Thursday, March 29, 2018

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN DIMENSIONS


Gun violence is not only a problem in U.S. schools, and the NRA is not the only culprit. It's also the Pentagon with its advocacy of permanent war and its view of the world as one big battlefield. For the commercial media, the military budget and U.S. military bases scattered throughout the world are non-issues, while for the Republicans supported by Blue Dog Democrats the issue is the need to increase military spending not reducing it. The courageous young students who are protesting gun violence will sooner or later (if they haven't already) see the connection between endless, senseless wars and violence at home. They are interrelated but the media and the politicians will do everything possible to disconnect them.

Indeed, the military-industrial complex of today is on steroids compared to the one that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech as president in 1961. At the time, the military buildup was justified as a necessity to face the Soviet threat. Then after the fall of the Soviet Union, the justification was the war on terrorism.

With Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor, U.S. militarism is bound to reach a new threshold. Bolton calls for not a “proportionate” but a “disproportionate” reaction to Russia’s alleged interventionism, which would include cyber warfare. Claiming that China and Russia work in coordination and are ganging up on the U.S., Bolton argues for a hardened response to both nations. Bolton’s appointment will likely be a watershed event, in which the war on terrorism will be downplayed and replaced with a much more dangerous type of confrontation, in some ways even more so than in the days of the Cold War. If there ever was a time for a full-fledged campaign against militarism in all its dimensions and manifestations, it’s now.


I’m not the only one who claims there is a connection between U.S. involvement in wars and domestic violence. Martin Luther King said the same. And what better moment to remember King’s legacy than today, April 4, 2018. Fifty years have gone by and King’s words about violence at home and abroad have proved to be prophetic.  




Sunday, March 18, 2018

Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil": Things Haven't Changed in 50 Years


Much debate in the U.S. boils down to whether domestic matters such as health care or social security should be prioritized or whether international issues are more important. Most people opt for the former. I place myself in the latter category. There are various reasons for this, among them the fact that military spending blocks the effort to improve the lives of people in the U.S. But there’s another reason which is ethical. Some may have already seen this video of the Baghdad airstrikes which Chelsea Manning turned over to Wikileaks. One thing is to read about what happened, another thing is to watch it on your screen and hear the voices and see the images. I just came across it as a link in a NY Times article (about the hacker Adrian Lamo) I was reading. Here it is:  

Watching it what comes to my mind is what Hannah Arendt (as a journalist working out of Jerusalem) said about Eichmann (which the Israeli establishment didn’t like at all). Evil people are not only madmen like Hitler. They’re also “normal” people (bureaucrats among others) who sit behind desks and talk a normal language with a normal voice pitch. Arendt called it the “banality of evil.” This is an example of that.


Wednesday, March 14, 2018

MARXISM AND UTOPIANISM IS HARDLY ONE AND THE SAME, KARL POPPER NOT WITHSTANDING


I am surprised and a bit disappointed that the podcast “Best of the Left” which I frequently listen to broadcasted an interview with academic Timothy Snyder (Council on Foreign Relations member) in their program titled “Understanding the Rise of the Right.” Snyder lumps Lenin and the left in general in the same bag with the right saying that the modus operandi of both ‘extremes’ is to focus on a utopian vision while ignoring the real issues. Snyder says: “Lenin said look, it’s not so much the actual facts that matter what really matters is the deeper truth that in the future there’s going to be a socialist utopia and if we have to bend the truth or even completely destroy the truth to get there that’s worth it…  because there’s a better world out there and that’s the deep truth.” (Lenin as a precursor of post-truth, anyone?)

That is to say, according to Snyder (and Karl Popper) the alleged deceptiveness of leftists (Lenin and before him Marx) stems from their imposition of a preconceived notion of change, if not dreams, and with no regard for reality. The narrative is reminiscent of Karl Popper’s condemnation of historicism and the association of Marx with Hegel, as if there were no difference between the two. The narrative is completely fallacious. It not only ignores Marx’s polemics with the Utopian Socialists (a movement which he never belonged to) but also the fact that he broke with the Young Hegelians, who he had been closely associated with (particularly Bruno Bauer). Although the young Hegelians rejected Hegel’s idealism and considered themselves materialists, nevertheless they failed to ground their thinking in the real structural basis of society – economy and class and not religious ideas which concerned Bauer and Feuerbach (in an attempt to undermine Prussian rule). Snyder would do well to read “The Holy Family” in which Marx and Engels critique the young Hegelians who (inspired by the early Hegel) felt that utopia was yet to be achieved. For those who are interested in the topic, I would highly recommend the fascinating movie on the young Marx (in German with English subtitles) (see photo above) which can be watched on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtJnbJ_TfGk&feature=youtu.be 

Sunday, March 4, 2018

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ UNCANNY COMPARISON OF LEOPOLDO LOPEZ WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING


The corporate media reached an all-time low this week in its one-sided reporting on Venezuela.  Wil H. Hylton in a lengthy article in New York Times' magazine section compared jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López with Martin Luther King. Throughout the article, Hylton weaves together the topic of King's employment of civil disobedience in the struggle to achieve equality for African-Americans and the protests promoted by López in 2014 known as the "guarimba." The comparison has to be seen as part of an ongoing effort promoted by international actors including the Trump administration to demonstrate that the Maduro government is a dictatorship, or a dictatorship in the making. The comparison falls short for a number of reasons. 
In the first place, the four-month "guarimba" in 2014 and again in 2017 had as its principal objective the achievement of regime change. This goal was embraced by the protesters in spite of the fact that the opposition parties (including López's Voluntad Popular party), which would have assumed power had the guarimba been successful, are highly unpopular – they are certainly not any more popular than the Chavista movement. Unlike King's civil rights movement with its well-defined concrete objectives, Lopez's guarimba protest was an insurrectional movement. López publicly declared that the guarimba would continue until the Maduro government was ousted. 
In the second place, the tactics employed by the “guarimberos” stood in sharp contrast with King's commitment to pacifism. Most important, there was no clear, well-defined separation between the "peaceful" guarimberos who built barricades consisting of boulders, trees and fires and placed oily substances on sidewalks resulting in numerous casualties of motorcyclists, on the one hand, and the violent guarimberos responsible for the death of six National Guardsmen in 2014 and the guarimberos of 2017 with their para-military appearance, on the other hand. 
In the third place, opposition leaders supported the violent guarimberos in concrete ways. One of the opposition's main slogans "freedom for the political prisoners" made no distinction between those who had engaged in violence and those who didn't. In 2017, Freddy Guevara, Voluntad Popular’s maximum leader in the National Assembly, met with and gave counseling to the hooded guarimberos who engaged in confrontational and at times violent tactics. By conveniently passing over these facts, Hylton is able to deny any tie-in between the “peaceful” and non-peaceful protests.
In the fourth place, the expressions of intolerance and even hatred also contrasts with everything that King stood for. Just one example was the incidents of the capturing of Chavistas and policemen to humiliate or inflict harm on them. Gurimberos in 2017 set fire to Chavista Oscar Figueroa resulting in his death. Hylton makes no mention of these incidents in his cherry-picking article.
Hylton’s article is replete with other deceptive statements and omissions. Just one will suffice. Hylton discusses López’s family lineage dating back to Simón Bolívar and Cristóbal Mendoza, the nation’s first president. But no mention is made of the fact that his grandfather was the brother and close business associate of Eugenio Mendoza, the Rockefeller of Venezuela for many decades. While Hylton recognizes López’s wealthy background, the fact that he was born into the richest family in the nation would detract from the author’s narrative of López as a champion of the poor. Are these omissions coincidental or are they part of an attempt to paint a glorified image of López even at the expense of basic journalistic principles?
By publishing the article the Times is not only sacrificing journalistic principles. It is helping to place on center stage an opposition radical who is well positioned to lead any movement that succeeds in removing Maduro from office. Opposition radicalism in the Venezuelan context is synonymous with the playbook that ousted Chávez on April 11, 2002, dissolved the nation’s main democratic institutions, delayed presidential elections for up to one year, hunted down Chavista leaders, and initiated bloody repressive actions against the popular movement. López, as mayor of Chacao (one of Caracas’ municipalities), played an active role in these events, a fact completely ignored by Hylton. The April 2002 strategy of effectuating a radical break with the Chavista past implied the implementation of neoliberal formulas, shock-treatment style. 
Hylton makes the dubious claim that in the U.S. political setting López “would probably land in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.” In fact, the radical brand that López is identified with once in power will translate itself into witch-hunts of Chavistas at all levels under the slogan of "no to impunity," as well as purges of the armed forces, the state oil company and the state in general. The repression of the Chavistas will open the way for tough, unpopular neoliberal measures. The electoral road to power precludes such sweeping changes, thus explaining the policy of electoral abstention favored by the radicals on the right including López. The New York Times, by glorifying leaders of the ilk of López, is demonstrating that the support of the U.S. liberal establishment for popular pro- working class reforms on the nation's domestic front does not extend to third-world countries.