Peace and Justice Post

The WikiLeaks avalanche has exposed floundering imperial rule to scrutiny – and its reliance on dictatorship and deceit

Seumas Milne, The Guardian, Dec 1, 2010

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of 250,000 US embassy cables have exposed an overstretched imperial system at work. Photograph: WikiLeaks

Official America’s reaction to the largest leak of confidential government files in history is tipping over towards derangement. What the White House initially denounced as a life-threatening “criminal” act and Hillary Clinton branded an “attack on the international community” has been taken a menacing stage further by the newly emboldened Republican right.

WikiLeaks’ release of 250,000 United States embassy cables – shared with the Guardian and other international newspapers – was an act of terrorism, congressman Peter King declared. Sarah Palin called for its founder Julian Assange to be hunted down as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands“, while former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has demanded that whoever leaked the files should be executed for treason.

Not much truck with freedom of information, then, in the land of the free. In reality, most of the leaked material is fairly low-level diplomatic gossip, which naturally reflects the US government’s view of the world, and crucially doesn’t include reports with the highest security classification.

When it comes to actual criminality and blood, nothing quite matches WikiLeaks’ earlier revelations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their chilling records of US collusion with industrial-scale torture and death squads, and killings of Afghan civilians by rampaging Nato troops.

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There are lots of dangerous places in this world: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Bolivia, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, and Somalia to name a few. But there is only one that could destabilize a large part of the globe and end up killing tens of millions of people. And yet for reasons of state that is the one place the Obama administration will not talk about: Kashmir.

And yet this region has sparked three wars between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. It is currently in the midst of serious political upheaval. And it is central to reducing tensions in Central and South Asia.

None of these facts should surprise Obama. While running for office in 2008 he explicitly called for a solution to Kashmir.  “It won’t be easy, but it is important,” he told Joe Klein of Time magazine.

Kashmir’s Importance

Given that India and Pakistan came within a hair’s breath of a full-scale nuclear confrontation during the 1999 Kargil incident, the importance seems obvious. According to a recent study in Scientific American, such an exchange would kill and maim untold millions, flood the surrounding region with nuclear fallout, and create a “nuclear winter” for part of the globe.

Kashmir also fuels extremists in the region—both Hindu and Islamic—which in turn destabilizes Pakistan and Afghanistan. The conflict has already killed between 50,000 and 80,000 people, “disappeared” several thousand others, seen thousands imprisoned and tortured, and subjected millions of Kashmiris to an onerous regime of occupation, with laws drawn straight from Britain’s colonial past.

Why then would President Obama remain silent on the subject, particularly since the outlines of a solution have been in place since 2007?

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One hundred years since the death of the great Russian novelist

wsws.org, 2 December 2010

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy died one hundred years ago on November 20, 1910. Although eulogized by many writers, one of the best tributes to Tolstoy came two years before his death when Leon Trotsky wrote this article on Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday. It was first published in German in Die Neue Zeit on September 18, 1908; then in a Russian translation in Volume 20 of Trotsky’s Works in 1926; and finally in an English translation by John G. Wright in the journal Fourth International in May-June 1951 under the title, “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel.” Minor revisions have been made to the original English translation. Several of the endnotes have been adapted from the 1926 Russian edition.

Tolstoy has passed his eightieth birthday and now stands before us like an enormous jagged cliff, moss-covered and from a different historical world.

A remarkable thing! Not only Karl Marx but―to cite a name from a field closer to Tolstoy’s―Heinrich Heine as well appear to be contemporaries of ours. But from our great contemporary of Yasnaya Polyana we are already separated by the irreversible flow of time which differentiates all things.

This man was 33 years old when serfdom was abolished in Russia. As the descendant of “ten generations untouched by labor,” he matured and was shaped in an atmosphere of the old nobility, among inherited acres, in a spacious manorial home and in the shade of linden-tree alleys, so tranquil and patrician.

The traditions of landlord rule, its romanticism, its poetry, its whole style of living were irresistibly imbibed by Tolstoy and became an organic part of his spiritual makeup. From the first years of his consciousness he was, as he remains to this very day, an aristocrat, in the deepest and most secret recesses of his creativeness; and this, despite all his subsequent spiritual crises.

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Paul Craig Roberts, Prisonplanet.com, Dec 1, 2010

The stuck pigs are squealing. To shift the onus from the US State Department, Hillary Clinton paints Wikileaks’ release of the “diplomatic cables” as an “attack on the international community.” To reveal truth is equivalent in the eyes of the US government to an attack on the world.

It is Wikileaks’ fault that all those US diplomats wrote a quarter of a million undiplomatic messages about America’s allies, a.k.a., puppet states. It is also Wikileaks’ fault that a member of the US government could no longer stomach the cynical ways in which the US government manipulates foreign governments to serve, not their own people, but American interests, and delivered the incriminating evidence to Wikileaks.

The US government actually thinks that it was Wikileaks patriotic duty to return the evidence and to identify the leaker. After all, we mustn’t let the rest of the world find out what we are up to. They might stop believing our lies.

The influential German magazine, Der Spiegel, writes: “It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.”

This might be more a hope than a reality. The “Soviet threat” during the second half of the 20th century enabled US governments to create institutions that subordinated the interests of other countries to those of the US government. After decades of following US leadership, European “leaders” know no other way to act. Finding out that the boss badmouths and deceives them is unlikely to light a spirit of independence. At least not until America’s economic collapse becomes more noticeable.

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by Charles Sullivan , Dissident Voice, November 29th, 2010

Free speech and dissent are always curtailed in times of war. Whenever soldiers occupy foreign nations, rational thinking is proscribed in favor of nationalistic hubris. Minority opinions, although grounded in ethics and reason, are repressed, often brutally. The majority becomes intolerant of dissenting views. Thoughtful dialog is suspended and irrational ideology gains ascendancy. Civil discourse breaks down, and the social order disintegrates into anti-intellectual emotionalism and chaos.

During World Wars I and II, it was dangerous for anyone to oppose war or to speak truth to power. When Eugene Debs delivered his Canton anti-war speech in 1918, he went to prison. In An Enemy of the People, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen demonstrated that the majority of the people are easily deceived, their emotions manipulated by profiteers and special interests. It requires serious conviction to take a principled stand in the midst of nationalistic fervor in which men and women so easily turn upon one another. During war, nationalism and repression are conducted with the fervor of a religious crusade.

In this era of permanent war we see bumper stickers that attempt to meld religion with nationalism. They carry jingoistic slogans like “God bless America” or “God bless our troops.” Significantly, God even appears on our currency. But why would a just God, if God exists at all, bless a nation that kills with impunity? Why would God bless a nation with a history of repression and genocide?  Why would God bless a nation that institutionalized chattel slavery and the repression of its working class?

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The truth about the unseemly way in which the US State Department has been behaving should not have gone public, insists Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who today called the revelation of these facts “an attack on the international community.”

The Obama Administration has expressed outrage at what amounts to the revelation of a growing number of crimes committed under their watch (and often on their direct orders), with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs calling the leaks a serious crime.

Of course, the Supreme Court has already ruled that classified documents can be published by the press, and while the original leaker himself, apparently Pfc Bradley Manning, may well be liable for prosecution under the Military Code of Justice, his crime certainly pales in comparison to those the documents detail.

One of the documents, for instance, was signed by Secretary Clinton, and ordered officials at dozens of US embassies to attempt to steal personal data, including credit card information, from a number of top UN officials. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is said to be extremely concerned that the US attempted to steal his credit card, and likely much less concerned that someone revealed the attempted theft.

Diplomatic communiqués released by Wikileaks shine unprecedented light on the US and how it sees the world

By Jerome Taylor, Cahal Milmo and David Usborne, US Editor

GETTY

President Obama’s administration has backed the gathering of personal details of foreign dignitaries

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