Category Archives: Things that aren’t what they seem

Blackwater: the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

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Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

2008 (with 2013 epilogue)

Book Review

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill (2008 with 2013 epilogue) is an in-depth examination of the systematic privatization of the US military. In 1988, as Secretary of Defense to Bush senior, Dick Cheney initiated the process of outsourcing to private companies of military training and security and intelligence roles. Thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Rumsfeld Doctrine, this outsourcing would extend to combat roles during the 2003-2008 occupation of Iraq.

Scahill’s book places special emphasis on the US failure to hold mercenary soldiers accountable for human rights violations. It also highlights the total absence of financial oversight, allowing Blackwater, Halliburton and other private military contractors to bilk taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars. Finally it raises the troubling specter of corporations or even wealthy individuals hiring a standing mercenary army, such as Blackwater, to declare war against sovereign states.

Cheney Downsizes the US Military

Scahill begins by discussing the major downsizing of the US military that began in 1988, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and break-up of the former Soviet Union. In his first year as Secretary of Defense, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion, by canceling expensive weapons systems and decreasing US troop strength from 2.2 to 1.6 million. As the cuts continued, there was a growing tendency to outsource various non-combat functions to private contractors. Clinton continued the trend, when he hired Military Professionals Resources Inc (staffed by retired military officers) to “train” the Croatian military* in their secessionist war against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Following George W Bush’s election in 2000, Rumsfeld pursued even more aggressive privatization of the Pentagon bureaucracy. The primary neoconservative rationale for shifting both combat and non-combat duties to private mercenaries was to allow the President to engage in potentially unpopular overseas military interventions.

Other advantages included the ability of private mercenaries to engage in unlawful activities (such as extraordinary rendition**), for which regular forces would be subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice – and a massive gravy train of unmonitored, no-bid contracts for wealthy Republican donors. In June 2004, after only fifteen months of US occupation, $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for.

The Blackwater Lodge and Training Center

Blackwater itself was first formed in 1996. It felled a big hole in training capacity, particularly in the Navy, resulting from Cheney’s extensive DOD cuts. Former Navy SEALS Erik Prince and Al Clark initially established the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center in North Carolina to offer private tactical training to Special Forces and local law enforcement personnel. A long time SEAL trainer, Clark supplied the concept. Prince, who came from a wealthy conservative Christian family, bankrolled it.

In 2002, Blackwater branched out into providing personnel as well as training. Their first contract would be to provide twenty security guards for Kabul’s CIA station in Afghanistan. In 2003, the State Department would award their largest documented (non-classified) contract providing security for US officials in Iraq. This included a $27.7 million no-bid contract to protect Paul Bremer. Bremer, who Bush appointed to run Iraq during the US occupation, quickly became the most hated man in Iraq.

Iraqi Resistance to Occupation

The book provides an interesting historical perspective on the rise of the Iraqi resistance movement in reaction to the virtual takeover of Iraq by US corporate interests. Contrary to the US media portrayal of the Iraqi opposition as al Qaeda terrorists, it was a genuine home grown movement which formed in reaction to Bremer’s refusal to allow free elections and his de-Baathification program. The latter instantly plunged the vast majority of Iraqis into abject misery. In addition to decommissioning 350,000 former Iraqi troops, it also threw hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers, government workers out of work (who were required to join the Baath party as a condition of employment). The loss of these front line personnel would result in the total collapse of Iraqi society.

As Scahill carefully documents, the original Iraqi resistance was peaceful and nonviolent until the US military and Blackwater contractors deliberately fired on peaceful civilian protestors.

Blackwater and other mercenaries are typically paid $600-800 a day for mercenaries. This contrasts with an average of $270 a day for active duty GIs.

The Ambush in Fallujah

Blackwater devotes five chapters to the horrific ambush in Fallujah on March 30, 2004, in which a local mob killed, burned and dismembered four Blackwater contractors before hanging them from a bridge. It was this event that would bring Blackwater to world attention, while setting off a chain of events that would compel (due to an overstretched enlisted force) the Pentagon to hire Blackwater and other private security contractors* as mercenary soldiers in Iraq.

At a pay rate of $600-800 a day (in contrast to an average of $270 for active duty GIs), private security companies had no difficulty recruiting mercenaries. In fact, the worse the violence got, the more profits rolled in for Blackwater.

By June 2004, there were 20,000 private mercenaries in Iraq. By the time Rumsfeld resigned in 2006, there was a one to one ratio between troops and mercenary soldiers maintaining the US occupation in Iraq (100,000 mercenaries vs 100,000 troops).

In 2004-2005, the Blackwater role expanded to guarding the US oil industries pipeline in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, to “protecting” FEMA reconstruction contracts in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and to providing immigration security at the Mexican border. By 2007, Blackwater had 2300 private soldiers fighting in nine countries, as well as a database of 22,000 former troops, special forces operatives and retired law enforcement officers who could be deployed at short notice.

Immunity from Prosecution

As of 2013, when Scahill published the revised edition, no Blackwater contractors had ever been prosecuted for criminal human rights abuses. Under an edict Bremer enacted in 2004, US mercenaries were immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. Prosecuting them in American courts is extremely difficult owing to the difficulty of transporting foreign witnesses to the US. However in October 2014, a Washington DC federal district court found four of them guilty of murder and manslaughter for the 2007 shooting of seventeen civilians in Baghdad.

Erick Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 and it has since merged with its main rival Triple Canopy to form Academi. Although Blackwater was banned from Iraq in 2009,  Academi still provides security for State Department personnel across many countries.They also continue to receive contracts from the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies.

Links to free epub and kindle versions of Blackwater are available at Blackwater the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

*In the mid-1990s, the Croatian military was dominated by right-wing Nazi sympathizers similar to those in the present Ukrainian government.
** Extraordinary or irregular rendition is the US sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person to countries known to practice torture. It’s also known as torture by proxy.
***Other companies that entered the lucrative mercenary market in 2004 include Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Algis, Armor Group, Hart, Kroll and Steele Foundation. British security contractors were also extremely pro-active in Iraq. By October 2006, there were 21,000 British mercenaries in Iraq, in contrast with 7.200 conventional duty troops.

Also published at Veterans Today

War is a Racket

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war is a racket

War is a Racket

by Major General Smedley Butler (1933)

Book Review

Published in 1933 by retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket is a historic expose of the role of Wall Street profiteering in instigating war.

The book begins with the startling statistic that World War I created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires. President Woodrow Wilson borrowed (from Wall Street banks) the $50+ billion to pay for World War I, increasing the national debt from $1 billion to $52 billion. Of this amount, $16 billion was pure profit. Butler lists specific companies, starting with Du Pont and US Steel, and the obscene profits they made from World War I.

He also deplores the systematic inefficiency and fraud that caused the War Department to pay two to three times the retail charge for equipment such as saddles and mosquito nets that had no possible use in a modern European war. This was on top of millions spent on poorly crafted wooden ships that sank when put to sea and airplanes that were technologically obsolete by the time they were delivered.

Wilson had been elected to his second term based on a campaign promise to keep the US out of the Great War. War is a Racket also discusses his secret White House meeting with a European commission that caused him to reverse himself. After informing Wilson the allies were losing the war, they warned that they couldn’t repay the $5-6 billion they owed American bankers, manufacturers and munitions makers if they were defeated.

Butler maintains the real reason the US entered the war was to protect these Wall Street interests. Obviously this isn’t what Wilson and his Committee on Public Information (run by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations) told the American people. They would be barraged with incessant propaganda about the Germans being monstrous barbarians and the Great War being the war to end all wars because it would make the world safe for democracy.

 

War is a Racket: free PDF

Major General Smedley Butler is best known for foiling the 1933 Bankers’ Putsch. This was a failed military coup, instigated by America’s leading bankers and industrialists, to remove Roosevelt from office and replace him with a Mussolini-style dictatorship. Butler, who was recruited to lead the coup, blew the whistle to the House McCormick-Dirkson Committee. They responded by launching a cover-up. Details of the Bankers’ Putsch only became public knowledge in 1967, when journalist John Spivac uncovered the committee’s secret notes.

All Wars are Bankers’ Wars

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john adams quote

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars

Michael Rivero (2013)

Film Review

The purpose of war, according to this brief documentary by radio host Michael Rivero, is to force central banks on countries that try to issue their own money.He makes a compelling argument, illustrated by numerous historical examples. The film’s main value, in my view, is in dispelling common misconceptions about where money comes from. Contrary to popular belief, western democracies don’t issue the money they use to run government services. They borrow the money at interest from privately owned central banks. In the US, this private central bank is called the Federal Reserve.

The American Revolution

Rivero begins by quoting Benjamin Franklin, who saw George III’s Currency Act as the main trigger for the American Revolution. The Currency Act prohibited colonists from using colony-issued currency. Instead they were required to use English bank notes. The latter were borrowed at interest from the England’s private central bank, the Bank of England. This interest payment amounted to a de facto tax on each and every financial transaction.

After the Revolution, the new American government returned to issuing its own currency. This ended in 1791, when Alexander Hamilton persuaded Congress to appoint a private central bank to finance government services. The First Bank of the United States was funded (at interest) by the Bank of England, which was controlled by Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

The War of 1812

Plagued by inefficiency and corruption, the First Bank of the United States was so unpopular that Congress ignored Rothschild’s threats and refused to renew its charter in 1811. Rothschild, whose control over British money enabled him to control both the economy and Parliament, had warned that Britain would declare war to re-colonize the US unless Congress renewed the charter. Although the US won the War of 1812, they were forced to charter the Second Bank of the United State in 1816 to repay their massive war debt. American’s second central bank lasted until 1832, when voters returned Andrew Jackson to a second term based on a campaign promise to shut it down.

The Civil War

From 1832-1862, the so-called “free banking era,” all banks were state charted. In 1862 Lincoln created a national system of banks to fund the federal government and issue currency. When he authorized the US Treasury to issue $150 million in interest-free “greenbacks,” the London Times called for the destruction of the US because of the major threat this posed to the global economy (i.e. international bankers). To punish Lincoln, England and (and France) would provide financial and material support to the southern Confederacy.

Government-issued currency ended for good in when the Wall Street banks conspired with Woodrow Wilson to create a permanent (private) central bank. The Federal Reserve Act was  written in secret by the US banking establishment and rammed through Congress during the 1913 Christmas recess.

World War I and II

According to Rivero, World War I was also a banker’s war, intended to punish Germany for the strict limitations it imposed on its central bank. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to repay all the war debts of the other European countries, even though Germany hadn’t started the war.

Crushed by this war debt, the only way Hitler could salvage the German economy was to abolish Germany’s central bank and return to interest-free government-issued currency. This move, which infuriated international bankers, resulted in rapid Germany re-industrialization when the rest of the developed world was mired in deep economic depression. It was lauded internationally as the “German miracle.”

Meanwhile in 1933, American bankers and industrialists plotted a “Bankers’ Putsch,” an attempted military coup against Roosevelt. Their goal was to install corporate fascism in the US, along the lines of Mussolini’s government in Italy. General Smedley Butler, the war hero they enlisted to lead the coup, foiled it by exposing it to the House McCormick-Dirkson Committee. The largely pro-business committee instituted a cover-up, until journalist John Spivac uncovered their secret report in 1967.

Breton Woods

In 1946, following World War II, forty-four nations signed an agreement at Breton Woods New Hampshire for the US dollar to replace the British pound as the world’s reserve currency. This was done with two stipulations: 1) that the US dollar would be redeemable for gold at a price of $35 an ounce and 2) that the Federal Reserve wouldn’t issue more dollars than they could redeem in gold.

Because the Federal Reserve is a private banking network, the federal government has no control whatsoever over the quantity of US dollars they issue. In 1971, it became obvious that the Fed was issuing far more dollars than it could redeem (the vast majority of money the Fed creates is electronic money – only about 3% is in notes and coins*). When France asked to redeem its dollar reserves for gold, Nixon unilaterally suspended the gold standard agreed at Breton Woods.

The Birth of the Petrodollar

At this point the US dollar became a “fiat” currency, theoretically back by nothing. In reality, it was backed by oil, through a complex agreement whereby the US agreed to “defend” countries (i.e. not destabilize or declare war on them) if they committed to buying and selling oil in dollars, aka “petrodollars.”

According to Rivero, the US invasion against a long list of Muslim countries is an indirect result of this agreement. Islam prohibits lending money at interest. As Rivero points out, none of seven Muslim countries retired General Wesley Clark has identified as targets for US military aggression (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon) had private central banks prior to US invasion and occupation.**

Historical Inaccuracies

Apart from several minor historical inaccuracies (eg the purpose of Executive Order 11110 that John Kennedy signed in 1961 and Nixon’s alleged pledge of the National Park system as security on US debt), the film serves as an excellent introduction to the hidden role played by private banks in issuing and controlling the global money supply.

 

*See 97% owned
**Retired General Wesley Clark first revealed the existence of this campaign to conquer the Middle East and North Africa during a Democracy Now interview in 2007.

photo credit: Serfs UP ! Roger Sayles via photopin cc

Also posted at Veterans Today

The Tyranny of Positive Thinking

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Smile or Die
Barbara Ehrenreich
RSA Animate (2010)

Film Review

Smile or Die is a clever animation of a Barbara Ehrenreich talk on the ruthless cruelty of “positive thinking” in an era of economic misery.

The video highlights how positive thinking is actually a form of pernicious psychological manipulation that shifts the blame for extreme income inequality from the greedy 1% to the working people they exploit.

Examples include the cynical cruelty of rebranding layoffs as a “growth opportunity.”

Ehrenreich is especially critical of the branch of positive thinking which maintains you can change the world (and get rich) merely by thinking the right kind of thoughts.

The CIA Role in Narcotics Trafficking

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 peter dale scott

Part 2 of Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations

“Deep state” is Part 2 of a five part documentary by Scott Noble called Counter-Intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations. Historian and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott coined the term Deep State to describe the shadow government that operates outside our so-called democratic institutions to service the needs of America’s wealthy elite.

This episode focuses on close historical links between the Mafia and CIA and the role of narcotics trafficking in all major CIA covert operations. CIA drug trafficking serves two main purposes. In addition to providing off the books (not reportable to Congress) income for clandestine operations, it’s also a source of ready-made criminal networks. The latter are valuable as a conduits for weapons delivery to CIA mercenaries and as lethal enforcers of corporate interests against labor and human rights activists.

Scott, who is interviewed at length, stresses the instrumental role of the CIA in ALL global narcotics trafficking. The converse is also true. Citing the French Connection (centered in Marseilles) and the Golden Triangle (in Southeast Asia) as prime examples, he makes the case that all major narcotics hubs collapse following CIA withdrawal from the region.

“Deep State” also shines a light on current drug operations in Afghanistan and Columbia. At present Afghanistan is the world’s leading heroin producer,  a direct result of CIA involvement in the region. Colombia, in turn is the world’s largest purveyor of cocaine, thanks to the CIA decision to use Colombia to “block the spread” of communism from Cuba to the rest of Latin America.

According to filmmaker Scott Noble,  all major Wall Street banks have engaged in laundering profits from illicit narcotics. Illegal drugs are America’s third biggest commodity, with the wealthy elite siphoning off the vast majority of drug profits. They also rake in immense profits from the prison industrial complex, a growth industry that owes its existence to the so-called War on Drugs. Wells Fargo and other Wall Street banks are major investors in the prison privatization industry.

Counter-intelligence: Shining a Light on Black Operations
Scott Noble
Metanoia Films (2013)
photo credit: jimforest via photopin cc
Also posted at Veterans Today

How Prostitutes and Ex-Slaves Saved Us from the Protestant Work Ethic

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a renegade history

A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

2010 Free Press

Book Review

I absolutely adored A Renegade History of the United States. Historian Thadeus Russell offers a totally unique but compelling perspective on the expansion of personal liberty in the US and other English speaking countries.

Unlike Zinn’s The People’s History of the United states and similar “working class” histories, Russell argues that that most of the person freedoms we enjoy aren’t the result of political movements. In his view they originated from the refusal of renegades, degenerates and discontents to accept the puritanical work ethic the founding fathers tried to foist on us. In other words, we should thank America’s drunkards, prostitutes, pirates, slackers, “shiftless” slaves and juvenile delinquents for the unprecedented levels of personal freedom Americans enjoy.

Parts of Russell’s book really surprised me, especially where he describes the uptight, repressed social conservatives (including Martin Luther King) who led American campaigns for abolition, women’s suffrage, labor rights and civil rights. Despite their high profile campaigns for specific legal “rights,” the leaders of these movements expended enormous time and energy trying to correct the “inappropriate” behavior of the masses they claimed to represent.

The Role of Prostitutes and Ex-Slaves

The unquestioned heroes of A Renegade History of the United States are prostitutes and ex-slaves. In the 19th century the only women who owned property, had sex outside of marriage, performed or received oral sex, used birth control, wore make-up, perfume or stylish clothes were prostitutes. In fact, it was prostitutes who won these and other rights that modern American women take for granted. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, prostitutes, especially in the Wild West became so wealthy that they funded crucial irrigation and road building projects. Likewise when most states banned birth control in the early 1800s, prostitutes continued to provide a market for contraceptives that stimulated production and distribution.

The importance of slaves and their descendents in the expansion of personal freedom relates to the tenacious manner in which they preserved a culture characterized by sensuous music, rhythms and dancing in a culture that condemned these activities as depraved and harmful to the work ethic.

Following the Civil War, there was a strong expectation that slaves would renounce these pleasurable pastimes and embrace the work ethic as good American citizens. Many eagerly embraced the discipline and self-denial emancipation demanded of them. Most didn’t.

In 1865 Congress confronted this dilemma by creating the Freedman’s Bureau to train ex-slaves how to become “good citizens.” Most enrolled eagerly, thinking they would be taught to read and write. Instead the classes focused on the ideals the founding fathers had promoted – frugality, self-denial and most importantly a love of work, even poorly paid work, as a source of virtue.

Russell cites letters and interviews with ex-slaves who saw no point in being free if it meant they had to work harder than a slave did. Many northerners, who acquired southern plantations cheaply during Reconstruction, complained that ex-slaves made terrible workers. Not only did they come and go as they pleased, but they demanded days off and refused to work in inclement weather. Many ex-slaves also resisted pressure to adopt legal norms of marriage.

Martin Luther King’s Campaign Against Un-Christian and Un-American Blacks

For me, the most interesting section of A Renegade History of the United States is the chapter about Martin Luther King and his little known campaign to persuade so-called “bad niggers” to embrace the puritan work ethic and cult of responsibility and sexless self-sacrifice that has characterized the dominant American culture.

In 1957, Reverend King launched three projects simultaneously: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to coordinate a nonviolent campaign to desegregate buses across the South, the Campaign for Citizenship to campaign for voting rights and a church-based campaign to rid African Americans of what King referred to as “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits. In 1957 he delivered a series of sermons condemning blacks who led “tragic lives of pleasure and riotous living” (see Problems of Personality Integration).

In 1958 he wrote articles in Ebony and published his first book, Stride Towards Freedom, in which he claimed black poverty was as much due to laziness and a lack of discipline and morality, as to institutional racism. He also condemned rock and roll.

The Role of Violence in the Civil Rights Movement

Russell also weighs in on what “diversity of tactics” debate that ultimately split the Occupy movement. He lays out compelling evidence that 1) only a tiny minority of southern blacks participated in King’s nonviolent movement and 2) it was “bad niggers” and violence, rather than King’s nonviolent campaign, that won the first major civil rights victories in 1963.

British and American War Crimes During World War II

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hellstrom

Hellstrom: the Death of Nazi Germany 1944-47  

by Thomas Goodrich

Aberdeen Books (2010)

 Book Review

 

The victor always writes history. Only German war crimes were prosecuted at Nuremberg. British and American war crimes were whitewashed out of history. If not for Kurt Vonnegut’s best selling 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, Americans would have no knowledge of the deliberate targeting of civilians in the firebombing of Dresden.

Hellstrom: the Death of Nazi Germany 1944-47 is a meticulously researched encyclopedia of Allied war crimes during World War II. In it, historian Thomas Goodrich carefully compiles statements of scores of eyewitnesses, including Allied pilots and war correspondence about US, British and Russian atrocities against German civilians and POWs during and after the war.

A Deliberate Campaign of Terror Bombing

Dresden wasn’t the only German city subjected to carpet firebombing aimed at terrorizing civilians. Based mainly on victim and pilot statements, Goodrich details the deliberate firebombing (with phosphorus-based incendiary bombs) that occurred in Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, cologne, Daimstat, Pforzheen and Wurzburg. The allies also firebombed three Swiss cities, another war crime, as Switzerland was a “neutral” country with no identifiable military targets.

Goodrich mainly focuses on Dresden, one of the last German cities to be firebombed. Many residents believed it would be spared, owing to its culture treasures and role as a hospital city for injured civilians. Dresden had no defense installation, major factories or air defenses. Owing to the absence of anti-aircraft weapons, the Allied bombers could fly low enough to target fleeing civilians and hospitals designated with a large red cross on their roof. The Red Cross later estimated that the Dresden massacre killed 300,000 – 400,000 civilians.

Prior to Dresden, the American pilots, unlike the British Royal Air Force (RAF) deliberately refrained from targeting. At Dresden, this changed, with Americans planes deliberately targeting civilians who survived the initial firestorm.

Eisenhower Deliberately Circumvents Geneva Convention

Like Bush II, Eisenhower deliberated created a new category of prisoners called Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF), so he wouldn’t be bound by the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs).

His treatment of POWs worsened following the May 8, 1945 armistice with Germany, as he no longer feared German retaliation against American POWs. In all, 800,000 German POWS died in French and US POW camps after the war ended the armistice. This contrasts with German treatment of Allied POWs, which followed the Geneva Convention 99% of the time.

The book contains victim statements from German POWS held in outdoor pens where they were drenched by continuous rain and fed 1/10 of a K ration three or for days a week. Eisenhower denied the Red Cross access to POW camps, as well as prohibiting them from supplying German prisoners food. The British, US and French military also used German POWs as slave labor, despite formal Red Cross protests that this, too, violated the Geneva Convention.

Forcible Repatriation of Soviet Dissidents

In addition to the maltreatment of POWs, the Allies honored a commitment they made at Yalta to repatriate one million Soviet dissidents (including White Russians who fought the Bolsheviks in 1917) to the USSR. This included 4,000 Soviet dissidents in the US who were forcibly repatriated. Stalin, in turn, summarily executed them or sent them to slave labor camps.

The Brutal Allied Occupation

The treatment of German civilians and POWs by invading forces varied. On both the eastern and western fronts, experienced front line troops tended to be the most civilized. They reasoned that good treatment would make the Germans in the next village more likely to surrender. The rear guard tended to be far less experienced and more inclined to engage in rape, gang rape, looting and torture. Stalin refused to sign the Geneva Convention, and Russian troops were particularly feared for their savagery.

During the occupation, Eisenhower and Truman deliberately engineered a famine in the Allied sectors (US, British and French) of Germany. The massive carpet bombing had totally destroyed the food infrastructure and millions of German civilians starved as they tried to survive on boiled grass and roots. Truman outlawed private food relief to Germany until the Pope, former president Herbert Hoover and numerous high profile senators and journalists objected to the Truman’s policy of deliberately starving the German civilian population. In all, far more Germans died in the first two years of peace than had died in six years of war.

The Allies also carried out a particularly brutal regime of “de-Nazification” in which German adults (including prominent anti-Nazis) were arbitrarily arrested and tortured until they confessed to being members of the Nazi Party.

The treatment of German civilians would improve in 1947, as the Cold War gained momentum and Truman recognized Germany’s importance as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Dresden9photo credit: Dresden bombing

Also posted in Veterans Today

Confronting Gandhi’s Racism

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In the following brief video, Indian activist Arundati Roy challenges the way the global elite has repackaged Mohandas Gandhi as a hero to be worshiped and adored. She delivered her talk shortly after the publication of The Doctor and the Saint, a book length introduction to a new edition of The Annihilation of Caste. The latter was written in 1936 by Dalit (aka Untouchable) lawyer and activist Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar. Gandhi bitterly fought Ambedkar and his ideas during his lifetime. This, according to Roy, was based on Gandhi’s entrenched beliefs about racial superiority, both towards Dalits and black South Africans.

Under Hindu’s rigid caste system a Dalit is limited (by virtue of birth) to occupations regarded as ritually impure, such as those involving leatherwork, butchering, or removal of rubbish, animal carcasses, and waste. Because these activities are considered polluting and contagious, by tradition Dalits are banned from full participation in Hindu social life. Discrimination against Dalits is still prevalent in rural India, as regards access to eating places, schools, temples and water sources.

Prior to the 1900s, hundreds of thousands of Dalits escaped their caste roles by leaving the Hindu religion and converting to Islam or Christianity. With the move towards representative government that occurred in the early twentieth century, an upper caste Hindu reform movement formed to ensure that India’s fourteen million Dalits (about one quarter of India’s population) remained outside the political process.

Gandhi, a member of the higher Banias caste, was part of this Hindu reform movement. He specifically opposed the movement started in 1904 to guarantee Dalits access to education. In the following video, Roy reads what he wrote about the Dalits he encountered during his time in South Africa (1893-1914):

“Whether they are Hindus or Mohammadans, they are absolutely without any moral or religious instruction worth a name; they are not learned enough. Plus thus they are adapting to yield to the slightest temptation to tell a lie. After sometime lying with them became a habit and disease. They would be lying without any reason, without any proper, prospect of bettering themselves materially in deep whom knowing what they are doing. They reach a stage in life when the moral faculties has completely collapsed owing to neglect.”

Gandhi launched his first non violent civil rights campaign in South Africa to protest the treatment of Indian immigrants as second class citizens. In 1906, he took the side of the British government when they declared war against the Zulu Nation in Natal and encouraged Indians to enlist with the British. Here are his views on Kaffirs [black South Africans) following his first arrest for civil disobedience:

“We were all prepared for hardships, but not quite for this experience. We could understand not being classed with the Whites, but to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed to be too much to put up with. I then felt that Indians had launched our passive resistance too soon. Here was further proof that the obnoxious law was meant to emasculate the Indians…Apart from whether or not this implies degradation, I must say it is rather dangerous. Kaffirs as a rule are uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals and scavengers.”

Roy goes on to describe the caste system in modern day India, where caste has merged with capitalism so that higher caste Hindus control all the major corporations and media outlets. Dalits continue to experience major discrimination and oppression, in both rural and urban areas. According to India’s National Crime Bureau, a crime is committed against Dalit by non Dalit in every sixty minutes. Every day four Dalit women are raped by upper caste men. Every week thirteen Dalits are murdered and six are kidnapped. In most cases, these crimes go unpunished.

Roy also points out that the Indian military is deployed on a daily basis to enforce the supremacy of upper caste Hindus:

“From 1947, whether the Kashmir, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Telangana, Punjab, Goa, every day of the year, the Indian Army is fighting its own people. And who are the people? Think about it. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Adivasis, Dalits.”

The Social Change Movement is Larger than You Think

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blessed unrest

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World

Paul Hawken
Google Authors (2007)

Film Review

In the following video, social entrepreneur Paul Hawken discusses Blessed Unrest, his book about trying to count the millions of local social change groups around the world. After several years of research, he concluded there were 1-2 million of them. They involve 100-200 million people and focus around three broad categories: social justice, human rights and ecological restoration. What they all have in common are their efforts to disperse a pathological concentration of power in a wealthy elite.

Hawken asserts this massive movement is virtually invisible because it’s solution-focused, rather than ideological. We’re accustomed to movements in which a charismatic white male leader founds a centrally-based organization and endeavors to expand it outwards to the grassroots. The movement Hawken refers started as small widely dispersed independent groups which are beginning to coalesce into networks.

He believes this diverse non-centralized movement had its origins in the anti-slavery movement. The past 1,000 years, in Hawken’s view, has been dominated by a system in which political power is based on privilege. With the abolitionist movement, which started as small local groups in England and the US, society began moving towards a system in which political power is based on community.

The high point of the video is where he scrolls through a screen shot listing the millions of groups. He asserts it would take more than four weeks to read through them all.

He predicted the number of social change groups, which is growing fast, would reach five million by 2013.

The Origin of the White Race

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I’ve just discovered another excellent film series at the  African Element website. This 20 minute clip, Episode 4, is about Bacon’s Rebellion and how the British ruling elite invented race to to confuse poor white’s about their working class status.

Slavery in Black and White
Darius Spearman (2012)

Film Review

 

Bacon’s Rebellion

The concept of whiteness and race is only about four hundred years old. It originates in preferential race laws that were passed after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The latter consisted of an alliance of poor white settlers, former indentured servants and Africans who drove Governor William Berkeley out of Jamestown (the capital of colonial Virginia) and burnt it to the ground. A similar rebellion occurred in the Maryland colony around the same time.

Prior to the discovery of the New World, enslavement occurred exclusively in the context of war and military conquest. Ireland was the first plantation colony. During the fifteenth and sixteenth century, large numbers of Irish peasants were driven off their farms as the aristocracy converted them to sheep pasture. With no means of support, landless Irish peasants migrated to London, where they provided for themselves through begging, casual labor and petty crime.

Large numbers ended up in prison. They could win their release by agreeing to a seven to eleven year period of indentured servitude in the American colonies. There they commingled with African indentured servants, who enjoyed equally atrocious living and working conditions.

Classic Divide and Rule

Following Bacon’s rebellion, the Virginia colony sought to drive a wedge between poor blacks and whites by passing a series of laws awarding European indentured servants specific privileges. Among others, this included 50 acres of land (on their release) and the ability to testify in court and enter into contracts.

Simultaneously the legal status of African indentured servants also changed, with the passage of Slave Code laws in Virginia and other colonies. These laws enabled masters the right to claim Africans and their offspring as permanent chattel slaves or property. The legal justification was that Africans weren’t English and didn’t enjoy the protections of English common law.

It was a classic example of divide and rule. Convinced of their innate superiority over Africans, poor white settlers shunned any associate with them, making any cross-racial collaboration (against the British aristocracy) highly improbable.