Humanitarian

by David Baake

2005/4/27

Weapons, Authority, and Class Warfare

@ 07:38 PM (55 months, 4 days ago)

Recently there has been an upsurge of gun violence in the US, particularly at the school at Red Lake Indian Reservation, that has reopened the debate on gun control and violence in America.  This issue has often been divisive among those on the radical left; hardly surprising because the only two choices offered in the mainstream are the gun-control-for-civilians-but-every-weapon-imaginable-for-cops-and-the-military camp, led by Tipper Gore, and the guns-don’t-kill-people-everyone-has-right-to-build-their-own-nuclear-weapons camp, led by Charlton Heston and an army of right wing racist militias.

 

The dichotomy of this debate is interesting because, on the surface, it might appear that the right-wing was actually opposing absolute state power.  However, the right’s championing of guns has little to do with giving people power against governments or the rich; after massive propaganda campaigns, the right doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.

 

So what is the true aim of the pro-gun lobby?  Jon Steward puts it in his America: The Book: ‘providing black people with enough weapons to wipe each other out.’  I would argue that this explanation has quite a bit more to do with reality than the stated goal of these groups, although perhaps black can be expanded to include all of the lower class.

 

The gun-toting right realizes that it has largely been successful, through massive propaganda administered by the entertainment industry and others, in convincing the lower classes of America that there enemies are not the rich who have de facto rule over the country, but other members of the working class, for whatever arbitrary reason.  Who should you pick as your enemy?  Why not someone from another race, or an immigrant, asks the news media?  Corporately controlled hip hop asks you, as if there weren’t enough ways to divide the working class, why don’t you form arbitrary gangs, and then slaughter members of other gangs? 

 

This is what mainstream hip hop is so good at, providing America’s impoverished youth with ways of dealing with their problems that are not threatening to the establishment and in many cases actually promote pro-establishment behavior.  You want to feel empowered?  Why not slap a bitch around!  Want to feel good about yourself?  Buy a Lexus or a Cadillac!  Want to ease your troubles?  Get stoned out of your mind on crack!  Do you feel violent because of your desolate situation in life?  Kill someone of another gang or someone in your own family (Eminem); whoever you want, just don’t take it out on the rich white capitalists who are the real root of your problems.  Corporate hip hop does the rulers of the country a great service by peddling these messages, teaching people to find sanctuary in drugs, sex, senseless murder, religion, and other things Marx would call ‘opiates of the people.’

 

Of course, I have great respects for those in hip hop whose message is different from the disempowering one delivered by white-owned corporate hip hop labels; my favorites include Tupac, Public Enemy, Saul Williams, dead prez, the Last Emperor, Outkast, the Roots, and many others whose voices are drowned out by songs full of brand names and bitches and hoes and senseless black-on-black violence.  Their art has been hijacked; just as all other genres of music were hijacked by Clear Channel and the corporate entertainment industry.

 

So, to summarize, the right wing is gun-happy because they know they won’t ever be the targets of the violence and that, thanks to their insidious propaganda, the working class will fight the bourgeois’ class war for them.  And once people in the working class start to kill each other, the bourgeois can amplify these events through its propaganda machine, thus inspiring more fear and hatred in the working class and ensuring that the cycle of violence will continue.  Aside from this, forcing guns down everyone’s throat helps create the erotic fascination with violence, mass-slaughter, and weaponry that needs to be present in the general population so that no one will object to the annihilation of 100,000 Iraqis or a $412 billion dollar Pentagon budget.  And of course, the weapons manufactures, some of the most profitable businesses in America, are also keen on freeing up gun control laws.

 

What about the liberals and Tipper Gore?  The aims of the ‘liberals’ who advocate gun control on civilians is simply to give the state a greater capacity to control its civilians by giving it a monopoly on violence.  This has always been the goal of law and order liberals, to ensure that no one questions authority or the right of government to oppress its citizens or to murder millions overseas. 

 

As Ward Churchill points out, talk of gun control only arose once the Black Panthers started policing a racist police force in Oakland that had been abusing African Americans with impunity, during a time when civilians were allowed to have the same types of guns police were carrying.  What if Tipper Gore had been around then?  She surely would have been among those who advocated civilian gun control to keep guns in their rightful hands, namely, in the hands of the state, and out of the hands of oppressed minorities who were standing up for their rights and fighting back.  That, I would argue, has been the principle motive of some of the gun control liberals.  In principle, equal access to weapons is extremely democratizing; something which of course the elite fear.

 

So, what is the best way to ensure that political liberties are protected and the same time fight to end the plague of senseless violence?  The working class could, instead of fighting the bourgeois’ class war for them, actually attempt unite and rebel against authority.  I doubt the thugs in the NRA would be so pro-gun if they actually saw their beloved weapons pointed at the establishment instead of just at regular people.

 

This is a steep order though, and in the meantime, it seems logical, if we want to protect liberty and at the same time protect lives, to put some limits on weapons, especially the state’s.  No, don’t repeal the second amendment, but maybe ban Assault rifles, for the military and the police, not just the civilians.  As Michael Moore points out in his uncharacteristically nuanced film Bowling for Columbine, the violence at America’s core has less to do with guns than it does with a murderous culture, and so it seems obvious that to really make the world more safe, we need to address some issues at the heart of American culture and ideology.  In the meantime, some restrictions can perhaps prevent some innocent blood from being shed in senseless violence.    

 

 

WMD in the Middle East: Israel's Defensive Nukes

@ 04:25 PM (55 months, 4 days ago)

 

At the time being, the only country that possesses nuclear weapons in the Middle East is Israel, which may have as many as 200 warheads.  According to Israel’s sympathizers, these weapons of mass destruction have been produced only to defend Israel from hostile Arab enemies seeking the destruction of Israel.  The idea that Israel’s nuclear arsenal was built to be a deterrence is simply ludicrous and is in direct contradiction with facts.  One rather obvious flaw in this explanation of the WMD, who does Israel so desperately need to protect itself from?  No Arab countries process nuclear weapons, and the only Muslim country that has nuclear weapons, Pakistan, is governed by an American ally.  Israel is allied with the greatest military power in the world, and an attack on Israel would mean certain annihilation for any country in the world.

A more fundamental problem with this explanation is apparent to anyone with even a superficial knowledge on the history of Israel’s arsenal.  During the 1980s while Israel was proliferating, it kept its weapons program top-secret from the entire world.  The international community only learned about the WMD when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician working on the weapons, leaked details of the program to the British press.  Vanunu was subsequently abducted by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and forced to serve 18 years in prison, 11 in solitary confinement.  If Israel were trying to build weapons to serve as a deterrence, why didn’t they want anyone in the world to know?  When North Korea felt it needed to defend itself against a foreign threat, it did what any rational country fearing its safety would do, it began advertising the fact that it had nuclear capabilities, in all likelihood before it actually had these capabilities, so that no country would be willing to attack it for fear of being dealt a nuclear attack.  If Israel was truly worried about being attacked, it would have done the same thing.  Only a country intending to use weapons offensively would build them secretly. 

This should serve as proof to anyone who thinks otherwise that Israel does perhaps have imperial interests, once it has ethnically-cleansed all of historic Palestine, to expand into other neighboring lands as it did in 1967 in service of American imperialism, and perhaps at some point independently of the US' wishes. As for Vanunu, the heroic prisoner of peace is still to this day denied basic human rights, rights which are not his, claim members of Likud, because he is not human [1].  He is still forbidden to go abroad, to speak with foreigners, and to give interviews.  He is regarded in Israel as a traitor, which is odd, since Israel’s nukes could not serve there defensive purpose that they apparently serve had Vanunu not leaked the truth.  Mordechai Vanunu ought to be regarded as a great hero for all those who wish to see peace in the Middle East, for without him, Israel’s murderous weapons might still be secret, or worse, might have been used.        

2005/4/11

Are the interests of American labor at odds with immigrant rights?

@ 04:59 PM (55 months, 20 days ago)

 

The debate over America’s immigration policy has recently come to a head, thanks to the Minuteman Project, a group correctly described by (among others) President Bush as ‘vigilantes’ that has sent hundreds of armed volunteers to patrol the Arizona-Mexican border and report undocumented immigrants.  While the Minuteman Project claims to be unaffiliated with racist groups, it is difficult to take this claim seriously given xenophobic statements posted on their website warning that the US is being ‘devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens’ and that ‘future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures.’  The solution, apparently, is to send racist thugs with weapons to harass Latino immigrants entering the US.  Immigrants crossing into Arizona already must evade armed Border Patrol and, if they succeed in this, must deal with extreme heat as they cross 200 miles of Arizona desert.  At least 223 immigrants died in Arizona last year, most due to thirst.

Unfortunately, the Minuteman Project is just the most recent manifestation (and perhaps most extreme to date) of an increasingly rabid anti-immigrant movement that has become prevalent in American politics.  This movement is predominately concerned with the ‘invasion’ of America by nonwhites who might not assimilate completely into White culture, or worse, might somehow jeopardize the dominance of White American culture.  Usually, someone making this argument will add a friendly remark such as, ‘they reproduce like maggots, you know.’

Abhorrent views such as these are unfortunately held by many on the far right.  Sometimes, however, members of the anti-immigrant movement will also make arguments that are not as blatantly racist and that may appeal to members of the working class.  It may be argued, for instance, that immigrants take jobs from American workers, or that, a labor market saturated with immigrants may lower wages for all workers.  It is important that we recognize these arguments for what they are; in Marxist terminology, a bourgeois attempt to divide the proletariat against itself and to give the working class a scapegoat to blame for its sinking living standard so that the proletariat does not unite to eliminate the root cause of their oppression, namely, corporate capitalism.  Indeed, the idea that immigrants are the cause of any of the working class’ problems is laughable.

On major flaw in the logic of right-wing labor is the assumption that immigrants increase the labor market in the US, leading to lower wages.  The vast majority of new immigrants to the US are from Mexico, a country whose citizens are already in the same labor market as US workers, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement.  It is also absurd to think that new immigrants to America are competing for the same jobs as citizens of the country.  The majority of new immigrants work in extremely low level jobs in poor conditions for low wages, jobs that native citizens would not be pursuing.  In some instances, immigrants may even be beneficial to the economy and to the working class as a whole.  Immigrants pay large amounts of money in taxes, taking the burden off of the rest of the working class, and their cheaper labor produces less expensive consumer goods.

It is a testament to the truly anemic state of the American labor movement that it would accept the fact that its wages must be determined by the market, and thus, they must keep out immigrants who might drive down the market wage.  It is truly a shame that the majority of the American working class is not united in repealing NAFTA, raising the minimum wage, fighting corporations, or taking back unions from business friendly bosses but is instead, in an act of cannibalism, attacking its third world proletariat counterparts.

I believe that the right to unrestricted movement is a fundamental human right, and that all refuges of poverty must have the right to seek a higher quality of life.  Therefore, first world labor must defend the rights of immigrants and fight for a less racist immigration policy.

2005/4/8

After the Coup: 'Humanitarian Abyss' in Nepal

@ 04:02 PM (55 months, 23 days ago)

          On February 1st, 2005, King Gyanendra of Nepal staged a coup by dismissing a democratically elected parliament and seizing absolute control over the country. Since then, all civil and political rights have been suspended, independent media has been shut down, and hundreds of activists, journalists, lawyers, students, human rights leaders and others have been arrested or have disappeared.  The former prime minister and the leaders of Nepal’s political parties are under house arrest.  The Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) has tortured civilians and assassinated others with impunity. The situation in post-coup Nepal has been described as ‘worst locations of human rights violations in the world’ by international human rights organizations [1].  The February coup is the second staged by King Gyanendra since 2002.

          The King justified the coup, arguing that the parliament was ‘incompetent’ and that without absolute dictatorial control over the country he would not be able to defeat the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a group of left-wing rebels from Nepal’s countryside.  A civil war has been fought between the Maoist rebels (CPNM) and the RNA during the last 10 years, in which an estimated 11,000 people have been killed, the majority of them killed by government forces, although both sides have committed atrocities during the war.  War initially broke out when the RNA attempted to crush rebellion in rural areas of Nepal, followed by the initiation of the People’s War, as it is called, by the CPNM.  The Maoists may control as much as 40% of the country, and are currently engaged in a struggle to replace the monarchy with a Communist People’s Republic.  The CPMN army consists of between 10,000 and 15,000, accompanied by a militia of as many as 50,000.

          While the US has officially admonished King Gyanendra after the coup, it has done little of substance to persuade him to restore liberties and has not cut off arm shipments. The US has been allied with the monarch since he came to power.  The US has since 2002 sent $20 million to train the Royal Nepalese Army and 12,000 U.S. M-16s submachine guns, as well as military advisers to King Gyanendra, to aid him in his fight against ‘terrorism.’ These contributions have doubtlessly been invaluable to Gyanendra’s campaign violence and oppression. The US has added the CPNM to its terrorist watch list, next to Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other notorious groups.

          The US has great interest in perpetuating King Gyanendra’s oppressive rule and in crushing Maoist resistance.  Nepal’s location is of extreme strategic importance, as it is located between the two fastest growing economies in the world, and, potentially, the two greatest threats to American hegemony in the world, India and China.  Recently, the US’ Asian policy has largely been focused on developing a system to contain these growing threats.  Thus, the US has been militarily reinforcing its allies in the region, Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, and has recently been courting India’s support for a potential alliance against China in the future. Nepal is a vitally important country, and keeping it under the control of a friendly regime is definitely a high priority for US policy makers.

          In addition, the US is interested in destroying the CPNM for another important reason, namely, anytime a left-wing regime rises to power in a third world region, there is always a risk of ‘the domino effect’ occurring, and as we know from the Cold War, the US is willing to intervene anytime it feels it could possibly loose control over an entire region.  The threat of an agrarian communism spreading in South Asia is quite real, as the majority of people in the region live in extreme poverty and much of the region still operates within a feudal agrarian system.  Although Nepal has the lowest Gross National Income (GNI) per capita in South Asia at $240, other countries in the region are not much better off: Bangladesh’s GNI per capita is $400, Pakistan’s is $470, and India’s is $530, and Bhutan’s is $660 [2]. If the Maoists were to come to power, power structure in South Asia could change drastically.  The US will undoubtedly do everything it can to ensure that the rebels in Nepal do not rise to power.

          But, while it seems unlikely that the US would allow an ally to be overthrown in such a geopolitically important country, the US may have its attempts to meddle in the affairs of Nepal blocked by India and China, who, while they support the King, do not wish to have the US intervening in regional conflicts.

 

Agrarian Communism in Nepal: A viable alternative to the status quo?

 

Obviously, there is need for drastic and rapid change in Nepal; the ‘constitutional’ monarchy offers only suppression to the people of the 12th poorest country in the world.  A new form of revolutionary agrarian communism may indeed by what is needed to fight for the peasants of Southern Asia who live in some of the world’s worst poverty and at the hands of the worst feudal exploitation.  The CPNM may be able to make revolutionary change in Nepal and could help inspire revolt in other poor regions of the world, if it comes into power. It claims to have a strong commitment to democracy and the rule of the people, and to stand “against imperialism, feudalism, fascism, comprador-capitalism and all reactionaries;” noble goals indeed. 

          It is not our place in the first world to criticize the tactics of those in the third world, especially since it is our first world governments supplying King Gyanendra with thousands of weapons with which to exert his dictatorial control over Nepal. However, if the CPNM is to be successful in realizing the ideals that it espouses, it must respect the human rights of the citizens of Nepal during its struggle to create a new state and it must be willing to work nonviolently when such an option presents itself. If they were to come to power, it must attempt to make the transition from a feudal state to a communist state as nonviolent as possible, and that once the state was established, citizens of Nepal must have their fundamental freedoms protected.

          If the CPNM is not able to remain committed to these Marxist ideals, it may end up causing as much suffering for the people of Nepal as the vicious King Gyanendra and the world power that is using him as its proxy.  We can only hope that the CPNM’s People’s War does not lose the people for the war.

         

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[1] International Nepal Solidarity Network: ‘Eyes of human rights’  

 

[2] World Bank

 

For more on Nepal, please visit International Nepal Solidarity Network