“The movement is currently in a lull. Everyone looks forward to spring, but there is no need to cling to escalation in period of quiet. No need, because it is precisely the time to expand, to engage in the less dramatic work of growing and incorporating the diffuse energies of the working class.

“Reformists urge coalition building, as though the union bureaucracies could somehow lead a radical movement. While some purists refuse coalitions, the revolutionary response is infiltration and invasion. When we approach the unions we don’t seek their guidance; we seek to introduce class antagonism into those institutions, to construct a broad class power, menacing and inescapable for the bosses just as it is irresistible to workers who spend each day on the defensive.”

The following piece is from Viewpoint Magazine, a new communist and anarchist theoretical journal coming out of Oakland. Thanks to Joe for suggesting this.

As always, when Kasama posts an essay (like this), this represents the views of its authors (and does not represent our endorsement of its assertions or verdicts). We are sharing it because we think it is of value for common revolutionary reconception and regroupment. Minor excerpts are marked by ellipses (“…”) .

* * * * * * * * *

by Asad Haider

“Don’t fuck with the Oakland Commune.”

Words which will live forever in history, to be remembered and repeated at every glorious defeat inflicted upon the heroes of the future by mayors, police officers, unions, churches, and children. A letter, signed by the Occupy Oakland Move-In Assembly, promised to respond to the inevitable eviction of an illegal building occupation by “blockading the airport indefinitely.”…

Yesterday these words were at the center of a material practice which brought our movement up against its limits. It’s not a bad thing to meet your limits. It means confronting the possibility and necessity of radical transformation. And this confrontation should be approached with all the courage and resolve on display when a young militant throws a tear gas canister back at a line of police.

Occupy Oakland Move-In Day was to be a historic event, an occupation of a privately owned building by a mass of people, announced well in advance. The literature indicated that “multiple targets” had been identified, and that the site would be “a vacant building owned either by a bank, a large corporation of the 1% or already public.”

The goal was familiar: to establish a social center in the building for community use. And in fact a remarkable schedule of events had been planned, a “festival” which could surely have drawn in attention and support.

Every action in Oakland begins with a deceptive innocence, a rally at Oscar Grant Plaza. The numbers were impressive – the mainstream media reports 1000-2000 throughout the day – and a sign that a remarkable cross-section of the city had been waiting for this. But at the same time police were walking through the crowd with a photo album of prominent organizers, along with warrants for their arrest.

Apparently some of those arrested were returned to the rally, and the march set off in good spirits. From time to time you could look across the street and see lines of police on the next block. You could also look up and see their helicopters.

At a certain crucial intersection it became clear that police, who had a bird’s-eye view of our trajectory, were blocking the planned route. In front of us was a quagmire known as Laney College. This was the first moment in which a desperately-needed contingency plan was unavailable. Though the truck with the sound system and furniture was at an impasse, the crowd spontaneously surged onto the unfamiliar campus and had no idea where to go. It wasn’t hard for the police to block the most apparent exits.

Inevitably, there was a mic check and an attempt at a general assembly; the suggestion that we occupy a building on campus was met with appropriate derision by the already irritated crowd. We walked over an extremely narrow bridge and climbed up a hill to the street, where once again we met our friends in blue and had no idea where we were supposed to go. Eventually we walked on a large street to approach the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, which was surrounded by fences and cops.

The Kaiser Convention Center is a very large building. It is an obvious and excessively ambitious target. Whether it was a good idea to consider this building at all will be the subject of great debate in the future. What’s obvious is that doggedly pursuing this questionable plan after significant police interference was inadvisable. The front lines, the people with trashcan shields, took the initiative. They grabbed the fence and pulled it down to face the police, who shot off a smoke bomb. Because smoke bombs look a lot like tear gas, they’re a great way to cause a crowd to become even more chaotic. But people were already drifting away by then, trying to find some representative of the leadership to explain plan B.

Every step we made towards plan B brought us towards another line of police. The handheld garage-door barricades and trashcan shields gathered again at the front lines, with a mass in goggles and bandanas behind them. Ominous drumming on parked cars and buckets. An advance on the police, met with flashbangs and tear gas. The crowd advanced three times.

There was nothing much to do after that. A megaphone told us we were going to take back Oscar Grant Plaza, so we walked back there. After a brief moment of recuperation the organizers announced that we would be taking another building in 45 minutes.

I regret to say the atmosphere was triumphalist. It’s understandable that a clash with police has a marked effect on the adrenal glands. But there was nothing resembling a victory in this. The stated goal had not been achieved, and the police are familiar with the aggressiveness of activists in Oakland. They expect it. In fact, the Oakland Police Department is on the verge of federal receivership, an unprecedented move, because the OPD really likes violence, and seeks it out as part of a policy of state-sponsored gang warfare. And the insistence on “Fuck the Police” marches in Oakland leading up to yesterday could only shift the emphasis from the occupation itself to the clash.

Now we have to ask ourselves if we should continue to give the police what they want, which we do in ritualized form at every action. After all, it is these rituals that reproduce belief in the cops. The cops tell a lie. The lie is that their violence is autonomous and imposes its power to preserve an abstract order. What they never want us to understand is that cops are an element of the machinery of the capitalist state, and they exist within a wide network of institutions which allow the capitalist class to exercise social power. In Oakland their repression was used to evict an encampment which threatened to bring public space under proletarian control, and to drive out an attempted building occupation on a day declared to be a “general strike.” And if yesterday the OPD was forced to call upon the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and city police including Fremont, Hayward, Berkeley, Pleasanton, Union City, and Newark, their actions were structured around the defense of private property and its social system.

But the reinforcement of private property is not limited to police violence. It happens in schools, the legal system, social welfare institutions, non-profit organizations, trade unions, and countless other spaces. Since these institutions don’t use violence to defend private property, a struggle whose assault on capitalist power is as broad as that power itself will situate street confrontations within a wide spectrum of activity.

In Oakland the class war did not begin with the occupation. It happens every day when the police are used against its citizens, many of whom are sent not just for a night in jail but to prison, if they aren’t shot in the back. And it happens every day when people are evicted from their homes, when they are subjected to discipline and humiliation in the workplace, when their schools are converted into training camps for Bill Gates. For many of these people, whose entry into political practice is required for the continuation of the Occupy movement, escalating the confrontation with police may not be highly desirable. Evasion is better.

And it is the subject of evasion which brings us to the next part of our story. I can’t claim, for a specific set of reasons, to have direct knowledge of what happened then. I can certainly assure you that I took no part in any illegal activities. But someone who isn’t me was there, and experienced it.

A much smaller crowd – maybe between 200 and 500 – followed a route past the Traveler’s Aid building, the site of the November 2nd occupation attempt, again followed by police. At a certain crucial intersection someone creatively knocked open a fire hydrant to produce a water barricade. The crowd swarmed into a park containing the Remember Them statue, with depictions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among others….

With their helicopters the police knew exactly where to line up to kettle the entire group, who were blocked into this park, with little left to do but admire the sculptures, erected by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, of men and women who committed civil disobedience and faced police in the past.

The police recited their order to disperse. Some people probably wanted to fight again, but the vast majority did not. They approached the lines of police and informed them that they wished to disperse. This had to be repeated several times; most times it was ignored, sometimes it was met with a response that they were waiting for instructions. When the instructions arrived the police informed people who wanted to disperse that they should move to another corner of the park and exit onto the street there. The crowd moved over to that corner, where a cop told them, “stay away from us,” and refused to allow anyone to leave.

Suddenly, at the other end of the park, a smoke bomb. People started running towards a fence, which blocked the only area without police. An advanced element knocked down the fence and the whole crowd ran, coming up against another fence and knocking that one down too.

A few people ran off and successfully dispersed. The others gathered and were kettled again. Part of this group made a remarkable escape through the YMCA, jumping over exercise equipment and exiting elsewhere. Another part of the group was arrested.

The action didn’t stop there. Another group, whoever wasn’t sitting in front of the YMCA with zipties cutting into their wrists, returned to Oscar Grant Plaza and simply decided to occupy City Hall, where they burned an American flag and fought with police again.

Earlier that day, as we sat in Oscar Grant Plaza waiting for the next round, I heard a number of people talk about the class war. War demands military thinking. Among the basic principles of military strategy is the one which dictates that you retreat when the enemy advances. This is as fundamental a principle as the one which dictates that you pursue when the enemy retreats. And any evaluation of the day will have to begin with the acknowledgment that up to 500 of our troops were captured.

In the 1895 Introduction to Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx’s account of the 1848 revolution and its repression, Friedrich Engels reviewed the effect of historical changes in warfare on the class struggle.

“Let us have no illusions about it,” he wrote. “A real victory of insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory as between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions. And the insurgents counted on it just as rarely… The most that an insurrection can achieve in the way of actual tactical operations is the proficient construction and defence of a single barricade.”

Knowing that the barricade tactic was one of “passive defense,” and that the military always possessed equipment and training unavailable to the insurgents, the revolutionaries of the 19th century pursued other goals.

“Even in the classic time of street fighting,” Engels wrote, “the barricade produced more of a moral than a material effect. It was a means of shaking the steadfastness of the military.”

But at a certain point street-fighting lost its “magic,” even for this “moral” effect. After 1848 the police developed their own tactics of street fighting, and a whole range of changes tipped the balance in favor of the military. Their armies became bigger, and their weapons far more effective. Engels lists the smooth-bore muzzle-loading percussion gun, the small-calibre breech-loading magazine rifle, and the dynamite cartridge. He adds that the urban terrain had been transformed, with “long, straight, broad streets, tailor-made to give full effect to the new cannons and rifles.”

To this list we can now add beanbag bullets, CS gas, and helicopters. We are lucky that, unlike in Egypt, more traditional varieties of bullets are not currently on the table. But we can’t ignore the limits of the barricades; since the Paris Commune in 1871, which the Oakland Commune now recalls, the tactic of the barricades has been linked to defeat and the possibility of vicious and bloody repression. We have not suffered such a gruesome defeat. But coming up with a long-term strategy, beyond the short-term tactics, means that we acknowledge and learn from the defeats that we experience.

The alternative to street fighting that was embraced by the 19th century socialist movement, parliamentary contestation, is absolutely useless to us now.

But even in the 19th century, when universal suffrage was a new democratic right, its use for revolutionary movements was not to enter into the administration of the capitalist state. Engels wrote that it “provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the mass of the people where they still stand aloof from us.” The dramatic increases in numbers – German socialists drew 1.5 million votes while it was illegal to even have a party meeting, and nearly 2 million votes after that – could compensate for the new military disadvantages. Street fighting, Engels argued, could play a role in the future if “undertaken with greater forces,” which could drop “passive barricade tactics” in favor of “open attack.”

A century later, insurrectionary anarchists and reformists like MoveOn vie for hegemony over the movement, each advancing street-fighting and voting not as tactics, but as the ultimate goals. And we have to be clear that it is an alliance between social democrats and ultra-leftists that has driven this movement, in spite of their public scorn for each other.

Their alliance, however, has opened a space for revolutionary responses to the crisis. These responses won’t be summed up in spectacular clash. They’ll be a process that will be with us through the ebbs and flows, beyond every defeat and within every victory.

The movement is currently in a lull. Everyone looks forward to spring, but there is no need to cling to escalation in period of quiet. No need, because it is precisely the time to expand, to engage in the less dramatic work of growing and incorporating the diffuse energies of the working class.

Reformists urge coalition building, as though the union bureaucracies could somehow lead a radical movement. While some purists refuse coalitions, the revolutionary response is infiltration and invasion. When we approach the unions we don’t seek their guidance; we seek to introduce class antagonism into those institutions, to construct a broad class power, menacing and inescapable for the bosses just as it is irresistible to workers who spend each day on the defensive.

Fences were torn down twice yesterday. The first time, a panicked and impotent attempt to convert a thwarted plan into a confrontation. The second time, as a tactical maneuver which played a precise and necessary role in evading the enemy. The determination and resourcefulness which enables such an escape could play a role in the army that not only defends the working class from capitalist brutality, but also defeats capitalist power. And at every action we are reminded that our historical task is to build the mass organization capable of drafting its strategy and guiding it to victory.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, a member of UAW 2865, and an editor of Viewpoint.

close-up

Vermont prisoners are forced to create material for the state police.

Payback and humor come together: Prisoner artists embedded a pig within the State police logo (in the spotted pattern of the cow).

A huge decal with this logo has been plastered on cop cars across the state.

Police spokespeople say they don’t find it funny.

* * * * * * *

Sidenote:

In nearby New Hampshire, prisoners are forced to stamp out license plates with the state motto “Life free or die!”

I consider that “cruel and unusual punishment” (which is constitutionaly forbidden).

This piece also appears on Dissident Voice and Cold Warfare.

by Gary Leupp

A recent column by the always insightful Ray McGovern succinctly demonstrates the problem.

The world of science acknowledges matter-of-factly that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. There is simply no evidence for one. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, staffed by specialists on nuclear power and maintaining a tight watch on Iran’s civilian facilities, finds no evidence of a military program. Two successive reports (National Intelligence Estimates) produced (in 2007 and 2010) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have declared with confidence that there is no operative weapons program. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and (even) Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both recently stated (or let it slip) that Iran is not currently attempting to build nuclear weapons.

But then there is the political world of systematic disinformation. The world of big, bold lies which, as they are constantly repeated, acquire a certain life of their own. Thus the mainstream press and the entire political class in this country refer routinely to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” as though there obviously were one. As though any questioning of the charge were thoroughly naive.

(By the way: try doing an advanced Google search for the exact phrase “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and you will call up 4,640,000 results. Try “Israel’s nuclear weapons program”—which we know exists—and you’ll get 533,000. What does this tell you?)

The proponents of the lie rest assured that it will resonate, since it pertains to a Muslim country, and people here are largely conditioned to believe the worst about Muslims and see them as all complicit in some sort of anti-U.S. movement. In a poll taken as late as 2007, 41% of U.S. citizens stated their belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks!

Similarly, misguided by well-funded and well-placed propagandists, people will believe anything about Iran.

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the U.S. after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

This view is so patently idiotic than many bright people might just roll their eyes in bewilderment and, lacking McGovern’s capacity for moral indignation, simply give up trying to challenge the mendacity. It’s tiresome, year after year, to refute the ever-expanding web of lies. But this is serious, dangerous idiocy broadcast from the citadels of power. It has become integral to U.S. political culture.

One should—again and again—cite this telling little anecdote. In 2002, as the campaign of lies about Iraq began to pick up steam, an adviser of George W. Bush told New York Times columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind that “guys like” him were in (what the adviser disparaged as) the “the reality-based community.” That is, people “who believe that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.”

But no, this top operative (Karl Rove, perhaps?) insisted. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Part of “creating new realities” is lying through your teeth, and spreading fear to obtain your political ends. The mission in 2002 was to persuade the people of this country that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. No matter that Iraq had been subject to the most intrusive arms inspections regimen in history, was bleeding from sanctions, and wasn’t regarded by any of its neighbors (including Kuwait and Iran, which it had invaded) as a threat. Through coordinated statements (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and leaks of (mis)information to complicit journalists, the Bush administration built a case for a truly criminal war (frankly pronounced “illegal” by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to the outrage of some U.S. diplomats).

If the Bush administration officials weren’t consciously taking their cue from the Nazis, they surely embraced a Nazi-like logic. As Hermann Goering stated before his suicide in 1946, “Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along… This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

And so we were told to fear an Iraqi nuclear attack on New York City. It worked beautifully. Most of the people were indeed dragged along. Neo-conservatives hell-bent on transforming the “Greater Middle East” to advantage Israel concocted their case through the secretive “Office of Special Plans” and scared a large section of the public into rallying for war. And when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence for Iraqi-al Qaeda links were found, they slinked offstage quietly (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) with no apology, embarrassment or explanation (to say nothing of prosecution).

Who is most responsible for this utter lack of responsibility? Barack Obama! He came to power through the support of antiwar voters. His own opposition to the Iraq war was timid and partial; it was, he thought a “strategic blunder” rather than a crime. (You simply cannot be a politician in the USA and speak honestly about the vicious criminality of its wars.)

The would-be harbinger of Hope and Change was all smiles when he met the outgoing president, and made it clear that there would be no embarrassing Justice Department investigations or prosecutions of Bush-era officials for war crimes. He wasn’t outraged that the highest officials in the land had approved a campaign to hoodwink the people into endorsing a horrific assault on a country that did not threaten us. He just wanted to put that all behind us, be reconciliatory, “unite the country” and move on…

Part of “moving on” meant embracing the neocons’ lies about Iran. In his very first press conference after the 2008 election, Obama signaled his intentions. He was asked about his response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s friendly letter congratulating him on his election. He sidestepped the question but used the occasion to grimly declare that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It was a shameless sop to the Israel Lobby. And just as George W. Bush ignored the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama ignores the 2010 NIE and presses on with a policy of vilification and confrontation.

There is some distance between Israel and Washington on the Iranian nuclear question. The Likud Party would happily involve the U.S. in another war (like the Iraq war based on lies) serving Israeli interests. But Obama apparently doesn’t want another war, and worries that an attack on Iran would jeopardize the U.S. project in Iraq. That Vatican-sized embassy compound could come under attack by pro-Iranian Shiite militias; its seizure would make the Iranian “hostage crisis” of 1979-81 appear a minor historical episode.

Obama can’t say what he must surely know: that the Israeli officials’ repeated references to Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat” to their state, echoed by neocons and the Lobby in the U.S., is sensationalistic fear-mongering of the sort Goering spoke of. The neocons have been bellowing “Bomb Iran!” for years hoping that the Christian Zionists and bought legislators will override “the judicious study of discernible reality.”

Dennis Ross, the leading Iran hawk in the Obama administration, may have left his National Security Council post last November out of chagrin at the fact that Obama had failed to carry out the attack Ross had advocated from at least 2008. (Described by Aaron David Miller, whom he’d served with as a diplomat during the Camp David negotiations of 1999-2000, as “Israel’s lawyer,” Ross had responded to the 2007 NIE by co-authoring a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece declaring that Iran was striving to become “a nuclear state” and that leaders needed to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” and send aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. He has long advocated crippling economic sanctions on Iran, precisely to provoke actions that might be used to justify a U.S.-Israeli attack.)

Still, Obama has acceded to the fundamental demand of the anti-Iran war-mongers: he has refused to respect the judgment of his own intelligence apparatus and relentlessly stepped up sanctions against Iran, arm-twisting allies to join in taking actions that many western legal scholars agree constitute acts of war. He does so ostensibly to derail a nuclear weapons program, but that is not the real reason. Nor is it because he believes that Iran truly constitutes an “existential threat” to Israel, which has its own 300 nukes. If he’s done his homework, he knows that the Iranian regime is not even an “existential threat” to Iranian Jews.

Doesn’t Iran have the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, a community tracing its history back two and a half millennia? And isn’t that community of maybe 35,000 protected by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1979 and by representation in the Majlis far exceeding its numbers? (Jews are fewer than half of one percent of Iran’s population, but their one constitutionally mandated seat in the Majlis is over three percent of the total.

Don’t synagogues operate legally (as they did, by the way, in Baathist Iraq)? And aren’t Hebrew schools funded by the Ministry of Education? Doesn’t Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution specifically allow Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians to “perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”? Didn’t a judge last year determine that Christians drinking wine during Communion were innocent of violating the law banning alcohol citing that article?

(When you hear the wild charge that Ahmadinejad, who has very limited power in Iran’s complex political system, is another Hitler, ask yourself how Nazi policy compared to all this? Iran is a very oppressive place, without question. But it is not the same as fascist Germany, as the hysterical Norman Podhoretz suggested in his ridiculous 2007 column, “The Case for Bombing Iran.”)

Obama and his team want to topple the regime in power in Tehran. But not primarily because it oppresses its people; this is the norm in the Middle East (and most places), and Washington (and Israel) have been comfortable enough with dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain… Nor because it has allegedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” (That was a deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad’s comment to a conference in 2005, indirectly quoting Khomeini, that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He alluded in the same breath to the vanishing of the USSR and the regime of the Shah. He made no reference to Iran using force to make this happen.)

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the U.S. of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving U.S. oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the U.S. wants to reestablish its lost hegemony.

While there have been moments when the U.S. flirted with the mullahs who replaced the Shah (the Iran-Contra episode under Reagan, Colin Powell’s brief consideration of rapprochement in 2001-2) the neocon advocates of “regime change” have always won out.

Iran under the Shah was a virtual ally of Israel, maintaining diplomatic and military relations and supplying it with oil. Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has maintained close ties with Palestinian resistance groups (notably Hamas) and the Lebanese Shiite-based Hizbullah.  These are probably the two most popular political parties in Palestine and Lebanon respectively, but since they challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli settler-state, they are regarded by the U.S. and most of its allies as “terrorists.” Hence Iran is a “supporter of international terrorism” and its government (like those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) should be destroyed—with no option left off the table.

The fact that there’s no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program is an inconvenient truth. And it would surely be inconvenient for the U.S. administration to state frankly that it’s trying to topple the Iranian regime—to either please the lying Likudists and enhance Israel’s power in the region, or to re-establish Anglo-American control of Iran’s oil production. Hence the ongoing campaign against discernible reality on behalf of another Big Lie.

A lot of people alarmed by the situation have been predicting an attack on Iran since 2002, the year of George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech and the year when the neocons huddling around Dick Cheney came to dominate foreign policy. For a couple years I was convinced a strike was imminent, only to learn that during Bush’s second term he had rejected Cheney’s advice to bomb. But the neocons remain a powerful force in policy making; they have helped insure that Obama consistently condemns a program which the experts deny exists, and ratchets up pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment through economic warfare.

The signals are so contradictory. The Bomb Iran advocates, including the Israel leaders, dearly hope that increasingly crippling sanctions (along with the—apparently—Israeli-sponsored program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sponsoring terrorm in the country) will provoke Iran into moves which will force a reluctant Obama administration to attack the nuclear facilities.

But as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press News observes, many “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq War, including former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Princeton professor Anne- Marie Slaughter, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, former Pentagon Middle East policy chief Colin Kahl, and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden have recently warned of dire consequences should either the U.S. or Israel attack.  There is opposition within the foreign policy elite. But there was during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq as well.

On the other side are the Congressional leaders urging the stiffest, most provocative sanctions and even (in HR 1905) prohibiting any contact between U.S. diplomats and Iranian representatives without Congressional approval fifteen days in advance.  Presumably such contacts might derail the drive to war.

On the one hand, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visiting Israel this month to meet his Israeli counterpart, in a mission former Maj.-Gen. Gideon Shefer described as one to stop Israel from attacking Iran. On the other hand you have the Pentagon requesting funding from Congress for a more powerful, bunker-busting bomb.  (Having spent $ 330 million constructing 20 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” they need another $ 82 million to make them more destructive.)

Perhaps the best outcome of the unpredictable course of events would be a serious falling out between Israel and the U.S., such as occurred during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. In the first, Israel, Britain and France tried to seize control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, fearing an Arab  joined with the Soviets to demand an end to this tripartite aggression. In 1981, Ronald Reagan ordered his UN ambassador to vote with the rest of the world in condemning the utterly illegal “preventative strike.”

Since then the power of the Israel Lobby in league with politicized Christian fundamentalism and the neocon cabal have so sharply tilted U.S. policy towards Israel that a president cannot even press for a freeze on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank without encountering a ferocious political backlash. One can’t be too hopeful about any “clean break” but it’s surely pleasant to imagine one.

* * * * * * * * *

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.

Read other articles by Gary here on Kasama

Police-State Kelly must go!

Asad Sadiq of the Bait-ul-Qaim mosque in New Jersey said:

“If you attack Cuba, are all the Catholics going to attack here? This is called guilt by association.”

From Daily Mail

A secret police document shows that the New York City Police Department increased surveillance of thousands of mosques and Muslims.

The revelation contradicts the department’s claim that it does not conduct religious profilingPolice analysts listed a dozen mosques from central Connecticut to the Philadelphia suburbs. None has been linked to terrorism, either in the document or publicly by federal agencies.obtained by the Associated Press

The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, the secret police document obtained by Associated Press.

The NYPD is prohibited under its own guidelines and city law from basing its investigations on religion.

The report, drawn largely from information available in newspapers or sites like Wikipedia, was prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. It was written at a time of great tension between the U.S. and Iran. That tension over Iran’s nuclear ambition has increased again recently.

Police estimated the New York area Shiite population to be about 35,000, with Iranians making up about 8,500. The document also calls for canvassing the Palestinian community because there might be terrorists there.

Kasama has received the following statement.

Take Action for NYPD Accountability

For all who can, join us today as we demand the resignation of Ray Kelly. See press advisory below for details of the event and background, co-sponsored by Occupy Faith.

What you can do:

1. Attend today’s event.
2. Read and forward the below press advisory.
3. Sign the petition.

Thanks for all you are doing.

* * * * * * *

PRESS ADVISORY 
February 2, 2012

Press Contacts: Fahd Ahmed (940) 391-2660, Linda Sarsour (917) 306-3323
This comes from Occupy Faith NYC.

As More Revelations of NYPD Spying Emerge:

Muslim and Ally Communities to Rally Calling for NYPD Accountability

Today, as the Associated Press reports more secret NYPD documents showing targeted surveillance of thousands of Shi’a Muslims and their mosques based solely on their religion, and one week since the NYPD was caught lying to the public and Mayor about it’s use of a bigoted training film, Muslim and diverse communities across the city are continuing their call for accountability by holding a rally and march.  Last week, Commissioner Ray Kelly and the NYPD was exposed for participating in the making and showing of the Islamophobic, hate documentary, “The Third Jihad” to 1,500 police officers and then repeatedly lying about it on the public record.

Who:               Muslim communities, interfaith leaders, directly impacted community members, legal advocates, Shia leaders

What:              Rally at Foley Square, followed by march to One Police Plaza

When:             Friday, February 3, 2012 from 3:00-4:15pm, March begins at 4:15pm

The Majlis Ash-Shura of Metro NY and DRUM (Desis Rising Up & Moving) are co-organizing a rally with the support of other Muslim communities, interfaith and other community allies, in order to call for the resignation of Commissioner Kelly and NYPD spokesperson Paul Brown, for community control of the NYPD, and a well-funded oversight mechanism with subpoena power.

Key organizer, Imam Al Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, President of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York and imam of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, says “Muslim New Yorkers are fed up with the NYPD unjustly targeting our community, violating the civil liberties of too many people, and lying about it with no repercussion. They are continuing to spy on multiple sections of NYC Muslims, with another report today about Shia Muslims. We are calling all people of conscience who share these to join with us in front of the sculpture ‘The Triumph of the Human Spirit’, across from the courthouse. Ray Kelly and Paul Browne must go!”

As Fahd Ahmed, legal and Policy Director of DRUM explains, “Commissioner Ray Kelly willingly participated in the making of the film, and while he has apologized, he has not explained why the NYPD chose to lie, on the record, about his participation for well over a year. In the same period, the NYPD has operated without transparency or accountability, and often with brute force, with Black, Latino, and other communities of color, youth, and the Occupy Wall Street activists.”

Supporting Organizations: (List in formation)
100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, Arab Muslim American Federation, Council on American Islamic Relations- New York (CAIR-NY), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Al-Awda NY, Jews Against Islamophobia, New York City Labor Against the War, The Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, Social Justice Task Force of Muslim Alliance in North America, ICNA New York, Muslim Peace Coalition-USA, NY, NYC Coalition to Stop Islamophobia, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF), Pakistan Solidarity Network, National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, PAKISTAN USA FREEDOM FORUM, The Justice Committee, Project SALAM, BAYAN USA, Yemeni American Coalition for Change, Defending Dissent Foundation, May 1st Coalition for Worker & Immigrant Rights, Arab American Action Network (AAAN), Turning Point for Women and Families,  International Action Center, WESPAC Foundation, Ad Hoc Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revolution, Committee to Stop FBI Repression-NY,Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), Black Unity,CAAAV, Labor for Palestine, Veterans for Peace NYC Chapter 34, Muslim Consultative Network, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR),OWS Immigrant Worker Justice, Working Group,International Socialist Organization, Asian Law Caucus,The December 12th Movement , International Association Against Torture, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, World Can’t Wait, Jafria Association of North America (JANA), National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF), Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Code Pink, New Sanctuary Movement, Occupy Faith

Invading Soviet tanks surrounded by Czech students, 1968

by Mike Ely

I received an email this morning from Scott (over at Banned Thought) who has scanned and republished an analysis I made (in 1984) of Soviet military doctrine. It lays out that Soviet military preparations in the 1980s were the calculations and preparations of a capitalist/imperialist power seeking to force a global redivision of the world (in rivalry with U.S. imperialism).

Since this old essay is now available, we will also share it here on Kasama.

I have mixed emotions about sharing it:

Because this is an important debate (over socialism) written in a long-ago now-obscure context. And because the analysis included both insights and errors.

Those errors are, in hindsight, pretty obvious — while the  insights (which relate  to the core arguments of class nature) retain some value for  readers today.

A century of controversy over real, existing socialism

Few historical/theoretical questions have proven as controversial as the nature of the Soviet Union.

There has been sharp debate over many decades over whether it was ever socialist. And over when capitalism was restored there.

This essay is part of that debate. This is not about the revolutionary days of the Russian revolution or the great collectivization or the heroic defeat of the Nazis. This is about the heavy tread of Breznev’s military — as it pushed out into the world to contend with U.S. imperialism.

The essay examines the Soviet Union’s war preparations in the 1980s and what we can learn from a close look at them — and specifically at the military doctrine that shaped them (and its class nature). The essay was written based on research I did for a presentation to the New York conference” in 1983 where the question “Soviet Union: Socialist or Soviet-imperialist” was sharply (and rather deeply) engaged.

(PDF) Against the “Lesser Evil” Thesis: Soviet Preparations for World War 3, by Mike Ely (1984)

Important debate over socialism (but written in thirty year old context)

I don’t think our current discussion of “What is socialism?” will take that old and very familiar form of a debate over the nature of the Soviet Union (in the 1920s, then 1930s, then 1950s and so on.)

But (under our new conditions) ongoing and sharpening debates are need over “What is socialism? What are its objective contradictions in real life? How is it different from capitalism actually? How do we know?” We have a lot to learn from the previous century. And a lot to decide afresh for a new century.

And everything touched by the Soviet Union now feels like old history. The USSR itself has been gone for over twenty years. A whole generation of new revolutionaries have grown up in a world dominated by one superpower, not two — and where the Soviet state-owned form of economy is a rarity at the margins.

And, again, our current debates (thank god!) take new and contemporary forms — and the dividing lines are being posed in new contemporary way.

At the same time, I think we can say that a set of unfortunate and conflicting verdicts have crept toward acceptance (often without much deep study or debate):

• First  we should probably just view the USSR (from the beginning) as  a kind of failure and mainly as a negative example of what to avoid.
• Second, that we should nonetheless view Soviet Union  (over its whole arc — from creation in 1917 until dissolution in 1991) as a continuity, marked by a flawed socialism — and that that we should simply agree that it was never actually (capitalist or imperialist (between the 1950s and its dissolution).
• Third, as a correlary to that, that the actual moment of capitalist restoration(or as it is sometimes put, the culmination of a degenerative and revisionist process) came around 1991 — with Gorbachev and then Yeltsin’s rise, the dissolution of the USSR, the disbanding of its ruling Communist Party, and the formal privatization of state owned properties.
• Fourth, that that the debate over the USSR was an unnecessary division among revolutionary forces from the 1920s to the 1980s.
• Fifth that it is simply a historical irrelevancy now.

If you hold the fifth view, you don’t need to read this old analysis from 1984.  If you hold the other four views, you may find this essay provocative (including because it doesn’t focus on historical periodization or economic — but on a specific part of the political superstructure: Military doctrine and deployments.)

My own view is that the question of the Soviet Union injected some specific and practical realities into the discussions of socialism and communism. Before the 1917 revolution, socialism was a multiplicity of dreams and programs. Afterwards, there emerged specific social orders (following revolutions) that were making difficult and controversial choices, that were setting up planning and productive systems, that were carrying out diverse political processes, and were acting as major players in a world system of states (including during wars). So suddenly the questions of “what is socialism? what is capitalism? what roads lead to communism?” had some “you can’t look away” common points of contact — and became concentrated in protracted debates over the USSR (a country which went through major changes decade by decade).

And in a way that drives some people nuts: tremendous and far-reaching political differences became crystalized in the debate over when (precisely) the USSR stopped being a revolutionary society, and what it then became instead. Was it conservatized in the early twenties when the Soviets and direct worker control was curtailed? Was it in the 30s when the Soviet state emerged more and more as a harsh force above the population? Was it in the late 30s and 40s when Russian  nationalism, expanded class hierarchy and social conservatism made major new returns within Soviet society? Was it in the mid-fifties, with the reversal of previous verdicts and the elevation of profit as a central criterion of planning and decision-making?

Very central issues of the revolutionary process are debated in this essay. Yet they are shaped by a 1980s context that is long gone, and highly unfamiliar to a new generation of revolutionaries. I don’t think we will discuss “what is socialism” through the prism of such long-ago debates. And thank god!

There were tremendously powerful advantages (to put it mildly) to having ‘real existing socialist states” in the world — first the USSR, then China. It is a process that (for decades) made communism a world force and made the question of socialism one of the central issues in politics everywhere. But it also wedded our movement to the particular (and peculiar) features of Soviet politics and economics — which was both inspiring and troubling (both for communists and for oppressed people). Even after many communists concluded that the Soviet Union had restored capitalism — we were still (somehow) wedded to an ongoing debate with those who thought that was not true.

An obvious error

Looking back over this piece, there are clearly some parts that don’t hold up.

In particular, the essay argues that both war blocs (U.S. and Soviet) were willing to go to war, and that they didn’t actually view nuclear war as suicidal.

As we know now, the Soviet side blinked when confronted with the possibility of war, backed down, and fell apart — rather than risk nuclear annihilation — something that this essay argued was not in the cards.

However, serious as this error is, and as humbling it is to reread  now thirty years later, it is not central to the overall thesis.

I think that readers will find the documentation of Soviet military doctrine and military deployments interesting. This essay makes the argument that the Soviet war preparations were imperialist (in their purpose and in their doctrinal/ideological nature). And challenges the now-influential “lesser evil” and “flawed socialist” analysis.

This essay was originally published in the Summer 1984 issue of the now-defunct Revolution magazine, which is not generally available online.

A view above the Denisova cave, where clues to prehistoric interbreeding were found. photo: Johannes Krause

Parts of this story have been told before (including here on Kasama):

DNA study of a single human finger bone found in Siberia’s Denisova cave reveals that we include genetic material from two other human species, the Neanderthals and a previously unknown species now called the Denisovians.

Still there is much to learn and enjoy in this  exploration unfolds:

It reveals how remarkably curious and clever we humans are — that our tireless and skilled investigators are able to extract such insights from a bone fragment!

And their work contains of a promise of how much more will be revealed, in the years ahead, as we explore our own past with two independent yet parallel methods: archeology and genetics.

Just the details from this cave alone are fascinating: There are over 20 cultural levels found there — left by humans over tens of thousands of years (and presumably by humans of different and overlapping species!).

The cave contains  remnants of 27 species of large and middle-sized mammals, 39 species of small mammals and remnants of other vertebrates — including the tusk of mammoth, ostrich egg shell, remnants of small cave bear, cave hyaena, cave lion, and wooly rhinoceros. That’s just the archeology side of it.

And now a sliver from a finger (and one tooth!) gives up startling new information about our common past.

For a couple hundred years, we have developed our trove fossil and tool discoveries, but did not have a sure way of knowing which humans left them. In this case, we have the reverse! We have the remarkable evidence of Denisovians who (as Dr. Reich says below) are currently “a genome in search of an archaeology.”

Quite possibly these Denisovians form a major part of human history (despite the fact that we know almost nothing about them yet). This article includes early speculation of their range and importance.  But the simple fact is that this cave is in the far north and the genetic remnant of their line appears strongest among some humans in the far South (Oceania) — suggesting (possibly, tentatively) a wide Asian range over long periods.

Human remains (of all previous hominid species) are remarkably rare, and more rare the further we go back in time. This is especially so in warmer climates where the dead bodies were quickly dispersed and decomposed. We have rather extensive knowledge (and over a hundred skeletons) of the recent, cold climate hominids called Neanderthal, compared to their contemporaries in Africa and the larger tropical band.

Also remarkable in this report is this statement:

“Dr. Parham’s analysis, which shows that some archaic immune alleles are widespread among modern humans, concludes that as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.”

Reports on these developments have appeared in many places, this particular article is from the New York Times (Jan 30).

DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All

By ALANNA MITCHELL

The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview.

The Denisovans (pronounced dun-EE-suh-vinz) were first described a year ago in a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature made possible by genetic sequencing of the girl’s pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult.

Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses.

Scientists are trying to envision the ancient couplings and their consequences: when and where they took place, how they happened, how many produced offspring and what effect the archaic genes have on humans today.

Other scientists are trying to learn more about the Denisovans: who they were, where they lived and how they became extinct.

A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of gene-sequencing technology have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to map the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred.

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “the hobbits” because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores, where their remains were found, impairs the preservation of DNA.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive, said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was the lead author of the Nature paper on the Denisovans.

For many scientists, the epicenter of the emerging story on human origins is the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, where the girl’s finger bone was discovered. It is the only known place on the planet where three types of humans — Denisovan, Neanderthal and modern — lived, probably not all at once.

John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose lab is examining the archaic genomes, visited the cave in July. It has a high arched roof like a Gothic cathedral and a chimney to the sky, he said, adding that being there was like walking in the footsteps of our ancestors.

The cave has been open to the elements for a quarter of a million years and is rich with layers of sediments that may contain other surprises. Some of its chambers are unexplored, and excavators are still finding human remains that are not yet identified. The average temperature for a year, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, bodes well for the preservation of archaic DNA.

Could this cave have been one of the spots where the ancient mating took place? Dr. Hawks said it was possible.

But Dr. Reich and his team have determined through the patterns of archaic DNA replications that a small number of half-Neanderthal, half-modern human hybrids walked the earth between 46,000 and 67,000 years ago, he said in an interview. The half-Denisovan, half-modern humans that contributed to our DNA were more recent.

And Peter Parham, an immunologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has used an analysis of modern and ancient immune-system genetic components — alleles — to figure out that one of the Denisovan-modern couplings most likely took place in what is now southeastern China. He has also found some evidence that a Neanderthal-modern pair mated in west Asia.

He stressed, however, that his study was just the first step in trying to reconstruct where the mating took place.

Dr. Parham’s analysis, which shows that some archaic immune alleles are widespread among modern humans, concludes that as few as six couplings all those tens of thousands of years ago might have led to the current level of ancient immune alleles.

Another paper, by Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier, two Swiss geneticists, suggests that breeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was rare. Otherwise, they say, modern humans would have far more Neanderthal DNA.

Were they romantic couplings? More likely they were aggressive acts between competing human groups, Dr. Stringer said. For a model, he pointed to modern hunter-gatherer groups that display aggressive behavior among tribes.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there, he said in an interview.

When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive.

The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

Although little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes.

Dr. Reich and others suggest that the interbreeding that led to this phenomenon probably occurred in the south, rather than in Siberia. If so, the Denisovans were more widely dispersed than Neanderthals, and possibly more successful.

But the questions of how many Denisovans there were and how they became extinct have yet to be answered. Right now, as Dr. Reich put it, they are “a genome in search of an archaeology.”

Today, in an act of supreme arrogance, you, Jean Quan, declared that you would “call” on the “national leadership” (!) of the Occupy movement to help you split (!) our movement.

You want Occupy nationally to denounce people within Occupy Oakland who you describe as “the ones who advocate violence.”  In short, unable to break our movement in the streets and ports, you now want us split, divided, and turning against ourselves.

What hypocrisy!

You who unleashed wave after wave of police terror on Occupy Oakland?

You whose police  shot anti-war Iraq veteran Scott Olsen in the face with a teargas canister and nearly killed him?

You who presided over the police department that murdered Oscar Grant in cold blood?

You want to preach to us about violence? You now demand we denounce those you targeted? You want us to help you demonize those who dare challenge you?

What cartoonish world of double-think are you from?!

You even went on to claim that “What they are doing against the city economically is not nonviolent either.” Really?

And what about the economic violence you were part of? What about what the disruption and suffering imposed on students though relentless budget cuts and austerity measures? Is the denial of education not a form of violence?

What about the gentrification of Oakland, and the police violence that enforces it?

We see you very clearly. You serve the machinery of money-making — the 1%, the banks, the developers, the co-opters.

Your attempts to divide us will not work. And you will not succeed in dividing us from the people of Oakland either.

It was your thugs who attacked Occupy Oakland on Saturday. And the people have every right to defend themselves.

Our movement is diverse ethnically, politically and tactically – but we are also united in purpose. Every one of your attacks just goes to unite us, the 99%, as we create a new world.

Your arrogance continued:

“Every Saturday they are doing demonstrations and in my city that is my night of highest police need. They are taking away resources from my city…”

Your city?! Your night?! No, Jean Quan, Oakland doesn’t belong to you or the 1%.

Oakland, its streets, its parks, its ports, its future will belong to the people. The society we’re modeling shows how beautiful it can be when we are free, including free of the violent hacks (like you) from this empire’s Democratic Party.

Love to the people and defiance to you,

Eric Ribellarsi