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tisdag 27 januari 2015
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«We are Charlie» - A study in mass hypocrisy
Tortilla con Sal, January 11th 2015
The recent terrorist attack in Paris has cost the lives of a dozen victims as well as those of their terrorist assassins. The attacks deserve categorical condemnation. But they also deserve a less naïve view of Europe's reality, something, from a Latin American perspective, difficult to work out.
The Paris attack and other incidents in France over recent days are part of a cynical and hypocritical pattern long recognizable in Western history. That same pattern of sadistic racism prompted Frantz Fanon to write “Let us have done with this Europe that never stops talking about humanity and, even so ,murders people on every street corner, in every corner of the world....”
The foreseeable result of the terrorist attacks in France has been to tip Europe's political spectrum ever further to the right, facilitating the repressive agenda of the corporate elites who in effect own the respective governments of NATO's North American and European member countries. Domestically, they deliberately promote inequality so as to protect elite control of the West's corrupt, powerful financial system. Overseas, they engage in crude destabilizing interventions in other countries' internal affairs, or else carry out direct brutal armed aggression.
Since before the attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001, manipulating fears around terrorism has been a key tool used to intimidate people in Europe and North America into accepting elite-driven policies against their own interests.Now, the political forces that make up the French Left have joined in the chorus “We are all Charlie” with the far right National Front and the misnamed social democracy of President François Hollande, in solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and writers of the Charlie Hedbo publication, which purports to be a free-wheeling satirical magazine while really fulfilling a systematically provocative propaganda agenda.
While Marine Le Pen, president of the extreme right wing National Front political party demands restoration of the death penalty to punish people responsible for terrorist attacks like that on Charlie Hedbo, the misnamed socialist and Left parties argue against demonizing muslims too much, implying the same, by extension with regard generally to non-white people living in France. If one thing now really unites all the people who regard themselves as the real French with their counterparts in other European countries and in North America it is their shared conception of Western superiority, especially in relation to freedom of expression.
As is all too well documented, the argument of Europe's moral superiority has facilitated innumerable episodes of genocide throughout history, from the time of the Crusades, to the era of colonial conquests and on to the wars of independence of the 20th Century. In May 1945, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Algerian civilians in response to an uprising in Sétif against the French colonial occupation. Similarly, between 1947 and 1948 in Madagascar, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Malagasy civilians. But in 1945, hardly anyone in Europe even noticed, let alone declared themselves Sétif, nor, later, was anyone in the West interested in the genocide in Madagascar.
In Paris itself in 1961, the French authorities massacred as many as 200 Algerians at or near the Charonne metro station during a demonstration against the Algerian war. Not until 1998 were a few of those responsible brought to justice. One of the instigators of the events leading up to that massacre was Jean Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen.Only over the last ten years or so has it been possible to speak openly in France about the Algerian War because, until then, the French authorities persistently refused to recognize the conflict as a war, despite having deployed over 400,000 military personnel there at the height of the conflict. Now many people in Europe want us all to be Charlie Hebdo as if political violence in Europe or North America was a little known aberration rather than a regular and frequent phenomenon of European and North American political life over the last fifty years.
In modern times, perhaps Ireland is the country that has been most notorious for prolonged political violence. How many Europeans were Derry in 1972 when British paratroops murdered 14 civilians and wounded 17? And who was Ballymurphy in 1971 when the British army murdered 11 civilians and wounded a number still unknown? Or in October 1973, who was Greysteel, when terrorists murdered 8 people there? Or Omagh in 1998 when terrorists exploded a bomb murdering 29 people and wounding over 200?
Shocking political violence is nothing new in contemporary European and North American history. Globally, for centuries, the West has waged permanent war on people around the world who have resisted European and North American depredations. Western governments have systematically used genocide and political violence to, first, achieve and, then, defend their global economic domination and political power. What has changed since the end of the Second World War is the ever greater cynicism, sadism and hypocrisy with which Western powers have abused international law and institutions like the UN to get what they want.
That cynicism and political opportunism is evident in various developments across Europe, where a series of racist and xenophobic political parties have gained significant support in recent years even, in the case of France's National Front, to being on the verge of entering government. In other countries, they have managed to hold the balance of political power in divided parliaments condemned, as in Sweden, to form minority or coalition governments. The same has happened in Denmark with the extreme right-wing Danske Folkparti, which enjoys about 15% electoral support nationally.
In 2006, it was in Denmark that the right wing daily newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a way that not only denigrated Islam but all the people of the Middle East, casting them as backward, with a proclivity for terrorism. Those same cartoons, after already having offended millions of muslims around the world, were subsequently re-published by Charlie Hebdo the French magazine whose staff were murdered during the recent terrorist attack in Paris. At the time the cartoons appeared, back in 2006, the European mood towards muslims was very sinister, with firebombing of mosques, and the general sense that muslims were fair game for abuse and attacks.
In 2011, in Norway, the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded over 100 in an attack on a social democrat youth camp on the island of Utøya. Breivik's objective, he said, was to kill his country's whole government for its alleged permissiveness towards muslims. In Sweden, the artist Lars Vilks crafted dogs out of wood to which he added the face of the Prophet Mahommed before placing them at prominent traffic roundabouts. A series of anti-muslim cartoons by Vilks provoked very strong reactions both within Sweden and abroad. In the Swedish city of Malmö in 2010 an aryan terrorist deliberately shot at immigrants chosen at random, killing and wounding various of his targets.
According to the 2008 Survey of Minorities and Discrimination (EU-MIDIS) more than a quarter of immigrants and members of ethnic minorities in Sweden, when consulted, reported having been victims of crimes against the person for “racist motives” in the previous twelve months. They were referring to crimes of physical violence, threats and menaces or serious abuse. Leading the list were gypsies, Africans from both North and South of the Sahara, Turkish people, people from Eastern Europe and Arabs . The figure does not isolate the total number of muslims affected, but, from the list of nationalities, one can deduce that the great majority of the victims were indeed muslim.
In Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, attacks agaianst immigrants from outside Europe and especially islamophobic attacks have been a constant characteristic in official statistics (for example, "Extractos de los informes del Observatorio Europeo del Racismo y Xenofobia (EUMC )”). Certainly, no demonstrations have ever been seen of the same size protesting the constant murders of Africans and Arabs as those seen in France over the massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The official explanation of this difference in the reactions by Europeans to racist murders and the attack on the French journalists is that the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff was an attack on freedom of expression.
In fact, freedom of expression in Europe is as much a complex and carefully fabricated cultural myth as it is a fierce battleground of political and social power and privilege. Western apologists brandish “freedom of expression” as if it were in some way a knockdown argument justifying the superiority of their societies. Outside North America and Europe, the majority world sees it as a theoretical privilege, which, if it exists at all, does so paid for by centuries of Western colonial exploitation and genocide against the peoples of Oceania, Africa, Asia and Latin America
In principle, in Europe and North America, the freedom exists to say what you like but only on the basis of a total, systematic marginalization and demonization of legitimate anti-imperialist criticism of the West and its different societies. This fact has become ever more clear, especially after the 2006 defeat of Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the case of criticisms of Western support for the slow-motion genocide by Israel's zionist governments of the people of Palestine. In practice, freedom of expression in the West translates in practice into freedom with impunity for every type of slander and abuse directed against minorities, especially minorities from outside Europe and, above all now, against muslims or, more particularly, Arabs.
The recent attack against Charlie Hebdo, and, likewise, the murder of two police officers and the kidnapping of customers of a Jewish-owned business are indeed unpardonable . But they have nothing to do with freedom of expression nor, it is worth insisting, with Islam. It is one more deliberately obscure, much manipulated incident in the so called “Clash of Civilizations” invented by imperialist strategists in a forlorn attempt to put a brake on the now steadily accelerating decline of the Western system of global domination. That strategy's execution long ago revealed, in the clearest way possible, that Western corporate and alternative media are enthusiastic collaborators in the psychological warfare campaigns orchestrated by their countries' governments .
Those Western psychological warfare campaigns attack targets that change from one moment to the next as required – lately Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, Muammar al Gaddafi in Libya, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bashar al Assad in Syria and Vladimir Putin in Russia. In the case of Islam and muslims generally, it is very convenient to interpret the recent events in France as a manifestation of an alleged inherent psychotic rage of muslims against the barbaric colonial oppression of the West. That treatment depicts the problem decisively as a deep rooted problem mass psychological problem of Arabs and muslims.
But the truth so desperately covered up by the "We are Charlie Hebdo" campaign is that the real problem, impossible to conceal by now, is quite the reverse. The real problem is the historic pyschological problem of mass hypocrisy in Western societies. It was the US government and its European allies that funded Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in exactly the same way that decades ago they supported the Muslim Brotherhood against Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the very same way, right up to the present day, they have validated, sustained and manipulated terrorist forces against the peoples of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Those people who now identify themselves with Charlie Hebdo refuse to acknowledge the sinister terrorist shadow that is the inseparable doppelganger of their own governments' insane foreign policies. By identifying themselves as "We are Charlie", people in Europe effectively ratify the support of their governments for innumerable terrorist atrocities committed across Lebanon, Egypt, Siria, Iraq and Iran. But these atrocities have been committed by the same terrorist groups that attacked the US in 2001.
Subsequently, associated terrorist groups bombed London and Madrid, murdering and maiming hundreds of civilians. Now they have attacked civilian targets in Paris. But despite all the readily available documentation of Western government complicity in international terrorism, long standing Western political and media manipulation of the terror motif has created a psychotic context in which the atrocity in Paris will be used by Europe's ruling elites to justify their anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian agenda of relentless economic and political repression at home and of barbaric military aggression overseas.
The "We are Charlie" campaign is an integral part of that psychotic context.
The recent terrorist attack in Paris has cost the lives of a dozen victims as well as those of their terrorist assassins. The attacks deserve categorical condemnation. But they also deserve a less naïve view of Europe's reality, something, from a Latin American perspective, difficult to work out.
The Paris attack and other incidents in France over recent days are part of a cynical and hypocritical pattern long recognizable in Western history. That same pattern of sadistic racism prompted Frantz Fanon to write “Let us have done with this Europe that never stops talking about humanity and, even so ,murders people on every street corner, in every corner of the world....”
The foreseeable result of the terrorist attacks in France has been to tip Europe's political spectrum ever further to the right, facilitating the repressive agenda of the corporate elites who in effect own the respective governments of NATO's North American and European member countries. Domestically, they deliberately promote inequality so as to protect elite control of the West's corrupt, powerful financial system. Overseas, they engage in crude destabilizing interventions in other countries' internal affairs, or else carry out direct brutal armed aggression.
Since before the attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001, manipulating fears around terrorism has been a key tool used to intimidate people in Europe and North America into accepting elite-driven policies against their own interests.Now, the political forces that make up the French Left have joined in the chorus “We are all Charlie” with the far right National Front and the misnamed social democracy of President François Hollande, in solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and writers of the Charlie Hedbo publication, which purports to be a free-wheeling satirical magazine while really fulfilling a systematically provocative propaganda agenda.
While Marine Le Pen, president of the extreme right wing National Front political party demands restoration of the death penalty to punish people responsible for terrorist attacks like that on Charlie Hedbo, the misnamed socialist and Left parties argue against demonizing muslims too much, implying the same, by extension with regard generally to non-white people living in France. If one thing now really unites all the people who regard themselves as the real French with their counterparts in other European countries and in North America it is their shared conception of Western superiority, especially in relation to freedom of expression.
As is all too well documented, the argument of Europe's moral superiority has facilitated innumerable episodes of genocide throughout history, from the time of the Crusades, to the era of colonial conquests and on to the wars of independence of the 20th Century. In May 1945, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Algerian civilians in response to an uprising in Sétif against the French colonial occupation. Similarly, between 1947 and 1948 in Madagascar, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Malagasy civilians. But in 1945, hardly anyone in Europe even noticed, let alone declared themselves Sétif, nor, later, was anyone in the West interested in the genocide in Madagascar.
In Paris itself in 1961, the French authorities massacred as many as 200 Algerians at or near the Charonne metro station during a demonstration against the Algerian war. Not until 1998 were a few of those responsible brought to justice. One of the instigators of the events leading up to that massacre was Jean Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen.Only over the last ten years or so has it been possible to speak openly in France about the Algerian War because, until then, the French authorities persistently refused to recognize the conflict as a war, despite having deployed over 400,000 military personnel there at the height of the conflict. Now many people in Europe want us all to be Charlie Hebdo as if political violence in Europe or North America was a little known aberration rather than a regular and frequent phenomenon of European and North American political life over the last fifty years.
In modern times, perhaps Ireland is the country that has been most notorious for prolonged political violence. How many Europeans were Derry in 1972 when British paratroops murdered 14 civilians and wounded 17? And who was Ballymurphy in 1971 when the British army murdered 11 civilians and wounded a number still unknown? Or in October 1973, who was Greysteel, when terrorists murdered 8 people there? Or Omagh in 1998 when terrorists exploded a bomb murdering 29 people and wounding over 200?
Shocking political violence is nothing new in contemporary European and North American history. Globally, for centuries, the West has waged permanent war on people around the world who have resisted European and North American depredations. Western governments have systematically used genocide and political violence to, first, achieve and, then, defend their global economic domination and political power. What has changed since the end of the Second World War is the ever greater cynicism, sadism and hypocrisy with which Western powers have abused international law and institutions like the UN to get what they want.
That cynicism and political opportunism is evident in various developments across Europe, where a series of racist and xenophobic political parties have gained significant support in recent years even, in the case of France's National Front, to being on the verge of entering government. In other countries, they have managed to hold the balance of political power in divided parliaments condemned, as in Sweden, to form minority or coalition governments. The same has happened in Denmark with the extreme right-wing Danske Folkparti, which enjoys about 15% electoral support nationally.
In 2006, it was in Denmark that the right wing daily newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a way that not only denigrated Islam but all the people of the Middle East, casting them as backward, with a proclivity for terrorism. Those same cartoons, after already having offended millions of muslims around the world, were subsequently re-published by Charlie Hebdo the French magazine whose staff were murdered during the recent terrorist attack in Paris. At the time the cartoons appeared, back in 2006, the European mood towards muslims was very sinister, with firebombing of mosques, and the general sense that muslims were fair game for abuse and attacks.
In 2011, in Norway, the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded over 100 in an attack on a social democrat youth camp on the island of Utøya. Breivik's objective, he said, was to kill his country's whole government for its alleged permissiveness towards muslims. In Sweden, the artist Lars Vilks crafted dogs out of wood to which he added the face of the Prophet Mahommed before placing them at prominent traffic roundabouts. A series of anti-muslim cartoons by Vilks provoked very strong reactions both within Sweden and abroad. In the Swedish city of Malmö in 2010 an aryan terrorist deliberately shot at immigrants chosen at random, killing and wounding various of his targets.
According to the 2008 Survey of Minorities and Discrimination (EU-MIDIS) more than a quarter of immigrants and members of ethnic minorities in Sweden, when consulted, reported having been victims of crimes against the person for “racist motives” in the previous twelve months. They were referring to crimes of physical violence, threats and menaces or serious abuse. Leading the list were gypsies, Africans from both North and South of the Sahara, Turkish people, people from Eastern Europe and Arabs . The figure does not isolate the total number of muslims affected, but, from the list of nationalities, one can deduce that the great majority of the victims were indeed muslim.
In Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, attacks agaianst immigrants from outside Europe and especially islamophobic attacks have been a constant characteristic in official statistics (for example, "Extractos de los informes del Observatorio Europeo del Racismo y Xenofobia (EUMC )”). Certainly, no demonstrations have ever been seen of the same size protesting the constant murders of Africans and Arabs as those seen in France over the massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The official explanation of this difference in the reactions by Europeans to racist murders and the attack on the French journalists is that the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff was an attack on freedom of expression.
In fact, freedom of expression in Europe is as much a complex and carefully fabricated cultural myth as it is a fierce battleground of political and social power and privilege. Western apologists brandish “freedom of expression” as if it were in some way a knockdown argument justifying the superiority of their societies. Outside North America and Europe, the majority world sees it as a theoretical privilege, which, if it exists at all, does so paid for by centuries of Western colonial exploitation and genocide against the peoples of Oceania, Africa, Asia and Latin America
In principle, in Europe and North America, the freedom exists to say what you like but only on the basis of a total, systematic marginalization and demonization of legitimate anti-imperialist criticism of the West and its different societies. This fact has become ever more clear, especially after the 2006 defeat of Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the case of criticisms of Western support for the slow-motion genocide by Israel's zionist governments of the people of Palestine. In practice, freedom of expression in the West translates in practice into freedom with impunity for every type of slander and abuse directed against minorities, especially minorities from outside Europe and, above all now, against muslims or, more particularly, Arabs.
The recent attack against Charlie Hebdo, and, likewise, the murder of two police officers and the kidnapping of customers of a Jewish-owned business are indeed unpardonable . But they have nothing to do with freedom of expression nor, it is worth insisting, with Islam. It is one more deliberately obscure, much manipulated incident in the so called “Clash of Civilizations” invented by imperialist strategists in a forlorn attempt to put a brake on the now steadily accelerating decline of the Western system of global domination. That strategy's execution long ago revealed, in the clearest way possible, that Western corporate and alternative media are enthusiastic collaborators in the psychological warfare campaigns orchestrated by their countries' governments .
Those Western psychological warfare campaigns attack targets that change from one moment to the next as required – lately Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, Muammar al Gaddafi in Libya, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bashar al Assad in Syria and Vladimir Putin in Russia. In the case of Islam and muslims generally, it is very convenient to interpret the recent events in France as a manifestation of an alleged inherent psychotic rage of muslims against the barbaric colonial oppression of the West. That treatment depicts the problem decisively as a deep rooted problem mass psychological problem of Arabs and muslims.
But the truth so desperately covered up by the "We are Charlie Hebdo" campaign is that the real problem, impossible to conceal by now, is quite the reverse. The real problem is the historic pyschological problem of mass hypocrisy in Western societies. It was the US government and its European allies that funded Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in exactly the same way that decades ago they supported the Muslim Brotherhood against Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the very same way, right up to the present day, they have validated, sustained and manipulated terrorist forces against the peoples of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Those people who now identify themselves with Charlie Hebdo refuse to acknowledge the sinister terrorist shadow that is the inseparable doppelganger of their own governments' insane foreign policies. By identifying themselves as "We are Charlie", people in Europe effectively ratify the support of their governments for innumerable terrorist atrocities committed across Lebanon, Egypt, Siria, Iraq and Iran. But these atrocities have been committed by the same terrorist groups that attacked the US in 2001.
Subsequently, associated terrorist groups bombed London and Madrid, murdering and maiming hundreds of civilians. Now they have attacked civilian targets in Paris. But despite all the readily available documentation of Western government complicity in international terrorism, long standing Western political and media manipulation of the terror motif has created a psychotic context in which the atrocity in Paris will be used by Europe's ruling elites to justify their anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian agenda of relentless economic and political repression at home and of barbaric military aggression overseas.
The "We are Charlie" campaign is an integral part of that psychotic context.
onsdag 17 december 2014
Idag är det dags att fira. Imorgon kämpar vi vidare
Av Jorge Capelán, TcS/RLP.
För idag 6 år sedan, den 4 november 2008, anlände jag till Havanna för att delta i årets upplaga av det Internationella Mötet för Kampanjen Fria de 5 Kubanerna som tills idag har hållits i staden Holguin. (Vad kommer att hända med dessa möten i framtiden? Skulle man inte kunna fortsätta med dem, fast nu till stöd för alla folkens befrielse?)
Jag minns den kvällen. Jag hade precis kommit från flygplatsen. Man kunde lätt känna av den förväntansfulla stämningen i hotellets lobby, på gatorna och i stadens övriga offentliga platser. Det var lätt att förstå anledningen: Det var nämligen den kvällen, med Barak Obamas seger över republikanen John McCain, med 64.9% av elektorsrösterna, att man skulle kunna våga hoppas om en ändring i den kriminella politik som för över fyra decennier imperiet hade bedrivit mot det kubanska folket.
Att Obama verkligen skulle våga eller kunna materialisera sina vallöften om att ta sig an sitt eget folks sociala behov, samt på att vara mindre krigisk mot världens övriga folk än vad galningen Bush hade varit, var det många av oss som tvivlade på - även om vi alla önskade det. I hotellets lobby, såväl kubaner som utlänningar firade när teleSUR offentliggjorde valresultatet. Jag såg samma reaktioner på gatan när jag gick ut för en promenad några minuter senare.
I Kubas fall dröjde rättvisan länge, men det kom till slut. Idag håller Obama på att ta de första små stegen mot ett slut på blockaden och våra fem brödrar, de hjältar som kämpade mot terrorismen, är tillbaka på Kuba med sina nära och kära. Jag fortfarande minns uttrycket av smärta och ömhet i Doña Mirtas ansikte, när jag i Holguin räckte fram till henne ett exemplar av en diktbok av hans son, hjälten Antonio Guerrero, som hade översatts till svenskan av en av de lokala svenska kommittéer jag representerade den gången.
Doña Mirtas uttryck medan hon bläddrade i den tunna boken skriven på ett obegripligt språk, men med illustrationer och en namnteckning som låg henne tätt intill hjärtat, fick mig att förstå det ohyggliga lidande som både hon och resten av Hjältarnas anhöriga gick igenom. Samtidigt kunde jag se i hennes uttryck viljan att inte ge upp, att kämpa vidare, samt tilliten till en revolution och ett folk som har formats utifrån en rad principer som gör dem kapabla att stå emot de mest ohyggliga grymheterna från Jordens herrar.
Idag har Doña Mirta och alla de Fem Hjältarnas övriga anhöriga kunnat åter förenas med dem som imperiet hade gripit och spärrat in i sina fängelsehålor. Idag, som Fidel lovade för många år sedan, de Fem Hjältarna är tillbaka i deras hem, och oss alla som under alla dessa år, överallt i världen, någon gång hade delat ut ett flygblad, eller samlat in någon slant, eller sålt någon tidning, eller hållit någon föreläsning, så att De Fem skulle kunna återvända, kan också fira tillsammans med hela det kubanska folket.
Låt oss fira idag, eftersom vi imorgon måste fortsätta arbeta hårt så att Obama förverkligar och fördjupar vad han har lovat tills blockaden bara blir ett minne blott, tills USA även normaliserar sina relationer till Venezuela och Bolivia, så att stormakten inte lyckas förinta hela världen och en gång för alla inser att den måste acceptera Vårt Amerikas självständighet.
För idag 6 år sedan, den 4 november 2008, anlände jag till Havanna för att delta i årets upplaga av det Internationella Mötet för Kampanjen Fria de 5 Kubanerna som tills idag har hållits i staden Holguin. (Vad kommer att hända med dessa möten i framtiden? Skulle man inte kunna fortsätta med dem, fast nu till stöd för alla folkens befrielse?)
Jag minns den kvällen. Jag hade precis kommit från flygplatsen. Man kunde lätt känna av den förväntansfulla stämningen i hotellets lobby, på gatorna och i stadens övriga offentliga platser. Det var lätt att förstå anledningen: Det var nämligen den kvällen, med Barak Obamas seger över republikanen John McCain, med 64.9% av elektorsrösterna, att man skulle kunna våga hoppas om en ändring i den kriminella politik som för över fyra decennier imperiet hade bedrivit mot det kubanska folket.
Att Obama verkligen skulle våga eller kunna materialisera sina vallöften om att ta sig an sitt eget folks sociala behov, samt på att vara mindre krigisk mot världens övriga folk än vad galningen Bush hade varit, var det många av oss som tvivlade på - även om vi alla önskade det. I hotellets lobby, såväl kubaner som utlänningar firade när teleSUR offentliggjorde valresultatet. Jag såg samma reaktioner på gatan när jag gick ut för en promenad några minuter senare.
I Kubas fall dröjde rättvisan länge, men det kom till slut. Idag håller Obama på att ta de första små stegen mot ett slut på blockaden och våra fem brödrar, de hjältar som kämpade mot terrorismen, är tillbaka på Kuba med sina nära och kära. Jag fortfarande minns uttrycket av smärta och ömhet i Doña Mirtas ansikte, när jag i Holguin räckte fram till henne ett exemplar av en diktbok av hans son, hjälten Antonio Guerrero, som hade översatts till svenskan av en av de lokala svenska kommittéer jag representerade den gången.
Doña Mirtas uttryck medan hon bläddrade i den tunna boken skriven på ett obegripligt språk, men med illustrationer och en namnteckning som låg henne tätt intill hjärtat, fick mig att förstå det ohyggliga lidande som både hon och resten av Hjältarnas anhöriga gick igenom. Samtidigt kunde jag se i hennes uttryck viljan att inte ge upp, att kämpa vidare, samt tilliten till en revolution och ett folk som har formats utifrån en rad principer som gör dem kapabla att stå emot de mest ohyggliga grymheterna från Jordens herrar.
Idag har Doña Mirta och alla de Fem Hjältarnas övriga anhöriga kunnat åter förenas med dem som imperiet hade gripit och spärrat in i sina fängelsehålor. Idag, som Fidel lovade för många år sedan, de Fem Hjältarna är tillbaka i deras hem, och oss alla som under alla dessa år, överallt i världen, någon gång hade delat ut ett flygblad, eller samlat in någon slant, eller sålt någon tidning, eller hållit någon föreläsning, så att De Fem skulle kunna återvända, kan också fira tillsammans med hela det kubanska folket.
Låt oss fira idag, eftersom vi imorgon måste fortsätta arbeta hårt så att Obama förverkligar och fördjupar vad han har lovat tills blockaden bara blir ett minne blott, tills USA även normaliserar sina relationer till Venezuela och Bolivia, så att stormakten inte lyckas förinta hela världen och en gång för alla inser att den måste acceptera Vårt Amerikas självständighet.
tisdag 16 december 2014
Latin Americans ditch Facebook and start their own social media
Jorge Capelán, Tortilla con Sal, December 14th 2014
While thousands of European users have decided to sue Facebook, Latin America's popular movements have chosen to build their own alternative to what has become an infamous monopoly known for all sorts of abuses, from profiting from its users' postings and clicks to the selling of their personal data to corporations and the CIA.
It is like Facebook, but it's definitely not Facebook: It is called Facepopular, the new Latin American social media born in Argentina.
The «face» in its name has nothing to do with the English word – it's
an acronym for Frente Alternativo Contra el Estáblishment [Alternative
Front Against the Stablishment].
Launched in the middle of 2013, today, a little more than a year later, it has managed to reach 900.000 members from all over the region, a number in the same range of magnitude as the one achieved in their first year by all those social media that today rule the global Internet.
«The goal is to generate a channel for communication and communitarian interaction, free from the arbitrary and authoritarian models imposed by other social media designed and operated outside the Latin American region by multinational corporations.
It is a Latin American social network, for Spanish-speaking people, conceived and designed according to our own criteria and standards», write the creators of the site, which was launched on July 9th, 2013 - Argentina's Independence Day.
Facepopular was originally conceived by a group of Argentinean cyber-activists after a campaign named “I'm not going to the 11/8” aimed at countering a number of upper-class rightist pot-banging protests staged against the progressive government of president Cristina Fernandez back in November, 2012.
With a little help from government, lots of recycled computers, ingenuity and plenty of engagement, the activists have managed to pull the “Red Popular”, a battery of alternative grass-root outlets ranging from streaming radio and TV broadcasts to blogs and e-mail services with Facepopular as the flagship.
With Facepopular, Argentina becomes a member of the select club of countries that host their own social media, a group that includes the US, Russia and China. For that reason, Facepopular has been declared of public cultural interest by the Argentina's culture ministry.
However, Facepopular has not been conceived as some new version of Facebook, although its design has some similarities. Facepopular includes features not present in the US-American monopoly, such as a “Don't Like”-button, chat rooms, streaming media and forums. Generally speaking, Facepopular is more of a place that favors organized interaction than Facebook, which is focused on individually motivated contacts.
In contrast with Facebook, Facepopular does have an explicit set of values that any member must observe, namely: to support the idea of integrating the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean in a united “Patria Grande” (Big Homeland); to support democracy (and thus to refuse engaging in destabilizing activities against democratically elected governments); and to oppose discriminating ideologies such as racism and sexism. Otherwise, no conditions of party or ideological allegiances are posed on the members.
In contrast with commercial corporate social media, Facepopular both expects and encourages active participation by its users in the network's development and promotion. For example, a system of “ambassadors” has been developed in order to allow users in different countries to promote Facepopular.
An example of this is the campaign #48horasdefacepopular (#48hoursoffacepopular) starting at 0:00 GMT on December 15th, in which activists of the social media will spread information in the Latin American cyberspace in order to recruit new users/activists. This is the second campaign of this kind launched since Facepopular started a year ago.
“Our territory is the Net, and our weapon is the Culture; the objective is to make people aware of our need to become a united, free, thriving and egalitarian nation under the banner of all our particularities, our differences and our common history”, write the creators of Facepopular in the network's founding manifesto.
While thousands of European users have decided to sue Facebook, Latin America's popular movements have chosen to build their own alternative to what has become an infamous monopoly known for all sorts of abuses, from profiting from its users' postings and clicks to the selling of their personal data to corporations and the CIA.
It is like Facebook, but it's definitely not Facebook: It is called Facepopular, the new Latin American social media born in Argentina.
Launched in the middle of 2013, today, a little more than a year later, it has managed to reach 900.000 members from all over the region, a number in the same range of magnitude as the one achieved in their first year by all those social media that today rule the global Internet.
«The goal is to generate a channel for communication and communitarian interaction, free from the arbitrary and authoritarian models imposed by other social media designed and operated outside the Latin American region by multinational corporations.
It is a Latin American social network, for Spanish-speaking people, conceived and designed according to our own criteria and standards», write the creators of the site, which was launched on July 9th, 2013 - Argentina's Independence Day.
Facepopular was originally conceived by a group of Argentinean cyber-activists after a campaign named “I'm not going to the 11/8” aimed at countering a number of upper-class rightist pot-banging protests staged against the progressive government of president Cristina Fernandez back in November, 2012.
With a little help from government, lots of recycled computers, ingenuity and plenty of engagement, the activists have managed to pull the “Red Popular”, a battery of alternative grass-root outlets ranging from streaming radio and TV broadcasts to blogs and e-mail services with Facepopular as the flagship.
With Facepopular, Argentina becomes a member of the select club of countries that host their own social media, a group that includes the US, Russia and China. For that reason, Facepopular has been declared of public cultural interest by the Argentina's culture ministry.
However, Facepopular has not been conceived as some new version of Facebook, although its design has some similarities. Facepopular includes features not present in the US-American monopoly, such as a “Don't Like”-button, chat rooms, streaming media and forums. Generally speaking, Facepopular is more of a place that favors organized interaction than Facebook, which is focused on individually motivated contacts.
In contrast with Facebook, Facepopular does have an explicit set of values that any member must observe, namely: to support the idea of integrating the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean in a united “Patria Grande” (Big Homeland); to support democracy (and thus to refuse engaging in destabilizing activities against democratically elected governments); and to oppose discriminating ideologies such as racism and sexism. Otherwise, no conditions of party or ideological allegiances are posed on the members.
In contrast with commercial corporate social media, Facepopular both expects and encourages active participation by its users in the network's development and promotion. For example, a system of “ambassadors” has been developed in order to allow users in different countries to promote Facepopular.
An example of this is the campaign #48horasdefacepopular (#48hoursoffacepopular) starting at 0:00 GMT on December 15th, in which activists of the social media will spread information in the Latin American cyberspace in order to recruit new users/activists. This is the second campaign of this kind launched since Facepopular started a year ago.
“Our territory is the Net, and our weapon is the Culture; the objective is to make people aware of our need to become a united, free, thriving and egalitarian nation under the banner of all our particularities, our differences and our common history”, write the creators of Facepopular in the network's founding manifesto.
måndag 7 juli 2014
Multipolar soccer
By Jorge Capelán / Aydinlik (Turkey).
The Western global media dictatorship and its coverage of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this year convey a tragicomic impression of schizophrenia. On one hand, for weeks and months the country has been portrayed as unable to host the championship because of inefficiency, corruption and sheer imbecility or outright contempt for human life, as in the case with the wild speculations about death squads killing street children in order to clean the cities for the incoming waves of tourists. On the other hand, in country after country, TV-audiences beat records by the day as people all over the globe gather to watch the performances of stars such as Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, Robben or Klose, and the same media monopolies that between matches do their best to smear the event, photograph, record, describe and comment every tackle, foul, header or corner taking place as if it were the only important thing going on in the world right now.
Allegedly, Brazil is in a state of war because of the ongoing «anti-government» protests but the polls say that if elections were held today, president Dilma Rousseff would get more votes than all of her opponents together (Nobody seriously thinks that Rousseff will fail to get reelected on the elections scheduled later this year). It is not the hundreds of demonstrators around the arenas that have affected the World Cup, but traffic jams. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to be unsatisfied in today's Brazil, as well as there are plenty of reasons to be «critical» of FIFA's mafia, but most Brazilians can differentiate between real foes with capital letters such as Capitalism, Imperialism and the Corporate Global Sports Industry and PT's government, which has created none of the former and instead has attempted to address their consequences.
Brazil inherits many of the structural problems common to other big (and small) third-world countries: Vast inequalities; a political system that prevents democratic reforms and protects the power of corrupted cliques; a poorly integrated economy, depending heavily on the exploitation of natural resources, as well as racism, sexism and other expressions of oppression.
In spite of all that, since 2002, left-wing leaders Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff have managed to start a dramatic process of democratization in the most unequal country in the region and the world: 36 out of 200 million Brazilians have left behind extreme poverty, and a total of 13.8 million households, 50 million people, benefit from social programs that have considerably improved their living conditions. These programs have increased the children's school attendance by 85% and reduced maternal mortality by 40% during the past decade.
Brazil today is not what it was before Lula and Dilma came to power. It has become the world's sixth largest economy and, since its membership in the BRICS(+A) group, it has become one of the leading voices in the process of emergence of a multipolar world order. Between 2002 and 2008, its exports have more than tripled to staggering 200 billion dollars a year; the discovery of the Presal findings have made of Brazil an offshore oil superpower and its industry, stimulated by huge orders from the public sector, has been hugely strengthened.
The Western Multinational Corporate Media's smearing of Brazil's World Cup today mimics the global smear campaigns being waged against Russia (remember Sochi) and China. It is a part of the Empire's strategy for the global «contention» of a multipolar World Order. In the Latin American context, this campaign belongs to a strategy directed mainly (although not exclusively) against three South American countries: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. The first two are regional giants (both members of BRICS) without which no project for regional integration is viable. The third one, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is the bearer of the most articulated anti-capitalist dimension of such a project of integration - a dimension without which the project itself would not be successful. That is why nobody should be surprised to see right now: a vicious campaign of US-sponsored «syrianization» against Venezuela; a Wall Street-backed speculation offensive of «vulture» hedge funds against Argentina and an outright character assassination of Brazil in the global Western media.
Emergent countries such as Brazil are not «cute» anymore. It's big time now and the hegemony of the tandem Wall Street/London City is at stake. Four years ago, South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup and the treatment of the Western Media, in spite of the terrible social and economic conditions, was nowhere near the negative coverage received by Brazil today. If the World Cup were held today in South Africa, we would witness a similar smear campaign. As we today «learn» that there still exist poor people in Brazil, we would «learn» that white people still have privileges in South Africa.
The Western global media dictatorship and its coverage of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this year convey a tragicomic impression of schizophrenia. On one hand, for weeks and months the country has been portrayed as unable to host the championship because of inefficiency, corruption and sheer imbecility or outright contempt for human life, as in the case with the wild speculations about death squads killing street children in order to clean the cities for the incoming waves of tourists. On the other hand, in country after country, TV-audiences beat records by the day as people all over the globe gather to watch the performances of stars such as Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, Robben or Klose, and the same media monopolies that between matches do their best to smear the event, photograph, record, describe and comment every tackle, foul, header or corner taking place as if it were the only important thing going on in the world right now.
Allegedly, Brazil is in a state of war because of the ongoing «anti-government» protests but the polls say that if elections were held today, president Dilma Rousseff would get more votes than all of her opponents together (Nobody seriously thinks that Rousseff will fail to get reelected on the elections scheduled later this year). It is not the hundreds of demonstrators around the arenas that have affected the World Cup, but traffic jams. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to be unsatisfied in today's Brazil, as well as there are plenty of reasons to be «critical» of FIFA's mafia, but most Brazilians can differentiate between real foes with capital letters such as Capitalism, Imperialism and the Corporate Global Sports Industry and PT's government, which has created none of the former and instead has attempted to address their consequences.
Brazil inherits many of the structural problems common to other big (and small) third-world countries: Vast inequalities; a political system that prevents democratic reforms and protects the power of corrupted cliques; a poorly integrated economy, depending heavily on the exploitation of natural resources, as well as racism, sexism and other expressions of oppression.
In spite of all that, since 2002, left-wing leaders Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff have managed to start a dramatic process of democratization in the most unequal country in the region and the world: 36 out of 200 million Brazilians have left behind extreme poverty, and a total of 13.8 million households, 50 million people, benefit from social programs that have considerably improved their living conditions. These programs have increased the children's school attendance by 85% and reduced maternal mortality by 40% during the past decade.
Brazil today is not what it was before Lula and Dilma came to power. It has become the world's sixth largest economy and, since its membership in the BRICS(+A) group, it has become one of the leading voices in the process of emergence of a multipolar world order. Between 2002 and 2008, its exports have more than tripled to staggering 200 billion dollars a year; the discovery of the Presal findings have made of Brazil an offshore oil superpower and its industry, stimulated by huge orders from the public sector, has been hugely strengthened.
The Western Multinational Corporate Media's smearing of Brazil's World Cup today mimics the global smear campaigns being waged against Russia (remember Sochi) and China. It is a part of the Empire's strategy for the global «contention» of a multipolar World Order. In the Latin American context, this campaign belongs to a strategy directed mainly (although not exclusively) against three South American countries: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. The first two are regional giants (both members of BRICS) without which no project for regional integration is viable. The third one, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is the bearer of the most articulated anti-capitalist dimension of such a project of integration - a dimension without which the project itself would not be successful. That is why nobody should be surprised to see right now: a vicious campaign of US-sponsored «syrianization» against Venezuela; a Wall Street-backed speculation offensive of «vulture» hedge funds against Argentina and an outright character assassination of Brazil in the global Western media.
Emergent countries such as Brazil are not «cute» anymore. It's big time now and the hegemony of the tandem Wall Street/London City is at stake. Four years ago, South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup and the treatment of the Western Media, in spite of the terrible social and economic conditions, was nowhere near the negative coverage received by Brazil today. If the World Cup were held today in South Africa, we would witness a similar smear campaign. As we today «learn» that there still exist poor people in Brazil, we would «learn» that white people still have privileges in South Africa.
fredag 27 juni 2014
Tack, FIFA!
av Jorge Capelán.
Visst är fotbollen stor. Tack vare denna hälsosamma och uppbyggande idrott kan vi alla känna oss lite snällare, eftersom det finns en uruguayansk fotbollspelare över vilken vi nu kan ösa allt vårt hat och våra negativa känslor: Vi pratar såklart om «kannibalen» Luis Suárez.
Tack vare denna till sin natur patologiska varelse, denna kopia av Hannibal Lecter, såväl i sin kulaniriska smak som i sin maniska återfallsbenägenhet, som inte förtjänar att ingå i den mänskliga gemenskapen på grund av det uppenbart abnorma gärning av att ha knaprat på en back i det italienska landslaget, vi har allihopa blivit förlåtna både våra egna och våra fotbollslags synder:
- Tusentals mexikanska fans, som under VM:s matcher skrek «Bög!» till Brasiliens och Kameruns målvakter varje gång någon av dessa boxade iväg någon boll är förlåtna. Epitetet «är inte att betrakta som en förolämpning i detta specifika sammanhang» sade FIFA, som avfärdade en anmälan om «olämpligt uppträdande» mot det mexikanska fotbollsförbundet. Världens fotbollsälskande homofober och rasister, förena eder i ett enda bögskanderande! FIFA, så upptaget som det är med att få ett slut på antropofagin inom idrott bryr sig inte ett dugg om det, vare sig «i detta specifika sammanhang» eller i något annat om organisationen tjänar på det.
- Också Neymar, som i ögonvrån såg kroaten Luca Modric från långt håll komma springandes bakifrån och med Brasiliens djupaste illvilja och helt oprovocerat smällde till med en armbåge som nästan fick motståndaren att förlora ett öga. Självklart är också förlåtna alla backar i världen som «markerar» (som det eufemistiskt kallas) sina motståndare med en motorsåg. Allt är tillåtet eftersom, som i Bin Ladens fall, «ingenting» kan jämföras med vad Suárez gjorde.
- Naturligtvis är också förlåtna Kamerunspelarna Benoit Assou-Ekotto och Benjamin Moukandjo, som hamnade i ett slagsmål på fotbollsplanen i matchen mot Kroatien. Andra som självklart skall förlåtas är Ghanas sjärnor Kevin-Prince Boateng och Sulley Muntari, som slog och förolämpade sin tränare under ett bråk om pengar. Allt är frid och broderskap i fotbollens värld, utom för viss avskum med benägenheten att bita sina motståndare.
Det är tur att FIFA har beslutat att straffa kannibalen Suárez på det hårdaste sättet man kan föreställa sig, nämligen genom att skilja personen ifråga från det enda hon kan göra i livet under så lång tid att hon nästan tvingas säga adjö till sin karriär.
Här krävs största stränghet! Lyssna inte på vad offret för det uruguayanska antropofagen, den italienska backen Giorgio Chiellini nu säger, att FIFA:s straff mot Suárez är överdrivet strängt! Stackars Chiellini (hoppas att hans skuldra fortfarande är på plats) säkert befinner sig fortfarande i chocktillstånd pga det där odjurets bett. Det är vad som kallas för «Stockholmssyndromet», nämligen att offret försvarar sin plågoande. Stackars Chiellini!
Fortsätt med det, FIFA! Mera rättvisa, tack! Slå dig inte till ro tills varje fotbollsarena i världen bevakas av hundratals drönare och DNA-testerna blir obligatoriska för var och en som vill sätta sin fot på dem! Fortsätt att tillåta ölförsäljningen på fotbollsarenorna, särskilt när holländska och tyska fanns är med, men var extra sträng mot de chilenska fansen, eftersom sådana är säkert ute efter att ställa till med bråk.
Men, framför allt, tack FIFA för att ha avrättat Suárez! Tack vare all uppståndelse med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att ingen har valt Blatter, att endast de rikaste tevebolagen, dem som tjänar mest pengar och sätter de priser de vill, har företräde till sändningstillstånden. Tack vare uppståndelsen med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att vi är blåsta, och nästa gång vi ser en världsmästare kommer vi att vara säkra på att det handlar om en medlem i de lönsammas gäng.
Visst är fotbollen stor. Tack vare denna hälsosamma och uppbyggande idrott kan vi alla känna oss lite snällare, eftersom det finns en uruguayansk fotbollspelare över vilken vi nu kan ösa allt vårt hat och våra negativa känslor: Vi pratar såklart om «kannibalen» Luis Suárez.
Tack vare denna till sin natur patologiska varelse, denna kopia av Hannibal Lecter, såväl i sin kulaniriska smak som i sin maniska återfallsbenägenhet, som inte förtjänar att ingå i den mänskliga gemenskapen på grund av det uppenbart abnorma gärning av att ha knaprat på en back i det italienska landslaget, vi har allihopa blivit förlåtna både våra egna och våra fotbollslags synder:
- Tusentals mexikanska fans, som under VM:s matcher skrek «Bög!» till Brasiliens och Kameruns målvakter varje gång någon av dessa boxade iväg någon boll är förlåtna. Epitetet «är inte att betrakta som en förolämpning i detta specifika sammanhang» sade FIFA, som avfärdade en anmälan om «olämpligt uppträdande» mot det mexikanska fotbollsförbundet. Världens fotbollsälskande homofober och rasister, förena eder i ett enda bögskanderande! FIFA, så upptaget som det är med att få ett slut på antropofagin inom idrott bryr sig inte ett dugg om det, vare sig «i detta specifika sammanhang» eller i något annat om organisationen tjänar på det.
- Också Neymar, som i ögonvrån såg kroaten Luca Modric från långt håll komma springandes bakifrån och med Brasiliens djupaste illvilja och helt oprovocerat smällde till med en armbåge som nästan fick motståndaren att förlora ett öga. Självklart är också förlåtna alla backar i världen som «markerar» (som det eufemistiskt kallas) sina motståndare med en motorsåg. Allt är tillåtet eftersom, som i Bin Ladens fall, «ingenting» kan jämföras med vad Suárez gjorde.
- Naturligtvis är också förlåtna Kamerunspelarna Benoit Assou-Ekotto och Benjamin Moukandjo, som hamnade i ett slagsmål på fotbollsplanen i matchen mot Kroatien. Andra som självklart skall förlåtas är Ghanas sjärnor Kevin-Prince Boateng och Sulley Muntari, som slog och förolämpade sin tränare under ett bråk om pengar. Allt är frid och broderskap i fotbollens värld, utom för viss avskum med benägenheten att bita sina motståndare.
Det är tur att FIFA har beslutat att straffa kannibalen Suárez på det hårdaste sättet man kan föreställa sig, nämligen genom att skilja personen ifråga från det enda hon kan göra i livet under så lång tid att hon nästan tvingas säga adjö till sin karriär.
Här krävs största stränghet! Lyssna inte på vad offret för det uruguayanska antropofagen, den italienska backen Giorgio Chiellini nu säger, att FIFA:s straff mot Suárez är överdrivet strängt! Stackars Chiellini (hoppas att hans skuldra fortfarande är på plats) säkert befinner sig fortfarande i chocktillstånd pga det där odjurets bett. Det är vad som kallas för «Stockholmssyndromet», nämligen att offret försvarar sin plågoande. Stackars Chiellini!
Fortsätt med det, FIFA! Mera rättvisa, tack! Slå dig inte till ro tills varje fotbollsarena i världen bevakas av hundratals drönare och DNA-testerna blir obligatoriska för var och en som vill sätta sin fot på dem! Fortsätt att tillåta ölförsäljningen på fotbollsarenorna, särskilt när holländska och tyska fanns är med, men var extra sträng mot de chilenska fansen, eftersom sådana är säkert ute efter att ställa till med bråk.
Men, framför allt, tack FIFA för att ha avrättat Suárez! Tack vare all uppståndelse med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att ingen har valt Blatter, att endast de rikaste tevebolagen, dem som tjänar mest pengar och sätter de priser de vill, har företräde till sändningstillstånden. Tack vare uppståndelsen med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att vi är blåsta, och nästa gång vi ser en världsmästare kommer vi att vara säkra på att det handlar om en medlem i de lönsammas gäng.
söndag 20 april 2014
Central America: Audio commentary for April 17th 2014
toni solo and Jorge Capelán comment on Recent elections in El Salvador and Costa Rica, election to positions in State institutions and continuing serious seismic activity in Nicaragua.
Click to listen
onsdag 13 november 2013
Constitutional reforms: strengthening democratic process in Nicaragua
Discussion with Jorge Capelán and toni solo on the background and content of the proposed Constitutional reforms in Nicaragua currently under consultation.
Click to listen
Click to listen
torsdag 31 oktober 2013
Bishop Abelardo's involvement with wanted criminals, US espionage in Nicaragua
Discussion with toni solo of the incident in Honduras involving Bishop Abelardo Mata's support for a gangster sought by the Honduran and Nicaraguan police and also the relevance of Edward Snowden's revelations to Nicaragua
Click to listen
Click to listen
tisdag 27 augusti 2013
Snowden revisited
Three months after their publication, the
revelations of US National Security Agency functionary Edward Snowden
leave a series of unanswered questions. The version that presents
Snowden as a solitary hero confronting the imperialist espionage
apparatus needs to be reconsidered.
In many ways the positive role of revelations like those of Snowden, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning is undeniable in uncovering imperialist crimes and presenting to the general public the truly totalitarian nature of US global power. However, it is also undeniable that these revelations are filtered through various powerful military, financial ,media and political interests. The revelations not only express a citizens' revolt against imperial violations of basic freedoms but they also, perhaps above all, express contradictions at the very heart of the Western élites.
One example of the romanticizing
propaganda of what has been discovered in recent years is an article by
Julian Assange published by the Australian web site The Stringer on
August 24th this year,i which shows the role of the Google company executives as global flunkeys of the US State Department and NSA.
Assange concludes, “That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.”
What Assange fails to mention is that among the sectors supporting Snowden and Wikileaks itself are other powerful interests equally “big and bad”
Snowden and the CIA
According to the official version that can be more or less reconstructed from reports on the matter,ii , Snowden was talented in computer skills and also in his knowledge of Japanese and Chinese. He has no university degree, hardly even a high school qualification. As an adolescent, Snowden ““He was a geek like the rest of us,......We played video games, watched animations. It was before geek was cool.” according to an anonymous acquaintance of Snowden's quoted by the New York Times.iii
In May 2004, Snowden enlisted in the Reserve of the US Army as a Special Forces recruit but never finished his training after breaking both legs. The following year he found work as a security guardiv in the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, an institution regarded as having close links to the National Security Agency. In very little time, Snowden then began a contract with the CIA working on information security.
Despite his lack of formal qualifications, Snowden received Top Secret security clearancev and in 2007 was assigned to the US embassy in Geneva, as a specialist in network security. Over time, Snowden underwent a crisis of conscience as a result of his work with the agency some of which he considered ethically objectionablevi and in 2009 he quit.....moving to a job in the National Security Agency.
Is that not strange? How can it be that a CIA functionary with high level security clearance just quits their job and in no time at all turns up working as a private contractor for another US espionage agency? After all, over several years, the CIA invested considerable resources in Snowden, as well as paying him extremely well. For example he says he took a 6 month course in information security at that time.vii If Snowden had a crisis of conscience that motivated him to leave the CIA, how did he manage to conceal that from his superiors during the rigorous debriefing process that takes place whenever someone with high level security clearance ends their assignment.
It hardly seems credible that Snowden simply said one day “I don't want to work for the CIA any more....” and his controllers replied “Ok, kid, we wish you well with your next career move....” More unbelievable still is that he was allowed to continue with his high level security clearance privileges.
In interviews, Snowden has said that he earned around US$200,000 as an NSA contractor. Others have said it was more likely US$120,000. Whatever the exact amount, that is certainly more or less the salary level of an employee with the Top Secret/SCI security clearance which Snowden seems to have had.
When Snowden in 2013 told his boss in the Booz Allen Hamilton agency that he wanted some time off to treat a recently diagnosed epileptic condition, surely that might have caught somone's attention? Epilepsy is not a mental illness, but medical opinion agrees that it does increase the risk of mental illness, which would be grounds for immediately suspending an individual's security clearance.
In any case, after Snowden's initial revelations, a Homeland Security sub-committeeviii undertook to find out how it was that Snowden managed to receive that Top Secret security clearance. The Inspector General of the federal government's Office of Personnel Management, Patrick McFarland, has said he has information on Snowden but could not reveal it, self-evidently, since Snowden had been a CIA employee. However, what did emerge from that meeting was a series of very disturbing data on the level of mismanagement in relation to access to classified information in the US.
It transpires that 87% of investigations into candidates for such access are never finished. The Top Secret classification can mean different things for different agencies. One single contractor, the US Information Service, does 65% of the investigations. Over US$1 billion paid by the federal Office of Personnel Management for those investigations has never been audited. At least eighteen OPM investigators have been found to have falsified their investigation results.
To all this, one can add that the USIS agency that investigated Snowden is itself under federal investigation for not having done that work “in an appropriate and detailed way”.ix Corruption and mismanagement are no surprise to anyone critical of the United States government. Even so, nor should one forget that the US intelligence agencies are experts at disinformation exercises.
With all that said, even if this kind of institutional mismanagement were the case, that does not explain how an individual like Edward Snowden can move from a highly paid job in the public sector to a highly paid job in the private sector with no questions asked. It simply does not add up that Snowden fooled, first, the CIA, then his private employers, Dell and Booz Allen, and finally the NSA. The chances are nil of the CIA letting Snowden move on with his Top Secret security clearance with no control of any kind either by them or his private sector employers or the NSA.
On June 10th this year in an interview with the Guardian, Snowden said that from his office he was able to intercept any communication, including those of federal judges or even the US President so long as he had the relevant e-mail address. Despite that, the NSA was unable to locate him in his Hong Kong hotel, even when registered under his real name, just as they were unable to check out the investigation awarding him Top Secret security clearance.
Frankly, the only reasonable explanation that Snowden could travel to Hong Kong and then make it to Moscow is that he was able to count on the complicity of the CIA to change his job and subsequently desert. At least, that is the view of journalist Jon Rappoport.x
According to Rappoport, the CIA is in conflict with the NSA. Currently, the NSA is a giant organization managing immense resources and information while the CIA sees its power and influence in decline. Rappoport cites a report in Wired Magazinexi of June this year according to which the Pentagon sought US$4.7 billion for the NSA in the 2014 budget while the amounts for the CIA and other US espionage agencies were cut to US$4.4 billion.
Rappoport thinks the CIA fed Snowden the information that he in turn has fed to the Western media. That in itself by no means suggests Snowden was not genuine in his actions and may very well be sincerely convinced of the danger the NSA's global spying capability represents for civil liberties.
George Soros
One thing definitely stands out in the coverage given to Edward Snowden by left wing and progressive media both in the imperialist countries and in our own. Namely, almost no one mentions the role of Wall Street financier George Soros. In general, it is an interesting question why almost no one discusses the role played in the funding of the so-called alternative media by corporate interests represented by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and any other similar institutions.
For decades, private foundations linked to big groups of US capitalxii, usually closely linked to the US government apparatus, to the CIA and to the Council for Foreign Relations, distribute millions of dollars in their effort to control and guide public opinion.
One of the thirty most wealthy people in the world and number fifteen in the Forbes list of US millionaires,xiii Soros funds the greater part of the progressive and even radical networks in North America that focus on defending rights to privacy and freedom of information. But hardly anyone seems to be interested in drawing the relevant conclusions in relation to that fact, given that Soros' ideology is by no means progressive.
By contrast, the connections of George Soros to the networks of imperial power are well known.xiv For example, the writer Eva Golingerxv notes that “parallel to his activities as a financial speculator, George Soros, along with the Bush and Bin Laden families, is part of the Carlyle Group led by Frank Carlucci, He is also a member of the Bilderberg group, the Council for Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch.” In 1993 Soros founded the Open Society Institute which has participated actively in joint operations with the CIA in former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Georgia and Tibet. Likewise, the misnamed philanthropic organizations funded by Soros were active all through 2011 in their attempts to help the Muslim Brotherhood take power in Egypt.xvi
Soros funded groups, like Human Rights Watch and Freedom House, take the lead in all the US government psychological warfare campaigns against foreign governments perceived as requiring destabilization so as to advance US interests. Along with Soros, the International Crisis Group (ICS), includes senior US foreign policy figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage and Kenneth Aldelman. Armitage y Adelman are both signatories of the Project for a New American Century which laid the doctrinal basis for the “war on terror” of George W. Bush.
Together with Snowden during the first press conference he gave after arriving at Moscow airport on July 12th was Tatyana Lokshina,xvii representative in Russia of the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch. Coordinating Snowden's legal defence in the US one finds another Soros funded organization, the American Civil Liberties Union xviii involved in public disagreements with the lawyers of Snowden's father, Lon, and Lon Snowden's Russian lawyer.xix
A declaration by the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation xx on July 12th this year criticised the administration of President Obama for excessive use of the archaic Espionage Act to punish various whistle blowers who in recent years have revealed information affecting imperial interests, among them Bradley Manning and Snowden himself.
The declaration by OSF legal adviser, Morton Halperin, asserts that President Obama's use of the legislation creates a serious threat to the public right to know and to the process by which Americans are informed about US government activities in matters of National Security.
It is a well established fact that Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald who took the lead in reporting Edward Snowden's revelations is someone closely connected with the Soros networks. In 2008, Greenwald and writer Jane Hamsher founded the political pressure group Accountability Nowxxi aiming to “move the Democrat Party to the Left”. The most importnt members of Accountability now are almost all members of the Soros network.xxii
Laura Poitras was the first person contacted by Snowden when he sought to publish his information in the New York Times. Laura Poitras also filmed the interview with Snowden conducted in his hotel in Hong Kong. Both Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald are board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation xxiii, funded by the Foundation for National Progress which publishes the investigative journalism magazine Mother Jones.
As a documentary maker, Poitras' career is characterized by critical political and social reporting especially after the September 11th 2001 attacks on the US. Her film “My country, my country” on the effects of the US occupation of Iraq was nominated for an Oscar. Poitras believes that this film got her placed on “the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) watch list" with the highest threat rate the Department of Homeland Security assigns.xxiv
As it happens, in 2012 Poitras received a prestigious fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation,xxv of US$500,000 on the basis that her “elegant and illuminating documentaries capture the lives and intimate experiences of families and communities largely inaccessible to the American media.”
The MacArthur Foundationxxvi helps organizations and individuals committed to “building a more just, verdant and peaceful world”. Among the groups receiving help from the MacArthur Foundation is the Center for Global Development, among the first 150 of the hundreds of groups receiving help from the Open Society Institute of George Soros.xxvii
Robert L. Galluccixxviii, current president of the MacArthur Foundation has a long record of service in the US State Department where he worked among other assignments in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and much later as Special Envoy to deal with the threat posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Gallucci is also currently a member of the US State Department Advisory Board of International Security Advisors and, superfluous to say, a member of the Council for Foreign Relations.
With those antecedents one can well ask how it comes about that an institution whose president is a key imperialist strategic adviser can stand over an award of half a million dollars to a documentary maker who in her own words is considered by the Department of Homeland Security to represent the highest level of threat to the United States of America. And it may be worth remembering a detail of that MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The foundation explains on its web site xxix that “Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential” (italics added)
On its web site, the Freedom of the Press Foundation states it “is dedicated to helping defend and support aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government.” xxx To fund this the organization uses a strategy known as “crowd-sourcing funding” by which the public can donate to one or several alternative media among a group proposed on a bi-monthy basis by the FPF on its web page. The FPF explains, “Our goal is to broaden the financial base of these types of institutions—both start-ups and established non-profit organizations — by crowd-sourcing funding and making it easy for people to support the best journalism from an array of organizations all in one place.”
In a Huffington Post interview of December 16th 2012xxxi, Trevor Timm, co funder and executive director of the FPF, explains that the original idea for the FPF came out of conversations with both Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle blower who published the Pentagon Papers and John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead rock group who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, promoting free software and Internet privacy.
The next day, December 17th 2012, the EFF
announced on its web page it had decided to become a legal adviser to
the FPF. As well as Barlow, Rainey Reitman, EFF's head of activism is
also a co-founder of the FPF and works as a member of the of the EFF's
technology team. xxxii
A footnote to that December 17th news item states that although one of
the EFF directors and some of its employees were active in the FPF, the
EFF as such was not a member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation but
merely its legal adviser.
In fact, what is certain is that the EFF is a regular recipient of funding from the Open Society Institute of George Soros.xxxiii The links between Soros and another of the EFF directors, Brian Behlendorf, developer of the Apache web server software, go back at least as far as 1998 when both participated in the political lobbying group MoveOn.org, in response to the indignation caused by President Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Back then the group urged congress to censure the President and “move on”.xxxiv
One example of how this kind of arrangement works is the support the FPF has given WikiLeaks since December 2012. "Since WikiLeaks became a front-page news story, secrecy has gotten worse in the U.S," as Trevor Timm declared to the Huffington Post.xxxv
Behind the Snowden scandal lies a struggle for power in the heart of the dominant Western élites. There is a possible link between the CIA's interest in making problems for the NSA and the interests of big finance, namely the massive ability of electronic spying to monitor not only the various terrorist threats but also the activities of the big banks.
Writer Jon Rappoportxxxvi takes up the inference made by novelist Brad Thor in his novel Black List,xxxvii in which he suggests the existence of a super-espionage agency which imagines a super-espionage agency which “for years ….has used its technological superiority to carry out massive business transactions based on privileged information”. One may well ask whether global mega-banks like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs or the Quantum Group of George Soros would take with equanimity the existence of an espionage agency with the ability to know more about them than they know themselves.
The revelations in perspective
Putting things in perspective, one has to ask what the revelations of Edward Snowden really mean.
Without disparaging their value, it is hard to believe that the intelligence services of US target countries like Russia or China would have been ignorant of :
- The existence of the ECHELON global telecommunications spying system and the so called FUKUSA network composed of the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand which has been active since the 1970s. New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager revealed this information in considerable detail in 1996:xxxviii
- The existence of an army of US analysts controlling all Internet traffic using tools like the HKEYSCORE program. One has only to look at the structure of global fibre optic communications to ee that the majority of these pass through the United States and are easy for the US authorities to intercept. Long before the revelations of Edward Snowden the symbiosis was clear between big companies like Google or Microsoft and the imperial war and espionage apparatus. (Try searching duckduckgo.com using the term In-Q-Tel).xxxix
Obviously other data in Snowden's power like the instruction manual on the workings of the NSA or the complete list of its analysts are important information. But it would not be the first time this kind of information has ended up in the hands of foreign intelligence services. Many cases of high level infiltration in intelligence services have taken place without causing the kind debacle of which Edwards Snowden's enemies are accusing him of having provoked.
The fundamental importance of Snowden's revelations is political. They show in an irrefutable way in front of worldwide public opinion the complete contempt of the imperial powers for individual rights to privacy. One is no longer dealing with target categories like “terrorists” or “criminals” but absolutely anyone.
On the other hand, the Russian and
Chinese intelligence services must have been well aware from the start
of the powerful networks supporting Snowden which is why they treated
his request for asylum with such circumspection. With hindsight it has
been fortunate that Snowden did not end up in Latin America.
Snowden's revelations are playing an important role in the awakening of awareness among large sections of the world population of the totalitarian Western system dominating most of the contemporary world. But people around the globe will be unable to use that information to defeat the designs of the imperial powers unless they understand clearly the true nature of the powerful Western elite interests attempting to manipulate that information for their own ends.
NOTES
The Guardian, 10 de juni de 2013
Entrada sobre Edward Snowden en Wikipedia (inglés)
iiiNew York Times, 16 de junio de 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/for-snowden-a-life-of-ambition-despite-the-drifting.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
En el artículo original se usa la palabra “geek”, que en inglés tiene
un significado bastante más amplio que en español, donde solo se usa
para designar a alguien con intereses muy estrechos, especialmente
tecnológicos. Por eso la tradujimos como “friki”, es decir, “una persona
cuyas aficiones, comportamiento o vestuario son inusuales”. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friki
ivSnowden,
para conseguir ese trabajo como guardia de seguridad en una instalación
de la NSA ya debe haber tenido algún tipo de autorización de seguridad –
algo que lleva tiempo conseguir. Según este artículo del Washington
Post, desde el 11 de septiembre de 2001, ha habido un gran aumento en la
cantidad de puestos de contratistas y empleados del sector público a
los que se requiere presenten una autorización de seguridad, desde
personal de mantenimiento en agencias de espionaje hasta técnicos y
desarrolladores de software. En 2010, el número de estos trabajadores se
calculaba en unos 854,000 en todos los EE.UU.
vBásicamente,
en los EE.UU. hay tres niveles de acceso a información clasificada:
CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET y TOP SECRET. Para lograr una autorización al nivel
más bajo, CONFIDENTIAL, se requiere pasar por una investigación de
entre unas semanas y unos meses, que cubre los últimos 7 años de la vida
del sujeto. Para obtener una autorización en el siguiente nivel,
SECRET, el período de la investigación va de algunos meses hasta un año,
siendo un pobre historial financiero la causa más común de
descalificación del sujeto. Este tipo de autorización es la más común a
nivel de contratistas civiles trabajando para el Estado de EE.UU. Para
obtener una autorización TOP SECTRET (TS), que da acceso a información
sobre seguridad nacional, antiterrorismo y contrainteligencia, los
requerimientos del estudio del sujeto son mucho más estrictos. Se debe
pasar por una investigación SSBI que debe ser hecha de nuevo cada 5
años. Se investigan los últimos 10 años de vida del sujeto (o, en su
defecto, a partir de los 18 años). También se investiga a su familia y
al registro del aplicante en otras agencias federales del gobierno de
los EE.UU. Esta investigación incluye entrevistas con familiares,
antiguos empleadores, conocidos, y con el sujeto mismo. Sujetos que han
recibido una autorización de acceso a información clasificada de esta
categoría pueden además acceder a una autorización de acceso a
Información Sensible Compartimentada (SCI), ya sea para Inteligencia de
las Comunicaciones (SIGINT), para información sobre armas nucleares,
para blancos de armas nucleares, etcétera. El requisito indispensable
para acceder a una autorización SCI es haber pasado por una
investigación SSBI. En el caso de Snowden, lo más probable es que
tuviera una autorización de acceso a información clasificada TS/SCI.
viCuenta
la historia que Snowden se sintió defraudado cuando en Ginebra, la CIA
deliberadamente emborrachó a un banquero con el fin de chantajearlo y
lograr reclutarlo para la agencia y así tener acceso a información
secreta sobre la banca del país helvético, que en ese momento se
encontraba una legislación para aumentar la transparencia bancaria.
xiiPara
una discusión del papel jugado por la Fundación Ford en apoyo a la
Guerra Fría Cultural llevada adelante por la CIA en Europa Occidental en
los años 50 y 60 del siglo pasado, ver “La CIA y la Guerra Fría
Cultural”, de Stonor Saunders. Sobre el papel de fachada de la CIA que
juegan las principales fundaciones filantrópicas en los EE.UU., ver “The
Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic
collaboration with the Secret Police”, de James Petras http://www.rebelion.org/hemeroteca/petras/english/ford010102.htm
y para una discusión algo más actualizada del tema, ver “Ford
Foundation, The CIA and U.S. Establishment Conspiracy” (I y II) de Bob
Feldman. http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2012/07/ford-foundation-cia-and-us.html http://wherechangeobama.blogspot.com/2012/08/ford-foundation-cia-and-us_1971.html
El 15 de agosto, el diario Wall Street
Journal informó que una sesión de chat que tuvieron Edward Snowden y su
padre, Lon, se realizó contra la voluntad de los abogados que asesoran a
éste último. El chat de dos horas entre padre e hijo se llevó a cabo
con la ayuda de Ben Wizner, abogado de la ACLU. Wizner pertenece al
equipo de abogados defensores de Edward Snowden en los EE.UU. Según el
diario estadounidense, el contacto entre padre e hijo se realizó contra
la recomendación del abogado de Lon Snowden, Bruce Fein. Al ser
informado de la conversación el abogado ruso de Edwad Snowden, Anatoly
Kucherena, dijo que le había urgido a su cliente que no hablase con su
padre ni por medios electrónicos ni por teléfono, y les pidió a ambos no
tener contacto hasta que pudiesen encontrarse en persona.
Una
nota de febrero de 2009 señala que los miembros de AccountabilityNow
entonces eran los grupos: "Daily Kos, MoveOn, the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), ColorofChange.org, Democracy for America,
21st Century Democrats" y "BlogPAC".
Greenwald, Poitras y Freedom of the Press Foundation
xxxviiiDescargar el libro “Secret Power” en http://www.nickyhager.info/ebook-of-secret-power/
fredag 28 juni 2013
Events in Brazil and the recent debate on Social Security benefits
toni solo and Jorge Capelán discuss events in Brazil and the Nicaraguan right wing's failed efforts to manipulate recent protests by elderly retired people about Social Security benefits.
Click to listen
Click to listen
måndag 24 juni 2013
Vad händer i Brasilien?
Av Jorge Capelán, Riktpunkt.nu
Den västerländska mediebevakningen om vad som händer i Brasilien är förkastlig. Som i fallet Libyen har imperiets maskineri för hjärntvätt och psykologisk krigföring lyckats påverka hela det politiska spektrumet – inklusive tongivande medier inom det som brukar kallas för vänster.
Det som händer i det sydamerikanska landet är allt annat än en ”revolution underifrån”, och det är inte heller något folkligt uppror mot arbetarpartiet PT:s politik utan en rörelse som tillfälligt har kapats av en aggressiv of fascistisk höger med stöd från delar av medelklassen och imperiet.
Om man googlar runt lite och tittar på bilderna från demonstrationerna de senaste dagarna märker man genast att merparten av alla demonstranter som visas är vita i ett land där 52 % av befolkningen är svart – och där de flesta svarta är fattiga.
De senaste 10 åren har de svarta ökat sin medelinkomst med 43.9% medan de vita (varav merparten tillhör medel- och överklassen) har ökat sin medelinkomst med 19.8%. Detta beror på en massiv omfördelning av resurserna som både Lula och Dilma har åstadkommit.
Omkring 20-25% av brasilianerna har lyfts ut ur fattigdomen. Det är inte dessa människor som demonstrerar mot regeringen.
De som romantiserar de senaste dagarnas protester som en ”sann” revolt underifrån mot en till ytan progressiv men i själva verket nyliberal regering har en rad saker att förklara: Vad är revolutionärt och progressivt i att skandera att ”ett enat Brasilien behöver inga politiska partier”?
Hur kan man betrakta en regering som nyliberal vilka ökar de fattigas inkomster och lyfter dessa ut ur fattigdomen, en regering som visar att det är fördelningspolitiken som möjliggör tillväxten, samt att man både kan utvidga den inre marknaden via ökad folklig konsumtion och samtidigt öka exporten?
Inledningsvis hade protesterna en helt annan inriktning, de var små (som mest 3 000 personer) och Sao Paulos militariserade polis mötte dem med övervåld. Polisen gjorde det på order av borgmästaren Geraldo Alckmin som tillhör högerpartiet PSDB (formellt socialdemokratiskt, nyliberalt i praktiken). Medierna (som i Brasilien är fräna motståndare till regeringen) svartmålade protesterna och hyllade polisen.
MPL-rörelsen eller ”Movimiento Passe Livre”, som startade protesterna mot planerna på att höja biljetterna i kollektivtrafiken i Sao Paulo, är ett slags motsvarighet till Planka.nu i Sverige. Den stöds av många vänstermänniskor ur alla schatteringar, inklusive av många PT-anhängare. PT har självt avgiftsfri kollektivtrafik i sitt program! I MPL fanns grupper som var emot all partipolitik överhuvud taget, men de var inte i majoritet och inte heller skulle de slåss med andra vänstermänniskor om en partibanderoll. Programmen mot vänsteraktivisterna i demonstrationerna startade senare.
Det som hände i Sao Paulo, där det hela började, var följande:
- Den 10 juni, MPL samlar jättemycket folk till en demonstration, enligt uppgifter ca 5 000 personer. Den militariserade polisen slår till på ett brutalt sätt. Många människor över hela landet blir jätteupprörda. Tidningarna fortsätter med sin kriminaliserande retorik.
– Till nästa massmöte, den 13 juni, kommer det hela 20 000 personer till demonstrationen. Över 70 demonstranter grips av den militariserade polisen med motiveringen att de hade flaskor med vinäger för att skydda sig mot tårgasen. Många människor skadades och det hela sändes live av de stora privata tevekanalerna.
– Helgen till den 15 och 16 juni ägde flera våldsamma demonstrationer rum, främst i Belo Horizonte, Brasilia och Rio de Janeiro.
– På måndagen den 17 juni, vände samma högertidningar om och började istället uppmana folk att gå ut och demonstrera utan politiska fanor, enbart med den brasilianska flaggan. Dessa som tidigare hade kritiserat demonstranterna och hyllat polisens våldsamma ingripande. ”Ett enat Brasilien behöver inga partier”, löd (den klart fascistiska) parollen.
Ända sedan dess har stämningen ändrats radikalt i demonstrationerna. Alltför mycket viftande med den brasilianska flaggan utanför fotbollssammanhang betraktas allmänt i landet som högervridet – ja, rentav fascistiskt. En rekordsiffra på 65 000 deltog (inte 200-300 000 som det påstås). Trots att de gamla parollerna fortfarande hördes, överröstades dessa av andra, nya paroller såsom: ”sänk skatterna”, ”VM kostar för mycket”, ”ner med korruptionen”, och ”ner med utsugningen av medelklassen”. Protestens sociala sammansättning samt dess innehåll hade ändrats.
Medan MPL krävde fri kollektivtransport, bättre utbildning och bättre hälsovård, pratade den kapade rörelsen enbart om ”korruption – inte om de privata intressenas korruption, naturligtvis, och inte heller om mediemogulernas korruption. Fascistiska grupper av skinheads och andra våldsamma element dök upp på demonstrationerna och hotade med våld mot alla vänsteraktivister son bekände sig som sådana. Många blev misshandlade, inte bara i Sao Paulo, utan på många andra ställen. Inga banker eller andra kapitalistiska symboler attackerades, däremot offentliga byggnader och PT:s partilokaler samt andra vänsterorganisationers lokaler förstördes.
Det finns många vittnesmål om att polisen på många håll lät de våldsamma grupperna agera ostört utan att ingripa. Det finns också vittnesmål om att grupper av oidentifierade individer brände ner saker på öppen gata på platser som inte hade någon anknytning till demonstrationerna, förmodligen med syftet att konstruera ett scenario av kaos.
De flesta som har deltagit i demonstrationerna håller inte med högeragendan, men det är först nu de börjar inse att rörelsen har bojkottats.
Detta destabiliseringsförsök kommer inte att lyckas övergå i en ren statskupp pga. de som kapar dess ledning inte har någon politik alls.
Det handlar om grupper i Brasilien som är alltför beroende av USA och Europa och den enda politik de kan erbjuda är just den politik som det brasilianska folket inte vill ha, nämligen nyliberalismen.
Än så länge har president Dilma Rousseff försvarat demonstranternas rätt att peka på bristerna i den brasilianska demokratin samt att diskutera hur en ny politik kan utformas. PT har klart och tydligt fördömt polisens våld mot demonstranterna samtidigt som de isolerade våldshandlingarna påbörjats av de fascistiska infiltreringsgrupperna.
I fredags samlades 76 vänsterorganisationer, inklusive politiska partier, fackföreningar och sociala rörelser i Sao Paulo, för att utbyta analyser om vad som hade hänt. Grupperna, som samlar praktiskt taget hela spektret av landets vänster, inklusive partier som befinner sig i opposition till PT, beslutade om att bilda en gemensam front mot det fascistiska våldet samt att verka tillsammans för att rörelsens ursprungliga paroller återupptas. Liknande möten har hållits på många andra ställen i Brasilien denna helg.
MPL ställde tillfälligt in demonstrationerna när det stod klart att de hade kapats av fascister. Nu återupptas dessa igen, inte som opposition mot regeringen utan som ett fredligt sätt att fördjupa regeringens sociala målsättningar.
Att västerländska medier har gjort en så stor sak av demonstrationerna i landet beror på att Brasilien har befäst sin ställning som världens sjätte största ekonomi och dess utkom håller i sin hand nyckeln till Latinamerikas rörelse för självständighet gentemot Väst.
USA och dess europeiska allierade har ett klart intresse av att de krafter som utlösts i samband med demonstrationerna används med syftet att hindra Brasilien från att spela en avgörande roll i byggandet av den gryende multipolära världsordningen.
Jag menar inte att CIA ursprungligen ligger bakom protesterna, men det är högst troligt att NATO:s strateger för psykologisk krigföring har på olika sätt bidragit till försöket att bojkotta proteströrelsen.
Som av en ren händelse, förra veckan annonserades Obamas kandidat till ny USA-ambassadör i Brasilien. Hon heter Liliana Ayalde, och var stationerad i Asuncion, Paraguay, under ”expresskuppen” i fjor varpå den paraguayanska oligarkin avsatte president Fernando Lugo.
Protesterna kan bli ett tillfälle att befästa den sydamerikanska jättens befrielse från den nyliberala politiken, men de skulle också kunna leda till nya destabiliserande incidenter som så småningom skulle kunna kompromettera Latinamerikas process av integration och självbestämmande.
Än så länge har president Dilma Rousseff och hennes allierade på vänsterkanten hanterat situationen med visdom, försiktighet och politisk intelligens. Låt oss hoppas att hon, PT och dess allierade lyckas, eftersom Latinamerika behöver ett starkt Brasilien.
Jorge Capelán
söndag 23 juni 2013
NICARAGUA: Right wing politicians and ex-Sandinistas manipulate pensioners legitimate claim
Jorge Capelan and toni solo, June 23rd 2013
Tortilla con Sal.
The reactionary rich country elites are at once sinister, cynical, predictable and banal. Their various regional expressions in Asia, Africa or Latin America all apply exactly the same destabilizing tactics in every country. The vogue these days is political mimicry:
The apparent spontaneity of the pensioners' action is belied by the fact that their nationwide mobilization requires tens of thousands of dollars to fund transport, accommodation and food. Very clearly that funding comes not from the self-confessed impoverished pensioners but from the right wing groups that are so blatantly manipulating them. As has happened so often elsewhere, the cynical anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua have abused graphic images from other countries in support of false accusations of violence and repression by the government here.
This tactic has been used flagrantly by corporate media for as long as anyone can remember to smear target governments everywhere. The latest example here in Nicaragua is of the right wing Chamorro family owned newspaper Hoy. On the Internet, they deceitfully used a photograph of an elderly woman beaten up up the Colombian security forces to suggest non-existent violence by Nicaraguan police against vulnerable elderly citizens.
The background to the pensioners protest action is that some 45.000 people of retirement age in Nicaragua have insufficient contributions to the system to receive the full pension. The government accepts their argument that they are entitled to a reduced pension based proportionately on their lifetime contributions. No one questions their right to a minimum pension - which also is established in the law - the problem is that the pension fund cannot meet their demand without collapsing.
A large part of their contributions have vanished into thin air. People working prior to 1979 have suffered because the dictator Anastasio Somoza stole their money when he fled Nicaragua during the revolution back in 1979. Between 1990 and 2006, pensioners lost out because their contributions were squandered by the Liberal governments in power during that period. In fact, one of the first actions of the Violeta Chamorro government was to abolish by decree the provision for a reduced pension.
Subsequently, Violeta Chamorro and her parliamentary allies reformed the Constitution to so as to strip the President of the power to modify the Social Security law. Now, many of the same people responsible for that change falsely accuse President Ortega of failing to act to assist the legitimate demands of retired people who would qualify for a reduced pension. These are the same right wing politicians who argue that the system needs to be reformed, which is code for reducing benefits, because it is under funded.
In fact, since 2007, the Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega has practically doubled the number of affiliated workers to 674.000 and dramatically increased the number of registered employers to almost 26.000. The size of the contributions has also increased considerably. But the system still cannot afford to give the pensionless seniors what they have contributed in the past, amounting on some estimates to about 2.3 billion cordobas. The pension fund would go bankrupt!
The only solution to the problem is to increase the base of contributors to the system by expanding the number of people in formal employment contributing to the social security fund. About 70% of Nicaragua's workers are not part of the system because neoliberal policies deliberately promoted an informal free market economy with strong disincentives for creating fully-insured jobs. It is that structural neoliberalism the Sandinista government inherited in 2007 and which it has substantially changed while at the same time constantly emphasizing medium and long term sustainability.
For that reason, the government has been negotiating with the pensioners organizations during all these years. About 8.000 of them receive the Government's solidarity bonus of about 45 dollars each month, and some 200.000 food packages have been delivered. Older people benefit especially from the government's improvements to the health system and initiatives like Misión Milagro which overwhelmingly serve older people who have problems with their vision.
Right-wing politicians, the network of toxic NGOs of the so-called "civil society" plus CIA-trained groups of middle class youths have fooled some of the seniors into believing that the state must pay them regardless of the effect on the other programs that benefit them such as the generously subsidized public transport, water and electricity services or free health care.
Last week, a hundred or so pensioners "occupied" the Social Security building. They promptly were surrounded by the police which already knew what the right-wing instigators had in mind. None of the elderly people were touched, not even with the petal of a rose, and they were offered help to leave the premises. Furthermore, bus transportation already had been ordered, as well as medical check-ups, food and so on.
Faced with the failure of their plan to provoke police violence, hundreds of right-wing activists tried to join the occupation and attempted to break through the the barrier of unarmed policemen who for several hours had to patiently stand facing the right-wingers insults, blows, stones and bottles. Six policemen were seriously injured. The right-wing TV, the newspaper La Prensa and the Corporacion radio station broadcast the "event" live all day.
Now phony progressives, ex-Sandinistas and their right wing allies make absurdly false accusations that the FSLN authorities have attacked peaceful demonstrating senior citizens. On Monday, the Sandinistas will flood the streets of Managua in order to set the record straight and remind the opposition that no "Nicaraguan right-wing Spring" will take place here. Thanks to the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua, the Spring started years ago when President Daniel Ortega took office in January 2007.
Tortilla con Sal.
The reactionary rich country elites are at once sinister, cynical, predictable and banal. Their various regional expressions in Asia, Africa or Latin America all apply exactly the same destabilizing tactics in every country. The vogue these days is political mimicry:
- take over a movement with more or less legitimate demands,
- make those demands impossible to meet (make sure to get the help of ultra-leftist and other extremist useful idiots to do that)
- then try to turn that struggle into a plebiscite about the progressive or radical government target of destabilization
- if possible, foment extremely violent polarization so as to provoke civil unrest or even war.
The apparent spontaneity of the pensioners' action is belied by the fact that their nationwide mobilization requires tens of thousands of dollars to fund transport, accommodation and food. Very clearly that funding comes not from the self-confessed impoverished pensioners but from the right wing groups that are so blatantly manipulating them. As has happened so often elsewhere, the cynical anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua have abused graphic images from other countries in support of false accusations of violence and repression by the government here.
This tactic has been used flagrantly by corporate media for as long as anyone can remember to smear target governments everywhere. The latest example here in Nicaragua is of the right wing Chamorro family owned newspaper Hoy. On the Internet, they deceitfully used a photograph of an elderly woman beaten up up the Colombian security forces to suggest non-existent violence by Nicaraguan police against vulnerable elderly citizens.
The background to the pensioners protest action is that some 45.000 people of retirement age in Nicaragua have insufficient contributions to the system to receive the full pension. The government accepts their argument that they are entitled to a reduced pension based proportionately on their lifetime contributions. No one questions their right to a minimum pension - which also is established in the law - the problem is that the pension fund cannot meet their demand without collapsing.
A large part of their contributions have vanished into thin air. People working prior to 1979 have suffered because the dictator Anastasio Somoza stole their money when he fled Nicaragua during the revolution back in 1979. Between 1990 and 2006, pensioners lost out because their contributions were squandered by the Liberal governments in power during that period. In fact, one of the first actions of the Violeta Chamorro government was to abolish by decree the provision for a reduced pension.
Subsequently, Violeta Chamorro and her parliamentary allies reformed the Constitution to so as to strip the President of the power to modify the Social Security law. Now, many of the same people responsible for that change falsely accuse President Ortega of failing to act to assist the legitimate demands of retired people who would qualify for a reduced pension. These are the same right wing politicians who argue that the system needs to be reformed, which is code for reducing benefits, because it is under funded.
In fact, since 2007, the Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega has practically doubled the number of affiliated workers to 674.000 and dramatically increased the number of registered employers to almost 26.000. The size of the contributions has also increased considerably. But the system still cannot afford to give the pensionless seniors what they have contributed in the past, amounting on some estimates to about 2.3 billion cordobas. The pension fund would go bankrupt!
The only solution to the problem is to increase the base of contributors to the system by expanding the number of people in formal employment contributing to the social security fund. About 70% of Nicaragua's workers are not part of the system because neoliberal policies deliberately promoted an informal free market economy with strong disincentives for creating fully-insured jobs. It is that structural neoliberalism the Sandinista government inherited in 2007 and which it has substantially changed while at the same time constantly emphasizing medium and long term sustainability.
For that reason, the government has been negotiating with the pensioners organizations during all these years. About 8.000 of them receive the Government's solidarity bonus of about 45 dollars each month, and some 200.000 food packages have been delivered. Older people benefit especially from the government's improvements to the health system and initiatives like Misión Milagro which overwhelmingly serve older people who have problems with their vision.
Right-wing politicians, the network of toxic NGOs of the so-called "civil society" plus CIA-trained groups of middle class youths have fooled some of the seniors into believing that the state must pay them regardless of the effect on the other programs that benefit them such as the generously subsidized public transport, water and electricity services or free health care.
Last week, a hundred or so pensioners "occupied" the Social Security building. They promptly were surrounded by the police which already knew what the right-wing instigators had in mind. None of the elderly people were touched, not even with the petal of a rose, and they were offered help to leave the premises. Furthermore, bus transportation already had been ordered, as well as medical check-ups, food and so on.
Faced with the failure of their plan to provoke police violence, hundreds of right-wing activists tried to join the occupation and attempted to break through the the barrier of unarmed policemen who for several hours had to patiently stand facing the right-wingers insults, blows, stones and bottles. Six policemen were seriously injured. The right-wing TV, the newspaper La Prensa and the Corporacion radio station broadcast the "event" live all day.
Now phony progressives, ex-Sandinistas and their right wing allies make absurdly false accusations that the FSLN authorities have attacked peaceful demonstrating senior citizens. On Monday, the Sandinistas will flood the streets of Managua in order to set the record straight and remind the opposition that no "Nicaraguan right-wing Spring" will take place here. Thanks to the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua, the Spring started years ago when President Daniel Ortega took office in January 2007.
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