Peace and Justice Post

Shamus Cooke, Information Clearing House, July 4, 2010

When the UN refused to agree to the severe sanctions that the U.S. wanted, Obama responded with typical Bush flair and went solo. The new U.S. sanctions against Iran — signed into law by Obama on July 1st — are an unmistakable act of war.

If fully enforced, Iran’s economy will be potentially destroyed. The New York Times outlines the central parts of the sanctions:

“The law signed by Mr. Obama imposes penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. It also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the United States government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran.” (July 1, 2010).

Iran must import the majority of its oil from foreign corporations and nations, since it does not have the technology needed to refine the fuel that it pumps from its soil. By cutting this refined oil off, the U.S. will be causing massive, irreparable damage to the Iranian economy — equalling an act of war.

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wsws.org, January 13, 2009

On a recent visit to Norway, a German supporter of the ICFI visited the house in which Leon Trotsky took refuge some time after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. This reader provided the following account of this period of Trotsky’s exile.

The house in Norway where Trotsky and his wife Natalia lived in exile

In 1935, after the French authorities refused to allow Trotsky to stay in the country any longer, no other European country was prepared to grant him exile. At that time, France was negotiating an alliance with Stalin and was about to establish a popular front government with the support of the Stalinist Communist Party of France.

In Norway, the Social Democratic Workers Party had just come to power. This party regarded itself as standing to the left of the Second International and had even belonged to the Communist International for a time, having then broken with it in 1923.

Walter Held, one of Trotsky’s supporters who lived in exile in Norway, had turned to Olaf Scheflo, a party leader who was sympathetic to Trotsky, and finally received a promise that Trotsky could stay temporarily in Norway.

After some problems caused by senior government officials who were opposed to his stay, Trotsky received a six-month visa, which was linked to a number of conditions. Trotsky had to promise the government that he would refrain from political activity and would reside some distance from the capital Oslo. As Isaac Deutscher writes, Trotsky did this on the assumption that he was being asked not interfere in the internal affairs of Norway. The government would later maintain that it had asked him to refrain from all political activity.

Konrad Knudsen, one of the editors of the social democratic newspaper Arbeiderbladet, tried in vain to rent a house for Trotsky and finally invited him and his wife Natalia into his own home. Although he did not agree politically with his guest, his whole family enjoyed friendly relations with the Trotskys and did everything possible to make their stay a pleasant one. After Trotsky had partly recovered from a severe and persistent infection, he began to work on The Revolution Betrayed, one of his most important books, in which he made his analysis of the degeneration of the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state, into a bureaucratic regime.

It was at this time that the period of murders and purges began in the Soviet Union. Not only was virtually the entire Bolshevik leadership wiped out, but also hundreds of thousands of members of the intelligentsia, the military, those active in the field of culture and countless ordinary Soviet citizens were detained in penal camps and/or murdered. The principal defendant of the show trials, with their fabricated charges and predetermined verdicts, was Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky’s visa was not extended, and he had to leave Norway after Stalin threatened the Norwegian government with a trade boycott and other sanctions.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came to the conclusion that there were only two possibilities for the future of the Soviet Union: either the working class would overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy through a political revolution and restore Soviet democracy, or the bureaucracy would reintroduce capitalist property relations and become a new ruling class. Trotsky’s prognosis was tragically confirmed by the realisation of the latter alternative at the end of the 1980s.

The house in which Trotsky wrote this book stands just a few hundred meters from European Route 16, which runs from Oslo to Bergen, some 60 kilometres north of Oslo. In this small locality hardly anyone today knows about Trotsky. There are no signs to indicate where he lived, and there is no commemorative plaque on the house.

Transcribed for the Internet by Per I. Matheson
[References from original translation removed]

By Leon Trotsky,  “Socialist” Norway

Leon Trotsky

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All this notwithstanding, we carried away with us warm remembrances of the marvelous land of forests and fjords, of the snow beneath the January sun, of skis and sleighs, of children with china-blue eyes, corn-colored hair, and of the slightly morose and slow-moving but serious and honest people. Norway, goodbye!

December 1936

My wife and I spent about eighteen months, from June 1935 to September 1936, in Weksal, a village thirty-five miles from Oslo. We lived in the home of Konrad Knudsen, editor of a working class paper. This residence had been designated for us by the Norwegian government. Our life there was completely peaceful and well ordered – one might even say petty bourgeios. The household soon became used to us, and an almost silent but very friendly relationship was established between us and the people around us. Once a week we went to the cinema with the Knudsens to see two-year-old Hollywood productions. From time to time, mainly during the summer, we received visitors, mostly people who belonged to the left wing of the working class movement. The radio kept us abreast of what was going on in the world; we had begun to use this magical, and unbearable, invention three years earlier. We were especially amazed at hearing the official pronouncements of the Soviet bureaucrats. These individuals feel just as much at home over the airwaves as they do in their own offices. They give orders, threaten, and quarrel among themselves – neglecting the most elementary rules of prudence regarding state secrets. Without any doubt, enemy general staffs glean priceless information from the intemperate language of Soviet “chiefs” – big and small. All this goes on in a country where even being suspected of opposition carries the risk of immediately being accused of spionage!

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by Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, Dissident Voice,  July 4th, 2010

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

–– Charles Dickens

We face what appears to be a military industrial media empire so powerful and complex that truth is mostly absent or reported in disconnected segments with little historical context. A case in point: the London Times reported on June 5, 2010, that American troops are now operating in 75 countries. Has President Obama secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US Special Forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world? If so, this increase is far in excess of special-forces operations under the Bush administration and reflects how aggressively Obama is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy. Somehow this information didn’t make it into the US media.

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Statement in the House by Rep. Tim Johnson of Illinois on funding the war in Afghanistan.

I stand in opposition to this rule and in sincere but deep opposition to this $63 billion massive spending bill, and particularly the war spending component of the bill.

I speak, I believe, on the behalf of the hundreds of thousands of brave men and women who serve America in the Middle East with neither a defined objective nor the ability to assess victory or defeat; and on behalf of families of our military personnel around the world who have lost their fathers or their mothers or their sons or their daughters in a valiant but shortsighted effort and battle that can never be won; and on behalf of the American taxpayers who have seen more than $1 trillion poured into an attempt to fight terror, where there is not even a remote relationship to the welfare of the American people; and really, also, on behalf of the innocent children who have had the misfortune to simply be in the ever-changing line of fire and the vicinity of terrorists who move effortlessly from Iraq to Somalia to Yemen to Paraguay to Afghanistan like the Whack-a-Mole at the county fair in the form of unconventional and ill-defined tribal warfare that 2,000 years have taught us we simply cannot fight.

I think it was November of 1952, when I was about 6 years old, that Charles Schultz and his Peanuts comic strip came out with the annual saga where, every year, Charlie Brown comes up to the football, and Lucy tells Charlie Brown year after year, “Just one more time, we’ll let you kick ball.” And each year, she pulled the football out, only to find Charlie Brown on his rear end.

I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, in this somewhat stretched analogy, that a series of Commanders-in-Chief are Lucy, and we’re Charlie Brown, and the football is the illusive promise of a goal that we simply cannot reach. We cannot force a culture to accept our values, and we cannot impose Western democracy on a people who don’t understand or accept it and whose leadership is corrupt and antidemocratic beyond repair. And we cannot continue to spend the billions and, arguably, trillions of dollars of the hardworking men and women in this country in a venture that has no objective, no end game, and no proximate connection to the well-being of our Nation.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, we cannot afford economically, we cannot afford militarily, and we cannot afford as a people to pass this bill. This President who, frankly, won an election based on his strong antiwar message, like many of his predecessors, asked us one more time to spend a few more billion dollars — in this case $38 billion — and a few thousand more men and women in an effort to kick the football just one more time. It simply isn’t doable.

I suggest to you, Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, that this rule underlies a bill that the vast majority, I believe, of the American people don’t want. I represent a district in central Illinois, and I think I speak in many ways for middle America. I voted for the authorization of force in Iraq and, frankly, Afghanistan; and I believe, like many of us, I may have questioned my vote. But I believe that we’re the greatest nation on Earth, thanks in large part to the generations of fighting men and women who have given their lives to this great cause and democracy and this great Nation of ours.

As we prepare to celebrate our independence in a few days, I think I speak on behalf of the average American citizen who says, For what? What is this money being expended for? Why are we doing it? And what’s the end game? And I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, that there is no end game, and I would respectfully ask that this rule and the underlying bill be defeated.

Jews For Justice For Palestinians,

Dear Friends,

Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg earlier this month. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world.

For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature University of Haifa

WOMEN
Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R’aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.

When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.

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The allegations of torture by British soldiers in Iraq bear chilling comparison with America’s worst excesses

• Phil Shiner and Tessa Gregory
• The Guardian/UK, Saturday 3 July 2010

The inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa is due to report by the end of the year. It will detail how Mousa died in Iraq in September 2003, allegedly brutalised by British soldiers in a “free for all”; and how it was that he and nine other men in the same incident were allegedly hooded, forced into painful stress positions, and deprived of sleep, food and water.

The Guardian article this week, which reported that many more civilians died in army custody than previously thought, should shock the conscience of the nation. The evidence of Lieutenant Colonel Mercer to the inquiry reveals that as early as May 2003 – four months before Mousa’s death – there were “a number of deaths in custody” with “various units”. It appears there were, by then, at least nine deaths. The Ministry of Defence refuses to answer questions from us or the Guardian as to where, how or why these Iraqis died, and refuses to confirm or deny whether any of these deaths were ever investigated and if so with what outcome.

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Despite the fact that the youngest of Israel’s victims on the flotilla — 19-year old Furkan Dogan — was an American citizen, we cannot rely on our American leaders in this pursuit of justice.