How Florida Reactionaries Undermine Venezuelan Democracy

by W.T. WHITNEY

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/how-florida-reactionaries-undermine-venezuelan-democracy/

Remember the Tonkin Gulf Resolution? In 1964 that joint congressional resolution propelled the United States into war lasting nine years. Resolution 488, passed by House of Representatives by a 393 – 1 vote on March 4, is a moral and practical equivalent. Its title was “Supporting the people of Venezuela as they protest peacefully for democracy, a reduction in violent crime and calling for an end to recent violence.”

The vote took place under a provision known as “suspension of the rules” which Congress uses for “legislation of non-controversial bills.” The sole dissenter was a Kentucky Republican. Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced R 488. In Florida she represents the 27th congressional district, part of Miami-Dade County. All but unanimous backing for the resolution is reprehensible – for three reasons.

One, the resolution did not tell the truth. It speaks of Venezuelans “protesting peacefully.” Actually as of March 7 protesters had shot five people dead. Three were soldiers. Six deaths are attributed to opposition roadblocks, 30 more because roadblocks prevented access to emergency services. Soldiers had killed three people, one a government supporter. When protests started in Táchira, Mérida, and Caracas in early February, police did not intervene until government offices and police cars were being attacked and burned and until food and medical supply trucks were blocked. The government arrested officers who violated orders to to act with restraint.

The resolution suggests Venezuela is undemocratic. Over 15 years, however, governments there have won 17 out of 18 national elections. They are elections that for fairness and efficiency are “the best in the world,” according to the Carter Center in Georgia. Press freedom abounds: Venezuela’ predominately privately-owned newspapers and television outlets disseminate opposition viewpoints. Their television broadcasts reach 90 percent of viewers nationally.

Real democracy means uplift for everybody. In Venezuela poverty dropped from 50 percent in 1998 to 32 percent in 2011. Social spending increased from 11 percent of the GDP to 24 percent. Pensioners rose from 500,000 to 2.5 million; people finishing college, from 600,000 to 2.3 million. High school enrollment increased 42 percent. Children malnutrition and infants deaths have fallen dramatically. Every year the minimum wage has increased 10 – 20 percent.

Media misrepresentation contributed to the resolution’s passage. Protesters, for example, hardly represent Venezuela’s majority population. Disturbances have taken place in only 18 of 335 municipalities, places where the middle and upper classes live and where right-wing politicians are in charge. Most students in the streets attend private schools. National polling shows that 85 percent of respondents oppose “protests continuing throughout the country.”

Secondly, passage of Ros-Lehtinen’s resolution is a new chapter in the process of U.S. preparations for undermining Venezuela’s elected government. Money tells some of that story. Analyst Mark Weisbrot reports, “[O]ne can find about $90 million in U.S. funding to Venezuela since 2000 “just looking through U.S. government documents available on the web, including $5 million in the current federal budget.” According to Venezuelanalysis.com: “Over one third of US funding, nearly $15 million annually by 2007, was directed towards youth and student groups, including training in the use of social networks to mobilize political activism.” And, “Embassy cables also reveal US government funding of opposition parties.” Discussing his leadership of the National Endowment for Democracy, a prime source of U.S. funding, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Preparations are evident too from a report produced by Venezuelan – U.S. lawyer Eva Golinger. She alludes to a meeting on June 13, 2013, location unspecified, attended by representatives Colombia’s “Center for Thought Foundation and the Democratic Internationalism Foundation. The two groups have links with ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, right wing protagonist of destabilization in Venezuela. Mark Feierstein, regional head of the US Agency for International Development, attended the meeting.

It generated a document entitled “Venezuelan Strategic Plan,” which detailed 15 “action points.” They included destruction of facilities, “massive mobilizations,” food shortages, and “insurrection inside the army.” The document mentions “crisis in the streets that facilitate the intervention of North America and the forces of NATO, with support of the government of Colombia.” “Violence [causing} deaths and injuries” is anticipated.

The third objection to Ros-Lehtinen’s resolution, and especially to congressional consensus, relates to her associations. She is famous for projecting Cuban-American determination to undo the Cuban Revolution onto the national stage. She thereby bears major responsibility for continuing a national policy of economic blockade of that island. Nor has she challenged her neighbors’ toleration of, even direct participation in, anti-Cuban terrorist attacks. It’s clear now that her neighbors have extended terror attacks to Venezuela, presumably as their contribution to U.S. plans to overthrow Venezuela’s government.

Surely it’s reasonable to expect that U.S. congresspersons, as part of their job description, might ask questions.

They could have inquired about Raul Diaz Peña, who in 2010 showed up in Ros-Lehtinen’s Miami office after having just arrived in the United States. Weeks earlier he had escaped from prison in Venezuela where he was serving time for having bombed embassies in Caracas in 2003. He told reporters on hand that costs for his escape and U.S. entry amounted to $100,000. The congresswoman indicated she “had been lobbying the US government”on his behalf .

On February 23, two days before Ros-Lehtinen introduced her resolution, Robert Alonzo held a “patriotic lunch” for friends at his farm outside Miami. He told them he wanted “help and solidarity of unyielding Cuban – exile combatants in their campaign to step up resistance to [President] Maduro’s misrule.”

Present were Reinol Rodríguez, head of the paramilitary group Alpha 66; José Dionisio Suárez, admitted murderer of ex-Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington; and Armando Valladares, formerly imprisoned in Cuba for bombings and more recently implicated in a plot to kill Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Born in Cuba, Alonso was living in Venezuela until authorities there discovered 153 Colombian paramilitaries lodged at his farm near Caracas. Their plan was to kill then President Hugo Chavez. Alonso helped out with the coup attempt against Chavez in 2002 by leading an assault on the Cuban Embassy.

Another meeting to plan the ouster of President Chavez took place in Miami in 2009. On hand were Jose Antonio Colina Pulido, on the lam after the embassy bombings in 2003; Joaquim Chaffardet, intelligence chief in Venezuela linked to the bombing of a fully loaded Cuban Airliner in 1976, along with Miamian Luis Posada; and Johan Peña, self-exiled after participating in the 2004 murder of Venezuelan prosecutor Danilo Anderson.

Other notable neighbors include: Patricia Poleo, who plotted against Danilo Anderson; military officer Gustavo Diaz, who helped propel the anti-Chavez coup attempt in 2002; and Angel De Fana who tried to kill Fidel Castro in 1997. Former Miami-area FBI head Héctor Pesquera attended a meeting in Panama where final arrangements were made to kill Danilo Anderson.

Finally, R-488 is emblematic of a serious problem relating to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, specifically privatization. The U.S. government has long farmed out decision-making on and implementation of policies toward Cuba to agents, really proxies, belonging to the Cuban-American émigré community. The same tendency now crops up in regard to Venezuela.

It’s apparent that privateers involved with Cuban affairs, epitomized by Representative Ros-Lehtinen, are promoting a U.S. campaign to undermine Venezuela’s government. Joining this essentially autonomous force are self-exiled, often terrorist-inclined, migrants from other Latin American countries, notably Venezuela. The evidence shows that the milieu where Resolution 488 was spawned nurtures this class of dark characters. That the resolution gained quick, basically unquestioning approval – after all, it was deemed “non-controversial” – is bad news for the future of democracy in both Venezuela and the United States.

by W. T. Whitney Jr.

The online journal Cancer Epidemiology on March 4 reported that although breast cancer survival rates increased overall between 1990 and 2010, white women benefited far more than did black women. Over twenty years, survival rates for white women had improved 27 percent; those for black women, 13 percent. This study of data from 41 U.S. cities showed that disparities in rates of improved outcome worsened over time, moving from a 17 percent differential in 1990-1995, to a 30 percent discrepancy during the next five years, to a 35 percent difference, and during 2006-2010 to a 40 percent gap.

Cancer biologists know that black women are genetically susceptible to a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. But results from New York, Minneapolis, Miami, Portland and Las Vegas give the lie to a genetic explanation for the discrepancy in death rates. Dr. Bijou Hunt, the study’s Chicago – based lead author, told Reuters that “If genetics were responsible . . . we would not have seen the rates go from being nearly equal in most places at the first time point to being so much worse for Black women than for White women at the last time point.” Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer, agrees: “Black people in New York are not genetically different from black people in Chicago, but their outcomes are different.”

“Most of the disparities are actually due to access to care and access to quality care,” Brawley suggests. According to Hunt, “The advancements in screening tools and treatment which occurred in the 1990’s were largely available to white women, while black women, who were more likely to be uninsured, did not gain equal access to these life-saving technologies.”

Writing in the March 14 New York Times, Harold Freeman, former Harlem Hospital physician and past president of the American Cancer Society, reported that “in 1990, we pioneered the patient navigation program, which provided one-on-one support to patients with abnormal findings…. Applying the two interventions in Harlem — breast cancer screening and patient navigation — [we] raised the five-year breast cancer survival rate from 39 percent to 70 percent in 2000.”

For the present writer, who worked as a physician, this report is shocking, but does not surprise. On March 12, 2010 Amnesty International released a devastating document titled “Deadly Delivery, The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.” Between 1987 and 2006, the report says, death rates for U.S. mothers during pregnancy and childbirth doubled, from 6.6 deaths per 100,000 births to 13.3 deaths. “African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women.”

According to Amnesty International, “[W]omen face barriers to care, especially women of color, those living in poverty, Native American and immigrant women.” As of 2011, 48 other nations claimed maternal mortality rates more favorable than the United States.

It’s an old story: African American women are almost twice as likely to die from cervical cancer as white women. Black males are more than twice as likely to die of prostate cancer as white counterparts. In 2010, the infant death rate for black babies was 11.6 first-year deaths per 1000 births; the rate for white infants was 5.2.

Fractured U.S. health care tolerates discrimination. Recommendations for practitioners are in order. First, if and when practitioners find themselves shouldering increased responsibilities for the public’s health, they would do well to rely upon tried and true clinical methods, which will retain their usefulness. So, practitioners would continue to prioritize the discovery of causes of people’s illnesses in order to know what to do. They would leave no stone unturned in their search. And they would, as always, offer diagnoses and correct treatments to anyone appearing for help. Training, apprenticeship experience, and ongoing peer review undoubtedly will continue to reinforce such precepts.

In the situation presented here, practitioners would find investigation of cause to be no great chore. Demographic and epidemiological data have established the role of race discrimination. Recall of earlier instances of poor health outcomes from the same cause bolster the conclusion. The sticking point, however, is the matter of “anyone.” Comfortable in an artisanal mindset, many practitioners say, “I see patients one by one. That’s all I can do.”

Practitioners ought, therefore, to prepare themselves for extending notions of who they care for. They would think about people away from their hospital or on the other side of their office doors. To broaden their horizons, a push will be required beyond that provided by universalized access to insurance, providers, and facilities. Persisting problems include discriminatory attitudes of some physicians and low quality hospitals serving African Americans. Presumably societal consensus will grow as to meeting the needs of all. If so, an environment may materialize in which practitioners are encouraged to build new capacities, taking on roles, for example, of planning, advocacy, and collaboration,

They ought to know that this prescription is no wild dream. There is a basis in reality. In one way or another, all industrialized nations do offer universal health care – all of them, that is, except for the United States. International health investigator Vicente Navarro has documented how social democratic political parties and labor unions, working in tandem, fought for and achieved such health care systems.

U.S. circumstances are different: “[I]t is the weakness of the working class .., with the absence of a mass-based socialist party and with very low levels of unionization, together with the strength of the capitalist class … that explains the absence of a comprehensive universal health program in the United States.”

Struggle on a broad front for human decency and human rights would set a new stage allowing individual health care practitioners to respond to societal expectations. Class dynamics play a role. According to Navarro, we are to “help to strengthen the labor movement in the United States, and in doing so we should also capitalize on the diversity of the social movements, helping those movements to see the basic commonality of their struggles to unite rather than divide working people. This is, indeed, the best thing you can do to improve the health of our people.”

March 25, 2014

When Slave-Owners, Tied to a Globalized Economy, Turned to Empire

by W.T. WHITNEY, Jr. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/25/slavery-cotton-and-imperialism/

“Cuba is already ours. I feel it in my finger’s ends.”

– James Buchanan, 1849

Historian Walter Johnson’s highly recommended book, “River of Dark Dreams,” centers on cotton production and slave ownership in the Mississippi River Valley prior to the U.S. Civil War. Planters, it seems, believed their fate was linked to imperatives imposed through an internationalized system of sales, manufacture, and re-supply. Johnson’s spirited, enthralling narrative casts slave ownership and cotton growing as precarious undertakings. Planters on the edge of disaster strategized and improvised in order to retain both land and slaves.

Their intransigence vis-à-vis northern compatriots derived, Johnson suggests, from immersion in a labyrinth-like alternative universe that set conditions for their economic survival. Planters were alienated enough from pretensions of their own government to seek deliverance through privatized military interventions in countries seen as hospitable to plantations and slavery.

Johnson focuses on actualities and people’s lives rather than on well-trodden slavery-era themes like abolitionism, or northern industrialization, or states rights . Social and economic history in his hands tells of ledger books; cotton “pickability;” slaves starving, stolen, rebelling, and running away; search dogs; slave babies dying, slave prices, soil fertility, droughts, sandbars, and Haiti. Steamboats feature prominently, along with their explosions, gamblers, races, high-pressure engines, and dining room etiquette. They were technological marvels of their era and absolutely crucial for marketing cotton,

During the period under study, Valley cotton production increased fortyfold, the slave population, 17 times. “The greatest economic boom in the history of the United States” was in progress. Cotton was “the largest single sector of the global economy.” Planters were part of “a network of material connections that stretched from Mississippi and Louisiana to Manhattan and Lowell to Manchester and Liverpool.” Indeed, the “rate of exploitation of slaves in a field in Mississippi … was keyed to the exchange in Liverpool (port of entry for 85 percent of U.S. planters’ cotton) and the labor of mill hands in Manchester.”

In New York southern cotton was re-sold, re-graded, and re-loaded onto other ships for the Atlantic crossing. That city consumed 40 percent of all income generated through cotton sales. Cotton made up two thirds of all U.S. exports. Yet only 10 percent of U.S. imports ended up in cotton-producing states. Southern manufacturers lacked essential equipment manufactured abroad. Cotton producers endured shortages of imported plantations supplies.

Johnson characterizes “the conceptual reach of the global economy in the first half of the nineteenth century” as “lashes into labor into bales into dollars into pounds sterling.” Cotton moved from plantations, to factors in New Orleans, to bankers and shippers in New York, to bankers, buyers, and manufacturers in England, all on a flood of promissory notes, loans, credit, and deductions.

Planters’ wealth took the form of slaves and land. Although land served as collateral for loans, “without slaves, land itself was worthless.” In effect, planters “buy Negroes to plant cotton and raise cotton to buy Negroes.” Facing hard times, slaveholders as a class could not simply transfer their investment from one form of capital to another… Their capital would not simply rust or lie fallow. It would starve. It would steal. It would revolt.”

Influential trade representatives and publicists determined upon a “spatial fix.” They envisioned the Mississippi River as conduit to southern venues favorable to cotton production and other investment possibilities. “In order to survive, slaveholders had to expand,” the author points out: “Proslavery globalism increasingly took the form of imperialist military action.”

“[F]or many in the Mississippi Valley … the most important issue in the early 1850s was Cuba.” Pursing annexation, former Spanish soldier Narciso López in 1851 invaded the island with troops drawn from “the margins of the cotton economy.” Slaveholders had donated supplies. The expedition failed, and López’ execution in Havana attracted 20,000 spectators. Former Mississippi governor and co-conspirator John Quitman raised 1000 men in 1855 for another invasion, which never materialized.

Johnson reviews the career also of slaveholder proxy William Walker whose small army in 1855 subdued Nicaraguan defenders and set him up as the country’s president. Mississippi Valley supporters provided supplies, arms, troops, and ample publicity.

Were slave-owners capitalist? Johnson rejects the notion of slavery as an “archaic” pre-capitalist mode of exploitation. He settles on “a materialist and historical analysis [that] begins from the premise that there was no nineteenth century capitalism without slavery.”

The author relies upon historical materialism, brain child of Karl Marx, as a social investigatory tool. Marx stipulated in his “German Ideology” that, “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature… This conception of history … has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice.”

Explaining his own methodological approach, Johnson echoes Marx: History is often “approached through durable abstractions: ‘the master-slave relationship,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘resistance,’ ‘agency.’ [Yet] these categories have become unmoored from the historical experience they were intended to represent.” Moreover, terms like “agency” and “power” are “thick with the material givenness of a moment in time.” The story of the hybrid cotton strain “Petit Gulf” shows “that beneath the abstractions lies a history of bare-life processes and material exchanges so basic they have escaped the attention of countless historians of slavery.”

For the author, “The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.”

Johnson documents early stirrings of U.S. imperialism. The take among many leftists is that capitalism by its very nature entails recurring crises in accumulation. They assume too that for solutions capitalists look to overseas extension of their operations, even to war making. Thus slave owner longings for exploitative possibilities in the Caribbean and in Central America fueled military adventurism. “River of Dark Dreams” serves in this regard to have documented the beginnings of a U.S. turn toward a global fix for close-to-home economic incongruities.

Via: http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/239-john-pilger/2011-the-forgotten-coup-and-how-the-same-godfather-rules-from-canberra-to-kiev–

WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2014 09:31

By John Pilger.

This article was first published on Truthout.

Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a fate similar to that of the elected government of the Ukraine, usually with bloodshed, says John Pilger.

Washington’s role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.

Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s, it was regarded in Washington as a “strategic threat.” The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?

The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US “ally.” This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington’s coups – in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a “Ukraine” or a “Chile” could never happen to them.

Australia’s deference to the United States makes Britain, by comparison, seem a renegade. During the American invasion of Vietnam – which Australia had pleaded to join – an official in Canberra voiced a rare complaint to Washington that the British knew more about US objectives in that war than its antipodean comrade-in-arms. The response was swift: “We have to keep the Brits informed to keep them happy. You are with us come what may.”

This dictum was rudely set aside in 1972 with the election of the reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Although not regarded as of the left, Whitlam – now in his 98th year – was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride, propriety and extraordinary political imagination. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm” and speak as a voice independent of London and Washington.

On the day after his election, Whitlam ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organization, ASIO – then, as now, beholden to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the Nixon/Kissinger administration as “corrupt and barbaric,” Frank Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time, recalled: “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”

Victor Marchetti, the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap – a joint US-Australian satellite tracking station in the center of Australia – later told me a “threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House. Consequences were inevitable . . . a kind of Chile was set in motion.”

The CIA had just helped General Pinochet crush the democratic government of another reformer, Salvador Allende, in Chile.

In 1974, the White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra as ambassador. Green was an imperious, very senior and sinister figure in the State Department who worked in the shadows of America’s “deep state.” Known as the “coupmaster,” he had played a central role in the 1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia – which cost up to a million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian Institute of Directors and was described by an alarmed member of the audience as “an incitement to the country’s business leaders to rise against the government”.

Pine Gap’s top-secret messages were decoded in California by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the decoders was a young Christopher Boyce, an idealist who, troubled by the “deception and betrayal of an ally,” became a whistleblower. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as “our man Kerr.”

In his black top hat and medal-laden mourning suit, Kerr was the embodiment of imperium. He was the Queen of England’s Australian viceroy in a country that still recognized her as head of state. His duties were ceremonial; yet Whitlam – who appointed him – was unaware of or chose to ignore Kerr’s longstanding ties to Anglo-American intelligence.

The Governor-General was an enthusiastic member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, described by Jonathan Kwitny of The Wall Street Journal in his book, The Crimes of Patriots, as “an elite, invitation-only group . . . exposed in Congress as being founded, funded and generally run by the CIA.” The CIA “paid for Kerr’s travel, built his prestige . . . Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money.”

In 1975, Whitlam discovered that Britain’s MI6 had long been operating against his government. “The Brits were actually decoding secret messages coming into my foreign affairs office,” he said later. One of his ministers, Clyde Cameron, told me, “We knew MI6 was bugging cabinet meetings for the Americans.” In interviews in the 1980s, with the American investigative journalist Joseph Trento, executive officers of the CIA disclosed that the “Whitlam problem” had been discussed “with urgency” by the CIA’s director, William Colby, and the head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, and that “arrangements” were made. A deputy director of the CIA told Trento: “Kerr did what he was told to do.”

In 1975, Whitlam learned of a secret list of CIA personnel in Australia held by the permanent head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange – a deeply conservative mandarin with unprecedented territorial power in Canberra. Whitlam demanded to see the list. On it was the name, Richard Stallings, who, under cover, had set up Pine Gap as a provocative CIA installation. Whitlam now had the proof he was looking for.

On November 10, 1975, he was shown a top-secret telex message sent by ASIO in Washington. This was later sourced to Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA’s East Asia Division and one of the most notorious figures spawned by the Agency. Shackley had been head of the CIA’s Miami-based operation to assassinate Fidel Castro and station chief in Laos and Vietnam. He had recently worked on the “Allende problem”.

Shackley’s message was read to Whitlam. Incredibly, it said that the prime minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country.

The day before, Kerr had visited the headquarters of the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s NSA whose ties to Washington were, and remain, binding. He was briefed on the “security crisis.” He had then asked for a secure line and spent 20 minutes in hushed conversation.

On 11 November – the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament about the secret CIA presence in Australia – he was summoned by Kerr. Invoking archaic vice-regal “reserve powers,” Kerr sacked the democratically elected prime minister. The problem was solved.

Dmitry Puchkov delivers a hilarious and brilliant summary of the situation in the Ukraine. His analysis drips with sarcasm and is full of valuable insights. He speaks in Russian but you can turn on English (or German) subtitles by pressing the cc button on the bottom right hand side of the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfzMnP3ilcI

Via: http://www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/14298-karzai-afghanistan-endorses-crimean-right-to-decide-their-future?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=%2AAfPak%20Daily%20Brief&utm_campaign=South%20Asia%20Daily%20Brief%203-24-14

In a snub to its Western backers, Afghanistan joined Syria and Venezuela this weekend to become one of the few countries to publicly support Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea (TOLO News). On Sunday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office released a statement saying: “[W]e respect the decision the people of Crimea took through a recent referendum that considers Crimea as part of the Russian Federation” (NYT). In an email to the New York Times, Aimal Faizi, Karzai’s spokesman, argued that the Russian annexation of Crimea was a “legitimate move” and that “Afghanistan always respects the free will of the nations on deciding their future.”

The Times’ report also notes that while “becoming the first Western-backed democracy to express support for the widely denounced referendum in Crimea might seem an odd tack for Afghanistan, which is heavily dependent on assistance from the United States and European countries,” “Russia’s insistence that it is righting a historical wrong” and that Crimea should have never been ceded to Ukraine, resonates with Afghans, who have long believed they “were unjustly cut off from their brothers and sisters” in Pakistan when Britain created the Durand Line separating the two in 1947.

The move also comes as Moscow is ramping up its investment in Afghanistan. The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff noted on Friday that Russia is “rebuilding the relics of the Soviet occupation and promoting its own political and cultural prowess,” by delivering new equipment to old Soviet factories, building a Russian Cultural Center in Kabul, and rehabilitating rundown housing complexes …

Ukraine: fascist coup

Via: http://lalkar.org/issues/contents/mar2014/ukraine.html

Since this article was written, the tide of violence has surged ever higher, culminating in the fascist coup the world is now witnessing. As we go to press the fascist coup engineered by the West in the Ukraine is now in full cry, with the ousted President Yanukovych the object of a manhunt, the governing party’s MPs terrorised out of parliament, a quisling “president” and puppet “government” issuing illegal decrees and ethnic Russians and others living in fear of sectarian pogroms. In the Crimea armed militia are now protecting parliament from the threat of assault, as the legislators discuss holding a referendum over extending the region’s semi-autonomous status. In Sevastopol a public meeting estimated at 25,000 strong rallied against fascism, uniting many different political tendencies, whilst volunteers were detailed to guard the city’s Lenin monument from provocateurs.
Correctly judging this fascist revolt to have been steered all along by the West as a destabilising provocation on its border, Russia is making it clear that it will shoulder responsibility for the welfare of ethnic Russians in the Ukraine and has heightened its military vigilance in the border areas.
Towards the coup

The three month-long demonstrations against Ukraine’s elected government, blatantly supported by both the US and the EU, have now spilt over into what Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had long since identified as “the path to a coup d’etat”. After a series of concessions to mob rule essayed by the government in an attempt to end the violence, culminating in the offer of an amnesty even for those demonstrably engaged in bloody riot and the occupation of key public buildings, the violence boiled over on Tuesday 18 February as pro-West rioters bayed for blood outside the parliament building in Kiev, deeming that lawmakers were too slow to bow to their demands.
That first day’s death toll was reportedly 26, with at least another 600 wounded. Ten of the dead were police shot by snipers; over half of the wounded were the police officers subjected to sniper attack. These figures conclusively gave the lie to the pretty picture painted in the West of “peaceful protesters up against injustice”. In the western city of Lviv, rioters hijacked police cars, and seized police weapons. In Ternopil the police station was burned down, whilst in Ivano-Frankivsk the building housing the regional administration headquarters were seized. One woman was reportedly shot dead in the course of an attempt to storm another building belonging to the security services in Khmelnytsky.
In short, it was clear from the outset that this is not a question of protest, but of a bloody coup attempt egged on by the West, with a view to destabilising and undermining Ukraine’s close neighbour, Russia. As of Thursday 20 February, with an attempted truce lying in tatters and gunfire heard across Kiev, the estimated death toll had climbed to 35, with the conflict showing no sign of abating. Protesters – or more properly, insurrectionists – reportedly pushed security forces off Independence Square, capturing a dozen buildings.
Nuland’s gaffe
Whilst the EU shares a common goal with the US, both eager to see Ukraine roped into the imperialist camp, there are some indications that differences over how best to skin the cat could add to the destabilising splits already opening up in the West. Angela Merkel had already come out in a rash over the news that US spies are tapping her phone. The fresh evidence of US contempt for its European “allies” furnished by Victoria Nuland can only be rubbing salt in the wound. When Nuland, the USA’s top diplomat charged with oversight of European policy, got on the phone to Washington’s ambassador in Kiev to discuss how best to steer the political crisis in the Ukraine, she apparently forgot that the same technology which allowed Uncle Sam to earwig on Merkel’s private calls also allows others to eavesdrop on her.
The precise bone of contention between the US and its European “allies” is unclear: it appears from the transcript that Merkel and co. wanted to include the Udar party’s Vitali Klitschko as deputy prime minister in a coalition government, whilst Nuland preferred to reserve the leadership role for the leader of Julia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (as “the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience”) whilst keeping Klitschko and Tyahnybok (leader of the outright fascist Svoboda party) in the wings. Nuland oozes satisfaction that the UN appears to be tucking in behind these US plans. Welcoming what she sees as a propitious choice of UN envoy to Kiev, she runs off at the mouth in full Valley Girl spate: “That would be great I think to help glue this thing and have the UN glue it and you know, fuck the EU”.
She could not have spelt out with greater crudity (or accuracy) the bedrock imperialist attitude to conducting diplomatic relations, with friend or foe alike. The UN is treated as a venal tool of US policy, whilst the “friendly” imperialists of the EU are at best seen as useful idiots, at worst deadly rivals. Whatever the precise policy difference which divides these two monopoly capitalist brigands (either way, it’s the same Ukrainian cat they want to skin), what emerges most clearly from this candid snippet is, first, the breathtaking impudence with which both the US and the EU arrogate to themselves the right to micromanage the domestic affairs of another sovereign country, and, second, the extraordinary degree of venom informing the relationship between fellow imperialists in the US and the EU. And whilst the White House tried to distract attention by raising a ballyhoo against Russia as the supposed source of the damning leak, the real context within which so much dirty laundry is now being aired on a regular basis is precisely the sharpening contradictions being forced to the surface within the imperialist camp itself.
Yanukovych vacillates, fascism rears its head
President Victor Yanukovych’s decision to decline for the moment the EU’s forceful invitation to conclude a bilateral trade deal with the EU, a deal which would have required Kiev to submit to neo-liberal economic “reforms” dictated by the IMF and would have had the knock-on effect of flooding the Russian market with cheap Western imports, was a brave assertion of Ukraine’s right to decide for itself what constituted its own best interests.
Such has been the ferocity of the backlash from a reactionary minority however, egged on in the most shameless way by imperialism, that the country’s leadership has subsequently vacillated and taken more than one step backwards. This was a mistake.
Once it became clear that the protests which spread out from the Maidan square were increasingly violent and fascistic, with public buildings coming under occupation, a statue of Lenin destroyed and replaced by the flag of the wartime Ukraine nationalist collaborators, and squads of thugs wearing camouflage suits and crash helmets swinging long-handled hammers as they roamed the street in gangs, a law was promulgated aimed at preventing legitimate political protest from spilling over into chaos and intimidation by the far right. Yet in January, this law was repealed. As domestic terror at home combined with international bullying to create an intolerable climate of fear, Yanukovych, now an ailing man, decided to fire the prime minister, Nikolai Azarov, and pull the rug out from under his own government. Far from ending the disruption, however, these conciliatory moves were interpreted by the West as giving carte blanche for yet more impudent meddling in Ukraine’s political affairs.
Not content with the prospect of seeing Yanukovych’s government liquidate itself in favour of a coalition government including some opposition representatives, the opposition “democrats” (democratically beaten in the 2012 election) spurned any such compromise, impudently demanding a government formed exclusively from within the incestuous confines of the opposition cabal, and a shotgun presidential election (not constitutionally due till February 2015).
The demonstrators do not speak for the masses
Contrary to the image that is portrayed in our media, the Maidan-niks do not represent the vast mass of the Ukrainian people. Many Ukrainians, especially but not solely from the industrial east of the country, indignantly reject this short-sighted love affair with the EU and NATO pursued by Kiev’s urban elite and some in the rural west of the country. Signally lacking from Western coverage of street protests in the Ukraine have been the lively demonstrations against the EU’s bullying tactics. Yet footage showing a sea of red flags borne aloft over large and well-organised demonstrations in major Ukrainian cities like Odessa, Xercon and Zaparozje is readily accessible on the internet did the BBC but choose to screen it. (See comrades on the march in Odessa on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg_qsUG1cDs&feature=youtu.be , for example.)
That the pro-EU, pro-NATO street demonstrators cannot claim to speak for the majority becomes clear from a recent Washington Post article. (“Who are the protesters in Ukraine?” Keith Darden and Lucan Way, February 12) The journalists report that “The anti-Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians. Electoral support for these views and for the political parties who espouse them has always been limited. Their presence and influence in the protest movement far outstrip their role in Ukrainian politics and their support barely extends geographically beyond a few Western provinces.”
Fascism creeps back out from under a rock
The Washington Post article ably describes how fascism has emerged as the bedrock of the protests. “The right-wing groups have been particularly active among the organization of the protest movement on the ground, particularly as the number of protesters has dwindled over time and revealed a resilient right-wing core. Svoboda’s deputies control the opposition-occupied Kiev city administration building, its flag is widely visible and a portrait of Bandera hangs in the central hall.” Thus it is that ” nationalist activists from Svoboda and these other groups have provided the opposition with its most ‘fearsome demonstrators’ who according to the New York Times ‘ “led some of the more provocative efforts to occupy buildings and block government offices.’ ”
And lest any remain in ignorance of the true genealogy of Ukrainian fascism, the natural home of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, the Washington Post should set them straight. “Svoboda, which captured 38 seats and 10 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections, until 2004 called itself the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine and employed neo-Nazi and SS symbols. While the party changed its name and symbols in 2004, Svoboda’s leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, continued to argue that the opposition should fight the ‘Muscovite-Jewish mafia running Ukraine’ and praised the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA) in World War II for fighting ‘against the Moskali [Muscovites], Germans, Zhydy [Jews] and other scum, who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.’ The party does not hide its glorification of the interwar fascist movement, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In December they held a torchlight rally on the Maidan to honour the OUN leader, Stepan Bandera, and they regularly fly the red and black flag of the OUN, which has been banned as a racist symbol at soccer matches by FIFA.”
Symptomatic of the climate of fear and intimidation being whipped up by the fascists is the fatal shooting in February of a district court judge, Alexandr Lobodenko, who had in January sentenced two men to house arrest for the attempted seizure of City Hall in the town of Kremenchug.
With so many Russian lives sacrificed in the Great Patriotic War in the fight to bury fascism, let nobody underestimate the seriousness with which Moscow now regards the provocation being stoked up on its border. In a post on Global Research on 13 February (“Russia’s ‘Save Ukraine’ Memorandum: Prevent the Ukraine from ‘Going Fascist'”), it is reported that a memorandum titled “Save Ukraine” has been published by the Izborsk Club, an advisory body close to Vladimir Putin, warning that a “Nazi creeping coup” in Ukraine could pose a strategic threat to the Russian Federation, undergoing a transformation “from a non-aligned, neutral and non-nuclear state into a new ‘hot spot’ for Europe and the entire world, and into a hotbed of instability and chaos on Russia’s borders.”
Neither the Ukrainian masses nor Russia herself can be expected to stand idly by if the West continues to stoke up this provocation.