The Story Behind the Carnage in Colombia

Formed in the 1980s, with the financing and backing of Colombia’s landowners and industrialists, the AUC and similar right-wing paramilitary gangs—often working in close collaboration with the military—were responsible for the bulk of the massacres and assassinations carried out over the last quarter century of civil war. These included the death squad killings of tens of thousands of peasants, workers, left-wing politicians, students and human rights advocates. The AUC and other right-wing paramilitary outfits are also estimated to have controlled some three quarters of the country’s cocaine trade.
The deep involvement of the state and virtually all of its institutions in these crimes became the defining feature of the right-wing presidency of Alvaro Uribe, the closest US ally in Latin America, between 2002 and 2010. During this period Washington, touted Colombia as a success story in its combined “war on drugs” and “global war on terror.” – Bill Van Auken, September 2011

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16.01.12 According to the US government’s own records 92% of the captives in the Guantánamo concentration-camp/prison have absolutely no connection to al-Qaeda. Only seven out of 775 captives there have even been charged with a crime. The prison in Cuba remains active because it serves a purpose for the ruling powers: intimidation through appearance. Guantánamo Bay serves the same purpose to the U$ Empire as crucifixions did for Imperial Rome: the intimidation of Imperial dissent.

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The Crime and Punishment Boomerang

14.09.11 The responses by official authorities to protests, riots and looting in the wake of a deadly police shooting during the summer of 2011 in England offer a particularly revealing characterization of a predatory and criminal state. These official authorities spent the all their  effort not to try and rectify the underlying causes of the problem, but to punish people for stealing food and shoes, all the while broadcasting belligerent statements through mass media outlets about a “payback”. Attempting to track and seize suspects from video cameras, armed police raids for stealing a television set, bogus trials and now the prisons are at record-breaking over-capacity.

And the same the characterization of official behavior equally applies to the United States, or any other reactionary state.

This worldwide criminal establishment punishes in inverse proportion to wealth.

Even though immense sums of money have been given away to the banking and finance sectors, pretty much nothing has been done by these same rulers to create jobs paying a living wage, or make any real effort to address structural poverty and the millions cut off and entirely disenfranchised. The inefficiency of this rule, and the wasted human potential, is absolutely staggering.

Of course people are going to riot eventually, without any jobs or hope of getting one, raising tuition rates by 300% overnight and cutting off even the illusion of earning a decent income after several years of school.

This system punishes every step of the way, no matter what you do, if you’re not rich. The real question is why the people are so docile that they don’t riot more often!

And the real absurdity is that no one actually wins in this game. If the establishment won’t provide jobs or develop the economic base to support the citizens, it would still be far cheaper to simply give the poor a welfare allowance to pay for food and housing than the current policy of punishment. Lawyers don’t work cheap, and the court system is notoriously expensive and time consuming to operate. The prisons cost a fortune, and it all adds up to billions of dollars and pounds to put shoe-stealers on trial and lock them up where they only become hardened criminals and come out with a criminal record that bars them from ever getting legitimate employment, and then you’ve got a whole underclass permanently marked and with little, if anything, to lose.

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I have analysed the role of punishment using mathematics and experiments. I think that most uses of punishment are very much for selfish interests, such as defending your position in the group. Punishment leads to retaliation and vendettas. It's very rare that punishment is used nobly.  – Martin Nowak on mathematically describing social cooperation, 21.03.11

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Unchecked Authority – Dictatorship Under Cover of Democracy

13.12.10 I always find it amusing the way that so many label mass-murdering dictators as insane monsters, despite all the legitimate evidence to the contrary. They do this in a desperate, and very hazardous, attempt to reassure themselves, and their audience, that the same atrocities can’t happen to them, or come from their own perfectly reasonable leaders.

In fact, mass-murdering dictators are simply the reflexive outcome that emerges from the expression of any unchecked authority. The degree of killing, torture, and brutality are directly proportional to the degree of authoritarian force expressed within society. Rulers in power over the pseudo-democracies, be they consecutive US presidents perpetrating genocide on Southeast Asia, or George W. Bush and Tony Blair conspiring to wage war in the Middle East, or any number of similar examples, are certainly no exception, they’re just limited in how far they can go. Keep in mind that the rulers in power right now are working tirelessly to remove the few remaining restrictions on the expression of their authority.

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Tyrants Rush to Silence the (Wikileaks) Messenger

01.12.10 As Wikileaks demonstrates, the national-security police-state is forever guided by the twin demons of over-reaction and fear. Presented with the opportunity it will inexorably destroy itself from the inside out. What does an honest (and supposedly democratic!) government have to fear from public scrutiny?

And a dishonest one? The more the oppressive machinery of a corrupt state struggles and twists in open displays of contradiction and hypocrisy, the faster it dies.

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[I]f you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are. - Joe Keohane, 2010

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US Authorities Train Police in Repression and Oppression

Ignored in mainstream media commentary and “think tank” analyses is the fact that the destructive consequences of American strategy in the Middle-East and Central Asia today are consistent with practices honed over more than a century in the poor nations of the periphery. Police training has been central to American attempts to expand its reach from the conquest of the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century through the Cold War era to today. Presented to the public in both the target country and the United States as humanitarian initiatives designed to strengthen democratic development and public security, these programs achieved neither, but were critical to securing the power base of local elites amenable to U.S. economic and political interests and contributed to massive human rights violations. They helped to facilitate the rise of powerful anti-democratic forces, which operated above the law, contributing to endemic violence, state terrorism and corruption.

From: American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, by Jeremy Kuzmarov, 15 March 2010, Japan Focus.

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Friends in Low Places

Obama politely refrained from comment about his host, President Hosni Mubarak, one of the most brutal dictators in the region, though he has had some illuminating words about him. As he was about to board a plane to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two "moderate" Arab states, "Mr Obama signaled that while he would mention American concerns about human rights in Egypt, he would not challenge Mr Mubarak too sharply, because he is a 'force for stability and good' in the Middle East ... Mr Obama said he did not regard Mr Mubarak as an authoritarian leader. 'No, I tend not to use labels for folks,' Mr Obama said. The president noted that there had been criticism 'of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt,' but he also said that Mr Mubarak had been 'a stalwart ally, in many respects, to the United States.'"

When a politician uses the word "folks", we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming. Outside of this context, there are "people", or often "villains", and using labels for them is highly meritorious. Obama is right, however, not to have used the word "authoritarian", which is far too mild a label for his friend.

From: Peace that could happen (but won't), by Noam Chomsky, April 2010.

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Film Review: Elite Squad [Tropa de Elite] (2007)

12.03.10 Elite Squad is an intense drama concerning the very ugly and ultra-violent drug war occurring in Brazil, specifically in Rio de Janeiro, based on the experiences of a former Elite Squad captain. The Elite Squad (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais or BOPE) is, as the name implies, a select group of police commandos that conduct special missions using the liberal application of deadly force and violence to get what they want. The film focuses on a specific incident in 1997 when the Pope decided to visit near one of the slums so BOPE is called in to suppress the neighborhood. But with all the extra-judicial killing, corruption, and torture by the police, the film leaves you wondering which clique is worse: the BOPE, the cops, or the drug dealers?

When there's a wide gap between practiced morality and preached moral values, trouble follows. And the same laws that compel social hypocrisy also generate political corruption.

The unstated message of Elite Squad is a testament to how hierarchal authority systems built upon violence are incapable of solving anything. These authority structures only make the situation even worse than before in a conveniently self-justifying feedback loop. As recently as 1985 Brazil was ruled by a brutal fascist military dictatorship, and although Brazil has made significant progress in governance, particularly under the Presidency of Lula da Silva, the country remains young, male, Catholic, and predominantly overpopulated. Even if drugs were legalized the ruling elite would still be stuck with millions of unwanted and completely marginalized people, indirectly revealing that Brazil’s war on drugs is a race war against former imported slaves at least as much as it is a class-conflict.

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Torture and Abuse: Favorite Tools of Despotic Authority

27.06.09 As official documents have slowly leaked out, or been released under legal pressure from public-interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), we’ve learned that the torture and abuse of captives under the guidance of Vice President Dick Cheney was part of an effort to generate evidence linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in order to justify launching war on Iraq. In other words, proceeding from a fundamentally false premise, captives were tortured to reveal facts that did not exist because Saddam never had any ties to al Qaeda!

So, it turns out that the infamous lie about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein working together was extracted through torture in Egypt, a notoriously brutal dictatorship jointly sponsored by Israel and the U.S. government with billions of dollars of American taxpayer money.

… which, incidentally, should be hurled in the face of former Vice President Cheney, every time he is invited onto a TV show to repeat his claims that torture saved the US from further terrorist attacks — and to ignore the crucial role he played in actually using torture to launch an illegal war. [1]

The origin for the torture techniques used on detainees is one of the most bizarre ironies yet to emerge from this sordid tale. The military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) directly adopted methods, like water-boarding and sleep-deprivation, which were used by Chinese and North Korean Communist interrogators to elicit 'confessions' from captured American soldiers! [2] These torture tactics were studied, and then employed only as extreme simulations for escape and evasion training by U.S. soldiers. But then the JPRA re-engineered them to be used on detainees, just like the Communists they fought against in Korea.

Even more outrageous, the torture and abuse of captives in the 'War on Terror', or whatever the latest bogus title is that’s being officially used, continues under the Obama administration. This kind of official behavior has now been institutionalized but it still operates using erroneous beliefs in non-existent ‘facts’, searching for information that doesn’t exist in order to justify pre-existing plans and ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people in the process, wrecking the prestige of America, and directly endangering the safety of American’s everywhere through the inevitable retributive counter-attacks.

In the end, though, what is most significant about al-Libi’s torture tour through US proxy prisons and prisons run by the CIA is the realization that, throughout his long ordeal, US interrogators or their proxies were persistently using torture to secure information from him about other prisoners and other suspects — either in the presence of these men, or through the use of photographs — that was just as unreliable as his “confession” about the connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that these other “confessions” must, in turn, have led to further arrests and further torture, with a cumulative effect that is truly mind-boggling in its scale. [1]

The use of torture to elicit false information that subsequently implicates other innocent people, who are then captured and interrogated forming a chain-reaction, is primarily why the Obama administration is still having so much difficulty shutting down Bush-Cheney’s showcase concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. They have no valid evidence to put anyone on trial, but they can’t release them without effectively admitting that the captives were innocent to begin with and the whole thing is a sick fraud!

As soon as authority resorts to torture and abuse it sends out a blazing warning signal to everyone who’s paying attention: proper oversight has failed, this regime has lost all legitimacy to rule, and now must be replaced through any means necessary.

1. New Revelations About The Torture and Alleged Suicide Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, by Andy Worthington, The Public Record, June 19, 2009.

2. Harsh Tactics Readied Before Their Approval, by Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, Washington Post, April 22, 2009.

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Russia Defeats NATO's Plans for World Domination

29.08.08 When reading news articles in the western mass media you have to keep in mind that what they represent is not the views and concerns of the public, or even the collective national interest, but rather the attitudes and concerns of the ruling elite. The Georgian conflict is a perfect example of this. Every news article is an outpouring of rage, vilification, and torrents of slander directed against Russia for daring to move against Georgia. An objective reader has to conclude that the mass-media’s anger is totally disproportionate to the state of actual events, and a reader familiar with recent historical events will conclude that it represents chutzpah and hypocrisy of monumental proportions.

Georgia started the crisis, but the West is blaming Russia. Everywhere there is total disinformation, distortion of facts, and international attempts to isolate Russia. - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, August 2008.

Bush, Cheney, British PM Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, these clowns make mob bosses and drug lords look subtle and sophisticated in comparison. And if this is all just idle rhetoric then why are they saying inflammatory things that they know they can’t back up with action, guaranteeing a loss of credibility after their true impotence is revealed? The difference between Russia’s and the west’s leaders is like night and day, the Russians say what they mean and act consistently and accordingly to their statements while the west’s leaders generate clouds of angry and distorted rhetoric and fail to follow any of it with concomitant action, then they deflect all responsibility for their own behavior onto their opponents, take for instance Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband, "The Russian president says he is not afraid of a new Cold War. … He has a big responsibility not to start one."

The stunning detachment from reality reflected in the statements and attitudes of the western political leadership should be cause for alarm to everyone. Not only are they disconnected from the national citizens they purport to represent in their putative democracy, but in actuality they've been doing just about everything they can to ratchet up tensions with Russia and create a new Cold War even as they blame it all on Russia at the same time! The whole reason for NATO was to counter the military might of the Warsaw Pact, the military defense block encompassing Eastern Europe and the USSR. Yet after the Soviet Union dissolved and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded NATO did not cease to exist too, and instead NATO, guided by the planners in Washington DC, actually went on the diplomatic warpath, intentionally expanding into the very region of Eastern Europe that acted as Russia’s defensive buffer against military attack.

What did Britain and America think they were doing? Pushing NATO deep into the old Soviet Union and setting up a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic on the patently false pretence that it was to counter the (non-existent) threat from Iran was bound to add to Russia's already considerable paranoia, without achieving anything worth having. – Lord Robert Skidelsky [1]

Then NATO began military operations in Afghanistan, in conjunction with extensive U.S. diplomatic and economic efforts to manipulate and control Central Asia, most notably for that region's oil and natural gas resources. Georgia is a key portion of this master plan for what in essence amounts to world domination by NATO. Georgia hosts the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline designed to bypass Russia entirely, and now we begin to see some of  the real reasons why the political bosses in Europe and the United States are foaming at the mouth with rage. [2]

Now the Bush-Cheney regime is talking about cutting arms-reduction treaties, and Europe’s craven leaders are threatening to freeze Russia out of the WTO and kick them out of the G8 economic group, or even taking the 2014 Winter Olympics away from Russia! This is the height of stupidity. Russia has gone to enormous lengths to try and integrate with Europe politically and economically and now the west wants to throw all of that in Russia’s face over a week-long skirmish on Russia’s own border! It was Georgia that started the war with their military assault on South Ossetia, a direct result of military aid, political backing from the west, and the promise of NATO membership, yet the western mass-media and political heads consistently portray Russia as the sole cause of all the trouble.

Intentionally inflaming tensions with Russia is stupid every way you look at it because Russia can easily retaliate against Europe, NATO, and U.S. military and economic efforts, from cutting off supplying NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan to blocking sanctions against Iran and similar UN security council efforts, or Russia can expand relations in South and Central America.

President Saakashvili is a hothead. He invaded South Ossetia aiming to translate theoretical sovereignty into practical sovereignty and lost Georgia's theoretical sovereignty as a result. He ought to be removed by his people, not for war crimes but for gross incompetence. – Lord Robert Skidelsky [1]

The Georgian people are being used as pawns by Washington, NATO, and their increasingly unpopular leader who hides behind the shield of nationalism. The best interests of Georgians will not be served by any of these three forces.

The fact is that Washington/NATO has lost in Central Asia and their misguided backing of Georgia’s autocratic ruler is just another in a series of embarrassing failures, and that’s really what the threatening language and irrational invective is about. The chess players have defeated the street bullies and sewn up the last critical piece of the Central Asian oil and gas resource puzzle, signing a 20-year contract to sell Turkmenistan’s natural gas through Russia’s Gazprom. [2] NATO’s rulers have no one to blame but themselves for starting this foolish game of winner-take-all antagonism, shunning cooperation at every turn in favor of unilateral victory, and then losing in the end.

NATO’s rulers should be held accountable for their actions by their own people, but until justice is delivered it’s clear that the only way NATO can learn anything is the hard way – by losing.

1. David Miliband must stop playing with fire, by Lord Robert Skidelsky, The Times (UK) August 28, 2008.

2. Russia takes control of Turkmen (world?) gas, by M K Bhadrakumar, ATOL, July 30, 2008.

Georgia Conflict Part II - The Israel Factor

06.09.08 The U$ government is pouring cash into Georgia in order to prop up the reckless regime of President Mikhail Saakashvili,  and to protect foreign investments that are betting on Georgia as a viable, and potentially highly lucrative, oil and gas conduit. The Bush administration announced a $1 billion aid package for Georgia in September, “… making the former Soviet republic one of the highest per capita recipients of U.S. economic assistance. … The assistance plan, assuming it is fully funded by this administration and the next, would exponentially increase U.S. aid to Georgia, which totaled about $64 million in fiscal 2008. [1]

The money is part of an IMF and World Bank loan package, and you know what that means -- deep trouble for the Georgian people. Georgia’s President Saakashvilli, a New York trained lawyer, has been a major promoter of privatization of national assets, cutting taxes and tariffs, and generally opening up his country to international speculative investment. Georgian Prime Minister Gurgenidze has described it as “the world’s most successful supply-side fiscal experiment.” As a consequence the rich have gotten richer and the poor are even worse off than before. The situation is like a giant elephant draining a muddy pool of water amidst a drought. At the same time Georgia has racked up a perilous trade deficit that threatens the economic stability of the whole setup.

In early September 2008 Vice President Cheney made a blatant bear-baiting tour of the Caucusus region where he promised to include Georgia in NATO. But Cheney and his neo-con allies are interested in Georgia for more than just the pipeline, it turns out that Israel is deeply involved in Georgia too. In fact numerous members of the Georgian government are Jewish. Davit Kezerashvili, Georgia's Defense Minister, is a former Israeli who uses his connection to facilitate purchases of Israeli weapons using U.S. aid. [3]

The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 12 reported, "Georgian Prime Minister Vladimir Gurgenidze made a special call to Israel Tuesday morning to receive a blessing from one of the Haredi community's most important rabbis and spiritual leaders, Rabbi Aaron Leib Steinman. "I want him to pray for us and our state," he was quoted. [3]

Israel even has plans to use Georgian air-bases to get closer to Iran for an air-attack! “This would sharply reduce the distance Israeli fighter bombers would have to fly to hit targets in Iran. And to reach Georgian airstrips, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) would fly over Turkey.” [3]

At this point to call Saakashvilli reckless would be an understatement, he’s leading NATO into a war against Russia and trying to involve the Caucasus region in a full-blown Middle Eastern war!

The Bush-Cheney regime had to know that Georgia was going to attack South Ossetia, and it seems pretty clear at this point that they must have at least tacitly approved of Saakashvili’s military assault. The top national security aide to Cheney, Joseph R. Wood, was in Georgia just before Saakashvili launched his attack.

Writing in the New Statesman August 14 Misha Glenny noted how the US and Israel had worked to arm Georgia, so that “Saakashvili and the hawks around him came to believe the farcical proposition that Georgia’s armed forces could take on the military might of their northern neighbour in a conventional fight and win.”

Glenny noted that the Georgian minister for reintegration of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Temur Yakobashvili, had praised Israel for its military assistance. Following the assault on South Ossetia, Glenny stated, Yakobashvili had said “Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers.” Thanks to its assistance, “We killed 60 Russian soldiers yesterday alone,” he said. “The Russians have lost more than 50 tanks, and we have shot down 11 of their planes. They have sustained enormous damage in terms of manpower.”

It is known that the US and Georgia held joint war games between July 15-31, codenamed Operation Immediate Response, which involved 1,000 US servicemen. One week later, on August 7, Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia. [4]

Unofficial NATO Expansion into Georgia

As part of a creeping expansion of NATO to include Georgia, that country has now been integrated into the alliance's electronic warning network.  “A Nato official said that the combined air surveillance arrangement had been negotiated before the crisis in Georgia. The technical switch-on, linking radars in Georgia to Nato, happened this week however.” [2] This action is exceedingly provocative towards Russia as it directly threatens their military defense, now NATO can track, monitor, and potentially attack Russian aircraft.

1. Rice: U.S. to Give $1 Billion to 'Help Georgia Sustain Itself, by Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 4, 2008.

2. Georgia linked to Nato early warning system, by Michael Evans,The Times (UK) September 5, 2008.

3. Israel of the Caucasus?, by Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times, September 4, 2008.

4. Danger grows of NATO-Russian clash in Black Sea, by Julie Hyland and Chris Marsden, WSWS, September 1, 2008.

For more on this topic read NATO on the March: Plan Georgia, by Freydis
 

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The bigger the crime the smaller the punishment; call yourself a government and you can commit all the crimes you want.

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Book Review: My Autobiography, By Benito Mussolini,1928, Dover Publications 2006

29.06.08 The title of this book is self-explanatory; it describes Mussolini’s life and events primarily between World War I and the ascension of the Fascist party as the government of Italy.

Benito Mussolini was born in 1883 in northeast Italy, the son of a blacksmith and a primary school teacher. He describes fighting in World War I against the Austrian Empire in the north of Italy, winning the war militarily but then having their national gains thrown away through post-conflict diplomatic machinations. It’s not really clear what happened but it appears that the western leaders thought they were creating some kind of happy new world where war would be abolished, and that consequently Italy should just gave up all her war territory, such as portions of Yugoslavia with a long history of Italian cultural connections. After losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the war this was, not surprisingly, seen as a huge insult to the Italian people. At the same time after the war Italy was afflicted with very stupid and short-sighted government and national leadership, for instance they banned flight and aircraft development and had all airplanes dismantled!

Everyone else in Italy knew that something had to be done and soon because the country was a mess, rapidly getting worse; the established democratic government was running the country into the ground. Soon economic mismanagement created inflation, only adding fuel to the fire of discontent. Radical socialists, communists, and anarchists could smell blood in the water, and taking their guidance from Lenin and the new Soviet Union set about to start a workers revolution to turn Italy into a Soviet state.

Mussolini built up his party starting with his newspaper, battled socialists and anarchists in the streets, got elected to office as part of parliament, organized his troops to march on the capital whereby the king of Italy recognized the impending civil war and preferred the conservative social leanings of the Fascists to the radical promises of the leftists, so he put Mussolini in charge of the government. Mussolini assumed government responsibility and quickly set about to repair the crumbling image, infrastructure, and economy of the nation.

Fascism was not initiated to be just another political party:

I speak of movement and not of party, because my conception always was that Fascism must assume the characteristics of being anti-party. It was not to be tied to old or new schools of any kind. The name Italian Fighting Fascisti was lucky. It was most appropriate to a political action that had to face all the old parasites and programmes that had tried to deprave Italy. I felt that it was not only the anti-socialist battle we had to fight; this was only a battle on the way. There was a lot more to do. All the conceptions of the so-called historical parties seemed to be dresses out of measure, shape, style, usefulness. They had grown tawdry and insufficient—unable to keep pace with the rising tide of unexpected political exigencies, unable to adjust to the formation of new history and new conditions of modern life.

The old parties clung in vain to the rattling programmes. These parties had to make pitiful repairs and tinkerings in an attempt to adapt their theories as best they could to the new days. It was therefore not sufficient to create—as some have said superficially—an anti-altar to the altar of socialism. It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception, adequate to the living reality of the twentieth century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism.

In a word, I felt the deep necessity of an original conception capable of placing in a new period of history a more fruitful rhythm of human life.

It was necessary to lay the foundation of a new civilization. [p. 53]

According to Mussolini he built the Fascist party from the ground up from his own effort.

The Italian Bundles of Fight were now transforming themselves. They were to receive the new denomination of Fascist National party, with a central directory and supreme council over the provincial organizations and the lesser Fascist sections which were to be created in every locality. On that occasion I wanted with all my desire to strip from our party the personal character which the Fascist movement had assumed because of the stamp of my will. But the more I wished to give the party an autonomous organization and the more I tried, the more I received the conviction from the evidence of the facts that the party could not have existed and lived and could not be triumphant except under my command, my guidance, my support and my spurs. [p. 107]

The fascist regime was a resolute dictatorship; Mussolini assumed responsibility in the new government:

An existence wholly new began for me. To speak about it makes it necessary for me to abandon the usual form of autobiographic style; I must consider the organic whole of my governmental activity. From now on my life identifies itself almost exclusively with thousands of acts of government. Individuality disappears. Instead, my person expresses, I sometimes feel, only measures and acts of concrete character; these do not concern a single per son; they concern the multitudes, they concern and permeate an entire people. So one's entire life is lost in the whole. ... Progressive inflation and the printing presses gave to everybody the old illusion of prosperity. It created an unstable delusion of well-being; it excited a fictitious game of interests. All this had to be expiated when faced by the severe Fascist financial policy.

Abroad our political reputation had diminished progressively. We were judged as a nation without order and discipline, unable either to prosper or produce. [p. 148]

Obviously, given the high stakes involved, the Communists didn’t take their defeat gracefully. Their assassination attempts on Mussolini, and efforts to undermine the Fascist regime, were defeated because Mussolini rearranged the social and economic order to favor the workers, while simultaneously assuaging existing authority’s fears of revolution with appropriately conservative platitudes. The Communists just couldn’t compete against Fascism that was better organized, offered a more popular product, and most stunning of all actually delivered what they promised. This in fact demonstrated a remarkable difference between Mussolini’s Fascism and every other political party in that his effort wasn’t just an exercise in seizing control over the resources of the nation for his clique but he actually meant what he said and aimed to organize the nation for the common good. In this regard Mussolini compares Italian Fascism with the typical selfish party interests:

Old men of the socialist and syndicalist poses and postures were amazed and perplexed at the daring new reform. Another legend fell: Fascism was not the protector of any one class, but a supreme regulator of the relations between all citizens of a state. The Labor Charter found interpreters and attracted the attention of the studious in every part of the world. It became a formidable pillar of the new consituation of the Fascist State.

As a logical consequence of the Charter of Labor and of all the social legislation and of the magistracy of labor, came the necessity of instituting the Corporations. In this institution are concentrated all the branches of national production. Work in all its complex manifestations and in all its breadth, whether of manual or of intellectual nature, requires equally protection and nourishment. The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts men and their possibilities into productive work and interprets for them the duties they have to fulfill.

In this new conception, which has found its logical expression in our representative forms, the citizen is valuable because of his productivity, his work and his thought, and not merely because he is twenty-one years old and has the right to vote! [p. 205]

Fascism Old and New

An important distinctions that needs to be made is that today’s ‘fascism’ refers to corporate control in primacy and state as subservient helper, think of the George W. Bush administration, war profiteering, deregulation, and so on. Mussolini’s Fascism was the opposite, it held corporate business interests as second with state control in primacy and thus business was regulated to serve national interests. Now, clearly both patterns eventually produce serious distortions, today’s fascism produces massive corruption, an environment antithetic to the well-being of the vast majority of the nation’s inhabitants, and is perfect for serving special interests while stealing from everyone else. Original Fascism unifies the nation and serves the public interest when under benevolent guidance, but puts enormous power in the hands of one or a few leaders who then find it all too easy to start wars of adventure or aggression. And without impartial oversight corruption blossoms.

A little further on I said: "Over all conflicts of human and legitimate interests, there is the authority of the government; the government alone is in the right position to see things from the point of view of the general welfare. This government is not at the disposition of this man or that man; it is over everybody, because it takes to itself not only the juridical conscience of the nation in the present, but also all that the nation represents for the future. The government has shown that it values at the highest the productive strength of the nation. A government which follows these principles has the right to be listened to by every one. It has a task to fulfill. It will do it. It will do it inexorably for the defense of the moral and material interests of the nation."

Little by little, the old labor structure and associations were abandoned. We were directed more and more toward the corporative conception of the state. [p. 204]

Fascism developed as a reaction to current political and economic conditions:

Fascism was not the nursling of a doctrine worked out before hand with detailed elaboration; it was born of the need for action and it was itself from the beginning practical rather than theoretical; it was not merely another political party but, even in the first two years, in opposition to all political parties as such, and itself a living movement. The name which I then gave to the organization fixed its character. And yet, if one were to re-read, in the now dusty columns of that date, the report of the meeting in which the Fasci Italiana di combattirnento were constituted, one would there find no ordered expression of doctrine, but a series of aphorisms, anticipations, and aspirations which, when refined by time from the original ore, were destined after some years to develop into an ordered series of doctrinal concepts, forming the Fascist political doctrine—different from all others either of the past or the present day. [p. 228]

Mussolini’s Fascist Italy allied with Hitler’s Germany during World War II and eventually lost against the combined military force of the Soviet Union and the western powers. In the end Italians didn’t reject Mussolini and the Fascist Party, so closely associated with his personality (much to his own chagrin), because of his governance or policies, they rejected him because he was attached to a war that was lost! The winning powers enthusiastically aided the process of discrediting Mussolini and Fascism for obvious ideological reasons. To this day leftists hate Mussolini (and of course Hitler) because both leaders usurped the popular labor policies  socialism uses as their primary selling point to the public. 

In comparison to Hitler, who learned much from the struggles of Italian Fascism, Mussolini was a much more cautious leader even to the point of foot-dragging at times. While Hitler was a visionary of global proportions Mussolini seems a more parochial thinker concerned with ordering his nation, and less so with ordering Europe or the rest of the world.

Benito Mussolini comes across as an articulate and educated person, hardly the stereotypical strong-man dictator. Mussolini’s demeanor throughout the book is refreshingly practical and friendly, at times, bordering on conceited, but in fairness his remarkable accomplishments certainly justify a measure of pride. Regardless of opinion characterizing Mussolini, My Autobiography is a fascinating book with a rare view of history and events that is well–worth reading. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t cover history after about 1930, leaving a critical gap that will have to be filled by other sources.

* * *

Once secret documents reveal that the British spy service MI5 built up Mussolini using large payments to fund his newspaper and keep Italy in World War I.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: "Britain's least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia's pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today."

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

"The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash," said Martland.

From: Recruited by MI5: the name's Mussolini. Benito Mussolini, by Tom Kington, The Guardian, October 13, 2009.

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China's Choices

11.12.05 & 27.06.09 The Chinese have been doing the same thing over and over for 4,000 years. Everything finally starts to come together in the climb back into modernity from isolation and social regression, and >bang<, China crashes back into riots, rebellions, and another civil war.

So, it’s worth mentioning that China today, in the early 21^st century, is still in a state of unresolved civil war as Taiwan is still considered to be a renegade province by the mainland regime. No one can be certain what will happen next for China, but considering the tenacious hold tradition and history have on the Chinese mind it isn’t too tough to form a likely hypothesis on near-future events. Most noticeable now is the break between the new  class of wealth and the party-military class that forms the heart of the military dictatorship currently running China. This disconnect is building the foundation for a second powerful, and eventually competitive, force that will challenge the ruling elite.

Deng Xiao Ping, in an effort to modernize a bleak and impoverished China, started this break by proclaiming the glories of becoming rich, and this trend can't be stopped now. Today China reports over 10% GDP growth annually, with skyscrapers and factories sprouting all over the densely populated eastern coast. The central party is starting to recognize the dangerous forces that rampant wealth outside of the parties control, and vast economic divisions within society, are exerting upon China as an unofficial  capitalist market economy. But when the party attempts to reign in the new rich they will discover a foe that doesn’t want to be nationalized and have their wealth taken away for the sake of the party, and not even if it's done under the guise of a need for promoting the greater public good.

The current interstitial period features a tug-of-war of bribes, corruption, and back room negotiations between the class of new rich  and the party, as both sides attempt to placate the other. This rampant corruption is intolerable to the longevity of the party as it eats away at the lingering remnants of official legitimacy it still has to govern the country. Meanwhile, a steadily rising tide of discontent in the ranks of everyone else in China, the masses that haven’t experienced any benefits from the new wealth, are becoming more violent and outspoken. This is clearly an unsustainable situation even without factoring in the massive pollution of the natural environment, the over-population problems in the cities, the unemployment crisis, the lack of health-care, the pending demographic time-bomb of millions of rapidly aging Chinese, and so on.

It is true that to a certain extent both party and the new independent rich need each other, but the goals of each side are not mutually compatible. The party still retains a tight grip on the military, as indeed the two are one and the same – the ‘People’s Army’ is really the ‘Communist Party Army’. If China had a flexible social structure then the different sides could potentially come to an agreement and work out their differences without the need to resort to violence and rebellion to rectify the rapidly compounding problems in the country. But China doesn’t have a flexible social structure, quite the opposite in fact. The Chinese don’t even have freedom of movement. For instance, all the rural Chinese flooding into the cities, desperate to escape extreme poverty and find a job, are there illegally because they don’t have the government paperwork allowing them to move. And they won’t get the paperwork because the government doesn’t want more people in the cities. Consequently, millions of formerly rural Chinese workers have virtually no rights because they don’t legally exist!

Watching from a safe distance it will be interesting to see if another civil war begins in China even without a resolution to the last one, or if new thinking can emerge and overcome historical trends.

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Hook, Line, and Sinker (Nietzschian Delusions)

November 2007

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Balance of Power

01.10.05 The events of the Cold War era show us that wars start when power becomes unbalanced. The Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) policy that emerged from the threat of nuclear self-annihilation in a hot war resulted in a relative, and perhaps counterintuitive, paucity of large-scale military conflicts over a period of five decades. And when a large scale military conflict did occur, such as the Korean war and the ‘police action’ in Vietnam, they were constrained from expanding into a worldwide conflict by a fear of nuclear Armageddon. In other words, what's especially startling about the five decades of the Cold War is how much worse it could have been.

This situation can be attributed to the balance of power that existed between the two superpower Empires, consisting of the United States and the Soviet Union, at least in nuclear weaponry. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the geopolitical scales went far out of balance resulting in the current worldwide ‘War on Terrorism’. This costly and deadly new global war will continue until the geopolitical forces return to a balanced equilibrium, either the United States becomes much weaker, or the rest of the world becomes much stronger.

And war is just terrorism with better funding, the eventual goals are the same in either case – influence of public opinion and the control of resources. It shouldn’t be a surprise that terrorists, insurgents, and indeed most any weaker military force, will violate the rules of the Geneva Convention. As the weaker power they will do anything they can to achieve a competitive advantage and cheating is about the easiest way to do that; by using brutality a weaker force can create fear and terror in order to gain a force advantage.

What's really surprising is when a superior military power violates the Geneva Convention mandates. The United States military is undoubtedly the most potent force on the planet but they display a remarkable weakness through the use of torture and other cruel and unusual punishments on detainees. Ostensibly, abuse and torture are for the purposes of interrogation, but an infantile desire for personal entertainment through the infliction of suffering on others is clearly evident as well in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and a multitude of covert and unnamed detention centers around the world the public is not even aware of, yet.

A balance of force is a very dangerous thing to lose through uncontrollable circumstance, but it’s simply embarrassing when done by choice. The Germans have always been an authoritarian group, but no greater expression of this culture of obedience to authority exists than the era of the Nazi party. The vivid historical recreation film Downfall (Der Untergang) of 2004 is a bleak and depressing account of the chaotic final days of Hitler and his staff and the insane behavior that inevitably emerges from an authority structure where allegiance is based on faith and unquestioning obedience. Downfall is quite illustrative of the need to always avoid granting too much power to too few, no matter how noble (or ignoble) their intentions may be. Americans figured this out over 200 years ago and had the mental brilliance to write it down in a Constitution, but the Germans had to learn all of this the very hard way, if indeed they have yet to figure it out at all.

Democracy is not meant to be efficient. Nazi Germany was meant to be efficient.

The conceptual appeal of democracy is that it works to create a widely dispersed balance of power. By granting everyone a voice and input into the shaping of events, democracy works to keep people involved, and as long as they are involved they have a stake in the outcome. British parliamentary democracy is an especially enlightened and functional system because it doesn’t create permanent losers that are locked out of the decision making process but instead compels participants to form coalitions that must take into account even minority voices. Conversely the American dual party system is one where the winner takes all, it creates angry losers that get forced to the side and a larger section of the population that eventually becomes so disenfranchised that civil disobedience and even violent revolution become the only means of gaining a voice and a stake in the outcome. But if you read Jefferson, maybe that was part of the plan.

President Thomas Jefferson once stated that, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." He was right about the need for continual political turmoil and turnover, and I can think of quite a few today who have overstayed their welcome, but the sanity of violent methods in an interconnected world of compressed time and space is a problematic proposition if other options remain. Violent retribution is just an extension of the dual party system where winners take it all. Rules like these perpetuate irrational hyper-competitiveness and a mentality that doesn’t know how to say ‘sorry’ or to ever concede truth or reason in the arguments of the other side.

We need a system that is uncontrollable and a people that are unmanageable, not because these people are rebels or partisans, but because they don’t believe out of faith or follow out of obedience, because they seek the source of the truth rather than what is simply socially ‘correct’ at the present moment. In order to defeat the cancerous growth and spread of despotism we need a system of contained chaos that is bounded by environmental limitations and not by arbitrary, artificial laws and dictates. In this quest one should always measure and determine action based upon the most likely subsequent consequence, what will really happen, not what you wish to happen. We have to think of each action as being an input into a larger environment because the connections between cause and effect are often unclear in complex networks such as those that characterize modern society. Achieving a desired situation is akin to building a desirable environment.

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Rising Stock: Investing in America's Future

February 2004

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Economies of Scale

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