Position of KKE on the Webb's platform and the developments in the CPUSA, Athens, 13 April 2011

To the members and cadre of the CPUSA,
To the workers that struggle in the USA
To the communist and workers parties

http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2011/2011-04-13-kke-to-cpusa

Dear comrades,

In February 2011 the chairperson of the CPUSA, Sam Webb, published an article in Political Affairs, the electronic publication of the CPUSA, entitled “A Party of Socialism in the 21st Century: What It Looks Like, What It Says, and What It Does”. Even if the specific article is accompanied by an editorial note which claims that “The following article represents the views of its author alone. It doesn't necessarily reflect the official views of any organization or collective.”, it is obvious to us that the public position of the head of a Communist Party concerning such an important issue requires special attention.

On the 16th of February we received a letter from the editorial team of Political Affairs which invited us to send in our opinion.

Our party, after studying this article and the reactions it has provoked within the ranks of communists both in the USA and internationally, considers it necessary to take a public position through this letter, as is required by its responsibility as a part of the international communist movement.

Our assessment is that we are dealing with a comprehensive liquidationist platform of 29 theses which has been placed before the international communist movement and proposes the total revision of the principles and revolutionary traditions of the communist movement.

The KKE, as a section of the international communist movement, considers as its duty the refutation of this platform, which questions the need for the existence of a party of the working class in the USA, and in general is directed against the revolutionary and anti-imperialist movement internationally. The 18th Congress of our party stressed that “The battle against social-democratisation tendencies in Communist Parties – through the intervention of imperialist mechanisms, anti-communism and the bourgeois media – must be fought firmly and consistently by defending the historic role of the working class and its organised vanguard, the principles of Marxism-Leninism and of socialism. This task takes on even greater significance in face of the growing anti-communist offensive in the EU and internationally.”

Dear comrades,

The platform that has been presented today, through the article of the chairperson of the CPUSA, constitutes the culmination of a course of “adjustment” in the last decade as the author himself points out. There have already been developments in this intervening period which communists in Greece, as well as in the USA and other countries have monitored with concern, such as:

* The handing over of the Party’s archives to the imperialists, the bourgeois state of the USA in 2007.
* The closure of the print publication of the newspaper (People’s Weekly World) and the journal Political Affairs, with the simultaneous alteration of its character.
* The organizational shrinkage and dislocation of the party.
* The political “tailing”, behind one of the two pillars of the bourgeois political system of the USA, that is to say behind the Democratic Party.
* The stance in relation to the ambitions of US imperialism ( e.g. rejection of the demand for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq)
* The blocking of the Joint Statement of the Emergency Meeting of the Communist and Workers’ Parties in Damascus, because in the final text there was the position for the withdrawal of the imperialist occupation forces from Iraq.
* These elements intensified after the 29th Congress of the CPUSA. It was not by chance that immediately after the congress, an article was published in Political Affairs which called into question not only the need to maintain the name of the party, but the possibility and even the necessity of a Communist Party’s existence in the USA today.

Today the Webb platform comes as the culmination of this course and openly propagandises the abandonment of the Marxist-Leninist worldview, the abolition of democratic centralism, and the undermining of the principles of the party of a new type.

We would like to draw your attention to the following basic aspects of this platform:

* ON THE QUESTION OF THE THEORY OF THE PARTY


It proposes the replacement of our theory by an eclectic hotchpotch which does not go beyond the limits of liberal bourgeois ideology. It attacks Marxism-Leninism directly, which constitutes one of the central laws of the existence and activity of the party of the new type, as V.I.Lenin pointed out “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement… role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.” In this specific platform various extremely old opportunist positions are promoted as new (e.g. Marxism-Leninism is foreign, anti-democratic, it is a distortion of Marxism by Stalin etc.), these are positions which disarm the labour movement and surrender it, without theoretical tools, to the claws of the exploitative system.

* ON THE QUESTION OF THE POLITICAL PROPOSAL OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY:


It promotes the view that there can be solutions in favour of the working class within the framework of capitalism. In this way, it promotes as an alternative solution the line of the so-called “green” capitalist restructurings. In addition, the Webb platform considers the characterisation of the crisis as a capitalist crisis of overproduction insufficient. It distorts the essence of the over-accumulation of capital as it associates it with…. A lack of investment opportunities. It states characteristically: “Short of a new New Green Deal on a global level, it is hard to see where the dynamism for a sustained upswing, let alone a long boom, is going to come from.”

These views recycle social-democratic and opportunist theories on economic recession and development which whitewash capitalism and conceal its class essence, leading the Communist Party to give up on its strategic goal and support political proposals, which have as their goal the acquisition of new super-profits by the capitalists, in the name of “ecology”, at the same time when they are turning nature and natural wealth into commodities, and destroying the planet in various ways.

* THE QUESTION OF THE SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE:


It renounces the struggle for socialism. The notion of revolution is entirely absent. It proposes an endless process of successive stages, in which the alliances will be formed not on the basis of the criterion of the era and the class interests of the working class. Webb proposes working for “- the balance of forces is to shift in a progressive direction”. This view condemns the party to submit itself to the temporary circumstances and not to work with a strategy for the overthrow of capitalism through the concentration of forces.

Nevertheless, it is obvious to us, that the tactics of a Communist Party must serve its strategy, which is the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a socialist-communist society. The position of Webb in practice abolishes the strategic goal of the Communist Party, and finally aims to shake the very character of the Communist Party. Socialism is in any case on the agenda, from the moment that we live in the era of imperialism, the highest and final stage of capitalism. The timeliness and necessity of socialism-communism is projected by the impasses of capitalism, the imperialist wars, the economic crises, the huge social, economic, environmental, ecological and other problems which capitalist society gives rise to. A Communist Party must form tactics and alliances which facilitate the concentration of forces, the class unity of the working class and the social alliance with the popular strata, with the aim of maturing the subjective factor for the acquisition of power by the working class, and not to be trapped in alliances and stages, which will lead it to struggle under a “foreign flag” in the logic of managing capitalism.

-ON THE QUESTION OF THE FORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

The Webb platform proposes moving beyond the Communist Parties. It says that “A party of socialism in the 21st century embraces Marxism, understood as a broad theoretical tradition that reaches beyond the communist movement.” A party that does not struggle for the interests of the working class but “fights for the interests of the entire nation.”

This position denies the necessity of the existence of the Communist Party in the USA and indeed in the entire world. The KKE successfully dealt with similar views, when they emerged in our party 20 years ago under the influence of “Gorbachevist” theories. The communists of Greece fought hard to repel these opportunist views, for the preservation of the KKE, for the preservation and strengthening of its revolutionary, class and internationalist character. Today, 20 years later, the communists not only in Greece but all over the world can judge the positive results that the outcome of this battle had for the KKE. The KKE was able to stand on its feet, to elaborate serious theoretical and political issues, without deviating from the principles of Marxism-Leninism. It approved its new programme and came to important conclusions concerning the causes of the overthrow of socialism, enriching its conception of socialism. It has taken significant initiatives for the unity of the communist movement at a regional and international level. It strengthened its bonds with the working class and the other popular strata. The influence of its positions and its prestige has been strengthened as it plays the leading role in the regrouping and development of the class-oriented labour-trade union movement and in the tough strike mobilizations of the workers in our country.

None of the above would have been achieved, if opportunism had prevailed 20 years ago in the KKE. The KKE would have gone down the road of dissolution and the labour-popular movement would have lost its basic pillar of support.

-ON IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

The Webb platform renounces the struggle against bourgeois ideology and opportunism. The party which Webb describes surrenders from the ideological struggle. He writes “A party of socialism in the 21st century doesn’t turn – liberals, advocates of identity politics, single issue movements, centrist and progressive leaders of major social organizations, social democrats, community based non-profits, NGOs, unreliable allies, and the “people” (according to some, a classless category concealing class, racial, and gender oppression) – into enemies.”

But can a Communist Party enlighten the working class, the other popular strata, if it does not have an ideological front against views which present capitalism as the only way, which simply promote different types of management of the exploitative system? The answer of the KKE to this is that it is impossible for the struggle of the people to develop without a firm and consistent ideological front against unscientific bourgeois and opportunist theories. This is especially true in today’s conditions, when the role of the various NGOs has become obvious, which are connected financially and in other ways with the imperialist organizations. In conditions when social-democracy has been in government and has demonstrated in practice that is a pillar of support for the bourgeois political system. In these conditions the communists not only must not give up on ideological work and struggle, but they must intensify the struggle even further against these forces.

-ORGANIZATIONAL OPPORTUNISM

Webb rejects the Leninist organization, the organization of the vanguard of the working class which corresponds to the needs of the class struggle for the abolition of exploitation. He rejects the Leninist organization because he rejects the struggle for socialism and has taken sides with the bourgeois class for the perpetuation of capitalism.

And so, a state machine which is both experienced and powerful will be opposed by a “party”, according to him, based on the Internet, with an open door policy for new members as an organizational principle: “Joining should be no more difficult than joining other social organizations”.

Thus we can see that not only does he reject the tried and tested organizational principles of the Communist Party of a new type, which were established in the era of Lenin, but he promotes the idea of a party of an NGO type, which corresponds to the content which he himself proposes and is in the direction of a “Communist Party” assimilated into the bourgeois system, which will work for the salvation and “correction” of capitalism and not for its overthrow.

-A PARTY OF REVOLUTION OR REFORM?

Reform is the answer given by Webb to this fundamental question, which was posed a hundred years ago. His view denies that the party is the vanguard of the working class and subordinates its activity to the lowest level of class consciousness (“A party of socialism in the 21st century takes as its point of departure the issues that masses (relative term) are ready to fight for”). Of course a reformist line is proposed as well as the prioritization of the intervention in the institutions of the bourgeois state. The struggle for reforms within imperialism is acclaimed not only as a “means” buts an end for this “new” party.

In reality, when has the path of reforming the capitalist system ever led to the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the vindication of the workers’ desires? The “recipe” of reforms has been tested by the peoples through various social-democratic and centre-left governments, which in practice have been proved to be the main vehicles for the imposition of anti-people and anti-worker measures, and as pillars of support for the imperialist organizations and wars.

-“MARXISM”…WITHOUT MARX

Webb calls the class nature of bourgeois democracy into question. As he writes: “What I’m challenging is the notion that everything is subordinate to class and class struggle no matter what the circumstances.” He questions the class nature of the bourgeois state, that is to say the dictatorship of the US monopolies and claims that “Thus the nature of the struggle isn’t simply the people against the state, but the people winning positions and influence in the state and then utilizing them to make changes (within and outside of the state)”.

This is an old opportunist position which Marx had already rejected in his era, and was revived by the bankrupt eurocommunist current. And this alone would be enough for us to come to the conclusion that the “Marxism”, which is mentioned as being the theoretical basis of the “party of the 21st century”, has nothing to do with Marx and his theoretical contribution but aims at its vulgar distortion, the burying of revolutionary theory, and the deception of the workers.

* ILLUSIONS CONCERNING THE ROLE OF THE US GOVERNMENT AND THE MONOPOLIES:


The Webb platform fosters illusions and works for the submission of the people to the government of the USA, that is to say the world’s leading imperialist power: “The point isn’t for the U.S. government to simply to crawl into a national shell, but to reinsert itself into world affairs on the basis of cooperation, peace, equality, and mutual benefits…”

At the same time he fosters illusions concerning a “ humanized” version of the monopolies: “big sections of the transnational corporate class have pulled the plug on the American people, economy, and state…the commitment of major sections of the transnational elite to a people-friendly public sector, a vibrant domestic economy and a modern society has waned…”

As the Chairperson of the CPUSA has given up on a class approach to society, the abovementioned positions are to be expected. These are positions which not only have nothing to do with the history and struggles of the party he represents, but they bear no relation to reality either. The continuing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the new imperialist war in Libya demonstrate what kind of activity the US government has developed outside its “national shell”. And it conducts similar anti-people activity for the defence of the interests of the monopolies inside its own country.

* ESCALATING THE LINE OF “TAILING” CAPITAL AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.


The strengthening of political reaction which is intrinsic to imperialism and is intensifying in the conditions of crisis is interpreted as “ultra-right extremism”. This leads to conclusions which violate the truth and reality, such as “we say too definitively that the independent forces stand no chance whatsoever of taking over the Democratic Party. That still may be the case, but it is a mistake to rule it out completely at this point.” The equation of the working class and its movement with the trade union bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO is consistent with the political line of alliance with sections of capital.

* TURNING TO ANTICOMMUNISM


Webb’s article marks an overt siding with the class enemy and a complete alignment with contemporary state-level anticommunism. It calls for “an unequivocal break with Stalin” and lines up with the slanderous assault on socialist construction which offered so much to the Soviet peoples and played the decisive role in the anti-fascist victory of the peoples. In essence, these positions attempt to conceal the reality, the complex problems of the class struggle in the USSR and the tough confrontation of working class power with the bourgeois class in the countryside, the kulaks.

It adopts, in essence, every kind of slanderous simplification of complex problems, such as the sharpening of the class struggle in the USSR. The article goes a step further and joins up with Havel, Walesa and all the reactionary anticommunists of the EU who talk of “crimes against humanity”. It lines up with the tendency that attempts to criminalise the Communist Parties and the defence of socialism: “τo describe these atrocities as a mistake is a mistake – criminal”.

As is well known the opportunist current in Europe that forms the so called Party of the European Left (ELP) holds a similar anti-historical position.

Dear comrades of the CPUSA,

Members, friends and cadre of the CPUSA,

Conscious Workers of the US,

At this very critical moment for your party the KKE calls on you to take into account that the ideological attack against the Party of a New Type focusing on its identity, its character and its organisational principles was unleashed from the very first moment of its existence. The revisionists have always supported the dissolution of the party of the working class; they have always been a pillar of support for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois class and its supporters understood from the very first moment the role of the party in the political emancipation of the working class and its movement. The ideological attack which was unleashed continues up to the present day as is demonstrated by Webb’s article.

We call on you to take into account the fact that the party can only fulfil the role of the proletarian vanguard on the condition that it is equipped with unity of will, unity of action, and unity of strict discipline. Its internationalist character stems from its nature; it constitutes an integral part of the world communist movement.

Experience confirms and practice which is the yardstick of truth proves that the revolutionary line of struggle not only does not restrict mass work but it reinforces it. It strengthens the expectations of the working people, it provides a way-out and a perspective, it contributes to the change of the correlation of forces. The independent action of the party is a prerequisite for the formation of a policy of alliances that will be subordinated to and serve the strategy for the overthrow of capitalism.

In addition, we consider it necessary to take into account that the necessity of the socialist revolution and the construction of the new communist socio-economic formation is not determined by the correlation of forces, which is shaped at the various historical junctures, but by the historical need to resolve the basic contradiction between capital and labour. The counterrevolutions in the USSR and the other socialist countries have not altered the character of our era which is an era of transition from capitalism to socialism which is timely and necessary as shown by the tragedy of the millions of workers and unemployed who suffer from exploitation and the intensification of the problems that the exploitative system causes.

We believe that the replacement of the principles of Marxism Leninism by revisionist approaches in the name of national peculiarities caused a great deal of damage to the communist movement and continues to do so. No national peculiarity can negate the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the necessity for the conquest of political power by the working class, for the socialisation of production and central planning. The economic crisis that broke out in the capitalist world and the intensification of the inter-imperialist contradictions further highlight the timeliness of socialism. Under these conditions the driving back of the new wave of state anticommunism, the defence of the socialism we knew, of its great contribution to the world working class, of the identity and the revolutionary traditions of the communist movement acquire a special importance.

Dear comrades,

Historical experience, the developments themselves have refuted the views that spoke of “the end of history”, the “obsolescence of Marxism-Leninism” and the “end of the Communist Parties”. On the contrary, today there is a stronger need for the existence of Communist Parties that have roots in the working class and the workplaces, which believe in Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. The labour movement must consciously act and rise to the challenge to ensure the existence of a revolutionary party of the working class. This is a crucial duty and a challenge for the most advanced workers and for communists in all the countries of the world and of course above all in the USA.

The consistent confrontation with and rejection of this opportunist-liquidationist platform is a requirement which springs from the historical traditions the labour and communist movement in the USA, it is a condition for the revival of revolutionary communist ideals in the US labour movement and society.

The International Relations Section of the CC of KKE

The Diva's Camp: The Appeal of Hillary Clinton, By: Shaun Jacob Halper, Huffington, Re-Posted from: April 8, 2008

The Diva's Camp: The Appeal of Hillary Clinton


Hillary Clinton is possessed by the spirit of Joan Crawford. Like that notorious über-bitch immortalized by Faye Dunaway in the camp classic Mommie Dearest, Hillary bulldozed into a Democratic primary dominated by men and brazenly declared, as any self-respecting diva would: Don't fuck with me fellas! This ain't my first time at the rodeo!

Hillary Dearest doesn't take no for an answer. Melodramatic and megalomaniacal, Hillary, like Joan, is an aging super star whose career is on the wane, but she refuses to exit the stage. I'm not going anywhere, she dishes out defiantly! Like Joan, Hillary will embrace any identity and any performance even if it requires sacrificing her own children (her party) at the altar of winning. And God help anyone who gets in her way: Christina, bring me the ax!

Barack-olytes cannot wrap their minds around HillDiva, who seems more like HillDemon to them. Why, they grumble, hasn't she -- that train wreck with eyebrows -- self-destructed yet? How does an unlikable, shrill, mendacious, and bloodthirsty monster manage to challenge the dignified, mild-mannered, and pure-intentioned Holiest of Demorcratic Holies? How can that woman, who represents nothing and who will say and do anything to win, hold a candle to Him who represents everything? Yes, we can, they marvel, but how can she? When, Andrew Sullivan pleads, will this horror film end?

In fact, however, Hillary is no monster. Sullivan and the Barack-olytes don't get Hillary because they don't get the aesthetic genre she is working in. Hillary Dearest is no horror show -- she is a camp phenomenon and fast on her way to becoming one of this century's greatest camp heroines. Hillary's camp should be taken seriously; it offers a critical alternative to Obama's Romanticism. And many Americans just cannot get enough of her.

Whether as Madame President or Vice President or just former First Lady, HillDiva will enter the Pantheon of Prima Donnas alongside the great gay-male camp icons of yore: Judy Garland, Mae West, the Divine Miss M, Madonna, Cher, Liza, the Joans (Crawford, Collins, and Rivers), Liz, Diana, Tina, Mariah, Beyonce.

Like all of these queen bees before her, HillDiva is continually reinventing herself. With each new hairstyle and each new outfit; with each new rhetorical strategy and each new scandal, we meet a different kind of Hillary. We have comeback Hillary, forgiving Hillary; victimized Hillary; lying Hillary; bellicose Balboa Hillary; Northern Ireland peace-brokering Hillary; vetted Hillary; sarcastic Hillary; survivor Hillary; tearful Hillary; experienced Hillary; Jesus-loving Hillary; vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary; sleep-deprived Hillary; 3am Hillary; feminist Hillary; cackling Hillary; patriotic Hillary; high-road Hillary; kick-him-while-he's-down (or "He wouldn't have been my pastor") Hillary; "Not some little woman standing by my man" Hillary; Bill's Hillary; Chelsea's Hillary; Obama-loving Hillary; "Not as Far as I know" Hillary; "I'm human" Hillary; McCain-loving Hillary; the Hillary I know.

From her burlesque biography to her faux-marriage; from her stylized overemotionality to her pseudo-drag admixture of male and female traits and gestures; from her synthetic stump speeches to her outrageous pronouncements and staged lies; and from her international acclaim to her most recently discovered wealth, Hillary, whether intentionally or not, embraces melodramatic excess at every turn.

Hillary, like camp, always comes back for an encore.

To be sure, Barack-olytes find camp unsettling and it is not difficult to see why. If the appeal of Hillary is the appeal of camp, then surely the appeal of Obama is that of Romanticism. The world according to the gospel of Obama is a world of drama (not melodrama), of spiritualism, of authenticity, of beliefs, of more perfect unions, of the national community, of teleology, and of the serious power of words. For Barack-olytes, the melodrama of camp reeks of heresy and antinomianism. In the context of messianic expectation, there is not much room for laughter.

But camp is (by definition) not purely a laughing matter and Hillary's performances are not just some theatrical joke. Camp loves the artificial, the spectacle, and the ridiculous because it refuses to maintain the illusions of political rhetoric. Camp exposes the masquerade of political theater by flaunting the grandiose pose and the ironic overstatement.

Camp celebrates theatricality because through its showboating excess camp reveals that our dominant cultural narratives -- whether on gender or sexuality; nationalism or politics; religion or society -- are artificial constructions. Through its ridiculous staging and dishonest spectacle, camp undermines the false illusion (upon which political rhetoric depends) that expression is a straightforward vessel which conveys intention. Camp reminds us through its conspicuous duplicity that there is a large gap between feelings and words and that all political rhetoric is just that -- rhetoric.

HillDiva's camp, which is monstrous to some, is a source of comforting laughter for others. When we laugh at her ridiculous and self-destructive performance, we recall that politics is artifice. In a political climate dominated by the audacity of hope, Hillary's camp is refreshing and instructive. Hillary offers no prophetic returns to a pre-Nixonian or pre-Watergate cultural faith in politicians and politics. Hillary will not usher in the End of Days.

Ironically, it is Barack Obama, the harbinger of change, who disseminates a political aesthetic that relishes in the uncritical mythologies of national community and national destiny. Hillary, the so-called establishment candidate, challenges us to remain critical of our political leaders and institutions.

Camp is the lie that tells the truth and Hillary, as a camp heroine, is the liar who breathes veritas.

besieged tegucigalpa one day after the 4th of July, a poem by andrew taylor, who is a son of The Americas

where o where
is the brave
the new United
states of the americas?

Sing the evening birds
in Tegucigalpa

cry the workers
of Honduras

shout the women militants

say the officious apprentices and clerks

whisper the old men in corners...

thousands, thousands
marched to greet
the one
they’d elected
people’s president
Zelaya !Zelaya !
Viva Zelaya ! !

thousands, thousands
marched towards Toncontin airport
with a gallant desire

but
cut down
by
the
passionless bullets
triggered by experts,

became blood-baptized fountains,
became the holy martyr-comrades
for the redemption of new Honduras

Zelaya !Zelaya !
Viva Zelaya ! !

O where o where
Is the audacious new brave
president of the United
states of Hope
of Change !?

(hear the world, hear history, it is shouting out...)

and
floating above besieged tegucigalpa

so also sing
the new white robed martyrs
the ecstatic, unconsoled angels
of beseiged tegucigalpa

recently shot dead
hit in the head
by gangster Junta gunfire
from inside the airport
as the people rocked a security fence

the report says
where hope is dying
in tegucigalpa

Malaysian socialists: `Unite to turn workers’ frustration into a political struggle for socialism’

By M. Saraswathy

[M. Saraswathy is deputy chairperson of the Socialist Party of Malaysia. She was a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance, and held in Sydney, Australia, April 10-12, 2009. Below is M. Saraswathy's speech to the final session of the conference: ``World at a Crossroads -- Fighting for our future''.]

Cuba si! Yankee no! Uh! Ah! Chavez no se va!

Red salute from Malaysia to all friends and comrades!

The Socialist Party of Malaysia thanks the Democratic Socialist Persective, Socialist Alliance and Resistance for inviting us to this valuable World at a Crossroads conference.

One of the most widely known truths today is that capitalism is in deep crisis of its own making . The endless search for greater and greater profits with complete disregard for people and the planet has inevitably resulted in crises which capitalism itself cannot solve.

The clock cannot be turned back on global warming, which has resulted in major changes to temperature and natural phenomena, and which poses a serious threat to future life on Earth.

Capitalism has also created a crisis of resources. The resources of the world are being exhausted and depleted by unplanned production and wasteful exploitation. Peak oil production has been reached and we face the prospect of a world that is short of energy resources.

Currently we are all in the midst of a worldwide economic recession that is entirely created by the capitalist system. Thanks to global capitalism no country in the world is spared. Workers are losing jobs in millions; there is widespread homelessness and misery. The recession has created and is going to create massive poverty. World poverty figures are going to skyrocket.

Of course, the capitalist-run media mourns not the huge suffering of the people but the bankruptcy of financial institutions, the drop in the billions owned by the billionaires, and the billions being pumped in by capitalist governments to save the capitalist system.

The constant warning is that this is going to be the worst economic crisis in 80 years, and even worse than the depression of the 1930s. For us socialists this means a long period of suffering and deprivation for the people, brought about by the ruthless profits-first and greed-driven system.

Hope

But this very bleak period also is a period of great hope, having created the objective conditions necessary for ending capitalism .Widespread unemployment and poverty also means widespread disenchantment and anger. We have the opportunity to create awareness among workers by exposing the capitalist system as a system that rides on the super-exploitation and repression of workers. We have the opportunity now to create awareness about the socialist system. We have the opportunity to empower workers. I think we are all agreed that the objective conditions are ready for a change. But are we ready to use this opportunity to fight for a socialist future?

I would like to propose some actions we should take in order to be able to respond to the crisis of capitalism.

1. Sink our differences

One of the biggest obstacles in the way to a concerted fight against capitalism is factionalism among the left. Many groups seem to be more concerned about the correctness of their ideology and position rather the onslaught of capitalism and how the left will need a joint response to it. There is a need to unite on our similarities as socialists, oppressed by an inhuman system in which the majority remains oppressed, and commit ourselves to struggle for socialism with the working class. There is a need for continuous dialogue over our differences as we work together. There is an urgent need for us to think of the challenges and kind of socialism in the 21st century and how to arrive at it. And to realise that capitalism is still strong and will come back after the recession only because the socialists wasted their opportunity. Human history and the working class will never forgive us if we continue divide ourselves!

2. Venezuela and Latin America

We need to look at Venezuela and Latin America. Non-socialists are achieving what socialists have failed to achieve in decades. Socialism is being introduced in ways never imagined before. What lessons can we learn from Latin America which we can apply in the struggle in our own countries?

3. We have to work

We have to go the ground level and agitate, as Che said. Engage with the working class in struggle, empower them. Gain the democratic space to enhance our struggles. We have to write pamphlets for workers to understand and discuss – to create awareness and urge them into action. We have to harness the anger and frustration of the workers and make people aware that humankind is not doomed to suffer under the capitalism system forever. Socialism doesn't drop from the sky!

As Rosa Luxemburg said, the choice facing humankind is socialism or barbarism. There will be great anger and dissatisfaction with the existing economic system. Our role is to turn this frustration into a political struggle for a socialist society.

Long live socialism!

Working class of the world unite !

Hidup perjuangan! Hidup sosialisma!

Barack Obama: Taking up where Teddy Roosevelt left off?

http://theragblog. blogspot. com/2009/ 04/steve- weissman- obamas-big- stick.html


By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2009

In less than hundred days in office, President Barack Obama has already demonstrated his desire to speak softly to all comers, friend or foe, while his proposed military budget shows a determination to carry America’s big stick into far-off trouble spots that most of us don’t know how to spell.


“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed just over a hundred years ago. Unabashedly committed to make America an imperial power, the energetic Roosevelt looked to a strong Navy to enforce the Monroe’s Doctrine’s hold over Latin America and to project the country’s growing power into the far corners of the world.

In less than hundred days in office, President Barack Obama has already demonstrated his desire to speak softly to all comers, friend or foe, while his proposed military budget shows a determination to carry America’s big stick into far-off trouble spots that most of us don’t know how to spell. The budget numbers and choice of weapon systems tell the story. Obama turns out be far more globally ambitious than either his supporters or detractors expected, and far more eager for Washington to remain the world’s policeman, ready, willing, and able to intervene militarily in what the Pentagon calls counter-insurgency and Teddy Roosevelt would have called colonial wars.

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, the Pentagon would retain a hedge against other risks, but the primary goal was to prepare to “fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years to come.”

Up to now, the raw numbers have drawn the most attention, much of it scurrilous or silly. Republican hawks condemn Obama for “gutting the military budget.” Anti-war bloggers defend him for proposing the most military spending in years, an estimated $534 billion or some 4% higher than George W. Bush’s last budget. And, it takes the right-wing libertarians at the Cato Institute to point out that the total military spending – including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other incidentals – amounts to more than $750 billion. According to CATO researcher Benjamin H. Friedman, “That is more than six times what China spends, 10 times what Russia spends and 70 times what Iran, North Korea and Syria spend combined.”

Obama’s choice of which arms to keep – and which to cut – further highlights his global ambitions. He has forced the Pentagon to cut down on overly exquisite and under-performing weapons systems, especially those intended primarily to combat technologically sophisticated opponents, such as Russia and China. The cuts would halt or scale back the F-22 fighter jet, the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic that the Kremlin opposes, non-workable armored vehicles for the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a new communication satellite, the C-17 transport plane, a new generation of stealth destroyers, and new helicopters to rescue downed pilots and for President Obama himself.

In place of these, Obama is boosting proposed expenditures for more boots on the ground and more plentiful, more modular, lower-tech, and somewhat lower-cost arms that make military intervention in colonial wars faster, cheaper, and – he hopes – more effective. Among the keepers:


* Littoral Combat Ships – smaller, high-speed, multi-purpose surface vessels that can operate in shallow water close to shore. The Pentagon will use them to move troops and equipment onto a beach, support Special Forces in commando raids, collect intelligence, perform surveillance and reconnaissance, sweep mines, hunt submarines, and fight pirates.
* F-35 joint-strike fighter planes – high-speed, multi-purpose single-engine jet fighters optimized for air-to-ground rather than air-to-air combat. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will use as many as 2,443 F-35’s to provide close air support, tactical bombing, and air defense. Allied nations will also use them.
* Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – remotely piloted drones to fly over targeted areas to collect intelligence and fire rockets. The Pentagon and CIA are already using them in Afghanistan and Pakistan, often killing civilians and provoking a militant reaction.


These are the weapons systems Obama wants to help Washington police the world. Whether he gets them, and whether he gets rid of those arms that do little to serve that task, remain to be seen. Each of the wasteful weapons systems has a powerful constituency, including the companies that make them, all the sub-contractors, the unions, the communities in which all of the work is done, and the senators and representatives who feed at the military trough. But, win or lose, Obama’s first military budget reveals his global goals and the technocratic rationality with which he is pursuing them. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.

[Steve Weissman is a contributor to The Rag Blog. A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.]

"Raisin in the Sun", poem by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?


Or fester like a sore--
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

A Good-bye Kiss to the Blockade?

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/
A Good-bye Kiss to the Blockade?

By Manuel E. Yepe

Original source: CubaNews

“The embargo on Cuba has been in place for almost 50 years. Although it may have been an appropriate policy response to the Cuban Revolution in the milieu of the Cold War, the reality of the 21st century calls for its abolishment.”

That assertion is made in article by Colonel Glenn Alex Crowther entitled “Kiss the Embargo Goodbye,” published in the [February 2009] monthly newsletter of the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the US Army War College, a branch of the US government’s Defense Department.

“It is time to kiss the embargo goodbye, while maintaining an unyielding stance that democracy is the only acceptable form of government in the Western Hemisphere,” the article states, thereby reasserting a supposed US right, recognized by no one else, to determine what form of government its neighbors should have.

According to Colonel Crowther’s interpretation of the history of Cuba: “On January 1, 1959, in the wake of several notable victories by insurgents, the dictator Batista fled Cuba for exile. His government, isolated from both the Cuban people and the US Government because of its repressive policies, collapsed. Fidel arrived in Havana on January 9, 1959. He and his comrades took power in the face of a total government vacuum.”

Crowther states that “the United States initially responded in a conciliatory manner; however, mutual antipathy prevented rapprochement. The United States responded with support for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Cuba then allowed the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. Fidel also initiated a policy of exporting revolution to the rest of the Western Hemisphere and a few countries in Africa. His Argentine lieutenant, Ernest ‘Che’ Guevara, promised ‘one, two, one hundred [sic] Vietnams.’”

Later, according to Crowther, the triumph of the Sandinistas against the dictator Somoza was the only confirmation of the Cuban theory of guerrilla foco, which, nonetheless failed in Nicaragua because the US intervened to defeat the revolutionaries, and it continued to intervene throughout Latin America against all “fidelista-inspired revolutions.”

In this context, “it was not surprising that the United States sought to punish the Cuban regime. Among other responses, the United States declared a commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba on February 7, 1962.” The immediate justification “was the expropriation of properties owned by US corporations and citizens; however the long-term goal was to destabilize Cuba and hopefully cause regime change.”

The author asserts that because of the support that the Soviet Union gave to Cuba, the blockade could not overthrow the revolution, but it did succeed in doing great damage to the Cubans and preventing them from providing “even more support to world-wide revolutions.” During the Cold War, one of the tactics used by the United States to wear down the USSR was to force it to provide aid to Cuba, and that motive for the embargo has lessened with the end of the Cold War.

In Crowther’s opinion, “the only reasons for supporting the embargo” are: (1) to force Cuba to reform and (2) to accede to the demands of the Cuban community in Miami. They were the ones who argued in favor of the 1992 Torricelli Law (the Cuban Democracy Act) and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act (Cuban Liberty and Democracy Solidarity Act), aimed at bolstering the blockade.

The first reason, the need to keep up the pressure to force Cuba to reform, has “manifestly failed,” writes Crowther. “Not only did the embargo fail,” the article states, “but it is not in step with our policy towards other communist regimes who were our opponents during the Cold War,” citing the examples of China, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The second reason, the desire of Miami Cubans to maintain the embargo, “has slowly gone the way of the Cold War,” Crowther writes, and notes that the positions of the Cuban diaspora regarding ties with their country of origin have become more variegated.

He adds, as if this were a great discovery, that the blockade increases the Cuban people’s mobilization against US intervention in their internal affairs, although he justifies this with the old lies that portray the Cuban defensive actions as the “tyranny” of “the Castro regime.”

Lifting the blockade, he states, would project the US before the international community as “magnanimous and inclusive. Maintaining it makes us look petty and vindictive to the rest of the world.”

The article’s author, a Research Professor of National Security Studies at the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, argues that “we cannot convince anyone that Cuba is a threat to the United States, nor can we make the case internationally that more of the same will have a positive impact. Lifting the blockade would signal that we are ready to try something different” to achieve change.

Crowther assumes that as soon as the blockade is lifted the market for US goods and services will open up, and he dreams of a bourgeoisified and consumerist society that will covet US appliances and gadgets when the blockade ends, as happened “in Iraq in 2003.”

It is outrageous that there are those who call for lifting the blockade, not because for a half century it has been an unjustifiable crime committed against the Cuban people, but rather because it has been ineffective in achieving the foul aims that gave rise to it.

--A CubaNews translation by Will Reissner. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

A partial Biog of Works in Soviet Studies

J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning editors, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 1993. [Getty & Manning]


David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia, Metropolitan Books, 1997 [King].
Some excellent photos of N.I. Ezhov, as well as the Greatest Genius of All Times and Peoples, and the "enemies of the people" they eliminated together.

V.A. Kovalev, Dva Stalinskix Narkoma ("Two Stalinist Commissars"), Izdatel'skaya Gruppa "Progress," Moscow, 1995. [Kovalev]
A dual biography of OGPU-NKVD chiefs Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda (1934-36) and N.I. Ezhov (1936-38)

Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Revised and expanded edition edited and translated by George Shriver), Columbia University Press, New York, 1989; pp. 358-361. [Medvedev]


Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin; 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror; Mehring Books Inc., 25900 Greenfield Road, Oak Park MI 48237; 1998. [Rogovin]
(A Trotskyite, Rogovin takes the unusual view that there really was an effective Trotskyite opposition in 1936-38, and that, by Stalinist standards, the 1936-38 purge was needed to maintain Stalinist control.)

Arkadij Vaksberg, Carica Dokazatel'stv: Vyshinskij i ego Zhertvy, AO«Kniga i Biznes», Moskva, 1992; paper, 350 pp plus 16 pp. of photos.

which is also available in English translation:
Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin's Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky (translated by Jan Butler), Grove Weidenfield, New York, 1991.

Against the British Plan to Divide Palestine By William Gallacher, M.P., The Communist International Vol. XIV, November 1937, pages 804-807

The question of Palestine has been raised in a new and acute form. The Royal
Commission proposes to divide this small country into three separate parts and
by this means not only to prevent the people of Palestine from realizing
national independence, but also to keep open and intensify the enmity and hatred
between Arab and Jew that have been so sedulously fostered by British
imperialism.

In the discussion of the report of the Royal Commission which took place in the
British House of Commons, there were many different interpretations given of
what Sir Henry McMahon promised the Sherif Hussein of Mecca in 1915, or of what
he meant when he said that Great Britain will, "acknowledge the independence of
Arab countries, in every sense of the word -- independence.."

There were also similar attempts to water down what was done by "Lawrence of
Arabia" just as there were numerous interpretations of what Balfour said, or
what Balfour meant, in his declaration on a National Scheme for the Jews in
November 1917. But however much speculation there may be on such matters as
these, they all appear to be beside the point.

Whatever British diplomats or politicians may have promised to one side or the
other, noting can alter the facts that the Arabs of Palestine have and must
secure the right to own their land, to develop their own form of government and
to determine the course of their own lives in cooperation with their Arab or
non-Arab neighbors.

For centuries Arabs and Jews have lived in close association, in peace and
amity. There is no reason why it should not continue to be so. When during
the Middle Ages, Jews were suffering the most unspeakable persecutions
throughout the rest of Europe, in Spain under the Moorish occupation they made a
mighty contribution to the advance of civilization.

Today when in a number of countries, the terror against the Jews has reached a
level never known before, the Jews in Palestine have an opportunity, as loyal
members of an Arab state, of contributing their share to a new advance in that
country, and by this mans to assist in winning the people of other lands for
support of the campaign to end Jewish persecution in Europe.

This means finishing forever with the reactionary policy of Zionism. For
Zionism, in so far as the solution of the "Jewish problem" is concerned, has
always been nothing but a harmful reactionary illusion. In actual fact it has
represented and carried through an invasion of Palestine, not in the interest of
the Jews, but of British imperialism.

The Arabs, I am certain, would never have objected to a moderate immigration of
European Jews. The more far-seeing would have welcomed them, realizing the
valuable part they could play in helping forward the development of the country.

But this immigration could only usefully take place on the basis of the full
recognition of Palestine as an Arab state. Therefore, from the earliest stages
of the immigration the Jews ought to have worked with the Arabs for the ending
of the British mandate and for the setting up of an independent legislative
assembly. Instead of following this, the only wise course, the Jews of
Palestine endeavored, under the incitement of the Zionists, to carry through an
occupation of Palestine at the expense of the Arabian people.

What other result could have been expected other than the tragic events recorded
in recent history? No people, unless they were utterly lost and decadent,
would submit without a struggle to the loss of their homeland and to the
wholesale buying up of their land, which threatened to deprive them of their
living and turn them into homeless wanderers. Certainly the Arabs were not
prepared to tolerate it and time and again they demonstrated their hatred
against the administration that was primarily responsible for their bitter
wrongs.

In the report of the Royal Commission we read:

"It has been pointed out that the outbreak of 1933 was not only, or even mainly,
an attack on the Jews, but an attack on the Palestine government. In 1936,
this was still clearer. Jewish lives were taken and Jewish property destroyed,
but the outbreak was chiefly and directly aimed at the government. The word
'disturbance' gives a misleading impression of what happened. It was open
rebellion of the Palestine Arabs assisted by fellow Arabs for other countries
against British mandate rule."

Despicable propaganda has been used in Britain and elsewhere in an effort to
discredit the heroic struggle of the Arab people. Arab men and women valiantly
placed their lives and liberty in jeopardy because they were fighting in a cause
that was just, the cause of national liberation. Yet we were told that it was
all the outcome of "foreign incitement" or that it was the "fanatical" Mufti and
his immediate associates amongst the big Effendi who were using the Arabian
people for some sinister end of their own.. But it does not require "foreign
incitement," or Muftis, to arouse a people threatened as the Arabs were. They
were left no other course but the path of revolt, and all who believe in
freedom, in the right of peoples to self-determination should have been
wholeheartedly with them in their fight.

With great courage they have asserted their right to Palestine and demonstrated
their determination to carry on till this right is recognized and established.
So now, the British imperialists, faced with the impossibility of continuing
with the mandate, make a new and almost unbelievable maneuver in order to retain
their power over this important center in the Near East. In several
discussions in the House of Commons emphasis has been laid on the vital position
of Palestine arising out of the new international situation in the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea. With quite cynical disregard of the Arab people, Mr. Amery,
the diehard imperialist and Conservative leader, told the House of Commons that
in the new situation that had developed, "Palestine was the 'Clapham Junction'
of the air" and must be retained at all costs by the British Empire. (Clapham
Junction is a well-known center in London from which roads and transport branch
out to all parts of
London. -- note by William Gallacher)

The Mandate, the regime that existed hitherto, having failed, it is with this
end in view that partition is now proposed. Whatever is offered to the Arabs
or the Jews, the real power, the real control, remains with the British
imperialists.

But the Arab people will no more submit to partition than to the Mandate. They
will carry on the struggle against the proposed "rape of Palestine" and for full
self-government over the whole of the country. Already much of the best land
has been taken from the Arab peasants and now it is proposed that 225,000 Arabs
on the Jewish side of the "partition" are to be transferred. What a blessed
word -- "transferred." Driven off the land they have owned and cultivated for
generations, they will be "replanted" somewhere, maybe to starve and die.
"Transferred" and "replanted." How is it possible that such barbaric treatment
of a great people (however simple their economy may be) can be contemplated?

At the dawn of capitalism in Great Britain, year after year thousands of men,
women and children were driven off the land, forced to cross the sea to the new
land of the West, never any more to see or cultivate the land they loved so
dearly.

Is this picture to be repeated in Palestine?

Can the people of Britain tolerate such a terrible injustice, which can only be
perpetrated by the prodigal use of armed might? For certainly the Arab people
will never tolerate it. They will fight with every means against this robbery,
against the attempted "rape" of their land, against the attempt to turn it into
a "Clapham Junction of the air" for British imperialism -- and they will be
right to fight.

But what of the Jews throughout the world? What have they to say to this
criminal attempt forcibly to tear a country to pieces and drive its peoples off
the land? Are they still under any illusions about the politics of Zionism or
are they beginning to understand that the reactionary leaders of this movement
are actually betraying the Jewish people?

My own Jewish comrades have always been clear on the reactionary role of
Zionism, but thousands of splendid young Jewish men and women have come under
the influence of the Zionist leaders and have been led to believe that Zionism
was the way of release from the persecutions that have made life a continuous
hell of torture for so many Jews.

But when the Zionists lead them into the camp of British imperialism, when they
identify their interests in Palestine with the interests of Britain and against
the Arab people, then the question arises: Is this policy calculated to bring
relief to the Jewish people who are enduring so much in Germany and Poland?
Will it make their lot easier or more difficult? Obviously the latter will be
the case.

Have the young men and women in the Zionist movement ever discussed the meaning
of the project that Palestine should be given to the Jews and should become "a
dominion of the British Empire"? Ivor Montagu, one of our very best Jewish
comrades, effectively exposes and disposes of the Zionist Congress in the Daily
Worker of August 14. Here is what he says:

"The Zionist Congress in Zurich must make all Jews, proud of their people, blush
with shame.

"They will assert their rights to Palestine. They will obtain their rights.
From whom? The British government.

"The British government, to whom Palestine does not belong, is called on to keep
its promise, which it had no right to make, by forcing the inhabitants, to whom
the country does belong, to give it to the Zionists.

"The Zionists are modern; go-ahead, destiny is on their side; Arabs are
backward, lazy, barbaric, and will be benefited by the invaders. The Zionists
claiming Palestine speak with the accents of Mussolini claiming and empire, or
Hitler, or Japan in China. . . .

""Realists among the Zionists are aware, and say frankly, that their one card is
to play good little combination excuse-policeman for the British Empire. They
are not realist enough to reflect on what happened to the Assyrian, who did the
same thing, when the British Empire had no more use for him.

"Jews who were not Jewish Nazis would know their only 'right' in Palestine is
such that they can negotiate with liberated Arabs and share in equal and
non-exclusive citizenship there with all inhabitants, not discriminating."

Ivor Montagu is right. The only "right" of the Jews in Palestine is to
cooperate with the Arabs in the building up of a prosperous Arab state. If
only they will understand this and act accordingly how much better it will be,
not only for them, but for the Jewish population throughout the world.

For all of us must participate in the struggle to secure for Jewish men and
women in the land of their birth or adoption equal rights to citizenship as any
other citizens. This must apply in Germany, in Poland and in all other
countries. Only in the land of triumphant socialism, the U.S.S.R, has an end
been put both to all kinds of national oppression and to anti-Semitism. The
U.S.S.R. represents a real fraternal alliance of the peoples. The Jews
throughout the world have made a civilization of which they can be rightly
proud. Cooperation of the Gentiles with the Jews must take the place of the
criminal anti-Semitism that is being so vigorously fostered in certain European
countries at the present time.

But the struggle to establish the rights of the Jews in Germany, Poland and
elsewhere cannot be aided if the Jews allow themselves to be used by the British
imperialists for the purpose of depriving the Arabs of their rights. On the
contrary the greatest possible injury will thereby be inflicted on the Jewish
cause.

Therefore, I appeal to all Jewish men and women, as one long associated with
them in the fight against persecutions and slander, to give no support to the
attempt that is being made to carve up Palestine. Palestine is the country of
the Arabs. An independent Arab state guaranteeing full and equal citizenship
to Jewish men and women will do a thousand times more for the Jews throughout
the world than any alliance with British imperialism can ever do.

In unity with the Arabs, establishing a strong democratic legislative assembly,
building up the economic life of the country, and in this the Jews can give an
extraordinary contribution, developing its culture and general well-being -- in
this way Palestine can become a prosperous and happy country and the unity
established there can be the forerunner of a greater unity throughout the world.

No partition of Palestine, but Palestine as an independent Arab state, for this
all honest Jews and all lovers of freedom, man and woman, must fight.

the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said it will terminate its secret prison network and “decommission” all of its overseas prison sites

CIA terminates secret prisons but rejects prosecutions
April 12, 2009
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

In a statement issued on Thursday morning, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said it will terminate its secret prison network and would “decommission” all of its overseas prison sites. The news was undoubtedly welcomed by many intelligence professionals who took issue with the use of techniques that President Barack Obama has described as “torture [that] betrayed American values, alienated allies and became a recruiting tool for al Qaeda”. Speaking to The New York Times, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program, Joanne Mariner, said the news was “incredibly heartening and important”. But she called for initiating criminal investigations against those at the CIA who implemented the institutionalization of torture. This is highly unlikely, however. In an email to CIA staff, the Agency’s new Director, Leon E. Panetta, repeated last week the standard CIA position that those responsible for implementing and carrying out torture during the Bush Administration “should not be investigated, let alone punished”. IntelNews has been reporting since January 15, 2009, that the Obama administration has no intention to punish CIA officers involved in torturing terrorism detainees, some of whom have been found to have committed murder.

Speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Panetta said last February that CIA officers “ought not to be prosecuted or investigated if they acted pursuant to the law as presented by the attorney general” at the time. That this interpretation is shared by the President was publicly confirmed by no other than departing CIA Director, Michael V. Hayden. Speaking to journalists about his then-imminent departure from the Agency, Hayden made sure to let them know that Mr. Obama privately assured him “he has no plans to launch a legal inquiry” into the CIA’s use of torture in the “war on terrorism”.

Behind Israel’s Attack on Gaza. By Joseph Fitsanakis

By Joseph Fitsanakis | intelNews | 12.29.2008

IN CONTRAST TO THE VAGUE international protestations by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about Israel’s “right to self-defense”, the domestic Israeli press has been extremely candid about the reasons behind Israel’s ongoing attack on the Gazan population. On Sunday, the country’s most respected newspaper, Ha’aretz, published a detailed account of what it described as the Israeli government’s “[l]ong-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public” which lie behind the latest onslaught against the imprisoned Palestinian population.

The paper correctly dismisses the official Israeli propaganda that puts the blame on militant Palestinian group Hamas for the end of the June 2008 truce. Instead, it points to the well-known illegal incursion into Gaza by a sizeable Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) team, which unilaterally broke the truce on November 4, reportedly to take out a “strip tunnel intended for terror attack”. No proof was ever offered for this allegation, either domestically or internationally. The Israeli press has long recognized that it was after this unilateral breaking of the ceasefire by the IDF that “[t]he fragile five-month truce began to unravel”. On November 13, Ha’aretz noted that it was in response to this action that Hamas forces resumed their rocket fire against Israeli settlements.

A RELUCTANT TRUCE

Back in June of 2008, Israel agreed to sign the truce with Hamas, mediated by Egypt, but only after pressure by the United States and with what was described at the time as “extreme reluctance”. Reporting from Jerusalem, an Agence France Presse correspondent cautioned on June 12 that while Israel had finally accepted “Egyptian efforts to broker a truce with Hamas in and around Gaza [...] at the same time [it] ordered its armed forces to prepare for a possible offensive against the Palestinian territory”. He went on to describe how, even as Israel was signing the truce, its military was killing Palestinian civilians, one of whom was “a 10-year-old girl, Hadeel al-Smeiri[, who] died when a tank shell hit a house east of the south Gaza city of Khan Yunis. Two of her relatives were wounded”. Little more than a month later, Israel decided to unilaterally begin constructing new homes in an illegal West Bank settlement “despite a pledge to the US to stop building on the site”, as the world’s press noted at the time. Writing for The Guardian, British correspondent Mark Tran warned that the construction approval was “bound to anger the Palestinians and irritate the US, which has called on Israel to halt construction in the settlements as part of the American ‘road map’ for peace in the Middle East”. Even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, usually among Israel’s most fervent international advocates, stated in June that illegal “Jewish settlement building was having a ‘negative effect’ on efforts to reach a peace deal”.

CONSTANT PROVOCATIONS

Adding insult to injury, in early December, the Israeli government turned a blind eye to the mass victimization of an entire Palestinian community by fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The BBC reported that, after being evicted by Israeli troops from an illegal building, the settlers “shot and wounded three Palestinians and set fire to property”. Commenting on the scenes of carnage, captured on video by an Israeli human rights group, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert aptly stated: “As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen”.

In addition to tacitly permitted pogroms by “enraged citizens” against innocent Arabs, the “Middle East’s only functional democracy” (pdf) has implemented another democratic measure against Arabs –namely it forbids, as a matter of policy, all journalists from entering Gaza. The few brave reporters who are caught trying to report on the miserable living conditions of the enslaved Palestinian population are arrested by the IDF and summarily expelled. In early December, Israel even detained and expelled the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Dr. Richard Falk. Falk, who is Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and the author of over fifty books on international law and human rights, was summarily arrested by the Israeli security services, placed in a detention facility in which he was “barely able to stand” and underwent what he described as “a very coercive” and “unpleasant” experience. The reason for his arrest was his earlier description of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip as a “flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law” and a “crime against humanity”. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, described the treatment of Dr. Falk as “unprecedented and deeply regrettable”, but her protestations have failed to stir the “Middle East’s only functional democracy”.

A PREMEDITATED ATTACK

The recent Ha’aretz revelations point to the true cause of Israel’s constant and deliberate provocations, outlined above. The paper cites “sources in [Israel's] defense establishment” in disclosing that the IDF was instructed by Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, to prepare for an attack on Gaza “six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas”. The rockets launched by the Palestinian group, in response to the November 4 unilateral breaking of the truce by the IDF, gave the Israelis the opportunity they required to put Operation Cast Lead into action. By accelerating the provocations, as well as employing what Ha’aretz describes as “operational deception and the misleading of the public”, the Israeli government was able to turn a once promising truce into another barrage of tit-for-tat violence.

On day three of the Israeli attacks, the UN is already estimating the civilian toll in Gaza to 64 dead and hundreds seriously injured, while the International Red Cross “describ[es] the situation in Gaza’s hospitals as chaotic, with medical teams stretched to the limit”. Meanwhile, Israeli military forces continue to prevent journalists and medical supplies from entering Gaza, which the IDF now calls a “closed military zone”.

THE PROBLEM WITH DEMOCRACY

Late on December 29, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Haim Ramon, disclosed for the first time that the operational goal of Operation Cast Lead is “regime change” in Gaza. “We will stop firing immediately if someone takes the responsibility of this government, anyone but Hamas. We are favorable to any other government to take the place of Hamas”, he said. The fact that Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian population in a territory-wide poll which the head of the European Parliament’s electoral monitoring delegation described as “extremely professional, in line with international standards, free, transparent and without violence”, is dismissed without discussion.

This is apparently what happens when the crusade to spread democracy to the uncivilized stumbles upon the ultimate barrier –namely the democratic election by the uncivilized of a leadership that the democracy-crusaders dislike.

Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, Barack Obama in Afghanistan Seven Lessons and Many Questions for the President , By William Astore

from: Tomgram

In 1967, outraged by the course of the Vietnam War, as well as her country's role in prolonging and worsening it, Mary McCarthy, novelist, memoirist, and author of the bestseller The Group, went to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to judge the situation for herself. The next year, she went to the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. She wrote accounts of both journeys, published originally in pamphlet format as Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), and later gathered with her other writings on Vietnam as a book, The Seventeenth Degree (1974). As pamphlets, McCarthy's accounts sold poorly and passed into obscurity; deservedly so, some would say.

Those who'd say this, however, would be wrong. McCarthy brought a novelist's keen eye to America's activities and its rhetoric in Vietnam. By no means a military expert, not even an expert on Vietnam -- she only made a conscious decision to study the war in Vietnam after she returned from her trip to Saigon -- her impressionistic writings were nevertheless insightful precisely because she had long been a critical thinker beholden to no authority.

Her insights into our approach to war-fighting and to foreign cultures are as telling today as they were 40 years ago, so much so that President Obama and his advisors might do well to add her unconventional lessons to their all-too-conventional thinking on our spreading war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What were those lessons? Here are seven of them, each followed by questions that, four decades later, someone at President Obama's next press conference should consider asking him:

1. McCarthy's most fundamental objection was to the way, in Vietnam, the U.S. government decided to apply "technology and a superior power to a political situation that will not yield to this." At the very least, the United States was guilty of folly, but McCarthy went further. She condemned our technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare as "wicked" because of its "absolute indifference to the cost in human lives" to the Vietnamese people.

Even in 1967, the widespread, at times indiscriminate, nature of American killing was well known. For example, U.S. planes dropped roughly 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia during the war, nearly five times the tonnage used against Germany during World War II. The U.S. even waged war on the Vietnamese jungle and forest, which so effectively hid Vietnamese guerrilla forces, spraying roughly 20 million gallons of toxic herbicides (including the dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange) on it.

In her outrage, McCarthy dared to compare the seeming indifference of many of her fellow citizens toward the blunt-edged sword of technological destruction we had loosed on Vietnam to the moral obtuseness of ordinary Germans under Adolf Hitler.

Questions for President Obama: Aren't we once again relying on the destructive power of technology to "solve" complex political and religious struggles? Aren't we yet again showing indifference to the human costs of war, especially when borne by non-Americans? Even though we're using far fewer bombs in the Af-Pak highlands than we did in Vietnam, aren't we still morally culpable when these "precision-guided munitions" miss their targets and instead claim innocents, or hit suspected "terrorists" who suddenly morph into wedding parties? In those cases, do we not seek false comfort in the phrase, C'est la guerre, or at least that modern equivalent: unavoidable collateral damage?

2. As Richard Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 by calling for "peace with honor" in Vietnam, McCarthy offered her own warning about the dangers that arose when the office of the presidency collided with an American desire never to be labeled a loser: "The American so-called free-enterprise system, highly competitive, investment-conscious, expansionist, repels a loser policy by instinctive defense movements centering in the ganglia of the presidency. No matter what direction the incumbent, as candidate, was pointing in, he slowly pivots once he assumes office."

Questions for President Obama: Have you, like Vietnam-era presidents, pivoted toward yet another surge simply to avoid the label of "loser" in Afghanistan? And if the cost of victory (however defined) is hundreds, or even thousands, more American military casualties, hundreds of billions of additional dollars spent, and extensive collateral damage and blowback, will this "victory" not be a pyrrhic one, achieved at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat?

3. Though critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam, McCarthy was even more critical of American civilian officials there. "On the whole," she wrote, they "behaved like a team of promoters with a dubious 'growth' stock they were brokering." At least military men were often more forthright than the civilians, if not necessarily more self-aware, McCarthy noted, because they were part of the war -- the product, so to speak -- not its salesmen.

Questions for President Obama: In promising to send a new "surge" of State Department personnel and other civilians into Afghanistan, are you prepared as well to parse their words? Are you braced in case they sell you a false bill of goods, even if the sellers themselves, in their eagerness to speak fairy tales to power, continually ignore the Fantasyland nature of their tale?

4. Well before Bush administration officials boasted about creating their own reality and new "facts on the ground" in Iraq, Mary McCarthy recognized the danger of another type of "fact": "The more troops and matériel committed to Vietnam, the more retreat appears to be cut off -- not by an enemy, but by our own numbers. To call for withdrawal in the face of that commitment... is to seem to argue not against a policy, but against facts, which by their very nature are unanswerable."

Questions for President Obama: If your surge in Afghanistan fails, will you be able to de-escalate as quickly as you escalated? Or will the fact that you've put more troops in harm's way (with all their equipment and all the money that will go into new base and airfield and road construction), and committed more of your prestige to prevailing, make it even harder to consider leaving?

5. A cursory reading of The Pentagon Papers, the famously secret government documents on Vietnam leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, reveals how skeptical America's top officials were, early on, in pursuing a military solution to the situation in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, knowing better, the "best and brightest," as journalist David Halberstam termed them in his famous, ironic book title, still talked themselves into it; and they did so, as McCarthy noted, because they set seemingly meaningful goals ("metrics" or "benchmarks," we'd say today), which they then convinced themselves they were actually achieving. When you trick yourself into believing that you're meeting your goals, as Halberstam noted, there's no reason to reexamine your course of action.

Questions for President Obama: Much has been written about an internal struggle within your administration over the wisdom of surging in Afghanistan. Now, you, too, have called for the setting of "benchmarks" for your new strategy's success. Are you wise enough to set them to capture the complexities of political realities on the ground rather than playing to American strengths? Are you capable of re-examining them, even when your advisors assure you that they are being achieved?

6. In her day, Mary McCarthy recognized the inequities of burden-sharing at home when it came to the war in Vietnam: "Casualty figures, still low [in 1967], seldom strike home outside rural and low-income groups -- the silent part of society. The absence of sacrifices [among the privileged classes] has had its effect on the opposition [to the war], which feels no need, on the whole, to turn away from its habitual standards and practices -- what for? We have not withdrawn our sympathy from American power and from the way of life that is tied to it -- a connection that is more evident to a low-grade G.I. in Vietnam than to most American intellectuals."

Questions for President Obama: Are you willing to listen to the common G.I. as well as to the generals who have your ear? Are you willing to insist on greater equity in burden-sharing, since once again most of the burden of Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen on "the silent part of society"? Are you able to recognize that the "best and brightest" in the corridors of power may not be the wisest exactly because they have so little to lose (and perhaps much to gain) from our "overseas contingency operations"?

7. McCarthy was remarkably perceptive when it came to the seductiveness of American technological prowess. Our technological superiority, she wrote, was a large part of "our willingness to get into Vietnam and stay there... The technological gap between us and the North Vietnamese constituted, we thought, an advantage which obliged us not to quit."

Questions for President Obama: Rather than providing us with a war-winning edge, might our robot drones, satellite imagery, and all our other gadgetry of war seduce us into believing that we can "prevail" at a reasonable and sustainable cost? Indeed, do we think we should prevail precisely because our high-tech military brags of "full spectrum dominance"?

One bonus lesson from Mary McCarthy before we take our leave of her: Even now, we speak too often of "Bush's war" or, more recently, "Obama's war." Before we start chattering mindlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan as American tragedies, we would do well to recall what McCarthy had to say about the war in Vietnam: "There is something distasteful," she wrote, "in the very notion of approaching [Vietnam] as an American tragedy, whose protagonist is a great suffering Texan [President Lyndon Baines Johnson]."

Yes, there is something distasteful about a media that blithely refers to Bush's or Obama's war as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis suffer. For American troops, after all, are not the only ones paying the ultimate price when the U.S. fights foreign wars for ill-considered reasons and misguided goals.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six years at the Air Force Academy. A TomDispatch regular, he currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005), among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Obama's Habeas Corpus Arch-Hypocrisy from Paul Street on Greenwald article

Obama's Habeas Corpus Arch-Hypocrisy
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/02/24/aclu/.

I had to read this twice just to take it in. The first time I went through it I had to stop to take a deep breath and a short walk around the block, repeating to myself the words, "holy freaking shit."

This is as bad as anything I've ever read about Obama.

Obama has actually turned out worse than I thought. He has out-done even my highly critical take on him from the left. His administration is completely nauseating. (I will explain some of this conclusion in the May issue of Z Magazine [ print - remember that?], in an article that went to press before I learned about the issue Greenwald discusses).

A brief summary of Greenwald's essay... Last February, the Obama administration filed a telling brief in federal court. In two sentences, this brief declared that the Obama Department of Justice essentially embraced the Bush administration's totalitarian position on (against) habeas corpus.

After the Supreme Court ruled last June that Guantanamo detainees possess the right to a hearing to contest the charges against them, the Bush administration simply started sending so-called enemy combatants from around the world to the American prison camp in Bagram Air Force base in occupied Afghanistan. Since Afghanistan is a "war zone," the Bush White House argued, prisoners there have no constitutional rights. Never mind that these were not prisoners captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan but were people abducted from their homes and workplaces in other countries and flown in secret U.S. jets to Bagram.

In its February '09 brief, the Obama justice department defended this Orwellian policy, arguing that such prisoners can be locked up without any constitutional rights for an indefinite period of time just as long as they are incarcerated in Bagram instead of Guantanamo!

If anyone cares at this point, Obama the U.S. senator and presidential candidate and former law professor spoke eloquently against Guantanamo and on behalf of "rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."

As Greenwald puts it, "Barack Obama - the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President - said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charge was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent beyrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today's Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and tail to preserve his power to do exactly that."

How incredibly grotesque. Such hypocrisy, I must say, truly stinks to high heaven.

Now, take a deep breath and walk out your front doo. Go around your block once, repeating after me, "holy shit, holy shit, holy shit..."

Spies at work CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs, by Stefan Christoff

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca
April 20, 2007

Spies at work
CSIS questioning of Canadian Muslims threatens their jobs

by Stefan Christoff

Visits from CSIS are an occupational hazard: Bassam Hussein

MONTREAL MIRROR--The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their workplaces, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques, say national and Montreal-based Arab and Muslim community groups. The groups are reporting major increases in the numbers of calls from distressed community members concerning CSIS interventions. According to the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada (CAIR-Canada), CSIS intelligence-gathering activities have increased over the past year.

“Community members who have been approached by CSIS across the country are calling our office on a weekly basis,” says Sameer Zuberi, CAIR-Canada’s communications co-ordinator. “This hike in CSIS visits is alarming to CAIR-Canada as it casts a blanket of fear and intimidation that is spread over our entire community.”

In response to increased CSIS activity, CAIR-Canada has shipped thousands of copies of a publication designed for Canadian Muslims dealing with CSIS and other Canadian authorities, entitled Know Your Rights Guide, to local mosques and community centres.

“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,” says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me, but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.”

“People are being targeted by CSIS for simply belonging to a certain ethnic group with certain religious beliefs without any obvious rationale for such targeting,” says Bassam Hussein of the Centre Communautaire Musulman de Montréal. “I was recently visited by a mother of four in Montreal who was seeking help due to CSIS harassment against her and her husband,” says Hussein. “CSIS went to her husband’s employer to inquire about him, the employer was terrified when CSIS contacted him and two weeks later, the employer let the husband go.”

The 2007 Conservative federal budget “earmarks new funding for CSIS,” according to the Ministry of Finance website, to the tune of $80 million over two years in addition to the approximately $200 million already allocated to Canada’s national spy agency. Media representatives from CSIS did not return repeated requests for an interview from the Mirror before deadline.

CAIR-Canada recently reported that approximately 30 per cent of all CSIS visits in the Muslim community are occurring at the workplace, often putting individuals’ careers in jeopardy.

“Community members feel that their civil liberties are being seriously compromised under the pretext of fighting terrorism,” says Hussein. “Community members who I know are being contacted by CSIS are simple people working hard to live in peace and raise their families.”

Marx - Prophet of capitalism, Business Standard, V V / New Delhi, Apr 16, 2009

About fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in east Europe, there appeared a general impression that Marx was now irrelevant: he was dead, and buried for ever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need read him again. “What we are witnessing,” Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, “is not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” But history soon returned with a vengeance. First in August 1998, the economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapse in Asia and market panic around the world that made London’s Financial Times wonder if we had moved “from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade.” The article was headlined, “Das Kapital Revisited.” The current financial crisis has reiterated the enduring relevance of Marx which has been ably presented for the common reader in Francis Wheen’s Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’: A Biography (Atlantic Books, $11.50).

Wheen tells us that the bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended with a piercing analysis with which he revealed the nature of the beast.

“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, were swept away, all new found ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.

And not just in capitalism’s homelands: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarous nations, into civilisation.”

One reason why Marx has been dismissed as a ‘determinist’ and ‘an economic materialist’ is because Marxist thought has not been studied in depth or simply because its critics have deliberately twisted it for their own ends. Marx did not believe in an entity called the ‘economy’. The core of his thought and the reason why it survives which Wheen shows in clear, simple prose, is the conflict between the forces and relations of production. In the Manifesto Marx acknowledges the genius of the capitalist system, its inventive and creative nature and its scorn for tradition, custom and fetish.

But the menace occurs when it erects a thing beyond the control of its creators. Take ‘environment’. It is the common property of all human beings. Yet, as Marx put it, “At the same time as mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

As Wheen shows, Marx had a love-hate relationship with capitalism and that is why he will be relevant as long as long as capitalism endures. Thus, the term ‘exploitation’ that our comrades use so often, does not mean starvation and misery (though in the capitalist world it may do so in these times), it signifies the extent to which the skills and abilities of those without capital are appropriated by those with it.

“Although every capitalist demands that workers should save, he means only his own workers, because they relate to him as workers. By no means does this apply to the remainder of workers, because they relate to him as consumers. In spite of all this pious talk of frugality he searches for all possible ways of stimulating them to consume, by making his commodities more attractive and by filling their ears with babble about new needs.”

How does the present financial crisis make Wheen’s Das Kapital especially relevant? You don’t need to read the newspapers for bailout packages or the frantic efforts by manufacturers/wholesalers to unload the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the present credit crisis hit us: just visit the shopping malls for bargain prices. The crisis of overproduction that we read in textbooks is for all to see. There is talk of American capitalism caught in a mangle to the extent that cars may cease to be made in Detroit as a consequence of the insane speculation in worthless paper ‘derivatives’.

The sad part of the story is that many financial experts had seen it coming. Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge and Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today, both published some years ago, had advised that we go back to Marx to understand the workings of the capitalist system. George Soros said as far back as 2005 that “Marx… gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways than the equilibrium theory of classical economics…The danger this time (to the capitalist system) comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.” Wheen’s Das Kapital explains why, in clear, simple language.

The real secret of Khrushchev's speech, by Tom Parfitt, The Guardian, 24 Feb 06

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/24/russia.tomparfitt

Fifty years ago a Soviet leader dared to criticise Stalin. But was this bravery or a cynical ploy?

Many of those who were present recall the "deathly silence" that fell across the hall. It was the evening of February 25 1956. Unexpectedly, delegates at the 20th congress of the Communist party had been ushered into a final, closed session at central committee headquarters in Moscow. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took the tribune and began to speak, some members of the audience fainted. Others clawed their heads in despair. Most could not believe their ears.

Without warning, Khrushchev had launched a fierce attack on his predecessor, the revered Joseph Stalin. The great vozhd (chief) who had guided the country through the second world war and died three years earlier was a "capricious and despotic character", Khrushchev said. In a four-hour indictment he condemned Stalin for creating a personality cult and unleashing "brutal violence" on anyone who stood in his way.

Uttered 50 years ago tomorrow, this was Khrushchev's secret speech: a coruscating indictment of Stalinism that would roll out across the world; the beginning of the "thaw" and the end of terror in a country where hundreds of thousands had been shot or sent to the gulags.

In the west, the speech has mostly been interpreted as a brave and moral step that changed the fate of the country. Earlier this month Khrushchev's granddaughter Nina, a lecturer who lives in the US, lauded him in the Washington Post for "outing Stalin as a monster".

Yet in Russia, amid muted celebrations of the anniversary, there is growing evidence that Khrushchev's speech was a cynical ploy to save his skin and that of his party cronies. "Khrushchev was trying to dump all the blame on Stalin when his own hands were drenched in blood," says Yuri Zhukov, a historian from the Russian Academy of Sciences who has studied newly declassified archives on the period.

The re-evaluation comes as critics accuse President Vladimir Putin of leading a drift towards an authoritarianism that resembles the rule of the communist strongmen who dominated the 20th century. New measures have included increased state control over broadcast media and the replacement of elected governors by appointees.

While he is not actively promoted by the Kremlin, Stalin remains hugely popular, with higher approval ratings than Khrushchev. Few politicians dare criticise his legacy despite pleas to do so from victims of his oppression. A survey by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion found that 50% of Russians believe Stalin played a positive role, up from 46% in 2003.

In 1956 Khrushchev's speech was certainly a rent with the past. Stalin, he said, had committed "serious and grave perversions of party principles" and triggered the "cruellest repression" by inventing the concept of the "enemy of the people". In 1937 and 1938, 98 of the 139 members of the central committee had been shot on Stalin's orders, Khrushchev revealed.

Many of the 1,400 people at the congress had only heard innuendo about such events and their shock was real; as was the fury of Stalin's supporters. "My impression was very negative," says Nikolai Baybakov, 94, then head of Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, and whose voice is still dark with fury at the insult meted out to his hero. "Yes, negative. Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev was a zero."

No debate was allowed, however, and the delegates went home in awe. Many were sunk in depression; two committed suicide within weeks.

Almost immediately, changes began. Although the full text of the speech was not published in the Soviet Union until the late 80s, excerpts were passed to local party officials and read at meetings. Political prisoners were rehabilitated, the press was given limited freedom and ties were re-established with foreign powers such as France and the US. Khrushchev's political enemies were sidelined, but they escaped the death sentence that would have been automatic under Stalin. Abroad, the speech sparked intense interest after it was leaked by foreign communists. The Observer devoted an entire issue to the 26,000-word text.

But while Khrushchev set unstoppable changes in motion, experts say he concealed his own role in bloody repressions. Only in the past five years has the full extent of his complicity in Stalin's terror become evident.

A telegram discovered in Politburo archives by Mr Zhukov shows that Khrushchev sent a request to Moscow to kill or imprison 30,000 people when he took over the leadership of Ukraine in 1938. A brutal purge of intellectuals and "hostile elements" was soon under way.

The year before, when he was party chief in the Moscow region, documents show Khrushchev asked permission to shoot 8,500 anti-Soviet "traitors" and dispatch almost 33,000 to camps. "These persecutions were real and they were carried out on Khrushchev's orders," Mr Zhukov says.

Dima Bykov, a young Russian intellectual, says Khrushchev was a willing servant of Stalin. "When I was a teacher I explained the 20th congress to my pupils using an analogy: imagine Himmler giving an anti-fascist speech at a Nazi congress after Hitler's death."

The limits of Khrushchev's thaw were evident a few months after the speech when he sent Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising. And while he allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish a novel about the gulags, he banned Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago for its unsympathetic portrait of the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution.

Nikita Khrushchev, 46, a journalist who was named after his grandfather, admits the Soviet leader was not the hero he is often made out to be. "Of course, grandpa participated in the repressions," he says. "Of course, you can see his signatures on the lists of those to be dealt with. And, of course, many documents have yet to be released from the archives. But the fact that he dared to expose Stalin was his own courageous step. It was a real feat ... It meant he had overcome the Stalinist inside himself."

Mr Bykov says Khrushchev was a brave man who recognised his faults and attempted reform, but lacked the will to smash the system completely. "Khrushchev was half dictator, half liberal," he says. "Putin is just the same. The difference is that in Khrushchev's time the main movement was towards freedom. Now it is backwards. Krushchev initiated freedom. Putin is its graveyard."

Corncob Nikita

· Khrushchev was best known as "corncob Nikita" for his attempts to plant vast tracts of maize

· His Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956 took four hours to deliver and the full text - not published in the Soviet Union until 1989 - was 26,000 words long. In it, he said Josef Stalin had "practised brutal violence, not only towards everything which opposed him, but also towards that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts"

· The speech included details of a furious letter from Vladimir Lenin to Stalin in 1923 in which the former leader accused Stalin of insulting his wife

· Politburo archives show that Khrushchev concealed that he had requested permission to shoot or imprison about 70,000 people himself as a party boss in the late 1930s