https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUE8O_ii_M
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Dore, Nina Turner, Pramila Jayapal, Nomiki Konst
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcza_FLuz94
The inflation LIE the government doesn't want you to know about
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QAuROcA4mY
Genocide and war propaganda
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/15/pers-a15.html
Joseph Scalice
@josephscalice
14 April 2022
A recording of this perspective by the author is available here.
On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden declared that Russia was engaged in genocide in Ukraine. The allegation tossed off by Biden is a lie, but it is more than this. It is a political provocation consciously aimed at whipping up a public hysteria to legitimize a massive escalation of the war, including the full-scale, open participation by the United States.
Genocide is a word stamped with profound historical content. There is no graver charge that can be leveled.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer, coined the word “genocide”—a coupling of the Greek genos (race or people) with the Latin cide (killing)—in 1944 in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Both the word itself and its subsequent legal codification by the United Nations were inextricably bound up with the Holocaust. What the Allied forces uncovered at the end of World War II was evidence of the worst crime in human history: extermination camps, mass graves, gas chambers, the human ovens and the mounds of spectacles and human hair and extracted gold teeth. Lemkin’s neologism strained to contain this enormity: the carefully planned extermination by the Nazis of European Jewry, 6 million killed with industrial efficiency.
This experience called for a precision of formulation that would give legal force and ethical specificity to the injunction “never again.” The United Nations in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, codified an international legal definition of genocide as specific crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The crimes of the Holocaust were seared in the consciousness of the world. Genocide was the premeditated and systematic extermination of a population because of its race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. The monstrous crimes of imperialism and war were weighed in popular consciousness by this measure, and those that began to approximate its barbarisms were deemed genocidal. History was re-examined in this light, and it was found that Hitler’s crimes were anticipated in the crimes of empire.
The westward expansion of American capitalism was fueled by railroad coal and genocidal acts. The indigenous populations of America were impediments to this progress, and cavalry and settlers systematically exterminated them. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre, the forcible removal of children—the Sioux and Cheyenne, Comanche and Yuki were slaughtered. This is how “the West was won.”
The emergence of American imperialism with the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century, seizing a formal colony in Asia, was conducted on a scale and with a rapacity that was genocidal. Over 200,000 Filipinos were killed. They were tortured, their villages incinerated, and populations were forced into concentration camps. General Jacob Smith embodied the brutality of the conquest when he told his soldiers, “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” Mass murder was a means to colonial conquest.
Each of the major colonial powers held grip on their possessions by genocidal force when they deemed it necessary. The Belgians secured rubber from the Congo with forced labor, mutilations, torture and mass murder. The British retained India by dint of repeated massacres. The French subdued Algeria with genocidal violence.
The dropping of atomic bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocidal acts. The bombings killed nearly a quarter million people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. It is undeniable that race was a critical factor. American citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in internment camps in the United States. The “Japs” were different, it was frequently argued, and they would not surrender unless you killed every last one of them. Hundreds of thousands—doctors, high school students, grandmothers—were incinerated in the nuclear blasts; tens of thousands more died agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning.
The American ruling class sustained its Cold War hegemony by aiding and overseeing bloodshed around the world, often of genocidal dimensions. The Indonesian dictator Suharto rose to power in 1965 through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party. The United States coordinated this mass murder, keeping track of its progress and providing radio communication to the military and paramilitary units carrying it out. Communists and alleged communists were hacked to death with machetes and their mutilated corpses clogged the rivers of Sumatra, Java, and Bali.
When the UN Convention on Genocide was completed in 1948, the United States would not sign and did not do so for another forty years. There was a nervous awareness that charges might be raised against the United States for its wars in Korea and Vietnam, for the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and the use of Agent Orange and napalm. In 1988, when Washington finally signed the convention against genocide, it was with the stipulation that the United States was granted immunity from prosecution for genocide unless the US national government authorized it.
The last thirty years have witnessed the uninterrupted crimes of US empire in the Middle East and Central Asia. Hospitals and villages were deliberately bombed. Cities were reduced to rubble. Economic sanctions starved hundreds of thousands of children to death, and drone strikes killed them at play. Once proud civilizations are haunted ruins, picked bare by the dogs of war.
The only plausible defense that Bush, Obama and Trump could mount if they were charged with genocide, is that while they did launch and conduct wars of aggression that killed over a million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they saw the deaths of men, women and children as a useful means to an end, and not as the end in itself. Their actions are undeniably genocidal.
Biden stands at the head of this blood-soaked power and accuses Russia of genocide. The charges deliberately mangle and distort both the contemporary facts and the historically established legal definition.
Biden points to specific events—corpses in the streets of Mariupol, the bombing of a train station—which may be war crimes, but which require investigation. Neither the precise details nor the perpetrator have yet been established. No evidence whatsoever has been presented that Putin is intent upon eradicating the Ukrainian people.
Nothing that has happened in Ukraine can be measured on the genocidal scale established by the Nazis and the United States and other imperialist powers. Biden’s accusation trivializes the Holocaust and does violence to history.
Biden’s accusations of genocide are not the rhetorical overreach of moral indignation. They are the deliberate and reckless escalation of conflict in service to the interests of US imperialism and they target Washington’s enemies.
Washington cries genocide when Russia bombs Kiev, but not when Saudi Arabia drops US weapons on Yemen, killing more than 377,000 people. Biden accuses China of genocide for the treatment of the Uyghurs, but he says not a word about Israel’s systematic devastation of the Palestinians.
The atrocity stories told by Washington and the repeated, baseless accusations of genocide tell us far less of the events themselves and far more of the war fever that is convulsing the imperialist powers. Once genocide is invoked, there is no possible further rhetorical escalation.
The US is preparing for direct military conflict with Russia. Biden speaks of genocide—blurring painfully acquired legal, historical, and moral distinctions—for the purposes of war propaganda. Russians—who bear no responsibility for the actions of their government—are now stigmatized, barred from international competitions, threatened and hounded internationally.
In an unmistakable sense, Biden is cultivating a genocidal frame of mind, marked by irrational scapegoating and hatred on the basis of nationality. Biden’s false use of this term is setting into motion a global war which could prove to be genocidal, one in which the subject of the genocide is the human race itself.
What are Sri Lanka’s trade unions doing amid the mass anti-government upsurge?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/15/slup-a15.html
W. A. Sunil
14 April 2022
Sri Lanka’s workers, youth and oppressed masses have taken to the streets across the island to demand the immediate resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his big business, Sinhala-chauvinist government and the dissolution of parliament. Facing immense hardships, they are demanding immediate relief from punishing price rises and shortages of food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, and an end to daily power cuts.
This immense outburst of social opposition has staggered the Rajapakse regime and the entire ruling class. As in other countries, the devastating global COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine have roiled Sri Lanka’s economy and deepened the already stark gulf between the bloated capitalist elite and the working class and rural toilers.
The government is now scrambling to stay in power after more than three dozen MPs deserted to the opposition.
It announced a “temporary” default on foreign debt payments this week, and is preparing to implement savage International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity measures to secure a bailout loan. This austerity program includes: raising income and value-added taxes; increasing fuel prices and electricity rates; instituting a market-determined flexible exchange rate; cutting the fiscal deficit, i.e., slashing social spending; and “restructuring” the state sector through privatisation, corporatisation and contracting-out. These measures will wipe out jobs, cut wages and otherwise trample on the social rights of working people.
Workers now confront the question of how to oppose this class war assault of the government and the entire ruling class.
The trade unions that ostensibly represent them are doing everything they can to prevent the working class from mobilizing its industrial and political power and to tie it to capitalism and parliamentary politics.
Precisely because the unions have been suppressing the class struggle, including a powerful strike wave that predates Rajapakse’s November 2019 election as president, the mass anti-government protests erupted completely outside them—just as they did independently of the opposition parties.
After remaining conspicuously silent for days as the “Gota got to go” protests swelled, the unions now claim to support the ongoing agitations. But they do so only with the aim of bringing them under control, and preventing them from developing into a challenge to capitalist rule.
Yesterday the Trade Unions and Mass Organisations (TUMO) announced it will hold a march on Saturday, April 16, in support of the protest that tens of thousands have been mounting in central Colombo for the past seven days to demand the resignation of President Rajapakse and his government.
Thirty-four trade unions, including the Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU), Ceylon Mercantile and General Workers Union (CMU) and Ceylon Bank Employees Union, are affiliated to the TUMO, as are the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party’s Workers’ Struggle Center and fishermen group, and some non-government organizations (NGOs).
TUMO has chosen as the main slogan for its march “Bow to mass opinion! Inefficient government, go home!”
The TUMO says nothing about the composition or class character of the government that should replace the hated Rajapakse regime. But it is no secret it wants to pave the way for another capitalist government. Indeed, the TUMO’s denunciation of the current government as “inefficient” echoes the main opposition party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), which has denounced Rajapakse for “mismanaging” the economy, including by not agreeing earlier to implement another round of IMF austerity.
On April 4, TUMO issued a statement calling for intellectuals and professionals to join with it in preparing “a short term, midterm and long-term practical and scientific program to solve” the people’s “burning social-economic problems.” This program, it went on to make clear, would not be directed at mobilizing the working class and oppressed masses to impose solutions that correspond with their class interests. Rather it would begin and end with what is “possible” within the confines of crisis-ridden capitalism and under the continuing domination of the Sri Lankan political establishment.
Based on this program, explained the statement, TUMO will “take actions to pressure the rulers to bring short term solutions standing on the side of people” and prepare a “people-friendly constitution.” It is calling on all trade unions, and professional groups, and civil organisations “to come together without colour and party distinction … to make reality of this program.”
In other words, what is being proposed is a popular front-type, multi-class movement, oriented to and most probably directly including parties of the capitalist establishment. It will be based on the canard that capitalism—which on a global scale is mired in systemic crisis, vomiting up reaction and threatening to engulf humanity in a global military conflagration—can be reformed. Such a movement will be used to tie the working class to the political establishment, suppress the class struggle and uphold capitalist rule, in which the trade unions today are thoroughly integrated.
There is a second trade union front, the Trade Union Coordinating Centre (TUCC). However, its politics are essentially no different. The TUCC brings together more than four dozen unions. Some of them are politically dominated by the opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), while others are independent unions that gravitate around the JVP.
On April 8, the TUCC sponsored protests and a one-day token strike of public sector workers in support of the ongoing anti-government agitation. It has said that it will give the Rajapakse government until April 18 to resolve the current crisis.
At a press conference last Saturday, the president of the TUCC-aligned Federation of Health Professionals (FHP) said if the government did not reach a “justifiable solution” to the protests by April 18 “all the trade unions have decided to carry on the struggle by joining with people’s struggle [and] beginning an indefinite strike.”
The TUCC unions’ threat of a general strike is not aimed at mobilizing the working class against the political establishment and in the fight for measures aimed at resolving the economic crisis at the expense of domestic and global big business and the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie. Rather by striking a pose of radical opposition, the unions are seeking to retain control over an increasingly radicalized rank-and-file who are demanding urgent action be taken to defend their sharply eroding living standards and oppose the government’s privatization drive. A second, related aim is to tie the working class to the JVP’s maneuvering with the government and other opposition parties.
Like the JVP, the JVP-led unions are calling for the setting up of an “interim government” based on the opposition parties after President Rajapakse and his government resign. They are also calling for fresh elections to bring a new government of professionals “free of looting, corruption and frauds” to power. This is nothing but another capitalist government. Significantly, the JVP has refused to rule out approaching the vampires of global capital at the IMF for “support.”
Recently employers in the Colombo free trade zone warned of growing unrest among workers over the surging cost of living. However, the unions are completely silent. At the same time, the General Secretary of the Free Trade Zone and General Workers Union, Anton Marcus, has denounced the ongoing protest against the Rajapakse government, calling them “unorganised, indisciplined and violent.” Like the ruling class, the unions are terrified by the mass anti-government upsurge and the growing demand of workers that they take action to defend their rights.
The last two years saw a wave of militant strikes and protests by public sector workers in the education, health, state administration, railway, port, petroleum and power sectors. There have also been continuous struggles on the part of plantation workers and strikes and protest in free trade zones.
Invariably, the unions have isolated and sold out these struggles, enabling the Rajapakse government to press forward with its drive to impose the burden of the crisis on working people. At the same time, the unions have collaborated with the government in implementing its profits before lives pandemic policy.
Last year about 250,000 teachers and principals engaged in a strike for more than 100 days, only to have the unions accept the government’s offer of a pay rise equal to just one-third of what the education workers had demanded. At the outset of the strike, the leaders of the main unions involved, including the CTU and JVP-affiliated Teacher Services Unions, said in a discussion with the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse that they “understand” the country is in “economic crisis.”
The media statement the leader of the Federation of Health Professionals, Ravi Kumudesh, made last month after betraying the health workers’ struggle is also highly significant. He admitted that unions had called limited strikes and protests to “manage” members who were pressing the union to fight for their demands.
Since June last year, President Rajapakse has again and again invoked the powers of the Essential Public Services Act to criminalise industrial actions at most public sector institutions. The unions have been completely silent about this draconian law. Nor have they condemned the threats made by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s elder brother, to use state violence to suppress the anti-government agitation, indicating their indifference to the democratic rights of the masses. And while they may criticize the authoritarian executive presidency, the unions truck and trade with the establishment parties that have upheld it for decades, and have no intention of making the fight for its abolition a lever for politically mobilising the masses against the capitalist establishment and for the reorganization of the economy on socialist lines.
In the present global capitalist crisis, working people cannot defend their rights or secure their basic needs by pressuring or pleading to the government and the capitalist class. Rather they must mobilize their independent class strength in the fight for a socialist action program to oppose austerity and the IMF and secure decent jobs, food, fuel and medicines for all!
To mobilize its class strength, the working class must break free of the suffocating political and organisational control of the pro-capitalist trade unions and build genuine organisations of working class struggle.
That is why the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is calling for the formation of action committees in every workplace, factory and working class suburb, democratically elected and independent of the trade unions and all the capitalist parties.
These action committees will organize the fight for the essential measures needed to address the pressing needs of the people. These include establishing workers’ democratic control over the production and distribution of all essential items and other resources critical for the lives of people; cancelling the debts of the poor farmers; and nationalising the banks, large estates, major companies and fortunes of the super-rich so their resources can be redirected to providing decent living and social conditions to all working people.
The emerging network of action committees will serve as a rallying point for the rural poor and youth, and unite Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim workers, rejecting the chauvinist and communal filth propagated by the capitalists and their political representatives.
As the authority of the action committees grows, they will become organs of working class political power, providing the basis to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to implement the above socialism program. The essential allies of Sri Lankan workers in this struggle are their class brothers and sisters around the world.
All workers and youth who agree with this program should join and build the SEP as the revolutionary leadership of the working class and oppressed masses.
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