Lessons Unlearned

Karl Marx knew a thing or two about politics

by Greg Godels / August 1st, 2022

Writing over a century-and-a-half ago, Karl Marx studied the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions that sought to drive a stake in the vitals of the European monarchies and consolidate the rule of the emerging bourgeois classes.

Contrary to his critics — especially the dismissive scholars — he applied his critical historical theories with great nuance and subtlety, surveying the class forces, their actions, and their influence on the outcomes. While Marx conceded that the revolutions were suppressed in the short run, he was able to show how they importantly shaped the future.

Many would argue that Marx’s account of the aftermath of the rising in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the finest example of the application of the Marxist method– historical materialism¹ — to actual events.

It is said that Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British author, who was a colleague in British intelligence of Soviet spy Kim Philby and a notorious windbag, was once asked if he ever suspected Philby, if Philby left any clues to his loyalties. After a pause, Trevor-Roper said that Philby had on an occasion insisted that The Eighteenth Brumaire was the greatest work of history ever written.

More than a clue, and Philby may have been right.

The Eighteenth Brumaire sought to explain a great mystery: How a country undergoing a profound historic transition from one socio-politico-economic order (feudalism) to another (capitalism), could go from the popular overthrow of a monarch to a constituent republic and back again to the establishment of an emperor, Louis Bonaparte, in a few short years.

Marx couldn’t help but find a bitter irony in the fact that the coup installing Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew as emperor mirrored the uncle’s ascension to emperor after the French Revolution. With equally bitter sarcasm, Marx amended the old saw about history repeating itself with the phrase “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Where Napoleon I tragically hijacked the revolutionary process, Napoleon III brought the farcical maneuvers of a dysfunctional bourgeois parliament to a farcical end by creating a farcical empire.

At a time when our own political processes — executive, legislative, and judicial — resemble a crude farce, at a time when opinion polls confirm the popular disdain for these institutions, we may well find Marx’s analysis to be of some use.

Consider ex-President Trump, for example. He, like Napoleon III, represents a mediocrity, only known for his pretensions and his rank opportunism. Trump likes to portray himself as a great president who arose as a savior, an agent for the restoration of US greatness.

Based on nostalgia for his uncle, Napoleon I, the nephew ruled France with the promise of an expanding empire to be feared and admired for its spreading of enlightened ideas; Louis Bonaparte promised to restore the unity of France, lead it towards greatness, and stability.

But are Trump and Bonaparte unique individuals who pushed themselves onto the stage of history? Are they historical accidents? Larger-than-life personalities?

Marx would argue that, in fact, Bonaparte succeeded because he enjoyed the support of a class, specifically the conservative peasantry, “the peasant who wants to consolidate his holdings… those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the empire.” Bonaparte’s supporters seek to save what they have and relive an earlier moment. In short, they want to make France [the Empire] great again. He answered the moment.

Marx explains:

In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above… Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them.

It must be noted that Marx is neither mocking nor condemning the conservative French peasantry for its support of the election of Louis Bonaparte (1849) or his coup (1851). Instead, he is explaining how and why Bonaparte could manage to rule, both legitimately and illegitimately, even after France had declared its second republic. The peasantry was, by far, the largest class. The peasantry had not yet recognized its existence as a class; it could not yet express its grievances, its interests, or its latent power in class terms; it could not produce its own class leaders. And it turned instead to a caricature, a small man with big aspirations, a toy Napoleon.

Like Napoleon III, Trump enjoyed class-based support: segments of both the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. The professionals and small business people who saw “elites” — typically urban elites — as threatening their way of life, culturally and economically, were drawn to Trump over the conventional corporate Republican leaders. Similarly, working-class voters victimized by deindustrialization, twenty-first-century economic crises, insecurity, rising costs of healthcare, etc., looked for someone “as an authority over them,” to send “them rain and shine from above,” that is, a modern-day Napoleon. They could not find that with the Democrats. They thought that they found it in Donald Trump.

Workers in the US have lost what the French peasant had yet to achieve in 1851: “…no community, no national bond and no political organization among them… They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.” Nearly eighty years of red-baiting, business unionism, and Democratic Party supplication after a rich history of class struggle have left the US working class with little class consciousness, with little ability “to form a class.” It is no wonder that Make America Great Again resonated with so many.

Both Louis Napoleon and Trump have their camp followers and thugs. Marx designated Louis Napoleon’s lumpen proletariat group of mischief-makers the Society of December 10 for the role they played in stirring the pot after his election. Trump has his ultra-nationalist, racist trouble-makers as well.

Marx saves his derision for the “so-called social-democratic party,” founded as a coalition of the petty-bourgeoisie and the workers. With the militant revolutionary workers killed, imprisoned, or exiled after the June, 1848 rising waged to establish a social and democratic republic, the workers accepted compromise and the parliamentary road. In Marx’s words:

A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. From the social demands of the proletariat the revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to them; from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie the purely political form was stripped off and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose the Social-Democracy… The peculiar character of the Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not with doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony… This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.

“…within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie.” This description of the limits of an incipient social democratic party in 1849 could be applied fairly to the aspirations of the small left wing of the US Democratic Party today. A little more than one hundred fifty years later, workers are still being herded into a party that seeks, at best, the weakening of the antagonism between capital and labor and transforming it into harmony [paraphrasing Marx]. The Democrats assume the votes of the working class and the most oppressed, while intensely courting the support of the urban and suburban upper strata super-voters and super-donors. This has been their strategy since the loss of the reactionary South to the Republicans.

In nineteenth-century France, the proletariat/petty bourgeoisie alliance was short-lived. Faced with a blatant violation of the constitutional limits of presidential action, the alliance allowed its threats of militant action to melt away when Bonaparte called its bluff, revealing a paper tiger.

Marx identified the folly of workers uniting with the petty bourgeoisie:

… instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people with the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it… No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation.

Not to be taken lightly for its defeat at the hands of Bonaparte and the bourgeois party, the petty-bourgeois took consolation with “the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then — then, we’ll show them what we are made of!”

If this sounds eerily like the empty threats of the Democratic Party before the brazen actions of Trump, his friends, and the Supreme Court, then lesson learned!

If we see parallels with the politics of nineteenth-century France and the twenty-first-century US, then we surely are reminded of Marx’s quip that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Surely, only an allergy to history, a blindness to past tragedies, can account for the continuing allegiance of workers and their leaders to a spineless Democratic Party that continually betrays the interests of working people.

Surely, we can do better. Marx thought so…

1. These reflections were inspired by a recent encounter with Jonathan White’s excellent 2021 book, Making Our Own History, A User’s Guide to Marx’s Historical Materialism, especially chapter 6. []

Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

Ukraine: a Potemkin Village Kind of War

by Todd Smith / August 1st, 2022

In his 2004 book on the 1914-18 European apocalypse, Cataclysm: the First World War as Political Tragedy, British historian David Stevenson states the war was “a cataclysm of a special kind, a man-made catastrophe produced by political acts” (from the “Introduction,” first paragraph).  Indeed, that is Stevenson’s thesis, that the Great War was a political tragedy of the first order of magnitude.  While Stevenson’s analysis perhaps over-emphasizes the role of the European political class, certainly terrible decision-making played a major part in both launching and then needlessly prolonging a war that wasted an estimated 10 million soldiering lives.  In the context of the current clash in Ukraine, Stevenson’s argument remains relevant.

Today, whether it’s Biden, Boris Johnson, Macron, Trudeau, or the EU’s Ursula von der “Crazy” (peripatetic Cypriot commentator Alex Christoforou’s coinage for von der Leyen), the Collective West’s reaction to Putin’s “Special Military Operation” has been a spectacular failure.  This really is a gang that can’t shoot straight unless, of course, they are shooting themselves in their Collective foot.  “Sanctions and Arms!” “Sanctions and Arms!” they all shouted with self-righteous indignation when Putin finally struck, as if “Sanctions and Arms!” would bring the Russian Bear to its knees, exposing Putin’s folly and crushing his regime…

Well, 3+ months into this horrific conflict, it appears that the TransAtlanticans’ policy of “Sanctions and Arms!” has proven ineffective, not to mention entirely delusional.  On the “Sanctions” front, this economic weapon has completely back-fired, with soaring fuel prices and open talk of looming food shortages — in the West!  Counter-intuitively, it seems as if Western leaders have declared war on their own citizens as much as the Russians.  Who could have foreseen that “Gas-for-Rubles” would become a catchphrase in 2022?

With reference to the massive “Arms!” transfers to AmericaNATOstan’s Ukrainian proxy forces:  How many more dead or surrendered Ukrainians will it take to show incontrovertibly both the cruelty and imbecility of this “More Weapons!” policy?  The mid-May mass surrender of the cornered Ukrainian troops in the Azovstal Steel Works — AzovStalingrad? — in Mariupol provides one clue; the current Russian rolling-up of the Donbass will be the next.  In other words:  if NATO wants to fight Russia in Ukraine, they are going to have to do it themselves.

The good news so far on this possible development is that the Death Star, or Pentagon, has no appetite for going “toe-to-toe with the Rooskie!” (Quote, if I recall it correctly, from General Buck “Bucky” Turdgeson in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, although George C. Scott’s excitably nihilist character is actually advocating for fighting directly with “the Rooskie!” in the movie). In fact, the Pentagon has been far more sober in its assessments than either the US State Department or the American Congress (not to mention our rabid Blue-and-Yellow Press), which mindlessly voted $40 billion more for the “Ukrainian” war.

So, the Ukraine Flag imogee crowd continues to maintain its “Stand by Ukraine!” Potemkin Village idiot mentality.  Of course, the Western Corporate Press is still leading the daily Cheers and “Rahs!” for Ukraine, painting a false narrative of constant Ukrainian victory — but only if we can get Zelensly a few more howitzers, tanks, planes, drones, Javelins, Harpoons (NATO boots-on-the-ground, perchance?), and bullets.  Oh, and maybe we can donate a Ouija board to President Comedian so he can summon back the “Ghost of Kyiv”?  That would truly clear the Ukrainian skies of the Russian invader this time, right?

The Potemkin Village: a Historical Snap Shot

“Potemkin spared no effort or expense in showcasing Russia’s power and resources.  He even surprised the Empress with a battalion of ‘Amazons’–100 Greek women dressed in crimson skirts and gold-trimmed jackets (spencers) topped by gold-spangled turbans with ostrich feathers.” ¹

Many things are meant, or possibly indicated, by the phrase “Potemkin Village,” which is generally understood as a kind of decorative front overlaid upon a particularly squalid or sordid reality so as to deceive the viewer as to the true state of affairs.  Today, we might call it a form of “disinformation,” whereas in times past the term “deception” would have adequately described this phenomenon.

Roundabout 1775, Russian Empress Catherine the Second (aka “the Great,” who ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796, or rather a long run…) appointed her “flamboyant favorite,” courtier Grigory Potemkin, to the office of Governor-General over most of what is now known as “Ukraine.”  At that time, the newly acquired Russian imperial lands were known as “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” in accordance with a “new”-naming fad popular amongst the prevailing European imperial powers.  In 1787, to commemorate her 25th year upon the Muscovite throne, Catherine embarked upon a 6 month journey through Novorossiya to Crimea, an extravagant political vacation with Lots of FireWorks!

Legend has it that Potemkin conspired to erect fake villages staffed by Walt Disney Peasants in order to impress the Empress with touristic delight during her voyage down the Dnieper.  This story is generally considered to be a wild exaggeration, although obviously World leaders, even today, are typically not treated to the most derelict of places they visit; quite the contrary.  U2, or the half of U2 that recently played a dolled-up underground subway stop in Kiev (or Kyiv, and I have to ask the math-musical question here:  Does one half of U2=”U1″?) certainly got the “Catherine 2,” or “Potemkin,” treatment in the Ukrainian capital.

However, there is a wholly other layer of irony to the “Potemkin Village” myth, namely:  Potemkin quite literally founded several villages that would go on to become key cities in what is now — at least for the moment — known as Ukraine, including Nikolayev, Dnipro, and Kherson.  Kherson, of course, was the first large city that Russia captured, way back in March, to little fanfare.  The Zelensky-fawning Western Blue-and-Yellow Press was strictly printing stories of heroic Ukrainian resistance then, so Russia taking a major Black Sea Ukrainian littoral town didn’t make the cut, and especially didn’t fit the “Potemkin” Narrative of plucky little neo-Nazi infested Ukraine beating the Big Bad Bear.  But:  “What about Snake Island?”  What about, indeed?  Potemkin Island would be a good title for any documentary about this conflict, or even The Ghost of Potemkin Island…

If the “Mainstream” were anywhere near the Reality Stream, many a red — and not merely “false” — flag should have been raised over the issue of “something rotten in the state of” — Ukraine.  A “Democracy” run by oligarchs with a President whose chief qualification for the job was having played the “President of Ukraine” in a comedy TV skit might have topped the list, especially after the “Trumpman Show” in the US.  Then there’s the bit about Trump’s successor, Joe “Bidenopolous” and Son’s wanton corruption in Ukraine during Obama’s reign:  What to make of that?  What to make of the Western-styled “Potemkin Village” of Democracy that is Ukraine?  How about some more “Sanctions!”, and surely more “Weapons!”

Truly, the propaganda scaffolding around this “Potemkin Village” Ukraine has been so preposterously poor that one wonders if the Covid-19 phenomenon had not only cooked, but then also eaten, the brains of the Western Elite Establishment?  Blinken blinks, absently; Nuland “Coup”-lands, hesitantly, as she describes Bio-Research Labs in Ukraine connected to the U$ under oath in a Senate hearing; and Jake Sullivan evokes an even paler shade of Jared Kushner every time he appears, which sometimes includes an MbS tantrum (although apparently pale Sullivan took Mohammed “Bone-saw” Salman’s tongue-lashing like a good boy…).

Clearly, there is a crisis of political leadership in the West, to the tune of:  These people are not fit to rule.  Instead of “isolating” Putin’s Russia as a harsh consequence for “Operation Z,” as they have all so imperiously claimed, these incompetent Western overlords have only managed to further isolate themselves from the rest of the World which everyone knows that they, the AmericaNATOstanis, view with absolute contempt.  Indeed, a mere modicum of respect for Russia and the Minsk Accords could have averted this catastrophic war that is destroying Ukraine.  In a very real-world sense, then, the Ukrainian war is certainly a “political tragedy.”

1. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend, John T. Alexander, 1989, p. 260. []
   Twitter

Todd Smith lives, writes, and observes the Brave New World Order in St. Louis. He can be reached at bartlebydick@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Todd.

The Potemkin villages myth EXPOSED - Russia Beyond

https://www.rbth.com/history/331767-potemkin-villages-myth-exposed

• The Sources
• The Reality
• The Aim of The Legend
• Read More: What Was So ‘Great’ About Catherine?

The myth of ‘Potemkin villages’ wasn’t even written during Catherine’s Crimea journey. Georg von Helbig, the secretary for the Saxon embassy at Catherine’s court, came to Russia in 1787, but was not on the journey. Between 1797 and 1800, Helbig published Grigoriy Potemkin’s biography, where, summarizing the rumors …

See more on rbth.com

• Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins

EXPLORE FURTHER

Did “Potemkin villages” really exist? - The Straight Dope

www.straightdope.com

What does potemkin mean? | Publication Coach

www.publicationcoach.com

Behind the Façade of Potemkin Villages - Messy Nessy Chic

www.messynessychic.com

Potemkin village - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Grigory Potemkin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Recommended to you based on what's popular • Feedback

Potemkin village - RationalWiki

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

• Origin
• Examples
• Images of Theresienstadt

The term dates to 1787; the story goes that the Russian statesman Grigory Potyomkin tasked with governing New Russia (recently-conquered lands in present-day Ukraine), had a fake portable settlement built to impress the visiting empress, Catherine the Great. Modern historians largely believe that the original Potemkin-…

Two Days in August Unleashing 28,000-plus Days of Conspiracy

by Paul Haeder / August 5th, 2022

Lanterns are seen on the Motoyasu river beside the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima in 2019 to mark the anniversary of the bombing (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

It is interesting to have these short essays (see below, “Two Days in August”) in the local twice-a-week newspaper where local events, school sports, the police log, food and dining and art and human interest stories line up next to long obituaries and funny pet stories.

It’s me barking up the wrong tree, for sure, and I wrote this as a way to bring light to the dark days that unleashed, as the title tells, 28,000-plus days of conspiracies. If you can murder Japanese in two cities, experimenting (sic) with uranium and plutonium bombs on civilians, you can carry out any number of other terroristic programs. You can have hit squads getting guns for coke, or you can murder your own president, or you can fake the Gulf of Tonkin, or you can help murder Allende in Chile, or you can drop plague-laced insects and rodents into Korea. The beat goes on, until the chickens come back to roost.

Imagine all the people seeking some light in the dark corridors of pancaking buildings — World Trade Center Towers — and a pancaking Building Number Seven that sustained zero hits.

These bombs did not end the war or save hundred of thousands of American soldiers’ lives.

You can fool yourself believing we are enlightened, exceptional, but how does that really happen, this collective fooling?

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Chinese Proverb

That is an ancient one, but in a world with Hearst and Pulitzer and Facebook and CIA and FBI infiltrating media, the press, academia, and with amazing stealth and concerted zest of a bad-bad education system (K12) that turns youth and creative souls into drudgery, into compliance, into non-thinkers, into sheep, we are not fooling ourselves. It’s in the DNA, until we get the Ivy League and elite colleges around the world producing (like an assembly line) neoconservatives, neoliberals and truly predatory folk, and now, folk who are not thinkers, not creative and who are compliant to the corporations, the lobbies, the others in the Deep State and the Deep Morass of Money.

The topics of the day, in 2022, are now virtrual landmines. You can’t talk about sex, drugs, religion, politics, science, policy, international issues, pharmacuticals, medicine, abortion, education, social work, military spending, culture, the current generation and next one. Or, you can bring these topics up, but be ready for closed minds and mean discourse and broken debates. Yelling and shouting and hating and breaking ranks and estrangement and isolation and locked down thinking, and reaching the metal ceiling of prejudice, bias and backward thinking.

[sinking of the Lusitania]

[attack of the USS Liberty by Israel]

[Building Seven]

[Tuskegee syphillis experiment (sic)]

[Illegal bombing of Cambodia]

[Gulf of Tonkin False Flag]

[Colin Powell and yellow cake lies]

[18 years in prison for telling the world about Israel’s illegal nuke program]

[Murder of Salvador Allende]

[Che]

So, all of that, all those precursors to plutonium and uranium bombs, and since then, we get the picture. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr is getting in on the fascism with a new short book:

[Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Debuts NEW Book]

Of course, Naomi Wolf did that fascism accounting years ago:

We are still in the Kill the Messanger mode:

And here we are, the Press, the so-called liberal media, dead on arrival with this hero:

*****

Here it is, my 1,000 word column coming out Friday, August 5, per the editor’s guarantee.

Two Days in August

By Paul Haeder

I recognize August 6 and 9 as evidence of my country’s cruelty to humankind.

How many News Times readers remember the classroom drills: Duck and Cover? That was the mantra for me growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. The US and overseas schools ran these nuclear attack drills all the time.

Students now practice active shooter lockdowns and room clear protocols in case of an unruly, violent fellow student.

For most of my adult life as a teacher and journalist, it has been an uphill battle trying to inform my fellow Americans about history. One sticking point includes the ignorance of the great sacrifices Russia made in defeating the Nazi’s. To this day, I have 60-year-old friends who think the Second World War was won by the US and believe the number of casualties and deaths suffered country by country puts the US on top of the death toll.

That baseline, much of what Americans get wrong about that war, Russia, Europe, the US’s role in things – to include the hatred the British and Americans had toward the Soviet Union, and what reparations really were about – keeps Americans locked in a magical thinking La-La Land.

Before we get to “The Bomb,” here’s the WWII count: Soviet Union – military deaths, 8,800,000 to 10,700,000; total deaths including civilians, 24,000,000. For the United Kingdom they had 383,600 military killed and 450,700 combined military and civilians. For the United States the totals, respectively, are 416,800 and 418,500.

Shifting to the two bombs the US dropped on Japan, I call these moments in August 1945 days that should live in infamy – the needless bombing of two “virgin” Japanese cities that did not end the war with Japan but rather was “a message to the Soviet Union.”

I was a college instructor for various military organizations, including at the US Army’s Sergeants Major Academy. I had career soldiers cry reading their personal essays aloud: narratives about their own childhood traumas, and sometimes the trauma of battle. I’ve had military students challenge my background and knowledge of world history and the history of both World War I and II.

Some of them, however, backed me up when I taught about the reality of why President Harry Truman dropped the bomb twice on Japan.

Using the atom bomb to vaporize a Japanese city was the stratagem to intimidate the Soviets and coerce them into making concessions with respect to postwar arrangements in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Just a few weeks after those two bombs destroyed two Japanese cities, Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, declared that “the atom bomb had been used because such a demonstration of power was likely to make the Soviets more accommodating in Europe.”

Truman’s message to the world concerned the US’s unmatched power by dropping the atom bomb on a big city. However, some of the scientists involved in the development of the bomb, in the Manhattan Project, lobbied to have the bomb dropped on an uninhabited Pacific Island.

This is our history: Truman did not want a weapon-to-end-all-weapons to misfire or fail completely. He wanted the bomb to be dropped, unannounced, on a virgin city. The capital, Tokyo, was out of the question since it already had been flattened by “conventional” bombing.

Our war department was strategic: by early August 1945, there were only ten Japanese cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants that remained more or less unscathed by bombing raids.

Imagine: Hiroshima and Nagasaki qualified for this inhumane experiment. The bomb was ready to be deployed before the USSR got involved in the Far East. Hiroshima was flattened on August 6.

The Japanese did not react with an immediate unconditional capitulation because while the damage was great, it was not greater than the March 9 and 10, 1945 attack by thousands of bombers on Tokyo that caused more destruction and killed more people than that “virgin” target of Hiroshima.

The surrender of Tokyo did not occur by August 8 – three months after the Germans surrendered in Berlin. The USSR declared war on Japan and the Red Army attacked Japanese troops in Northern China on August 8, 1945.

A second bomb, just one day after the Soviet Army battled Japanese in the Far East, was dropped. On August 9,  another “virgin” city, Nagasaki, was destroyed by Truman’s bomb. Many Japanese Catholics perished. A former American army chaplain later stated: “That’s one of the reasons I think they dropped the second bomb. To hurry it up. To make them surrender before the Russians came.”

This chaplain might not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.

The myth of how the Japanese were defeated or surrendered was embedded in Americans when I first taught classes in 1981, and then in 2000 when I taught at the NCO Academy, in 2011 when I taught in Seattle at a Jesuit school, and in 2022 when my friend argued with me about who and how the war was won.

Admiral William Leahy, in command of U.S. Pacific forces, said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade.” Sixty-five Japanese cities were in ashes. General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a Newsweek interview: “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. Those  226,000 mostly civilian Japanese perished in two cities because the US wanted to send a message to the USSR.

Seventy-seven years later the US is deploying a similar military stratagem in Ukraine.

Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

Albo and Assange

by George Galloway / July 31st, 2022

The clock is ticking for the greatest Australian in history. If PM Albo doesn’t do something soon, Assange will be sent away never to be seen again. We can only hope the PM is working behind the scenes to do what he knows in his heart is right.

George Galloway is a six-term parliamentarian, freedom fighter, and man of the world. Read other articles by George, or visit George's website.

Penal Assassination: The Gradual Effort to Kill Assange

by Binoy Kampmark / July 30th, 2022

They really do want to kill him.  Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison.  The locality and venue, for the purposes of this exercise, are not relevant.  Like the Inquisition, the Catholic Church was never keen on soiling its hands, preferring the employ of non-church figures to torture their victims.

In the context of Assange, Britain has been a willing jailor from the start, guided by the good offices of Washington and none too keen in seeing this spiller of secrets released into the world.  Bail has been repeatedly, and inexcusably, refused, despite the threats posed by COVID-19, the publisher’s own deteriorating health, and restrictions upon access, at regular intervals, to legal advice from his team.  Just as some banks are deemed too large to fail, Assange is considered too large a target to escape.  Let loose again, he might do what he does best: reveal government venalities in war and peace and prove the social contract a gross deception and mockery of our sensibilities.

The UK legal system has been the ideal forum to execute the wishes of Washington.  Each legal branch that has examined the extradition case has assiduously avoided the bigger picture: the attack on press freedom, exposing war crimes, illegal surveillance of a political asylee in an embassy compound, the breaches of privacy and legal confidentiality, the encroachments upon family life, the evidence on proposed abduction and assassination, the questionable conflicts of interest by some judicial members, the collusion of State authorities.

Instead, the courts, from the outside, have taken a blade to cut away the meatiest, most solid of arguments, focusing on a sliver that would be, in due course, defeated.  The sole decision that favoured Assange only did so by essentially regarding him as an individual whose mental fragility would compromise him in a US prison facility.  In such a case, suicide would be virtually impossible to prevent.  District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who made the ruling, thought little of the publisher’s credentials, heartily agreeing with the prosecution that no journalist would have ever exposed the names of informants.  (This farcical interpretation was rebutted convincingly in the Old Bailey trial proceedings.)

The rest has been a grotesque show of gargantuan proportions, with the High Court and the Supreme Court showing themselves to be political dunces or, which is not much better, dupes.  Believing a number of diplomatic assurances by US prosecutors on Assange’s post-extradition fate, made after the original trial, seemed awfully close to a form of legal match-fixing.  We all know that court cases and the law can be analogised as betting and having a punt, the outcome never clear till it arrives, but this was positively ludicrous.

To anyone following the trial and knowing the feeble nature of reassurances made by a State power, especially one with the heft of the United States, promises about more commodious accommodation, not being subject to brutal special administrative measures, and also being allowed to apply for a return to Australia to serve the balance of the term, was pure, stenchy balderdash.

Amnesty International is unequivocal on this point: diplomatic assurances are used by governments to “circumvent” various human rights conventions, and the very fact that they are sought to begin with creates its own dangers.  “The mere fact that States need to seek diplomatic assurances against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (other ill-treatment) is indicative of a risk of torture.”

The US prosecuting authorities have even gone so far as to weaken their own position, making their undertakings conditional.  Typically, they shift the focus back on Assange, suggesting that he might influence matters by his own mischievous conduct.  All in all, nothing said was binding, and the glue holding the promises together might, at any given moment, dissolve.

Admirably, Assange continues to have some fiercely dedicated followers who wish him well and wish him out.  Independent Australian MP Andrew Wilkie has the sort of certitude that can pulverise the attitudes of bleak sceptics, though even he must nurse a few doubts.  In his address to supporters of Assange in Canberra, delivered on the lawns of the Australian Parliament, he was confident that keeping “the pressure up” would eventually lead to justice for the publisher.

In a crisp summation, Wilkie distilled the case.  “The US wants to get even and for so long the UK and Australia have been happy to go along for the ride because they’ve put bilateral relationships with Washington ahead of the rights of a decent man.”  Keep maintaining the rage, he urged his audience.

The matter is considered so urgent that Australian Doctors For Assange have warned that death may be peeking around the corner.  “Medical examinations of Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison in the UK,” stated spokesman Robert Marr, “have revealed that he is suffering from severe life-threatening cardiovascular and stress-related medical conditions, including having a mini-stroke as a result of his imprisonment and psychological torture.”

The organisation has written to US Ambassador Carolyn Kenney “requesting she urgently ask President Biden to stop the US persecution of Australian citizen Julian Assange for merely publishing information provided to him and stop the US attempt to extradite him from the UK.”

From the Australian perspective, we can already see that there is a go-slow, cautious approach to Assange’s fate, which also serves the lethal agenda being pursued by the US prosecutors.  Despite a change of the guard in Canberra, the status quo on power relations between the two countries remains unaltered.  Everyone, bar Assange, seems to have time to wait.  But in terms of life and health, the time in question is almost done.

Read also “The Slow-motion Assassination of Julian Assange.”

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Justice in the Land of the Free^TM

The cases of Griner and Assange

by Kim Petersen / August 5th, 2022

I feel for American basketball player Brittney Griner. Did she break the law? Yes, she did, and she pled guilty at trial. But a sentence of nine years — to be spent in what the New York Times calls a “penal colony” — for bringing hashish into Russia for self-treatment (assuming this is true) seems overly harsh. But the law can be an ass. If humans have sovereignty over their own bodies, then it is just plain wrong to be hassled for what one chooses to consume.

On the other hand, Griner should be accorded the same treatment from the Russian justice system as any Russian would be accorded. If this has been the case, then it can be argued that justice was meted out without favoritism in the Russian system.

Still, if it was a packing error, then Griner is paying a high price for a mistake that on its face would cause no harm to any other person.

US president Joe Biden called the sentence “unacceptable” and said he will do all he can to bring Griner back to the United States. When a country considers that one of its citizens is a victim of injustice abroad, then a country should agitate on behalf of its citizen.

A prisoner swap with Russia has already been broached by the US, so Griner may be back stateside before long.

Julian Assange: A Victim of Injustice

There is a current case, however, that speaks to notions of justice in western countries. Biden apparently considers the American legal pursuit of Assange — an Australian citizen whose acts (i.e., journalism) were committed outside the US — as acceptable. The US claim to extraterritoriality is well known to China and Meng Wanzhou.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been languishing in some form of incarceration for over 20 years, and he now faces potential imprisonment for the rest of his life if extradited and found guilty of espionage in the US. People who are clued in realize these charges are as phony as the sexual crimes alleged and dropped against him by Sweden. Assange’s actual “crime” is exposing the crimes of the US; especially revelatory was the Collateral Murder video where US troops in an Apache helicopter gleefully gunned down Iraqi citizens on a street in Baghdad. The murderers remain scot-free. For exposing war crimes, Assange and Bradley Manning have been punished.

Is Australia concerned about justice for its citizens? Assange has hardly received an iota of Australian government concern or assistance compared to that Griner has received from the US. Assange has also received scant support from the Australian monopoly media. In fact, Australian government leaders and media have usually criticized Assange or distanced themselves from him.

What if China were switched with the US and found itself faced with what Assange is accused of by the US? What would be the situation then?

Assange who has not been overly kind to China, has, nonetheless, received support from China. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “All eyes are on Assange’s human rights conditions and what may become of him. Let us hope and believe that at the end of the day, fairness and justice will prevail. Hegemony and abuse of might will certainly not last forever.”FacebookTwitterReddit

Email

Kim Petersen is an independent writer and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. Twitter: @kimpetersen. Read other articles by Kim.