the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 19, 2007
Gasoline prices are now more than $3.11 per gallon on average nationally, and approaching $3.50 in California and other big states. Since crude oil prices have increased to almost $100 per barrel on world markets, price increases are expected to continue for gas at the pump.
Don’t believe all the myths and scare- mongering used to justify these outrageous prices.
No, there are no oil shortages anywhere. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out on November 8, supply above the ground is "abundant." The amount of oil in storage tanks is near all-time record highs: 4.2 billion barrels at the end of June, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
No, we are not running out of oil below ground.
The world’s proven oil reserves are 12% higher than they were a decade ago, according to BP (British Petroleum). And that’s not even counting the more than trillion barrels of oil locked in Venezuela’s Orinoco tar sands. "Combined," writes the Wall Street Journal, "that comes to a century of production at the current rate." Oil reserves may not be eternal. But there are still plenty of new major oil finds, and we continue to discover new oil reserves at a faster rate than the world consumes them. Just this month, for example, the Brazilian government announced that oil fields discovered off the coast of Brazil will almost double that country’s reserves.
No, there is no big increase in worldwide demand for oil.
According to BP, oil consumption in the U.S. actually fell by 1.3% in 2006. As for worldwide demand, it increased by a measly 0.6%. In other words, all those scare stories about how supposedly "incredible" economic growth in China and India has driven big increases in worldwide oil consumption are complete nonsense and garbage.
No, there is no big increase in the cost of crude oil production.
The cost of extracting oil ranges from $4 per barrel in Saudi Arabia up to $30 per gallon in Canada’s oil sands. In 2006, the average lifting cost per barrel of oil was about $9 per barrel at oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. This means that crude oil is being sold for up to 10 or even 20 times its cost of production.
To sum up: oil prices are not going through the roof because we are running out of oil, or because India and China are burning it all up.
No, oil prices are being driven up through the insatiable greed of the big oil companies. These companies dominate the world oil market. And they use that power and control to produce enormous profits. In 2006, the top six oil companies, known as the "super majors," had combined profits of over 136 billion dollars. Just one company, Exxon-Mobil, had profits of 40 billion dollars. And this year, their profits are on track to be even higher!
Of course, those oil companies don’t just keep the money for themselves. They recycle it through stock buybacks engineered to boost the stock price and provide big dividend increases to further enrich their major stockholders, that is, big parts of the world bourgeoisie. They pay their top executives tens and hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
And in the process, the oil companies drain the wealth and resources of the world. They snap up big chunks from the wallets of billions of consumers, while impoverishing and destroying entire regions in the Middle East and other underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia and South America through war and pollution. The people in those regions call it the "oil curse."
In fact, it is not the oil that is the problem, but the quest of the capitalist class to enrich itself at the expense of the rest of the world.
Nov 19, 2007
The following article is translated from the November 9 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), published by the revolutionary workers organization of that name in France.
One after another, the heads of Merrill Lynch, Citigroup (the biggest bank in the U.S. and the world) and the Union Bank of Switzerland (USB), three of the biggest financial companies in the world, were fired. These companies’ stockholders blamed these executives for the companies’ billion-dollar losses.
From real estate speculation in the U.S. to the unbridled world financial speculation that it fed, the entire financial system is affected. No one really knows how far the crisis will go. From week to week, the enormity of the sums squandered in speculative operations has increased at a dizzying pace. It began with some mortgage companies and then spread rapidly to all the big banks, including outside the U.S. Thus Merrill Lynch’s October estimates of losses in speculative investments rose from 4.9 to 7.9 billion dollars. At Citigroup, financial analysts estimate the bank will need to take 30 billion dollars from its own funds to cover investments that today are worthless.
The most recent estimate of the size of funds lost this year due to financial speculation in risky mortgage loans in the U.S. varies from 100 to 350 billion dollars. That’s equal to the total budget of the French government.
But it’s the population, the working people of all these countries, who have already been asked to pay for this monstrous waste. In the U.S. an estimated two million families face foreclosure. Tens of thousands of construction workers have already been laid off, as well as tens of thousands of bank and financial service workers throughout the country.
The governments in the U.S. and Europe have intervened in this crisis for months. They are not trying to prevent the layoffs or foreclosures or bankruptcies. They are trying to bail out the banks. This summer, tens of billions of dollars in public funds were put at the disposal of banks weakened by all their speculative activities. Just recently the Federal Reserve bank made 41 billion dollars available to the U.S. financial system.
When will they stop trying to make the population pay for their speculation? When workers force these parasites to put the capital they have accumulated in the hands of the population to meet its own needs.
Nov 19, 2007
The following is translated from the November 16 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the journal of the revolutionary workers organization of that name active in France.
The workers of SNCF (French National Railway Company) have been on a strike that they have renewed each day starting from Tuesday, November 13. The workers of the RATP (Paris subway and bus), EDF (French Electric Company) and GDF (French Gas Company) joined them on Wednesday morning. The strikers are refusing the government’s plan to force them to work longer for a reduced pension.
The French government claims that those who work for the railroads, the Paris subway and bus systems, as well as the gas and electric companies are privileged because their pensions have not been cut, while private sector workers and other public employees have seen their pensions cut. The politicians call these workers privileged even when the pensions for many of them amount to less than 1000 euros (1450 dollars) a month. These same people applaud the 15 billion euros (22 billion dollars) given in tax reductions for a few thousand richest families, or consider it normal that the president of the Republic gives himself a 172% raise!
The railroad, subway and bus, and gas and electric workers are right to defend themselves. All workers must be in solidarity with their battle and hope that the strike is massively supported.
The government is trying to make this strike a test of strength. But this test of strength doesn’t only oppose the government to some 500,000 workers with special pensions. It also opposes the government and the bosses to all the workers. The government wants to save money at the expense of all retirees. It also intends on cutting health insurance, public services, all that is useful, indeed vital to the majority of the population, in order to funnel more money to the bosses.
On the question of pensions, the government is out in front. But it acts as the representative of the bosses, who carry out unending war against the workers by freezing their wages while prices soar. When prices soar, profits increase. And when wages are frozen, profits are free to increase.
The entire working class will lose if the government wins this test of strength. The retirement age for everyone will be pushed still higher and pensions will be reduced still more.
So let’s be clear: whatever our occupation, our type of work, this strike concerns all of us. If we don’t want to sink into poverty, we must join the struggle sooner or later. And we must put forth a powerful and determined enough struggle to make the bosses fear that our movement will escape control and will threaten their profits. And, furthermore, workers must fight to take away the bosses’ exclusive control over the factories, banks and chain stores.
The monopoly of the great industrial and financial corporations over the economy is a catastrophe for the majority of the population, for the whole society.
While workers do more work and see their purchasing power erode, while retirees suffer misery, businesses make ever higher profits. Hundreds of financial corporations take charge of such unimaginable sums they don’t know what to do with it. They carry out financial speculation which in turn threatens to bring down the entire economy.
But the union leadership has chosen to disperse the force of the strikers by calling on some to come out on November 14 and others on November 20. Faced with the attacks of the bosses and the government, the working class needs unity around demands common to all. In the past, workers have shown a fighting spirit that can overcome the foot-dragging of the union leadership and force them to go further.
All workers have an interest to push forward this spirit once again.
Nov 19, 2007
On November 1, a group of students at Morton West High School in Berwyn, Illinois, a working class suburb of Chicago, protested against the Iraq war and regular visits to the school by military recruiters. They sat down in the cafeteria and refused to go to classes.
About 200 students participated in the protest at one time or another during the day. The school administration tried to reduce the size of the protest by getting some parents, teachers and athletic coaches to convince particular students to leave. Later, they got the roughly 25 students who were still protesting to move from the cafeteria into a hall near the principal’s office. In return, the students were promised a light punishment for cutting classes that day.
But at the end of the day, the district superintendent of schools double-crossed the students. All the remaining protesters got 10-day suspensions, and were threatened with expulsion; the superintendent claimed they had engaged in mob action. This accusation contradicted Berwyn’s police chief who reported that officers had made no arrests nor filed any charges because “It was all very peaceful and orderly.”
Parents and other supporters of the student protesters were outraged at the long suspensions. They mobilized and forced the school superintendent to drop any threat to expel students and to reduce the 10-day suspensions for all but four of the protesters. Parents are now pushing to have all the suspensions removed from the students’ school records.
One local supporter of the students wrote in to the Chicago Sun-Times saying, “Recruiters are preying on our young, especially targeting the poor, and are allowed full access to public schools when the very war they are promoting is robbing our nation’s schools of much-needed funding. If students have the audacity to speak out about this obvious injustice, they are told to shut up and get out.... You are good enough to die for your country but not good enough to stand up for your rights.”
He is right. End the war! Bring all the troops home now!
Nov 19, 2007
For the past 60 years, capitalist society has resounded loudly with attacks on the ideas of communism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union sixteen years ago, it has become fashionable to call communism a failure and the idea of a more egalitarian society a utopia.
For sure, something has gone wrong since the Russian Revolution of 1917. But it is not the ideal of a more egalitarian, just, humane society, which the revolution fought for. The vision of millions of workers who fought, in Russia and elsewhere, for a decent future did not fail. In fact, the Russian Revolution has been an important historical lesson for the workers’ movement.
The Russian Revolution was the first of a series of revolutions that took place in Europe in the last years of World War I. Millions of people were being slaughtered. These revolutions were the result of the outrage European workers felt against their governments, generals, politicians and bosses who had brought the terrible bloodbath of the war upon them.
In February 1917, revolutionary workers, soldiers and peasants overthrew the Russian tsar in a spontaneous uprising. Their slogan was "Peace, Land and Bread." But the new government, which included representatives of the capitalists and landowners, was not willing to answer these demands.
The Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, was able to win the support of a majority of the workers in Petrograd and Moscow by consistently standing by these demands and by the slogan "All Power to the Soviets." (The soviets were factory councils formed originally by the workers to organize their struggles. Eventually, they became the organisms through which the working class democratically organized its power.)
In October 1917 (November 7 according to our calendar), based on the power of the workers organized in soviets, the Bolsheviks led an insurrection overthrowing the old government. The Soviets proclaimed a workers’ government in Russia.
The first decree of the new revolutionary power concerned peace. The proposal to all the warring governments was for an immediate peace without annexation of territory. It was an appeal to all people to impose this peace.
The second decree concerned land: the expropriation without indemnity of the lands of large landowners and of lands owned by the Church. The decree called on the peasants to apply the measure and to decide what to do. The soviets of peasants were encouraged to organize the dividing up of the expropriated lands entrusted to them.
At the beginning, the Soviets did not nationalize industrial and commercial enterprises. But these were put under the control of the workers.
The strength of this new power was that it corresponded to the aspirations of tens of millions of people. It allowed them to transform their wishes into actions that changed their fate.
The Russian Revolution had an immediate impact both on the bosses and on the workers in other countries. While all the major capitalist countries (England, France, Germany, the U.S., Italy, Japan) immediately attacked revolutionary Russia, a wave of workers’ revolutions swept Finland, Germany, Hungary and Italy between 1918 and 1923. Even in the United States, a massive strike wave swept the country.
But this massive upsurge of the European and American working class did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism in any of these countries. It’s not that the workers in these countries did not fight as hard as the Russian workers did. Rather, there was no organization like the Bolshevik Party, ready to lead a fight for power. The workers’ organizations in Europe were dominated by Social Democrats–similar to many union leaders in the U.S. today. Not only did they hold back the struggle of the working class. In Germany, where the revolution went the furthest and had the best chance to succeed, the Social Democrats helped lead the counter-revolution against the workers. They literally rescued and restored the capitalist order when it had completely collapsed after Germany’s defeat in the war.
Nevertheless, these mass upsurges in other capitalist countries helped the Russian workers and peasants to successfully defend their revolution.
So the first workers’ state in history was able to survive, but it ended up the only one, isolated in the middle of a hostile capitalist world. Moreover, Russia was a backward country, devastated by almost a decade of war. The Russian workers had gotten rid of the big bosses, native and foreign alike. But the economic backwardness and social contradictions inherited from Tsarist Russia had not vanished overnight. Now they came back like a plague in a Soviet Russia that also faced a blockade. Soviet Russia, in its early years, was not capable of producing even the basic necessities of life for its population.
Furthermore, the invasion and civil war wiped out almost an entire generation of conscious, revolutionary workers. In addition, the collapse of industry decimated what was left of the working class. So the system of workers’ control based on factory councils stopped functioning. The workers no longer democratically controlled from below the bureaucrats, who ran things both at the economic and political level. The bureaucrats had a free hand to take privileges in a society of scarcity. They produced a whole layer of careerist functionaries, factory managers and professionals, who filled the ranks of the state and party bureaucracy. These people had not even taken part in the revolution. They had often opposed it. But in the following years, they started to accumulate political power.
The Russian working class did not accept the rise of the bureaucracy without a fight. Lenin in his last years took on the fight against the bureaucracy, but his illness and eventual death in January 1924 gave the bureaucracy more room to expand. The struggle between the working class and the bureaucracy became visible as a political struggle within the Russian Communist Party. Stalin emerged as the spokesperson for the bureaucracy. The revolutionaries who tried to stop and reverse the degeneration of their revolution formed the Left Opposition under the leadership of Trotsky. By the late 1920s, the bureaucracy had won, and Stalin had consolidated his dictatorship over the party and the country.
The two main leaders of the Russian revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, had always argued that socialism could not exist in a single country in a world dominated by international monopolies and imperialism. They saw the Russian Revolution as one battle in the war between capitalism, which existed internationally, and the international working class. It was very important that the working class had won its first victory. But unless other workers’ revolutions followed, especially in the advanced industrialized countries, the Russian Revolution would be doomed.
The bureaucracy that now ruled the Soviet Union and claimed the heritage of the Revolution of 1917 was anything but revolutionary. It sought to protect the Soviet Union–and its own power–by compromises and alliances with capitalist governments. At home, it maintained its power through a brutal repressive dictatorship over the working class.
In 1917, Russia was a poor and backward country. By the time of its disintegration in the early 1990s, however, the Soviet Union was one of the most industrialized countries of the world. True, it was not in any way a socialist society; the Soviet state was not even controlled and run by workers. But the Soviet economy had been developed to the point that the Soviet Union became the second-ranking economic power in the world in less than 50 years. Its development was more rapid than that achieved by any other country’s economy. It was based on an economy that was nationalized and planned, even if bureaucratically. The Soviet state subsidized the cost of basic foodstuffs, housing, health care, social security, education and transportation for all citizens.
These gains of the Russian Revolution of 1917 were preserved for decades despite the rule of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, for fear of a massive revolt by the working class, did not dare attack these gains. But the bureaucracy kept chipping away. Each little group of bureaucrats reinforced itself at the expense of society, and against other bureaucrats.
In the late 1980s, power struggles and political maneuvering between groups of bureaucrats at the top of the state apparatus triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. In an effort to consolidate his own position as the head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev promised local bureaucrats more autonomy from the central government. Another bureaucrat produced by the old Soviet regime, Boris Yeltsin, took this promise further–all the way to the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union. They broke up the country into 15 separate governments. Gorbachev ended up without a state apparatus to preside over, while Yeltsin himself came to power in Russia, the largest of the former Soviet states.
Most, if not all, of the new rulers in the former Soviet republics were members of the old bureaucracy. But now, with the support of capitalist governments led by the U.S., they felt confident enough to finally abandon all references to socialism and communism. In the name of a "free market economy," Yeltsin’s government started to lift subsidies from goods and services and to make attempts at privatizing the state-owned land and factories. The various Soviet republics now had become "independent states." The factories now were called "independent enterprises." In this way, the local bureaucrats started to free themselves from the highly centralized political and economic system of the former Soviet Union.
The result has been a complete disaster for the Russian working class. Many factories have stopped or drastically reduced production, causing widespread unemployment. Those workers who still have jobs often have to wait months to get paid. Prices continue to skyrocket. In many of the old Soviet Republics, especially in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the state structure has collapsed, leading to civil war and chaos.
In short, the "capitalist prosperity" advertised by the bureaucrats and their capitalist sponsors abroad has never materialized. While a few rapacious speculators and gangsters have found opportunities to make billions, conditions for the working class and a large part of the middle class continue to deteriorate.
Ninety years ago, Russian workers started the first attempt in history to build a workers’ state to run society in the interest of working people. The goal of the revolutionary workers was not limited to Russia; it was to wipe exploitation and oppression from the face of the earth. The Russian workers understood that their revolution would never survive if it remained confined to their country alone.
To this end, the Russian workers did everything in their power. But revolutions are class wars. And in war, the outcome is never guaranteed. The exploiters, that is, the capitalists, will always fight to keep their privileges. World capitalism succeeded in defeating workers’ revolutions in other countries and isolating the Russian Revolution.
Under these circumstances, the Soviet state formed in 1917 by revolutionary workers degenerated into a bureaucratic dictatorship over the workers. The bureaucracy became another obstacle in the way of any progress toward socialism in Russia and abroad. Today, in its attempt to lead Russia back to capitalism, the bureaucracy has brought the country to a state of chaos, poverty and destruction, with dictatorships consolidating this regime.
That situation is, in fact, the normal working of capitalism. For decades, chronic unemployment and poverty have marked the lives of working people in underdeveloped countries–that is, the majority of humanity. But today, the working class in rich countries, too, is seeing jobs, living standards and social services vanishing rapidly.
It’s not that workers accept these attacks sheepishly. But anger and outrage at deteriorating conditions don’t automatically lead out of the quagmire. In the absence of organizations that represent the independent class interest of the working class, most struggles today are waged in the name of completely reactionary and divisive ideologies. The result varies. We have seen the rise of racism in the U.S. and Europe all the way to ethnic cleansing and outright genocide in many underdeveloped regions of the world such as in Iraq, the Balkans, the republics of the former Soviet Union, and Africa.
This desperate situation can be traced back to the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Since the defeat of the workers revolutions after World War I, the working class worldwide has been retreating. Under the unchallenged rule of capitalism, the world has seen nothing but one man-made catastrophe after another.
Human history is full of such setbacks. But it is also full of comebacks. A revolutionary comeback of the working class is the only way out for humanity. For the only future capitalism has to offer humanity is an endless cycle of poverty, war and destruction.
Nov 19, 2007
An electrician at Chrysler told a reporter, “The contract got ratified and we got burned.” He was so right. The burning started before the ink was dry and will continue for years to come–if this contract is respected.
But workers would not continue to pay for a new car if its engine seized up and the four wheels fell off as they were driving it out of the dealership. This contract is like that car.
UAW leaders promoted a new type of VEBA fund to pay for retiree health care at each company. They told workers that since the funds were now set up independently, they would continue to provide retiree health care benefits even if a company went bankrupt. They told workers that the funds would be “good for 80 years.”
Only in a world where sub-prime mortgages never collapse!
First, the new VEBAs are severely underfunded, even according to the auto companies’ own calculations. GM is only putting in 57% of its future health care obligations. Chrysler is putting in 55%, and Ford is putting in only 46%–that is, less than half.
And who will cover the other half of the health care costs? There is no doubt about it: the retirees themselves. According to the contract language, the VEBA fund can begin to increase retiree health care costs after January 1, 2012!
Even worse–the VEBA funds are not paid in cash but rather in stocks, bonds and other forms of company IOUs. So, if the company goes bankrupt, like at Enron, Bethlehem Steel, K-Mart or Delphi, all those company IOU’s and stocks will quickly become worthless. Will the retirees’ doctors accept worthless stock? Not likely!
UAW leaders promised that this contract guaranteed “Job Security.” But GM immediately announced thousands of job cuts due to the closing of shifts at three plants and cuts in the line speed at another. Job Security promises be damned! Within five days of the Chrysler ratification, Chrysler announced shift closings at five plants and plans to eliminate 12,000 more employees. Before the ink was dry! Ford is expected to soon follow suit.
The companies and the UAW leadership promised job security. But buried in the small print, unavailable to most workers, was the loophole: depending on “market-driven” or “volume related” conditions!
The contract was also supposed to offer permanent jobs to temporary workers. But at GM, only half of the 6,000 long-term temps will be offered permanent positions. And a force of 600 temps at one plant was specifically “excluded.”
The “job security” contracts are phony, mirages, frauds.
The 2007 contracts were peddled to those currently working in the plants–the only ones with the right to vote on it–as protecting their own wages and jobs.
That’s not true, since wages are to be frozen for four years, and most cost-of-living protection is “diverted” to the companies–supposedly to help pay for the VEBAs! Plus there are many changes in the medical plans that will require higher payments. Nonetheless, clearly these contracts were organized so as to take the worst concessions from those who didn’t have a right to vote: from retirees and from those yet to be hired, in the hope that the workers voting wouldn’t see beyond their own paycheck and a small signing bonus.
The new hires will never be eligible for regular pensions or benefits.
Current workers are not protected either. Who is going to protect the wages and pensions of the current workers, when the low-wage workers become the majority in the plants? It took the auto parts maker Delphi only three years, after pushing through a contract in 2003 that lowered wages to new hires, to impose low wages on everyone.
Auto workers did not enter these contracts willingly. At Chrysler, the contract was almost voted down; and at GM, the 35% vote of workers who rejected the contract was bigger than any no vote on a contract in 35 years. At Ford, which was last to vote and therefore under the most pressure to accept it, the contract was passed by a big margin–79%, according to the UAW International. But in some key plants, voter turnout was very low. If the workers at Ford were not ready to stand against the company and the UAW apparatus, neither were they eager to cut their own throats.
The 2007 contracts were voted on under conditions of fraud, intimidation, and coercion. In no court are terms and conditions of such contracts considered valid.
Workers would be perfectly justified to spit this lemon back in the companies’ faces–and in the faces of the companies’ partners.
Nov 19, 2007
Honda announced that it will start production at a new plant in Greensburg, Indiana, in late 2008. Starting pay will be only $15, rising to $18 in two years.
Up to now, the transplants Toyota and Honda paid their hourly workers about $24 an hour. This was calculated to be near enough to the unionized auto worker’s wage of $28 an hour, so that transplant workers would have less incentive to unionize.
But with the new UAW contracts now paying new hires $14 to $16, all the other auto companies now understand they don’t have to pay top wages any more.
The new UAW concessionary contract is opening up an enormous race to the bottom–one that will only end when workers begin to stand together and oppose it.
Nov 19, 2007
At UPS, Teamsters Union leaders have recommended a new contract stating that no new jobs will be full-time. All new hires will be part-time and without any medical benefits. Pensions will be moved to a different pension fund with more risks to present and future retirees. Retiree benefits will be frozen–at the 1997 level!
UPS made more than four billion dollars in profit in 2006. In 2007 it has given 1.7 billion of its profits out in dividends and plowed another two billion dollars into a stock buy-back program to boost the stock price for wealthy shareholders.
With big concession contracts being imposed in auto, UPS doesn’t even have to pretend to be losing money in order to arrogantly demand deep concessions.
And it did not stop the Teamsters Union leaders from granting them.
It’s up to the workers to say NO!
Nov 19, 2007
Paul Tibbets, the military pilot of the Enola Gay, that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945 just died. He was 92 years old. About a hundred thousand people died that day but Tibbets never expressed the least regret. “I slept well every night,” he said justifying his pride in following the orders to destroy an entire city.
But not all those who participated in the bombing of Hiroshima agreed with Tibbets. Claude Eatherly was the radio-operator of the reconnaissance plane that signaled Tibbets that weather conditions were perfect over Hiroshima. The political establishment wanted the bomb dropped in such weather so that it could be filmed and the pictures of the mushroom cloud could be shown all over the world.
Easterly expressed regret and anguish for the role he played in the bombing; he was treated for mental problems after the war. Yet he still spoke out against nuclear weapons and against the lies of politicians.
Politicians and others have always justified the terrible devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by saying it shortened the war and saved more than a million lives. These are outright lies.
In August of 1945, Japan was on its knees, which the U.S. military and political brass knew full well. Fifty years later, Admiral Leahy, a top admiral under Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his memoirs, “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.... The use of that barbarous arm did not help us win the war.” Another witness was General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied Military forces in Europe. Eisenhower also opposed dropping the bomb, saying, “At this precise moment, Japan was looking for the way to capitulate while saving a little face.... It was not necessary to strike with that terrible thing.”
The U.S. government had other reasons to drop the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the one hand, the American government wanted to keep the imperial Japanese regime in place in order to guarantee social order. A few generals were executed as war criminals, thus relieving the regime of having to explain the failure of its policies.
Even more importantly, these bombs were a signal sent to the USSR, proof that the United States possessed the “ultimate weapon” to ensure its crushing military superiority over Stalin, at a time when he was still their “ally.”
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first act of the Cold War.
Nov 19, 2007
In the first ten months of this year, more U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq than in any other year in the war.
In the first ten months and one week, more U.S. soldiers were killed in the war in Afghanistan than in any other year in that war.
These two wars, which in reality are one, are not–as Bush pretends–“going well.” Not for the U.S. troops. And certainly not for the people of these besieged countries.
Two things are new since the “surge” began in Iraq last February. The U.S. has stepped up its bombing. And it is giving weapons and support to sectarian and ethnic militias, using them against the population to control whole areas of the country.
The end result has been an Iraq increasingly divided into ethnic, sectarian or even political enclaves, policed by the various militias. The center of Iraq, which once was the most diverse, is being drained of its population. Shi’ites continue to flee to the South, while Sunnis escape from the South to the West and near northern part of the country. In the North, the area around Kirkuk is a battlefield, with Kurdish forces camped on its outskirts, blockading the city, imprisoning Arabs inside the city.
Baghdad has gone from being 65% Sunni and 35% Shi’ite before the war to 75% Shi’ite today. At the beginning of 2006, the majority of Baghdad neighborhoods were still populated by various groups. And mixed marriages were common–with estimates put as high as 50% of all marriages in Baghdad before the war crossing sectarian lines. Today, there are only two neighborhoods that remain mixed and mixed couples often cannot live together any more.
Before the war, Basra, the southern port city, had been among the most cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East, with a mixture not only of Shi’ites and Sunnis, but also Kurds, Christians, African Muslims, and many secular Shi’ites. Today it has become almost totally Shi’ite, and overwhelmingly fundamentalist, with women being more repressed by the day.
This is ethnic cleansing, being carried out by organized violence. It’s terrorism, aimed against a civilian population, with the purpose of dividing in order to rule.
Almost four million Iraqi civilians have been driven from their homes–either by U.S. bombs; or by U.S. sweeps through neighborhoods or towns; or by violence carried out by sectarian or ethnic militias, driving some people out in order to control the rest. More Iraqis have been displaced since last February, when the so-called “surge” began, than in the whole rest of the war put together.
Almost 15% of the whole population have been turned into refugees. The U.N. Office of Internal Migration calls the Iraqi refugee crisis one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern history–and also one of the least noticed. It certainly escapes anything but a bare mention in U.S. government and military reports or in the U.S. media.
Bush may pretend it’s not happening. He may pretend that things are on the upturn–but for the U.S. troops and the Iraqi people, Iraq has become quite simply a hellhole.
If there is any hope in this whole situation, it is the increasing unwillingness of U.S. troops to carry on the war. Already by last January, over half a million troops who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, either quit active service as soon as they could or left the Reserves or National Guard as soon as their stint was up. Half of all officers being turned out by West Point have quit, almost as soon as they put in the 5-year stretch required of them.
The number of troops going AWOL is increasing as well. The Department of Defense declared that 4,698 soldiers went AWOL in the past 12 months. That’s the highest level since 2001 and a 42.3% increase over the year before, according to the magazine Army Times.
Recruitment of new forces costs much more in time and money. The simple fact is that the U.S. military is running out of cannon fodder to throw against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every expression of opposition to this war coming from the U.S. population reinforces all those troops who do not want to continue.
The quickest path to ending this war is to reinforce those troops who want out. Generals cannot fight without troops.