many reports are suggesting that the judges involved in the extradition process, in both the UK and USA, are well ‘tied in’ to both countries’ establishments. So I am sceptical that they will be minded to, or even able to sustain any resistance to the perpetual behind the scenes lobbying that has gone on and is still going on, to have Assange demonised for revealing truths he was not supposed to reveal.

However, even if there is only a 1% chance of Julian’s release, the fight continues. After all, even the postmasters and postmistresses were found guilty in a court of law after Post Office Horizon IT debacle, and it is only now, after 20 years, that they have a chance of justice.

For Julian Assange’s wife and family and for Julian himself, this is a matter of life or death. His wife, Stella, has said that this might be his “final hearing” because he is so weak physically and mentally after so many years that she thinks he is unlikely to survive being extradited. The fight has to go on.

Why US and Global Capitalism Wants Julian Assange Dead

order here

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

US capitalism is “merciless” when it comes to defending its profits.German Industrialist.

 

The Collateral Murder Video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down civilians, (See full video here)  including a Reuters reporter, in Iraq (and laughing about it) is not the only reason the US ruling class wants Julian Assange dead or why he has been incarcerated for so long. Wikileaks, Assange, Chelsea Manning, Bradley Manning at the time, the whistleblower who leaked the video, have been persecuted and tortured by the US government in its brutal efforts to silence free speech and independent journalism.  Edward Snowden is another US citizen wanted by the US regime for informing us and the world of the regime’s crimes and exposing so called diplomacy for what it is.

 

I bought the book, The Wikileaks Files when Verso first published it in 2015. Every activist and socially conscious person should have a copy as a reference source.

 

Here are a few comments from the book about Russia and Ukraine and more:

“…in the decade following the century’s turn, the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia and are recurring points of conflict….”

 

Another area of warfare is trade and agriculture. Ukraine, as we now know (some of us didn’t need a war to inform us) is the largest country in Europe and main exporter of grains, particularly wheat. I remember my father, who spoke some Russian, used to call it Europe’s bread basket. We now know it is very much the former colonial world’s bread basket.

 

Wikileaks released 1000 documents from the Cablegate cache related to the US government’s, “pushing (US) industrial manufactures on its allies” but beyond that, The files point out that US support of the biotech industry is aggressive in Europe and plays an even  “…bigger role……in assuring a place for genetically modified agricultural products (GMO’s) in a region that largely wanted nothing to do with them.” The US state representing Monsanto in this example.

 

Wikileaks and the leaked cables showed that the “…American campaign promoting biotech products was a worldwide effort. In all, some 1,000 documents from the Cablegate cache address this effort…..”

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But US biotech was not all that was being pushed on the global community. Along with the  release of cables between the US state department and its representatives abroad revealing their phony diplomacy, the publishing of When Google Met Wikileaks in 2014 by OR Books was the last straw for the US ruling elite. The book is an account of a meeting Assange had (at Google’s request) when he was under house arrest in Norfolk in 2011. In late 2010, Foreign Affairs,  a journal of the Council on Foreign Relations,   published a policy piece co-written by Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and Jared Cohen, who Assange initially describes as the “director of Google ideas” Assange later referred to Cohen as “Googles director of Regime Change”.  The article, Assange writes, praises the, “reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy.”  and was the basis for a book published in 2013 titled, The New Digital Age.

 

In When Google Met Wikileaks Assange writes that, “The New Digital Age is a startingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the twenty first century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google and Mr. Cohen, a former advisor to Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.”  P53 *

 

He says of Google’s Eric Schmidt that he, “…fits exactly where he is: at the point where the centrist liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgement of the “benevolent superpower”.. They will tell you that open-mindness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil”. They believe they are doing good. And that is the problem.” P35 (my added emphasis)

 

The advance of information technology epitomized by Google…., says Assange, “…. heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism.” (P57 When Google Met Wikileaks). Through this meeting Assange draws the conclusion that Schmidt, the technocrat, and Jared Cohen, the foreign policy wonk, along with two others that accompanied them to the meeting comprised, a “…..delegation that was one part google three parts US foreign policy establishment.”

 

It’s important to remember that prior to the publishing of these books, the rape accusations against Assange and his house arrest on November 28^th 2010, Wikileaks released US diplomatic cables (Tunileaks) between the US Embassy in Tunisia and the US State Department revealing what every Tunisian knew and felt; the corruption of the US supported regime. Less than an hour after WikiLeaks had published the diplomatic cables on its own site, they were published by the dissident Tunisian website Nawaat with whom Wikileaks had formed association. "The monopoly of state media in most authoritarian Arab regimes had been progressively undermined for several years as citizens sought alternative information from dissident bloggers and television.”, Yasmine Ryan wrote in Al Jazeera at the time, but “WikiLeaks……. offered the final blow, and, in fact, found partners in the Arab world in the alternative media.”

 

Wikileaks was gaining a following among dissidents, and news outlets (primarily bloggers) in corrupt despotic regimes the US either installed or supported.

 

In December, what we know as the Arab Spring took off as a Tunisian street vendor set fire to himself protesting the rotten corrupt regime of Ben Ali, the US supported head of state that ran Tunisia, as many Arab regimes do, like a family business. The revolts spread, assisted by social media and numerous heads of Arab gangster regimes were dislodged including Hosni Mubarak who Hilary Clinton described as a “family friend”and  who Joe Biden stressed was “not a dictator” and said he should not resign. Obama and Clinton only abandoned the torturer Mubarak when it was clear the Egyptian people were removing him.

 

Julian Assange, is presently incarcerated in Belmarsh prison in the UK. The US is aiming to get the UK government to extradite him where he will no doubt be tried and likely executed for “….obtaining classified information with reason to believe that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation.” Read more at the United States Department of Justice website. As of this writing, the information Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning released to the American people and the world has not caused harm to the working class of the United States or anywhere else.

 

Julian Assange is a friend of the working class. He has not revealed things to us that we don’t already know in the abstract, what he, Chelsea Manning and people like Edward Snowden have done, is make them social fact. This undermines the pretense that diplomacy is about honor, cooperation, democracy and principles.

 

Assange is imprisoned having had no trial, having been convicted of no crime.  Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson who claimed Assange asked him to hack in to government computers has since admitted he fabricated that story and instead was, “…recruited by US authorities in order to build a case against Assange, and misled them into believing he was a close associate of the Wikileaks founder. In reality, however, he had only “volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organisation” Key Witness Admits He Lied, US Media Ignores Exculpatory Revelations The Wire 7-7-21,

 

Assange is not a socialist to my knowledge. He does not appear to have any history of trade unionism or such activity and in When Google Met Wikileaks he doesn’t see the working class as a force for change. Why would he? But he is not an enemy of the working class or the workers who, with little other opportunity, end up in uniform being sent by those in power in to military ventures that are waged in the rapacious quest profits. As I write, Ukrainian and Russian workers are dying in a proxy war between two imperialist powers, one much more powerful than the other.

 

Working class people owe Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and others like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning a debt of gratitude. They are heroic figures and we must support them in some way. If you are in a union get your local to pass a resolution condemning the continued incarceration of Julian Assange. Speak out for Edward Snowden and others as well. It’s in our interests to do so.

 

In the book Assange points out that, “for us as an organization, we are in a. position where we have the full force of a superpower and its investigative organs, and the rest of NATO, operating against us, bribing people, monitoring communications, et cetera”.

 

I know that there are millions of US workers, if they were reading this (and I wish they were so share it) would agree. The most distrusting of the US rogue regime is the US working class. Look at how they treat us. But like any citizens of any nation, without a powerful force speaking for us, one we can join, participate in and build, one that has real power, the general approach is, “better the devil we know than the one we don’t”. I get that but unfortunately that road leads to hell too.

 

Free Julian Assange

 

*Google Ideas is now Jigsaw. Cohen was the CEO as of last year.

Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

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Why The US Wants to Kill Julian Assange

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

6-08-22

 

When a writer, or someone that writes something which is how I prefer to refer to myself, takes that first step to put pen to paper, the most important decision is to decide who you want to read it.

 

The audience I would like to read this commentary is working class people. I would like millions of working class people to read what I have to say here, but I know that will not be the case. Not only do I not own a publishing outfit, I also think that millions of us do our best to ignore the madness and potential catastrophic consequences of this madness. But, most of us have children and grandchildren, and we owe it to them not to ignore reality.  It’s not as if we don’t care, we do. We care about the possibility of nuclear war, and climate change. The problem is that millions of workers, and huge sections of the middle class, just do not see a way out. There is a powerful mood in this country that there is nothing we can do.

 

If we consider Julian Assange, his incarceration and the war against Wikileaks, as well as Chelsea Manning) formerly Bradley Manning).  Here are two people that working-class people should embrace and defend. In fact, we owe a debt of gratitude to them. Manning is the whistelbower that leaked the Collateral Damage Video that showed a US attack helicopter mowing down civilians, including a Reuters reporter, in Iraq (and laughing about it). Assange has been incarcerated for years and both have been persecuted and tortured by the US government in its brutal efforts to silence free speech and independent journalism.  Edward Snowden is another US citizen wanted by the US regime for informing us and the world of the crimes of the US ruling class.

 

It is informing the world and the US population about the horrific crimes of US imperialism that Assange and Manning are guilty of. When the US state department or any US administration whether Democratic or Republican, talk of a threat to national security, they are not talking about “our” security, the US workers and middle class. Our security is constantly being undermined and actually destroyed by both these Wall Street Parties.

 

What National Security means to the folks in Washington and the Pentagon, to the US capitalist class and its representatives in these parties, is the right to profits no matter what the consequences. It means protecting the rights of capital over labor, profits over the environment, and the US over the rest of the world.

 

What Assange and Manning did, was expose their phony diplomacy. If they had exposed Russian war crimes, or Chinese war crimes, or torture in Venezuela, they would have been knighted in the UK and had their own talk shows in the US, even movies in Hollywood. Tom Hanks would play Assange and maybe Leonardo Di Caprio Manning.

 

Back in 2015 I bought the book, The Wikileaks Files. It is a book every worker should have as a reference source.

Here are a few comments from the book about Russia and Ukraine and more:

“…in the decade following the century’s turn, the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia’s regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage. As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia and are recurring points of conflict….”

 

We know the consequences of this action. But Another area of warfare is trade and agriculture. Ukraine, as we now know (some of us didn’t need a war to inform us) is the largest country in Europe and main exporter of grains, particularly wheat. I remember my father, who spoke some Russian, used to call it Europe’s bread basket. We now know it is very much the former colonial world’s bread basket.

 

When military power may prove too unpopular and might damage its reputation as the world beacon for democracy and freedom, the US regime wages an economic war. US capitalism uses its economic power and the sheer size of its productive forces in industry and agriculture (food production), to deprive other weaker countries of desperately needed commodities including food. The US blockade of Cuba has increased the misery and depravation the Cubans have had to bear during the pandemic by increasing the scarcity of much needed medical supplies. The US sanctions on Venezuela have reportedly led to 50,000 deaths As I wrote previously, the sanctions against Iraq that cost half a million lives, never gave Saddam Hussein hunger pains.

 

Wikileaks released 1000 documents from the Cablegate cache with some published in the 2015 book. Some were related to the US government’s “pushing (US) industrial manufactures on its allies” but beyond that, it points out that US support of the biotech industry is aggressive in Europe and plays an even  “…bigger role……in assuring a place for genetically modified agricultural products (GMO’s) in a region that largely wanted nothing to do with them.”

 

Wikileaks and the leaked cables showed that the “…American campaign promoting biotech products was a worldwide effort. In all, some 1,000 documents from the Cablegate cache address this effort…..”

 

The US state representing Monsanto is evident in this example.

 

I recall a German industrialist during the investigation and eventual fining of VW for cheating with mileage software in its cars, saying that US capitalism is
“merciless” when it comes to defending its profits. Indeed, four million dead in Vietnam can attest to that.

 

The authors of the first three chapters of the book, the footnotes inform us, “wish to remain anonymous”. Looking at Assange in prison in the UK should we expect otherwise? In the first chapter, and I am not going to go much beyond here, the authors remind us of the Wilsonian Doctrine, basically Manifest Destiny and the view that there is no limit to the response when the issue of building a world composed of liberal democratic states (bourgeois democracy) is the order of the day. As the authors state, “this doctrine is generally understood as the justification of military and other interventions by the US if they help produce a liberal world order….” They mean a liberal “capitalist” world order.

 

This strategy takes precedence over the concept of state sovereignty or the right of a nation to self-determination, to determine its own future,that Biden and co. are using today with regard to Ukraine. The Ukrainian working class is being used in the most horrible way as a front for US imperialism in a proxy war with its weaker Russian competitor; better they die than US Americans. The anonymous authors in The Wikileaks Files said as much back in 2015. They write: “The US sees itself as the natural vanguard of such a global order, as well as the chief bearer of any right to suppress, state sovereignty in the pursuit of liberal (capitalist RM) goals”.

 

Britain was invaluable to the US in the second great imperialist war (1939-45) as hundreds of thousands of workers from its colonies were drawn in to this war between European powers.  Nigerian, Irish, and thousands of Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindu’s fought for the allies in both world wars (were there any Indians in the movie Dunkirk?). But according to Wikileaks, in order to maintain the Wilsonian Doctrine, the US opposed a “racial equality” motion and “’self determination’”  was denied  “to colonized nations” 20 years before at Versailles.

 

The Wikileaks files points out that “The chief concern of US officials during this period was that ‘premature independence’ might lead to a new freedom for people, as yet unfit to govern themselves.” Even more astounding, Wikileaks points out that a leading US expert on African politics “William J Foltz wrote in 1966, it would take more than a few generations to teach the majority of black Africans, ‘the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics.’” This theoretical grounding explains the reason for the assassination of Lumumba, the installation of Mobutu in the Congo, the overthrow of Albenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and the support of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the support of the South Vietnamese government that couldn’t get elected by its own people and so much more. Effectively and meaningfully means safeguarding profits, not providing water, health care, infrastructure, food etc. A dictator or strong man regime was more favorable than people attempting to choose their own path.

 

I will not continue in this vein. But, given the tight control and censorship of the US mass media I watch reports from former colonial countries like India for example. The media is so controlled here (admittedly it is not the same as a dictatorial state like Putin’s Russia, (the US bourgeois has mastered the art of self-deception) but there are many former colonial countries that have a different view to the Ukraine crisis and are not happy about being dragged in to a European basically a US/NATO conflict.

In this video, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar confronts the criticism by the US and the UK that India is supporting Putin and the Russian war machine basically. Jaishankar responds perfectly and I am certain his views are held by millions of people in former colonial countries, plundered and/or bombed by the west.

 

I also consider the US bourgeois political strategist, John Mearsheimer to be pretty much right on the button in this analysis of the present situation. Here is what he says about the US, Australian and UK defense pact but more importantly is his straight forward explanation of US history and the US role in our global society in under two minutes.

 

But we never hear these views, these opinions in an serious way. They are not made available to the masses. I am not asking people to forsake the NBA finals but ….it’s in our interest to educate ourselves.

 

This aggression, this almost religious like, acceptance the US ruling class has of its role in the world and human history, is the most dangerous threat to humans as a species on this planet. They call it Manifest Destiny, the view that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable and indeed its expansion throughout the world. And that's what Marx means when he wrote about 170 years ago that the capitalist class that arose from the crumbling feudal society,”….compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” My added emphasis.

 

I recognize that the Indian External Affairs Minister and John Mearsheimer are representatives of the capitalist class and apologists for capitalism. They do not see the working class as a force for change in society. Mearsheimer in the videos I have watched never mentioned them and Jaishankar is a politician in the Hindu nationalist regime of Modi I assume. There have been massive strikes in India and it’s not likely Jaishankar has supported them. But this does not negate their comments.

 

As I pointed out in a previous commentary, Julian Assange in his other book, When Google Met Wikileaks, had some very astute observations about US capitalism and global capitalism in general, but failed to understand or even see the working class as a major player in the events ahead or even a force at all. Who can blame them in a way.

 

The reality is that we are in a period of late stage capitalism. There is little room for reform and if there is any possibility at all it will be very temporary. The recent upsurge in the class war between workers at Amazon and Starbucks and other 21^st century employers is a positive development and we hope it grows, but everything points in the other direction and if Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to be taken seriously and I think he should, the proxy war in Ukraine aimed at weakening Russia will continue for some time. The main goal is, as Blinken admitted in a rare moment of honesty, to get Russia out of the way and go for the competitor of note, China.

 

These are scary times and workers should not underestimate the rapacious quest for profits and the willingness of the US ruling class to sacrifice our standard of living and even our lives being the last ones standing in the marketplace of the world.

 

Only a united working class and a global federation of democratic social states can change this situation and drag us back from the abyss.

 

And John Mearsheimer had better watch out otherwise he may end up in the cell next to Assange.

Google, Tech Billionaires, Wikileaks and and Julian Assange

Richard Mellor

GED/HEO

The conflict in Eastern Europe is part of a wider struggle internationally between major powers. In my view it is not Russia that US imperialism sees as its major adversary but China. CIA Director William Burns says as much.

One of the problems is that at some levels, particularly 5g, China is way ahead of the US and the US tech billionaires (Oligarchs?) want help from the US taxpayer to "level the playing field".

Reading some reports about this led me to return to a a book by Julian Assange titled "When Google Met Wikileaks." The book was a result of a meeting Google boss Eric Schmidt had with Julian Assange when he was under house arrest in the UK back in 2014. Schmidt and one of his sidekicks, Jared Cohen, wrote a book titled "The New Digitial Age". Assange wrote a review of the book that was published by the New York Times and it is a chapter in, When Google Met Wikileaks. He referred to Cohen as Googles Director of Regime Change. I recommend reading it.

I do mention the invasion of Panama by the US under the pretext of hunting down a terrible drug dealer named Manuel Noriega. Noriega was an associate of George H. W. Bush and another war criminal, Oliver North.  For what actually happened in that invasion where according to US mass media, nobody died, watch The Panama Deception. A bit long but worth it. The great Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran is in it.

Wikileaks Has Dumped All of Its Files On The Internet

 

Wikileaks has dumped all of its files on the Internet. You can find them at this link:

http://bit.ly/3hBchZn

Or this one

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/?fbclid=IwAR2U_Evqah_Qy2wxNY12FMqFC5dAFUcZL5Kl4FIfQuMFMp8ssbM46oHXWMI 

The Trial of Julian Assange and Independent Journalism

Free Julian Assange. No Extradition

John McDonnell on the Trial of Julian Assange 

 

Free Chelsea Manning (again)!

March 11, 2019

“This is not my first rodeo”

U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

The Trump administration is pushing forward on its plan to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange for publishing the thousands of top-secret documents that Chelsea anonymously provided them in the spring of 2010. The documents provided an overview of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the “Collateral Murder” video, as well as State Department cables and Guantanamo prisoner information. Chelsea’s 35-year prison sentenced was commuted by President Obama in the final days of his presidency.

She could be jailed up to 18 months this time.

Chelsea Manning spoke to the press prior to be taken into custody, March 8, 2019, at the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Virginia.

As she was being taken back into custody on March 8, 2019, declaring that, “I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”
Chelsea explained:

I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury. Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system. The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after and in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events. I stand by my previous public testimony.

Daniel Ellsberg responded via the Freedom of the Press website:

Chelsea Manning is again acting heroically in the name of press freedom, and it’s a travesty that she has been sent back to jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury. An investigation into WikiLeaks for publishing is a grave threat to all journalists’ rights, and Chelsea is doing us all a service for fighting it. She has already been tortured, spent years in jail, and has suffered more than enough. She should be released immediately.

Edward Snowden via Twitter added, “I agree with @DanielEllsberg, and admire @xychelsea’s courage. Compelling sources to testify against the journalists with whom they’ve worked threatens the independent function of the free press in an open democracy. She must be released.”

Defend Chelsea Manning

A quick word about Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) who has been sent back to prison for not testifying to a US Grand Jury against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I never planned to say anything just felt I needed to say something.

But there's more I should have said.  People can get their organizations, churches, school clubs, and most importantly their union locals to pass resolutions condemning the US government's actions and that she be released.

As I say in the clip above, if you have not seen the video Collateral Murder do so. This is why the US state apparatus was intent on ridding itself of this person as she courageously made it possible for the rest of us to see it.   Despite all the lies and rumor about Manning's role as a whistleblower and that it hurt US troops, this was not the case. They want Assange primarily because they want Wikileaks shut down. This is about knowing the truth, sharing the truth with the masses of the people. All the rest is phony.

If you are in a union, introduce a resolution condemning the US government in pursuing Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks; get it sent out to the higher bodies and anyone else that will take it up. Getting it passed is almost secondary to having it discussed. The power can be tamed simply by making an issue public and debating it, especially if working class people are debating it.

This is a free speech issue and its important we support those on the front lines. The other issue I think of as I write is that the initial persecution of her was also to warn working class people and their allies in the military to keep their mouths shut.

Democratize Social Media

The following is from Left Horizons (UK) (images added)

Editorial: democratize social media

March 21^st 2018

The data amassed by Facebook and the alleged use of this by the secretive Cambridge Analytica company has raised important issues for Labour and trade union activists. It is long over-due that there should be a discussion on the role of social media within the labour movement and, perhaps even more pertinently, in the struggle for a socialist future. The problem is, of course, that many of today’s best and most hard-working activists cut their teeth in the decades before social media was around. Information Technology as a mass phenomenon is barely over two decades old, and social media perhaps half of that.

The questions that need to be asked and discussed revolve around the extent to which social media is a positive factor in the struggle for socialism and to what extent it is an obstacle to be overcome. We also need to ask how social media can best be managed and made accountable to the majority of the population, the working class.

This not the occasion to comment in great detail on the structures of the big tech giants, but it must be remembered that they are first and foremost profit-making companies. They have all been responsible for tax-dodging on an industrial scale and there are regular reports in the British press about the piddling amounts of taxes being paid by the likes of Google and Facebook, despite hundreds of millions of pounds in turnover and profit.These companies run rings around the tax authorities, by using their complex international structures to shift profits from one offshore location to another.

The social media provided by these big tech companies is now ubiquitous and across the whole planet it is dominated by only five firms: Facebook, which also owns Whatsapp and Instagram; Google, which also owns Youtube; Yahoo, which owns Flickr and Tumblr; and then Twitter and Linkedin. These companies, respectively, have 1.9bn, 1.5bn, 161m, 271m and 187m accounts. Although obviously many people will have multiple account across all these platforms, these numbers are nevertheless staggering and they are rising relentlessly.

The potential of these companies to harvest ‘meta’ data – a broad range of links, contacts and even a lot of personal detail – on on their billions of customers is mind-boggling and it is clear that the state, both in the UK, the USA and elsewhere is now fully equipped to do just that.

Britain’s facility at GCHQ and the American National Security Agency have been storing and keeping vast amounts of data for years. Wikileaks released information two years ago about the ‘PRISM’ programme of the NSA which has a colossal capacity for data collection, storage and retrieval. These agencies have the technical capacity to eavesdrop on conversations anywhere in the world where there is a mobile phone.

According to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, (writing in his book, WhenGoogle met Wikileaks), Google is thoroughly integrated into the United States military-intelligence-surveillance complex. He mentions Eric Schmidt, the executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2017 and Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, as someone who cut his teeth working for ‘agencies’ connected to the Pentagon. Google, according to Assange, has made “petabytes of data” available to the US intelligence community through its PRISM programme.

Google helped to launch a satellite from which it shares data with the US intelligence community. Its research into navigation and robotics, often through subsidiary companies like Boston Dynamics, is integrated into, and accessible to, research of the military-industrial complex. Assange quotes a sinister comment from the New York Times nearly twenty years ago:

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, 28 March, 1999).

The particular issue in the news today – the Cambridge Analytica (CA) company – is an example of how sections of the ruling class are gearing up to use social media in the political sphere. Although the Chief Executive Officer of CA has been suspended because of his exposure by a Channel 4 documentary, this suspension is little more than damage-limitation. The company was clearly set up by an old-Etonian in the first place – and bank-rolled by a wealthy hedge fund – to act as a political vehicle, not just to make a profit.

Awww! How Sweet

Cambridge Analytica claims to have played a key role in the election of Donald Trump. The company head of data, on the Channel 4 programme, boasted of the role they had played: “…when you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes but won the electoral college vote, that’s down to the data and the research…you did your rallies in the right locations, you moved more people out in those key swing states on election day. That’s how we won the election…[Trump] won the election by 40,000 in three states. The margins were tiny…”

Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive of CA boasted on the same TV expose about the ability of his company to pull the wool over the eyes of the authorities.  “…they’re not technical”, he said, referring to politicians, “They don’t understand how it works”.

Whistle-blowers who worked for social media companies have only confirmed what many have suspected for a long time, that huge amounts of personal data have been ‘harvested’ by outside bodies. Sandy Parkilas, previously the platform operations manager at Facebook told the Guardian (March 21^st) “My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data.” Asked what control Facebook had over the data used by developers, he added, “Zero, absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers, there was not any control…” The ‘blind’ suspicion that many Facebook users have expressed, that their likes, dislikes and activities are ‘monitored’ is therefore completely founded on truth. There are no effective controls and, indeed, it is likely that meta-data on all Facebook users is stored somewhere at GCHQ or NSA, or both.

We should not forget another aspect of the misuse of social media, in the form of automated accounts, so-called robot accounts, or just ‘bots’. These are accounts set up in the thousands, using apparently real people’s names, and they can be managed on this large scale by only a handful of technicians. Their purpose is to feed information, usually as links or short comments or tweets that support a particular political point of view. By using a large number of bot-generated posts, all apparently from bona-fide people, the impression can be given that a particular point of view is more widely supported than it really is. It is not only the Russians who are masters at this – the Israeli Government too has a very well-funded and accomplished IT propaganda wing that is active on social media.

There is no point in just being paranoid, however. One could reasonably ask, what does it matter if the NSA or GCHQ knows the whereabouts of every activist in the British labour movement? It would take an army of observers, even using alogrithms to weed out key words, to keep tabs on every malcontent. Moreover, the ‘malcontents’ are growing in number week by week.

Being more positive about modern technology, there is no doubt that in the information age news and information is disseminated at lightning speed all around the world. We could couple that with the fact that it seems to be proving harder and  harder to maintain secrets. Capitalism as an economic system is not only based on greed and corruption, but also on a veil of secrecy that hides the truth from a literate and intelligent population.

Increasingly, as technology becomes more ubiquitous, that veil is lifted and the public get a glimpse of the dirty dealings that go on behind closed doors. The organisation Wikileaks is itself testimony to that. In recent years we have had a succession of scandalous revelations about secret diplomacy and, above all, about tax-dodging and money laundering. The Pentagon papers lifted the veil on secret US diplomatic e-mails and then the Panama papers and the Paradise papers spilled the beans on tax-dodging.

The dissemination of this information has definitely filtered through to the social consciousness of millions of workers and in some cases has had a direct effect on fermenting big political events. In Julian Assange’s book, he quotes the former Tunisian propaganda minister, after the first stirrings of the ‘Arab Spring’ overthrew the regime of Ben Ali. The Wikileaks releases at that time, he said, were “the coup de grace, the thing that broke the Ben Ali system.” Within a month of Ben Ali being overthrown, there were civil uprisings or protests in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Sudan, Oman and even Saudi Arabia. Social media certainly played a role in galvanising these protest movements and uprisings.

Tories outspend Labour on social media advertisement

Here in the UK, it is thought that social media had a significant effect on the general election in 2015 and even more so in 2017. In the month leading up to the deadline for registration for the 2017 election, 1.76 million under-35-year-olds registered to vote.  This was higher than the figures for 2015 (1.39m) and 2016 (1.28m) and without a doubt social media played a role in getting younger voters out, the majority of whom voted Labour.

According to the BBC’s Media Show (June 14, 2017), several new social media outlets and websites made contributions to getting young people to vote. London Economic, for example, was a site set up to counteract the negative reporting on Corbyn in the national newspapers and on TV. They claim that one of their articles had 1.6m hits and hundreds of thousands of shares on social media. Another relatively new site, Evolve Politics, reporting on issues like housing and the NHS, claimed that their Facebook page had 1.3 million hits in May 2017and a reach of 17 million over last week of the election period, despite only having been going for a year. On the same radio programme, a Daily Mail journalist lamented the declining influence of papers like his.  “They just don’t have the same influence they had 25 years ago…”, he moaned. The Tory press, with a combined sale of around 9 million copies, do not reach more than a quarter of the total electorate.

Social media is actively used by labour movement activists today. There is hardly a meeting organised anywhere that is not advertised on social media. However, it is important that we also understand the limitations of social media. Discussions, arguments and issues are raised in millions of conversations on Facebook on a daily basis. Millions of tweets are posted on Twitter every day. But what is exchanged is at best a few pithy phrases, perhaps a paragraph or two, and not a few insults as well. One thing is clear, a proper discussion cannot take place on social media. There is no depth, no development and no possibility of an extended and rounded exposition of a point of view. On Twitter, even doubling the number of characters from 140 to 280, only a headline can be put forward. More often than not, Facebook and Twitter are used as signposts – to point readers in the direction of a properly-developed argument or point of view, or facts and figures somewhere on another website.

In the same way that we should recognise the limitations of social media in having serious discussions, we should acknowledge the limitations of so-called ‘e-democracy’ in supposedly promoting accountability and transparency. As with social media, e-democracy tends towards what is partial, shallow and transient. If democracy needs to be informed to be meaningful, then e-democracy is sorely lacking in information and it tends, in any case, to be controlled by those who manage the discussions and the e-election platform. When the Lansman coup took place in Momentum there was much discussion about the coup being allegedly in favour of increasing the participation of members through ‘direct’ democracy. This has turned out to be a sham. In the most recent electronic voting – on representation to Labour’s constitutional inquiry – it got a maximum of around 3800 participants, which is between 11 and 16 per cent participation, depending on which membership figures are taken.

Social media has its uses, therefore, but it also has its limitations. When there has been serious social unrest, as has happened in Egypt and, more recently in Sri Lanka, governments are not averse to shutting down social media altogether. In the struggle for socialist change the drawbacks of social media need to be understood and worked around. As long as activists in the labour movement are using social media to facilitate the organisation of meetings and activities that is all very well, but social media is not in and of itself a substitute for real, face-to-face meetings and for organisations of real people.

In the final analysis, it is not the means of conveying the message, but the message itself, that will move people into political activity. It is not social media, but austerity that is driving millions of workers across the globe in the direction of political activity and shaking up political consciousness to an unprecedented degree.

In the last general election, according to the Electoral Commission, the Tories spent four times as much as Labour on Facebook adverts (£2.1m compared to £577,000) and twice as much on Google advertising  (£560,000 compared to £254,000). Yet in every age group brought up with social media, Labour had an overwhelming majority of support. It was the message, not the medium, that counted. That, and the actual presence of a Labour leader who spoke at more than a hundred meetings and rallies around the country, by-passing the hostile national press and – to a degree – also by-passing social media.

Future success in achieving a real and lasting socialist transformation may well be facilitated by social media, at least in its early stages, but it can only be guaranteed in its fullest sense by real working class people, in meetings, demonstrations and strikes. Social media may help, but the real job to be done is on the streets, in the communities and in the workplaces.

Then a socialist government could ensure that social media is not subject to the secretive and rigid control of a handful of multi-billionaires, but would be owned and democratically managed by users and subscribers, with the support of IT specialists and elected bodies. The terms of operation of social media platforms would be open to scrutiny and their use of personal  data tightly subscribed and, in any case, transparent. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica issue has raised important issues for us in the labour movement and we should use the opportunity to discuss all the ramifications and implications for the struggle for a socialist future.

[When Google met Wikileaks, by Julian Assange, published by Navayana, 2014]

March 21 2018