Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

December 30, 2014

David Duke’s warning

Filed under: Iran,racism — louisproyect @ 9:50 pm

RAW STORY

Ex-KKK leader David Duke: Lay off Steve Scalise or I’ll start naming other pols I met with

David Ferguson


30 DEC 2014 AT 14:24 ET

David Duke (DavidDuke.com)

David Duke (DavidDuke.com)

In an interview with Fusion.net explaining his connection to current House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), Duke said that he is exceptionally well-connected within the U.S. political class and that charges of racism against him are a product of the media’s “zionist” and “tribalist” mentality.

Incoming Majority Whip Scalise has come under fire over a speaking engagement with Duke’s pro-white EURO (European-American Unity and Rights Organization) foundation in 2002.

According to Duke, the rush to repudiate Scalise and his possible white-nationalist sympathies is “all bullshit.”

“I’ve grown up” since his days as a Grand Wizard of the Klan, Duke told Fusion’s Brett Logiurato via phone. “And I know who the real racists are.”

* * * *

Yeah, and this is one of them:

December 29, 2014

2014 in review

Filed under: Uncategorized — louisproyect @ 8:17 pm

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 490,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 21 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

In response to “Selling ‘Peace Groups’ on US-Led Wars”

Filed under: Syria — louisproyect @ 6:28 pm

If a link to Margaret Sarfehjooy and Coleen Rowley’s article “Selling ‘Peace Groups’ on US-Led Wars” had not been posted on Marxmail, I probably would have missed it since Robert Parry’s Consortium website is not part of my daily tour of pro-Assad propaganda. The World Socialist Website is about all I can bear, especially since I don’t want to do anything to bring my blood pressure up to worrisome levels.

The article is a smear job on Minneapolis peace activists who have had the temerity to oppose Bashar al-Assad. But before getting into the article, some words about the authors are in order.

Coleen Rowley is well known for being an ex-FBI agent who became something of a whistle-blower after 9/11. She faulted the FBI for not acting on information about the hijackers that the Twin Cities office had supplied. Her intervention led to her being co-named Time Magazine “Person of the Year” in 2002. Despite becoming a peace activist and a critic of governmental abuse, there is some connection between her present-day activism and the vigilance she displayed after 9/11—namely a belief that “jihadist” terrorism has to be exposed and fought wherever it rears its ugly head. She might oppose the “war on terror” but by the same token sees most forms of Muslim resistance to oppression as outside the pale. For example, in an article on the Boston Marathon bombings, she decried the FBI’s failure to arrest the Tsarnaev brothers prior to the terrorist attack but shows little interest in what would cause Chechens to resort to such desperate measures. By analogy, you cannot write about the rise of ISIS in Iraq without understanding how Sunnis were being oppressed by the Shiite government.

Her co-author Margaret Sarfehjooy is an Iranian-American with clear affinities for the Islamic Republic. For example, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited New York in 2010, she was part of a delegation that included Brian Becker of the ANSWER coalition, a pro-Assad outfit. That Ahmadinejad’s cops had been torturing the men who were trying to organize a bus driver’s union in Tehran did not seem to discomfit them.

As might be expected, Sarfehjooy is one of those people who saw the Syrian revolt as the first stage in a military assault on Iran:

A new geopolitical monster, NATOGCC, includes the key role of Qatar and the UAE in the NATO invasion─and destruction─of Libya. After the NATOGCC win in Libya, they are on a roll. The GCC strategy of regime change in Syria is the preferred way to weaken Iran.

If this was bullshit in 2012, think how much more so it is in 2014 when the USA, Syria and Iran are in a de facto coalition against Sunni rebels. If in Rowley’s eyes, “jihadism” is a major threat to world peace and security, why not sling mud at activists in Minneapolis who took up the cause of Syrian rebels? And if it requires writing lies about them, so be it. The ends justify the means, doesn’t it?

All in all, the article reminded me of what someone told me on Facebook in late 2013 during Obama’s empty threat about crossing “red lines”: even if the accusation that Syrian rebels gassed their own people in East Ghouta was false, it doesn’t matter as long as it benefits the antiwar movement. I have a different attitude toward such matters. If the left is seen as capable of telling lies, it will lose its credibility. That is one of the reasons the CPUSA lost 90 percent of its membership after the Khrushchev revelations.

Let me now roll up my sleeves, don some wading boots and turn to the article itself.

It purports to be an exposé of a Quaker group called “Friends for a Nonviolent World” (FNVW) and a group it helped launch, the “Committee in Solidarity with the People of Syria” (CISPOS). Both are based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, as are their accusers. Most of the attacks are on CISPOS but FNVW comes off as willing dupes: “Do the real pacifist members approve? Or even know?”

They write: “In Minneapolis, FNVW and its spin-off CISPOS hosted several events with Syrian expats who were on record as supporting the U.S. bombing of their country.” This charge stopped me dead in my tracks. As Michael Karadjis noted in a comment about this article on Marxmail, this is a charge they had an obligation to back up but did not:

Yet the only “evidence” provided in the article is “In Minneapolis, FNVW and its spin-off CISPOS hosted several events with Syrian expats who were on record as supporting the U.S. bombing of their country.” Read it again – that’s it! No names, no details, not even another sentence to elaborate. We take the authors’ seedy words that other speakers were allegedly “on record” for calling for bombing Syria. Is it even true? And if, so, what meetings? Were the meetings about bombing Syria? Was it a discussion, where some speakers advocated bombing Syria, while people like Mohja Kahf, who is well-known to oppose bombing, speaking against this view? Was it a meeting where those who the authors allege “are on record” supporting bombing perhaps didn’t discuss that issue at all? Who knows? Who can judge? No-one, because the authors are just slimy slander-mongers, so they think detail is irrelevant.

The brunt of Rowley and Sarfehjooy’s attack is directed at Mohja Kahf and her ex-husband Najib Ghadbian, who are likened to the Iraqis who met with neocons in the years leading up to the invasion in 2003:

Often Syrian “experts” speaking to peace groups, such as FNVW/CISPOS’s upcoming speaker, Mohja Kahf, have ties to the early destabilization of Syria. This American Prospect article documents how Najib Ghadbian, Kahf’s husband of over 20 years (apparently up to last year when they divorced) was one of the Syrian dissidents who attended the early 2006 meeting with Liz Cheney (then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter), along with other Syrian dissidents to plan how to destabilize Syria and topple its government. Like some Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons’ choice to run post-invasion Iraq, Kahf’s husband apparently got himself invited to Liz Cheney’s “Iran-Syria Operations Group” by having signed the “Damascus Declaration” in 2005, the year before.

There’s so much here that is crap, one hardly knows where to begin. To start with, the “destabilization” of Syria must be a reference to the peaceful protests that Kahf hailed in any number of her articles. In fact she is committed to nonviolence and regrets that an armed resistance was formed. As a reminder of how those protests were dealt with by the Baathist dictatorship, here’s a reminder. In February 2011, after schoolchildren from Dara’a wrote anti-Assad graffiti, the cops arrested 15 of them and took them to jail where they were tortured. All of them were 16 years old and younger. Had these kids met with Liz Cheney? Inquiring minds want to know.

Dara’a was an agricultural center, a hick town in other words It might be useful to recall what drove people in such towns remote from the glittering capital of Damascus to rise up. Ironically you can find the facts on the World Socialist Website, which before it became a mouthpiece for the Baathist dictatorship was capable of distinguishing black from white as this article written just before the uprising began indicates:

The situation in the agricultural areas is dire. Twenty percent of Syria’s economy derives from agriculture. According to government and UN estimates, 1.3 million people have been affected by drought over the past three years, mainly in the north and east of the country where 800,000 have been severely affected. Up to 80 percent of them live mostly on a diet of bread and sugared tea, which does not meet their daily calorific and protein needs.

Unable to afford to feed their animals, many herders sold all their livestock at low prices, while an estimated 5 to 7 million animals died, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation. People have left their homes for the towns and cities. So great has been the distress that the UN World Food programme has signed an agreement with Syria to provide US$32 million to provide food, seed, animal fodder and other assistance to 300,000 people.

That’s what destabilized Syria, not anything that Mohja Kahf and or her ex-husband wrote or did.

Now to the question of Mohja Kahf advocating American intervention in Syria, which is coyly implied in the article but not openly stated since that would cross the line into Big Lie territory. It is worth looking at her Facebook page, where you will search in vain for any statement in support of American bombing.

I also invite you to visit the Facebook page for CISPOS, where you will not only find no calls for bombing Syria but instead a post that calls for just the opposite:

Screen shot 2014-12-29 at 12.51.43 PM

Does this matter to Margaret Sarfehjooy and Coleen Rowley? I am sure it doesn’t because the real crime of CISPOS is not advocating “regime change” in Syria but calling attention to the genocidal policies of the Baathist tyranny. It is quite depressing that people on the left can stoop so low as to sweep its crimes under the rug but a lot of this has to do with Islamophobia. As the term phobia implies, there is fear and hatred of the Syrian poor who invoke Islamic rhetoric in a desperate struggle to keep their spirits up in a war that has cost 200,000 lives. If Syria were as populous as the USA, this would equate to 3 million dead, all within four years.

The pro-Baathist left has taken up a cause that is remarkably reactionary. Assad’s soldiers, particularly the more fanatical Alawite detachments, post graffiti stating, “God, Bashar, Syria and Nothing Else” and “Al-Assad or we burn down the country.” It looks like they are making good on their promise.

 

December 26, 2014

Reading Trotsky While Watching Kurosawa

Filed under: Counterpunch,Film,Kurosawa,Trotskyism — louisproyect @ 8:28 pm

yojimbo-film-13526-hd-wallpapers copy
COUNTERPUNCH WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 26-28, 2014

In Search of a Marxist Method for Film Criticism

Reading Trotsky While Watching Kurosawa

by LOUIS PROYECT

A couple of weeks ago an Australian friend and fellow Marxist raised some interesting questions about film:

I have just moved to the capital city of the state and attended my first film festival. I have always enjoyed movies but in the past have been living in regional centers.

It got me thinking about what constitutes a “good movie” and yourself and David Walsh are the only two Marxist movie critics I can think of. David never seems to like anything very much and his discussion of culture – which is interesting- relies heavily on Trotsky’s ‘Literature and Revolution’.

I know you have written in passing about the sort of movies you like but wondered if you’d written more systematic about Marxism movie criticism.

Despite having written over nine hundred film reviews in the past twenty years or so, I have never really given much thought to the question of “Marxist movie criticism”.

Unfortunately Walsh has stopped writing film reviews for the World Socialist Website, which for my money was the only thing worth reading there. It’s a dirty little secret but most of the material that appears on wsws.org is extracted from the bourgeois press and then spiked with Marxist rhetoric about how evil the capitalist system is, as if we needed any reminding. I’d rather read the NY Times and make such observations myself.

Unlike Walsh, I stay away from Hollywood films except for the end of the year when I am obligated to watch a sufficient number of films like “Gravity” or “Zero Dark Thirty” to make sense out of the nominations my colleagues in New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) put forward at our annual awards meeting. Most of what I review is either documentaries or gritty neorealist films from “foreign” countries (nothing is more foreign to me than Hollywood) so I have a much lighter burden than Walsh.

read full article

Founder/editor of Swans is incapacitated

Filed under: swans — louisproyect @ 4:18 pm

Gilles d’Aymery with Jan Baughman, his wife and co-editor

This morning an old friend and–like me–a former contributor to Swans, an online magazine, informed me that a notice appeared on its home page announcing an uncertain future due to the incapacity of its founder and long-time editor Gilles d’Aymery:

Note from the Editors: Dear readers, contributors, and friends. We are sorry that we haven’t been able to publish since July 28, 2014. Gilles has suffered three cerebral concussions that have left him impaired. He’s lost most mobility. He cannot walk at all and moves on a chair. He’s lost much ability with his two hands and has a difficult time to type on the keyboard. On top of this he has suffered some brain damage. Therefore, it is a condition that makes it impossible to maintain Swans until his health improves. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will try to put together an end of the year review, but we certainly cannot promise that it will happen. Same for our Infamous Predictions.

I wrote for Swans between 2003 and 2011 but resigned after d’Aymery wrote an intemperate attack on Paul Buhle who had begun writing for Swans. Over the years I had never gotten used to his tongue-lashings at people who were writing for the magazine over trivial offenses. Since nobody was getting paid, it took some gumption to call them on the carpet as if they were your employees.

I had resigned from Swans once before, I can’t remember exactly when but I do remember why. Not long after I began blogging as the Unrepentant Marxist, d’Aymery wrote some rude comment about how I was wasting my time in some narcissistic enterprise or words to that effect. It was the first and last time he had been rude to me. He learned that I am more than happy to contribute articles but would not stand for verbal abuse. Other Swans contributors were much more willing to put up with it, possibly writing it off as “oh, that’s just Gilles blowing off steam”.

Of course, there was another side to Mr. Hyde. In a hundred different ways, d’Aymery was extremely warm and supportive to me over the years and to other members of the Swans “flock”. He was deeply appreciative of what I wrote and took great care in editing and offering suggestions to make the articles better. At his best, he could be a writer’s gift from heaven.

Despite his evidently professional skills as editor, d’Aymery’s background was in business:

Gilles d’Aymery was born in 1950 in France. Educated at the Universities of Economics & Law of Toulouse and Paris, and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, he’s traveled extensively and speaks several languages. Aymery has worked in the international oil & gas industry, moved to the U.S. in 1982, eventually changed course to become a computer consultant to small US businesses, and created Swans in 1996. He has been dedicating his time to Swans since January 2001.

I knew little else about d’Aymery except that he had a bad motorcycle accident some years ago that resulted in serious injuries to his legs. When I learned about his round of concussions, I speculated that it might have been the result of this disability combined with old age lack of coordination that might have led to repeated falls. One of the reasons I was so anxious to lose weight and reduce my blood pressure was to avoid medications that could make me lose my balance and injure myself.

In August 2012 I began writing for CounterPunch, an act that d’Aymery considered a betrayal. He always saw CounterPunch as a rival even though I doubt that Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair viewed Swans in the same fashion. Swans had an approach that was much more rooted in print culture than the Internet. It came out on a biweekly basis and refused to allow articles to be crossposted elsewhere. D’Aymery was okay with a couple of paragraphs and a link to Swans but would get tough with anybody who violated his rules.

He approached me in 2003 because I had become a fairly high profile opponent of NATO’s war in Yugoslavia and the post-911 “War on Terror”. At the time Swans was a pole of attraction for people like Edward Herman whose anti-imperialism was based on cold war divisions. Since Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were figures with long-standing ties to the Soviet bloc, it was natural to take your stand with them even if you were forced to admit that they violated human rights.

My background was different from Herman’s. As a Marxist, I would have had no problem backing individuals and movements that had the blessings of the US State Department. But in the intense propaganda war over Iraq that pitted us against “laptop bombardiers” like Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Bérube and Norm Geras, it was easy if not necessary to play down our differences with someone like Saddam Hussein.

After Putin invaded Chechnya, I began to part ways with the Edward Hermans of the world. My Trotskyist training kicked in, especially the article the Old Man wrote in 1938 titled “Learn to Think” that warned against Manichean politics:

If the French fascists should make an attempt today at a coup d’etat and the Daladier government found itself forced to move troops against the fascists, the revolutionary workers, while maintaining their complete political independence, would fight against the fascists alongside of these troops. Thus in a number of cases the workers are forced not only to permit and tolerate, but actively to support the practical measures of the bourgeois government.

In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.

Despite the preponderance of articles in Swans that did indeed automatically placing a minus sign where Samantha Powers put a plus, I never considered resigning. For that matter, I never would consider resigning from CounterPunch even though most articles follow the Edward Herman anti-imperialist methodology. Swans was important to me in the same way that CounterPunch became important. Both publications were stocked with well-written and interesting articles that could not be found elsewhere, especially those covering the cultural beat. I was always proud to share writing credits with Peter Byrne at Swans, a man who focused on the cultural and who was hip enough to describe himself in these offbeat terms:

Born in Chicago, Peter’s wandering has never lessened his affection for that American city par excellence. He had his anti-American period just after his bout of acne. But he was surprised to discover, as he changed addresses, that there were creeps and non-creeps in roughly equal proportions around the globe. Though curious about history, his own bores him. He was once heard to murmur, “Stuff your index cards and the assumption that the teacher always knows best.” The past is passed and he’s only concerned about what he’ll write tomorrow morning.

In the evening he may look into what the local thespians are up to or bolster the dwindling public at one of the fleapits. Sometimes he stays home and ponders the lives of all those other Peter Byrne’s that live in Google-land. He once thought about singling himself out by signing P. Tecumseh Byrne, but discarded the idea when it caused a laughing fit in Gabriella. In the small hours he’s prone to wrestle with his principal metaphysical problem: How to outwit the airline officials who insist on charging him excess baggage fees for all the books he brings back from abroad.

Peter, who is even older than me, stopped by my apartment six or seven years ago where we had a stimulating conversation. He reminded me a lot of the bohemians I ran with at Bard College and who were my kind of people long before I went through the largely unproductive experience of Trotskyist sectarianism. My politics, like many of my favorite writers at Swans and CounterPunch, is joined at the hip to art and culture. In a way I regret having lost my connection to Swans, a place that no matter how much Gilles d’Aymery got on my wrong side always made me feel at home.

December 25, 2014

The Interview

Filed under: anti-Communism,Film,Korea — louisproyect @ 6:45 pm

The good news is that “The Interview” will have little impact on American public opinion vis-à-vis North Korea since it is such a flaccid work, unsure whether to make fun of its co-stars or to deliver Reagan-era sermons on the evils of Communism. It succeeds at neither of these competing goals.

The bad news is that it is one of the lamest comedies imaginable, a formulaic imitation of films like “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and “Zoolander” that feature a leading character of monumental stupidity. The “jokes” boil down to the main character saying or doing idiotic things. It is, of course, possible to make a comedy featuring such a character—the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films being a prime example. But the Pink Panther films revolve around ingenious set-ups where the stupidity of Inspector Clouseau is put to good use.

A year after leaving the Trotskyist movement, I took a writer’s workshop at NYU that was largely a waste of time. But one thing the instructor told us rang true. He said that comedy was much more difficult to write than serious literature. I complete agree with this based on the evidence of Hollywood comedies over the past 25 years or so. Blake Edwards, the director and screenwriter for the Pink Panther films, illustrates comedy done with intelligence. Edwards started off as an actor in the 1940s in films directed by John Ford, William Wyler and Otto Preminger, three masters from the Golden Age of American film. By contrast Seth Rogen, who directed and wrote the screenplay for “The Interview”, acted in Judd Apatow films, a major contributor to the epidemic of unfunny comedies Hollywood cranks out on an assembly-line that are marketed to 15-year old boys who can’t get enough fart, tits and penis jokes.

Rogen plays Aaron Rapaport, the producer of “Skylark Tonight”, a soft news show of the sort that might appear on MTV. James Franco, who has been directed to mug in every scene to the point where you can barely stand another minute of his eyebrow-wagging and hand-flailing histrionics, plays Dave Skylark. It is the same sort of overwrought performance that made “Spring Breakers” unwatchable. Along with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, Franco is now one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for scenery-chewing renditions of “colorful” characters.

In the entire film, there is not a single word that comes out of Skylark’s mouth that can be mistaken for what an actual person might say. Like Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy in the Apatow film that obviously inspired “The Interview”, Franco’s character is intended as satire—a TV newsman who does not understand how foolish he appears. If you ever want to see how such a character can be developed skillfully, I’d refer you to the Mary Tyler Show that played on CBS from 1970 to 1977. It was a comedy based on a TV news show that featured Ted Baxter, a vain and pompous news reader who was close enough to the real thing (think David Gregory) to work as satire. Rogen was not writing satire; he was writing burlesque and a rather crude one at that.

As you probably know, since the film’s Kim Jong-un is supposedly a fan of “Skylark Tonight”, he invites Rapaport and Skylark to come to North Korea to interview him. When the CIA learns that they are given this opportunity, they recruit Skylark to poison him with ricin. But in the course of spending time with the dictator, Skylark decides after the fashion of Dennis Rodman that he is a nice guy after all and backs out of the assassination plot. It is only when he discovers that a grocery store near Kim’s palace is filled with fake fruit and vegetables that he decides to go through with the plot.

Once Skylark is back on board for the mission of killing Kim, the film descends into completely idiotic action sequences where the North Korean military and the two newsmen (plus a woman that has been assigned to be their handler but who is secretly an enemy of the regime) engage in machine gun battles out of the Sylvester Stallone/Chuck Norris playbook. It is as slapdash and uninspired as the preceding more “comical” scenes. After Skylark and Rapaport commandeer a tank and blow Kim’s helicopter out of the sky, the film proceeds to a happy ending. It is this conclusion that supposedly angered North Korea sufficiently to organize the Sony hack that has been in the news.

There are those who regard “The Interview” as a virtual conspiracy mounted by Sony, the State Department and the Rand Corporation. In a December 23rd interview with Democracy Now, U. Cal/Santa Cruz professor Christine Hong states:

You know, what’s interesting to me about this is the fact that if you actually look at what the Sony executives did, they consulted very closely with the State Department, which actually gave the executives a green light with regard to the death scene. And they also consulted with a RAND North Korea watcher, a man named Bruce Bennett, who basically has espoused in thesis that the way to bring down the North Korean government is to assassinate the leadership. And he actually stated, in consulting with Sony about this film, that this film, in terms of the South Korean market, as well as its infiltration by defector balloon-dropping organizations into North Korea, could possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion. So, in this instance, fiction and reality have a sort of mirroring relationship to each other.

Frankly, I don’t think that the North Koreans have much to worry about. This film is a limp and toothless enterprise that would have a lot less impact on the north than the far more sophisticated films that the south has cranked out over the years, especially those that appeal to their longing for national unity and peace. If anything, the liberal presidency of Kim Dae-jung, whose overtures to the north were a departure from the hardline anti-Communism of previous governments and whose initiatives were reflected in “reconciliation” films such as the great “Joint Security Area”, would be much more of a threat to the status quo in the north—and for that matter the reactionary Chaebol-dominated neoliberalism of the south.

I suspect that revulsion in the south over the failure of the conservative government now in power to get to the root of the corruption that allowed an inadequately regulated ferry to sink and cost the lives of 300 young people, will eventually return a liberal government to power. Of course, as is the case everywhere, including the USA, such governments are not likely to redress the class inequalities that allow the Chaebols to dominate Korean society.

In a CounterPunch article on Korean War movies that I wrote last year, I touch upon some of the political issues that the north and the south are grappling with. They are issues that are far more important to how things unfold in the coming years than a work of such crowning stupidity like “The Interview”:

My introduction to Korean films and the changing political landscape in the south was Lee Chang-dong’s 2000 masterpiece “Peppermint Candy”. Not only was it a fearless assault on South Korean repression of strikes and student protests in the 1980s, it was my pick for best narrative film that year leaving Academy Award winner “Gladiator” in the dust. If Hong Kong cinema had become increasingly formulaic by then, South Korea picked up the slack and turned into by far the most fertile ground for new cinema in the world.

Chang-dong Lee went on to write and direct other masterpieces, including “Secret Sunshine” and “Poetry”, but even more importantly to serve as a symbol of progress in the south and reconciliation with the north in his capacity as Minister of Culture and Tourism in 2003-2004 under reformer President Roh Moo-hyun. Roh continued the policies of Kim Dae-jung who ruled from 1998 to 2003. Widely regarded as the Nelson Mandela of South Korea, Kim instituted the “Sunshine Policy” that sought to bring the two halves of the country closer together.

Roh’s presidency was marred by personal corruption and a willingness to make concessions to neoliberalism, especially the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. in 2007. Despite this, Roh remained committed to rapprochement with the north. In 2011 Wikileaks released an American diplomatic cable to South Korea calling attention to Roh’s concerns over the mistreatment of North Korea.

Economic stagnation under Roh led to him being ousted in 2007 by Lee Myung-bak, the CEO of Hyundai, one of South Korea’s top chaebols. One year into his presidency, Lee trashed the Sunshine Policy and warned the north that he would end economic cooperation unless it abandoned its nuclear weapons program. Elected in 2012, South Korea’s first female president Park Geun-hye has been following Lee’s policies to the letter–hence the current crisis.

December 24, 2014

What is a Marxist organization?

Filed under: revolutionary organizing — louisproyect @ 8:05 pm

What is a Marxist organization?

by SCOTT JAY on DECEMBER 24, 2014

joincp

It is a commonplace on the Marxist Left that revolutionary organizations need to be rooted in the working class, so much so that “middle-class” is just as common an insult as “sectarian” or “opportunist.” Middle-class dominated socialist groups are generally aware of their class basis and strive to overcome it—noting that an organization tends to be middle-class does not tell anybody anything they did not already know. Therefore, we will look at the problem of the base of an organization from a different angle.

A fundamental weakness of the organizations of the socialist Left is that their members do not have a material stake in their organizations.

Members of Leninist organizations join largely because they believe in the ideas. This is certainly how they are recruited. For the groups that are able to grow larger than an irrelevant sect, the members may even join because they believe in the actions of the organization. But very few of these actions actually have a material impact on the lives and livelihoods of their members and Leninists rarely even consider that this might be a problem.

For decades, Leninists of various stripes have distinguished themselves by their unique analyses of the Soviet Union, recruiting members to their theoretical model and, in some of the better cases, engaging in mass movements and even trade union activism as well. These groups could debate on end their different analyses of whether the the Soviet Union was state capitalist, or a degenerated workers state, or whether they included China, Cuba, Serbia, Albania, or North Korea among their canon.

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December 21, 2014

Hanukkah — bah, humbug

Filed under: Jewish question — louisproyect @ 6:24 pm

An innocent toy connected to a not so innocent holiday

In the same way I used to organize sales for the Socialist Workers Party in Houston in the 1970s, directing people to various grocery stores or college campuses with bundles of the Militant, the Chabad sends its young missionaries to what they regard as fruitful opportunities for converting lost souls. But this Hasidic outreach group is not interested in saving Christians or Muslims. It is people like me, secular Jews, that they are trying to reach, based on their presence in front of my building during Jewish holidays throughout the year.

Yesterday as I was on the sidewalk in front of my high-rise, one of these young men, clad in a dark suit and wearing a wide-brimmed fedora made by Borsalino, approached me to ask if I’d like to have a donut in honor of Hanukkah. (My building is ecumenical with a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah menorah in the lobby in an obvious bid to make the Jewish residents more amenable to chipping in for the staff’s holiday bonus.)

No thanks, I said.

As I was making my way up to my apartment, I wondered what the deal was with the donut. I don’t remember anything like that from my relatively observant household in the 1950s. We lit candles on the menorah, even though I had only the vaguest idea of what that was about—it had something to do with a synagogue lantern miraculously staying lit for 8 days after the oil had been exhausted, while the Maccabees were fighting the infidels but that’s about all I knew.

Out of curiosity, I took a quick look at the ever-so-useful Wikipedia to see what connection there was between donuts and the holiday and discovered: “Fried foods (such as latkes potato pancakes, jelly doughnuts sufganiyot and Sephardic Bimuelos) are eaten to commemorate the importance of oil during the celebration of Hanukkah.”

As I was perusing the article, I began to wonder what role Hanukkah played in the Jewish religion. For young people in observant households, it was our Christmas but a rather unproductive one. The Christian kids had a gaily-decorated tree and gifts galore while we had nothing but a stupid candelabra and a cheap little trinket called a dreidel that you spun like a top, towards what end I had no idea. Once again, Wiki delivered the goods:

Tradition has it that the reason the dreidel game is played is to commemorate a game devised by the Jews to camouflage the fact that they were studying Torah, which was outlawed by the Seleucids. The Jews would gather in caves to study, posting a lookout to alert the group to the presence of Seleucid soldiers. If soldiers were spotted, the Jews would hide their scrolls and spin tops, so the Seleucids thought they were gambling, not learning.

I had no idea that gambling was involved. I feel like Captain Reynault in “Casablanca”.

But of the most interest was the battlefield victory it was meant to celebrate. I had a feeling that in the 16 years of Marxmail, there must have been something that dealt with the legacy of the holiday that was in its way just as bloodthirsty as Passover that celebrated the death of innocent Egyptian children. I was not disappointed. I crossposted this article nearly 3 years ago to the date:

Rethinking Hanukkah: The Dark History of the Festival of Lights

2010 December 1

by J.A. Myerson

OK, so: there’s a civil war. On one side is a group of reformers, who break from divine-right totalitarianism to design a society based on reason, philosophy, comity with national neighbors and religious moderation. On the other is a violent group of devout fanatics who engage in terrorist warfare in their quest to institute religious law that includes ritual sacrifice and compulsory infant genital mutilation. Which side are you on?

And if the second group defeats the first, returns the land to theocratic despotism, institutes a program of imperial conquest and declares the abolition of secular thought, isolating itself from the rest of the civilized world for a century, do you celebrate their victory?

Easy answers, surely, if this scenario were situated in the Muslim world of the 21st century. But, starting tonight, a great many Jews the world over, including—or perhaps especially—secular American Jews, will light candles and sing prayers in observance of Hanukkah, which commemorates the historical incident aforementioned. The sectarian factions were traditionalist Jews and their Hellenized brethren. The location was Jerusalem. The year was 165 BCE.

A decade earlier, Antiochus IV Epiphanes had assumed rule of the Seleucid Empire, which stretched farther east than Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire, from modern day Saudi Arabia all the way to what are now Turkmenistan and Pakistan. Antiochus appointed Jason—probably in reward for a bribe—to the governorship of Judea, then a client state of the Seleucids, and, in 167 BCE, Jason did away with Jewish law and rebuilt Jerusalem in a Greek model. This included banning genital mutilation and Jewish sacrifice, permitting Jews to marry gentiles and instituting an internationalist program exemplified by participation in the Olympic Games.

To be sure, Seleucid Judea, being an imperial protectorate, was hardly the democratic polis par excellence; widespread corruption and capricious political leadership combined with a measure of jealous authoritarianism hardly constitute the virtuous city. Nevertheless, a secular, multicultural state is subject to civic reform in a way that dictatorial theocracy is not, and the latter is precisely what the Maccabees sought to establish. (The Maccabees are routinely called a “rebel army,” but really this is a romantic and obfuscatory term; “terrorist militants” is a well chosen substitute, and the one we use for their contemporary analogues).

Judah Maccabee, whose father Matthias had had to flee Judea after killing a Hellenistic Jew for worshiping before an idol, served as the chief of that fundamentalist army, his brothers Jonathan and Simon occupying the upper lieutenancy. Their holy war featured the demolition of pagan altars in the villages, the ritual cleansing of the temple and compelling the circumcision of children. Their terror campaign worked and, in 165 BCE, after just two years of secular law, the Maccabees overtook Judea, establishing the political reign of the Hasmonean dynasty.

Not content with the victory, Judah continued the war—when was the last time holy war ended with the conquest of but one land?—and expanded the boundaries of Israel, setting a nationalist-expansionist precedence whose reverberations we (leave alone the Palestinians) continue to feel. Between Judah’s regime and the subsequent administrations of his brothers, the fanatical Maccabee Israeli army conquered the port of Joppa and the fortress of Gezer and razed the Acra in Jerusalem. Hasmonean rule lasted until 64 BCE, when the Romans moved in and Herod the Great became King of Israel—for more on that, see the gospels of the New Testament.

*   *   *

Judaism, as much as any other world religion, can boast an extraordinary history of secular thought. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Isaiah Berlin, Christopher Hitchens, Tony Kushner—who can think of better Jews than these or imagine, without anguish, a world devoid of their contributions? My own family’s ancestry is Jewish and we are ourselves devoted to secularism and the pursuit of a Judaism in the image of those named above.

Nevertheless, growing up, we lit the candles and sang the Hebrew prayer my mother could remember from her childhood (but—how Jewish—cannot translate to English). My father, for his part, is fond of proving that he can sing “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” in Yiddish—his father escaped an Orthodox home at age 13, never to return—not that the rest of us are in any position to verify his rendition’s accuracy. Latkes (with sour cream and apple sauce, naturally), gelt (lousy chocolate, sure, but it’s shaped like money!) and dreidels came out once a year, in order, I’m sure I always knew, to make Jews feel better about not having Christmas, which is a big deal to the goyim (so big that the Myersons celebrate it too, and more enthusiastically than the Jewish consolation prize, to boot).

What a piercing irony, that secular Jews have taken to comforting ourselves in the yuletide season by celebrating the destruction of the Hellenistic Jewry, whose legacy we inherit, at the hands of fundamentalist fanatics who wouldn’t even consider us Jewish. With each lunatic attempt to expel Palestinians from their homes to make room for Orthodox settlers from Brooklyn, with each story of a Hasidic woman confined to a medieval lifestyle of bondage and repression born of superstition and uncritical faith, with each exposure of depravity and fraudulence in the communities who make the most exuberant claims to piety, it becomes clearer: the time has come for us to proclaim loudly that we have a better tradition. Let us celebrate the Hellenistic Jews and their struggle, rather than the violent extremists and their victory.

The prayer Jews are expected to say on the first night of Hanukkah (the only one my mother knew to teach us) translates thus: “Blessed are you, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with his commandments and has commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah lights.” Need anyone mention that the greatest Jewish tradition is not one of following any commandments whatever, but rather of investigating, examining, discovering? The secular Jewish tradition holds that it is through those processes that one learns truth, not through the revelation of commandment. Cast off that prayer.

The klezmer ditty, though, can stay. “One for each night, they shed us with light to remind us of days long ago.” Let us take this opportunity to remind ourselves of what really happened in days long ago, and commit ourselves to reversing it.

*   *   *

The author is obliged to mention Josephus’ The Wars of the Jews along with the biblical apocrypha contained in the first and second book of the Maccabees, which provide the history presented here. For additional reading, please see relevant works by Christopher Hitchens and James Ponet, both in Slate.

[Hitchens and Ponet are both worth reading as well.]

December 20, 2014

Obama’s hackers

Filed under: computers,cops/agent provocateurs,corruption,crime,Obama — louisproyect @ 9:29 pm

kim_obama

No matter how many years I have been monitoring crimes high and low in what co-authors Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein called “Washington Babylon”, there are those times that I can only do a double-take over something I read in the NY Times. Today was one of those days as I read an article titled innocently enough “Panel to Advise Against Penalty for C.I.A.’s Computer Search”. If you tried to guess what the article was about from the heading, you’d wonder why anybody would be penalized for a “computer search”. After all, I use Google 25 times a day and nobody ever had the need to penalize me, even IT management at Columbia University that probably figured out that if I was on Google, it was to find out who starred in Godard’s “Contempt” rather than how to do a recursive grep in Unix.

But the heading should have been “Panel to Advise Against Penalty for C.I.A.’s Computer Hack” since that is what actually happened:

A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.

The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.

If it was done at “the behest” of the CIA director and behind the backs of the Senate investigators, but seen as not worthy of punishment, there must have been mitigating circumstances that would have allowed that panel to act as it did. Like the possibility that Diane Feinstein was a secret al-Qaeda operative and it was necessary to check up on her. I mean, after all Obama is a Marxist, right? That’s what Glenn Beck says and who would gainsay him?

As it turns out, the panel is like one of those police department internal investigations that are conducted after some Black youth gets shot 37 times. Who would expect the cops to find themselves guilty? That’s basically what happened here. As the NY Times reports, the members were “appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency.”

The CIA broke the law just as cops do when they shoot an unarmed Black youth. The Times article referred to “improperly” hacking the Senate computers. That is not quite the term that describes what took place. “Illegally” is more like it. When Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence committee, asked Brennan whether the CIA was subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – an anti-hacking law, Brennan said that he’d have to get back to him.

Those two members from outside the agency might as well have been career CIA officers for what it’s worth. One of them was panel chairman Evan Bayh and the other was Robert F. Bauer, Obama’s legal counsel during his first term.

Evan Bayh was the Senator from Indiana between 1999 and 2011 and served as the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council from 2001 to 2005. The DLC embodies the sort of politics that the Clintons made infamous. Some people voted for Obama in 2008 under the assumption that being opposed by Hillary Clinton meant that he was not cut from the same DLC cloth. As it turned out, Obama was exactly like Bill Clinton, a loyal servant of Wall Street and a firm believer in the right of the US to rule the world. In 2002, Bayh stood at George W. Bush’s side in a ceremony announcing their joint support for an invasion of Iraq.

Since Barack Obama is strictly opposed to punishing John Brennan or any of his flunkies, you can expect his former lawyer to understand what his job is. After Robert F. Bauer stopped functioning as the White House shyster, Obama sent him off with the following encomium: “Bob was a critical member of the White House team, He has exceptional judgment, wisdom and intellect, and he will continue to be one of my close advisers.” With a White House that has clamped down on the press more than any administration in modern history and that has made secrecy its standard operating procedure, who would expect Bauer to do anything else except get the CIA off the hook?

Bauer wrote for the Huffington Post briefly. You can get a flavor of his worldview from a couple of articles. In one he makes “the progressive case” for pardoning Scooter Libby, the Bush aide who went to prison for perjured testimony in the Valerie Plame investigation. And here I am, stupid me, always thinking that progressive meant something like public works programs or single-payer health insurance. Golly, you really learn so much from the Huffington Post.

Bauer’s other article worth noting was a tribute to Richard Rorty on his passing. It demonstrates an understanding of the culture wars that I wouldn’t have expected from a shady lawyer in the corridors of power. He urged that the heirs of the New Left, the professors at places like Columbia University teaching cultural studies and standing up for diversity, would find common cause with the New Deal left that preceded it.

In making his case, Bauer referred to Rorty’s essay “The Last Intellectual In Europe — Orwell on Cruelty”. On the very first page of the essay, Rorty quotes Orwell’s opposition to practices that had become widespread in the 20th century. He referred to them in “1984”, those that “had long been abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations – not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

Such is the Orwellian state that we have finally arrived at that Robert F. Bauer can write such an article for Huffington Post honoring a man who opposed “torture to extract confessions” while at the same time covering up for a CIA that was guilty of such crimes.

 

December 19, 2014

A response to Owen Jones and James Bloodworth on Cuba

Filed under: anti-Communism,cuba,journalism — louisproyect @ 5:45 pm

Owen Jones

James Bloodworth

Vexingly but not unexpectedly, Owen Jones and James Bloodworth used their Guardian and Independent columns as bully pulpits against the Cuban government. Despite their impeccable left-liberal credentials, their commentary left a bad taste in my mouth not unlike the one I experienced when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews weighed in: “I just don`t think they are going to change their stripes. I think they’re commies. I think they’re communists.” Commies. Nice.

I have more respect for Jones, who was on Marxmail briefly when he was 16 years old or so, a most precocious lad. Back then he repeated the talking points heard across the British left: “If the working class wield no political power, then who does? A privileged layer of officials, i.e. bureaucrats. It is they who legislate and enforce law, not the working class.” Nothing has changed in the 14 years when he wrote this except maybe a softening on bureaucracy, something understandable given his loyalty to the British Labour Party—a far cry from the heaven-storming sensibility of his adolescence.

Yesterday Owen Jones weighed in at the Guardian on the Cuban “dictatorship” that he hoped would disappear with the blockade. Like a comparison test for detergents, Brand X—Cuba—fails miserably next to those “progressive governments that promote social justice as well as democracy.” He adds: “They have lifted 56 million people out of poverty this millennium, and have done so without imposing a dictatorship.” (The 56 million figure was arrived at by the United Nations Development Programme and formed the basis of a BBC article Jones linked to.)

Apparently Peru was one of the countries Jones held up against Cuba since its poverty rate was reduced by 26.3 percent and had lots of freedom—hurrah, hurrah.

But I would urge some caution on taking the United Nations Development Programme report at face value, the source of the BBC article’s poverty reduction claims. If, as is likely, Peru’s National Statistics and Information Institute (INEI) is feeding data to the UN, the numbers are not to be trusted.

The INEI recently announced a sizeable 5.2 reduction in poverty in 2007. However, many have questioned the validity of these numbers, including Farid Matuk, an ex-president of INEI, who guesses that such numbers might be forged. They suggest a poverty reduction rate of 0.6 percent per each point of GDP growth, which is three times higher than the average of previous years. At this rate, Peru would eliminate poverty completely in about 10 years, which strains credulity.

I suppose that if having parliamentary democracy is ipso facto a sign that a nation is freer, then Peru—Brand A—is superior to Brand X. But if you are an Indian, Peru does not seem all that free. Between 2006 and 2011 after protests were mounted against mining on indigenous lands, the government declared martial law and gave the green light to the military to kill 200 activists.

For an incisive report on the reality behind Peruvian president Ollanta Humala’s faux populism, I recommend Deborah Poole and Gerardo Rénique’s NACLA report from May 2012:

Within weeks of Humala’s inauguration, major mobilizations were staged in the departments of Ancash, Apurímac, and Cajamarca—which are characterized by extreme poverty, long traditions of subaltern politics, and some of Peru’s largest mining projects. The protesters’ demands included an end to all mining in headwaters, a ban on the use of cyanide and mercury, a national ecological zoning code elaborated with citizen participation, and implementation of the national Law of Consultation. Led by Valdés, at the time minister of the interior, the Humala government moved quickly to repress the popular mobilizations. In November, during a strike in Apurímac, Valdés’s heavy-handed approach clashed with the more conciliatory politics of then prime minister Lerner and other left-wing cabinet members who favored negotiation and reform. It also, however, drove home the widening political and cultural divide pitting Humala’s right-wing functionaries against the popular organizations that had helped to bring his government to power.

I guess that if Humala came to power through multiparty elections, he had the right to “repress the popular mobilizations”. That’s how democracy works, right? In Brazil as well, right? Another Brand-A success story.

Let me repeat. Except for this sort of article and his membership in the Labour Party, I really respect Owen Jones especially when he backed out of a Stop the War Coalition’s meeting on Syria that was featuring Assad apologist Mother Agnes. James Bloodworth, on the other hand, is a sniveling little rat.

Bloodworth’s column opens with the obligatory “god that failed” confession that is so necessary for those pursuing a career as a lapdog for the ruling class:

One small claim to fame of mine is that I was present during Fidel Castro’s final public speech as Cuban President back in 2006. Stood at a lectern about 50 yards from me, El Maximo Lider harangued the relatively small crowd for over two hours, littering his speech with the usual denunciations of ‘Yankee imperialism’, ‘capitalist monopolies’ and – I particularly enjoyed this part – ‘Bush and Blair’.

For a young revolutionary tourist like myself the spectacle of the bearded ideologue in full flow was subversively exciting: I hated all of those things too, or at least I thought I did. Like so many who pretend to despise the boring machinations of liberal democracy I was passionately rooting for the romanticism of Che Guevara over the banal compromises of the capitalist system. And so beards, green fatigues and tropical exuberance were in and Starbucks and McDonalds were most definitely out.

Did you catch the business about getting over denunciations of ‘Bush and Blair’? Oh no, we can’t have such dogmatic notions cropping up in the writings of a 31-year old journalist angling to be the next Christopher Hitchens. How so yesterday, railing against Bush and Blair. Why the next thing you know, people will be playing Billy Bragg CD’s. So embarrassing.

But our latter-day Arthur Koestler came to see the light:

But in reality the ‘plucky Caribbean island’ was no tropical Shoreditch and what I witnessed was the stage-set Cuba rather than the grim and Spartan reality. I was a Useful Idiot, in other words; a person who would valorise the 95 per cent literacy rate on the island without telling you that it was the Cuban Government which decided what a person was allowed to read. Like many a pampered comrade, I rallied against the ‘superficiality’ of McDonald’s and Burger King while forgetting that plastic food is incomparably better than no food at all.

What is there to say in reply to a claim that fast food is better than “no food at all”. This is the sort of shit-flinging rhetoric you get on the Sean Hannity show and hardly worth bothering to answer.

Now it is true that Cuban media is state-owned. Presumably it would be better for Cuba to have the sort of free press we have in the USA where those with the money have the freedom to own one, to paraphrase AJ Liebling.

But it is not enough to be able to buy and sell a newspaper or television station. Bloodworth raises the bar even higher. If you buy a newspaper or TV station and then use it to editorialize on behalf of a government that was voted into power but that does not live up to your lily-white liberal standards, then watch out.

On February 19, 2014 Bloodworth repeated his god that failed shtick, this time about Venezuela:

There was a time when the so-called Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela appeared to hold great promise. I remember watching The Revolution Will Not Be Televised back in 2003 and being mesmerised by what I saw: here was a government spending the country’s oil wealth on social programmes for the poor and giving the rich a kicking in one of the most unequal societies in the Western Hemisphere.

But unlike 2003, Venezuelan television no longer plots against the government, a function of private enterprise apparently:  “In 2013 the last remaining independent television station in Venezuela was sold to an ally of the president.” Maybe there’s something I’m missing but isn’t that the way bourgeois democracy operates? Last week the New Republic editors and writers that Martin Peretz had hired resigned because they objected to the new owner’s intentions to make the magazine more like the Huffingto Post or the Daily Beast. And that’s not much different from when Peretz bought the magazine in 1974. He fired the liberal editor and a bunch of people then resigned.

That’s how capitalism operates as far as I know. Newspapers are profit-making enterprises. You buy one and then you have the right to order people to write things that reflect your POV. That’s how the Independent operates, doesn’t it? If Rupert Murdoch bought it tomorrow, heads like Patrick Cockburn would roll. I do suspect that James Bloodworth would still have a job. Murdoch would smile ever so benignly on such a bright young anti-Communist thing.

 

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