Peace and Justice Post

Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, Jan 12, 2011

Today marks the first anniversary of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, leaving a quarter of a million of its people dead, more than 300,000 injured, and approximately a million and a half homeless.

One year after this natural disaster, the horrors facing Haiti’s population have only deepened, with a cholera epidemic claiming thousands of lives and a million left stranded in squalid tent camps.

This festering crisis underscores the social and political sources of the suffering inflicted upon Haiti’s working class and oppressed masses. That such conditions prevail virtually on the doorstep of the United States, which concentrates the greatest share of the world’s wealth, constitutes a crime of world historic proportions and an indictment of the profit system.

Those familiar with the conditions on the ground in Haiti provide an appalling account of the indifference and neglect of American and world imperialism toward the country’s people.

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The lawyer of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblower website Wikileaks, has said that the journalist faces the threat of the death penalty or detention at Guantanamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault.

The Guardian quoted Assange’s legal team as saying in a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, that there is a similar possibility that the US would eventually seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere”.

“Indeed, if Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Assange should be executed,” they added.

The 35-page skeleton argument was released by Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, following a brief review hearing at Belmarsh magistrate’s court on Tuesday, the paper said.

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By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi, The Independent, Jan 12, 2011

AP

The attack on the Samjhauta Express in 2007 may not have been the work of Muslim militants

By Ivan Eland, Consortium News, January 12, 2011

Editor’s Note: The Afghan War grinds on, now well into its tenth year, with no coherent U.S. plan for either success or withdrawal, only the prospect of more death and destruction and the further destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

With difficult choices ahead – and Washington still trapped in tough-guy rhetoric – the future prospects for U.S. policy in the region are only dimmer, prompting the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland to suggest that the time has come for some unpleasant deal-making:

If actions speak louder than words, the U.S. military has seemed to confirm the pessimistic findings of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which the military had recently pooh-poohed.

The military assessment emphasized a rosy picture of gains in the Helmand and Kandahar provinces in Afghanistan, whereas the NIEs, a product of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, acknowledged some gains in those two provinces but focused on Pakistan’s unwillingness to shut down guerrilla sanctuaries across the border as a serious obstacle.

In December, the military commanders tried to discredit the NIE by saying it was an out-of-date effort by intelligence chair-borne divisions that had spent only limited, if any, time in Afghanistan.

The next week, however, senior American military commanders in Afghanistan — seemingly acknowledging the validity of the desk jockeys’ main point — were advocating a risky expansion of Special Operations ground raids across the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to attack those Taliban sanctuaries, also reflecting a growing frustration with Pakistan’s lack of effort there.

Furthermore, as the military emphasized gains in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, it downplayed the spread of the insurgency and instability into northern Afghanistan.

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The release of large amounts of classified documents has shown how eager the administration is to tell the American public the exact opposite of what they are telling one another. It seems that the classification system isn’t even necessary for this, however, as Vice President Biden, fresh off of pledging to the American people that the US would be totally out of Afghanistan “come hell or high water, by 2014” has now told a completely different story to Afghan officials.

“We are not leaving in 2014,” Biden assured President Hamid Karzai during a news conference in Kabul, insisting that the US was prepared to continue with its military occupation “well beyond 2014.”

Biden, who had previously chastised Karzai for his corruption, praised him today for his “leadership” through nearly a decade of failed NATO military adventures. Karzai, who has recently been condemning the US for killing large numbers of civilians, spent his time praising the US for its “contributions.”

Currently there are some 150,000 NATO troops, predominantly from the United States, and NATO estimates that there are 25,000 Taliban forces in the country, which is the exact same estimate they made a year ago. Despite claims of “progress” in the war, violence is still on the rise across the nation.

by Albert Einstein, Global Research, Jan 10, 2011

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

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Chris Hedges,  trutdig.com,  Jan 10, 2011

AP / Petros Giannakouris

A young protester with a painted face demonstrates in central Athens during an anti-war rally back in 2007.

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

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By Ilan Pappe, ZNet, January 11, 2011

I begin by thanking all the organizers; I know it took quite a lot of efforts to bring us all together. It is a great achievement, and as Mazin Qumsiyeh and Haidar Eid, mentioned, and Lubna Masarwa, yesterday, you also provided a great opportunity for us to meet and we are very grateful to you for this opportunity to meet you and to meet each other. It is easier because of the Israeli oppression to meet here than to meet in Palestine where we should meet and hopefully one day we will all be there without the need to go to the frozen hills of Stuttgart to create a joint life!

And I think that’s the gist of the Zionist story that it does not allow people to meet normal life and to be normal friends that they need to go through all that hardship in order to fulfill a very elementary human impulse to live together.

We live in very bizarre times. On the one hand, we could not have wished as activists for a better Israeli government. I think that this particular government makes any sophisticated analysis about what Zionism in Israel is all about quite redundant. It is very easy to expose not only the Israeli policies, but also the racist ideology behind them. On the other hand, Israel is the most successful economy in the West in the last three years; it has done much better than the Germany, much better than most of the economic powers of the West; its banking system is very stable, its currency is one of the strongest in the world and it doesn’t suffer at all from all the hardships that had affected the Western capitalist economies in the last three years.

The result is a very bewildering gap between what average and decent people in the West think about Israel and the way the Israelis, specially the Israeli Jews, think about themselves. They think that they live in a very successful society, they believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over, that the Palestinian question has ended, yes, you have a problem in Gaza, yes you have a problem with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this is a global problem, this is not a particular Israeli problem; this is part of the so-called war against terror.

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Morning Star Online, January 10, 2011

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